Madriani - 02 - Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  It is the latest fad among the civil sharks who try the mega-buck tort cases. Hired, private focus groups, average citizens paid to be locked in a room for days with lawyers. There the attorneys sample their wares in advance of trial, their theories and evidence to see what will sell and what won’t, the best defenses. Mine is only a modest takeoff on this latest tool of litigation.

  “But we won’t have to pay for it,” I say. “All we have to do is figure a way to get Chambers to ask that the Scofield evidence be played out in the grand jury.”

  “That won’t be too hard,” she says.

  I stop. I look at her.

  “Simple,” she says. “We send him a letter telling him that it is not our intention to put the Scofield evidence before the grand jury, on grounds that it is irrelevant and could confuse jurors. We give him a citation to Johnson in the letter and let him read the law.”

  I smile. Lenore Goya is becoming a quick study on the temperament and tactics of Adrian Chambers. Like blood to a shark, her correspondence will, no doubt, draw the quickest Johnson letter ever crafted by human hands in this state.

  I smile at her. “My treat,” I say. Lenore has earned her lunch.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It has come like a hot rocket, Chambers’s rendition of the so-called “Johnson letter,” produced so promptly that it is difficult to believe it was crafted by human hands.

  Lenore is ecstatic. It is all she could have hoped for, and as I read it, perhaps a little bit more.

  “He’s probably waiting for us to file a motion by way of objection,” she says. Goya is certain that Chambers is girding himself for our pitch to the court, our anticipated argument to keep the Scofield stuff away from the grand jury.

  “He’ll grow a long white beard on that watch,” I tell her. His letter is unequivocal. He’s thrown the door open wide for us. He won’t be able to complain later that the Scofield evidence is irrelevant or prejudicial to his client.

  “If we can get the jury to bite,” I say, “we can run it up the pole and see how it flies.” I’m talking about the details, the discrepancies in the Scofield case. We are both wondering whether we will be able to convince a jury of the existence of another killer, a copycat. If we are lucky, we will have a dry run to find out.

  Lenore has also given me some bad news in this meeting. It seems Kay Sellig with her ear to the ground at the Department of Justice has gotten wind that Acosta’s formal letter of complaint has arrived there, questioning my handling of the Russian’s extradition from Canada. She has no idea what the Attorney General will do with this thing, but for now it is ticking like a bomb in his in-basket. All I need right now is the bad press of some government inquiry looking over my shoulder.

  For the moment I’m holding Chambers’s letter, studying its terms.

  As if it were fired from a sawed-off barrel, Chambers’s Johnson letter has been loaded with a lot of scatter shot. He has reached into the hot ashes of defeat on his failed attempt for a quick preliminary hearing, and seeks to try his case before the grand jury by correspondence. This is, in my view, a mistake.

  In addition to the physical evidence found in the Russian’s van, Iganovich had made those damaging utterances at the point of his arrest in Canada, statements overheard by the two security guards who took him into custody. While it is debatable whether any of these statements could be viewed as wholesale admissions, a jury might see them as concessions of guilty knowledge. It would not be a far leap of faith for a jury to conclude that it was not the vehicle which concerned the defendant so much as its contents.

  Chambers now uses his Johnson letter to put a favorable spin on these statements before the grand jury. He claims that his client was concerned by the thought of delinquent parking fees on the abandoned vehicle. According to the unlikely story, Iganovich thought this was the reason for his detention in Canada. He plays upon the fact that the man spoke only broken English, that he was in a foreign country and confused. He claims others had parked the car for Iganovich and failed to provide him with the parking stub, that the Russian thought this was a big item, that it played upon his fears, and bred anxieties. Hence his blurted statements about the van. It is a fanciful story. I can only credit Chambers with an inventive if somewhat implausible imagination.

  True to form, he does not identify this convenient third party, the person who allegedly parked the van.

  “It begs a question,” says Lenore.

  I look at her.

  “How does he intend to get this story before a jury,” she says, “at trial?”

  Goya is right. Without Iganovich as a witness on the stand to play out this unlikely scenario before a jury it may be a song with a single chorus, one that will be sung only here, before the grand jury.

  “Maybe he has another witness,” I say. “A friend who will testify that he parked the vehicle.”

  She makes a face. “And incriminate himself?” she says.

  I shake my head like I have no other explanation.

  “We’ll have to wait for the disclosure of their witness list at trial,” she says.

  “Maybe not,” I tell her. “For evidence to come before the grand jury it must be admissible at the time of trial. We have a right to know the source of this testimony before we place it in front of the grand jury.”

  “What are you saying? We force him to identify the alleged driver of the van now?” she says.

  “That’s one way.”

  “He has another option,” she says. “He could strip the item from his letter, take it off the table for the time being.” Lenore guesses that when pressed, this will be what Chambers does.

  She is probably right. It is a notorious practice, and one that emanates from the darker side of the defense bar, the last-minute production of a convenient alibi witness. It is an invitation to perjury as old as the law.

  The legislature of this state has sought to deal with it over the years, crafting laws which require the early posting of witness lists, to give the prosecution time to check out the credibility of witnesses before they take the stand. But even these are sometimes bent by judges in an effort at fairness, to give the defendant a final word.

  “Let’s make a demand on Chambers,” I say, “invite an offer of proof as to which witnesses if any will verify his story on the parked van.”

  “Flush him out?” she says.

  I nod.

  I can tell by the look on Lenore’s face that she likes this approach.

  For the moment, however, there is something about Adrian’s letter that is to me more troubling. I have looked at it from every angle, so much so that its corners are now dog-eared. As I read it again, I get an uncomfortable, queasy feeling, that something is wrong.

  “His letter is like a road map. And I’m troubled,” I say, “by the specifics.”

  “How he knew the details,” she says. “I was wondering that myself.” Lenore has seen it, too, though she mentions it only now.

  “How could he know what was in the Scofield file?” I say. “It’s been sealed. We didn’t charge his client with these murders.” I make a face. “So Chambers has no access to the particulars involved in these crimes.”

  “A good guess on his part,” she says. “He knows for example that we’ve matched up ends of the cord used to tie the first four victims to the ground. It was in the police reports in those cases. The same with the metal stakes, that the ones used to kill the college kids were ground to a point.”

  “Possible,” I say. “Could be simple deduction. The fact that we didn’t charge Iganovich with the Scofield killings tells him that we failed to get a match on the rope and the stakes in those cases.”

  This is what she is thinking. It is plausible. Chambers would not be likely to miss such a thing.

  “It’s a smart move,” she says. “You make a blind allegation in your letter that the rope and the stakes don’t match and then wait to see what we do. In order to dispute it before the grand jury, we have to produce evi
dence in the record, a match. He reads the grand jury transcript and knows precisely what we have. Either way he can’t lose. If we sit mute and don’t counter any of this with hard evidence, he can safely assume we can’t produce a match at trial.”

  I am looking at her, tracking her line of thought. “So when we get to court, he uses these unexplained crimes, the discrepancies in the evidence, as a lever to lift doubt in his defense.”

  She nods. “I think so. That’s where he’s going. He’ll try to sell the jury on the theory that somebody else did ’em all. Chambers will argue that unless we can tell the jury who did the Scofields, there is a reasonable doubt that his client is not guilty of any of them.”

  She is right. This is clearly his line of attack. It might not be enough to acquit, but it could certainly hang the average jury, leave them hopelessly deadlocked. The county would be faced with the prospect of another costly trial. Chambers would take his revenge, laughing each inch of the way. Confronted with the prospect of still another trial, Derek Ingel and Armando Acosta would make it their special mission in life to crush my career.

  I look again at Chambers’s letter, lying open on my desk. There is something else that troubles me, something I do not mention to Lenore. It is the tenor of this writing. Chambers is far too sure of himself. His words are not the image of someone dealing in the dark, juggling details grounded on conjecture.

  In one area he has slipped over the edge, revealed a bit too much. It is the tire tracks, the ones at the Scofield scene.

  Imbedded in the letter, three paragraphs down is Chambers’s assertion that vehicle tire tracks found at the scene of the Scofield killings do not match the tires on his client’s van. He is of course correct. The police have indeed found tracks, and moreover, come up with no match.

  The problem is, there is no mention of any tire tracks in any of the reports on the earlier killings. It is something that is isolated, confined, mentioned only in the Scofield file. This information on the tire tracks Chambers could not get from any serendipitous conjecture.

  There is no way that Chambers could have known about this, I think, unless he has eyes and ears inside my case, unless he has been talking to someone close to the investigation.

  Chapter Twenty

  “We’re going out,” says Nikki.

  “Emm?” Saturday afternoon and I’m lost in the sporting green, at the kitchen table, the first time I’ve read anything unrelated to work in a week.

  “Even when you’re here, you’re not here,” she says.

  I drop the paper, a pained expression, and apologize.

  When I look up, Nikki has her purse over her arm. It seems that this is the extent of my life of late with Nikki and Sarah, an endless train of amends for lost weekends, and late nights in the office.

  “Where are you going?” I say.

  “I’ve been talking to you for the last five minutes,” she tells me. “You haven’t heard a word I was saying.”

  She’s right. Nikki’s been working at the sink while I huddled behind the paper. Her voice has been a constant din in the background, competing with the television which Sarah is still watching in the other room. But I have seen and heard none of this, not even the box scores which my eyes have traversed four times on the page in front of me. My mind is on Putah Creek, the choreography of my grand jury.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “My mind is elsewhere.”

  “Right.” Nikki gives me a look, like what else is new?

  “I’m taking Sarah to the movies, and then we’re having dinner with Laura Benson and her girls.” Laura Benson is another lawyer’s widow, married to a trial mogul, one of the local tort sharks, who at any time has more irons in the fire than the village smithy.

  Nikki has joined the “widows’ web,” a network of lawyers’ wives who in effect have given up all hope of weaning their husbands from their obsessive work ethic. I have seen some of their literature, mimeographed sheets with the motto on top:

  “Live with ’em or leave ’em—

  either way you lose ’em.”

  It is the latest in self-help for the lawyer’s spouse.

  “Your dinner’s in the ice,” she says. “The dish covered in foil. Five minutes in the microwave,” she tells me.

  “What time will you be back?”

  “Whenever we get back,” she says. This is another of their tenets, brazen independence, to the point of impudence.

  “Some clue as to a time would be nice,” I say. “Today? Tomorrow?”

  She ignores me. “Sarah. Turn off the TV. Let’s go. We don’t want to be late.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” she says. “Sarah and I are going to have fun.”

  My conscience begins to ease a little with this thought.

  “When you’re finished with your trial, you can join us,” she says. “We’ll still be here—maybe,” she says.

  This is her exit line. She leaves me, with this knife still twisting in the open wound.

  We are now three days in on the presentation of evidence to our grand jury. Straightforward and uncomplicated I have spoon-fed them Kay Sellig’s testimony of the rope and metal stakes, the match which points to Andre Iganovich as the killer of four college students, the manner in which that evidence was found, and the details of his flight from Davenport.

  Goya and Sellig have worked out the details on the Scofield evidence. Now they are lying in wait for an opportunity to put this before the jury.

  We have decided that, no matter what, we will not reveal the medical evidence from Dr. Tolar’s autopsy, the fact that the Scofields were killed elsewhere and moved to the Putah Creek. I do not want this in the grand jury transcript for Chambers to read. I will hold it like a trump card for trial.

  My biggest fear is that they will let the Scofield evidence slide, read the Johnson letter and yawn. In our final strategy session Goya and I had discussed a little farce, something she and I could play out if things went badly, a few questions and answers in front of the jury. This was intended as a way to drag the bait, to set the hook, to draw a motion to hear the Scofield evidence. But our hastily drawn parody was thin, shallow as a sandbar and nearly as dangerous. It was not likely to deceive the quick-witted, particularly a judge on appeal, or Chambers if he chose to test the indictment. An appellate panel might wonder what our colloquy is doing in the record.

  Lenore said she had a better idea. I listened to this with some trepidation. But in the end I agreed.

  Our enemy thus far has not been the facts or the law, or for that matter the wily mind of Adrian Chambers, who is present here only by his writings. Instead it is the small contrary factions on this jury that are causing the most grief. Little budding walls of animosity have cropped up between groups of jurors. These have nothing to do with the issues or the evidence before us.

  From the perspective of a prosecutor, the best grand jury is a closed and intimate thing, like a family pulled together in crisis. The introduction of a single discordant member can cause considerable pain. And I have found mine.

  William Geddes has short cropped hair and a thin angular face. He is a transplant from the big city, a retired cop. Off on a disability dive from the Los Angeles Police Department, he lives like the landed gentry, with his horses and his fourth wife, on a spread outside of town. From all appearances he is a fifth-degree loudmouth with a wandering libido.

  Between belches over Diet Coke, he’s been drooling all over the table, lecherous looks at Lenore Goya and another juror, a young school teacher, a blond seated at the other table across from him.

  On the first day of evidence, Geddes copped looks at the blond’s long legs under a short dress, until she showed up the next day in pants, and sat down the line, where he could no longer leer without wrenching his neck.

  Yesterday he crossed the line. He hit on Goya. It started with a few soft off-color jokes and guileless references to sexual trivia. Not to anyone in particular. Geddes uttered these just under his breath in the quasi-pri
vacy of our afternoon break, as if it were all in good fun, an innocent quest for a few laughs. But always his eyes were on Lenore, like a radar dish searching for prurient shadows.

  Then he made his breathless move. As she headed for the door on an errand, in passing traffic, he spoke in her ear just loud enough to be overheard by two of the other jurors and me.

  “How about a drink, just you and me, after work?” he says. Novel he is not.

  As for Goya, she slowed only half-a-stride, turned and looked him in the eye. “God already put one asshole in my pants,” she said. “Why would I want another?”

  One of the jurors doubled up over at the table, laughing out loud.

  Geddes shot him a mean look.

  This did not faze the man, a farmer of Dutch stock, built like a snowplow. Geddes was relegated to a variation of his initial malignant gaze. He put a face on it, tried to pass it off.

  “Jesus.” He shook his head and laughed. “I’ll bet she gives head like a barracuda.” It was a feeble search for sympathy from the male contingent, an appeal to the redneck brotherhood that did not fly.

  Goya had cleared the door and didn’t hear his last comment. The jurors I’m sure thought this was lucky for Geddes. Otherwise he would have been explaining to his wife how it was that “Mr. Doodles,” Geddes’s one-eyed monster in the turtleneck sweater, got his two cylinders crushed.

  This morning Geddes is obstreperous, a seeming stream of pointless questions, as if by this he is taking his revenge on the group.

  The three farmers sit next to each other at the table like Larry, Moe and Curly, with beefy, hairy forearms folded across their chests.

  A college professor and two housewives sit on the other side, quiet, not disposed to ask questions or make comments, except under their breath to each other. I have no idea what they or others on this jury may be thinking.

  Ravi Sahdalgi, a Pakistani graduate student, is closest to me, sitting near this end of the U-shaped tables.

  “Rag-head.” It is what Geddes uttered under his breath the one time Sahdalgi sought to speak up. This thoughtful and introspective man has been silent ever since.