Swindlers (15 page)

Other judges might take their time, look
around the courtroom, nod at the clerk or the bailiff or some other
familiar face, climb the few short steps onto the bench with slow,
deliberate effort, and then settle into the heavy leather chair
like someone getting ready to watch a movie; Alice Brunelli came in
like a whirling dervish, a tornado, a harsh, bitter wind. The court
clerk, out of habit, placed her hand on the stack of papers on her
desk when Brunelli passed to keep them being blown onto the floor,
and then touched the back of her head to make sure her carefully
combed hair was still in place. Alice Longworth Brunelli did not
hold her head high - that was not the kind of pride she had - she
held it in the way of a prize fighter who cannot wait to get in the
ring. She bounded up the three steps to the bench and almost before
she hit the chair flashed a quick, razor thin smile and welcomed
the jury back to court. Then she glanced at me, but only for a
moment, and only to let me know she knew I still existed, and
turned immediately to Franklin at the other table.

“You may call your first witness.”

Franklin shot straight to his feet. The much
abused pencil flew out of his hands, struck the table, ricocheted
onto a floor bent and misshapen under the weight of a thousand
useless arguments, and then rolled under his abandoned chair.
Franklin did not notice. With his shoulders thrown back, he stood
there, his gaze squarely focused.

“The People call….”

He hesitated, and everyone remembered what
had happened yesterday when, asked to do the same thing, call the
first witness in the trial, he had drawn a blank and made to seem a
fool. He stared down at the case file, and the needed witness list,
open on the table in front of him.

“The People call….”

A sly look, a smile that grew broader and
more confident across his face, and suddenly everyone, and
especially the jury, knew he was doing it on purpose, reminding
them of what he had done, showing that, like them, he could laugh
at his own mistakes. There were not many lawyers who could have
pulled it off, made a temporary weakness into a permanent strength,
taken a minor error and turned it into a major advantage.

“The People call Mustafa Nastasis,” he
announced in a clear, powerful voice.

The captain of the Blue Zephyr, the captain
who, when I first met him, the morning I watched Danielle leave
with her husband, had struck me as somehow out of place – What was
he going to testify?

Instead of moving close to the witness, from
where he could ask questions in a conversational tone, Franklin
stood in front of the counsel table, nearly twenty feet away. He
had a good voice, moderately deep and unusually vibrant, and, more
importantly, a voice that carried into every corner of the room, a
voice that held your attention from the sheer sound of it. And he
knew it. You could tell from his eyes, the look of pleasure each
time he spoke. Too much pleasure, as it seemed to me.

“Mr. Nastasis, you’re employed as the captain
of the yacht owned by Nelson St. James – Is that correct?”

I was on my feet before the witness could
answer.

“I wonder if Mr. Franklin would mind
repeating the question, your Honor? I could not quite understand
what he said.”

Franklin clenched his teeth. In a louder, and
slightly rigid, voice, he asked again, “Mr. Nastasis, you work as
the captain of the St. James Yacht – correct?”

I bounced back up.

“Objection! Leading.”

Alice Brunelli did not look up from what she
was reading.

“Sustained.”

Franklin was fuming. He knew what it meant to
lead a witness, but what difference did it make with a question as
routine and commonplace as this? Rolling his eyes to show the jury
that the defense lawyer’s objection was not only time consuming but
stupid, he asked the same question the proper, textbook, way.

“How are you employed, Mr. Nastasis?”

Mustafa Nastasis sat on the witness stand
calm and alert, his manicured hands folded in his lap. A shrewd
smile stole across his mustached lip, as he watched the brief
exchange between the lawyers. His dark, hooded eyes widened with a
kind of grudging admiration at the way the judge, a woman, took
control. He waited, in no hurry, after Franklin asked the question,
glancing past him to see if I was going to again object.

“I am the captain of the yacht – Blue Zephyr
– owned by Mr. St. James before his death,” he replied finally in a
smooth, even cadenced voice.

I remembered his voice, the way he pronounced
each word with grammar book precision, and I remembered what he had
told me, that strange, enigmatic remark that wherever else they
might go, Nelson St. James and his wife always came back to Blue
Zephyr. Now St. James was dead, but Nastasis, still vague and
unfathomable, did not give the impression that he was burdened with
any great grief over the loss.

“Would you tell us what happened that night,
what you saw when you were out on deck, the night that Mr. St.
James -”

Objection!”

Franklin wheeled around. “Objection?”

“Yes, that’s what I said,” I replied,
returning his look of incredulity with a brief smile of massive
indifference.

Alice Brunelli removed her glasses and bent
forward, a slightly puzzled expression on her rather long, angular
face.

“Objection, Mr. Morrison?”

I raised an eyebrow, as if the point were
obvious.

“He asked the witness how he was
employed.”

“Yes, and…?”

“He asked him how he was employed at the
present time; he did not ask him how he was employed then. It may
be interesting to know that Mr. Nastasis is today the captain of
the St. James yacht; it tells us nothing about how he was employed
the night in question and how he happened to be out on deck.”

Alice Brunelli did not change expression. Her
eyes moved to Franklin. First one interruption, then another; he
could barely contain himself.

“It’s implicit!” he insisted with
ill-concealed contempt.

“What is implicit?” I questioned with all the
innocence I could pretend.

“That he was employed then the same way he is
now, that he was working there, that he went out on deck, that -
!”

“All that because he works there now? That
was months ago.” With a sidelong glance at the witness, I
continued, “Maybe Mr. Nastasis was on board as a guest; maybe he
liked it so much he decided he wanted to be there all the time and
hired on. Maybe – well, maybe a lot of things,” I said, looking
Franklin right in the eye, “but we’ll never know unless you
ask.”

Franklin was about to shout that this was
mindless, a complete waste of time, but he saw from the stern
expression in Brunelli’s watching eyes that when it came to the
rules of evidence it was not going to be a question of convenience.
He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Okay, I’ll ask. Tell us, Mr. Nastasis, how
were you employed the night you went out on the deck and found the
defendant, Danielle St. James, holding a -”

“Objection!” I cried, springing at once to my
feet. “The prosecution is again leading the witness.”

I could have stopped there, but I wanted to
do more than state my objection: I wanted to annoy Franklin, harass
him every way I knew, do anything I could to throw him off, make
him lose his temper. I had to attack his vanity, lecture him on the
finer points of the law, treat him as I knew everything and he knew
nothing. I had to drive him crazy, if I could.

“The witness has to describe what, if
anything, he found,” I explained in a tone that suggested this must
be news to the prosecution. “It isn’t the prosecution’s place to
tell him.”

Franklin began to protest, but Brunelli had
had enough. She waved him off and in almost the same motion
crouched forward so she could better see the witness and the
witness could see her.

“Mr. Nastasis,” she began, “were you employed
as the captain of the St. James yacht on the night in
question?”

The Greek captain with the Turkish mother
seemed to enjoy it, the way a woman had put a man in his place; but
only, I suspected, because it proved that Franklin was not the man
he ought to be.

“Yes, your Honor; I was.”

“On the night in question,” she went on with
measured efficiency, “approximately what time did you go out on
deck?”

“It was a few minutes past midnight.”

“And what was the reason you went out on deck
at that hour?”

“I heard loud voices – screaming – and then I
heard what sounded like a gunshot,” replied Nastasis, speaking
slowly and with precision. “I found Mrs. St. James standing there,
with a gun in here hand. There was blood on the deck, on the
railing, blood where Mr. St. James -”

Brunelli held up her hand and stopped him
there.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Nastasis.”

She drew back from the front corner of the
bench and turned to Franklin whose face had turned seven shades of
red. It did not matter that he was prosecuting the case, it did not
matter that he had prosecuted hundreds of cases before; trial was
combat, even if words were the only weapons, and in her courtroom
you had only yourself to blame if you thought the rules too formal,
or too antiquated, and that you could pick the ones you wanted. If
you could not ask the right questions of your own witness, thought
you could trifle with the rules of evidence, then, by God, she
would do it for you and let the jury draw its own conclusions about
whether you should be trying cases in a court of law. When she gave
the witness back to Franklin she looked at him as if she wondered
how he had ever gotten through law school, much less become a
member of the bar.

Franklin was not going to take it. He turned
to face the witness but his eyes never left the woman who had just
humiliated him.

“I’d ask you a question, Mr. Nastasis,” he
said with cold, deliberate indifference to what he knew would be
the consequences, “but I’m not sure I know one that the defense
attorney would not object to and the judge would not sustain!”

Alice Brunelli shot out of her chair.

“Are you suggesting collusion between the
court and a party to this case?” She fixed with him a lethal stare
that would have made a weaker man tremble, but only seemed to
increase Franklin’s defiance. “If I were you, Mr. Franklin, I would
think very seriously about my answer.”

Alice Longworth Brunelli had finished near
the top of her class at Yale; Robert George Franklin had gone to
night school and finished somewhere in the great amorphous middle
of his class. She could have joined any law firm in the city; he
could not have gotten so much as an interview. They came from
completely different worlds and they knew it. Without meaning to,
she looked down on him, a night school lawyer who, from her
perspective, cared only about winning and nothing about the law;
while he, on the other hand, resented the way she and all the other
Ivy League lawyers thought what was taught at Yale or Harvard was
more important than what he had learned on the streets. He put up
with her because he had to, but he did not have to like it. He had
had his moment of revenge; he knew what he had to do next.

“I apologize, your Honor,” he said in a voice
that fairly bragged an absence of conviction. “I can assure you
that it wasn’t -”

With a brusque motion of her hand, so quick
it might have caught a fly, she cut him off.

“Take the witness, Mr. Franklin. Let’s move
on – we haven’t got all day.”

But before he could ask a question, she cut
him off again.

“Mr. Morrison,” she rasped impatiently, “I
trust that you’re not going to raise objections just for the sake
of objecting?”

“No, your Honor,” I replied. “I’ll only
object to questions that are objectionable.”

She raised an eyebrow and lifted her chin,
the preface to a warning, notice that if I made another objection
it better damn well be one the rules of evidence would support.

“Mr. Franklin, please continue.”

Franklin had a whole set of questions; not
one of them, he was certain, leading or otherwise
objectionable.

“Mr. Nastasis, would you please describe to
the jury what you did when you saw the defendant standing there
with the gun in her hand, after she had shot and killed her
husband.”

I was on my feet, shouting another objection.
Some of the jurors smiled to themselves; all of them leaned
forward, anxious to see what would happen now..

“The question assumes facts not in evidence,”
I explained, shrugging my shoulders to show that I could not be
blamed for the mistakes of the other side. “No evidence has yet
been introduced that Nelson St. James had been shot, much less that
he was dead.”

Franklin nearly laughed. He had me now; he
was certain of it.

“The witness just testified, under your
Honor’s thorough examination, that – I believe the exact phrase
was, ‘There was blood on the deck, on the railing, blood where Mr.
St. James -’ He’s testified, in other words, that the victim was
shot and -”

“That may have been what he thought,” I
interjected, “that may have been his impression, but the fact has
not yet been proven. The prosecution cannot ask a question that
assumes, and by that assumption suggests to the jury, that it
has.”

Brunelli did not need to think about it.

“Sustained. Rephrase the question, Mr.
Franklin.”

And so it went on, hour after hour, testimony
that should have taken twenty minutes lasting three or four times
that long. I used everything I knew about the law of evidence and
when there was not a rule I could use, made one up. I would not
give an inch, and neither would he. There were no more cries of
outrage, no more scornful looks. He asked a question, I objected;
he waited for the ruling and, if he had to, asked the question a
different way again. He never made the same mistake twice, and like
a sullen, but determined student, he filed away each lesson for his
own, later use. By the end of it, his direct examination of the
prosecution’s first witness, he had so far regained his confidence
that he was close to the jury box, talking to Mustafa Nastasis as
if they were two old friends, almost smiling whenever, through my
frequent interruptions I tried to join the conversation. Then, when
he was finally finished, it was my turn.