“Let’s talk about the lenses,” he says. “Is there anything that stands out with regard to these?”
“The glass is quite expensive, and it’s not a common prescription,” says the witness.
“Tell us about the expensive glass.” Kline is looking at Acosta.
Here we go again.
“Top of the line,” says the witness. “What we call ‘high-index glass.’ Very thin. Very light. But capable of taking a high prescription value.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You get lightness in terms of weight, comparable to plastic, but more resistant to scratches, and you can load the glass with a high degree of correction.”
“Cheaper glass won’t do this?”
“No.”
“And I take it the customer pays for this?”
“Usually twice as expensive as normal optical glass.”
“What are we talking about?”
“A hundred, a hundred and fifty dollars.”
“In the case of these glasses, how much?”
“A hundred and fifty dollars,” says the witness.
We are rapidly approaching what most families would spend for food and clothing in a month, and we haven’t costed in the doctor, his prescription, or calculated the tax.
“I thought you were a discount store?” says Kline.
“We are,” says the witness. “We also offer prompt service. Some customers want it done right now.” He actually snaps his fingers when he says this, so that one cannot help but come to the notion that this has been rehearsed.
“Objection. Speculation.”
“Overruled,” says Radovich.
Kline has done his homework and is now reaping the rewards, doing a tap dance on our bones-all the flourishes to aggravate a jury. The image he is nurturing is clear; Acosta with his face in the public trough, drawing down the salary of a prince, enough to buy designer eyewear and too important to wait in line like the unwashed masses.
“You wouldn’t expect to make too many sales like this, would you?” says Kline.
“As I said, maybe just a handful each year.”
What he means are a few potentates, an Arab oil sheikh or two, and perhaps a judge.
“But they would be very profitable sales, so you’d remember them and record them?”
“Objection. Leading. Assumes facts not in evidence.”
“Mr. Kline,” says Radovich. “You wanna testify, you raise your hand and take the stand.”
“Sorry, Your Honor.”
“Why don’t you try again?” says the judge.
Kline regroups. “Would the records of such a sale stand out, Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how many customers purchased glasses of that kind, the so-called high-index glass set in Specter Four Thirty frames, since the frames were offered for sale by Vision Ease?”
“Two,” he says.
“Do you know whether one of these was Lili Acosta?”
“It was,” he says.
For an accused defendant it could be said that there is not much that is more damaging than a matching fingerprint, though Kline is working with evidence approaching that realm at this point. It is now becoming clear what he laid on Oscar Nichols to convince him of Acosta’s guilt-the bloodied spectacles resting on the railing, and the witness who sits on the stand.
“Anything else peculiar about the lenses?” asks Kline. He is not finished.
“I would say the correction for astigmatism is unusual.”
“Perhaps you could explain to the jury in laymen’s terms?”
“The prescription here is for a reading glass, a common prescription for eyes as they age. But the patient who wore these also suffered from serious astigmatism. That’s an irregularity in the curvature of the lens of the eye. It results in light entering the eye not meeting at a single focal point. If serious, this can result in blurred vision. The patient who wore these glasses suffered from astigmatism in both eyes.”
“Was it serious?”
“For some forms of work,” says Hazlid, “it would be quite an impairment.”
“I won’t get into the methods of corrects. We don’t need to do that,” says Kline. “But with regard to the pair of spectacles before you in evidence, do you know what the prescription is for each lens in these glasses?”
The moment of drama, Kline with his sword drawn, aimed at our vitals.
“I do.”
“Would you please tell the jury?”
“Omitting the correction for reading, which is common, a plus two for each eye, the correction for astigmatism to the left eye is three point two five diopters, by twenty-three degrees. For the right eye it is four point two five diopters, by one hundred and fifty-seven degrees.”
“Would you say that is an unusual prescription?”
“I would say that it is highly unusual.”
With this, Kline appears to have come further than he anticipated with this witness. He is beaming at the jury box, not a smile, but the stern expression of resolve. There is an electric atmosphere in the room at this moment, a clear shift of momentum that I am not likely to reverse with this witness. With a single item of evidence Kline is on the verge of crossing the threshold beyond reasonable doubt, over the river and into the prosecutor’s promised land, where the burden would shift to us.
“Doctor, can you tell us, do you have on record the vision prescription for the defendant, Armando Acosta, as last recorded by Vision Ease?”
“I do,” he says.
“And what is it?”
“What I have just given you,” says Hazlid. “It is the same prescription as found in the pair of glasses in evidence before you.”
As he says this, you could drop a pin in the jury box and locate it by its own sound. The glasses on the jury railing at this moment are the focal point for eighteen sets of eyes, jurors and alternates, all with a single question. How will the defendant explain the presence of these at the murder scene, a sliver of their broken glass embedded like a piece to a puzzle in the victim’s foot?
CHAPTER 25
After the testimony on the eyeglasses, Kline brings on his next witness like icing on the cake, cream in your coffee, or a nail in your coffin, depending on your point of view.
With hair that went fully white before he was fifty, Oscar Nichols has an amiable face and a soft sermonizing style that makes the passing of a sentence in criminal matters sound like a religious experience. There is a certain ethereal quality to his manner that has caused the less benevolent of the courthouse crowd to refer to him over the years as “Uncle Remus.”
He is not an imposing figure. I would guess he stands five feet six and weighs a hundred and fifty pounds with sand in his pockets. He has a kind of permanent smile etched in his cheeks, grin ridges like cement. His ascendancy to the bench lends credence to the theory that the meek shall inherit the earth, or at least that portion of it inside the bar railing. To this day I do not know his politics. He runs his court by consensus, an endless search for agreement among the disagreeable-a kind of legal burlesque in which prosecutors and defense attorneys who despise each other haggle over justice for defendants who would kill them both if the guards would only remove the shackles.
Nichols is everyman’s vision of the benevolent grandfather, a monument to innocence who prays at the altar of trust. He would give matches to an arsonist who said he was cold. He would also, in a pinch, do the right thing, which unfortunately at this moment means offering incriminating testimony against an old friend.
This morning Acosta seems almost relieved to see him. I have to stand and do barricade duty in the aisle to keep the Coconut from talking to the witness who is about to hang him. Even with this they get in a quick exchange of pleasantries-inquiries about each other’s wife and family, the press taking notes.
Kline is busy pushing some papers at his table across the gulf, while he confers with one of his associates. He has been deft in his handling of these last witnesses, making up for lost ground.
With the glasses he laid a nice trap, discovering evidence that was outside of the loop, spectacles not purchased from Acosta’s regular optometrist and therefore not discovered by us. For Armando’s part, he has apologized profusely for this oversight. He now remembers that the glasses were last seen in his house months before. He has no idea how they came to be found at the scene of a murder.