David Ellis - The Last Alibi

After a lengthy delay, Cromartie opens his hand, visible to the camera. “That’s it? A guy whose last name you don’t know, who might want to hurt you, but you don’t know why?”

“I wish I knew more,” I say. “I’d love to tell you more, but I haven’t figured it out yet.”

Roger Ogren stops the tape. “Detective Cromartie,” he says, “since this interview with the defendant on the early morning of July thirty-first, has the defendant come back to tell you who ‘Jim’ is?”

“No, sir, he hasn’t.”

“Since this interview, which took place over four months ago, has the defendant come back to tell you why this ‘Jim’ person wanted to hurt him?”

“No, sir.”

“During these four-plus months, has the defendant told you anything at all about this supposed murderer named. . ‘Jim’?”

“He hasn’t. Not a peep.”

Roger Ogren looks over his notes at the lectern one last time. Shauna takes a deep breath.

I lean into Shauna’s personal space. “You ready for him?”

“Is he ready for me?” she whispers back. False bravado, or I haven’t known this woman half my life.

“Thank you, Detective,” says Ogren. “No more questions for this witness.”

Shauna

Judge Bialek calls a recess before I cross-examine Ray Cromartie. I have my notes in front of me, drawing some arrows to move around some questions, but it’s dangerous to get too wedded to notes. Once you write them down in detail, you tend to stay with them and stop listening to the witness. It becomes less of a fight and more of a conversation. You just have to let go and trust your preparation. You have to take off the training wheels and pedal that big bike down a dark, scary trail.

Jason is taking a bathroom break with an armed escort, so it’s just Bradley John and me in the conference room adjacent to the courtroom. I don’t like to stray too far during breaks. Elevators can break down, restaurants can take too long to bring the food. I can handle the stress of a trial, I’m used to it, but I could live my whole life and never get used to the stress of being late. So Jason’s brother, Pete, who is in town for the trial, has brought us sandwiches from a deli.

I pick at a turkey and Swiss on wheat while I meditate. After a moment I push my notes away and breathe out. “I can’t look at this anymore. I just need to do it.”

Bradley is chewing on a pickle and staring at a transcript from the interrogation. “I don’t know why Jason ever agreed to that interview,” he says. “He knows better than anybody not to do that.”

“Sometimes you can’t take your own advice,” I offer.

“Yeah, but-I mean, it’s one thing if you try to talk your way out of things. The perps I used to interrogate would do that all the time. They’d be full of stories. ‘Here’s what happened, see, it went like this, see,’ and I’d let them just drone on and on and tangle themselves in knots. But Jason didn’t argue a case for himself. He basically just let Cromartie beat him up.”

I scrap the sandwich and go for the good stuff, the salt-and-vinegar potato chips. “You’re forgetting that Jason was still under the spell of OxyContin,” I say. “You saw him scratching his arms in there and smacking his lips. Classic withdrawal symptoms.”

“I know, I know. But all he had to do was take Five. Just assert his right to remain silent and shut the whole thing down. That’s what I told him to do. I told him, before we went in-”

“I know you did, Bradley. I know you did.” I pat his arm. This interrogation has bothered Bradley as much as anything in this case, because it was the one thing that happened on his watch. He gave Jason sound counsel-to not make a statement-but he was overruled. Surprise! Jason didn’t listen to advice. Truly, he wouldn’t listen on his best day, and on top of everything else, there was the painkiller problem. It’s hard to know Jason’s frame of mind in that police station. I wish I knew. I wish I knew whether Jason knew what he was doing or screwed this whole thing up by talking to Cromartie.

“He looks guilty,” Bradley says. “On that tape, he looks guilty.”

“I know he does.” Jason knows it, too.

I crinkle up the empty bag of chips and toss it toward the trash can. The bag unfolds midair and glides to the carpet, wide right. Golf was always my game.

“And the house key?” Bradley says. “I mean, if Jason didn’t say a word to the cops, they’d still be trying to piece together the sequence of events. But Jason told them he came home and found her there dead, and now we’re stuck explaining how she got into a locked house without a damn house key and no sign of forced entry. I mean, am I missing something? Do we have an answer for that stupid house key?”

“I don’t know of any answer,” I concede, feeling sweat dripping down my armpits.

“No. So that’s all I mean. Jason did himself no favors.” He shakes his head. “It was my job to stop him and I didn’t, Shauna.”

“Let’s not relitigate the past,” I say. Bradley has beaten himself up over this countless times. I thought I was done listening to it. It’s the trial, I guess, the public unveiling of the interrogation for the jury, that has brought down a fresh rainfall of remorse on our associate.

“We have our case and we’re going to make it,” I say. “It may not be the greatest, but it’s all we have, and we have to believe it with every fiber of our beings.”

“Right. That’s right.” Bradley gives a presumptive nod and snaps back into trial mode. “You’re right. Jason didn’t kill Alexa, right?” He gives me a playful push. For some reason, he likes to push me.

I busy myself with my notes, fitting them together sequentially and lining up the edges like a schoolgirl would.

“They can’t prove that he did,” I say, more to the point.

Jason

“Good afternoon, Detective Cromartie. I’m Shauna Tasker. I represent Jason Kolarich.”

“Counsel.” Cromartie coughs into his fist and eyeballs Shauna.

“Detective, you are familiar with the concept of gunshot residue, or GSR?”

“I am,” he says. “But it doesn’t-”

“It was a simple question, Detective. Are you or aren’t you?”

Cromartie frowns. He also pauses, wondering if either Roger Ogren or Judge Bialek will rise to his defense. But they won’t. Judge Bialek usually likes to give witnesses a little freedom to elaborate on answers-especially because if they have something meaningful to say, they’ll end up saying it, anyway, when the other side gets to ask questions-but Cromartie was going too far with a simple question.

“I am familiar with it,” he says, tucking in his lips, his attention enhanced now. He’ll be more careful next time, a little more reticent to stray too far. Good for Shauna. Cromartie is probably an old-schooler; how he was going to react to questioning by a woman was anyone’s guess. We’re not guessing now.

“Gunshot residue, or GSR, is residue of the combustion components of a firearm after it discharges a bullet, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Basically, when a gun fires, the primer and powder combust and create an explosion.”

“That’s right.”

“And GSR is the residue from that combustion. Residue, dust, particles might be found on the arm or wrist or hand of an individual after they’ve fired a gun. Is that correct?”

“Emphasis on the word might ,” Cromartie says. “It might leave residue. It might not.”

“Well, the reason you perform a GSR test is to determine whether an individual has fired a gun recently, correct? That’s why you do the test?”