Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  He hits on Scofield, the theme that the true murderer is out there, stalking, still at large, that his client is a defendant of convenience, an immigrant with limited language abilities, someone obvious to dislike, easy to convict.

  Ingel stops him. “You’re making argument, Mr. Chambers. Stick to the evidence of your case,” he says.

  “Yes sir,” he says. Adrian regroups.

  “The evidence of this case,” he says, “is entirely circumstantial. The fact is that my client would not be here today but for three pieces of evidence, a coil of cord, some metal tent stakes, and a piece of cloth with human blood on it.

  “This and the inference,” he says, “that found in his car they must therefore belong to Mr. Iganovich. That in a nutshell is the state’s case.

  “On first blush,” he says, “this may seem damning. But consider for a moment the rest of the evidence, the part that Mr. Madriani did not emphasize, the part that he does not know.”

  With this he turns and looks at me sitting at the table.

  “The evidence will show,” he says, “that indeed a window of this vehicle was broken as the prosecutor willingly admits. What he does not tell you,” he says, “what he fails to disclose is the fact that this window was smashed completely out, leaving the vehicle open to anyone who chanced by. The van sat there in a public garage, open to any passerby for a substantial period, for a number of days, before police came upon it, opened it, and found the seemingly incriminating evidence. This is the state of the evidence.

  “The fact is anyone could have deposited the evidence in that vehicle after it was parked.”

  “You’re arguing again,” says Ingel. “Keep to the evidence, I don’t want to tell you again,” he says.

  “I was just getting to it, your honor, a critical piece of evidence.”

  Ingel looks at him and nods as if to say, “then do it.”

  “For some time police operated on the theory,” he says, “that this window was broken by a vandal, a possible witness who may have looked inside, who may have noticed the presence,” he lingers for a moment, mental italic for the words that follow, “or the absence of this critical evidence inside.

  “They had reason to believe,” he says, “that this was the case. Testimony from their own officers will reveal that this theory in fact was pursued, but to no effect. The police,” he says, “on that stand”—he points to the witness box—“will tell you this.”

  I look at Lenore, like how could he know this.

  She leans in my ear. “Roland,” she whispers.

  She is right, the tripping little fingers of Roland Overroy are all over this, revelations no doubt intended as a show of good faith to Adrian in their negotiations.

  “But the police failed,” says Chambers, “to find this critical witness. Perhaps they should have looked a little harder. For it is failure which we have rectified.”

  Lenore is leaning toward me to add something, when she hears this, breaks off and looks instead at Adrian, his hands gripping the jury railing.

  “We will present a witness,” he says, “who will testify that he is responsible for breaking the window of this van, a man who has cut no deals with the prosecution for his testimony, who is willing to face the penalty for his crime.”

  Like this is an assurance of credibility, a single misdemeanor count for vandalism.

  “Our witness,” he says, “will testify under oath that when this window was smashed, he intended to burglarize the vehicle, that he opened the doors and went inside. He will testify unequivocally that after entering the van he was disappointed. He will tell you that he found nothing of value to take, no radio or tape deck, no tools, nothing of significance.”

  Adrian turns from the jury and looks directly at me. In the instant before he speaks I get a premonition of what is to follow. Then he drops the hammer.

  “He will also tell you,” he says, “here under oath, that on the day he smashed the window there was no coiled cord, no tent stakes and no bloody rag in the defendant’s vehicle.”

  With this all I get is Adrian’s simpering smile.

  Lenore and I are the picture of cool sitting at the table, seeming indifference dripping from us, like perhaps the only thing on our minds is an early lunch.

  Inside I am a hot caldron, steaming to get my hands on Chambers’s witness list, buried in the pile of papers in front of me.

  Adrian takes his seat. Ingel checks his watch.

  “Too late,” he says, “to call a witness. We’ll take the luncheon recess now. Mr. Madriani,” he looks down at me. “You will be ready for your first witness when we convene,” he looks at his watch. “At one-fifteen.”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  He admonishes the jury not to discuss the case, then smacks the gavel on its wooden base.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  This noon Lenore and I order out for lunch from the office, sandwiches in brown bags from the greasy spoon a block away. While one of the secretaries is running for these we are talking strategy, and poring over the list of Adrian’s witnesses. Something which by law we are forced to exchange.

  The artifice of his case at this point is beginning to emerge. The defense in a capital murder trial is always a variation on some age-old theme; in this case that somebody else did it.

  Adrian will put his own flourish on this old saw. Using the unsolved Scofield murders as a diversion, he starts with our own hypothesis that someone else did the Scofield crimes. That we agree on this premise gives his case a gloss of legitimacy.

  From his witness list, the experts assembled, we can surmise the main point of attack, an all-out assault on the factual distinctions that set the Scofield killings apart from the other murders. If someone else did the Scofields, and if the differences in the MO between these crimes and the others appears illusory, Adrian is halfway home.

  The flanking move is his secret vandal. A planned coup de grace aimed at the head of our case. If credible, this witness can destroy the only link binding Iganovich to the incriminating evidence in the van.

  Lenore and I study his list like some seer perusing tea leaves. There’s a lot of misdirection here. Both sides have seeded these with deliberate distractions, an ocean of red herrings, people with whom they have rubbed shoulders during their investigation, but who have nothing meaningful to offer in the case. In this way it is easy to conceal the handful of actual witnesses, to put the other side to a great deal of work before trial.

  For my part, Adrian now has the name of Julie Park’s former hair-dresser, and the guy who read the gas meter at her apartment building, this along with two dozen others whose only knowledge of the facts in these cases is what they’ve read in the papers or seen on the tube.

  But one reaps what he sows. For the most part, studying Adrian’s list is a barren exercise. It is a column of names and addresses, the bare minimum required by law. We are also entitled to any written reports of testimony prepared by witnesses. Adrian has kept all of this verbal.

  In the frame for this trial we have had little time to check his witnesses, to send Claude and his minions to talk to many of these names, to winnow away the chaff. We are stabbing in the dark as to which of these people is Adrian’s magic pellet, his mystery vandal. I’m scoping down the column of names with the point of my pen, an idle exercise until I hit one that sounds familiar.

  “James Sloan.” I look at Goya. “Any bells?”

  She shakes her head.

  I go down the balance of the sheet. Nothing.

  I come back to “Sloan.” I’m wondering where I’ve heard this name. Something recent, in the last several weeks.

  I pick up the phone, dial a number. A female voice answers.

  “Ester, Paul Madriani across the street,” I say.

  Ester Peoples is the docket cler
k who handles filings for the criminal courts in the main lobby of the Davenport County Courthouse. I can hear her chewing on something. Another bureaucrat donating her lunch hour.

  “Can you check a name for me, on the computer?”

  “Sure. How far back?”

  “A year,” I say.

  I give her James Sloan, spelling the last name. I hear the clicking of keys. Then: “Which one do you want?” she says.

  “More than one James Sloan?” I say.

  “One guy,” she says, “three convictions.”

  “What for?”

  “One count arson, reduced to malicious mischief, two counts vandalism . . .”

  “Bingo,” I say. I get his social security number from Ester, thank her and punch the next line on the phone to call out again. This time I don’t dial, but hit one of the self-dialing numbers up top. Claude does not answer, but on the third ring I hear the voice of Denny Henderson.

  He tells me that Claude is on his way over to my office. Dusalt is my first witness this afternoon. We will prep with him only briefly before heading back to court.

  “Denny. I want you to pull the most recent booking sheet on one James Sloan.” I read him the social security number, and court file number from Ester.

  “Right now?” he says.

  “No, yesterday,” I say.

  Some grumbling on the line, then dead air. I hold for what seems like ten minutes. Then he’s back on the line.

  “Got it,” he says.

  “See if there’s the mug photo,” I say.

  Some shuffling on the other end. “Charming,” he says.

  “You got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me guess, a purple do, done up in spikes, pock marks on the face like the bubbles in a sulfur pot?”

  “You know the guy?” he says.

  “In a manner,” I say.

  The porcelain prince, I think. The men’s john at the courthouse the day I ran into Adrian, the punk with his schlong caught in the mesh of his zipper, Chambers’s erstwhile client.

  It was the zippered jacket and weird hair. There was something incongruous in the name “James Sloan” when Chambers went through the charade of introducing us that day. This it seems has held the name like some computer batch file at the edges of my recall ever since.

  “I want everything you’ve got on him, every arrest file, as soon as you can get it over here. Then I want you to go by the courthouse and get the depositions, the court files on the charges.”

  “They won’t let me take the originals,” says Henderson.

  “Then copy them.”

  He counts up the arrests. “It’ll take all day,” he says.

  “You got something better to do?” I tell him he can draw straws with Claude as to who gets this duty. He gives me a groan knowing already that he will come up short in this contest. Claude is in court. I hear a lot of grousing, like he’s about to hang up.

  “And Denny.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Run a current rap sheet on the guy. See if he has any felony convictions anywhere else.” We hang up.

  “It would be nice,” I tell Lenore, “if we could hang him out on a felony conviction.” This would be something with which to impeach his credibility before the jury. Convicted felons carry the scar for life.

  “Then you know who it is?” says Lenore. “Chambers’s witness.”

  “If I know Adrian,” I say.

  “But how did he find the guy when we couldn’t?”

  “You’re assuming,” I say, “that he did.”

  She gives me a look.

  “Adrian’s famous for producing witnesses of convenience,” I tell her, “better at curing the blind spots in his case than a faith healer.”

  Watching Adrian in court over the years I have learned that the margin of victory is too often measured by the preponderance of perjury emitted by his witnesses, a stench like a good dose of mustard gas from the stand.

  She looks at me wide-eyed, that any lawyer, an officer of the court, would do this knowingly, as a matter of course. For all of her street-smarts and barrio background, if you scratch the hard surface of Lenore, underneath you will find a romantic.

  “If Adrian Chambers ate nails,” I tell her, “he would pass corkscrews. He does not simply torture the truth, he is more devious.”

  Because I have seen it before, I can predict Adrian’s tactic with some confidence.

  “When we put Claude on the stand,” I tell her, “to lay the foundation for the evidence of our investigation, Adrian will ask him about our theories on the vandal who broke the window, our futile efforts to find this witness. Thanks to Roland,” I say, “he will build his defense by fulfilling our own prophesies, and modifying the message. In his version, the witness broke the window, but can attest that none of the evidence was inside. It is Adrian’s ethic, any means to defeat the perfidious powers of the state.”

  There’s a knock on my door.

  “Come in.”

  It’s Claude. He’s got a number of files under his arm, folders containing police reports and other business documents compiled during the course of our investigations. He will use these on the stand to refresh his memory in case any details are hazy.

  “Ready to do it?” I say.

  He makes a face, like no big deal.

  “Something for you,” he says. He hands me a slip of paper pulled from one of the files under his arm, a lab report from the State Department of Justice.

  “Present from Kay Sellig,” he says.

  I read, but it means nothing to me.

  “Her people analyzed the paper and clippings that made up the note delivered to your house.” Claude’s talking about the threat delivered with the photo of Sarah.

  “Whoever did it got a little sloppy,” he tells us. “One of the word groups clipped out and pasted to the note contained a trademark symbol and a small piece of a logo in one corner. Microscopic,” he says. “But we got lucky. A lab assistant recognized the snippet of logo.”

  I look at him, like how was this possible?

  “The guy has seen the publication a lot,” he says. “It’s off the title page, the cover sheet to a publication produced for law enforcement agencies. The state Criminal Law Reporter,” says Claude.

  I know this publication. Cop shops around the state use it to keep abreast of the latest court decisions in the areas of arrest, and the search and seizure of evidence. I am a subscriber myself, as are a growing legion of lawyers practicing in the field.

  “Any ideas?” I say.

  Claude wrinkles an eyebrow, like he has his own theories. “We might want to check to see if the Davenport Police subscribe to this thing,” he says. I know what he is thinking: Jess Amara.

  “Do it.”

  We change gears for the moment, as we are running out of time. I warn him about Adrian’s likely tactic on cross, that he will fish for details on our theory that a vandal may have broken the window of the van, that thanks to the loose tongue of Roland, this now plays a part in the defense case.

  He uses a few expletives to describe Overroy. But then he tells me that Roland may have problems of his own. One of the investigators Claude has assigned to Sellig to help her search for the missing piece of cord has talked to the photographer who was processing the stuff the day it disappeared.

  “The guy tells us there was somebody hanging around in your library the day they were doing the job, shooting the cord. He was interested in cameras, taking up a hobby, fingering all of their lenses. They got to talkin’,” says Claude.

  “Then this guy leaves and an hour later when they go to close up shop they notice that the cord is gone.”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “Roland.”

  “Suddenly
he’s a regular shutterbug,” says Dusalt.

  This would not surprise me. Embittered by my rejection of his brokered settlement offer, it would be like Roland to take a half measure, not the cord that links all of the murders to the Russian, just some of them. Spread a little pain, sit back and watch.

  We will probably find the missing cord the day before the close of our case when I will have to crawl on my knees to Ingel pleading.

  Claude looks at Goya. “Did you tell him?” he says.

  “Not yet.”

  I look at them. “What now?”

  It is what Lenore has been waiting to talk to me about. She and Claude have been paring down Adrian’s witness list for two days now, searching for the anticipated alibi, the person or persons who could testify to place Iganovich in Canada at the time of the Scofield murders. If we amend to charge his client, he will want this witness available. Even if we don’t charge he may use the witness, pour water on our case to erode the factual discrepancies between the murders, and then show that his client was out of town for the last one.

  “There’s nobody that fits the bill,” she tells me.

  We go over the list. Lenore is operating on the theory that any likely witness would be a resident of Canada, someone who saw him up there and who could testify as to the date. The list contains not a single Canadian address.

  “What about ticketing agents in this country? Could be a local name who sold him the ticket and would remember him.”

  She shakes her head. “We checked that. And something more,” she says. “Some weeks ago Claude checked with the airlines. They just got back to him yesterday. The flights out of Capital City to Canada, there’re four each day. One of the flight attendants on an Air Canada flight thinks she remembers seeing somebody who looked like Iganovich. From a picture,” she says.

  “Well then that’s it,” I say.

  “The problem is,” says Claude, “when the lady checked her flight schedule, the particular flight in question left Capital City the day after the Scofield murders. She’d been off on maternity leave until that date.”

  This sets like molten lead in my veins. A moment of dazed silence. We have been operating from the beginning on the belief that Iganovich could produce an absolute alibi for his whereabouts on the day the Scofields were killed, that he was a thousand miles away. Now on the opening day of trial, Claude and Lenore are telling me that this assumption may be wrong. Our theory in Scofield is beginning to settle in deep squish, grounded on the touchy-feely surmises of the shrinks, their prognostications and profiles for the serial mind. The fact that the Russian was available in town at the time of the murders is, in my book, worth more than a thousand Rorschach tests and psych-evals.