Bronx Justice (12 page)

So from momentarily thinking there'd been yet another sighting, or even suspecting Pope of deliberately muddying the waters with his witness's mistake, Jaywalker now saw that Pope was playing it straight. He was obviously every bit as surprised by Mrs. Cerami's error as Jaywalker was. First he'd tried to jog her memory, but since she was his witness, he couldn't do so by leading her or otherwise coaching her. Having failed to get her to correct herself, he'd had to settle for highlighting her slight uncertainty. Finally, he'd tied the sighting to her phone call to Detective Rendell, who would be in a position to clear up the confusion once he took the stand, later on in the trial.

So Pope hadn't been trying to pull a fast one, which was pretty much in character. He was simply being the same old Jacob Pope: thorough, formal, dry, colorless to the point of being stiff. But not dirty.

If anyone had been at fault, it had been Jaywalker himself. As soon as he'd realized Mrs. Cerami's error and Pope's inability to correct it, he should have asked Justice Davidoff's permission to confer with Pope. Together, they could have stipulated to the actual date of Mrs. Cerami's
phone call to Detective Rendell and announced it to the jury, quickly putting any confusion to rest. But Jaywalker still had plenty to learn back then, and he'd let it go.

Pope had one final question for his witness. As he had several times earlier on, he lowered his voice dramatically.

The question was repetitive, and Jaywalker could have objected to it. Maybe he realized a second too late. Maybe he was afraid his objection would be overruled, serving only to draw attention to the point Pope was trying to make. Perhaps he was even entertaining the fantasy that the witness might somehow hedge or stumble in her answer, betraying the slightest bit of hesitancy. If so, it was a foolish fantasy. Again Mrs. Cerami looked directly at Darren.

As he had at the Wade hearing, Jaywalker began his cross-examination of Mrs. Cerami gently. The hearing had taught him what
not
to ask her at the trial. He knew better, for example, than to try to shake her certainty that Darren was her attacker. The most he could hope to do was to demonstrate that there'd been obstacles to her observations, lapses in her memory, and discrepancies between how she'd described her rapist to the police and how
Darren Kingston really appeared. The very worst thing Jaywalker could do was to attack her and end up alienating the jury even more against his client. Eleanor Cerami had already been victimized once, after all, and once had been more than enough.

So he began by establishing that Mrs. Cerami had had no reason to pay attention to the man upon first seeing him, and in fact had barely taken notice of him before he'd pulled the knife. He got her to agree that once he did pull the knife, she focused on it, rather than on his face. Therefore, on the elevator—where the lighting had been the best—she'd had little occasion to study her attacker's face.

Jaywalker asked her to demonstrate how the man was holding the knife. When she gestured with her right hand, he pressed on.

Jaywalker brought out that at no time had he cut her. He wanted the jury to be certain of that. He also wanted to try to get Mrs. Cerami to relax just a bit, if she could, instead of concentrating so hard on where he was going with his questions. Because there were a couple of important points he needed to develop with her. The exact way in which the man had loosened the overhead lightbulb, for example.

They'd found a smudged partial fingerprint of indeterminate age on one of the bulbs, too fragmentary to be classified and used to search databases for a match. But it hadn't been Darren's.

Jaywalker took a deep breath before deciding to go for broke.

Jaywalker let the breath out. Eleanor Cerami had just described the act of an unmistakably right-handed person. Darren Kingston was left-handed.

He had her concede that, with the bulb unscrewed, the stairwell had become darker than it had been before. He brought out that she'd been terribly frightened and very nervous. He asked her to repeat as many of the man's actual words as she could remember. He had her state, as she had at the Wade hearing, that the man's speech, other than being polite and soft-spoken, was in no way unusual. Jaywalker would have liked to take it one step further. He would have liked to come right out and ask Mrs. Cerami if she remembered the man ever stuttering. But he figured
Rendell had asked her, and Pope had probably asked her half a dozen times. Jaywalker's asking her might finally wake her up to the fact that his client must be a stutterer. All she would have to do would be to say, “Oh, yeah, now that you mention it, I think he did stutter.” At that point, Jaywalker might as well walk over to the window, open it, wave goodbye and jump. Though six floors up might not be high enough.

So he moved on to the physical description Mrs. Cerami had given of her attacker. Jaywalker was armed with the police reports, so he knew pretty much what her answers would be and could focus on those items that contrasted with Darren Kingston's appearance. He brought out that she'd described a man twenty-five to thirty years old, weighing 180 pounds and sporting a short Afro. Darren was twenty-two, weighed less than 160, and had medium-length hair.

Although some African-Americans do indeed have reddish or maroon irises, Darren didn't. His eyes were brown.

Next Jaywalker had Mrs. Cerami describe in greater detail the shirt the man had been wearing, a tight-fitting, short-sleeved beige V-neck. Both Darren and his family had insisted that Darren owned no such shirt and never had. Jaywalker got Mrs. Cerami to specify that her rapist's sneakers had been low-cuts. Darren's were high-cuts. And in spite of the fact that Darren had a chipped front tooth and a noticeable scar through one eyebrow, Mrs. Cerami could recall no scars, deformities or other distinguishing marks on the man.

That brought Jaywalker to the task of trying to establish that it had been September, not August, when Mrs. Cerami claimed she'd seen her attacker again, walking through the lobby of her building. He wanted to show that Darren had already been arrested and released on bail by that time, and would have been unlikely to go anywhere near Castle Hill. But the more Jaywalker questioned her, the more she stuck to her story, that it had been in August, only a week after the rape. It made no sense. She'd phoned Detective Rendell the Monday after Darren had been arrested. Rendell, afraid they had the wrong man, had contacted Pope, who'd checked and found out that Darren had made bail. Several days later, Pope had warned Jaywalker to have Darren keep away from his witnesses.

Then, in the midst of Jaywalker's questions, Mrs. Cerami suddenly offered an explanation for the confusion.

What had happened, Jaywalker was pretty sure, was that the witness had finally realized her error. No doubt she and Pope had gone over the date of the second sighting during trial preparation, and her transposing it from September back into August had been nothing but an honest mistake. But now that she'd said what she'd said, under oath, she was
afraid to change it. Never mind that an honest admission would have cost her nothing in the eyes of the jurors, and would have neither helped nor hindered the prosecution or the defense. So she'd decided to invent an additional sighting a week after the rape, leaving the details of it—which were really the details of the so-called third sighting—intact, because she'd already described them that way.

Well, thought Jaywalker, so be it. He was less concerned with showing that Mrs. Cerami had lied than he was with nailing down the details of the September sighting, the one that had actually occurred. So he concentrated on that one.

Jaywalker could have left it at that, but he needed to pinpoint the time, particularly if he was going to try to show later on that it couldn't have been Darren.

Jaywalker stepped back so she could get a good look at Darren. It was a
win-win
question, he knew. On the one hand, if the witness were to say no, it meant she was now hedging on her earlier testimony, and that she was no longer positive of her identification of the defendant as her rapist. On the other hand, if she were to say yes, that she was just as certain, and Jaywalker could somehow establish a solid alibi for Darren at the time of the sighting, he would be able to argue to the jury that if Mrs. Cerami was wrong about that having been Darren, despite all her certainty, then she could be just as wrong about Darren having been her attacker in the first place.

But if Eleanor Cerami recognized the trap, she gave no sign of it. She answered without hesitation, the way any witness who's convinced she's telling the truth would have answered.

Jaywalker left it at that. If it turned out that he could really account for Darren's whereabouts at 9:30 on the morning of September 17th, it would look like a coup, a triumph of cross-examination. But if he couldn't, and if the jurors happened to call for a read-back of Mrs. Cerami's testimony during their deliberations—and the chances were they would—the read-back would end right there, on that note of absolute certainty. Jaywalker would have egg all over his face, and Darren Kingston would have the next twenty-five years to wonder what his family had been thinking when they'd hired him.