“In which case it wouldn’t matter whether he had the original of the letter or a copy,” says Harry.
“Exactly.”
“But who would kill him for that?”
“Not our client,” I tell him.
“No,” says Harry. “Probably not.”
Harry and I have had our share of high-profile cases, but this one, tinged as it is by the issue of race, possesses an explosive quality all its own. To the extent possible, I have avoided the media, for there are obvious pitfalls here, questions the answers to which can be twisted to fit a dozen different political agendas.
This morning one of these has exploded on us like a roadside bomb during our trek to trial. In an effort to extinguish the flames from this, Harry and I meet with Carl Arnsberg at the jail. It is nearly seven in the evening, the first chance we’ve had to talk to him. Harry and I have been locked up in court all day with jury selection and pretrial motions.
Inside the closed cubicle, the little concrete conference room, Harry is first to erupt.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell us about these people? Surprises like this can lead to the death house. Who are they?” Harry’s face is flushed. He is angry.
Arnsberg avoids eye contact. “Friends,” he says.
“Why didn’t you tell us about them?”
“Didn’t think it was important,” says Arnsberg. He is sitting at a small stainless-steel table that is bolted to the floor, his head resting in his hands as he gazes down at its scratched surface.
“Not important?” Harry’s voice rises a full octave. “Lemme ask you. Do you know what they’re saying?” Harry looks at him.
“No.”
“They’re saying that you talked openly about kidnapping Scarborough, that you tried to talk the two of them into helping you. And that this all took place just two days before Scarborough was killed.”
“It’s not true.” For the first time, Arnsberg’s gaze comes up from the table. He looks at Harry straight on. “That’s a lie. I never asked anybody to help me. I was only talking.”
“We have their statement,” says Harry.
“I don’t care what you have. It’s a lie.”
It is a game played by prosecutors: Bury the needle in a stack of other needles. In reply to our request for discovery, the district attorney, in addition to reports and photographs of the physical evidence, has sent us a list of more than three hundred potential witnesses-people who worked at the hotel, acquaintances of the defendant, some of whom have known him but not talked to him since grade school, others who might be eyewitnesses who may have seen Arnsberg in the hall outside Scarborough’s room that morning. Harry, with investigators for our side in tow, has been forced to waste valuable time checking all these out. Most of them are chaff, people the D.A. will never call, because they have nothing of value to offer in his case. They are put on the list to distract us, to waste our time and limited resources. Most of all they are there to provide camouflage, to hide the handful of razor-sharp pieces of real evidence lying just beneath the surface over which they hope to drag us and tear us to pieces. Unfortunately for us, Walter Henoch and Charles “Charlie” Gross threaten to do just that.
“You say you were only talking to these friends,” I chime in. “Talking about what?”
“Passin’ the time o’ day. Shootin’ the shit. You know. Just talkin’.”
“About what?” If he could, Harry would waterboard Arnsberg at this point. To my partner, torturing a client who lies to his own lawyer should be part of the attorney-client privilege. Misdirection from a client is one of the things that sets off Harry’s naturally short fuse.
“All right, sure we talked about the man.”
“Scarborough?” says Harry.
Arnsberg nods, then puts his head back in his hands, elbows propped up on the table.
“Look at me,” says Harry. “What did you tell them? Specifically. Details.”
“I told ’em it would be a piece of cake.” Arnsberg still won’t look at him. “So what?”
“What would be a piece of cake?”
“Kidnapping him. I maya mentioned it, that’s all. But it was only talk. We weren’t gonna do anything. I never talked about killin’ him.” To Arnsberg this seems to make everything all right.
“Still, the man’s dead,” says Harry. “Somebody did something.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“How long did you know these two guys?” I ask.
“I dunno. Charlie I known for a year, maybe a little more. The other guy-”
“Walter Henoch.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know him hardly at all.”
“I see,” says Harry. “Just well enough to discuss a kidnapping with the man.”
“You make it sound bad.” Arnsberg finally looks up at him.
“Not half as bad as the prosecutor will make it sound. Believe me,” says Harry.
Arnsberg’s eyes are bloodshot, as if he is missing a lot of sleep in the jailhouse maelstrom at night.
“Where did you meet these guys-Charlie and Walter?”
“Like I said, we just had a few drinks. Met at a bar.”
“Does the bar have a name?” says Harry.
“ Del Rio Tavern. Place out offa I-8, near El Centro.”
“Why way out there?” says Harry.
“We were meetin’ some other people.”
“The Aryan Posse?” I ask.
The kid looks at me, kind of cross-eyed. “Some of ’em might have been members.”
I have been alerted to this by Carl’s father, who warned me that his son had gotten involved in something called the Aryan Posse, a neofascist group with connections out in the desert halfway to Arizona, at some kind of meeting place. Mail used to come to the house when Carl was living there with his mother and father. His father saw it and raised hell. But it didn’t do any good. This has been the other shoe waiting to drop. There have been a few items in the newspaper, references to Arnsberg as a neo-Nazi, but to date nothing definitive. This makes me wonder what the cops have that they will drop on our heads come trial.
“We’d just had a few drinks together, after work. You know. We’d shoot the shit.” This according to Carl.
“And you drove all the way out into the desert for that?” says Harry. “What’s the matter? No bars in town that suit your taste?”
Arnsberg looks up at him through one eye but doesn’t answer.
“Carl, you may as well tell us. It’s going to come out during trial. Were you a member of the Aryan Posse?”
“No. You keep askin’ me, and I keep tellin’ ya. No, I never joined. Just went to a couple of their meetings out there. That’s all.”
“You were on their telephone list. They called you for events,” I tell him.
“Lot of people got called to go to events. Doesn’t mean they’re members. You go to a meeting, they get your cell number.”
“Did you talk to anybody at any of these meetings about Scarborough?” I ask.
“No. Not me. Never. I mean, there was a lot of talk about him. They had pictures of him.”
“Of Scarborough?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did they get these pictures?”
“I don’t know. Maybe off his book.”
“You mean off the book jacket?” says Harry.
“I don’t know. But they shot it all up.”
“His picture?”
“Yeah. They made it into, like, a target. His face in the bull’s-eye. Put it out on the range and shot it all to hell.” He laughs.
Carl thinks this is cool. He won’t be nearly so cavalier if the prosecutor gets wind and paints the image for the jury.
“Did you shoot at it?” I ask. This would have devastating consequences if prosecutors can get testimony of Arnsberg shooting at images of the victim days before he was killed.