O
UR FIRST TWO WITNESSES
are two of Salazar’s regular customers. Both swear that Salazar begins their yard work at seven o’clock on the dot, and is often parked outside their houses as much as an hour before he is scheduled, drinking coffee, reading a magazine, or talking on his cell phone. Sometimes he’ll start earlier—watering the flowers, hand-trimming bushes, chores that don’t make noise. Their testimony establishes that Salazar is often on the Westside early in the morning, and that his presence there on the day of his arrest was not an aberration.
A decent enough start. But then Carlos, our one good alibi witness, fucks up royally. Even though Joe and I spent days with him going over his testimony, he falls apart almost immediately. He confuses times and locations, can’t remember names—the whole nine yards. It is an acute case of stage fright by a man scared to death of the system. Joe, who is conducting the examination, is constantly interrupted by Loomis’s objecting to his leading the witness, which he is—he has to—and Judge Suzuki invariably rules in Loomis’s favor. By the time Joe finishes, I don’t think there is one person in the courtroom who doesn’t feel sorry for Carlos, nor does one of them believe him. The looks on the faces of the jurors are clear they sure as hell don’t.
Loomis practically sprints to the podium to begin his cross. He eviscerates Carlos, shreds him into confetti. The poor shlump is drenched in sweat.
When Loomis is finished, there is less man than hulk on the stand. Judge Suzuki, attempting to be humane, frees Carlos from his ordeal as nicely as he can while remaining impartial. Carlos is bent over almost in half as he leaves the room, like a man holding in an acute case of diarrhea. I wonder if he drinks. If he doesn’t, he should start, immediately.
“That went well,” Joe remarks dryly, as Carlos vanishes out the doors at the back of the room. His remark is so off the wall I can’t help but bleat out an involuntary laugh. Immediately, I cover my mouth with my hands, but Suzuki heard me. He favors us with an inquisitive and unfriendly look.
I point to my stomach as if it’s the culprit and I’m an innocent bystander, then make a wringing motion with my hands.
Suzuki nods in understanding. “We’ll take a ten-minute recess before the next witness,” he announces.
I retreat to the ladies’ room for a much-needed pee. As the baby gets bigger and bigger, it’s harder and harder to control my bladder. I’ve begun wearing two pairs of cotton underpants to absorb any errant moisture. And I’ve sworn off asparagus. I remind myself to talk to Judge Suzuki about my delicate situation so that if I have to ask for breaks, he will automatically grant them. He wouldn’t want me piddling on his courtroom floor.
Back in the courtroom, with a few minutes left in the recess, I take the chamber’s temperature. There is a roiling mood of anticipation in the air, coupled with such palpable tension you can almost physically touch it. We have one more witness left, the psychologist we hired to evaluate Salazar (it was positive, or we wouldn’t be putting him on), then Salazar himself will take the stage. How he handles himself during our examination, and more important, at cross-examination, will be critical to our success or failure. All the rehearsals have gone well, but as we saw from his friend Carlos’s travesty, you can throw the practice performances out the window when you actually open on Broadway.
In a corner of the room, Joe and the psychologist are talking quietly, a last-minute rehash of the questions Joe is going to ask. Usually when a lawyer from our office uses a psychologist, it is because we have a client with some severe mental illness, and to put such a person behind bars without medical supervision is nuts; yet it’s done all the time. We get a disproportionate number of mentally ill people, because we deal with society’s dregs. Salazar is actually an exception.
Joe excuses himself from the witness and joins me at the defense table. “I think Dr. Silk will help with damage control,” he says. The psychologist’s name is Leonard Silk. “Let’s face it,” Joe says with a twisted expression on his face, “we have nowhere to go but up after that clusterfuck with Carlos.”
To me, Dr. Silk is more cotton than silk, but that’s good, because slickness doesn’t work with juries—they develop a good bullshit detector for condescension, a trap many expert witnesses fall into. They fall in love with their knowledge, and want you to know how smart they are. Like that kid in school who always raised his hand and knew every answer, they can become pains in the ass fast. And juries tend to fade out when experts are talking—technical material is boring. We’re putting Silk up there because, one, he’s going to say good things about Salazar—that he doesn’t fit any pattern of a serial killer—and, two, because he’s the only other witness we have. To go directly from Carlos to Salazar could be ruinous, because the jury would still have the taste of that fiasco in their mouths. Bridging them with a more objective witness is smart. And he isn’t Latino, which is also important. It might be racist to say that, but it’s true. Even in this so-called enlightened age, white men carry an aura of authority about them.
The prosecution didn’t have a psychologist witness, because the one they brought in to evaluate Salazar concluded that he wasn’t crazy, was not faking his belief in his innocence, and didn’t fit any serial-killer patterns. Silk, who arrived at the same conclusions, will present Salazar as a rational man without major hangups. Having our doctor testify will be beneficial to us, except for whatever tidbits Loomis can squeeze out of Silk on cross. Joe and I are not worried about that. Silk is a veteran, he knows how to avoid the prosecution’s traps.
After establishing Dr. Silk’s credentials, Joe addresses the issue Loomis will bring up if he doesn’t—that Silk has been an expert witness in hundreds of trials, almost all of them for the defense. That’s the nature of the beast. After fifty years of lawyer shows on television, jurors are sophisticated now; they know that every expert who is involved in a trial is partisan to one side or the other. But you still need to establish that your partisan witness isn’t bending the truth. He may be interpreting it to your advantage, but he can’t lie. On the rare occasions that they do, they invariably get tripped up. So they don’t.
One thing Dr. Silk learned during his sessions with Salazar, which none of us knew, because Salazar never told us, is that he was adopted at birth. He does not know who his birth mother was, and doesn’t care. He grew up in the Southwest, New Mexico and Arizona, and left home after he finished high school. He moved to L.A., went to work for a gardener, learned the business, then started his own. Both of his parents are dead, and he has no siblings. He has led two lives, before Los Angeles, and after. He loves his wife, he loves his kids, he loves his work, and he gets fulfillment in his ministry and youth work.
“Are there studies about adoptive children?” Joe asks Silk.
“Thousands.”
“About their behavior in society?”
“Are they more social, less social, that sort of thing?” Silk answers with a question of his own.
“Yes. Or other characteristics that separate them from non-adoptive children.”
“Not across the board,” Silk answers. “If they came from an emotionally and psychologically stable family, they’re like anyone else, statistically. It’s all about the individual. In some ways you can equate them to children who come from families in which the parents divorce. They often are more stable, not less, because they crave stability.”
Joe moves to the heart of his argument. “Do serial killers or killers in general exhibit social or psychological qualities that differentiate them from people who aren’t killers?”
“If it’s a crime of passion, which most killings are, no,” Silk answers. “But if they aren’t, the answer is yes. A person who kills in cold blood is a sociopath. They do not feel empathy or remorse toward their victims, or anyone.”
“In your professional opinion, Doctor, are these murders the work of a sociopath?”
“Yes, they are.”
“You examined Roberto Salazar, is that correct?”
“Yes. I met with him on several occasions.”
“In your opinion as a clinical psychologist, with decades of experience in this special field, is Mr. Salazar a sociopath?”
“No.”
“Does he have any sociopathic tendencies at all? Any indications of them?”
“None that I could discern,” Salt answers decisively. “He has compassion, warmth, decency. In my opinion, his personality is the polar opposite of a sociopath’s.”
“So from a psychological point of view, he does not fit the pattern of a serial killer.”
“No. He’s about as far away from that as you can get.”
Loomis doesn’t spend much time on Silk. It’s the end of the week, and Loomis knows the jurors are itchy to be released from their bondage, so he doesn’t prolong their agony. Unless technical testimony brings forth something new and shocking, it goes in one ear and out the other. Two hours of back and forth and Silk is finished.
Today is Thursday. Court is adjourned until Monday morning, at which point the perfect storm that will be Roberto Salazar testifying for his life will begin.
I
THREW UP LAST NIGHT.
I would like to blame my delicate stomach on my being pregnant, but you don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I have been a lawyer for seven years and have handled over a thousand felony cases, and none were as remotely important as this one. Starting today, Roberto Salazar takes the stand in his defense, and I’m conducting the direct. This will be the most important day, or days, of my career. I’m more uptight than I’ve been since I don’t know when. Worse than the first time I took my clothes off in front of a bunch of strangers. Almost as bad as when my mother shot me and I was afraid I might bleed to death.
Joe and I spent the three-day break rehearsing intensely with Salazar; almost all day Friday, and several hours both Saturday and Sunday. He was more receptive to us than he had been earlier in the trial. He knows his life depends on convincing the jury that he didn’t kill those women. It’s going to be a tough battle, despite the key eyewitness’s change of mind and Cordova’s slipup with the timing of his visit to the victim’s home. The eyewitness didn’t say it wasn’t Salazar, she said she wasn’t 100 percent absolutely positively certain. And Cordova’s record is spotless; inserting Salazar’s name probably was a slip of the tongue. Still, he did say it. It’s on the record.
My job is to make Salazar come across as sympathetic and believable. He has to charm the jury, make them like him, and subliminally want to protect him against the machine. If he can do that, and if he can hold off Harry Loomis, who under that velvet glove will come at him like a rabid dog, he has a chance. Slim. But slim is better than none.
Roberto Salazar is brought in and takes his seat. He is freshly barbered and his shirt is new, right out of the wrapping. I bought it yesterday. He looks like a scoutmaster, the straight kind who doesn’t prey on his charges. He smiles at his wife and Amanda, who are in their customary seats, directly behind us. Amanda gives him an encouraging smile in return. His wife looks like she’s scared shitless. She’s probably the most realistic person in the room.
“How do you feel?” I ask him, pulling his attention away from his wife. I don’t want her negative vibes infecting him.
“I’m all right,” he answers, with surprising calm. If he’s uptight, he isn’t showing it. I would be jumping out of my skin if I were in his position. I practically am, anyway.
“How do
you
feel?” he inquires of me, as if I’m the one in need of support and he is my advocate. He’s a minister—maybe he believes that God is going to take care of him. That reminds me of the old saying that probably came from the mouth of a Southern sheriff in a bygone era.
Your soul may belong to Jesus, boy, but your ass belongs to me.
God can judge us in the hereafter, but in the United States, a secular nation (at least for now), the judging is done by human beings.
“I’m as good as a woman in my condition can feel,” I say, leaning in close to him, my mouth at his ear. “Answer my questions the way we rehearsed,” I remind him. “Speak clearly, in full sentences when necessary, but don’t add your own thoughts or ideas. You can look at the jury from time to time, but don’t play to them.”
“How long will this take?” he asks.
Why, you have another appointment?
“All day for us, or maybe longer. We’re not going to rush this, I want those jurors to get comfortable with you, and that will take time. Them, I don’t know,” I say, looking over my shoulder at the prosecutors sitting on the other side of the aisle. Loomis is looking at some papers, deliberately not paying attention to us, but the other lawyers are. They stare at us openly. Not with overt hostility, more like sizing us up. Are there going to be any last-minute surprises? That has to be on their minds. With cross-discovery now there aren’t many, but they have already been burned by their key eyewitness, so they’re skittish and ornery. What they’re really wondering is how Salazar will hold up on the stand against their boss, who can eviscerate a defendant without the poor victim realizing his guts are all over the floor until he’s bled to death. They hope Salazar will wither and die, leaving nothing more than a small grease stain on the courtroom floor that the custodian will wash away with Fantastik and a little elbow grease.
I’ve worried and wondered about that happening. The prospect makes me nervous, scared. And at the end of the day, I can’t control how that will go. Roberto Salazar will have to stand and deliver.
With me deftly coaching him, Roberto Salazar tells his life story. He never knew either of his birth parents. He was adopted shortly after he was born by a Mexican American couple who could not conceive. The adoption was prearranged. His parents never told him the specifics and he never asked them, but by putting bits and pieces together he decided that his birth mother must have been a young girl, unmarried, Catholic, so abortion was out of the question. She would have been sent to a home for unwed mothers, probably run by nuns. His adoptive parents, both dead now, were older than most parents. They lived in a small town on the Arizona-New Mexico border. His father drove a delivery truck, his mother was a maid at a motel. Their social life was nonexistent. They were haphazard churchgoers, and when he was young, Salazar was not religious.