He left carrying his beer, and a moment later his Corvette kicked up a spray of pebbles from the driveway and tore off down the street. I resented the noise almost as much as the man who made it.
For once, I knew more than the prosecution. Not that it would do me any good.
Abe Socolow was Sergeant Joe Friday in the courtroom. Just the facts, ma'am. He didn't need to know, didn't want to know, every twist and turn in the lives of Chrissy and Guy Bernhardt and their father. I needed to know, but wherever I turned, the answers came out wrong.
"So did that tall glass of gin kill her daddy or what?" Granny asked me. She had driven up from Islamorada, toting a wicker basket containing conch chowder, white lightning, and jerk chicken. Kip carried a brown paper sack filled with Key lime marmalade, fruit chili, and other preserves Granny had put up.
"Chrissy pulled the trigger," I said, sorting through the goodies that now lay scattered across my kitchen counter. "But she was manipulated by her brother and programmed by the shrink."
"Just like Laurence Harvey," Kip said.
"Huh?"
"In The Manchurian Candidate. Brainwashed and trained to kill."
"Yeah, something like that."
"Can you prove it?" Granny asked.
"No," I admitted.
"Then what are you gonna do?"
I opened a mason jar and sniffed at the rye liquor. "Play soft defense. Bend but not break. Maybe Guy Bernhardt makes a mistake, and I get lucky."
Granny gave me her puzzled look. "You mean Socolow, don't you, Jake?"
"No. Abe's not the enemy. He doesn't even know what really happened. Guy Bernhardt does, and he's the opposition."
"Chrissy knows," Kip said.
"What?" I was taking a sip of the liquor, but my hand stopped in midtrack.
"I mean, if they programmed her, it's got to be in her head somewhere, doesn't it? Like flashbacks in the movies, where all you need is something to bring them back. I can always tell when someone's going to get one, 'cause there's a close-up of the person's eyes, and the music comes in a rush, and then everything goes to black and white."
"Flashbacks," I said, mulling it over.
"Yeah, like in Dolores Claiborne, only there they weren't black and white, just kinda a different color, and Kathy Bates could remember all this really bad stuff that happened to her."
Granny was looking at me sideways. "What are you thinking, Jake?"
"Just trying to figure how to bring up the music."
We started the day with housekeeping matters, both sides submitting proposed jury instructions, even though we were a week away from finishing the case. Judge Stanger granted my motion to exclude Luciano Faviola and Martin Kent as witnesses, ruling that the pattern of prior acts of violence was not similar enough to meet the Williams rule, and in any event, there was no question as to the identity of the shooter.
Abe Socolow's direct examination of Rusty MacLean was short and thankfully lacking in surprises. Rusty told the jury that he had been sitting immediately adjacent to a heavyset man at the bar. No, he didn't recognize the man, never saw him before. Mr. Lassiter was sitting right next to Rusty. The jury seemed puzzled by that. No frame of reference. Johnnie Cochran wasn't with O. J. on June 12, 1994, right?
The defendant, Christina Bernhardt, walked in. Sure, he'd recognized her. At one time, he was her agent, but you know how models are. Jump from agency to agency at the promise of better work. She wasn't more than ten feet away when she pulled out a gun and fired three times at the heavyset man. Hit him with every shot.
"What, if anything, did you do?"
What, if anything…? My profession has its little ritualistic questions. Once, in a lawsuit against a dressmaker for a botched wedding dress, the opposing lawyer asked my client, the bride, "What, if anything, were you wearing during the ceremony?"
"I was frozen," Rusty said, shaking his head. "I mean, I never saw anything like…"
He let it hang there.
"Then what happened?" Abe Socolow asked in another time-honored question lawyers use to move the story along.
"Jake, Mr. Lassiter…" Rusty looked over at me and gave a half smile. He was a boyish charmer until you got to know him. "Jake jumped up and went for the gun, but Chrissy just fainted dead away into his arms."
"Your witness," Socolow said amiably.
There was no need to cross-examine Rusty. Except my need to inflict some pain, preferably not on my client or myself. I stood and Rusty smiled at me, which caused a red-hot spot in my gut to spread to my limbs. I was sweating.
"Mr. MacLean," I began, as if I'd never seen this fellow in my life, "have you ever been convicted of a crime?"
Rusty's smile froze, and he shot an anxious look at Abe Socolow, who merely shrugged. It's a perfectly legitimate question of any witness, but strangely, under the rules of evidence, if the answer is yes, you can't ask, "What crime?" If the answer is no, and it's a lie, you can put on evidence of the conviction to impeach the witness.
"You oughta know," Rusty said finally.
"Indeed I do, but the jury does not." I opened a file and held up a blue-backed legal document, as if examining it. "I ask again, sir. Have you ever been convicted of a crime?"
"Yeah, you represented me. Next time, I'll get a better lawyer."
That drew some laughs from the gallery, and a few smiles from the jury box, but it didn't bother me one bit. Let the jurors think poor Chrissy had a bumbler while the state was represented by the coolly efficient surgeon named Socolow. I am not above a ploy for sympathy. I returned the blue-backed document to its file folder. It was the deed to my house, not Rusty's conviction for fraud, after overcharging models for their composites while making farfetched promises of employment.
"Mr. MacLean, how much time elapsed from the moment Chrissy Bernhardt took the gun from her purse until the last shot was fired?"
Rusty shook his head. "It was quick. I dunno. Less than ten seconds." He stared into space, thought about it, actually brought his hand up as if holding a gun, pulled an imaginary trigger three times. "Maybe six seconds."
"Six seconds," I repeated. "Now, you just testified that Christina fainted after shooting her father?"
"Yeah. I said that."
"So she lost consciousness?"
"She just collapsed, and you caught her before she hit the floor."
"Precisely when did she lose consciousness?"
"Precisely? I don't know."
"Was it a second before she fell, five seconds, six seconds?"
"Well, it couldn't have been six seconds. That would be about when she started firing, and she was conscious then."
"She was?" I tried to sound surprised. It isn't difficult because I often am. "Were you monitoring her heart rate?"
"No."
"Or her blood pressure?"
"No."
"Or her brain waves?"
"No, of course not, but she was firing a gun, for God's sake."
"Which you were looking at, correct?"
"What?"
"The gun, Mr. MacLean. When Chrissy Bernhardt was firing the gun, state's exhibit three…" I walked to the clerk's table and picked up the little Beretta. "You were looking at it, weren't you? Your eyes were glued to the gun?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"Just as you are now?"
Rusty's eyes flicked from the gun to the jury and back to me. "Yeah. It kinda draws your attention."
"Therefore, you weren't looking at Chrissy's eyes, were you?"
He paused a moment, irritated with me. "No, I guess not."
I returned the gun to the clerk. "So you couldn't possibly know if Christina's eyes were open or closed at the time of the shooting, could you, sir?"
The purpose of cross-examination is to eliminate a witness's choices, and just now, Rusty had no choice. "No, I couldn't tell if her eyes were open," he admitted.
"You couldn't see her facial expression at all, whether her face was slack or taut?"