“No. I shot a few rounds. But not at the target. Some empty beer cans. At their range. Somebody handed me a gun. It looked like fun, so I shot a few. But I don’t remember shootin’ at anything that looked like Scarborough.”
“You don’t remember,” says Harry.
“No.”
“Wonderful. Now we have a good mental image to go along with the words, verbal musings over how easy it might be to abduct the man. D.A.’s gonna have a field day,” says Harry.
“Hell, it was all over the papers, on the news,” says Arnsberg. “Guy was stirring up trouble. He was a shit disturber. Fucking agitator. You want to know the truth, he got what he deserved.”
It is becoming increasingly clear that we may not be able to put our client on the stand. One statement like this before the jury and they will erect a scaffold in the jury box and hang him there on the spot out of sheer principle.
“Tell us exactly how the issue of kidnapping came up,” I say. “When you were talking to your friends? By the way, was anybody else present, besides the three of you?”
“No.” He thinks for a second. “No. Just us three.”
“Go on. How did it start?”
“Lemme think,” he says. This time it takes him a couple of seconds. “I’m pretty sure it was the other guy, that guy Walt. He said there was a lot of talk out on the reserve. That’s what they called the place the Posse met. He said there was people talking about gettin’ this guy.”
“ Scarborough?”
“Right. He said something like ‘their blood was up.’”
“Walt said this?” says Harry. “What did he mean by that?”
“They was mad. You know. Then he said I was lucky, cuz I was workin’ in the hotel, and according to the newspapers he was gonna be staying right there where I worked. So at least I could see him up close, like that.”
“Walt said this?” I ask.
“Walt, or it mighta been Charlie. I’m not sure. One of ’em said it. That’s how it got started.”
Harry’s following all this as he pages through the witness statement.
“Who suggested kidnapping?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I mighta said something. That it would be easy to do. Ya know, it was cool. Just talking with guys. I had a few beers. I was never gonna do it,” he says. “Just talk.”
“What did they say then? Walt and Charlie?” I ask.
“They said, ‘Yeah. Cool, man. Right on.’”
“Yeah, they wanted to do it, or yeah, it would be easy?”
“I think they meant it would be easy. I’m not sure,” he says.
“Well, let me read to you,” says Harry. “Maybe it’ll refresh your memory.” He flips a couple of pages. These are stapled together at the top left-hand corner. He finds his place, then lowers the spectacles a little on the bridge of his nose so that he can look over the top of them at Arnsberg.
“‘Walter Henoch: You’d do that?
“‘Carl Arnsberg: Yeah.
“‘Walter Henoch: Kidnap him?
“‘Carl Arnsberg: Yeah. I’d do it. I might need some help, but I’d do it.
“‘The three of us did high fives at the table. I ordered another round of beers.’ This is Henoch speaking,” says Harry.
Harry flips a page, scans down it, then another. “Here,” he says.
“‘Carl Arnsberg: It would be easy. Rap him up the side of the head, throw his ass in a laundry cart, and take him down the service elevator. Hell, we could have his ass out in the desert tied to a post in front of a firing squad before he knew what hit him. Skin his ass before we shoot him.’
“Did you say that?” Harry looks at him.
“No. No, no. I don’t think so. Like I say, it was a while ago. But I don’t remember anything like that.”
“Maybe all those beers, you forgot?” says Harry.
“No. No. I never said that.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. Yeah I’m sure.” His words are emphatic. The look in his eyes is anything but. Like a kid caught pissing against the side of the schoolhouse by the principal.
“You’re sure?” Harry asks him again.
This time all he gets is a shrug from Arnsberg. “I think so. If I said it, I didn’t mean it.”
“So you might have said it?”
“Hey, I don’t think so. I know I didn’t talk about killing him.” The gravity of all this is beginning to settle on Carl Arnsberg, like stone weights used to crush a man. Up to this point, the case has been circumstantial, physical evidence at the scene that tied Arnsberg to the location of the crime and the time it was committed. Apart from his associations and his potential motive of hate, he also had a business reason for being in the room that morning. He was delivering breakfast, by all rights an innocent act. This, however, is something else: witnesses who can put words in Arnsberg’s mouth in the period immediately prior to the murder, especially when those words cut close to the events of the actual crime. This could give the state a case with legs. It is not something complex and hard to comprehend, like DNA with its infinite mathematical probabilities, something the defense could flip on its head and play with. If the jury believes the witness statements, they become a pipeline to the defendant’s innermost thoughts, a statement of intentions.
Worse is the part that Harry and I are not telling him. These particular witness statements are not in the usual form, a loose narrative of paraphrased remembrances jotted down from recall days or weeks after the event.
These witness statements are in the form of a transcript, chapter and verse, with quotation marks at the beginning and end of each passage, direct quotations. There is only one way that such a transcript is normally made-that is, if one of the participants to the conversation is wearing a wire.
Our best guess is that this particular gathering of neo-Nazis popped up on some law-enforcement radar screen. If the cops rolled one of the members, perhaps nailing him on drugs or some other charge, and then cut a deal, getting him to wear a wire whenever he talked to his friends, this would explain how Carl was caught on tape. He may not have attended many meetings, but he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, shooting off his mouth.
Sit down at a street-side café with an intimate friend to have a confidential conversation and your words along with pictures may show up on YouTube and the World Wide Web. If Harry had to guess, his candidate for wearer of the wire would be Walter Henoch, the newest man on the scene, the one Arnsberg didn’t know that well, the man who got him talking.
7
Upstairs, the walls of the main courthouse are decorated with pictures of the local worthies, mostly judges, some of them dating back to just this side of the California gold rush. Here the noise and commotion, the jostling of bodies, is different from in the lobby downstairs. Most of the lawyers, clerks, and courthouse staff seem to have some goal and direction, even if the cases they’re working do not.
There are two separate courthouses in this town, one civil and the other criminal, connected by a bridge that spans the street between them. And for all intents and purposes, it is the only thing that connects them.
It is just my view, but on the civil side it would require a peculiar wit to call it a justice system. Buried in mud over the axles twenty years ago, lawmakers threw up their hands and pushed everything on the civil side out of the courthouse door and into arbitration. This became the tollbooth you had to pass through to get back into the courthouse.
Once there, however, any claim, no matter how frivolous, often results in the defendant’s ponying up money rather than being bankrupted by years of litigation or facing the prospect of death by old age in a courtroom full of busy lawyers flinging pieces of paper around.
On any matter that even hints of the complex, it can take years to get through trial, followed by decades on appeal. On anything that is in fact complex, a lawyer can spend his entire career on that single case, and many have done so.