Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (33 page)

“
Yes, sir.”

“
And in criminal cases,
too?”

“
Yes.”

“
And were my ears deceiving
me, or did you this very morning describe Ms. Baroso’s physical
condition when asked to do so by the prosecutor?”

“
I suppose I
did.”

“
Then why be so reluctant
to describe Mr. Lassiter’s condition?”

I just—

“
You just didn’t want to
tell the jury that Jake Lassiter was beaten to a pulp by Kit Carson
Cimarron.”

“
Objection!
Argumentative.”

“
Sustained.” Judge
Witherspoon looked at Patterson and instructed him gently, “Please
confine your questions to…well, to questions.”

“
Isn’t it true that Mr.
Lassiter was beaten to a bloody pulp?”

“
I don’t know if I would
characterize it quite that way.”

H. T. Patterson was good. Damn good. As soon
as he saw Racklin was defensive, he would pour it on. Trying to
hide the obvious when the truth won’t hurt is a common cop mistake.
If I attacked Cimarron, it didn’t matter if he ran over me with a
steamroller defending himself. So a smart prosecution witness would
just shrug and say, yeah, ole Kit got in a few licks. But Racklin
was trying too hard to help the prosecution, something that’s
almost always a mistake.

“
Well, Detective, how would
you characterize a concussion, multiple lacerations and contusions
of the torso and all four limbs. How would you characterize bruised
ribs, strained ligaments, blackened eyes, blurred vision, a
dislocated shoulder, and numerous scars from a
bullwhip?”

“
I’d say your client bit
off more than he could chew when he jumped K. C.
Cimarron.”

Ouch.

“
Really? Did you see Mr.
Lassiter do just that? Did you see him jump Mr.
Cimarron?”

“
No.”

“
Because you weren’t
there.”

“
That’s right.”

“
So your testimony is
dependent on what Ms. Baroso told you?

“
That, and from my
independent investigation of the

scene.”

“
Your in-de-pen-dent
in-ves-ti-ga-tion,” Patterson drawled, as if the two-bit words
weren’t worth a nickel, “began after you took a statement from Ms.
Baroso, did it not?”

“
I don’t follow you,” the
detective said.

“
It is not necessary that
you do, but I would appreciate it if you would answer the question.
Isn’t it true that you first spoke to Ms. Baroso, and after getting
her tearful version of the events, you proceeded to
in-ves-ti-gate?”

“
Yeah, it’s true. I had to
start somewhere, and your client was unconscious.”

“
So he was, having been
beaten into that state by Mr. Cimarron, correct?”

“
Yeah, he got hit. I said
that.”

Patterson’s voice grew louder. “And
thereupon, having been told what supposedly happened by Ms. Baroso,
you began to in-ves-ti-gate, or shall we say, you began to gather
evidence that would corroborate and confirm, exculpate and
exonerate this attractive young woman from any and all
suspicion?”

“
The lady was never under
suspicion.”

“
What!” thundered
Patterson, as if the answer was the biggest shock since the Jets
beat the Colts in Super Bowl III. “You never even considered that
Mr. Cimarron had been dispatched into the hereafter by…the
lady
?”

Racklin sighed with
exasperation. His look to the jury said
these fucking lawyers are a pain in the ass.
“Ms. Baroso identified herself as an assistant
state attorney in Miami, and then—”

“
Did she show you her badge
and ID?”

“
Yes, as a matter of fact,
she did.”

“
So here is one dead body
on the floor and another man lying unconscious with multiple
injuries, and once you learn that the third person on the premises
is a fellow law enforcement official, you immediately conclude she
is a mere witness and not a suspect, correct?”

A good question on cross-examination must be
answered yes or no. And if the cross-examiner is really sharp, the
question asks whether the witness has stopped beating his wife. If
Racklin answered yes and admitted that he immediately concluded Jo
Jo was free of suspicion, H.T. made his point: It was a hasty call
by the cops. If Racklin answered no, then he knew the next question
would be: When did you conclude she wasn’t a suspect? And on and
on.

“
I’ve been doing this a
while, and I concluded she was not a suspect. I considered her a
witness. She seemed credible and—”

“
She
seemed
credible! I suppose Jeffrey
Dahmer seemed like a good prom date.”

“
Objection!” Now McBain was
on his feet. “Counsel keeps arguing with the witness.”

“
I withdraw the question,”
Patterson said, graciously.

“
What question?” McBain
muttered under his breath.

Ramrod straight, pulling himself up to his
full five feet six inches, cowboy boots included, H. T. Patterson
strutted to the clerk’s table and picked up the report compiled by
the crime scene technicians.

“
Now, Detective Racklin,
you have testified that Mr. Cimarron died of a nail wound to the
head ...”

“
No, I didn’t. I said I
observed a head wound. I believe the deputy medical examiner will
testify as to cause of death. That’s how we do it up
here.”

Oooh. Racklin was no dummy. He was telling
the jury to keep an eye on this slick-talking stranger.

“
Yes, thank you so much for
that clarification. Did you observe any nails other than the one
you described as having been embedded in the saddle?”

“
I believe the technicians
came up with some in the corncrib. It’s in their report. You’ll
have to ask them.”

“
I see.” Patterson came
back to the defense table and was thumbing through his notes. You
like to conclude cross-examination with a bang, but H.T. seemed to
be out of bullets, or nails, as the case may be. Just then, one of
Charlie Riggs’s old lectures popped into my head. Something about
the four manners of death. Natural, accidental, homicide, and
suicide. I wrote a single word with a question mark on a yellow pad
and slipped it to Patterson.

My bantam rooster of a lawyer nodded and
turned his attention to the witness stand. “Detective, when did you
conclude the death was a homicide?”

“
Upon being shown the body
by Deputy Dobson who responded to the call.”

“
Prior
to taking Ms. Baroso’s statement.”

He thought about it a moment. “Actually,
Deputy Dobson was telling me what the lady said, as he led me to
the body.”

“
So you knew Ms. Baroso’s
version of events even as you looked upon the body for the first
time?”

“
That’s what I just said,
yes.”

“
And you concluded it was a
homicide.”

Racklin smiled a crooked smile. “It didn’t
look like a heart attack or a fall down the stairs.”

“
Or a suicide?”

That stopped him a second.

“
Did it
look
like a suicide?” Patterson
asked. “Yes or no?”

A perfect question. It’s fun to watch
someone good at his work, whether it’s Marino finding the open
receiver or Perlman plucking the right string.

“
No, not exactly,” Racklin
said quietly.

“
So you never contemplated
the possibility of suicide?”

Another problem for the detective. If he did
contemplate the possibility, when and why did he rule it out? If he
didn’t contemplate it, why not?

Racklin tried to hedge his bets. “Not in any
great detail,” he answered, but the look on his face said he’d
never even considered it.

“
In what detail did you
contemplate the possibility?”

“
I can’t
recall.”

“
Isn’t it true you never
considered the possibility of suicide?”

“
I can’t recall spending
time considering it. Like I said, it didn’t look much like a
suicide.”

“
Did you fail to consider
the possibility because it didn’t look like a suicide or because
you immediately accepted Ms. Baroso’s version of
events?”

Racklin’s pause said he was trying to figure
out the ramifications of each possible answer. “Both, I
suppose.”

“
But you have testified
previously that the wound initially appeared to have been caused by
a gunshot fired at point-blank range, correct?”

“
Yes.”

“
You have witnessed many
such wounds, have you not?”

“
Some.”

“
Some? Let’s see, in your
years as a homicide detective, first in Denver and then here, how
many such gunshot wounds have you investigated, confining ourselves
to those gunshots fired at point-blank range into the temple or
ear?”

“
I m not sure.”

“
Five, fifty, a hundred, a
thousand?”

“
I’m not sure. More than
five, less than fifty. Say nine or ten.”

“
And in those dozen gunshot
wounds, how many were homicides and how many were
suicides?”

He paused and gave the impression of
honestly trying to remember. “One was Russian roulette. I suppose
that was an accident. Maybe two were gang killings. The rest were
suicides, as I recall.”

“
But you never considered
that possibility here because you immediately accepted as true
Josefina Baroso’s version of events, isn’t that
correct?”

Trapped. He’d already said it. Not that we
could prove Cimarron killed himself. But there were two living
people in that barn, and it damn sure helps a reasonable doubt case
if the cops were too quick to grab one of them.

“
Yes, that’s right,” the
detective said, just wanting to end the agony.

H. T. Patterson told the judge he had
nothing further and gave the witness back to the prosecutor, who
didn’t want him. Judge Witherspoon allowed as how it seemed like a
good time for lunch, and no one disagreed.

***

By the middle of the afternoon, half the
jury was dozing or looked as if they wanted to. Two crime scene
technicians and a lab worker identified little bags filled with
odds and ends, none of which you’d want in your refrigerator. The
blood, skin, bone, and brain matter belonged to K. C. Cimarron.
Fingerprints on the stud gun were smudged, and the handle may have
been wiped with a cloth, but there were still latents on the barrel
identified as belonging to Cimarron and me. A partial of a third
person’s print was picked up there, too.

“
Do you have any idea who
this final fingerprint comes from?” McBain asked on direct
examination.

The prints guy, a bookworm type with a
laboratory pallor, looked at the jury as he was doubtless
instructed and said, right on cue. “All I can say is that it isn’t
from Mr. Cimarron, Mr. Lassiter . . .” He paused for effect, “or
Miss Baroso.”

McBain smiled at Patterson, and just in case
anybody missed the point, he repeated it. “Not Ms. Baroso’s
prints?”

“
No, sir.”

The other technician, a dark-haired woman in
her thirties, testified about picking up the stud gun and
delivering it to a Douglas Clifton who would perform certain tests
on it. This was just chain-of-custody material, so the gun could be
admitted into evidence. When she picked up the gun from the barn
floor, or in her words, when she “secured the apparent weapon,”
there was no nail in the barrel, but there was a plastic clip with
nine .27-caliber bullets remaining in the gun.

The nail pulled from the saddle was three
inches long, made of carbon steel, and fit perfectly into the gun.
The head of the nail contained a small amount of gunpowder residue
in addition to the gunk from Cimarron’s skull. Actually, she didn’t
say “gunk.” She called it brain tissue, and the schoolteacher juror
with the lace handkerchief squeezed her eyes shut.

***

It was a few minutes before six o’clock, and
all the technical talk was over, so the judge sent the jury home
with the usual admonition against forming opinions or discussing
the case with the neighbors, and added the friendly advice about
driving carefully with all the tourists in town.

As he stuffed his files into cardboard boxes
for the night, H. T. Patterson asked me, “Can I buy you a
drink?”

“
Is the law an
ass?”

We walked out of the stuffy, overheated
courthouse and into the bracing air of dusk in the Rocky Mountains.
Snowflakes whirled in a crisp breeze, and a three-quarter moon hung
low over Smuggler Mountain. Cars crunched through a new snowfall on
Main Street, and exhausted, happy skiers headed back to their
hotels, condos, and chalets. I was struck by the utter beauty of
the coming night, but at the same time, was overcome by a profound,
nameless melancholy, a sense of approaching doom, and an unshakable
conviction that I was powerless to affect my own destiny.

CHAPTER 23

WHERE DAYLIGHT MEETS
DARKNESS