The Best Friend

by Adam Mitzner

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, after you told him that his wife was missing, how did he react? Did he seem concerned to you? Worried about his wife’s whereabouts?”

  This elicited a “leading” whisper from Maggie. I ignored that too.

  “No. Not very much. I thought I might be more worried than he was about the situation. I knew I could get fired if I couldn’t find Samantha Remsen and get her to the set.”

  “So you were more worried about losing your job than Mr. Zamora was about losing his wife?”

  This time I objected.

  “Withdrawn,” Ethan said, his point having been made without the need for an answer to the question.

  When it was my turn, I asked, “Had Ms. Remsen ever overslept for work before then?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, this was the first time she’d ever been late by even a minute, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Other actors were late from time to time, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “But never Samantha Remsen.”

  “No.”

  “And you say that Mr. Jefferson told you that he thought she was late on set—for the first time ever—because he thought she must have overslept? That’s what he said to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not a mind reader, correct?”

  She laughed. “No. I’m a PA,” she said, causing everyone to laugh with her.

  “Isn’t it possible that Mr. Jefferson was lying to you when he said he thought Ms. Remsen had overslept?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Right. Just like you don’t know if he killed Ms. Remsen.”

  Ethan objected, causing Katlyn to look up at Judge Sloane with a confused expression. “Am I supposed to answer that?” she asked.

  “No,” the judge said. “I’m pretty sure it was rhetorical.”

  Late that night, Maggie and I were at her office. Tomorrow would be her big day in court, as she was going to take the lead in cross-examining the party guests. All except Tyree Jefferson, who was my responsibility. I’d told Nicky to get some downtime tonight. Watch television or read. Have a glass of scotch, but just one. Get a good night’s sleep.

  “You know that Nick . . . well, he doesn’t understand what you’re doing,” Maggie said.

  “Him or you?”

  Maggie didn’t insult me with subterfuge. “I’m not being judgmental. I just don’t understand what’s going on, that’s all.”

  “What is it that you don’t understand, Maggie?”

  “When you made a different call than I would have about rushing the trial, or about seating a juror or two, or even about reserving the opening, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. But . . . we prepared a defense that was focused on telling the jury that Jefferson killed Samantha, and we agreed that we would hit it hard at every opportunity. Call me crazy, but I expected you to do that with Hibbitts. Hit him at every point that he was so starstruck by Jefferson that he never gave his story the scrutiny it deserved, and in that way we kept the jury’s focus on the fact that Jefferson is a lying sack when he says he drove her home. That he never texted her that night, which proved he wasn’t expecting her back. But all you did with Hibbitts was show that her DNA wasn’t in his car. I’m not sure that gets us anywhere. You don’t normally leave DNA in a car after a five-minute ride.”

  I didn’t take offense at Maggie’s second-guessing. To the contrary, I would have been disappointed if she had kept her concerns to herself.

  “I made a judgment call. Hibbitts was a better witness than I expected. I was worried that if we pushed too hard that he hadn’t given Jefferson enough scrutiny, he’d have an answer for that. It seemed unnecessary to risk it. It’ll be more effective if we hit Jefferson with that.”

  She looked at me with a wary expression. “Tell me the truth. Did he kill his first wife? Because that’s the only thing I can think of that might be the reason that you’re . . . doing whatever it is you’re doing here.”

  That question had hung over every decision we’d made concerning trial strategy. We’d spent hours researching the grounds on which Judge Sloane should exclude any reference to Carolyn’s death at trial, as well as discussing how the judge would rule on that issue. But Maggie had never before asked me to answer it.

  I had previously assumed that her self-restraint was calculated. The answer didn’t matter to our defense, and possessing such knowledge could only compromise it. If Nicky confessed to the murder, even though double jeopardy prevented him from being charged again if we knew of his guilt for that crime, he could still be charged with perjury for lying about it under oath in this trial, and we were ethically prohibited from allowing him to testify that he was innocent. Indeed, Maggie’s question went to whether I’d already violated that rule—the criminal offense of suborning perjury—when Nicky testified to his innocence in the first trial.

  “He testified that he didn’t do it,” I said.

  “I know what he said. I read the transcript. Every word of it. I wasn’t asking what he said. I thought you might tell me the truth.”

  “He never confessed to me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said.

  She wanted my opinion.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I believe someone killed her.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? If not Nick, who?”

  “His mistress.”

  46.

  All court days begin with the same pomp. First, the bailiff announces the judge’s arrival from chambers with three knocks on the doorframe of the courtroom. Everyone rises, and after the judge takes the bench, she instructs them to be seated. After that, the jury is summoned, and everyone rises again as they enter.

  The following morning, however, Judge Sloane deviated from the standard routine. Before telling everyone to be seated, she announced that she had given the jury the morning off because she wanted to hear further argument on the motions in limine—the Latin term for our request that she not allow any mention of Carolyn McDermott’s death or Nicky’s first trial for her murder. We had already thrashed out these issues before trial, but apparently Judge Sloane had some unanswered questions.

  Like so many things in the law, the answers to those questions could be found only by going back in time. In this case, to Christmas Eve 1898. On that date, a man named Harry Cornish received a Christmas gift by mail at his home at the Knickerbocker Club. The postmark on the package was December 23, 1898. There was no card in the envelope, but the box indicated the gift was from Tiffany’s. Inside was a blue bottle bearing a Bromo-Seltzer label.

  A few days later, Cornish offered the Bromo-Seltzer to Katherine Adams, who was suffering from a headache. Upon taking the Bromo-Seltzer, Adams collapsed and died.

  The police arrested Roland Molineux for the Adams murder. In the prior year, Molineux and Cornish had a nasty disagreement over, of all things, Cornish’s management of the Knickerbocker Club. The evidence further showed that Molineux had purchased something from the Tiffany’s stationery department in December 1898 (but not what he had bought), and he had been seen in the vicinity of the New York post office on the afternoon of December 23, 1898. There was also some similarity between Molineux’s handwriting and the address written on the package, although the science of handwriting recognition at the time was still too new to establish a definitive match.

  During Molineux’s trial, the prosecution put on evidence that in the month prior to the Adams murder, Henry C. Barnet had died after receiving a gift by mail at his residence at the Knickerbocker Club. The gift was found to be poison of the same type that had killed Adams.

  From these sordid facts emerged a rule of jurisprudence that would determine whether the jury would hear anything about Carolyn McDermott’s death. The Molineux Rule, as it had come to be known, posited that the prosecution may not introduce evidence of another crime to show guilt in the case presented t
o the jury. However, like almost every rule in the law, there were exceptions. Evidence of a prior crime could be used to reveal motive, intent, modus operandi, identity, or a common scheme or plan. In other words, if the prior crime was so distinct and similar to the current crime as to be akin to a signature, it was admissible to show guilt.

  Maggie and I had argued in our papers that none of the Molineux factors permitted introduction of evidence concerning Carolyn McDermott’s death into the trial for Samantha Remsen’s murder. First and foremost, a jury had found that Carolyn had not been murdered at all. Or at least that there was a reasonable doubt as to whether Nicky had murdered her. But aside from that, the thirty-four years between the deaths, the fact that the circumstances in each case bore no similarity—a drowning in a bathtub versus a broken neck—meant that there was no link between them sufficient to consider them signature crimes that could only have been committed by Nicky.

  I was convinced that we were right on the law. I was equally certain that no one who was ignorant of the Molineux Rule would agree. Ask a hundred people whether the fact that Nicky was accused of murdering his first wife was relevant to whether he had murdered his second, and every single one of them would answer in the affirmative.

  A more experienced judge would likely not have had so much trouble wrestling with the issue. Judge Sloane, however, had apparently been unable to make up her mind.

  “Mr. Ethan, the only link that I see you attempting to establish between the crime that Mr. Zamora presently stands accused of and the crime of which he was acquitted some three decades ago is that they both involved his wife,” she said at the outset of the hearing. “Am I missing something there?”

  “The murder of both Mr. Zamora’s wives meets the Molineux Rule exceptions,” Ethan said, which answered Judge Sloane’s question; she was not missing anything at all. He had nothing.

  “In other words, you believe that the law would always permit the introduction of evidence concerning the suspicious death of a first wife if the accused is on trial for murdering another wife.”

  “I’m not prepared to say always, Your Honor. But in this case, yes.”

  “That’s where I’m stuck, Mr. Ethan. This case seems to be more of a no, because it is not clear that Mr. Zamora’s first wife was even murdered. That’s what troubles me. What I see happening here is that we’re going to end up retrying the McDermott murder case in its entirety, thirty-four years after the fact. And the sole purpose of doing that is to say, See, Mr. Zamora killed his first wife, so you should find him guilty of killing his second wife. It seems to me that is exactly the kind of connection that the Molineux Rule was designed to prevent.”

  When the judge is going your way, the best way to help your cause is to keep your mouth shut. But when Judge Sloane asked me if I wanted to be heard, I stood to address the court.

  “The Molineux Rule prohibits any reference to Carolyn McDermott’s death in 1986 because the prosecution cannot say that both of Mr. Zamora’s wives were even murdered.”

  Judge Sloane stopped me there. “I’m not sure that’s the key factor, Mr. Broden. Wouldn’t you agree that if a defendant was on trial for murder using . . . a blowtorch, for example, and there was evidence of him blow-torching someone else to death, the prior incident would be admissible in the trial, even if the defendant had never been convicted of the prior offense?”

  Despite her inexperience, Judge Sloane was obviously smart, which enabled her to see through the smoke screens Ethan and I were creating. He was saying that the murder of the first wife was always admissible in the trial of the murder of the second without regard to the lack of any commonality of the facts, and I was saying that the acquittal in the first murder makes it never admissible in a subsequent murder trial, no matter how similar the circumstances.

  Ethan saw a glimmer of hope in the judge’s hypothetical and came to his feet. “Your Honor—”

  “Please sit down, Mr. Ethan. You too, Mr. Broden,” Judge Sloane said.

  She didn’t say anything else for at least thirty seconds. The silence felt interminable.

  Finally, she said, “Herewith is the decision of the court.”

  Judge Sloane read what turned out to be a seven-page decision. At first it wasn’t clear which way she was going to rule, as she set forth the facts in a neutral recitation. But it soon became apparent that she would not admit anything into evidence having to do with Carolyn’s murder.

  We were now free to put Nicky on the stand. He could testify that he hadn’t seen Samantha Remsen after he left the party.

  Of course, I doubted very much that was the truth.

  47.

  Having multiple witnesses to an event can sometimes be more of a curse than a blessing at trial. There are bound to be discrepancies with every iteration, and opposing counsel can focus jurors on those small deviations to call into question the larger points of agreement.

  That said, I doubted Ethan would have that problem regarding the dinner party. All five of his witnesses were celebrities. Jurors always believe celebrities.

  I wondered whom Ethan would choose to put on first. I knew it wouldn’t be Chloe Lassiter, who looked like a child, or her boyfriend, T-Rex, who was well known for his antipolice lyrics and a generally thuggish persona. That left one of the Lennoxes to carry the water. My money was on Jaydon Lennox; I even proposed a five-dollar bet with Maggie to make it interesting.

  She laughed. “First, I find the case pretty interesting all by itself, thank you very much. And I take it that you never saw Guilty Minds?”

  A popular film from maybe two decades before. The movie that made Jaydon Lennox a star.

  “No.”

  “Jaydon Lennox played a guy who lied on the stand to protect his best friend. He gets stabbed in the heart by that same best friend in the end, and his last line is something like, ‘I would have lied for you again, if only you’d asked.’”

  “So you’re saying it’ll be Paige who goes first,” I said with a smile.

  “That’s what I’m saying.” Maggie smiled back. “And I’ll bet you ten bucks.”

  Before we could shake hands to seal the deal, Ethan said, “The People call Paige Anderson-Lennox to the stand.”

  “You can owe me,” Maggie whispered.

  Judge Sloane had a rule that the lawyer who handled the questioning was the only one who could object during the other side’s examination. That meant I’d be a spectator for Paige Anderson-Lennox, as well as the other witnesses to follow, assuming Ethan called the entire dinner party to the stand. To signal this change of lineup to Judge Sloane, Maggie and I had switched seats, so now I sat beside Nicky in the middle of the defense counsel table.

  Paige Anderson-Lennox was wearing oversize, black-framed eyeglasses that did little to hide a face most people would recognize in a crowd. She had once been Hollywood’s It Girl and, for a brief period, had commanded the highest salary of any actress. By the time she turned forty, however, leading-lady roles had become scarcer, and she started taking on character parts. To the surprise of many, she turned out to be an excellent actress when given the right material. So much so that the conventional wisdom was that she had been robbed when she didn’t win an Oscar last year.

  “What was your understanding of the relationship between Tyree Jefferson and Samantha Remsen?” Ethan asked her.

  “They were close.”

  “How close? In other words, did you understand that they were having an affair?”

  “Objection,” Maggie shouted.

  Judge Sloane didn’t seem to understand the problem. “Basis, Ms. Gallagher?”

  “Unless the witness is going to testify to something she observed firsthand, or something Mr. Zamora told her about this topic, her testimony will be either hearsay or speculative.”

  Judge Sloan looked down at the witness. “Do you have firsthand knowledge about an affair?”

  “Just rumors,” Paige said.

  “Move to strike,” Maggie said loudly.
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br />   “Yeah, that was my fault,” Judge Sloane said, as if that remedied the problem. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, please disregard that last answer. Rumors, of course, are not evidence. They have absolutely no reliability whatsoever.”

  “Oh, and they were dancing together very closely,” Paige added.

  Ethan saw the daylight provided by a helpful witness. “Too closely for work colleagues, in your opinion?”

  “Closer than I would dance with a man who was not my husband,” she said in a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth voice.

  “Did you observe anything else that indicated to you that Mr. Jefferson and Ms. Remsen might have been engaged in an extramarital affair?”

  “What Mr. Zamora said to Tyree at the party.”

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, but it was something like he’d better keep away from her.”

  Jaydon Lennox followed his wife on the stand. With the soothing baritone that was recognizable from the ubiquitous television commercials for a European luxury car brand, he confirmed every word of his wife’s testimony, virtually verbatim. Specifically, he supported his wife’s recollection about the intimate dancing by Tyree and Samantha. He also added that if Tyree Jefferson had held Paige as close as he did Samantha, Jaydon would have made him regret it.

  Chloe Lassiter claimed that she saw Tyree and Samantha dancing from the pool and recounted how she’d said something to T-Rex along the lines that she couldn’t believe Tyree acted that way toward Samantha in front of her husband.

  T-Rex was sworn in under his given name, which caused some snickering in the gallery. Ethan called him Mr. Singleton. His recollection was the shakiest, which stood to reason because he had never met Samantha before the party, and therefore had never seen her interact with Jefferson. Still, his impressions of the argument between Jefferson and Nicky matched the others’ versions.

  On cross, Maggie made what points she could. She focused on the drug use and drinking, emphasizing the consensus view that Jefferson was as drunk and high as anyone else there. And they all admitted that they left the party shortly after Nicky and had no idea if Samantha had ever gone home.