Howtown (13 page)

The restaurant she’d chosen was a cubbyhole of prosperity in an otherwise fading neighborhood. It billed itself as a cafe on the big window that looked into it from the street but the starched white tablecloths, gleaming flatware and handsomely attired waiters belied the modest claim. Inside, the air, the paneled walls, the clatter of footsteps on parquet floors and the murmur of expense-account conversation bespoke unhurried affluence. We were led to a table in the back of the big dining room.

“Would you care for something to drink?” the waiter asked.

“Perrier,” she said, without looking at me.

“Water,” I said. When he walked away, I watched her carefully remove her sunglasses. “How long were you in court?”

“I was there from the start,” she said. “Doesn’t it bother you, Henry?”

“What?”

“Murder,” she replied. “The way he was killed was horrible,” she added, grimacing. “Or don’t you think about that?”

“Oh, yes,” I answered. “I think about it, but not in the same way you do. I can’t afford to be shocked because then I don’t learn anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s hard to know the mind of a murderer,” I said, and paused to sip the glass of water which a busboy had discreetly deposited on the table. “Talking to them doesn’t help much. Their explanations of why they killed are often incredibly banal.”

“That surprises me.” she said. “I mean, it’s so—”

“Dramatic?” I offered. “Exactly. And horrifying. So, of course they retreat into banalities. They can’t focus on the horror any more easily than we can. The only way I can reconstruct their mental states is to study how the killing was done.”

“You make it sound so scientific,” she said edgily.

“A little detachment helps.” I sipped more water.

“That’s appalling.”

I said, “One of the things I do in Los Angeles is draft wills for people with AIDS. Sometimes I’m the last person they see besides doctors and nurses. Everyone else has written them off, even the people they leave their things to. Now that’s true detachment.”

We ordered lunch.

I managed a few minutes with Paul in the holding tank before the noon recess ended. He sat against the wall, head tipped up, eyes closed, listening to my assessment of how the morning had gone. When I finished, he asked, “I saw Sara in the courtroom?”

“Yes, I had lunch with her.”

He lowered his head. “She hasn’t come to visit in a few days. It’s because you told her that I’d seen Ruth, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Paul. Maybe.”

“Maybe,” he said softly. “It’s funny, Henry, this is the first time since we been married that I actually need her.”

“Maybe you can learn to make a virtue out of necessity.”

He stood up. “What’s going to happen in court?”

“The cops will testify, and they’ll put the things they took during the search into evidence. The money. The pictures from the film.”

“Did they develop it?” he asked, tensely.

“Yes,” I replied. “I called Rossi and asked him about it and he told me they had the pictures. When I asked to see them, he said he couldn’t break the evidence seal except in open court. I asked him if he’d seen them and he said only Morrow had. Morrow told them they were pictures of a girl.”

Paul nodded. “I didn’t want to get her involved in this.”

“Well, they’re not really relevant so maybe we keep them out of the trial.”

The bailiff came in and said, “The judge is about to take the bench.”

“The People call Benjamin Vega.”

Ben Vega made his way to the stand and perched there nervously while the oath was given to him, whispering an almost inaudible, “I will.”

“Who is he?” Paul asked.

“The officer who took the film from your car.”

Paul shifted in his seat, straining forward to listen. Vega was being asked, “And how long have you been a police officer?”

“Two years,” he said, eyes riveted on Rossi.

“Officer Vega, did you take part in a search of the premises at 6537 La Tijera Drive on the evening of July twenty-seventh of this year?”

“Yes, sir, I did,” he replied with, I thought, unnecessary servility.

“What exactly did you do?”

Vega took a deep breath and said, “Well, there were six of us assigned to the search. Detective Morrow took four officers into the house and me and Officer Mitchell, we were told to search the car.”

“Describe the car.”

“A black Mercedes sedan. Brown leather interior. It was parked in the driveway.”

“Was it unlocked?”

“The lady, Mrs. Windsor, I guess, she unlocked it for us after Morrow showed her the warrant.”

“The warrant authorized a search of the car?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what, if anything, did you recover from the car?”

“I found a roll of film on the floor of the front seat, on the passenger’s side.”

I leaned over to Paul. “Is that right?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“And what did you do with the film, Officer Vega?”

“I took it into the house and gave it to Detective Morrow.”

“And did you see what Morrow did with it?”

“Yes, sir. He put it in a baggie.”

“No further questions.”

Lanyon said, “Mr. Rios.”

Ben Vega looked over at me nervously.

“I have no questions of this witness.”

“You’re excused, Officer Vega.”

The prosecution’s next witness was the criminalist from the forensics lab who had developed the pictures. His testimony was limited to establishing that the film which Vega had given to Morrow, Morrow had then given to him. He had developed the film and returned it and the pictures to Morrow. This was called establishing the chain of custody, a necessary foundation before physical evidence could be introduced into a proceeding. Although I might find reason to try to pick the chain apart at trial, for now I was only interested in seeing the pictures. Rossi had the witness identify the envelope into which he’d placed the pictures and when it was my turn to examine him I passed.

“The People call Dwight Morrow.”

Morrow stalked to the witness stand, took the oath, folded his hands on his lap and stared out at us with expressionless black eyes.

“Detective Morrow, what is your current occupation?” Rossi asked, leaning against the podium.

“I’m a detective with the Los Robles Police Department,” he said stonily, “assigned to Homicide.”

“And how long have you had that assignment?”

“Two years.”

“And prior to that, what was your assignment?”

“I worked in Sex Crimes.”

Rossi drew a breath. “And when you were assigned to Sex Crimes,” he said, “were you ever involved in an investigation relating to the defend—”

I was on my feet. “Objection, this is completely irrelevant.”

Lanyon bestirred himself from his postprandial daydreams and asked the reporter to read back the question. When this was done, he said, “Will you approach the bench, Counsel.”

“With the reporter,” I added, making my way across the well of the court.

“You, too, Barry,” he said to the reporter.

The three of us arranged ourselves at the sidebar. Lanyon, his breath faintly alcoholic, said to Rossi, “How about an offer of proof, Mr. Rossi.”

“Your Honor,” he chirped, “this is foundational.”

“To what?” I asked.

“Let’s give him a chance to tell us,” Lanyon lectured.

“By showing that the defendant is a pedophile, the People will establish why he was at the victim’s room as well as why he may have had a motive to murder Mr. McKay.”

“What motive?” I demanded.

“The People will show that the defendant was being blackmailed by the victim.”

Lanyon looked at us, drowsily. To me, he said, “We could cut this short if you’d stipulate your client was previously arrested on child molest charges.”

“I still object to relevance.”

“That objection’s overruled,” he said, “and the question is whether you want the gruesome details to come out.”

“We will stipulate that Mr. Windsor was arrested, but not convicted, of those charges,” I said, carefully, “for the purposes of this hearing only.”

“Mr. Rossi?”

“Fine,” Rossi said.

“Okay, so stipulated,” Lanyon said, “now let’s get on with this.”

We went back to our respective places. Lanyon said, “For the record, counsel has stipulated to the matters which Detective Morrow had begun to testify to.”

“What matters?” Paul whispered fiercely.

I whispered back an explanation of what had just occurred.

“… assigned to investigate the murder of John McKay?” Rossi was asking.

“Yes,” Morrow replied.

“And in connection with this investigation, did you execute a search warrant on the defendant’s home and vehicle on the night of the July twenty-seventh?”

“I did.”

“What, if anything, did you recover in that search?”

“Well,” Morrow said, “in the defendant’s study I recovered a briefcase that contained cash.”

“And how much cash?”

“I later determined it to be twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “Also, there was a roll of film.”

“You recovered this film.”

“No,” Morrow said, “the film was given to me by Officer Vega, who found it in the defendant’s car.”

“Detective, what did you do with the money?”

“I booked it into evidence, sir.”

“Why did you do that, Detective?”

Morrow shifted slightly in his seat. “Well, based on the circumstances, I formed the belief that the large amount of cash might have been used for some illegal purpose.”

I got to my feet. “Your Honor, there’s no foundation to this testimony. I move to strike.”

Rossi said, “If I may ask a follow-up question.”

Lanyon nodded.

“What circumstances are you referring to, Detective?”

“Well, first the fact that the victim dealt in child pornography, and, second, the fact that the defendant is a known pedophile …”

“Objection. We stipulated precisely to avoid this characterization of my client.”

Lanyon’s look let me know that we’d reached the moment of settling scores. “Overruled. Go on, Detective.”

“Is a pedophile,” Morrow repeated, emphatically, “and he had been at the victim’s motel room, all this led me to believe that the money may have been to make some kind of payoff, or—”

“I renew my objection. This is the flimsiest foundation I’ve ever heard for the admission of this kind of evidence.”

Lanyon looked straight through me. “Overruled.”

“What did you do with the film, Detective?” Rossi asked.

“When I got back to the station, I booked it into the evidence locker where it remained until I took it to forensics for developing.”

“And when was that?”

“That was the next day.”

“And was the developed film returned to you at some point, Detective?”

“Yes, within the day.”

Rossi reached down to counsel table for the sealed envelope. “Your Honor,” he said, “I have in my hand an envelope sealed with an official seal of the Los Robles Police Department, and marked with an evidence number. May I approach the witness?”

“You may.”

He walked over to Morrow and handed him the envelope. “Do you recognize this, Detective?”

“Yes, it’s the evidence envelope that I used to put the pictures in.”

“Is it sealed in exactly the same way you sealed it?”

“Yes.”

“With the court’s permission,” Rossi said, “I’d like Detective Morrow to open the envelope.”

“Fine.” He threw me an acerbic look. “Mr. Rios, you may want to watch this.”

“Thank you,” I replied with equal sarcasm. I went over to the witness stand and watched Morrow tear open the envelope. He turned it upright, tapped the end, and a stack of pictures slid out. I caught a glimpse of the first one, which, as advertised, was a picture of a girl, no older than thirteen, lying nude on a bed. A man’s head and naked back lay between her spread legs.

Her eyes were wide open and absolutely vacant.

T
HE REMAINING DOZEN PHOTOGRAPHS
were of the same girl in positions intended to be lascivious, but which, instead, ranged from the near comic to the terrifying. She was a little rag doll of a girl, neither exceptionally pretty nor homely; not exceptionally anything but young. Her eyes were glazed—drugs, terror, boredom, it was hard to tell which. In all the pictures she was on the same bed, a big, lumpy-looking thing covered by a deep blue comforter that showed off her pale, skinny body. On the wall above the bed was the bottom half of a painting of ocean waves, the kind of mass-produced art that decorated the walls of a million motel rooms. An edge of a nightstand was also visible, a part of a phone, a glass of something red, wine, maybe. And that was all there was by way of a setting. No pretense at fantasy. Just the stick figure of a girl who, in one picture, was being sodomized and in another performed fellatio.

The man in the pictures was carefully photographed so that only his profile showed once or twice. He was, like Paul, Caucasian, slender, fair-haired, without any distinguishing marks on his body. He could have been any youngish white man, Paul included; it was impossible to tell. All this I concluded in the couple of minutes it took Morrow to shuffle the pictures to Rossi, who handed them to me, who gave them to Lanyon. Lanyon glanced at them impassively and stacked them neatly on the corner of the bench.

“I want to move these into evidence,” Rossi said, his voice unsteady and faint.

“Where are the negatives?” I asked quietly.

“They’re in the envelope.”

“I want an order from the court requiring an independent lab to process the negatives.”

“Let me see them,” Lanyon replied.

Morrow tapped the envelope again, and a smaller envelope, also sealed, slid out. He unsealed it and handed it to the judge, who opened it and removed the negatives. One by one, he held them up to the light.

“They appear to be the same pictures, Mr. Rios. I don’t see the point of spending county money to put another set of these into circulation.” He slipped them back into the envelope. “Do you have any objections to my receiving these into evidence?”

“I want the criminalist back on the stand,” I said. “I want him to testify under oath that these were the pictures he developed.”