“We’re cool, dickwad. Now state your name for the record.”
His testimony was less interesting than the preliminaries. He’d been sitting in front of Ziegler’s house in Perlow’s car. Heard a gunshot, ran to the back of the house, didn’t see the shooter.
Discovery was moving along smoothly. I had waived preliminary hearing and accepted the state’s discovery without whining about documents being withheld. I made no combative motions and quickly prepared for trial.
Most defense lawyers love delay. With enough time, the state’s case can fall apart. Witnesses die or forget or change their minds. Evidence is lost or mishandled. The prosecutor gets a better job and dumps the case onto the desk of some overworked kid.
I am not like most defense lawyers. I like to move for a speedy trial. My theory is that the state has harder work to do. It must gather evidence, prepare its witnesses, do the lab tests, and prepare a logical case where A leads to B and B leads to C, and “C” stands for “conviction.” The state needs boxes and files and color-coded notebooks. The state has the burden of proof, and I have the burden of staying awake. I can defend a case with a blank yellow pad and my slashing cross-examination.
In the legal world, the prosecutor is a carpenter, pounding his nails with a steady hand, building a house out of sturdy beams, while the defense lawyer is a vandal with a can of gasoline and a Zippo lighter. Sometimes you don’t even need the pyromania. Just huff and puff and the state’s shaky house will crumble.
Castiel’s case, however, was built of sturdy stuff, starting with a truckload of physical evidence. Fingerprints on the window, a solid match with Amy. A speck of fabric in the bushes, positive link to Amy’s unitard. We had answers for both pieces of evidence, though extremely risky ones. Amy would have to take the stand and admit she trespassed on Ziegler’s property several days before the shooting. She’d crept up to the solarium window through those thorny bushes, and that’s when the fabric and prints were left behind.
We’d be conceding that Amy had a maniacal obsession with Ziegler. She blamed him for her sister’s disappearance. She stalked him from next door, sneaked onto his property, and peeped at him through the windows. How much more difficult is it to believe that she came back another time, gun in hand?
Our case had other problems, too. Even if I cast doubt on the forensic evidence, I had no answer for the ballistics. The bullet pulled from Perlow was fired from the same weapon that Amy used to mortally wound my tires. Her uncorroborated story that the gun had been stolen two nights before the shooting was so lame, it ought to be taken out, blindfolded, and shot.
Then the biggest problem of all. Charlie Ziegler. On deposition, he had testified that he saw the shooter through the window. Amy Larkin. He would repeat the story at trial. If I couldn’t prove he was either lying or mistaken, we would lose. To destroy Ziegler’s testimony, I needed evidence that Amy could not have been at his house that night. A rock solid alibi.
Whenever I visited Amy in the jail, she was clutching a Bible. She had retreated to her upbringing. Scriptures and prayers. She also clung to her story that she didn’t shoot Perlow. Couldn’t have. She was with a man somewhere else the night of the shooting.
Where?
Can’t tell you.
Who?
Same thing.
Who do you suppose shot Perlow?
No idea.
How do you expect me to win?
Divine Providence.
I told her that, in my experience, God helps those who help themselves.
As the trial date approached, I considered the situation and came to a few, well-thought-out conclusions. It was pretty simple, really. I had a client I didn’t trust and a case I couldn’t win.
49 Jailhouse Rock
Lucinda Bailey loves fine wine. At Christmas, I buy Lucinda a case of Syrah from the Eberle Winery in California. All year long, she keeps me informed of the comings and goings at the county’s penal institutions.
Lucinda runs Information Technology for the jail system, and she’d been calling me every morning for the last nine weeks. I had asked her to keep tabs on Amy. If my client really had been with a man the night Perlow was shot, I figured that guy might visit her in jail. But each day, Lucinda had the same news-no visitors the previous day. Until this morning.
I was in the office. I had no customers, so I was studying the pre-season college football betting lines. Alabama was the favorite to win its second straight national championship. But pre-season wagers are sucker bets. Too many variables. A twelve-game season, plus a conference championship game, plus the BCS title game, if the Crimson Tide got that far. I’d wait until September, place a sentimental bet on Penn State, and start studying the point spreads week to week.
Lucinda Bailey’s call interrupted my dreams of greenbacks. “Your client had a male visitor at 8:05 A.M. yesterday. Stayed for thirty-seven minutes.”
“Finally! What’s his name?” I was prepared for a guy named John Doe with phony I.D. and a Groucho Marx nose and glasses.
“Charles Ziegler, Anglo male, lives on Casuarina Concourse in Gables Estates.”
What the hell!
The man Amy supposedly intended to kill comes visiting. Bizarre. He couldn’t be her alibi witness. He was two feet away when Perlow took a slug in the chest, and he claimed Amy was the shooter. So what was he doing there? What hadn’t my client told me?
I headed for the jail. Driving across the causeway, I ran through what I knew and what I didn’t know, the latter outweighing the former. I had stirred up the waters surrounding Krista Larkin’s disappearance. Castiel, Ziegler, and Perlow all went to battle stations. Perlow threatened my life, but he’s the one who ended up dead. What secret was I close to discovering? If I could figure that out, I would know who killed Perlow.
Or was it far less complicated? Had my client simply taken a shot at Ziegler and hit the wrong guy? Had she used me to find the guy who killed Krista, not for a trial, but for an execution? Which still didn’t answer the question of why Ziegler came visiting.
Something else. My previously high-strung, nerves-rubbed-raw client was oddly at peace, just a week before she was to be tried for murder. On the other side, Alex Castiel was so cocky of a conviction he didn’t even offer a plea.
Forty minutes after taking Lucinda’s call, I was sitting across from Amy in the glass-walled lawyer’s room at the women’s jail. She seemed intent on making me an even less effective trial lawyer than I already was.
“I can’t tell you why Ziegler was here.”
“Sure you can. What did you talk about?”
“I’m sorry, Jake.”
“Is it dangerous for Ziegler, too? Like your bullshit alibi witness? Mr. X?”
“I just can’t.”
“You want to know my theory? You and Ziegler killed Perlow together.”
“Why would we do that?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“I didn’t shoot Perlow. I swear it.”
“You know what? I don’t care. I quit. I’m firing myself.”
“You can’t, Jake. I checked. No judge will let you out right before trial. Besides, you don’t quit on people.”
“Says who?”
“You.”
Great. Just great. I was going to trial not believing my client, and that wasn’t the worst of it. I knew land mines were buried in the sand, but the only way to find them was to run blindly ahead, awaiting the roar.
50 Where the Wind Was Born
Castiel was not happy with his star witness. “You look like shit, Charlie.”
“Lemme alone, Alex.”
“You having trouble sleeping?”
“Not bad enough to call Michael Jackson’s doctor … yet.”