Gravewriter (20 page)

“You wanted him to testify because he's a minister, he's semifamous—at least by voice—and he's the only person outside of prison who knows Peter personally.”

Martin held up his hand. “Commercial is over,” he said. “I should hear this.”

Pastor Abraham Guy continued his radio rant:

“So how do we LOVE an enemy who takes advantage of us?” he raged into Martin's ear. “An enemy who steals what we have earned through HARD WORK, who cheats our elderly out of their pennies, who hurts our children, mugs our sisters, and robs our brothers at the point of a gun?”

Carol turned her palms up, asking, “What? What?”

Martin put a finger to the earpiece, like an FBI agent on a stakeout. His other hand grabbed a fork and stabbed a slice of steak.

The voice in his ear continued:

“In my career doing GOD'S WORK, I have tried to bring the ministry to the enemies of hardworking folk—that's right, I have carried the Scripture WITHIN THE WALLS of the state prison, and more than once …”

Martin grumbled, “More than once? More like every week for five years. I hate this guy—he's so afraid of getting tarred as too liberal.”

Carol folded her arms and scowled. “I can't hear what he's saying,” she reminded him.

Pastor Guy ranted along:

“… What can one poor minister do where the government of the state of Rhode Island has failed so miserably? Our judicial system is an ABOMINATION. The jails are so near full. How long before the ACTIVIST JUDGES say we must release the short-timers to make more room? Does this make you feel safer for your children?”

Martin groaned. Carol reached for another olive. He explained, “He's setting up a tough-on-crime position for his run for governor.”

“On his show?” Carol asked. “Aren't there campaign rules about that?”

“Politicians make the rules for themselves, so there're loopholes,” Martin explained. “Until he declares himself a candidate, he can say what he wants, and the radio station doesn't have to give any opponent equal time.”

Pastor Guy fumed:

“We will be releasing people back into society who ARE NOT READY to go back. Where is the rehabilitation in our prisons? We ought to be transferring these potentially dangerous criminals to facilities in other states if we don't have room to hold them here. Sure it costs money, but how much are we willing to pay for peace of mind? I've been in our prisons, folks. I've looked into eyes BRIMMING with evil. Eyes that could belong to THE DEVIL HIM SELF—that's what I've seen in there.”

Martin slapped the table in anger. “Asshole!” he shouted.

Carol nodded and smiled to diners nearby, then glowered at Martin.

“Half of what he says is wrong, and it's killing my strategy in Peter's case,” Martin said, disgusted. “He says the prison is full of evildoers.”

“Isn't it?”

“Mostly—but how can I call him as a witness now? I'm trying to portray Peter as the class dunce who got in over his head.”

“You have deposition transcripts,” Carol reminded. “Pastor Guy told you—under oath—that Peter was mild-mannered, respectful, interested in the Bible.”

Martin said bitterly, “I didn't think to ask the son of a bitch if he had seen evil in Peter eyes.”

She shook a finger at him in jest. “That's no name to call a pastor.”

“He's a politician,” Martin said, staring off to a yellow-brick cupola on top of the mall. “At his core, he's a self-promoting asshole—any accidental noble qualities are secondary.” He yanked out the earpiece. “It's risky now to call him to testify. I could use his deposition transcript to keep him on the reservation during my direct exam, but I don't know
what
he could say on cross.”

He chewed cow. “But I don't have much else,” he admitted. “Larry Home has been more credible that I had expected—it's damning for Peter to be seen in cahoots with his cell mates.”

“He escaped with them,” she said. “I'd call that cahoots.”

“If I can't separate Peter from those other two thugs, we're screwed.”

Martin grabbed his steak knife. The blade reflected the sun. He stared at the knife, at the tiny serrated teeth that moved so easily through the beef. He saw his reflection in the silver.

He had an idea.

“Pen!” he called out.

Carol dug a red felt-tip from her alligator purse. Martin snatched it and furiously scribbled his thoughts on a starched linen napkin.

“Are you separating Peter from the other escapees?” Carol asked.

“Don't have to—any one of our jurors would have escaped that night, too. Just like Peter Shadd. I only have to show them why.”

He wrote. She waited a full minute.

“Why?” she begged.

Martin stabbed the knife into the table and stuck it there. “Because if Peter didn't go, Garrett Nickel would have cut out his guts.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It's a possibility,” he said. “With a maniac like Nickel, wouldn't that be enough?”

E
than Dillingham stood at the far end of the jury box. As any good lawyer knew, if he could hear the witness clearly from there, so could the jury. His voice rang a little thinner than usual that morning, after three long days leading the direct examination of Lawrence Home.

“When we left off yesterday, Mr. Home,” Dillingham began, “you had testified that the defendant, Mr. Shadd,
menacingly
pulled a gun on you.…”

Martin bounced up. “Objection!”

The judge glanced at the clock. “Two minutes past nine and we have our first objection,” he said. “Could be a new record.” He read Martin's mind, and told Dillingham, “Let's do this thing with less
colorful
adverbs, okay?”

The prosecutor lifted his chin an inch to acknowledge the objection as minimally as possible, then continued. “And so after Mr. Shadd pointed the gun at you, and left you stranded on the island in the lake, what did you do?”

Three days on the witness stand had started to wear on Larry
Horne. His hair had grown greasy. The flesh under his eyes had softened and puffed up. He had been a competent witness all three days, describing the escape and Peter's betrayal. But he suddenly seemed agitated. Martin had watched Home as the sheriffs escorted him to the stand. He counted three dirty looks toward Peter. Home had ended his testimony the day before by describing the double cross. Maybe he had been stewing over it all night.

Let's hope so.

“I waited awhile, thinking maybe he'd turn back,” Home said.

Martin made a note. That seemed like a lie. He took his eyeglasses from their case and slipped them on. The spider clung to the lens over Martin's right eye. It looked as big as a bearskin rug. Martin eased the glasses off and closed them back in their case.

“The sun started coming up,” Home said. “I had to do something, so I tore my shirt into strips and lashed a bunch of sticks together.”

“To make a raft?” Dillingham asked.

Horne frowned at him as if he were an idiot. “To make a little float I could hang on to and kick my way to shore.”

“And you made it?”

“Actually, I got halfway back and drowned,” he deadpanned. He raised an eyebrow and looked away, as if to say,
What's with this guy?

Jurors giggled and smiled at one another.

Martin bit his lip. The jury knew that Home was a punk, but they liked him anyway. They had come to see him as an amusing rouge, which was dangerous for Peter. The only juror who seemed unmoved by Home was William Povich, but who knew what Povich was thinking? He was inscrutable behind a wrinkled brow and lively eyes that scanned, never stared.

“Mr. Home,” Judge Palumbo scolded.

Horne looked up at Palumbo, shrugged, and complained, “It's a stupid question, Your Honor. If I'm here, I must have made it.”

Even Palumbo broke into a tiny smile. He glanced to Dillingham
and said playfully, “This court does not discriminate against stupidity, but perhaps Mr. Dillingham would like to rephrase?”

“I would, sir,” Dillingham said. He chuckled at himself and then said to the judge, “We lawyers have long appreciated this court's tolerance for our less insightful moments.”

Martin was shocked. Self-deprecating humor from Ethan Dillingham? The jurors adored it. That little joke was Dillingham's finest moment in three days, and the first time he had connected with the jurors as a human being.

The bastard.

Dillingham flattened his smile, turned to Home, and corrected himself. “What I mean to ask is, how did you make your escape without being apprehended?”

Horne shrugged. “Little bit of luck—I made it to shore and then laid there to rest. The sun was up. By then I knew the prison was looking for us, so I had to get out of the orange pj's, right?”

“Mm-hm. Go on.”

“So I crawled across a road into somebody's backyard, okay? And they hadn't brought their laundry in from the clothesline, so I helped myself to some painter's pants and a couple shirts. The fit was real good. Maybe a tailor lived there, I dunno. I stuffed my jumpsuit in their trash and then tested out my new clothes in the neighborhood. It's important to look casual, see? Take it slow. If you gotta run, you better be in gym shorts, or you're gonna look suspicious. That's what Garrett used to tell me. I thought maybe he had read that in the Bible.”

Dillingham seemed perplexed for a moment. How did they get from fleeing the island to gym shorts and the Bible? He checked his legal pad and found his place. “Three days later, you were arrested in Maine,” he said.

That was a statement, not a question. Martin could have objected
to the form, just to be an ass, but he let it pass. No use getting on the jury's nerves so early in the morning.

Horne said, “I hitched some of the way, hid in the back of a pickup, too. It ain't hard—you don't need a passport to get to Maine. I didn't know that the little bastard had already shot Garrett.”

“Objection!”

Judge Palumbo agreed with Martin. “The jury will disregard that last comment, and the witness with keep his opinions to himself. Anything more, Mr. Dillingham?”

Dillingham checked his legal pad. He flipped the page, and then another, as if he didn't want to let Home go after three days of direct examination. “No, Your Honor,” he said finally, “I'm done with this witness.”

To prepare for this cross-examination, Martin had studied Horne's criminal record and then looked up old newspaper stories about the crimes he had committed. He had read the quotes from Home's victims and had allowed a dark spot of contempt to grow on his heart. In court, he tapped into that dark spot and exaggerated the hell out it.

“Do you remember Daryl Archer?” Martin asked.

Larry Home leaned forward and squinted his cyclops eye at him. “Who?”

“Daryl. Tall guy. Was a neighbor of yours. You bloodied his skull with a shovel.”

“Objection!”

“Remember him now?”

Judge Palumbo signaled for a time-out and then beckoned both lawyers to the bench for a sidebar conference, a huddle the jurors could see but not overhear.

The judge leaned over the bench. The two lawyers leaned in tight. Martin could see the curly gray hair up Palumbo's nostrils. The judge nodded to Dillingham. “Talk to me,” he said. “It's your objection.”

“Mr. Home is a witness, not the defendant,” Dillingham whispered. “Mr. Smothers should not be allowed to rehash every time Home spit on the sidewalk.”

“I'll leave out the spitting and stick to his violent assaults,” Martin replied. He could feel Dillingham's hot peppermint breath on his hair. “Your Honor, this courthouse should put in a revolving door for this guy Home. He's played nice with Mr. Dillingham for three days, but I should be allowed to use his own record to dirty him up a bit.”

Palumbo turned to Dillingham for an answer. The prosecutor ummed and aahed, huffed, and then began to speak. “I reiterate, Your Honor—”

“Then you don't need to talk anymore,” the judge said, cutting him off.

To Martin, the judge said, “You can use his history to probe his credibility, but stick to the court record, and spare us the blood. Got it?” He shooed the lawyers away with a little backhand wave.

Martin spent the next two hours in a tense and bitter exchange with Home over his record of bar fights, traffic altercations, and the time he stomped a guy who had beaten him at darts.

“Your appearance here is not due to your love of truth and justice, is it?” Martin asked, giving Home a sarcastic wink.

“Objection!” Dillingham yelled, popping up.

“Rephrase,” the judge said.

“What kind of leniency,” Martin asked, “has Mr. Dillingham offered you in exchange for your testimony?”

Horne looked at Dillingham. “Uhhh …”

“He can't help you,” Martin barked. “What kind of deal did you get?”

Horne licked his lips. “Immunity on the escape.”

Martin summed up the exchange so that the thicker jurors would not overlook it. “So in exchange for testifying against your former cell mate, Mr. Dillingham agreed not to prosecute you on the charge of escaping from Rhode Island's most secure prison, is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“A free ride on your escape?”

“Ain't that what I said?”

“And you could not have gotten that kind of largesse from Mr. Dillingham unless your testimony was useful to him in his case, isn't that right?” Martin asked.

“Objection!”

“Sit down, please, Mr. Dillingham,” the judge said. “The witness may answer.”

Horne looked at Dillingham, who stared back, unblinking. Home said, “He wanted me to talk about the escape.”

“If you had nothing bad to say about Peter Shadd, you wouldn't be here, would you?” Martin shouted, jabbing his finger at Home. “You couldn't get your cushy immunity deal without offering some dirt, could you?”