David Rosenfelt - One Dog Night

“Mr. Carpenter has been a criminal attorney for a number of years, has he not?” he asks.

“He has.”

“And you were a police officer here in Paterson? And then a police chief in Wisconsin?”

“Correct.”

“Did you arrest a lot of people?” he asks.

“My share.”

“So it’s certainly possible that someone was following you, unrelated to this case?”

“It would have been possible, had not subsequent investigation confirmed our suspicions.”

It was a great answer, nailing Dylan in his tracks, but he quickly recovers. He smiles condescendingly, and says, “We certainly look forward to hearing about that.”

The decision was posted at noon on the Delaware Chancery Court Web site.

It was twenty-one pages, and filled with legalese and rationalizations. But the summary page was all that one needed to read to understand that it represented a sweeping victory for Entech Industries.

The poison pill that Milgram had attempted to adopt was considered by Judge Holland to be a “fraudulent attempt by the board of Milgram to thwart the purchase,” and not in the best interests of the Milgram shareholders.

Savvy legal minds, were they inclined to read and analyze the full opinion, would note that Holland’s ruling relied mostly on fact, rather than law, which would make it even less likely for an appeals court to overturn. Since it was widely known that Milgram did not have the resources nor appetite to mount an appeal, Holland’s approach made such an attempt even less likely.

Sure enough, within an hour of the announcement of the ruling, Milgram’s board indicated reluctant acceptance. Though they disagreed in principle with Judge Holland’s decision, they pledged to work with Entech to insure that the purchase would move immediately to completion.

Alex Bauer on behalf of Entech followed in kind, releasing a statement praising the work of the court, and Milgram’s acceptance of the decision. The statement indicated that the purchase of the outstanding shares would begin within twenty-four hours, and promised that the future of the combined company and its employees would be an outstanding one.

For Judge Holland, the issuing of the opinion brought a mixture of shame and relief. It was the first time in his career that he had ever been coerced into giving a particular ruling; it violated every principle he had ever lived by.

But he had known he was going to do it for a while; no other option presented itself as feasible. It was over now, it was well behind him, and he knew that he had done it masterfully, and that it would withstand whatever scrutiny might be applied to it.

He would go home, and spend some precious hours and days with his family.

And then he would say good-bye.

Sam is proving to be a surprisingly good witness.

I’m pleased and relieved about that, because even though we’ve rehearsed his testimony a few times, I was afraid that he would love the drama of it all and turn into a loose cannon on the stand.

I take him through the phone records, and the process by which we zeroed in on Loney, as well as the other various players. I avoid naming the important people on the list, including Bauer and Judge Holland. We may wind up going there, but I’m reluctant to do so. Once they are named, then the threat of doing so becomes an empty one.

Sam refers during his testimony to the subpoenaed phone records, which helps to avoid having to explain how we got the previous, hacked versions.

Finally, he describes finding Loney’s body in the Delaware warehouse. “I called his cell phone, and it led me to the bloodstains, which led me to the body.”

“What did you do then?”

He grins. “I climbed back through the window and ran across the street.”

“How about after that?”

“I called Laurie… Ms. Collins, and she said to stay there, that she was going to call the FBI, and that I was to just tell the truth about what happened.”

“And did you do that?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And did you tell the truth today?”

“Yes.”

I turn him over to Dylan, who continues to take the same approach to what he considers tangential testimony. He doesn’t want to get too far into the nitty-gritty of it, fearing that would give it credibility, and worse, relevance.

“Mr. Willis, that was quite an adventure you went on.”

“I guess…”

“Discovering the body of a known mobster like that, it must have been frightening,” Dylan says.

“It was, but I handled it.”

“Obviously. Now that it’s over, and you can look back on it, what does it have to do with the Paterson fire that was set six years ago?”

I had told Sam that Dylan would lead him down this path, trying to get Sam to give a tortured explanation of how Loney’s death could possibly relate to Noah’s guilt or innocence. But the quick flash of panic in Sam’s eyes makes me fear that in the pressure of the moment he’s going to forget the plan.

He doesn’t.

“I’m afraid I haven’t given that any thought,” he says. “My job was to analyze the phone records, and try to track down Mr. Loney. I wasn’t told to work on any theories. That’s above my pay grade.”

It stops Dylan in his tracks; he wants to attack the relevance but can’t, since Sam didn’t testify to it. He tries to come at it from a few other angles, but Sam is ready for him, and deflects it.

All in all, it’s a tour de force performance, and I don’t even have to ask any additional questions on redirect.

I am not at all happy with the quality of our defense, or where we stand in the trial as we reach the end. We’ve thrown a bunch of stuff on the jury wall, but at this point there is little chance that it stuck. I’m going to have to explain what it all means during my closing statement, and hope that we can get to that elusive reasonable doubt, at least in some jurors’ minds.

Where I think we have been successful is in casting doubt on the Butler statement recounting Noah’s “confession.” It should be clear by now that Noah barely knew him, and would have been very unlikely to have confided such a monstrous secret.

Working against us, of course, is the fact that Butler’s statement is corroborated by other evidence, most notably the DNA on the paint can. That is simply not something that we have been able to effectively rebut.

Closing statements will be tomorrow, and I head home to do some preparatory work. Laurie is not there; hopefully she’s out either solving the case or, if not that, maybe getting some sexy lingerie to please her man.

I take Tara and Bailey for a walk and then settle in to read through the files for what seems like the five-millionth time. Laurie comes home at around nine o’clock. I don’t see any Victoria’s Secret bags, so hopefully she solved the case.

The look on her face says that she just might have.

“I’ve been at the hospital,” she says. “Seeing Jesse Briggs.”

“How is he?”

“Not good. He’s not going to leave there, and he knows it. The doctors have stopped treatment.”

“That’s too bad,” I say. “But why were you there?”

“I’ve been finding out as much as I can about his daughter and her baby, but I needed to know something else, and I knew he could tell me. She moved back to Paterson a few months before the baby was born.”

I nod. “I know. Tony told us that when we were at Taco Bell.”

“Good memory,” she says. “But do you know where she moved from?”

“No.”

She smiles. “Delaware. Dover, Delaware.”

“Well, you’ve now heard all of the evidence,” Dylan says.

“I know that it wasn’t easy. Sometimes lawyers like me have a tendency to speak more than we should. My wife often says that I take five sentences to say something I shouldn’t say in the first place.”