The Attorney

by Steve Martini

  I haven’t had time to read the paper, but I’m assuming they didn’t pick up on Ryan’s question, the inference that somebody pressed Brower not to turn over the cigar to the cops. If she saw that, Susan would be ballistic by now.

  “How did we get into this?” she says.

  I get up out of the chair. Step around behind her. She’s still facing the table, palms spread flat, leaning on it.

  “Listen, you’re under a lot of pressure.” I rub her shoulders with my hands, kneading the taut muscles like baker’s dough. “When this is over, we’ll take a trip. Maybe south, down to Baja. Sit in the sun and relax. The kids can swim. We need a break. All of us. We can’t keep doing this.”

  She gives up a deep sigh. “Yes.”

  I can feel some of the tension go out of her body.

  “In the meantime,” she says, “I’m going to be fending off the sharks. The ones on the board of supervisors.”

  A guy named JerOme Hurly, an eccentric who spells his first name with a big O in the middle, is the owner of a smoke shop downtown, and it turns out is Jonah’s supplier of fine cigars. He actually smiles at my client as he takes the stand.

  Jonah waves back before I can stop him.

  Ryan moves quickly through the preliminaries, the witness’s name, the name of his shop, the fact that he’s been at the same location for thirty years.

  “Do you know the defendant, Jonah Hale?”

  “Oh, sure. Good customer,” he says.

  “When was the last time you saw him, before today?”

  The witness thinks for a second. “Three months ago, maybe.”

  “And where was that?”

  “In my shop. He came in to buy cigars,” says Hurly.

  “Had he done this before? Purchase cigars from you?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “How many times?”

  “I don’t know. What would you say?” Hurly looking at Jonah, actually trying for consensus on this point. “Eight or ten times, wouldn’t ya say?”

  Harry knees Jonah under the table, and the old man doesn’t respond, total deadpan.

  “I suppose eight or ten times,” says Hurly.

  “What kind of cigars did he usually buy?”

  “Oh, Mr. Hale’s got good taste. Premium cigars,” he says.

  “Expensive?” says Ryan.

  “Oh, sure.”

  Ryan retreats to the evidence cart off to the side. Takes his time, and finally comes back with two small brown paper bags. “May I approach the witness, Your Honor?”

  Peltro waves him on.

  “Mr. Hurly, I’m gonna show you a cigar and ask you if you recognize the brand.”

  Hurly opens the bag handed to him and looks inside. “Help if I could take it out,” he says.

  Neither Ryan nor I object.

  Hurly rolls it in his fingers, smells it, holds it up to the light, and nods. “Montecristo A,” he says. He could also tell this by simply looking at the container still inside the bag.

  “Did you ever sell that kind of cigar, a Montecristo A, to the defendant, Jonah Hale?”

  “Oh, yes. He bought them generally by the box, but sometimes individually, in the little containers like this,” says Hurly.

  “Is that an expensive cigar?” says Ryan.

  “A box of twenty-five would cost you nine hundred dollars outside the U.S.,” says Hurly. “But ahh . . . they’re a little more than that here,” he says.

  “Why is that?”

  “They come from my private reserve,” says Hurly. “Hard to get.”

  “Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Hurly, that these cigars are grown and manufactured in Cuba? Illegal to buy or sell in this country under the Cuban embargo?”

  “I’m not sure of that,” he says. “A lot of suppliers will tell you cigars come out of Cuba. Most of ’em are grown and made in this country. Some in the Dominican Republic,” he says.

  “But your supplier for this particular cigar told you it was made in Cuba, didn’t he?”

  “Cigar distributors say a lot of things. I don’t know that I always believe them. Half the cigar shops in town claim they keep Cuban cigars under the counter. It’s not always true.”

  “But you were told these were made in Cuba, right?”

  “What I was told,” he says.

  “Is that why they’re so expensive?”

  “Well, that’s a fine cigar,” says Hurly. He’s looking at Jonah, caught on the horns of a dilemma: consumer fraud on one tip, federal customs agents on the other. They will no doubt soon be examining Hurly’s private stock in the back room, that is, if he hasn’t already buried it or burned it.

  “How many of your customers buy that cigar?”

  “Oh.” Hurly thinks for a moment. “You mean a cigar or a box?”

  “Let’s start with individual cigars.”

  “I sell a few of them a month.”

  “What’s a few?”

  “Maybe three or four.”

  “All to the same people?”

  “Regular customers,” he says.

  “How many regular customers?”

  “Two of them,” he says. “Three including Mr. Hale, there.”

  “How many of those customers buy them by the box?”

  “Oh. Only Mr. Hale.”

  “He was the only one who bought them in quantities?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know whether any other shops in the area carry that particular cigar?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “Not that I know of. Requires a certain kind of clientele to stock that kinda thing,” says Hurly.

  “I’m sure,” says Ryan.

  “Would you call this cigar, the Montecristo A, a rare cigar?”

  “Oh, it’s a fine smoke, all right.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, would you call it rare in the sense that it’s not something you find on the street every day?”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’s true,” he says. “Few places up past L.A. sell ’em. I’ve only heard rumors, of course. Place in Brentwood sells ’em to celebrities,” he says.

  “Apart from the defendant and your two other customers who bought one cigar at a time, nobody else in the area smoked these cigars, did they?”

  “Objection. Calls for speculation.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Nobody else bought them from you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And to your knowledge no other shops in this area sold any, right?”

  “That’s true.”

  Now Ryan surprises me. “That’s all I have for this witness,” he says. He never removes the contents from the other evidence bag, the smoked and stubbed-out cigar from the scene.

  Harry’s in my ear, but I wave him off.

  “Mr. Madriani. Your witness,” says Peltro.

  “Just a few questions, Your Honor.

  “Mr. Hurly. Did you have an opportunity to see another cigar, partially smoked and stubbed out . . .?”

  “Objection,” says Ryan. “Beyond the scope of direct. If the defense wants to call the witness, they can do it in their own case.”

  “Sustained,” says the judge.

  “I have no other questions,” I tell the court.

  “The witness is excused.”

  I sit back down, Harry looking at me. “What do you think?” Whispering in my ear. “Maybe he couldn’t ID the other one? Maybe he said something Ryan didn’t like?”

  I’m shaking my head, not sure. Maybe it’s something worse.

  Ten minutes later, and we find out it’s worse. It takes Ryan that long to get through the man’s credentials.

  Lyman Bowler is a plant biologist from a southern uni
versity, author of a treatise on tobacco, and, according to Ryan, one of the foremost experts on cigars in the country.

  He is a tall, slender man, what you would call stately, and speaks with an accent that is not southern. I would guess from somewhere in the northeast.

  Ryan has already placed the two evidence bags in front of the witness.

  “Dr. Bowler, I would ask you to look at the two cigars in those bags and tell me whether you’ve had an opportunity to examine trace evidence from either or both of them before today?”

  The witness looks at them, checks the markings, not on the cigars but on the bags holding them.

  “Yes. There’s a lab stamp on the bag, and I’ve seen pictures that correspond to the two cigars in question.”

  “Just pictures?”

  “No. We also received samples of the tobacco.”

  “And when was that?”

  “About a month ago,” says Bowler. “Samples of both of these cigars were sent to me by your office.”

  “Did you render any kind of a written report regarding that examination or your findings?”

  “No.”

  Ryan doesn’t ask why, but the answer’s clear: because the prosecutor didn’t want a report floating around in his files that he would have to disclose. This makes it easier to sandbag us now.

  “And what kind of examination did you perform?” says Ryan.

  “Under a stereomicroscope. On slides,” he says. “I examined both trace samples from the wrapper as well as the filler tobacco in each of the two cigars. The materials that were supplied.”

  “So that the jury understands,” says Ryan. “There are two different kinds of tobacco, wrapper and filler?”

  “Yes. The filler is generally a blend of several different kinds of tobacco. The wrapper is what the name implies, a leaf tobacco that is specifically grown to use as the outer wrapper for cigars.”

  “Were you able to come to any conclusions following your examination of the samples?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what were those conclusions?”

  “As to the origins of the tobacco, I concluded that the filler and the wrapper for both cigars were grown outside of the United States. Most probably in Cuba.”

  “And how did you come to that conclusion?”

  “Process of elimination. To understand,” he says, “you have to go back to Castro’s takeover of the country. In the early nineteen-sixties when Castro was consolidating power, nationalizing industries, one of the things he did was to seize all the plantations. Many of the owners fled the country. Some of them took with them their Cuban tobacco seeds. A few came to the United States. Some went to Honduras. Others to the Dominican Republic. They set up and started growing, using the Cuban seed.”

  “So what you’re telling us is that the tobacco in the samples I sent you could be from Cuban seed cigars.”

  “The tobacco in all the samples is definitely Cuban in origin. But I don’t think it’s what you would call Cuban seed. Certainly not grown in the United States.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There aren’t any traces of blue smut mold on the tobacco from any of the samples. Blue smut mold is a leaf mold very common in the United States. It comes up out of Mexico each year and contaminates the domestic tobacco crop. You would find traces of it in virtually every cigar from tobacco grown in this country. But it’s not known to exist in Cuba.”

  “Can you tell us, Doctor, besides the fact that the tobacco for both cigars was grown outside the United States, were there any other points of similarity between the samples taken from the complete and un-smoked cigar in the one bag, and the crushed-out partially smoked cigar in the other?”

  “Oh, yes. The samples of the wrapper from each are quite distinctive. They have an oily composition that is unique to wrappers grown in Cuba. Nowhere else are these quite the same, the Dominican Republic, Honduras. The wrapper is definitely Cuban-grown in both samples.”

  “And would you say it’s the same kind of wrapper?”

  “It’s the same generic leaf,” says Bowler.

  “And that would be something consistent, that a manufacturer of fine cigars would strive for?” says Ryan. “Uniformity in the wrapper?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Dr. Bowler, by examining either the samples sent to you or the cigars themselves, were you able to form any kind of scientific opinion as to whether the two cigars in question are of the same manufacture, the same brand?”

  “Yes. In my opinion, they are. The same brand,” he says.

  “Have you formed any opinion, or conclusion as to the identity of that brand?”

  “I think so. Not from the samples themselves, but from the cigars. The distinctive torpedo shape, the oily texture of the wrapper, particularly on the unsmoked cigar, but also on the remnant . . .”

  “You’re talking about the cigar stub? The one found at the crime scene?”

  “Yes. I would say that they are both the same. Premium cigars. Perhaps the best in the world. There’s no doubt in my mind,” says Bowler, “they’re Montecristo A’s. Both of them.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  “It could be worse,” says Harry. “They could have DNA from Jonah’s saliva on the stub.”

  It’s not that I don’t have faith in my client’s protests of innocence, but the thought has crossed my mind more than once. The gods of forensics may have favored us at least a little. The business end of the smoked cigar was contaminated by the victim’s blood at the scene, enough that they couldn’t do DNA.

  We are also guessing that one of the paramedics early on the scene may have stepped on it before the techs got there. Ryan has been unable to produce evidence of teeth impressions, though he tried. The crime lab looked and came back with nothing definitive. One of their theories is that the killer stepped on it to put it out.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” says Harry. “That means the killer tracked in the blood. Nobody’s gonna do that on purpose. Not to put out a cigar.”

  “That assumes the blood was there at the time.”

  Harry looks at me.

  “She may have been bleeding. Maybe the pool hadn’t caught up with the cigar when he dropped it.”

  “You think she was still alive?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Harry says the DNA could have been exculpatory, showing that somebody else smoked the cigar.

  “Or a train wreck,” I say. There’s no telling what a jury will do with evidence of probabilities on the scale of DNA. Glaze their eyes over for three days with the science of the helix, and you may find them flipping coins in the jury room.

  The strain of the trial is beginning to show on Jonah. The first few days, when the state’s case stumbled, fits and starts, he seemed to take refuge. Then Ryan got back on track with the evidence of the cigars. The resilience ran out of Jonah like a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Tonight he is showing more than his age.

  We have called in the doctor. Jonah telling us there’s nothing wrong, but his hands occasionally clutching gently at his chest, rubbing his left shoulder, are telling us something else.

  Harry’s worried about him. The doctor has assured us they’ll hold him for observation overnight in the county’s hospital prison ward where they can monitor and control his medications.

  Right now Harry and I have other problems. Jason Crow didn’t show up at the courthouse today. By seven-thirty, Harry and I are doing the honors. He drives. I navigate. Up the hill toward Crow’s apartment.

  “I thought he might do this. Parolee, par for the course,” I tell Harry. It’s why Harry prepared the subpoena a week ahead of our case. To give us time to run him down in case he rabbited. Now if we’re lucky we have time to find him, instill the fear of God, even if
His chief archangel, Murphy, isn’t with us. I tried to call Murph, had him paged, but no luck.

  When we get to Crow’s apartment I have Harry drive around the block, checking the lights, what I remember to be Crow’s flat, side and back. It looks like it’s dark, though a faint light can be seen coming from a small window a little higher than the others on the wall; I’m guessing a bathroom.

  “If that’s his apartment, looks like he’s out,” says Harry.

  “If he is, he’s either on foot or somebody else is driving.”

  Harry looks at me.

  “The gray Datsun back there. On the left. It’s Crow’s car. Murphy traced the plates to find him.”

  I have Harry park the car in the front, a space at the curb where we have a good view of the front porch and the door, Crow’s car down the street. From here Harry can see and not be seen, not from Crow’s apartment upstairs anyway.

  “I want you to stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “To watch his car, and the front door. I’ll ring the bell, slip around the back. If he’s there, my guess is that’s where he’s gonna come out. On the run,” I tell him. “Especially after the way Murphy nailed him the other day. He’ll head for his car.”

  I’m not about to try to jump him, get into it with him à la Murphy. I leave that to the process servers and PIs.

  “If he gets to his car, you pick me up out on the street. There.” I point to a place where I’ll be. “Keep your lights out. We’ll follow him to see where he goes. Once he settles we’ll get a bench warrant, let the cops pick him up.” Crow has already violated the subpoena.

  I’m pretty sure I can convince Peltro to have him held pending his testimony. He’s a key witness for our case, with a considerable record.

  Harry sits tight. I head for the front door. Up the stairs. I don’t have to hunt for the right button. I see the clean piece of paper with his name on it and press the button next to it. The sound of the buzzer upstairs. I hit it twice quickly and back down the stairs, along the other side of his building away from his windows.

  There’s a walkway leading to the backyard, broken concrete with weeds growing up out of the cracks. A few seconds and I’m in the backyard. Here there are some bushes struggling for survival among the weeds, shadows thrown by a good-sized avocado tree. I step back into the darkness and wait. I can see Crow’s apartment, at least the back window. Still no lights. The stairs on this side of the house are wood in need of repair, leaning slightly, what used to be white, now a kind of peeling gray.