A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal)

by William L. Myers Jr.

  The chuckling this time is louder. To keep the jury from seeing his face redden, Mick turns back toward the counsel table and spies Lauren Zito signaling him to wrap it up. His embarrassment turns to anger.

  “Just a few more questions. You said something about the door being smashed in?”

  “Yes. The frame was made of metal, and it was dented, big-time. And the door, which was wood—the whole left side, the side where the doorknob was—was a mess.”

  “So it looked like someone had exerted a tremendous amount of force on the door?”

  “Sure.”

  “Someone very, very strong.”

  Pagano is on his feet. “Objection, calls for speculation.”

  The judge sustains the objection, but Mick can tell that the jury gets the point.

  “One final thing. You said you and Officer Piccone both went in the front door?”

  “Yes.”

  “That meant that the back door was left unguarded.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So someone could have run out the back of the building when you and your partner entered in front, and you wouldn’t have known.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Nothing further.”

  Pagano is on his feet before the judge turns the witness over to him for redirect.

  “Did you see any bloody tracks leading from the decedent’s body to the back of the building?”

  “There was a lot of blood and footprints near the carpet. But I didn’t see any running toward the back. No.”

  “Nothing further.”

  Mick is on his feet now.

  “Did you look?”

  “Uh—”

  “Did you specifically look for bloody tracks leading toward the back?”

  “That wasn’t my job. You’d really have to talk to the CSU guys.”

  “Nothing further, Your Honor.”

  Mick sits, unhappy. The point about Trumbull not seeing any tracks because he didn’t look is only a temporary victory. The CSU team certainly checked, and there were none. The bloody-footprints thing was a stupid move. Now he has no choice but to return to it with the CSU witness.

  Trumbull’s testimony takes only half an hour. It’s 2:15 when Pagano calls his next witness. It’s Lieutenant Matthew Stone, the lead investigator for the CSU assigned to the case. Mick knows Stone to be an honest cop, and thorough. His work at the warehouse crime scene will have been top-notch.

  Stone takes the stand. He’s forty-one but looks younger, with short blond hair and an honest face. Pagano takes him through his education, training, and experience with CSU, then has him run through the crime scene, using photographs to walk the jurors from the Escalade parked outside through the busted-up door and into the warehouse itself.

  Using the same remote-control device used by the assistant medical examiner, Stone displays a medium-distance photograph of Valiante’s body in situ. Even from a distance, it’s a gruesome scene. Most of the jurors recoil and look away until they are able to steel themselves and study the photograph.

  “Does this photograph depict the location where the body was found?”

  “Yes. Of course, the body had been disturbed somewhat,” Stone says, “when the patrolmen pulled the decedent away from Ms. Nunzio. But the photograph depicts where she and the decedent were positioned when the police entered the building.”

  “Based on the evidence, where do you believe the decedent was killed?”

  “Oh, right here, where the body is lying. This is where the decedent bled out, and there was a vast swamp of blood soaked into the rug.”

  Extending his arm toward the defense table, Pagano says, “It has been suggested that perhaps the killer ran out the back after the murder. Did you find any evidence to support that notion? Any tracks, for example?”

  “No. The only set of tracks—footprints—were those that led to where the patrolmen indicated they found the defendant, and then a second set of tracks from that spot out of the building to where I understand the defendant was placed into a squad car.”

  Stone pauses, then remembers something. “The defendant was still at the scene when I arrived, so I had the detectives, who arrived at about the same time, remove his shoes and put them into an evidence bag. The rest of the defendant’s bloody clothes were removed and bagged at the Roundhouse.”

  “Did the footprints immediately around the murder site tell you anything about how the defendant moved?”

  “Based on the spacing of the tracks and their configuration, it looks like he backed away from the murder site, slowly.”

  “Was there any sign of a struggle between Mr. Nunzio and the decedent?”

  “Not that I saw. There was no upset furniture. The lamps were still sitting on the end tables.”

  Pagano moves to the defense table and retrieves some paper exhibits.

  “As part of the CSU’s investigation, did your forensics team perform DNA testing and fingerprint analysis?”

  “Of course.”

  Pagano hands the witness the exhibits and has Stone identify them as the reports of the DNA and fingerprint analyses.

  “Please tell the jury what the forensics team found.”

  Stone glances at the reports, then turns to the jury. “All of the blood was that of the decedent, and—”

  “When you say ‘all of the blood,’ what do you mean?”

  “The blood on the carpet, on the decedent, on Ms. Nunzio, who was cradling the body, on the knife, and on the defendant. And the footprints we spoke about earlier.”

  “And the results of the fingerprint analysis, focusing on the knife?”

  “The only prints on the knife were those of the defendant.”

  “The defendant,” Pagano repeats, letting the words hang in the air. “Sir, based on your analysis of the crime scene, the results of the forensics testing, and your experience as a police officer and CSU investigator, did you form a conclusion about the nature of the crime and how it was committed?”

  “Yes. I concluded that the defendant used the knife, Exhibit 17-A, to cut the decedent’s throat, and that the decedent bled out through the wounds. This happened on the carpet in the center of the living area of the warehouse. Then, with the knife in his hand, the defendant backed away from the murder site, twenty-one feet away, to be exact, to where he was standing when the police entered the building.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Nothing further, Your Honor.”

  “Your witness, Mr. McFarland,” the judge says.

  He stands, buttons his coat, and walks toward the witness stand, pausing a respectful distance away.

  “Lieutenant Stone, would you mind pulling up on the screen one of the pictures you took of the busted-in doorjamb and the door?”

  Stone does so, and Mick gives the jury some time to study the photos, take in the extent of the damage.

  “This was a warehouse, and the doorframe was steel.”

  “Yes.”

  “The door itself was a solid wood?”

  “Yes.”

  Mick pauses, then walks to the evidence table.

  “Commonwealth Exhibit 14,” he says, lifting one of the bags and carrying it to the witness stand. “Are these the shoes you had removed from Mr. Nunzio?”

  Stone studies the shoes through the clear plastic. “Yes.”

  “Italian loafers with thin soles?”

  “I guess.”

  “Can you see the soles through the plastic? Does there appear to be any damage to the soles?”

  Stone pulls the exhibit close to his face. “I don’t see any.”

  “In fact, the soles are in pristine condition, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “There doesn’t appear to be much wear on them.”

  “Do these look like shoes that kicked the warehouse door, bashed it with such force as to dent the steel frame and splinter the hardwood door itself?”

  “Objection. Lack of foundation. How could the witness know that?”

  “Sustained,” the Judg
e McCann says. Then, leaning toward the witness, she asks, “Do you see any damage to the shoes or other markings indicative of sudden stress?”

  “Just a lot of dried blood.”

  It’s Mick’s turn to object. Stone’s a fair guy, but not above the occasional zinger on the witness stand.

  “Sustained. Answer my question, Lieutenant.”

  “I apologize. There were no such markings.”

  Mick looks over at the jurors and sees that several of them are writing on their legal pads. He’s convinced some of them, at least, that Nunzio isn’t the one who kicked open the door.

  “Moving on, Lieutenant Stone. Let’s talk about the defendant’s gun, the Sig Sauer P938 that Officer Trumbull testified he found on Mr. Nunzio’s person.”

  He retrieves the gun from the evidence table and carries it to the witness stand.

  “Did you observe the weapon on the warehouse floor, where it was left by Officer Trumbull?”

  “I did.”

  “Do you recognize this gun, marked as Commonwealth Exhibit 2, as the one you observed that night at the warehouse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the gun loaded? Did it have a clip containing nine-millimeter bullets?”

  “It did.”

  “Had it been recently fired? I assume your team had it tested.”

  “We did, and the weapon had not been fired.”

  “And Mr. Nunzio had no gunshot residue on his hands or clothes?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Tell me, did you come to a conclusion as to why Mr. Nunzio, if he wanted to kill the decedent, didn’t simply use the gun?”

  Pagano objects, but McCann overrules him.

  “That wasn’t part of my mission. My job was to observe, gather, and preserve the physical evidence to make a determination as to what did happen, not what the defendant could have chosen to do but didn’t.”

  The perfect answer, and true, but Mick is fine with it. Some of the jurors are again writing on their legal pads.

  “Let’s turn to your testimony that there were no footprints, or tracks, leading from the murder scene to the back of the building.”

  Stone shrugs.

  “Is the lack of footprints consistent with someone having come to the warehouse, killed Valiante just moments before Mr. Nunzio arrived, and then run out the back after removing his shoes—”

  “Objection,” Pagano calls out.

  “You’re grasping at straws,” Stone says.

  “Gentlemen! One at a time,” the judge scolds them.

  “I withdraw the question,” Mick says. He looks at the jury and sees that only one juror is writing something down. Another seems to be thinking about it. The foreman stares at him.

  “Lieutenant, when asked whether you saw any evidence of a struggle, your only answer was that the furniture didn’t seem to be disturbed. Did you see any evidence conclusively establishing that the decedent was not engaged in a struggle in the open area of the warehouse, where there was no furniture?”

  “I saw no evidence of that, either way.”

  “So it’s possible that the decedent was engaged in a struggle with someone before the decedent ended up on the rug, where his throat wound was inflicted.”

  “If you’re suggesting the decedent and the defendant were fighting—”

  “I didn’t say the defendant, I said someone—”

  “The decedent’s only injuries were to his throat, and to his wrists and ankles from the zip ties. There was no bruising or other injuries anywhere else on his body.”

  “People can wrestle without sustaining bruising, can’t they?”

  “Objection!” Pagano barks. “Lieutenant Stone is not a medical doctor. Defense counsel should have tossed up this round of speculation to Dr. Arcangelo.”

  “Sustained.”

  Mick concludes his questions by establishing that Stone can’t say whether the victim was bound at the time he was murdered. The plasticuffs were splattered with blood, but they could have picked up the blood from the carpet, where they were found.

  Again, Pagano does not engage in redirect. Again, it seems to Mick that the prosecutor is rushing his case. But why?

  38

  FRIDAY, JUNE 21, CONTINUED

  Matthew Stone’s testimony takes a little more than an hour. The court calls for a short break at 3:30, with everyone to return at 3:45. Once the jury is out of the courtroom, Lauren Zito beckons Mick and Vaughn to join Rachel Nunzio and her on the other side of the bar.

  “We like what you’re doing with the Giacobetti thing,” Lauren says. “The jurors and shadow jurors are responding to it. Is there a way you can work in a motive for Johnny to have been the killer?”

  He glances at Vaughn, then Zito and Rachel.

  “Does Giacobetti know we’re taking this tack?” he asks Rachel.

  She sighs. “Mick, please.”

  He can’t tell from her tone whether she’s saying, of course Johnny G. knows, or telling Mick that it’s irrelevant whether he knows or not.

  “You’re missing the point,” an exasperated Lauren explains. “Right now, we don’t know for sure what’s going to work with the jury. So far, your questions have opened the door to both a self-defense argument and a Giacobetti scenario. We need for you to run with both, see which one the jury’s more open to.”

  “What kind of jury consultant are you that you’re talking to me like this?”

  “You mean saying out loud what it is you’re already thinking as a defense attorney?”

  He glares at Zito until Rachel breaks their standoff.

  “Mick,” Rachel says, gently reaching for his arms, “I understand your frustration. I do. And so does Jimmy. We haven’t given you much to work with. But that’s going to change, I promise. Please, just put up with it, and do what Lauren is asking a little bit longer.”

  He sees what appears to be genuine warmth in Rachel Nunzio’s eyes. She’s telling him she knows they’re overstepping their bounds, and she’s sorry for it.

  “Stop playing me, Rachel.”

  As though a switch were turned off, her eyes instantly turn cold.

  “I’ll move forward with both lines of defense,” he says. “I was going to anyway. But I don’t like how this is going down. I’ve never worked with a jury-whisperer before, but I find it hard to accept that this is part of the normal program.”

  Rachel gives him a slight nod of acknowledgment. “Remember what I told you when I first came to your office? Mine is not a normal family.”

  “The Commonwealth calls Detective John Tredesco,” Pagano says.

  Mick watches as his nemesis from the police force makes his way to the stand. The detective limply raises his right arm and takes the oath with a bored look on his face. When he sits, Tredesco smooths his comb-over and focuses his narrow-set eyes on Pagano. From the outset, Mick can tell, the jurors are cool to him.

  Pagano runs Tredesco through his tenure on the force—five years on patrol followed by eighteen years as a detective, thirteen being with the homicide unit—then takes him to the night of the murder.

  “It was shortly after 10:00 when I received the call at home. There had been a killing at a warehouse off Admiral Peary Way. I got ahold of my partner at the time, Greg Lott. He lives about a mile from me, so I had him swing by and pick me up. We went right to the scene.”

  “What time did you arrive, and what did you do when you got there?”

  “We arrived at 10:45, and the first thing we did was identify ourselves to the CSU lead, Lieutenant Stone. His people had just begun working the scene, so we weren’t allowed inside. He did let us peek through the doorway, and we were able to see the murder site and the body.”

  “Were the defendant and his daughter still there?”

  “The daughter had just been taken away by ambulance, I was told. The defendant was in the back of a patrol car, and I decided to take him back to the Roundhouse for interrogation.”

  “Would you describe the defendan
t’s appearance?”

  “He was drenched with blood. It was all over his shirt, his face, his hands. He had dark slacks on, and they were wet with blood, too.”

  Pagano thinks on this a minute. “If his slacks were dark, how could you tell the wetness was from blood?”

  “It had to be either blood or urine, and I didn’t think killing someone would make Jimmy Nunzio pee his pants.”

  “Detective!” The judge leans toward the witness box. “No more.” She turns to the jury and tells them to disregard Tredesco’s remark.

  Mick studies the jurors; he can tell their distaste for Tredesco is growing.

  “Please continue with what you did,” Pagano says.

  “Detective Lott and I put the defendant in our car and drove him to the station.”

  “How did he seem to you during the drive? What was his demeanor?”

  “He seemed fine. Day at the beach.”

  Judge McCann glares at Tredesco but holds back.

  “What happened in the interrogation room?”

  “He asked for a lawyer as soon as he sat down.”

  “Mr. McFarland?”

  “No. He didn’t come into the picture until the next day. The lawyer who came that night was someone else.”

  “What did you do until the lawyer arrived?”

  “We had the defendant change out of his bloody clothes. We placed them in an evidence bag for CSU and gave him an orange jumpsuit.”

  “And once the lawyer arrived?”

  “That was it as far as getting any information from Nunzio. So Detective Lott and I went back to the crime scene. CSU was just finishing up, and we were allowed inside.”

  Pagano has Tredesco describe what he observed inside the warehouse—the shelves of drugs, the kitchenette, the living room furniture, and the blood-soaked rug. Then he takes the detective through his investigation over the next few weeks: his inability to speak with Christina Nunzio at HUP because she was heavily medicated and supposedly had suffered a mental breakdown; his interview with security guard Rodger Carey; his failed attempts afterward to locate and speak with Johnny Giacobetti; his failed attempts to get through to Frank Valiante once he learned that the victim was Valiante’s son.

  “Those mafia guys aren’t keen on helping the police,” he says. Then he mumbles under his breath, “Surprise, surprise.”