Steve Martini - Double Tap

“I don’t know.”

“They laid it on the rocks, didn’t they? Just as they laid the gun under the rosebush, so that you and your staff could find both when you went looking for them. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t know.”

“The witness has answered the question,” says Templeton. Templeton wants it to end.

I head back toward the table with the silencer in my hand. “I’m not quite done.”

This time I return with the bag, canvas camo, desert colors with pockets inside for the two clips and the silencer, a larger space for the handgun, and one more square-shaped pocket underneath it.

“Have you looked at this gun bag?” I ask Perryman.

“I have.”

“Do you know where it came from?”

“It’s standard-issue military for that particular weapon. The HK Mark Twenty-three forty-five automatic,” he says.

“Ah, I see you’ve done your homework. Did you take the time to place all of the various components of this weapon in their proper pockets to see if they fit?”

“I did.”

“And what did you discover, if anything?”

“They all fit.”

“Yes, but was anything missing in this bag from the standard kit as it was issued by the military for the HK Mark Twenty-three?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“A laser sight,” says the witness.

“Ah, yes. The missing laser sight. Did you find a laser sight anywhere at the victim’s house or in her yard or on the rocks beyond the seawall?”

“No.”

“So you never found the laser sight.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“And you never found any of the spent cartridges or additional loaded rounds for the gun, either, did you?”

“No.”

“Did you have divers check the water, the area of the surf beneath the rocks, looking for any of this evidence?”

“We did. The tidal action was too rough for anything to be found.”

“So if someone threw the laser sight into the water, it would have disappeared, unrecoverable, correct?”

“Apparently,” says Perryman.

“Same with the bullets and any empty cartridges, right?”

“I suppose.”

“And yet, the killer didn’t bother to toss the handgun itself into the water, or the silencer. Doesn’t that strike you as curious?”

“Perhaps,” he says.

He has gone from “I suppose” to “Perhaps.”

“A few hours ago Mr. Templeton asked you a question about your expertise in the collection of physical evidence at crime scenes. He asked you whether you had ever seen a situation in which the suspect or accused perpetrator in a crime would dispose of evidence that the suspect knew might link him to a crime, even evidence of substantial monetary value. Is that not what he asked you?”

“Yes.”

“And as I recall, you stated that you were aware of situations where suspects or accused perpetrators were in fact motivated to dispose of such evidence linking them to a crime, is that what you said?”

“Yes.”

“Then let me ask you a question: Assuming that this firearm belonged to or was at one time known to be in the possession of the defendant, Emiliano Ruiz”-I point to my own client at the counsel table-“and assuming that he committed the crime as the state charges, why would he lay the firearm that links him to that crime in the flower bed in the backyard of the victim’s house? Why would he leave the silencer on the rocks beyond the seawall behind that house? Why? Why, when he could have dumped them both into the surf and, as you yourself testified, they would have been swallowed up by the sea?”

The witness glances quickly at Templeton, then shakes his head. He seems about to be saying he doesn’t know, then catches himself. “Perhaps he tried and in the dark he didn’t realize,” he says.

“That’s the best you can do?”

“Objection.” Templeton is now standing on the lip of his chair that extends beyond the front edge of the box on top of it. “Move that counsel’s comment be stricken.”

“Sustained,” says the judge.

“I have no more questions of this witness.” As I turn to walk toward the counsel table, I see Ruiz looking at me, the slight glimmer of hope on his face, the first I have seen in more than two months.

Iwas sitting on the state’s evidence report, the lack of impressions in the soil left by the gun and absence of marks on the silencer, for almost six weeks. I hoped that Templeton would not pick up on the inevitable sonar waves pinging just beneath the surface of his case.

Whenever arguments came up in chambers over evidence I would chirp loudly on some other point and hop in a different direction if the issue veered close to the photographs of the gun or the silencer. Like a bird protecting its nest, I feigned a broken wing over some other issue. In the end I was lucky, I suspect in part because Templeton was distracted by the embarrassment of riches presented in his own case.

“You did good. Very good. You nailed his feet to the floor, Counselor.” Emiliano is smiling at me this morning inside the holding area, one of the small cubicles just off the courtroom. He is buoyed by my cross-examination of Mitchell Perryman on the stand yesterday afternoon.

Decked out in his suit, a freshly starched shirt, and a different-colored tie each day, Emiliano looks more the banker than a defendant in a murder trial. He has learned to do a Windsor knot with the tie. With the half shadow of his dark beard clean shaven, he could pass for one of the sullen-faced Adonises of modeldom, Mr. December on the calendar Men of Combat . He cuts a good image. Whether the jury will try to put him to death is another question.

“You really got that guy. . The evidence man,” he calls him.

“Sometimes lawyers get lucky,” I tell him.

“You should learn to take a compliment,” he tells me. Emiliano has gotten the routine down so that he knows almost exactly, even without a watch, how much time he has once Harry and I arrive before they call us out into the courtroom. His orange jail jumpsuit is in a pile on the floor in the corner. Superman changing in a phone booth.

Ruiz looks as if he’s had a good night’s sleep, the first one in several weeks. “The little things that life gives to you sometimes. If you’re like me, it doesn’t happen very often,” he says. “You should be happy about it.”

“Oh, I am. It would be nice to be able to come up with a repeat performance, but I’m afraid that Mr. Templeton is not going to allow that to happen.”

“Don’t get me wrong: I’m not getting cocky, not even confident,” he says. “I know they’re probably gonna hang me no matter what. Still, I’d like to think we went down swinging. And the way you stuck the guy yesterday, I don’t mind saying, made me feel that at least maybe-you know, like, maybe-we made a statement. You know what I mean?” He looks at me.

“Yes.”

“Maybe that’s all we can do. But I think some of the jurors are listening. I think they’re asking themselves who set me up.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“No, I mean it. The lady at the end, I saw her taking lots of notes. Trust me,” he says. “You got ‘em thinking.”

It is the one thing in a capital case that a lawyer always worries about, besides conviction and a death sentence: creating expectations in the client’s mind that cannot be met.

“I don’t want to be the one to throw a damper on the party,” says Harry, “but we still don’t have a ruling from the court of appeal on the evidence from Isotenics.”

“No, we don’t. I talked to the judge about it this morning. In chambers with Templeton.”

“What did he say?” Harry missed the meeting. He was pulling some materials together for the day’s witnesses.