“How do you plan to spend the money,” Jill asks sarcastically, now that she has taken Olivia through her story, ‘that you expect to receive from your daughter’s death?”
I am on my feet objecting, “She hasn’t received any money. Your Honor.”
“Sustained,” Judge Tamower says, her first words in twenty minutes.
“No more questions,” Jill says, sitting down with a grim smile on her face. It was the question she wanted to leave the jury with, not Olivia’s answer.
As I think about where to begin, it occurs to me that Jill has made the same erroneous assumption I had that Olivia and Andy are no longer sexually involved and has failed to follow up. But perhaps she hasn’t asked this question for a reason: she would be delighted to leave the jury with the impression that the affair is over. Olivia, I decide as I sit down, can’t be allowed to have it both ways. Either she must be shown to have manipulated Andy into helping her through an act of seduction or she still loves him, and as repugnant as that may be to a Southern jury, it will be consistent with Andy’s feelings when he testifies.
“Your witness, Mr. Page,” Judge Tarnower clucks impatiently from the bench. I get up again and begin the arduous chore of trying to rehabilitate Olivia’s answers, but, as I have feared, there is little I can ask Olivia that hasn’t already been compromised by her admissions. No matter what spin I give my questions, Andy still seems to be either a conspirator with her or a grossly incompetent professional. Maybe she doesn’t know how she feels about him, but I will point out to the jury that maybe after all this time she should. If Andy won’t turn on her, I sure as hell can when it comes to my closing argument.
“Mrs. Le Master, did I hear you say that you are uncertain,” I ask, feigning a genuine air of puzzlement, “about your present feelings for Dr. Chapman?”
If she has a clue where I am going, Olivia doesn’t act like it. Calmly, she recrosses her legs as if I had asked her what she had for breakfast.
“Although I know Pam’s death was an accident,” Olivia says calmly, “I can’t help but feel very confused about the way it happened. As I have said, I no longer think Dr. Chapman should have used shock.”
I lean my arms against the lectern as if I am suddenly wearied by her testimony. Dr. Chapman? She is talking about Andy as if she only met him a couple of times.
“Isn’t it a a fact you told me that it was you who seduced Dr. Chapman and not the other way around?”
Taken off guard, Olivia draws back in the chair as if I have tried to strike her.
“I don’t recall saying that,” she says, frowning. Her face colors slightly, and if I can see it, so can the jury. I am glad I can’t see Andy without turning my head, because I know if I do, I will see him going through the roof.
“Isn’t it a fact, Mrs. Le Master,” I say slowly, now clearer in my own mind about the effect Olivia wants to create,” ‘that you’ve had sex with my client as recently as last week?”
There are titillated gasps behind me. Olivia, visibly angry, can’t resist a look at Andy before saying, “That’s not true!”
To heighten the effect, I, too, turn and look at Andy, who seems as stricken as a father who has caught his teenaged daughter in her first act of deception. I turn back to Olivia and keep up the pressure.
“Is it your testimony that you haven’t had sexual intercourse with my client on five different occasions since he was originally charged in this case?”
Olivia knows she can’t retreat, and tears again well in her eyes as she cries in a choked, almost guttural, voice, “Of course not! I’ve talked to him on the telephone several times, but that’s all!”
I pause, wishing her steadily reddening face would burst into flames.
“Now isn’t it a fact that approximately fifteen years ago the Department of Human Services substantiated child abuse involving your son, whom you no longer have custody of?”
Prepared for this question, Olivia, as if on cue, bursts into tears again and recites the story she gave me yesterday. The jury seems more shocked than moved, a reaction I’ll take anytime. I sit down, and while Jill confers furiously with Kerr Bowman, Andy whispers furiously, “Why did you ask her all of that?”
When Jill tells Judge Tamower finally that she has no more questions, every eye in the courtroom watches Olivia leave the stand. I hedge my answer.
“You don’t think the jury should hear the truth?”
“You humiliated her!” he rages.
I try to keep from reacting in front of the jury. Only a man in love could worry about such a thing.
“Why should she be humiliated,” I ask, disingenuously, “if she’s telling the truth?”
Unwilling to respond, now that Yettie Lindsey is about to begin her testimony, Andy pulls back and sits rigidly in his chair. He knows what is coming. Even if he could talk me out of asking him what he has admitted as recently as last night, Jill Marymount will have to bring it up, and Andy is one criminal defendant I will not give the benefit of the doubt if he tries to lie on the witness stand. I will not let him lie to protect Olivia. If I were on the jury, I’d be mulling over at least two possibilities. If Andy testifies under oath the affair is still going on, I’d be asking myself whether she is still screwing him because she still loves him, or she is manipulating him so he won’t turn on her. At least now, if I judge this correctly, the case will turn on Andy’s credibility and not Olivia’s.
Bristling with the dignity that only rejection can give a person, Yettie makes the kind of witness lawyers drool over in their sleep. She is wearing a beige knit suit that seems enameled upon her chocolate frame, and her strange, speckled yellow eyes seem to burn with the pleasure of the knowledge that at long last some chickens are coming home to roost. The men on the jury have to be wondering what in hell would possess a black man to kiss off this voluptuous and obviously passionate young woman for a milky bread stick like Olivia-unless, it was, of course, a fortune and a chance to get into a white woman’s pants. Tearfully, she acknowledges she was in love with Andy, and you can see the female jurors loving her for admitting it and loving her for eavesdropping outside his office. That son of a bitch, we’ll punish him if for nothing else than breaking this girl’s heart. Sure, she spied on him, but we wouldn’t have cared if she’d set up a hidden camera and microphone under their beds.
Yet despite the visual impact Yettie has on the jury-indeed on all of us except perhaps Andy her testimony re ally adds nothing, since Olivia has admitted at least part of it just minutes before. And she doesn’t say the one additional thing that could hurt Olivia (and by extension Andy), and that is her comment to me in her office that Olivia said on more than one occasion that she thought Pam would be better off dead. If she went to Jill with what she had overheard, why didn’t she volunteer this as well? Why didn’t Jill ask her what else she had heard Olivia say? Perhaps Yettie believes that those comments could have been made by anyone with a self-abusive child, and that it wouldn’t, after all is said and done, be fair to mention. I don’t know the answer, but now is not the time to find out. Unwilling to give Jill a second bite at this juicy plum, I say, “I have no questions of this witness. Your Honor.”
Jill has sandwiched Leon Robinson between Yettie and her other witnesses. As he struts to the witness stand, I feel my heart kick into overdrive. My tongue goes to my false tooth, on which I will be paying for the next six months. My body was sore for three days. If Leon has told Jill that his friends and I got acquainted that night in the parking lot, I haven’t heard it.
Judging by the way Leon is sashaying to the front of the courtroom, someone must have told him he is the star witness in this case. In his red cowboy shirt with its requisite whorls, buttoned-down pockets, and fancy stitching and new, starched Lee jeans that slide down over brown cowboy boots that gleam with a military spit shine, Leon, his pompadour waved even higher on his head than at the probably cause hearing, looks cocky instead of nervous. Surely, like Olivia, he must be pretending confidence he can’t be feeling. Unless Leon has had a vastly different life from most Arkansans, he hasn’t appeared before this many people since the night he graduated from high school.