Steve Martini - The Judge

“I think there mighta been. I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“Was there any yellow police tape around the apartment? By the front door?”

“Yeah. It was roped off,” he says.

“So you had to go under this to get in?”

“I don’t remember. I think so.”

I hand him the logbook and ask him if it would refresh his memory as to Forensics and whether they were there when he arrived.

“Sure.”

“Please look,” I tell him.

He scrolls with a finger, wets a thumb and turns a page, then looks at me.

“Yeah, they were already there when I arrived.”

“How many technicians were there?”

He looks again. “Two,” he says. “Sanchez and Sally Swartz.”

“Now that you’ve read the log, do you recall seeing them at the scene?”

“I probably did, but I don’t remember.”

“Where would they have been?”

“Coulda been anywhere. Probably inside,” he says.

“The living room?”

“That’s where it happened,” he says.

“So I take it that if you have no vivid recollection of seeing these forensic technicians at the scene, you did not spend much time in the living room?”

“No.”

“Was this sort of off limits to officers other than forensic technicians?”

Kline can see where I am going with this, closing off avenues of retreat.

“Not exactly,” says Arguillo. “The lieutenant went in there, a few other people. If they had business,” he says.

“But you had no business in there?”

He mulls this for a moment, like a fox eyeing leaves on the forest floor for a trap.

“I don’t remember,” he says.

“Do you remember walking through the area near the coffee table that night? Seeing the blood on the carpet of the living room?”

“I might have,” he says.

“But you don’t remember seeing the forensic technicians?”

“Mighta been afterwards,” he says. “After they left.” He takes a sip of water from a cup on the railing of the witness stand and smiles at me for the first time. Tony is keeping all options open.

“I see. Did you personally gather any evidence from that area of the apartment, in the living room?” I say.

“No.” This is provable and Tony knows it.

“Did you confer with any of the technicians or other officers while they were working in that area?”

“No.”

“Did you take possession of any of the physical evidence that they gathered from that area?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps you can tell us, Sergeant, how the defendant’s own technicians managed to find strands of hair that correspond to the victim’s on the floor in the front seat of your unmarked car?”

Tony’s eyes dart. His Adam’s apple bobs just a little.

“How would I know,” he says. “Coulda picked it up anywhere.”

“Anywhere?”

“Sure. Just walking through her apartment.”

I nod like perhaps this is possible. I have photos on poster boards brought out and mounted on easels in front of the jury box.

“And hairs like these,” I say. “These have been identified as equine. Horse hair, corresponding in all respects to the hair found on the blanket used to wrap the body of the victim and in her apartment. These particular hairs were found on the floor in the front seat of your police vehicle. Do you have any idea how they got there, Sergeant?”

Tony’s giving me the so-what shrug. “Same thing. Probably stuck to my feet as I walked through.”

“As you walked through her apartment?” I say.

“Sure.”

I take up the pointer and position myself in front of the poster-board pictures.

“And this, Sergeant. Do you see this?” I am pointing to other, lighter-colored objects, like rods of gold that have clung to some of the hairs.

“Do you know what these are, Sergeant?”

“Don’t have a clue,” he says.

“They are fibers,” I tell him. “Sixty percent Dacron polyester, forty percent Orion acrylic. The precise composition, character, and color of the blanket used to wrap the victim. Can you tell us, Sergeant, how these fibers came to be found in your vehicle, along with the hair that was on that blanket?”

It is the cumulative nature of this more than any single item that is damning.

“Like I said. I was in that apartment.”

“And there is blood as well. Type A, same as the victim’s, that was found on the carpet of your vehicle.”

“I’m not surprised,” he says. “There’s a lot of blood in police cars.”

“Would you like to wait to see what the DNA reveals?” I ask him.

Tony does not respond to this.

These last two items I had not argued with Radovich in chambers. Technicians had found them, but had not analyzed them at the time of my motion. They were, however, brought into evidence during the testimony of our expert.

“How do you explain the presence of blood and blanket fibers?”

“Like I said, I walked through her apartment.”

“And did you wallow in her blood? Roll on the floor to pick up hair and fibers?” I say.

“Objection,” says Kline.

“No,” says Tony.

“Objection. Move to strike,” says Kline.

“Overruled.”

“But counsel is impeaching his own witness,” he says.

“Overruled. The witness will be deemed hostile,” says Radovich.

I am now free to lead him.

“Isn’t it a fact, Sergeant, that you had a date with the victim, Brittany Hall, on the night of the murder and that you were there in her apartment hours earlier, before police ever discovered her body in that alley? Isn’t it a fact that you killed her?”

“That’s bullshit,” says Tony. Arguillo is up out of his chair.

“Sit down,” says Radovich, “and watch your language.”

“That’s not true,” he says.

“What about the note?”

“It was canceled,” he says.

The instant the words leave his lips, Tony knows he has miscued. It is the problem with lying. You tend to forget which portion of the lie you told to which audience.

“What did you say?” I say.

“Nothing,” he says. “I misunderstood.”

“What was canceled?”

“I misunderstood you.”

“What was it you misunderstood, Sergeant? Which part of your own lie?” I ask.

Kline does not even bother to object. He is left with the fact that the items he could not find in Acosta’s vehicle, the blanket fibers, blood, and the victim’s own hair-that all of these have turned up in Tony’s car.

If the guards would comply, Acosta would order champagne. He is ecstatic over Tony’s testimony. For an instant he dances on his tiptoes, more grace than I would have credited to such a large man. He does what passes for a pirouette, he is so pumped up.

“Can you believe that he would make such an admission?” he says. “What a fool. What a glorious fool!”

Then, in the next breath, a dark look. In sober tones: “Do you think the jury understood?”

The fact that Arguillo did not want to repeat it, I tell him, was the clincher. I think the perceptive ones among them will get the message: that Tony was now claiming the date with Hall he’d denied having all along; he now was saying it had been canceled. The same fiction he had told Lenore.

Armando, like every client I have ever defended in trial, is a manic-depressive. Each piece of good fortune requires his lawyer’s confirmation. Acosta no longer trusts his own judgment.

We are in the lockup of the courthouse and the guards are telling us to hurry. It is late and they are anxious to return Acosta to his cell in the jail three blocks away before they are finished serving dinner.

“Leave us,” says Acosta. His most imperious tone. He orders the guards out so that he can consult in privacy with his lawyer.