James Grippando - Hear No Evil

Again he paused. He scanned the courtroom, seeming to search for help. Finally he answered, “Yes.”

“Did she cry?”

He nodded.

“Did she scream?”

“Yes.”

“How did it make you feel to hear your mother screaming and crying?”

“Not good.”

“Bad?”

“Terrible.”

“Bad enough so that you didn’t want to hear anymore?” asked Jack.

“Yes.”

“Bad enough to make yourself deaf?”

The prosecutor was on his feet. “Judge, I hated to call the defendant’s son to the stand, but at least I kept it short. This is way beyond the scope of direct.”

“Overruled. But, Mr. Swyteck, be sensitive.”

Be sensitive, thought Jack. If he only knew. “Yes, Your Honor.” Jack squared himself to the witness and said, “Brian, did you ever feel angry toward your father?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did your father and mother have a fight on the night he died?”

“Yes.”

“Was she screaming?”

“I couldn’t hear it.”

“But you saw them fighting, didn’t you?” said Jack.

“Yes.”

“Could you hear it in your head?”

A pained expression came over the boy’s face. “Yes.”

“So even though you’re deaf, you still heard your mother’s screams. In your head?”

He nodded.

“Did your father hit your mother that night?”

“I don’t remember.”

Jack sensed that he was lying. Then again, there were no bruises noted on Lindsey after the police came to the house and found Oscar’s dead body. “Did your father do anything at all to your mother that night? Anything that made you mad?”

He began to tremble. “He made her do things. Like he always did.”

“What kind of things?”

“With Lieutenant Johnson.”

Jack drew a breath. He had to carry this line of questioning through to its conclusion, but he wasn’t sure he could. “Brian,” he said, his voice tightening. “Did you see the things that your father and Lieutenant Johnson did?”

“I know what they were doing.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they took my mother in the bedroom. And they locked the door.”

“Did you see them go into the bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“How many times did you watch this happen? How many different nights?”

The child shrugged.

“More than once?”

“Yes.”

“More than five times?”

“Yes.”

“More than ten times?”

“Yes.”

“This happened many times over a long period of time, didn’t it, Brian?”

He nodded.

Jack was trying to be the good lawyer and stick to his cross-examination. But it was only human for him to empathize with a boy who had essentially lost his mother. Jack had felt that same anger, the way his own mother was taken from him. He often wished that there had been someone he could blame, someone who could be the object of his anger. In that sense, Brian had an advantage. He knew who had come between him and his mother. He knew exactly who to hold accountable.

The judge said, “Mr. Swyteck, do you have any further questions?”

Jack composed himself, brought himself back to the task at hand. Brian had already denied shooting his father, so there was no percentage in rehashing that ground. Jack, however, had another angle, good lawyer that he was. “Brian,” he asked in a serious voice, “were there ever times you wished that your father was dead?”

Brian stared at Jack, then at the woman who was repeating the question in sign. He was just ten years old, but he seemed to know a trap when he saw one. Jack watched him squirm, watched him mull over in his mind the question that seemed to split him in two, the side that wanted to answer and the side that didn’t.

Jack was dying inside, but he had to push it. “Brian, please answer me. Were there times you wished that your father was dead?”

Tears were streaming down the boy’s cheeks. He nodded and said, “Many times.”

Jack couldn’t move. Another lawyer might have asked the next logical question, but Jack couldn’t do it. He’d taken Brian far enough. He would leave it right there. “Thank you. No further questions, Judge.”

Jack returned to the table for the defense. Lindsey had tears in her eyes, and she grasped Jack’s shoulder the instant he took the seat beside her. He didn’t dare look at her for fear that just one glance might set her off, a broken mother sobbing into her lawyer’s pinstripes. Jack glanced at Sofia, who seemed entirely at a loss for words. In another case, with another witness, she might have leaned over and whispered, Excellent job, Jacko! But not in this case. Not with this witness.

Jack closed his eyes, then opened them. He didn’t often think this way, at least not since he’d stopped defending death row inmates. The words were right there, tumbling around in his mouth, ready to be shouted out at the top of his lungs. They were bitter words, words so true that sucking them back was like swallowing a handful of rusty nails.

God, I hate this fucking job.

The case went to the jury just before noon.

Jack had some time on his hands, but he didn’t know how much. The general rule was that a quick verdict was bad for the defense, which didn’t really mean anything, except that it was a show of confidence for the prosecutor to hang around the courthouse while the jury deliberated, and it was a show of optimism for a defense lawyer to leave and go about his business. So Jack went.

He was doing his best to appear optimistic.

Jack hadn’t identified a single misstep in the prosecutor’s closing argument, especially the rebuttal-the last words to the jury. In his mind, Jack kept playing that crisp delivery over and over again, each time hoping to discern a flaw in the prosecutorial logic, some inconsistency, some semblance of reasonable doubt that a strong-minded juror could cling to and force the others to vote for Lindsey’s acquittal. But Torres’s words kept jabbing at him like a lance.

It wasn’t every day that a federal prosecutor accused him of falsely painting his own son as the fall guy for murder.

“Blame it all on the child,” Hector Torres said, repeating his mantra to a riveted jury. The courtroom was stone silent, as if the crowd knew that this was the prosecutor’s last shot at reclaiming the momentum that he’d let slip away. “Does it surprise you, ladies and gentlemen, that the defense would adopt this eleventh-hour strategy? It shouldn’t. These people will stop at nothing to bring shame on the Pintado family.

“Mr. Swyteck did his best to paint the child as a murderer, but let me remind you that I was the only one who asked Brian Pintado if he shot his father, and he denied it under oath. I could go on and on, but I’ll leave you with these three thoughts.

“One,” he said as he raised his index finger, counting off his final points. “It is undisputed that Lindsey Hart’s fingerprints were found on the murder weapon.

“Two, it is undisputed that Lindsey Hart was having sex with a man who was not her husband.

“Three-remember the testimony of the government’s expert witness, Dr. Vandermeer? He was the fertility doctor who told you that Oscar Pintado had a very high count of this ‘assassin sperm,’ which meant that he was a very jealous man. I find that quite interesting, and you should, too. When you go back to deliberate, ask yourself this question: If Oscar Pintado was forcing his wife to have sex with another man-if this threesome went down the way Lindsey Hart said it did-then why was Oscar so jealous? If he enjoyed watching his wife have sex with another man, then why did it bother him so much that it had a scientifically measurable physiological effect on his body? Why? I’ll tell you why.”