Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Doctor, let me ask you, how did you first discover that the victim was pregnant?’

‘During the course of a complete autopsy it’s general procedure to enter the abdominal cavity-’

‘Then it wasn’t obvious to you from external examination that Melanie Vega was pregnant?’

‘No. She made extraordinary efforts to keep her weight down.’

‘Isn’t it strange that no one told you?’

‘What do you mean?’ he says.

‘I mean, this is a woman, four months pregnant, and her husband never told you?’

‘I never talked to Mr. Vega.’

‘But there was no record of such a disclosure by Mr. Vega in the investigative reports, as part of his interview on the evening of the murder? You read those reports, did you not?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And there was no disclosure in the reports, was there?’

‘No. Not that I recall.’

‘Don’t you consider this unusual, doctor? I mean, a distraught husband, his wife murdered, talking to the police, and he doesn’t think to tell them about this double tragedy?’

‘Objection. Calls for speculation.’

‘It calls for expert opinion,’ I say. ‘The doctor has performed thousands of autopsies, read thousands of police reports in connection with those autopsies. I’m asking him if as an expert in the field he does not find the failure to disclose such information on the part of a distraught husband to be peculiar.’

‘I’ll allow the question,’ says Woodruff. ‘With reference only to your realm of experience, doctor?’

‘A little peculiar, perhaps,’ he says. ‘But I suppose the man was quite upset.’

‘Hmm.’ I do a little pirouette in front of the witness box, so that as I speak I am looking away from the witness and toward the prosecution’s table.

Harry and I have come up empty on the semen from the sheets of Melanie’s bed. The laboratory which examined these for us was unable to complete DNA testing. The dried semen was too old for a valid sampling. So we have finally come to the moment of confrontation. I can no longer conceal my hand.

‘Doctor. As part of your examination did you by any chance determine the paternity of the unborn child?’

Cassidy’s eyes flash and she grits her teeth. I have crossed the Rubicon, the first overt assault on Jack, the outlines of my defense now seeping through the fog.

Cassidy whispers into Lama’s ear. I suspect the same instruction I gave Harry this morning, a subpoena to take blood from Jack Vega. By the time we are finished Jack will have more holes than a pincushion.

There’s a stirring in the press rows. Notwithstanding admonitions by the court, it will not take long for this inquiry to filter back to Vega. As a witness he is sequestered outside, where our process server will no doubt find him this afternoon, ministrations with sharp needles to follow.

‘It’s a simple question, doctor. Did you determine the paternity of the child?’

‘To what purpose?’ he says.

‘Yes or no?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘There was no reason.’

Angelo may not think so, but as I look at them in the box, the question of this child’s origin is not lost on the jury.

This morning as the jury files into the courtroom, Dr. Angelo’s plastic skull of Melanie Vega rests on the top shelf of the evidence cart, its head pinioned by the steel rod which protrudes over the front edge of the cart, empty eye-sockets engaging each juror as they take their seats. Cassidy has no doubt arranged this grim greeting; Melanie’s plastic proxy silently asserting its own brief for justice.

Laurel seems gripped by this as she sits next to me, flanked by Harry on the other side; a gruesome visage, she seems to falter just a bit.

As Cassidy arrives in the courtroom, she goes through the same exercise she has performed each day for the past week. Dressed to kill, no pun intended, in a designer suit, she wears a pair of white running shoes. In full view of the jury she opens a paper bag and pulls her leather pumps with two-inch heels. She changes into these at the counsel table. This is a message to the jury that she is no Mercedes-minded lawyer, but just one of the folks, a working stiff like them.

This has several of the women looking, silently taking note. The subtle messages that influence.

As she tries her case, Cassidy is methodical in the way that Sherman was on his march to the sea. She leaves in her wake a scorched landscape of twisted testimony and half-told truths. If there is a single piece of physical evidence she suspects might give us comfort, she will torture it until any effort to explain its relevance is lost on the jury.

Yesterday Morgan brought on a fibers expert who identified the bits of fluff from Melanie’s bathroom floor. She goaded the witness until he finally identified the fibers as similar in all respects to carpet fibers taken from the rug found in Laurel’s possession at the time of arrest.

All during this Laurel was protesting in my ear that the carpet taken in Reno was hers, from her own apartment.

This seemed to be borne out by the witness’s later testimony. Three minutes later, under cross, I got him to concede that the fibers were as common as grains of sand on a beach, sold by a score of manufacturers and found in half the homes of America. The witness readily conceded that he could not state with scientific certainty that the fibers in the evidence bag came from Laurel’s rug. I could tell that by the time he left the stand the man was wondering why Cassidy had called him at all. But then she leaves no stone unturned. After all, the other side can always stumble.

For Morgan it was just one more reach, but no ring, so this morning we do ballistics.

Nico Perone is the resident ballistics expert. Short, balding, and with a gut that hangs over his belt like Santa’s toy bag. As a witness he does not make a good appearance. If you were selling scandal on a national scale and Nico had a corner on the market, you would not race to put him on the tube’s morning talk-show circuit. The man’s respiration is elevated by the two-step climb into the witness box. Perone could work up a good sweat in January on a stroll in the Arctic. As for his dress, Nico wears part of this morning’s breakfast and what looks like last evening’s dinner on his tie.

In the battle of cops against criminals, he is a partisan and a front-line fighter, a friend and follower of Jimmy Lama’s. There is nothing objective about Perone’s science. I have seen him slip and stumble in a few cases, usually into pits of his own making, stretching the evidence to fit the crime.

This morning he is on the stand, ready to swim in his own perspiration. The sleeve ends of his coat are already dripping from where they have mopped his head, and Cassidy, the friendly one, has merely asked him his name.

They cut through the preliminaries, the courses Nico has taken at the FBI Crime Lab in Washington and other places that qualify him as a witness. Morgan shows him the bullet in the little bag, and he identifies it as the one he examined and upon which he rendered a report in connection with Melanie’s murder.

‘Mr. Perone, what can you tell us about the characteristics of this bullet? Its caliber and weight?’

‘Nine-millimeter, Luger,’ he says.

‘Is that a make?’

‘Style,’ says Nico. ‘Some people call it a parabellum. First introduced for use in the Luger automatic pistol in the early part of the century,’ he says. ‘That one weighed in at a hundred and twelve grains. I’d be willing to bet, however, that it was a hundred and fifteen when it was made.’

‘Is that a professional opinion?’

‘Yeah. ’Cuz they don’t make it in a hundred-and-twelve-grain weight,’ he says.