Steven Womack - By Blood Written

Thursday morning, six weeks later, Manhattan The war began in earnest the afternoon of Michael’s arrest.

The DA’s press conference and the arrest warrant had been the first skirmish. They fired a few shots, just to test the enemy’s resolve. Talmadge fired back with just enough force to show that he wasn’t going to be pushed around when he openly announced Michael Schiftmann was looking forward to his day in court.

The arraignment was the first big battle. District Attorney Collier demanded no bail. Talmadge countered with a demand for release-on-recognizance. Collier countered again with an eight-figure bail request. Talmadge fired back with a demand for minimal bail.

In the end, Criminal Court Judge Harry Forsythe settled on a million-and-a-half bail. Michael put up one hundred thousand dollars and the deed to his Palm Beach condo.

Forsythe also, as Steinberg predicted, confiscated Michael’s passport.

Then they went home.

Two days later, the New York City police executed a search warrant requiring Michael to provide DNA samples for forensic purposes. An enraged Michael wanted to fight the search warrant, but Abe Steinberg convinced him there was no point. In Steinberg’s office, a medical technician pulled a dozen hairs from Michael’s head, swabbed the inside of his mouth with a cotton swab, and did a blood draw. The evidence was collected and secured, then shipped off to the lab at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation in Nashville.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, Talmadge filed a motion for discovery. Thirty days later, a large file was delivered to his office. He went through the file sheet by sheet, paragraph by paragraph, then caught the next plane to New York.

Abe Steinberg met him in the lobby and shook hands with his old friend and protege. “How are you, Wes?” he asked, laying his left hand on Talmadge’s shoulder.

“Good, Abe, good.”

“How was the flight?”

Talmadge smiled. “Food’s pretty good on first-class, even these days.”

Steinberg smiled back at him. “C’mon, our boy’s back in my office already.”

Talmadge followed as Steinberg led the way down the hall. “How’s he holding up?” he asked.

Steinberg shrugged. “Hard to tell. I’ve seen better, but then again, I’ve seen worse.”

The two walked down a long hallway to a suite of offices occupied by the most senior partners in the firm. Steinberg stopped as they entered the suite and faced Talmadge.

“Before we go in,” he said, “I want to know. What’s it look like?”

“Well, as Spencer Tracy once said of Katharine Hepburn,

‘There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is is cherce .’ “

Steinberg stared for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The two entered Steinberg’s office. Michael rose from the sofa as they walked in. Steinberg walked around and sat at his desk, with Talmadge taking one of the chairs as Michael sat back down.

“Good morning, Mr. Schiftmann,” Talmadge said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Michael answered nervously, “and please, it’s Michael.”

Talmadge nodded. “Okay, Michael.”

“Wes has the material the Davidson County district attorney’s office returned to us in reply to the discovery motions,” Steinberg said. “By law, the prosecution is obliged to provide a defendant with all the evidence against him or any exculpatory evidence prior to any trial or consideration. Our job at this point is to evaluate the evidence and to figure out how to best answer it in order to place in the minds of the jurors reasonable doubt.”

“If we can do that, then there’s every reason to expect a favorable verdict if this ever does, in fact, go to trial,” Talmadge added.

“Is there a chance we can head this off before trial?” Michael asked. “Can we make this go away without a trial?”

Talmadge leaned back on the sofa. “Well, that’s problematic. Of course, we’ll try. The list of motions that we’ll file during this phase of the process reads almost twenty typed pages. We’ll challenge everything from the jurisdiction of the court to the makeup of the grand jury. We’ll move to suppress everything they throw at us. But in the real world, unless there’s been some incredible screwup on the part of the DA, you don’t get very far most of the time.

“And in one sense, the district attorney has taken an incredible chance by announcing that he’s going to seek the death penalty. He’s essentially bet the rent money on the outcome of this. Now, I know Bob Collier pretty well, and he’s not a blowhard and he’s not a grandstander. The fact that he’s even going for the death penalty means he thinks he’s got a good case. And as a rule, if you’re defending a capital case and it actually goes to trial, you’re in trouble before it even starts.”

Michael stared at the floor for a moment, then looked back up quickly. “That’s as a rule. But let’s talk specifics.”

“Okay,” Talmadge said, opening his briefcase. “Let’s look at what they’ve got. I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing it for the purposes of our conversation so we don’t have to spend hours going over it in detail.”

He pulled out a stack of papers and thumbed through them, then pulled out a single sheet. “First, they’ve got the evidence of the crime scene. This was reported in the media as one of the bloodiest, goriest murder scenes to come down the pike in a long time, and from the photos I saw, they were right.”

“Any chance we can get those photos suppressed?” Steinberg asked.

Talmadge nodded. “A chance we’ll get at least the worst ones suppressed,” he said. “They’re clearly prejudicial. But all of them? I doubt it.”

“Then what?” Michael asked.

“The photos in and of themselves only prove there was a crime committed. They don’t prove you did it.”

Michael nodded quickly. “Okay. Good.”

“Then we’ve got the usual. The autopsy reports, the forensic evidence. The good news, to get to the bottom line, is this: They’ve got nothing that explicitly places you at the crime scene, at least not yet.”

“Not yet?” Steinberg demanded.

Talmadge returned. “The results of the DNA swabs they took won’t be in from the lab for at least another week or two.”

“And the bad news?” Michael asked.

“They’ve also got nothing that explicitly proves you weren’t there.”

A tense silence followed as Michael sat there, trying to take everything in.

“Yes,” Talmadge said after a few moments. “And then we move on. They’ve got credit card receipts, rental car and hotel receipts, restaurant receipts, all of which place you in Nashville the night of the murders. But so what? We concede that. You were doing a book signing. It was in the newspaper. But then we go on from there. The police have questioned witnesses at the hotel who say you left the hotel about ten that Friday night and didn’t return until almost two in the morning. Which places you outside the hotel during the time the murders were committed.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Michael said. “I never can after a book signing. I went out, hit a couple of bars, had a few drinks.”

“Fair enough,” Talmadge said. “You try and remember what bars you hit and we’ll try to find people who can place you there.”

Michael nodded. “I’ll start working on it.”

“But then we come to the one thing they’ve got that might be problematic. Several days after the murder, a bum found a bunch of bloody clothes, a pair of latex gloves, couple other things in a Dumpster about three miles or so from the murder scene. The blood on the stuff was traced to the murder scene, and they’ve positively typed it to the two victims.”