The Motive (54 page)

“Do you want to play twenty questions?” Hardy asked. He turned to the judge. “This is ridiculous, Your Honor. I’ve already spoken to the witness just last night and he told me he’d be happy to come down and talk on the record. He is in fact in this building right now. I didn’t need a subpoena to get him to do it. He’s interested in the truth.”

This brought a guffaw from Rosen. “I bet.”

Braun turned on him. “Now that will be enough, Mr. Rosen. Mr. Hardy, who is this witness?”

“Dr. Yamashiru.”

“And you say he’s here now?”

“Outside in the hallway, Your Honor. I talked to him just before we came in here. There will be no delay at all.”

“And your cross-examination will focus on what he’s already testified to?”

“Yes, Your Honor. In light of these new facts. His testimony is of course central to the people’s case, and I believe these new facts will be critical if the jury is to reach a just verdict.”

“Would you care to share these facts with the court back here?”

“If it please the court, Dr. Yamashiru’s testimony will speak for itself.”

Rosen couldn’t hold back from addressing Hardy directly. “So now you’re withholding discovery?” Turning to the judge, “Your Honor, this is both blatant and outrageous.”

“But,” Braun countered, “legal. If he calls his own witness he has to give you his statements, as you know. If he recalls one of yours, it’s just further cross and he doesn’t.” She turned to Hardy. “This had better be further cross, Counselor, and not new material.”

Braun wasn’t sure that she liked it, but Hardy’s motion specifically excluded questions that he might have neglected to ask through oversight or error the first time Yamashiru had testified. She knew that new facts sometimes did get discovered in the middle of a trial, and when they were legitimate, should be admitted. Braun let out a heavy sigh, gathered her robes around her again, and this time stood all the way up. “How much time are we talking about, Mr. Hardy?”

“A half hour, I’d say, at the most.”

“Mr. Rosen, any objection if he goes first? Get it out of the way.”

At last Rosen seemed to understand the way the wind was blowing. “If it’s really a half hour, Your Honor, I have no objection.”

It didn’t even take half of a half an hour.

Braun succinctly explained the situation to the jury, and then Hardy called back up to the stand the forensic odontologist
who’d identified Missy D’Amiens by her dental records.

The clerk reminded Yamashiru that he was still under oath, and he said he understood that and sat erect in the witness box. He was a medium-sized, wiry man in his early fifties, well dressed in a dark gray suit and a modern-looking, multicolored tie. His attitude was of expectancy, even eagerness. Recognizing his patient Catherine Hanover at the defense table, he gave her a friendly, though discreet, nod.

Hardy noticed it and hoped some of the jurors had seen it as well. Anything to humanize the defendant. He held some loose papers in his hand—the “dailies” from the day earlier that Yamashiru had been on the stand testifying for nearly two hours. He’d studied them this morning at his dining room table just after he’d gotten up an hour before dawn. Now, in the courtroom, he stood six feet in front of his witness and bowed slightly. “Dr. Yamashiru, since it’s been a while since you gave your testimony, I wanted to review for a moment the thrust of what you said the last time you were here. It is true that Missy D’Amiens had dental work done at your office on several occasions between…”

Keeping it concise but detailed enough to jog the memories of the jurors who, like Hardy, had possibly slept through parts of Yamashiru’s earlier testimony, he brought the witness up to the present. “And you concluded, did you not, Doctor, based on your expertise and experience, that the dental records identified in your office as those of Missy D’Amiens correlated exactly with those of the female victim of the fire in this case?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Exactly?”

“Exactly. There was no doubt whatever.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Hardy took a surreptitious deep breath as he walked back to the defense table where Catherine sat staring at him with a laserlike intensity, a mixture of fear and faith. He hadn’t had time to meet with her before they got to the courtroom today, and even if he’d found the time to talk to her in the holding cell, he wasn’t completely sure he would have told her his plans. Until it was done, it wasn’t done, and he was loath to raise her hopes.

Walking back to his place in front of the witness, he said, “Doctor, did you yourself do any dental work on Missy D’Amiens?”

“No.”

Even through the security doors, Hardy was aware of the expectant buzz in the gallery. But he dared not pause. “No, you were not her dentist?”

“Not personally. She came to my office, but the work was done by my associate, Dr. Kevin Lee.”

“And is Dr. Lee still with your practice, Doctor?”

“No. He opened his own shop in San Mateo about a year ago.”

“Think back carefully, Doctor. Do you recall if you ever actually met Missy D’Amiens yourself?”

It took Yamashiru twenty seconds, an eternity in a courtroom. “No, I can’t say that I did.”

“And yet you identified her records?”

“Yes, well, I had the records. I examined the records. They were in her name.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Back at the defense table, Hardy reached over and squeezed Catherine’s hand, and then straightened up and turned back around. He walked to the table off to the right of the jury box that held the prosecution and defense numbered and lettered exhibits. There he picked up the eight-by-ten original photograph of Missy D’Amiens that he’d introduced for his cross-examination of Maxine Willis as Defense Exhibit A. Turning again, he faced the judge. “May it please the court,” he said, “I am holding in my hand a photograph earlier designated as Defense Exhibit A. I’d like to pass it around the jury if I may.”

Hardy waited in suspended tension as the photograph made its silent way down the front row of six, then to the back row—man, woman, man, man. And at last it was back in his hand.

Taking another breath to calm his nerves, now jangling, he advanced right up to the jury box. “Dr. Yamashiru,” he said, “would you please take a careful look at this picture and tell the members of the jury who it is a picture of?”

“Yes, it’s Missy D’Amiens.”

“Doctor, if you never met her, how do you know that?”

“Well, I guess first because Inspector Cuneo told me it was her when he showed me the picture, and then of course I saw her picture in the papers, too.”

“Please think back, Doctor. When Inspector Cuneo showed you this photo, it was a single photo, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I’m sure it was.”

“And he didn’t ask you if it was Missy D’Amiens. He told you it was, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So, Doctor, you merely confirmed what the inspector already knew, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Doctor, if I told you that your former associate, Dr. Lee, who actually worked on the patient, told me just last night that this was
not
the person whom he knew as Missy D’Amiens, would you have any reason to doubt him?”

Yamashiru paused again. “No.”

Behind Hardy, an audible gasp rippled through the courtroom. He heard Catherine’s restrained “Oh, God,” and one of the jurors swore under his breath. Up on the bench, Braun looked for a moment almost as though she’d been struck.

But Hardy didn’t savor the moment. He needed to nail it down for the record. “Dr. Yamashiru,” he said, “I’d ask you to please take another moment to look at this picture. And once again I’d ask you, outside of what you’ve read or been told, do you know who this woman is?”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen her before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Has she ever personally been a patient of yours?”

“No.”

Suddenly, Hardy felt the strain go out of his shoulders. He drew a breath, let it out, and addressed the judge. “Your Honor, the defense will be adding Dr. Kevin Lee to our witness list.”

Catherine gripped his hand as he came back to the defense table. “How can that be?” she asked. “What does it mean?” She brought his hand up to her mouth and kissed
it. “Oh, thank you, thank you.” Hardy brought both of their hands back down to the table, covered hers with both of his, firmly. “Easy,” he said. “Easy. It’s not over.”

All around them, in the gallery as well as the jury box, pandemonium had broken loose and Braun was gaveling to get her courtroom back under control. To Hardy’s left, Rosen was on his feet as though he were going to ask some questions of Dr. Yamashiru, but he hadn’t yet moved from the prosecution’s table. Beside him, Cuneo slumped, head in his hands. Their case was suddenly in shambles and everyone in the courtroom knew it.

Rosen threw a look over to Hardy, then brought his eyes back front. Gradually, as order was restored, Braun seemed to remember that she still had a witness on the stand. “Mr. Rosen,” she intoned, almost gently, “redirect?”

Shell-shocked, Rosen opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t manage a syllable.

Hardy saw his opening and decided to take it. Normally, in a largely pro forma gesture, the defense would make an oral pitch for a directed verdict of acquittal at the close of the prosecution’s case in chief. This 1118.1 motion asked the judge to rule that as a matter of law the prosecution hadn’t presented a sufficient weight of evidence to satisfy its burden of proof. Therefore, without the defense even having to present its case, the defendant should be released. In practice, the release of a defendant in this manner was a rare event indeed.

But it did happen on occasion. There was ample precedent, and Hardy thought that if ever a directed verdict were called for, it would be now. After all, Catherine was charged with killing Missy D’Amiens. If she wasn’t the victim in this case, if Missy wasn’t in fact even dead for certain, and that now appeared to be the case, then that charge against Catherine became moot. Even more satisfyingly, the botched identification of one of the victims underscored the ineptness and even prejudice of the original police investigation. If they couldn’t even get the victim right, how was the jury going to believe anything else they proposed?

So Hardy was standing now and the judge was nodding, indicating with her hand that counsel should approach the bench.

In the relative calm of Lou the Greek’s, Hardy and Glitsky sat in a darkened back booth about a half hour before the lunch crowd would arrive in earnest. Hardy was dipping pita bread into the Lou’s version of
tsatsiki
, which incorporated soy sauce and hot chili oil into the standard yogurt, garlic and cucumber mix, and somehow the resulting glop managed to work.

“I blame you,” Hardy said. “If you hadn’t whined so much about having to testify…”

“I wasn’t whining.”

Hardy put on a voice. “If I testify against a cop, the other uniforms won’t like me anymore.” He popped some bread. “So if I wanted to save you all the embarrassment and worse, I figured I had to come up with something.”

“All right, but how did you get it?”

“The car.”

“The car?”

He nodded. “I always said that was the key. Now if you’d only have found it earlier…but I guess better late than never, huh? I’m sure you did the best you could.”

Glitsky wasn’t going to rise to the bait. “What about the car, though?”

“It was towed from in front of Missy’s apartment.”

“Yes it was. So?”

“So she drove it there.”

“Right. And?”

“And if she died in the Steiner Street house, it would have still been somewhere near Alamo Square, where she had parked it, where the Willises had seen her get into it.”

“No. They said it was Catherine.”

“That’s what they said, but they were wrong. It was Missy all right. At least I assumed it had to be. It couldn’t have been anybody else, really. But I wasn’t completely sure until I talked to Yamashiru, then found Dr. Lee and went by his place last night and showed him the picture. Actually, I had some more family snapshots of Missy, too, and Yamashiru didn’t recognize any of them. I just wanted to pin Yamashiru down before Cuneo got him to ‘remember’ seeing Missy around the office.”

“And if she wasn’t the one in the fire,” Glitsky said, “she
couldn’t have been the one he identified from the dental records.”

“Exactly right.”

“So she did it. Missy.”

“That’s the money bet,” Hardy said. “Then she split with the money.”

“You have any idea why?”

“I thought I’d leave something for you to figure out. That’s police work. As you are no doubt aware, I deal only in the realm of exalted and abstract thought.”

Glitsky couldn’t fault him for crowing a little. He figured he’d earned the right. “So where’s it at now?” he asked. “The directed verdict?”

“Braun’s deciding. Technically, she shouldn’t grant it. The motion only goes to the people’s case, and whether that evidence alone could support a verdict. Yamashiru has only said he doesn’t really know if the photo belongs with the records in his office. Those records are in the alleged victim’s name and Dr. Lee hasn’t testified yet. But everybody knows what’s coming, and Braun’s so pissed at Rosen and Cuneo she might just pull the trigger. And whether she grants the motion or not, the jury’s got to believe the police investigation was totally inept if not completely contrived.”