Hostile Witness (48 page)

THE MOMENT WHEN
a lawyer stands in court and calls the next witness is a moment fraught with expectation. As the witness walks the long distance down the aisle, the jury, the judge, the opponents, the gawkers, the entire community of that courtroom wonder what evidence will be disclosed, what devastating story will be told, in what way will this witness’s testimony be decisive. It is a glorious moment for the trial lawyer, full of drama, full of mystery. No matter how many trials, no matter how many witnesses, no matter how pedestrian the matter at issue, standing in the courtroom and calling the next witness never becomes routine. And the key to that moment is logistics. In every courtroom across this country there is a lawyer with neck craned, examining the benches and the door in the back, wondering if the next witness is waiting to respond to the call. It is not enough to prepare the questions, to practice the testimony, to hone the arguments to razor sharpness. Logistics are all. Standing in the courtroom, calling the next witness and having nothing happen, you might just as well be standing there naked.

“Do you have your witness yet, Mr. Carl?” asked Judge Gimbel, and none too kindly. The judge had a docket of 478 cases, and waiting for a witness to magically appear was doing nothing to reduce that number.

“If I can just have another minute, Your Honor,” I said.

“Sixty seconds,” said Judge Gimbel. I was hoping he
would leave the bench, tell his clerk to get him when I was ready, take me off the hook, but the judge had brought his paperwork with him and as he sat up on high and scrawled in big letters across some important legal document I sweated like a thief. Like a naked thief.

From the defense table I dashed up the courtroom aisle, suffering the smirks of Jimmy and Prescott and Prescott’s coterie, and burst into the cool, cruelly empty hallway. I looked left and then right and then left again. Nothing. The plan had been that I would flee the Society Hill Sheraton with Beth, in brown wig and overcoat, drawing the chase while Morris and Veronica, in blonde wig and jacket, simply strolled out the front door past Sheldon, acting as lookout, and stay on their way straight to the courthouse. Then Morris would bring her here, to the courtroom, to await my call. It was the awaiting my call part that was causing the problem. Beth was outside the courthouse, waiting for their arrival at the main entrance on Market Street. I was rushing crazily about inside, hoping they would magically appear.

Beside the courtroom doors there was a bank of pay phones and quickly I called Morris’s office.

“Kapustin and Son, Investigations,” said Morris.

“Morris, you bastard, where are you?”

“There is no one here to take your call, but we are checking in with this machine like crazy. Just leave a message and we’ll be with you so quick your head will do a somersault, that quick.”

I cursed into the phone in loud, precise language before the machine beeped me shut.

I called my office, to see if Morris had left me a message, but Rita only sneered. “Any calls? My, here’s a shocker, Mr. Carl. No calls this morning. Maybe I’ll ring up the
Inquirer
about this breaking story. No calls for Mr. Carl.”

I hung up on her and spun out of the phone alcove in frustration, whirling into the frail figure of Herm
Finklebaum, the toy king of 44th Street, sending him sprawling backwards on the cold white floor of the courthouse. I leaned over him. He wore his regular plaid shirt, ragged houndstooth jacket, lime-green slacks. He lay there, unconscious, the blood throbbing only faintly beneath the skin stretching over the hole in his head.

“Jesus, Herm. I’m sorry. Are you all right? Herm? Herm?”

He lay there quite still. He was a small, frail man. The skin clung tightly to his cadaverous skull. My already fraying nerves writhed into a panic.

“Herm? Oh, God, Herm? Are you all right, Herm? Herm? Jesus, Herm. Wake up.”

One eye popped opened.

“Next time, buddy boy, you watch where you’re going or it will end in a lawsuit.”

I helped him up. He turned his neck carefully from side to side.

“It feels a little stiff,” he said.

“Do you need a doctor?”

“Not really, it’s been stiff since ’seventy-two.” His laugh was an annoying, rhythmic wheeze, like an asthma attack.

“Look, I’m sorry, Herm, but I have to go. I have to find someone.”

I was already past him, hustling off in my vain search for Morris when he said, “You maybe looking for that pretty little Miss Ashland?”

I slid to a stop on the waxed floors and spun around. “You know where she is?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.”

“Oh, come on, Herm.”

“Okay, I do. Morris has her down on the sixth floor. He told me to find you to ask when you wanted her.”

“Now,” I said. “I want her right now.”

“Morris thought it better to keep her hidden until she was really needed.”

“I need her right this instant.”

“It’s going to be interesting?”

“It’s going to be dynamite.”

“All right, buddy boy. One dishy little number coming up. Save me a seat.”

Logistics are all until they’re solved, then they disappear like a dream upon waking. I had my questions ready, I had prepared the testimony, I had my arguments honed, and now, best of all, I had my witness. I took a moment to slow myself down. I took three deep breaths and gave myself a slight oxygen buzz. When it wore off I straightened my jacket, shot my cuffs, and walked with as much confidence as I could muster into the courtroom.

All gazes were upon me as I strode down the aisle. The judge asked me if I was now ready to proceed and I said I was. The jury sat straighter in their seats. The court reporter wriggled his fingers in preparation. Prescott sat with pen poised over his pad. Much had been paid for this moment and I meant to enjoy it. I scanned the jury, I looked at Jimmy Moore, the wild expectation grew. Before the judge could break the mood with one of his admonitions to get moving, I spoke in a loud and clear voice,

“On behalf of Chester Concannon, I call to the stand Veronica Ashland.”

Right on cue she opened the courtroom door, peered in, and then pensively, awkwardly, with just the right amount of hesitation and awe, she walked down the aisle, her head held nervously forward. She was wearing a white blouse, a black pleated skirt, she looked more like a Catholic schoolgirl than a councilman’s mistress. Without glancing at either Chester or Jimmy she took the stand. With hand raised and voice low she said, “I do,” to the clerk’s swearing-in and then sat demurely in the witness chair, hands on her lap, waiting for me to draw out her story.

“DID YOU WANT TO
come to testify today, Ms. Ashland?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you subpoenaed me,” she said.

From the start, I wanted to let the jury know where this witness stood. Here was not Chester Concannon’s mother testifying to save her son, here was a potentially hostile witness, sitting up there only because she had a truth that we were insisting she tell. I had her identify the subpoena that I had served upon her and put it into evidence. I would wave it at the jury in my closing as I argued for her credibility.

“Now, Miss Ashland, do you know Councilman Moore?”

She glanced at him warily. “Yes,” she said.

“How do you know him?”

“We’re friends,” she said.

“How did you meet him?”

She let out a deep breath and said nothing.

“How did you meet Councilman Moore, Miss Ashland?”

“He had come with a group to raid a crack house on Sixty-first Street.”

She had given the wrong address. “Was that Sixty-first Street or Fifty-first Street?”

She sighed. “You’re right, Fifty-first Street. I was inside when he came.”

“Why were you inside?”

“I was using at the time.”

“Using what?”

“Cocaine.”

“Crack cocaine?”

“Yes.”

“And the councilman found you inside?”

“Yes. And he took me to a drug rehabilitation center and got me off of drugs.”

“Do you know the councilman’s attitude toward drugs?”

“He hates them with a passion. He hates the dealers, the profiteers. He hates those who killed his daughter.”

“They incense him?”

“Yes.”

“Make him angry?”

“Yes.”

“Violently angry?”

Prescott stood up quickly. “Objection, calls for speculation.”

“Answer if you can,” said the judge.

“Yes,” she said. “Violently angry.”

“Have you seen the violence?”

“Yes. At the raid he was swinging a chair wildly, knocking down everything he could find. He was almost crazy.”

“Did you see him hit anyone with the chair?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I saw him hit Norvel Goodwin.”

“And who is Norvel Goodwin?”

Her lips quivered in hesitation and her eyes pleaded at me not to force her to say anything against Goodwin, but I looked down at my papers, waiting for her answer.

“The man who was selling in that house.”

“Were you involved with Norvel Goodwin at the time?”

“Romantically, you mean?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I was on drugs. Romance and drugs do not go hand in hand, Mr. Carl.”

“Were you sexually involved with Norvel Goodwin?”

“Yes.”

“How did you feel when you saw the councilman swing the chair and hit Mr. Goodwin?”

“I was scared. But he didn’t hurt me, he helped me.”

“And after he helped you get off drugs, did your relationship change?”

“Yes.”

“How did it change, Miss Ashland?”

She looked at me hard and then glanced at Jimmy and then cast her gaze down to her hands twisting together on her lap. “We became lovers,” she said.

“You began to have an affair, is that right?”

“That’s what I said, yes.”

“And did the affair continue throughout this trial?”

“No, not the whole time. Jimmy told me it was over the day you mentioned my name in court.”

“How did he tell you this?”

“Over the phone.”

“Isn’t he putting you up in a hotel room now?”

“I told him I was afraid to stay at home. He found me a room.”

“Did he visit you there?”

“No,” she said. “You’re not listening. It’s over.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Angry,” she said.

“At him?”

“No,” she said. “At you.”

And so my foundation was laid. I had brought out her relationship with Jimmy, her drug use, Jimmy’s propensity
to violence when faced with drugs and their dealers, and the end of their affair, leaving her bitter toward me, not Jimmy, so she would have no reason to lie about what Jimmy had done. My difficulty, of course, was that now I had a drug user for a witness. What I had to do, in effect, was to try her in front of the jury for being a drug addict, a slut, a homewrecker, try her and acquit her before Prescott was able to get his hands on her in cross-examination. I had to bring out everything that might be used against her, bring it out as carefully as if it were an armed pipe bomb, and then diffuse it before the jury so that when Prescott tried to impugn her on cross with it the jury would think they were being told an old story and wonder why Prescott was going over it still again.

So what I did was gently lead her through her entire life story, from Iowa to London to her trip around the world with Saffron Hyde. I had her linger as she talked about the bus accident, about how Saffron needed the drugs for his pain, and how she too became addicted. And then, in detail, I had her tell the jury about his swim in the Ganges and his death in Varanasi and the burning of his body. Both Eggert and Prescott objected to the story but the judge gave me the latitude I requested, agreeing with me that I was entitled to give evidence to mitigate any loss of credibility of the witness due to her drug use. So back we went to New York and the University of Pennsylvania and that crack house on 51st Street where Jimmy Moore found her, and the drug rehabilitation center and the apartment in Olde City that the councilman leased for her at a bargain rate in exchange for a street. It was a good story, well told, with tears and hesitations and true emotion and by the end of it there was no doubt that the jury felt for her, shared her tears. The jury had gone through her life story and come out at the other end on her side. I was ready now to get to the meat of her testimony, except for one more disclosure.

“During the time of your relationship with Jimmy Moore, did you have affairs with other men?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Miss Ashland?” It was a question not strictly relevant, but I couldn’t help myself from asking it.

“I don’t know. I was lonely, I guess. Bored. Jimmy had a wife. I had nothing but a part-time him.”

“Did you have an affair with Zack Bissonette?”

“Yes,” she said and that brought a little “Aaah” from one of the jurors who had finally begun to see what she was doing in this trial in the first place.

I hesitated for a moment, looked down at my papers. I shuffled one over the other and back again as I screwed up my courage to ask the next question. “And did you also have an affair with me?” The question itself was enough to silence any murmurs in the courtroom.

“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

I could have stopped there, I guess. I had tossed out the worst of it with that simple question and her simple answer. I could have left it to Eggert and Prescott to pick over the carcass of our dead relationship. Chester Concannon was glaring at me with a strange look of doubt that I had never seen from him before, a doubt that would only grow deeper the further I delved into what had happened between Veronica and me, and there was really no reason to delve any further. But when the judge called me to the bench and reamed me out for a good five minutes over getting involved with a witness, forcing me to explain to him that I didn’t know she was a witness when I started my involvement with her, I thought I should explain that very thing to the jury, since they too may have been suffering from a misapprehension. So instead of stopping like I could have, I continued on.

“How did you meet me, Miss Ashland?”

She gaped at me, and then said, “At a restaurant. You tried to pick me up with some of Jimmy’s champagne.”

“For how long did we see each other?”

“For as long as it was convenient.”

She was staring hard at me and I stared back at her and for a moment it was only her and me in the courtroom and I had the power to ask her anything I wanted. I was tempted to ask her about her feelings for me, did they ever exist, did I ever satisfy her, was our sex as incredible for her as it was for me, did she ever love me, did she ever dream, like I did, that it could go on forever. And could she forgive me for what I was putting her through now and, if so, was there any possibility that after this was all over, after the trial was finished, after she had cleaned herself up and our lives had resumed their unbearable stasis, after everything, could she ever consider coming back to me? That was what I wanted to ask her, all that and more. But what I asked instead was, “When did you tell me you had been sleeping with Zack Bissonette?”

“When you asked.”

“That was after we had become involved, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And did we continue our affair after I learned about your relationship with Bissonette?”

“Well, you kissed me after that,” she said. “When you gave me the subpoena.” That got a chuckle from the crowd.

“But now our relationship is over, is that right?”

“It was over before it started,” she said.

“And we’re not seeing each other anymore?”

“No,” she said and then she let out a sly smile. “Not even if you begged.”

I stepped back and winced. My reaction was noticed, there was a titter from the jury, a few slight laughs from the audience behind me. And somehow, with the laugher it all seemed all right now. It was the banter that did it, the clichéd angry girlfriend bit that did it. It was as if my relationship with Veronica now fell neatly into that whole boy-girl
thing, absolving me of anything dark and sinister. I glanced over to the jury and there were some admiring glances, that someone like me could have played around with someone like her. I had been raised a few notches in their esteem. It was incredible, I thought, that a woman with whom I was obsessed could mash a grapefruit in my face in the middle of a crowded courtroom and it only served to build up my standing. Sure, let it happen just like that. I had a job to do, a story to tell, and now it was time to tell it.

“All right, Miss Ashland,” I said. “You have a checking account, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Is there another name on that account?”

“Chet’s name is also on the account.”

“Why?”

“I was getting some money from Jimmy every now and then through Chet. Putting Chet’s name on it made it easier for him to give me the money.”

“Did there come a time when certain large amounts were deposited in that account?”

“Yes,” she said. “Chet asked me to put in certain amounts of cash.”

“Chet asked?” She had made another mistake. “You mean the councilman.”

“No, Chet. I assumed he was asking on behalf of Jimmy. Everything before with that account had always been on behalf of Jimmy.” So that’s what she had meant when she said Jimmy had asked her to deposit the money. But why had Concannon gone along with it? I looked at Chester. He had the same look of doubt his face had held before.

“How much was deposited?” I continued.

“I don’t know the total, but each deposit was always just under ten thousand dollars.”

“How many deposits?”

“Ten or fifteen.”

“And what happened to the money?”

“I don’t know firsthand,” she said.

“Tell us what you know,” I said.

“Objection, hearsay,” said Prescott.

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“Well, what had you heard?” I asked.

“Objection,” said Prescott.

“Sustained,” said Judge Gimbel. “Move on, Mr. Carl.”

That line wasn’t working. She didn’t know enough to get out what I had wanted to get out about Norvel Goodwin and the money. Her knowledge was secondhand, her answers too indistinct. I looked over at the jury box. I saw a yawn. The sight of it cut me. I was losing them. I needed something big, now.

“All right, Miss Ashland, let’s move on to Zack Bissonette.” There was a pause, which sucked back the jury’s attention. “Where did you meet him?”

“At his club. Jimmy, Chet, Chuckie, and I used to go there. That’s how we met.”

“How did you start dating?”

“Dating?” She tossed me a little smirk, just to let everyone know she was no cheerleader in a ponytail. “He asked me out one night at the club.”

“While you were there with Jimmy?”

“Yes. Whatever his shortcomings, lack of gall was not one of them.”

“And what did you say?”

“I gave him my phone number.”

“You wrote it down for him?”

“I just told it to him. I figured if he was interested enough he would remember.”

“And he remembered?”

“Yes. He called me the next day.”

“And you went out together.”

“Yes.”

“Why, Miss Ashland? Why did you go out with Mr. Bissonette?”

“He was handsome, he had played baseball, poorly maybe, but he had played, he dressed in black, I don’t know, I guess I couldn’t think of a reason not to.”

“Now when you started going out with Mr. Bissonette, were you using drugs?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“How long had you been drug-free?”

“Over two years.”

“Did you see Mr. Bissonette many times?”

“A few.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“Yes, I slept with him.”

“Did there come a time when you stopped seeing him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I grew bored. I grow bored easily, Mr. Carl, as you know. He was boring, that’s all.”

“So you told him it was over.”

“Yes.”

“How did Mr. Bissonette take it?”

“Not very well. He wanted to keep seeing me. He insisted we keep going out.”

“What happened?”

“I said no, that it was over.”

“Did there come a time when you started seeing him again?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Well, he was begging, he was a pest. One night when I was bored, with nothing to do, I called and told him he could come over.”

“Did he bring anything with him?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“He brought me cocaine.”

I stepped back from the podium for a moment to let the last answer sink in. The points were being laid out and I wanted the connections to be drawn by the jurors before being made explicit by Veronica. I wanted them to expect to hear what Veronica would say, that Jimmy, who was violently opposed to drugs, had reacted violently once he found out that Bissonette had been first sleeping with and then supplying drugs to his mistress, a woman who had filled the gap in his life left from the drug death of his daughter. I wanted to set it up so that when Veronica gave voice to the obvious suspicions her response would be that much more believable. I turned around to look at the rest of the courtroom. There was Morris nodding at me, sitting next to Herm and Beth. Slocum was also in the audience, taking notes as he prepared for the murder trial. Behind Jimmy, where his wife usually sat, was an empty place in the benches. The courtroom artists were busily sketching the scene. Everything was perfectly in place. When whatever murmurs that had arisen from the cocaine response faded, I stepped back to the podium to continue.