“But I never felt I had to discuss this with you because, as I say, I generally like to stay out of battles where I have a personal stake, but also because you won at the PX, so there was nothing for me to say. The court had ruled.”
Jackman slid his haunch off the edge of his desk and went to sit across from Stier in his leather wing chair. “But now, suddenly,” he continued, “this new wrinkle-maybe there were two shots and not just one-seems to undermine your basic theory of the case. This is important to me, first because it’s no longer personal, and second because, contrary to popular opinion, my job-our jobs, yours and mine-that job is not only to prosecute. It’s to serve justice. It’s to find the truth of what happened. If we find exculpatory evidence, it’s our duty to put it in the record, not hide it so we can go ahead and get our conviction.”
“I’m not hiding anything, Clarence. I didn’t know about this until twenty minutes ago.”
“No, I know that. I guess my real question is how does this make you feel about this case, and about your defendant? Does it change anything for you, and if so, what?”
Stier’s body language-hunched shoulders, flushed complexion-belied the control he exerted over his confident tone. “Strategically, I’d admit it’s a pain in the ass. It’s going to give more credence to this testimony than it deserves. But as to the actual facts, first, they probably don’t change a lick. You tell me the woman’s apparently senile, so she may or may not have heard two shots, and in any event she didn’t get to Schiff and Bracco until a couple of days later. Hell, what she heard might not even have been on the morning of the murder. So do I have an issue with my basic theory? No. None. Nothing’s changed.”
Jackman, hands relaxed and linked in front of him, nodded. “And Mr. Glass?”
“Regardless of what the media’s doing with the mayor and all that, Jerry’s helping me make the dope case, Clarence, and that’s the motive here. I know it’s unusual for the feds to get involved in one of our murders, but to me the financial stuff he’s got already proves the money laundering, which in turn proves her complicity with Vogler. As for the mayor…” Stier met Jackman’s gaze. “She’s no part of my case. Neither’s Fisk. That said, their financial dealings with Joel Townshend are complicated and wide-ranging, and I don’t think Jerry’s out of line looking into them.”
“Well”-Jackman stole a peek at his watch-“thanks for making the time. I see you’ve got to be back in court in ten minutes.”
This was a dismissal.
“Certainly.” Stier got up and made it to the office door before he turned. “Thanks for the heads-up on Schiff’s witness, Clarence, although I don’t think she’s going to make any difference in the verdict. And on the other stuff, I appreciate the candor.”
Cheryl Biehl considered herself a close friend of Maya’s. She’d visited her twice in jail, and Hardy knew that for a nonfamily member to brave the bureaucracy, indifference, cultural challenges, disorganization, noise, and crowds of the jail’s visiting room showed a rare and true commitment and friendship. And to do so twice! Biehl’s affection for Maya must be genuine. So he was happy that he wasn’t going to be grilling her on her earlier testimony to Stier, testimony that had effectively painted her friend as a long-standing user and seller of drugs.
He was also marginally cheered, if slightly perplexed, by Stier’s addition of a new witness, Lori Bradford, at this stage in the proceeding. Calling for a sidebar, and admitting as soon as the court had come back into session that he had only been informed of the existence of this witness during the lunch recess, Stier acknowledged that he would in all probability not actually call her. But he told Hardy and the court that a perusal of police procedures during the investigation had revealed that this woman’s testimony had not made it into the inspectors’ reports, and hence not into Hardy’s discovery documents. Painting the oversight as little more than an unimportant technicality, Stier just wanted to preserve the sanctity of the record.
Hardy accepted this for the time being. He would have time to find out everything he might want to know about Lori Bradford and her testimony. And in the meanwhile he had what he hoped would be the simple cross-examination of Cheryl Biehl, where he might elicit some facts about her continuing friendship with his client that might help the jury view her in a better light in the here and now.
“Ms. Biehl,” he began, “in the past eight years, have you ever witnessed Maya using or selling marijuana?”
“No.”
“When you told her that you’d heard about Dylan Vogler selling marijuana out of Bay Beans West, what did she say to you about that?”
“She said she was sure that wasn’t happening. Dylan didn’t need to do that.”
“And about her statement regarding Levon Preslee, that ‘she was never going to get out from under them.’ In spite of that comment, to the best of your recollection, did she ever mention Levon Preslee to you again?”
“No.”
“So it was just that once, right after he got out of prison?”
“That’s right.”
“And how long ago was that?”
“I don’t know exactly. It must have been seven or eight years.”
Hardy took a beat, walking back to his table. Maya, her eyes still puffy from the crying jag, nevertheless seemed to be more engaged, less burdened somehow. He gave her a subtle nod of encouragement. And, in fact, Hardy felt he had cause for a renewed sense of hope. After all, he had two brand-new and unexpected facts with which to conjure-Lori Bradford and Tess Granat-and in his experience facts had always had a way of expanding concentrically, although he couldn’t identify as yet the exact territory they were expanding into.
Now he paused.
He’d been considering trying to use Cheryl Biehl’s cross-examination as a way to give the jury some kind of a sense of the real reason that Dylan had been blackmailing Maya. Of course, this would be a very tricky strategy on a couple of levels, not the least of which because it left Maya with essentially the same motive-blackmail-to have killed her manager. But these, he considered, might both be mitigated by other considerations. In the first case, blackmail over the hit-and-run took Maya’s purported selling of dope and its attendant moral turpitude out of the equation, and this also removed any motive for her having killed Levon. Also, in the real world, and absent Maya’s confession-which would never be forthcoming-there was no chance of building a case for the hit-and-run, so that issue was moot.
But somehow the risk of pursuing any of this seemed suddenly too great. Hardy had his own responsibility under the attorney-client privilege to keep any hint of what he’d just learned to himself. He didn’t want to play any morally ambiguous games with his fragile client on this score. He was now finally her confidant and confessor, and he couldn’t betray her by not-so-subtle implications of other motivations. So all in all, though Hardy thought that getting the fundamental truth about Maya and Dylan before the jury might have its advantages, in the end he decided it was not something he could do.
He turned back to his witness. “Thank you, Mrs. Biehl,” he said. “No further questions.”
As far as witnesses went, Jansey Ticknor had opened up after they’d charged Maya back in October. In her first interviews with Bracco and Schiff she had been unforthcoming, but during the course of Paul Stier’s preparations for the preliminary hearing back in November, she had come to remember quite a bit of what she couldn’t seem to initially recall about Maya Townshend and her relationship to Dylan. Now Stier was seeing to it that she was laying as much of it as she could out for the jury. “So Mr. Vogler told you about their earlier relationship?”