In My Dark Dreams (42 page)

“All right,” I answer, keeping my tone neutral. “He’ll be glad to see you. Make sure you give him a big smile.” I lean over the railing and whisper in Amanda’s ear. “Thanks for bringing her.”

“It’s important that she be here,” Amanda whispers back. “Especially now. He needs all the support he can get.”

“Amen to that.”

The side door opens, and Salazar is brought in. His eyes widen when he sees his wife. She smiles wanly at him, but he doesn’t smile back. He stares at her intently for a moment, as if trying to read her mind. Then he gives her a curt nod and sits down in his chair at our table.

“It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you gave her a smile,” I admonish him. “Her coming here in her condition is a big deal, Roberto. I know you’re angry with her, but this has been hard on her.”

His hands are gripping the edge of the table so tightly his knuckles are white. “My kids would have had nothing,” he hisses between clenched teeth. “She had no right.”

“Cut her some slack, damn it!” I hiss back. “She’s human, okay?”

He inhales sharply. Then he lets go of his grip on the table and turns around to look at her. He closes his eyes, as if in prayer, then opens them and smiles at her. “Hola, dulzura,” he says.

“Hola, mi amor,” she whispers back.

“All rise.”

Judge Suzuki enters the courtroom. The climax of this wretched tragedy is about to unfold.

The eyewitness, a middle-aged floozy with hair bleached so blond-white it almost shimmers, is wearing a short skirt. She crosses her legs as she sits in the witness chair and flashes a large portion of thigh as she does so. A couple of the male jurors who have a nice view of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow can’t help but gape. She looks like a Pamela Anderson knockoff. Her plastic surgeon didn’t spare the silicone on her. Women like this are a dime a dozen in Los Angeles, where every other one is an actress, model, or singer. Only in their dreams, almost all of them.

Loomis guides her through her story. As we all listen, I feel Salazar tensing alongside me. I lean over and whisper in his ear. “You have to relax. You’re sending the jury the wrong message.”

He bites his lip, takes some deep breaths. I turn my attention back to the witness.

“You came to the police with this information,” Loomis now says. We could object on the grounds that he’s leading the witness, but he would rephrase the question, and our calling attention to it would only tighten the noose around our necks.

“Yes,” she answers. She has a baby-doll voice, which goes with the rest of her persona. She must think her image is cool, she has obviously spent years cultivating it.

“What happened?” Loomis continues.

She describes the process. First, you look at pictures in a book. If one of them looks like the person you saw, you look at them for real, in a lineup, protected by the well-known one-way window.

“Did you pick someone out of the lineup?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You positively identified a man in that lineup as the same man you saw with Cheryl Lynn Steinmetz right before she was murdered.”

“Yes.”

“And is that man in this courtroom today?”

Here it comes: the left hook that will knock us to kingdom come. My stomach is in such a knot I fear for my baby’s health.

“I’m not sure.”

All the air has suddenly been sucked out of the courtroom. Judge Suzuki’s jaw literally drops like a cartoon drawing. Twisting to look at the jurors, I see that they are in shock, too. As is everyone else.

A few reporters dash out, cell phones in hand. The rest of the audience stares at the witness in amazement. She couldn’t have blown everyone away any more if she had poured gasoline over her head and lit herself on fire.

Loomis, Mr. Ice-water-in-his-veins, looks as if he’s been poleaxed. He leaves the podium and walks to his witness. I look at his hands. They are trembling.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Morganne.” That’s her name: Marlene Morganne. Obviously, made up. She must have wanted two
M
s, and Marilyn Monroe was already taken. “The man you picked out of the lineup. He is in this courtroom today, isn’t he?” There’s an edge in Loomis’s voice now, an implied threat.

Her answer is the same. “I’m not sure.”

Loomis turns to Judge Suzuki. “May I ask the defendant to rise?” he asks.

The
defendant,
not the
accused.
The first time he’s said it that way.

Suzuki nods. “The defendant will rise,” he orders Salazar.

I touch my client’s elbow. He gets to his feet. I stand next to him. Joe stands as well. “Look right at her,” I whisper to Salazar.

He turns his face to the woman, and stares at her unblinkingly.

“The defendant, Roberto Salazar,” Loomis says, in a voice that could cut glass. “Isn’t he the man you picked out of the police lineup?”

The woman’s lip is quivering; she’s on the verge of tears. She shakes her bleached tresses. “I can’t be positive,” she says. Her voice sounds like Shirley Temple, when she was six or seven.

“But you identified him!” Loomis has lost his cool. He sounds almost hysterical now. “You positively identified him.”

“I know,” she whimpers. “But I was looking at him through that mirror. In person, I’m not sure.” She squints her eyes, as if that will bring Salazar into sharper focus. “It could be him, but I’m not a hundred percent positive. So I can’t say it was him absolutely.” She looks up at the judge. “I can’t lie, can I? If I’m not positive it’s him, I shouldn’t lie that it is, should I?”

If a judge is God in his courtroom, this is a very wrathful God. “No,” Suzuki commands her. “If you are not sure this is the man you saw that night with the victim, you must not testify that it is.”

She looks down at her hands. “Then I can’t.”

Loomis, the color drained not only from his face but, from the look of his hands, his entire body, asks for a recess. Suzuki grants it and retreats to his chambers. The bailiff escorts the witness, who is shivering with anxiety, out of the room. Loomis retreats to the prosecution table. He and his team begin to confab in furious rage and bewilderment.

I’m emotionally wrung out. This beats anything they could concoct on
Perry Mason
or
The Twilight Zone.
The television talking heads will be in a frenzy tonight.

Sitting alongside me, Salazar is like a sphinx. I look behind me, at Amanda and Salazar’s wife. Amanda has her arms around Mrs. Salazar. She shakes her head in amazement and gives me a smile that is equal parts surprise and joy.

I turn back to Joe. “Can you believe this?” I ask him in astonishment.

“Someone got to her.”

I feel like I just touched the third rail.
“What?”

“Someone got to her,” he repeats. His voice is muted, so only I can hear him. “Either threatened her, or bought her off.”

“Who would have done that? Who
could
have done that?” He cocks his head toward the gallery. “Who do you think?” I turn and look at Amanda again. She’s still smiling.

The prosecution team, clumped together at their table, look as if they have just attended a funeral. Maybe they have. Maybe it was their own.

Their witness used the recess to refresh her makeup. There is a trace of mascara smeared on her cheeks, as if she put it on in a dark closet. My stomach feels like a kettledrum—the baby has been kicking up a storm, protesting being emotionally disturbed. I can’t help that, she’ll have to bear it a while longer. Her mother is a gladiator, girded for battle in an expensive maternity dress.

“This man you saw with the victim, the night she was killed. How far were you from him?” I ask the witness from my place at the lawyer’s podium.

The witness thinks a moment, squeezing her eyes together to concentrate better. This must be something she learned in Acting 101, how to look serious convincingly. She isn’t convincing me, but the jurors sure are fascinated by her.

“Ten feet, about,” she ventures.

“Ten feet.” I leave the podium and stride to the witness box. I’m so close to her I can smell the Altoids on her breath. They didn’t completely mask the halitosis that comes from a dry, frightened throat. I turn around and walk four steps away, turn back and look up at the judge.

“I would like the defendant to come stand next to me,” I request.

“Go ahead.”

I motion to Salazar. He gets up, adjusts his coat, and walks over to me. I turn to the witness again.

“About this close?” I ask.

She swallows, trying to raise some saliva. “Yes,” she says, in a voice that sounds as if she’s been eating sand.

I walk to the stand and hand her the glass of water that is provided for witnesses. She grabs it from me and gulps it down. When she has drained it, I take the empty glass from her hand, because if I don’t, she might drop it, cut herself, and bleed to death—the only act that could top her performance so far. Then I go back to Salazar, take him by the arm, and march him a step closer. Now we are about six feet from her. If she had been ordered not to fire until she could see the whites of his eyes, her guns (if she had any) would be blazing.

I take a step to the side so Salazar is alone in the center of the floor, standing in a figurative spotlight. “Can you say, with one hundred percent certainty, that this is the man you saw that night?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “It looks a lot like him, but I can’t swear to it.”

“Do you want him to come closer?”

“No!” she cries out in alarm, recoiling against the back of her chair. “I can see him fine. It doesn’t matter how close he comes. I can’t swear it’s the same man. I’m telling the truth. What else do you people want from me?”

S
OMETIMES YOU WIN, SOMETIMES
the other side loses. That’s what could happen here. Loomis, on redirect, tried to bully his witness into recanting, but she held firm. Salazar might be the man she saw, but she won’t swear to it. Judge Suzuki finally has to step in and save her from the prosecution’s hounding. Their own witness, their star.

She was their last witness, so they rest their case. A feeling of gloom pervades their half of the courtroom, even though we haven’t presented our side. They still have powerful forces behind them, the panties being the strongest, as well as Salazar’s proximity to at least two of the murder sites. But a witness who turns like that can poison the well. We will have to wait for the verdict to find out if she did.

Tomorrow, we present our side. It will be short. We only have a few witnesses—Carlos, Salazar’s friend who was with him the night of and the morning after one of the killings, a couple of Salazar’s customers who will establish his working habits, a psychologist we hired to evaluate Salazar, and finally, Salazar himself. He will testify in his own defense. He has to. If we don’t put him on the stand, he will be judged guilty by omission.

I sit at home, reading over the transcripts of the prosecution’s case, to see if there are any glitches. As I’m about to call it a night, a few lines of testimony from two of their witnesses catch my eye.

I read them over again, and compare them to each other. Then I pick up the phone, and call Joe.

“Recall Sasha Koontz,” the bailiff says in his clear, loud voice.

Cheryl Lynn Steinmetz’s roommate comes forward. As she has already been sworn in, she is still under oath, so she doesn’t have to do that again. She sits down and looks at me with a puzzled expression.

This will only take a few minutes. Either I guessed right, or I didn’t. I lay the relevant page of her testimony on the top of the podium and read from it.
“Lieutenant Cordova came to our house. It was early; he woke me up.”
I look up. “This would have been what time, Ms. Koontz? Seven, seven-thirty?”

“Oh, no,” she answers. “It was much earlier. About five.”

I can feel the buzz behind me, like a swarm of bees returning to the hive. “Five in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“Yes, because when the doorbell rang, I looked at my clock. It was right after five.”

“Who did you think it was?” I asked.

“Cheryl,” she replies. “I thought she had forgotten her key. She did that, sometimes.”

“You’re absolutely sure of that time. That it was before six-fifteen.” Six-fifteen was when the 911 dispatcher got the anonymous phone call about Salazar.

“Yes, I’m sure. It was a few minutes after five o’clock in the morning.”

“One more question. Where did Ms. Steinmetz keep her dirty laundry?”

“In her hamper.”

“Which was where?”

“In her closet.”

“Her bedroom closet?”

“Yes.”

Cordova is on the stand. If he’s nervous, he doesn’t show it. Although Joe cross-examined him before, I’m doing it now. I found the glitch, it’s my right to explore it.

I have the pertinent page of Cordova’s testimony in front of me. “Let me read some of your testimony back to you,” I tell him. “Question:
What were you looking for?
Answer:
I was looking for something that might tie the victim to the suspect.
Question:
Like what?
Answer:
A note, something like that. People write things on their calendars. I thought maybe she had done that, something about meeting a man. A name, a place. Something to tie her to …”
I pause. “…
Salazar.”

I look up. “At five o’clock in the morning, you had not yet found Roberto Salazar. So why did you say his name? Why did you give all of us the impression that you had gone to the victim’s house
after
you had found and arrested Roberto Salazar, not before?”

Cordova remains unruffled, at least outwardly. “It was a mistake. A slip of the tongue.”

“A slip of the tongue? Something that important and it’s nothing more than a slip of the tongue?”

“I was hoping to find a name,” he repeats stubbornly. “Nothing more.”

“At five in the morning. Alone in her room. With a killer at large on the streets of Los Angeles.” Before he can answer, I turn my back on him and announce in a clear and authoritative voice, “No further questions.”

On redirect, Cordova explains that going to a victim’s home is standard procedure, for the reasons he gave, and also in case the next of kin lived there. So he was going by the book. But my point about Cordova saying Salazar’s name before the police had found him has been made, and the jury is going to remember it.