Star Time (76 page)

"I'm not talking about trial strategy," she fumed. "I'm talking about your maybe helping a vicious killer go free. The women in this city were terrified out of their minds until he was caught. Nobody would criticize you for convincing him to plead guilty and save himself from the death penalty."

"And get life instead.” He shook his head.
“Ice in the winter."

"Dan, you only took this case because the court administrator twisted your arm. He needed a top lawyer for Montano so it would balance out all the notoriety the case was getting. No one expects you to win it."

Dan did not reply.

Mara's expression stiffened. "You're not thinking about Montano, only about this personal vendetta you have against
Huyton
. You're afraid any kind of guilty plea will look like you lost to him."

"I can win it," Dan replied evenly.

"Then God help the next woman Montano meets on a dark street."

She spun back toward the spectators' section.

Dan’s gaze stayed on
Huyton
who had been behind her quietly conversing with Jensen, his chief deputy and head of the Trial Division.

About Dan's height,
Huyton
had craggy cheekbones and fair hair receding from his forehead in a slow, orderly evacuation. A tight, wide mouth and jaw and a darting gaze revealed his obsessive energy. He wore a blue, vested suit. Only in the hottest summer, Dan remembered, did he forgo the vest.

Huyton’s
socially prominent family had produced inconspicuous, prosperous lawyers for generations until it suddenly defied upper-class tradition by entering politics. His late grandfather had returned from the democratizing experience of fighting in the Second World War determined to plunge into public service and reform his city and state's corrupt politics. He had eventually served three terms in the U.S. Senate; a man of unswerving integrity, his name remained hallowed throughout Pennsylvania. Gil's father had also gone into politics and was still a ranking member of the House and a major power in the city; he had added political savvy to the family wisdom, comprehending that one had to work at politics like a business, making alliances and espousing policies that would win votes. Although Gil had little of his grandfather's majestic presence or his father's practiced affability, he had intently directed his life toward a political career since childhood.

Deeming the time right, he had resigned from an old-line law firm, run for DA, and was swept into office along with a new, reforming mayor. He had run well ahead of the rest of the ticket, his family name and tough stand against crime and corruption winning wide popular support.

At that moment Peter
Boelter
approached
Huyton
to speak privately. Dan noted the DA's amiable ease with his boyhood friend, so different from his stiff awkwardness with people outside his social circle. He had played football at Princeton, and Dan guessed him to have been the sort of player who made up in ferocious desire what he lacked in natural skill—not overly fast, but willing to risk life and limb to make the tackle or hold on to the ball in a crowd. Dan suspected his decision to run for
DA had derived from an unconscious impulse to prove himself a winner at the family sport of public service.

What irked Dan was that the DA’s good intentions often slipped over into what Dan viewed as self-righteous zealotry. Dan was wary of people who believed they possessed certainty about the truth.

A far door opened. Handcuffed and escorted by two deputy sheriffs who had transported him from
Holmesburg
Prison in North Philadelphia, Ricardo Montano entered and, with hooded, sullen eyes, scanned the crowded courtroom. This would have been alien territory, no matter what his reason for being here.  On the short side and fair-skinned, with a black mustache and wavy dark hair, he had emigrated from Colombia as a young teenager.

After he seated himself beside Dan, the cuffs were removed and the deputies planted themselves behind his chair.

"All rise," the tipstaff intoned. Appointed to preserve order, guard the jury, and wait upon the judge, he bore a title that harked back to Old England, where his predecessors carried a silver-tipped staff.

Judge Louis Carver entered on cue. He was a round-faced, careful, black man in his forties, a new appointment, beholden to
Huyton's
party. The spectators may have crowded into the courtroom on account of the Montano case, but Carver had a full schedule of preliminary hearings to work through this morning. After the list of cases was read, with the lawyers for each announcing either their readiness or their need for a continuance, Carver gestured toward the tipstaff to call the first preliminary hearing, the
Commonwealth
v.
Montano.

Dan and the two prosecutors,
Huyton
and Jensen, took seats at adjacent tables facing the judge's bench. Dan's only function would be to cross-examine prosecution witnesses called to tie Montano to the crime and, in so doing, convince the judge that the evidence was insufficient to hold Montano for trial. A tough job when one considered that only the DA could introduce evidence.

Huyton
began calling his witnesses. First a member of the Mobile Crime Unit who had examined the scene the morning the body was found. Then the manager of the bar on Twelfth, who stated that
Cassy
Cowell left work there at a couple of minutes after midnight, at the end of her shift, having told him that she was going straight home to study for an exam in the morning.

Next was the policeman, who reported seeing Montano at a little past midnight, two blocks away, on Thirteenth and Locust. It was a cold night with few people on the streets. The policeman testified that after realizing he was being observed
,
Montano had headed into one of the alleys leading to Twelfth. The officer was sure of the time because he
and his partner had reported in to their district station a few minutes earlier.

The two prostitutes Montano pimped for were called to testify. The first was a blowsy, overweight blond, who claimed that Montano had left the corner at around midnight, walking north on Thirteenth. The other woman, prettier, thin, and black, was more specific, declaring that she had gotten a terrible migraine headache and was about to go home when a car drove up containing two men who wanted to hire both women. Montano had pulled her aside and slapped her hard several times to force her to take the job. He then stomped off in anger when she wouldn’t.

Dan's first cross-examination was of Harry
Stallworth
, an African-American police detective with a neatly cropped mustache and beard, who had arrested Ricardo Montano. Dan tore into him with questions that challenged the basis for the arrest.
Stallworth
maintained he had sufficient cause to make the arrest, but he was sweating when he stepped down.

"Mr.
Huyton
," the judge said, "do you have any other witnesses?"

Dan held his breath.

"One more, Your Honor,"
Huyton
said. "I call as the commonwealth's last witness Timothy K. Feeney."

Dan began to breathe again. He lived for moments like this.

Tim Feeney was a stocky man with a pug nose, dark eyebrows and hair, and a mouth that twisted into cocky amusement as he swaggered up the aisle. Under
Huyton's
questioning, he more or less repeated the story he had given in his front-page interview in the
Herald:
Just after midnight he was driving south on Twelfth Street along his truck route, delivering bundles of newspapers to downtown newsstands. He had just gone through Walnut when he saw a man running out of an alley and onto Twelfth. The man glanced his way for a moment before racing off in the opposite direction and around the corner.

"Is that man present in the courtroom?"
Huyton
asked dramatically.

"Yes," Feeney replied, with equal drama. He was glorying in his moment in the sun.

"Please point him out."

Feeney raised his arm and pointed to Ricardo Montano, seated beside Dan.

Huyton
added, "Let the record show that the witness identified Ricardo Montano as the man he saw running from the murder scene that night."

Amid the murmured comments in the gallery, reporters bent to their notebooks.

Huyton
turned again to Feeney. "You're quite sure."

"Yes, I am."

"You have no doubts."

"None."

"Thank you."
Huyton
glanced at Dan.
"Your witness."

Dan stood up and approached the witness box. As he had anticipated,
Huyton
was rusty at doing preliminary hearings. Although he had been a top corporate litigator, he had not done criminal work since his short stint as an Assistant DA right after graduating from law school.  Instead of introducing the barest minimum of evidence needed to establish that enough of a case had been made to try Montano for the rape and murder, the DA was over-proving his case with direct testimony that Dan could cross-examine.

"Mr. Feeney, do you mind if I ask you why you waited several days before going to the police with your story?"

"I didn't really connect the guy to anything until I seen his picture in the paper."

"You say you had a good view of him when he ran out onto Twelfth and you were at Walnut?"

"Yes."

"There are two alleys that cut through the block. Was it the nearer or the farther one?"

"The farther one, St. James.
I went down there a couple days ago just to be sure," Feeney added smugly.

"That would make it—what—maybe a hundred fifty feet from the corner to that alley?"

"Something
like
that."

"Saw his face clearly, did you?"

"I sure did."

"Under the streetlight on Twelfth at St. James?"

"Yes."

"Good and clear, was it?"

"Right."

Dan stepped closer. "Would it surprise you to learn that both streetlights on Twelfth Street between Walnut and Locust were out that night and still are?"

Huyton
leaped to his feet. "Objection, Your Honor. No foundation has been established that the lights were out, and Mr. Feeney is not an expert in the city's lighting system."

Dan's eyebrows rose. "Your Honor, the witness says he saw the defendant 'good and clear' under the streetlight a hundred and fifty feet away. I have an affidavit here from a supervisor with the Streets Department that says the streetlights were not in working order that night. I'd say identifying my client in the dark wouldn't take an engineer, it would take Superman."

A laugh broke from the gallery. Carver gestured for the lawyers to approach the bench to argue the point privately.

Huyton
began. "
Your
Honor, the witness apparently had sufficient light to see the defendant."

"At midnight?
With no streetlights?"
Dan rejoined sarcastically. "Feeney's lying."

"Defense counsel's question already assumes the fact in question—that the streetlights were broken."

Carver appeared relieved to be able to make the ruling on a technicality.
"Sustained.
Mr. Lazar, please restate your question."

Regardless of the ruling, Dan had already given Feeney a warning that any inaccurate testimony about the lighting would be disputed.

"Was the streetlight out at St. James?" he asked.

"Well—" The teamster's voice lacked its earlier confidence. "—it might have been."

"And the other one on that block?"

"That one, too."

Dan moved close now, blocking Feeney's line of sight to the prosecution's table, where a nod or gesture might lead him out of danger.

"Mr. Feeney, if, as you now indicate, the streetlights may not have been working, how was it possible at midnight for you to see the face of a man well enough to identify him accurately from a hundred fifty feet away?"

The silence in the courtroom grew torturous as Feeney struggled with the problem.

Finally he answered, "I didn't mean that I was sure he was the guy. I mean he kind of looked like the guy I seen that night. Same build."

Dan pounced. "But, in fact, you can't be at all sure he's actually the man you say you saw, isn't that right?"

"I guess that's right."

"In other words, he could be someone completely different."

"Yeah, he could be."

"So you now retract your identification."

"Retract?"

"Take back."

"Yeah.
I take it back."

Dan smiled congenially. "Thank you, Mr. Feeney. No further questions."

Enraged and at a loss,
Huyton
glared first at his lieutenant, whose preparation had failed him, and then at his witness, on whom his case had been built. He had grilled Feeney extensively before trial, and the man had been adamant about his identification.
Huyton
tried for ten
minutes, through redirect questioning, to resuscitate his witness's identification, but the damage had been done. He had to rest his case.