Defense for the Devil (31 page)

“I see,” Barbara said. “What name did you use in August?”

“I don’t remember,” Marta said regretfully. “Once I said I was Mary Pickford. Another time I registered as Jane Austen. I just pick a name at random because I want to remain anonymous. And I pay in cash. I’ve been doing that for many years.”

Barbara let her disbelief show, then asked coolly, “When you visit your mother at the nursing home, do you sign in with a fictitious name?”

“I seldom sign in,” Marta said. She made a little gesture with her hand, as if waving away gnats. “One time, reporters got wind of my visit and they pestered my mother afterward, and it was traumatic for her. Many of us with long-term residents in the home don’t bother to sign in; we just visit and leave again.”

“So there’s no record of your visit to Eugene in August? No motel record, or nursing home record, or credit card record?”

“I’m afraid that’s right,” Marta said. “There’s just my word that I was here and why.” She said this with absolute self-confidence mildly tinged with regret.

“Have you used the same method for your present visit?”

“No. I don’t drive up when the weather might turn bad. I flew into Eugene last Wednesday and rented a car. I didn’t have a hotel reservation yet. I had a slight headache and went to the lounge for a cup of coffee and an aspirin, and there I picked up a newspaper someone had left and I read about the murder and I realized that I couldn’t keep this visit private and anonymous. I called my secretary and asked her to make a reservation for me. I’m registered in a local hotel under my own name.”

Once, many years earlier, before Barbara had passed the bar exam, she had watched Frank question a witness, then abruptly stop, and she had asked him why he hadn’t nailed the guy. “Being a trial lawyer is nine-tenths facts and evidence and knowing it by heart backward and forward, and one-tenth intuition,” he had said. “But when that one-tenth clamors for attention, you listen hard before you utter another word. That’s the part that wins or loses your case.”

Her intuition was telling her to stop. She wasn’t going to crack Marta Delancey open, and she had become aware that the jury was developing a great deal of sympathy for Marta. Barbara wouldn’t have been able to say how she knew that, just that it was so. It would not benefit her to play the heavy now, to pound away.

Very politely she said, “Thank you, no further questions.”

It appeared that everyone in court was astounded by her stopping without even trying to refute Marta’s positive identification of Ray Arno on the bridge, and maybe that was a point, she thought. Ray had scribbled a big
Why?
on his notepad. She whispered, “I’ll explain after we adjourn.” She didn’t know if she could explain to his satisfaction, but she had been reassured by an almost imperceptible nod of approval from Frank.

30

That night Barbara
dreamed: She was standing in a sleety rain, watching divers at work in water so clear, she could see their every movement. The water kept freezing over with a thin layer of ice that acted as a magnifier and did not obscure her view; then a wave would come and the skim of ice would crack and break and float away, only to re-form after a second or two. She could have told the divers to come out, to look from the surface, that they
didn’t need to enter the water, since it was clear enough to see every rock on the bottom, every bit of floating seaweed, tiny fish darting, but her dream self did not move, did not speak. Eddies formed and vanished. She leaned forward in an effort to see them more clearly. Then fear and wonder seized her as she realized they were faces. She struggled to turn away, to close her dream eyes, but her dream self was frozen in place, leaning over, then falling toward the water, toward the watery faces.

She snapped awake, still caught in the deep-dream paralysis, until a shudder passed through her; she was freezing, soaked with sweat. Carefully she slipped out of bed, groped for her robe, and padded barefoot to the bathroom. Her face was streaked with tears, her hair clung to her sweaty forehead and cheeks, and she was shaking with a chill. Even as she tried to recapture the dream, it vanished from her mind, leaving only a dull headache.

That morning the courtroom was as packed as it had been the day before, but without the air of expectancy that Marta Delancey’s appearance had roused. Last night’s television news had shown Marta getting into a limousine, being whisked away after her testimony; she had returned to California. An item in the morning paper, more commentary than news, had suggested that she had been the state’s star witness, that her testimony had been devastating to the defense, which was not expected to recover.

As the jury was being brought in, Shelley whispered that Bailey said there was an FBI agent present. Then Roxbury brought in his next witness.

Harrell Trainer was twenty-eight and looked years younger, a little ill at ease at his role in the trial but extremely confident when he began to talk about the underwater search. In excruciating detail Roxbury had him describe the procedure, the strategy of a water search in a fast-moving river, and finding the plastic bag.

His fifteen minutes of fame stretched out to over an hour, but that was incidental; he looked very proud when he left the witness stand. Barbara did not ask him a single question.

A laboratory technician was next. Gus Moxon was a stout man with a pale complexion and a very grave demeanor, with deep worry lines in his forehead. He had been in charge of cataloging the items recovered. It had been his responsibility to see that the items were air-dried and that all the water was collected to be analyzed.

Roxbury had him identify the various items: a pair of shoes, socks, underwear, shirt…. The articles of clothing were all in separate, tagged plastic bags.

Roxbury finally got to the gloves and had them identified: two pairs of gloves, one leather, one canvas. Then he held up the plastic bag with the lead pipe. There was a profound hush in the courtroom as he described it—hollow, lead, two feet long—and asked Moxon if he had identified it and cataloged it. Moxon said yes after thinking about it for a second.

“And can you tell the court what is in this bag?” Roxbury asked, holding up one more plastic bag.

“Yes, sir,” Moxon said. “Detective Ross Whitaker removed those items from the pipe. There’s nine pounds of metal washers, two steel key rings, and a piece of nylon line.”

Roxbury had a few more questions, and he got the same kind of slow, thoughtful answers.

When Barbara had her turn with Moxon, she asked, “When did Detective Whitaker dismantle the pipe?”

He thought about it, then said ponderously, “We put it in the drying room with everything else until everything was good and dry on Sunday, and then they tried to recover prints, and did other tests, and then he took it apart and I cataloged the washers and key rings and the nylon cord at that point in time.”

“Thank you,” she said. “No further questions.”

The glance Roxbury gave her was deeply suspicious, as if he sensed a trap and could not quite fathom how it would be sprung.

They ate lunch at Frank’s house that day. He had made a pot of chicken soup over the weekend, and he brought out a loaf of good French bread.

“Bailey, are you sure the printouts are still in the hotel safe?’ Barbara asked.

“Never sure about anything,” Bailey said. “What I know is that Trassi put the stuff in the safe, and the guy who stands to earn a buck hasn’t alerted us that he’s taken it out again.”

Bailey’s beeper went off. He cleaned his bowl before he ambled away to the study to return the call.

“Palmer’s on a plane heading toward Seattle,” Bailey said in the doorway a minute later. He grinned at Barbara. “A herd of guys will pick him up at SeaTac and hang on him like burrs.”

“If they lose him, I personally will go on a vendetta,” she said. His grin broadened. After a moment, almost absently, she stood up and headed for the stairs, not because she had anything in particular to do up there but because she had to move.

“When she gets restless like that,” Shelley said in a near whisper to Frank, “I feel like I should start pacing, too. But I’m too hungry.”

The forensics investigator, Detective Ross Whitaker, was a slightly built man in his forties; his hair was black and straight, and he wore eyeglasses with black frames. Neatly dressed in a charcoal gray suit, a blue tie, black socks and shoes, he looked studious and sincere, rather like a Mormon missionary.

For the benefit of the jury Roxbury had Whitaker describe his education, his police training, his specialized forensics training, his duties…. Barbara would have been willing to stipulate all this; she knew Whitaker’s credentials were flawless. But Roxbury went on and on with him, with numbing exactitude.

They had recovered no usable fingerprints, he said when Roxbury finally got around to the evidence. The water in the bag had trace amounts of blood, and the bloody water had soaked all the items, so that they all had the same traces of blood; the blood was in Mitchell Arno’s blood group. There had not been time for DNA tests. They had recovered hair samples, which were not incompatible with Mitchell Arne’s hair.

Roxbury tried to get him to state that the hair samples matched Mitch Arno’s hair, but he would only say they were not incompatible.

“Did you find hair samples that were not incompatible with Ray Arno’s hair?” Roxbury asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Detective Whitaker, why did you take the lead pipe apart?”

“After we examined it for fingerprints and trace evidence, we saw that both key rings had bits of additional trace material wedged in them. We took it apart to examine the key rings more thoroughly.”

“Your honor, at this time, I ask permission to show a video we made of the procedure,” Roxbury said then.

Barbara objected; she had not seen the video yet. Judge Waldman called for a recess, and she and the attorneys met in her chambers to view it.

On the television screen in the judge’s chambers, they watched the scanning of the entire pipe when it was still intact. At both ends large key rings had been used to hold the nylon line in place. At one end the line was unbroken and had been slipped between the coils of the key ring wire; on the other end the cord had been knotted, then the ends burned and fused together to hold the second key ring securely. Whitaker, wearing latex gloves, cut the line to free the key ring at one end. He picked it up with tweezers and put it on a dish, with a short piece of the line still attached. He tilted the pipe, and the washers slid out in a neat row. He pulled the line through the pipe, slid the second key ring off and placed it on another dish.

“There’s more,” Roxbury said then. “We wanted to reconstruct a pipe to inform the jury of the process, and to show the weapon complete.” He looked at Barbara as if expecting an argument. She merely shrugged.

The scene shifted to a desktop that held packages of washers, a length of pipe, a roll of nylon line, and two key rings. Whitaker’s hands were ungloved now. He moved swiftly and surely. First he stretched out the line and cut it, then slid a washer on it and centered it, then he doubled the line and slipped it through the holes in one package of washers after another until the line was filled, like a string of beads. The first washer acted as a stopper for the rest. He inserted the string of washers into the pipe far enough that several of them were visible at the other end, and he worked the loop at that end between the coils of the key ring. He pulled the string tight, placed the second key ring on the other end of the line, and tied a knot to hold it in place. He fused the knot with a cigarette lighter and then cut off the excess line. The entire process had taken only a few minutes. The four-pound lead pipe had become a more lethal weapon that weighed thirteen pounds.

“Satisfied?” Roxbury asked smugly.

Barbara nodded. “Nasty,” she said. “Very nasty.”

When court resumed, it was nearly four o’clock. He would take half a day with follow-up, she thought derisively, and listened to Roxbury inform the jury about the video they were about to see.

Barbara watched the jurors as they watched the video. One of the women began to look ill when the implication of what she was seeing struck her. One of the men, who had appeared sleepy and even bored that morning, had come wide-awake, his eyes narrowed in concentration.

Roxbury resumed questioning Whitaker after the video ended.

He showed him various bags, the washers, the key rings, the cord, and finally the pipe itself. “Is this pipe we just saw being assembled like the one you took apart?” He held up a pipe and handed it to Whitaker, who said yes.

“Did you assemble this pipe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did you get the materials you used? The washers, pipe, all of the items?”

“At a local home builder’s supply house.”

“You just walked in and bought all those items, no questions asked?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Detective Whitaker, when you examined the key ring on the end of the pipe more thoroughly, what did you find?”

“There were bone fragments wedged in between the coils of the ring. And there were traces of skin tissue and head hair also wedged in the loops.”

“Can you determine if the skin tissue is from the scalp?”

“Yes, sir. The hair follicles of the skin tissue indicate that it was from the scalp, and there were three hair fragments, also from the scalp?”

“If that pipe had been wielded with enough force to crush the skull of a man, would you expect to see bone and tissue fragments lodged in the loops of the key ring?”

“Yes, sir, I would.”

“And that’s what you found, bone and skin. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

When Roxbury said he was finished with this witness for now, Judge Waldman excused the jury for the day with her usual strict admonition about talking about the case or watching any news broadcast or reading about it.

Barbara reassured Ray Arno that she would be by later to discuss the day, and the days to come; he looked very gloomy. Then his guard collected him, the spectators began to disperse, and Frank said in a low voice close to her ear, “Your office. We have a visitor coming by around six. Carter Heilbronner.”