Steve Martini - The Jury

He ignores me. “I’ll have to pay support from my salary, whatever I take home in pay. They can’t touch that. Right?”

I make a face, like maybe. “Who’re ‘they’?”

“The state,” he says. “Here’s the deal. I take Penny and all the bills. That would qualify her for state aid. I’d be broke.” He smiles at the thought of being destitute and immediately reads the negative response in my eyes.

I start shaking my head.

“There’s no other way,” he says.

“Even if you did it, it wouldn’t work,” I tell him. “The state would see through it in a heartbeat. The Medicaid auditors would be all over the two of you before you could cash the first check.”

It is a fact of life that some cagey live-on-the-edge con artist might get away with it, drive a Mercedes and live the high life on somebody else’s laundered checks using a different name each day, bouncing from state to state always one hop ahead of investigators. But Frank and Doris Boyd are not cut out for this kind of life. I can see them in jail togs with their kids in tow.

I tell Frank this. From the desperate look in his eyes, I can tell immediately that this was a mistake. He looks at me like the enemy.

“That’s okay,” he says. “If they put us in jail, then the county could take care of Penny and the other kids, while Doris and I do time.” He is serious. It is the kind of mindless escape the middle class, people who have never seen the inside of a jail cell, might come up with when they are desperate. Frank has now sold his wife on this.

I argue with him, but he doesn’t want to hear it. Frank feels he’s found the only way out of a desperate situation. If I say no, he’ll sell his van and his tools to come up with a retainer and find some low-life shyster who will take his money to file for this ill-conceived divorce. If I can keep him under my umbrella and talk some sense into him and Doris, maybe I can convince them not to do it. Frank is the mover here, the shaker in the family. Doris would follow him to hell if he told her this was the way out. She’s too busy trying to raise three kids, keeping one of them alive.

We talk some more. I tell him I would have to think about it, look at the insurance policy first to see if there is any other way.

“Carriers get dicey when you threaten lawsuits, especially for bad faith. There’s a chance that you haven’t hit the cap yet. They are notorious for inflating costs. It could be you’ve got some more time.”

His eyes light up with the thought. “You think so?”

“It’s possible. Even if you don’t, we may be able to buy you some.”

He reaches across the table, his hand cold and wet from squeezing the bottle of beer, and cups his palm over my forearm. “You’d do that for us?”

I nod and for the first time, he settles back in his chair and takes a deep breath, a moment of relief, eyes cast up at the ceiling.

We are headed north on I-5, Harry at the wheel of his new Camry, the air conditioner humming. My partner is beginning to draw the line at riding in “Leaping Lena,” my ragtop Jeep with its isinglass windows pulled out in good weather.

But the quiet hum of the tires on the road is not enough to dispel the growing sense of dissatisfaction I feel from Harry. Warnake’s testimony put a hole in our boat. The only question is whether it’s below the waterline.

As we work our way up toward La Jolla and the university, Harry finally breaks the silence.

“You realize we dodged a bullet on the tensioning tool? We owe the gods of evidence on that one.”

According to Harry, if Warnake had been able to link the tool, the one from Crone’s garage, to the killer tie around Jordan’s neck, Crone might as well start packing for the trip to Folsom.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “If he did it, why leave the cable ties in his coat pocket for the cops to find?”

“Maybe he forgot them. People tend to panic,” says Harry. “Especially if they’ve been busy cutting off arms and legs. And he is forgetful. Remember, he’s the one who couldn’t remember arguing with the victim the night she disappeared.” This is still sticking in Harry’s craw. “You can chalk up the cable ties in his pocket with the other things he forgot.”

According to Crone, the cable ties in his coat pocket were probably there from trash night the week before. It was a ritual. He would come home from work, don a pair of work gloves he kept in the garage, gather up the trash from the house and dump it in the can, then take the can out to the curb. Newspapers and cardboard he would bundle and tie up with the cables using the tensioning tool he kept under the workbench. According to Crone, there was no intention to hide the tool. It must have gotten pushed under an old piece of carpet when he put it away the last time he’d used it. It is a plausible story. Whether the jury will buy it may depend on how many people on the panel put out their own garbage.

“I’ll admit it defies common sense,” says Harry. “But then the man’s a little frizzy. University type. You know what I mean. A lot of aptitude and not much judgment.” Harry’s looking at me from the driver’s seat offering a sideways glance. “He’s stuck with the evidence, and so are we.”

“Still begs the question why the cops didn’t find his prints on the ties or the tool,” I say.

Harry has thought about this. “The ties were too small, too narrow to take an identifiable print,” he says. “And remember, they did find smudges.”

“And the tool?”

“He wore gloves?”

“Did you ever try to put one of those cable ties together wearing gloves?”

Harry shakes his head.

“I did. It’s not easy. If he took his gloves off to work the tie, why did he put them back on just to use the tool to tighten it?”

“He’s eccentric? I don’t know. It’s a hole we’re gonna have to plug,” says Harry.

“It’s possible he wiped the tool clean after he used it to kill Jordan. But if he did, if he thought about it enough to wipe off prints, why didn’t he go the extra step and just get rid of it? Drop it off some dock, or better yet put it in the bag with the body, weigh it down and deep-six the whole bundle?”

“Maybe he didn’t have time,” says Harry.

“Maybe he didn’t do it,” I say.

He smiles, never one to commit himself.

Before Tannery finished with Warnake on the stand, he had him testify regarding the tensioning tool found in Crone’s garage. But his strategy here was not to link Crone to the tool. Instead he wanted to shore up a weakness in his own case. Tannery couldn’t link the death tie to the tensioning tool found in the garage based on tool marks. He wanted to tell the jury why.

It seems whoever killed Jordan pulled so hard on the tool that the cable tie got twisted in the process, deforming the edges and stretching the nylon before it was cut. Successive tests performed by Warnake were unable to replicate the precise toolmarks left along the edge of the cut tie. Tannery explained this to the jury, distilling this imperfection from his own case before we could exploit it.

He left me only one thing to talk about on cross: the fact that the heavy-duty cable ties used in this case marked them as unique. His survey of manufacturers limited the number of producers of that particular tie to fewer than a half-dozen nationwide. Consequently, anyone who purchased these particular kinds of ties would be limited to those same sources.

My point: There was a good chance that anyone purchasing the ties in San Diego would likely obtain them from the same point of manufacture, with the same toolmarks as those found in Crone’s pocket. After I flogged him with this thought several times on the stand, Warnake finally threw up his hands and gave me the great concession- “Anything’s possible.” This was as good as it got, and according to Harry it wasn’t good enough.