William Bernhardt - Naked Justice

Ben tried to get his bearings. How did he take this lie apart? “Did Mayor Barrett know about this project of yours?”

“No. I was hoping to surprise him. I wanted to wait until I had a completed prototype. Thought it would make it easier to push the project past the council.”

“And you expect us to take this story seriously?”

Whitman remained calm. “It was a serious project.”

“If it was so serious, why on earth would you use Buck Conners?” Ben pointed dramatically with his finger, forcing the jury to turn to scrutinize the scruffy, ill-clad, ill-groomed data processor.

“Simple,” Whitman replied. “I needed a good photographer, and I knew he was good and wouldn’t charge me as much as a professional. It’s his hobby, you know.”

“What did you tell him to photograph?”

“I left it at his discretion. To be honest, I’m not very artistically inclined. I don’t have a good eye for that sort of thing.”

“Why was he hanging around the mayor’s house?”

“I can’t say for sure, but I assume he thought a photo of the mayor’s home would be a nice addition to the brochure. It’s a logical choice.”

Ben gripped the edges of his podium. Somehow this thing was slipping away from him. He had to get it back before it was too late. “If your joint project with Buck really was this perfectly respectable marketing brochure, as you would have this jury believe, why did you meet Buck in the dead of night in a North Side park?”

Whitman shrugged. “It was a convenient halfway point between our homes. I live on the North Side, Mr. Kincaid, near Gilcrease Museum. I don’t have the prejudice against the North Side some people do.”

Ooh. Nice zinger. About half the jury lived on the North Side. “And what about Mr. Sanders? He saw you in a car talking to Buck near the mayor’s home.”

Whitman shook his head. “He’s mistaken. I’ve never been there.”

“He said he saw you.”

“He saw a car. Lots of people have brown cars. That doesn’t mean it was me.”

Ben’s voice rose. “And so you’re telling this jury that it’s just a coincidence that he was hanging around the neighborhood, working for you, at the same time that someone else committed the murders? That’s pretty convenient, isn’t it?

“No,” Whitman said calmly, “I don’t find it convenient at all. I find it very inconvenient. I find it very inconvenient for me, and very tragic for the Barrett family.”

“Your honor,” Bullock said, “I must object to this rude and abusive questioning of the city’s acting mayor. Mr. Whitman is not on trial.”

“That distinction didn’t stop you from doing your best to smear Mr. Kincaid’s investigator,” Judge Hart said curtly. “Overruled.”

Ben switched gears. “If you didn’t direct Buck’s work, Mr. Whitman, why were you communicating with him constantly at work?”

A small furrow crossed Whitman’s brow. “I think you’re mistaken.”

“In the two weeks prior to the murders, you probably communicated with Buck a dozen times during office hours.”

“That’s simply incorrect. I never went to his station. I never called him on the phone.”

“Are you denying that you communicated with him regularly during the weeks prior to the murders?”

Whitman’s eyes flickered for a moment. “Yes, I am. It’s simply untrue. I had no reason to talk with him.”

At last! Finally Whitman had given Ben enough rope to hang him. “Do you have a computer in your office, Mr. Whitman?”

He looked distinctly bored. “You know I do. You’ve been there.”

“And according to Mr. Conners, the city offices have e-mail capability. Is that true?”

“I suppose so. To tell you the truth, I don’t use those machines much.” He chuckled. “Don’t understand them, don’t trust them.”

“Are you claiming you don’t use e-mail?”

“I may have once or twice. Not often. And never to Buck.”

Ben started walking back toward counsel table. “You wouldn’t object if we examined your computer to verify that, would you?”

He spread wide his hands. “Of course not. But I’m afraid I always delete my messages at the end of the day. So there would be nothing for you to see. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Now it was Ben’s turn to smile. “You know, that’s what I thought, too. I thought that once an e-mail message was deleted from the hard drive on your desktop computer, it was gone. Vanished into the ether. But my office assistant, who’s a computer whiz, told me otherwise. He explained that although pushing the delete button will delete the copy of the message that has been stored on the hard drive of your individual computer, the mainframe or server—the central computer that routes the e-mail from one machine to another—retains a copy. And those copies remain in the central computer system until they are actively deleted, which is usually done only once or twice a year. Did you know that, Mr. Whitman?”

Whitman’s response was slow and brief. “No.”

“Well, turns out it’s true. It also turns out you can hire a computer expert to hack into the central computer and extract all the messages that have gone to or from a particular terminal. Isn’t that amazing?”

Whitman didn’t appear amazed. “Indeed.”

“Now, you wouldn’t object if we took a look at the messages that went to and from your terminal during the two weeks before the murders, would you? Well, you’ve already said that you wouldn’t. You’re not going to revoke your permission now, are you?”

Whitman’s voice was considerably quieter. “I … suppose not.”

Good. That helped Ben past a major evidentiary obstacle. “Thank you, sir.

“We’ll have to go back to the office. I don’t know how long it will take—”

“Fret not, Mr. Whitman.” Ben popped open his briefcase and withdrew a stack of letter-size papers. “I’ve already done it.”

He stopped at Bullock’s table and dropped a certified document in his lap. “Here’s the subpoena the judge issued for the documents themselves. Here’s an affidavit from the computer supervisor at the city office building who actually extracted the messages.” He approached the witness stand and forced the papers into Whitman’s hands. “And here are the messages.”

Ben returned to the podium with his copy of the messages. “Feel free to sort through them, Mr. Whitman. I’m sure they’ll all be very familiar to you. Those are your messages, aren’t they?”

Whitman glanced down at the papers in his hands. “I suppose.”

“By my count, sir, you communicated with Mr. Conners a total of eleven times by e-mail during the two weeks prior to the murders.”

Whitman fumbled through the papers. His manner and voice seemed disjointed, lost. He was scrambling. “I guess there were more details to work out than I recalled.”

“I guess so. Some of those details really intrigued me. Like the one mentioned in message six.” Whitman thumbed to the document while Ben held it up and read it out loud. “ ‘Meet me on Terwilliger at six.’ ” Ben looked up. “Just in case anyone has forgotten, Terwilliger Avenue is the street the Barrett family lives on, isn’t it, sir?”

Whitman’s eyes darted from side to side. “I … believe that’s correct.”

“Mr. Sanders lives there, too. I wonder if this is the day he saw you there? When you met Buck at six.”

Whitman did not respond.

“And then there’s message eight,” Ben continued. “That’s an interesting one. ‘Barrett will be home early this afternoon.’ ” Ben put down the paper. “Now, that’s an interesting bit of information to be conveying to your photographer, especially since you didn’t know he would be photographing the Barrett home. Why would he want to know this?”