"Greed and corruption. Bribery and murder."
The four horsemen of a murder trial. Waddle would drill the jury with the phrase every chance he got. Some lawyers believed in the rule of recency. What you hear last stays with you longest. Steve taught Victoria to use both theories because the best lawyers opened strong and finished strong.
"What I'm about to tell you is not evidence," Richard Waddle said. "It's a preview of what the evidence will be. It's a shorthand version of the story you are about to hear."
Opening statement. What lawyers like to call the "curtain raiser." They had their twelve jurors plus two alternates, all of whom had just raised their hands and promised to follow the law and the evidence and render a verdict just and true.
"And what's that story about?" Waddle asked rhetorically.
Victoria thought she knew the answer.
"Greed and corruption, bribery and murder," he answered himself.
Yep. Thought so.
"It's a story about a wealthy man with no links to the Keys and no respect for our beautiful string of islands, this emerald necklace reaching into the sea. You folks who live here know we've got to protect the beaches and the mangroves, the turquoise waters and the fragile life beneath the sea. But this defendant came here for another purpose. He's a big man with big plans and he doesn't let anything get in his way. Environmental laws? He'll find a way around them. Bribery laws? He'll violate them with impunity. It's the way he's always done business."
Victoria had never heard an opening statement quite like it. Waddle hadn't even gotten to the alleged murder and he'd already crossed way over the line into character assassination. She could object, but Steve's advice rang in her ears.
"You piss off the jurors when you object in opening. They want to hear each side's story. Sit quietly. Smile sweetly. You'll get your chance."
Waddle approached the defense table and pointed at her client. "That's him, Harold Griffin, sitting with his Miami lawyer." Mia-muh loy-yuh.
Ordering up some home cooking from a dozen local chefs.
"The defendant roared into town like a wave of napalm hitting a row of shotgun shacks. Shock and awe.
That's Harold Griffin. He blasted into the Keys with his private planes and his fancy boats and all that money and he says, 'The rules don't apply to me. I'm Harold Griffin. I do what I want. I bribe public employees, seduce them with greenbacks, and when they don't do exactly what I want, I kill them!' "
The jurors were transfixed. Next to her, Griffin squirmed in his chair. Victoria placed a calming hand on his arm.
Waddle walked to the clerk's table, picked up the speargun with one hand and the spear with the other. Gesturing with both weapon and projectile, he looked dangerous. That was the idea, Victoria supposed.
"With this deadly weapon, Harold Griffin impaled a living human being. Under our laws, you're not even allowed to spear a lobster. But Harold Griffin used this to puncture another man's vital organs. A man named Benjamin Stubbs, a loyal civil servant who was first corrupted and then callously dispatched by the defendant for refusing to do his dirty work."
Waddle droned on, painting a portrait of the deceased man, humanizing him. He was trying to create sympathy, Victoria knew, as soon as he said: "I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm looking for justice."
While Waddle prattled on, Victoria scanned the courtroom. Sheriff Rask was in his usual position in the front row. Junior had taken the day off. He needed to practice free dives in the Tortugas, saying he'd been letting himself get out of shape. The Queen played hooky, too. She needed a shopping fix, but with no Nieman-Marcus for 150 miles, Victoria knew she'd be back at the hotel spa by noon.
"Now, the defense is going to say that Mr. Stubbs might have accidentally shot himself with that speargun. They're going to bring in an expert witness with charts and diagrams to tell you about the angle of entry and velocity and a lot of other mumbo-jumbo they'll say creates reasonable doubt."
"Objection!" Maybe Steve would let it go, but she'd had enough. "Your Honor, I'd prefer to be the one to discuss our evidence. I probably know a little more about it than Mr. Waddle does."
A polite way of saying, "Mind your own briefcase."
"Overruled. Mr. Waddle's entitled to speculate, and the jury's entitled to hold it against him if he's wrong."
Damn.
"You know what an expert witness is?" Waddle smiled at the jurors. "A hired gun. Now, maybe you can't buy an expert witness, but you can sure as heck rent one. According to papers filed with the court, the defense has rented a 'professor of human factors. .' "
Making it sound like "charlatan with rank and tenure."
". . from Columbia University in New York City. I don't know why they had to go all the way to New York City, unless they couldn't find anyone in Florida to do their bidding."
Oh, shit.
Victoria knew she should object. She should pound the table and act outraged. But she was gun-shy after losing the first objection.
"In case you don't know it, a human factors expert is somebody who'll tell you that a curb is too high or a guardrail too low. I'm not sure what this professor from New York City knows about spearguns, so I'll have a few questions for him when he gets down here for his little paid vacation."
Waddle went on, speculating that the professor probably didn't know Manhattan Island from Green Turtle Key. Griffin drummed his fingers on the defense table and scowled. His look, Victoria thought, combined with his bull neck and broad chest, made Griffin appear belligerent. Victoria scribbled the word "smile" on her legal pad and slid it in front of her client.
The State Attorney was better on his feet than she had expected. And yes, Steve had warned her about that, too.
"Don't let Dickwad fool you with that aw-shucks routine. He's smarter and meaner than he looks."
Buried in the middle of Waddle's opening was the admission that no usable fingerprints were found on the speargun. Smart, Victoria thought, hanging a lantern on what might be perceived as a weakness in his case. The proliferation of forensics shows on TV has created what lawyers call the "CSI factor," jurors expecting fiber and hair and blood spatter evidence in every case, all accompanied by techno-hip computer graphics.
"There are no fingerprints," Waddle explained generously, "because the ridged polymer pistol grip on the speargun is not susceptible to prints."
As Waddle wound down, one of his assistants walked into the courtroom carrying a dummy, which he placed in an empty chair at the prosecution table. Unlike Tami the Love Doll, this sack of sawdust lacked name and gender. It resembled one of those crash-test dummies that gets knocked ass-over-elbows when broadsided by a weighted sled.
"Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you're going to hear a bunch about this speargun. It's an old pneumatic model, powered by a blast of air from a carbon dioxide cartridge. You load it like this." Keeping the barrel pointed at the ceiling, Waddle leaned over and jammed this spear into the barrel until it locked. "Not hard to do. As you can see, it'd be darn near impossible to accidentally shoot yourself. But shooting someone else- well, that's as easy as. ."
Waddle wheeled toward the prosecution table and fired. The spear whooshed across the courtroom and plugged the dummy in the chest with a sickening thwomp! The dummy's arms spasmed and its head whiplashed. The jurors gasped.
"Imagine the shattering of bones and the bursting of vessels. Imagine the pain and the horror. Imagine Ben Stubbs watching himself bleed nearly to death before he lost consciousness."
Victoria was furious. She could object. But the damage had already been done. Now, for the remainder of the trial, whenever the speargun was mentioned, the jurors would not be listening. Their minds would be focused on one horrific sight and sound. The spear thwomping into Ben Stubbs' chest.