“Mr. Mirza, this is not the original but a copy of the letter in question. The original has already been examined by a laboratory employed by the defense. It was turned over to the police for their examination less than an hour ago. I should tell you that our experts have already identified your fingerprints on the original letter and its envelope. You should be advised that perjury is a serious crime. I remind you that you are under oath.”
Mirza looked at the document.
“Your Honor, we’ve never seen this before.” The prosecutor was on his feet waving his copy of the letter at the judge.
“Neither had I, Your Honor, until late yesterday morning,” said Madriani, “when, subject to a subpoena, the letter was found in a safe-deposit box belonging to Mr. Mirza at Fontana Bank in the city. It was tucked inside a large manila envelope containing some insurance documents.”
“I’ve never seen this before,” said Mirza, his hands shaking.
“We would ask for a continuance,” said the prosecutor.
Madriani ignored him. “Then perhaps you can explain to the jury and the judge how it came to find its way into your safe-deposit box with your fingerprints on it?”
“The witness will answer the question.” One thing judges don’t like is perjury.
Mirza looked up at the judge, then toward the prosecutor, and finally at Madriani. A bewildered expression spread across his face. “I don’t know! I really don’t know!”
Six days later, after the police crime lab verified Mirza’s fingerprints on the letter and its envelope, both sides made their closing arguments to the jury.
In the courtroom, crowded to overflowing, Alex Cooper sat just beyond the railing behind Madriani at the counsel table. In closing, it took little more than an hour for Madriani to shred the State’s case given that the testimony and evidence of the prosecution’s chief witness had turned to dust. Other than the bleak GPS data putting Mustaffa’s taxi in the vicinity of the body dump, Mirza’s testimony was the only real evidence tying him to the crime. Worse, it now appeared as if there was an active conspiracy afoot to frame Mustaffa.
Paul explained to the jury that while he could not defend Mirza’s conduct on the stand, he understood the unwillingness on the part of the witness to own up to his perjury. After all, his family was in jeopardy and he had reason to be afraid for them.
Mirza, to the last breath, denied ever having seen the letter in question. He claimed that, to his knowledge, no one had ever threatened his family and no one had told him what to say on the stand. He was adamant. No doubt the DA’s office would take him to its own version of the woodshed for a thrashing on the issue of perjury if the jury failed to believe him. Still, there was no way to explain the fingerprints and the letter in the safe-deposit box, all belonging to Mirza.
After retiring to the jury room for deliberations, it seemed that the headiest item on the jury’s agenda was the election of a foreman. Before the noon break they were back with a verdict. “On the count of violation of Penal Code Section 187, first-degree murder, we, the jury, find the defendant, Ibid Mustaffa, not guilty.”
There was a veritable uproar in the courtroom as Mustaffa was discharged by the judge. Madriani made plans to meet with him the following Monday at his office in San Diego. Mustaffa left to get his personal belongings that had been taken from him the night of his arrest.
Paul, Alex, and Jenny Corcoran retreated through the phalanx of reporters to a restaurant for lunch and a glass of wine. It was Friday afternoon. Alex had to fly back to New York, but Jenny was able to stay on. She made plans to get together with Paul and his girlfriend, Joselyn Cole, as well as his law partner, Harry Hinds, in San Diego for a quick visit.
After lunch, some local sightseeing, and a heavy dinner, the lawyers parted as Paul dropped Alex at the airport. She was still conflicted, she told him, about how it felt to hear that Mustaffa was acquitted when her first assumptions about his guilt in this heinous crime were so strong.
Paul headed back to his own room. He would spend one more night in the City of Angels before collecting his luggage, picking Jenny up the following morning, and heading south to San Diego and home.
As for Jenny, she was exhausted. As soon as she got to her room and showered, her head hit the pillow and she tried to sleep. But still the subconscious was at work. Something troubled her. It was the testimony of Terry Mirza.
In the true-to-form trials of the real world, Perry Mason endings with witnesses crumbling on the stand and admitting their guilt do not occur, except in one narrow band of cases. People who commit perjury and who are confronted on the stand with irrefutable evidence of their lies often do recant their testimony, particularly when admonished by counsel and the judge in stern language that perjury is a serious crime for which they could pay a stiff penalty, including time behind bars, if convicted. Mirza had been told this several times and still he stuck to his testimony. He insisted that he had never seen the letter threatening his family or directing him how to testify.
The letter had still another quality to it, like a rabbit pulled from a hat. Samir Rashid somehow had acquired information about Mirza and his family in Egypt. According to Rashid, they were under a severe threat of death from the people who had raided the Cairo Museum and stolen the golden figurine, Surfing the Panther. These people had already killed Carla Spinova to get their hands on the memorandum left behind in the charred U.S. consulate building in Benghazi, the memo that identified the mastermind behind the museum theft, as well as the deal for the sale to the North Korean dictator. Rashid’s same sources had told him about the letter delivered to Mirza and the threat to his family. The Cairo thieves were desperate to convict Mustaffa for Spinova’s murder — to make her death appear to be a brutal sexual assault, staged to seem so — because it would put an end to the controversy and leave them free to do their deals with their stolen booty. Case solved. Story over. It all made sense. Sort of.
Slowly her subconscious released her and Jenny drifted off to sleep. She couldn’t tell how long the slumber lasted, minutes or hours, disoriented as she was in the dark room. But she was awakened with a start by the noise next to her head. She opened her eyes in the dark, little blinking lights in unfamiliar places and the sound of the electronic ringtone blaring next to the bed. She grabbed for the receiver and found it on the second stab.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Jenny. Paul Madriani here. I’m sorry to wake you.”
“What is it?” She looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was four thirty in the morning.
“We need to talk. The police called me ten minutes ago. Ibid Mustaffa is dead.”
“What?”
“He was killed by a hit-and-run driver at an intersection in West Los Angeles two hours ago. The police found my business card with the hotel phone number in Mustaffa’s pocket. They said he was drunk, stumbled into the street, and got nailed. According to witnesses, the driver sped off.”
Jenny’s mind, still half asleep, raced trying to absorb it all.
“Corcoran, are you there?”
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Mustaffa was Islamic, devout. He prayed five times a day. More to the point, he didn’t drink.”
An hour later, the two lawyers sat bleary-eyed hunched over the table in Paul’s hotel room gulping coffee from Styrofoam cups, something from an all-night café on the corner.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” said Jenny. “You want to know what I think?”
“What?” said Paul.
“I think Mirza was telling the truth. I don’t think he’d ever seen that letter before. I mean, you had him in a vise right there on the stand, squeezing him with hard evidence. Why not own up? After all, if your family is in jeopardy, it’s no longer a secret.”