Fourth Person No More
Page 25
I dictated to Marley fifteen pearly paragraphs to top off last night’s material. I quoted Reardon extensively. I summarized his obvious strategy.
Marley used nine graphs and only two quotes and told me to write the rest up as analysis for the next day’s edition. I wasn’t necessarily happy about that, but I was feeling pretty good about myself until I got back in the courthouse.
At first, the trooper at the door would not let me back in the courtroom. I had made the mistake of stopping for an over-confident, little snack on the way back to the courthouse, and unlike most judges of my acquaintance, Secrist actually resumed proceedings when he said he would.
“They’re in the middle of the kid’s testimony,” the trooper said, putting a gentle, but oh-so-certain hand on my chest. “You heard the judge.”
The kid was Moze, and I had heard the judge.
“It’ll be my ass,” I told the trooper.
“No, it’ll be my ass,” he said. “And shut up. The turd’s going to cross him.”
He turned to adjust a volume knob on a set of speakers that had been set up in the hallway for those who could not get in the courtroom. When he did, I slipped in the door and took up a position standing against the back wall. Secrist scowled at me but said nothing.
“You hadn’t been a police officer long when this incident occurred, had you?” Reardon began.
Moze looked him in the eye and said “No” in a flat voice. I knew that Crandall had spent a good deal of time preparing him for his testimony, but I was also pretty sure that some of his brother officers had taken him aside to counsel him in even blunter terms.
They would have taught him to testify on cross in the way most cops testify on cross: One word better than two; one syllable best of all. Reveal no emotion. And never, ever lie—unless the fucking defense attorney makes you and you can’t be caught.
“Less than a year, correct?”
“Yeah.”
Reardon had started the cross sitting at the defense table. He stood now and strolled to the side of the witness stand away from the jury box. His position would make it difficult for Moze to look at the jury. Some lawyers, apparently Reardon among them, subscribe to a theory that it undercuts a witness’ credibility if the lawyer prevents the witness from making eye contact with a jury.
“This was your first homicide investigation?”
“Yeah.”
“True you’d never seen a homicide victim before?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You threw up, didn’t you?”
“Objection,” Crandall called, “irrelevant.”
“Motive, bias, prejudice; they’re always relevant,” Reardon said.
Secrist declared the objection overruled.
“You remember the question?” Reardon asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s the answer?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, you threw up?”
“Yeah, it was disgusting what your client did to those children.”
Reardon did not bat an eye.
“Who saw you throw up?”
Moze’s gaze flickered. He started to look for me in the gallery seat I had occupied before the break but caught himself.
“Nobody, I know of.”
Reardon half-turned to see who Moze might’ve looked at. He looked first to where I had been sitting, then around the gallery until he found me holding up the wall. I put my head down and wrote notes before I caught his eye.
“Could there have been somebody you don’t know of?” Reardon asked when he turned his attention back on Moze.
“Objection.” Crandall was on his feet this time. “Argumentative. Asked and answered. If he doesn’t know of anyone, the answer is no.”
Reardon smiled pleasantly, as though Crandall had just underscored his point, which, of course, he had.
“Withdrawn. Who else was at the crime scene with you?”
“Bunch of officers.”
“After a while, you mean. After you had gone out there and called it in.”
“Yeah.”
“Who was with you when you were dispatched?”
I held my breath. I had the sense others in the room were doing the same. Moze raised reptile eyes from a point on the floor between him and Reardon and stared at a point on the far wall just above Reardon’s head.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody. Who was with you when you arrived at the crime scene?”
“Nobody.”
“Who went into that trailer after you came out and before the other officers arrived?”
“What?”
“Simple question, Deputy. You went into the trailer when you arrived, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then you came out and threw up, right?”
“I already said I did.”
“After you threw up, you called it in and some other officers arrived, did they not?”
“Yes.”
“Who went into that trailer between the time you walked out of it and the other officers arrived?”
Moze’s eyes found that place on the far wall again.
“Nobody.”
“Deputy, I want the jury to understand your testimony. You’re telling us that there was never anybody at that crime scene or in that trailer other than you and other police officers?”
He lifted a hand toward the gallery.
“Victims’ families.”
“All right,” Reardon said with a trace of annoyance. “Your testimony is that there was never anybody at that crime scene or in that trailer other than you, other police officers, and the victims’ families. Is that right?”
“Objection,” Crandall called, “asked and answered.”
“Sustained,” Secrist answered. “Move on, counsel.”
I thought I heard Moze sigh. Or it could’ve been me who let out his breath, but relief on either Moze’s part or mine was premature.
Like all the good ones, Reardon worked a witness without notes. He returned to the defense table, where Legs handed him a file folder. He ran a finger down something in the folder, tapped a spot, and handed the folder back.
“Your report says you left the scene about mid-morning of the next day. Is that correct?”
Moze shrugged. He was kind of cocky after dodging a bullet.
“Yeah,” he said in that snotty tone boys use when they think a question’s too dumb to attend to.
“You were the first officer at the crime scene?”
“Yeah.”
“And you were the first officer to secure the crime scene?”
“Yeah.”
“And you were there for most, if not all, of the initial phases of the investigation?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Were you aware that there was a set of footprints found at the crime scene?”
“I ‘spect there was a bunch of them.”
Reardon pursed his lips and nodded.
“I’m talking about the ones that led from the trailer down the drive and turned into the woods.”
Crandall was on his feet.
“Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.”
But Reardon had, in the way of low-rent lawyers, lobbed in the facts he needed and there was no pulling them back.
“I assume you’ll be proving that up later, Mr. Reardon,” Secrist said.
“Just as soon as Mr. Crandall calls his first real investigator,” Reardon said.
“Overruled.”
Moze had been shifting in his seat, apparently concerned about where Reardon was going. But the obvious inference that he was not a real investigator stilled him and made color show on his neck.
“I knew about them,” Moze said with more certainty and surly undertone than was good for him.
“I . . . ,” said Moze, caught off guard. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Did you see those footprints when you arrived?”
“No.”
“Did you look for them?”
“Not then, no.”
“Did you ever look for footprints?”
“Nobody told me to.”
“Nobody told you to,” said Reardon, developing a pattern of repeating statements that made Moze look weak and unreliable. “So the answer is no you didn’t look for them, is that correct?
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what? Yeah, that’s correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did someone tell you the footprints had been found?”
“Objection, hearsay,” Crandall called.
“Well, I guess they must’ve,” Moze said before Secrist could rule. “I don’t remember.”
Secrist looked at Crandall and shrugged in silent recognition of the lawyers’ cliché that it’s useless to close the door after the horse has fled the barn. Moze’s response was already in evidence. It essentially relieved Reardon of his promise to introduce evidence of the footprints through another witness. Crandall glared at Moze.
“You don’t remember,” Reardon repeated.
He snagged his rump on the defense table and crossed his arms. He looked at Crandall then the jury.
“Were the footprints there when you left?”
“I reckon they must’ve been. The techs found them.”
“You know the techs found footprints, but you didn’t look for them and you don’t know who told you about them?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Whose footprints were they?”
Reardon’s earlier questions about who had been with Moze when he was dispatched and at the crime scene were steps along the garden path to get to this fork. If Moze answered the question truthfully and told Reardon the footprints were mine, as surely Moze must’ve known them to be, he would admit to perjuring himself. Moze could expect probably another hour on the witness stand while Reardon explored the length and breadth of that lie to make suspect all of the rest of Moze’s testimony as well as that of every other cop Crandall intended to call.
If Moze said he didn’t know whose footprints they were, his answer would be yet another brick Reardon would lay to build his theories that the police had been sloppy and that some unknown person killed the kids and shot Lottie. Whether Moze had all that figured out at the time is a bad bet, given his inexperience on the stand, but he must have understood instinctively neither answer helped Crandall’s case.
“I don’t do forensics,” Moze said finally.
“Perhaps not,” Reardon said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
Moze’s gaze danced around the floor between Reardon and him.
“What was your question again?”
“Whose footprints were they?”
“Nobody told me.”
“The truthful answer then is you just don’t know.”
“I reckon.”
“And apparently you didn’t bother to ask.”
Reardon told Moze he was done before Moze could answer.
Crandall did what he could to rehabilitate Moze. He asked Moze a series of questions about whether he was trained in forensics, whether it was his job to look for footprints, and whether it was common for officers to talk among themselves about investigations that they were only peripherally involved in so that it was likely he would have heard about the footprints from his brother and sister officers, if not whether a match had been made to any other footprints.
Moze’s answers amounted to no, no, and yes, just as Crandall wanted, but it didn’t help much. When Moze left the stand, not a single juror would look at him. They fixed glum gazes in the middle distance. They had wanted to like young Moze.
Litigators believe in strong starts. It is a maxim among them that juries remember and tend to believe what they hear first and what they hear last. Anything in between, you’re shooting craps.
Crandall put Moze on first not just because he was the best one to start a chronological telling of the tale but, more importantly, to sear into the jury’s mind just how revolting the scene had been inside that double-wide. When she shared her notes with me later, Janelle said he’d done an excellent job of that.
However, Reardon had muted Crandall’s intended effect and left the jury with impression that Moze was inexperienced and that he therefore might be incompetent or even a liar. Moze’s performance thus was far less than Crandall hoped and far more than Reardon had any right to expect.
You would’ve never have known it from their expressions, though. Both Crandall and Reardon kept their game faces on. Wood, sitting next to Crandall, looked put out.
Only the Defendant seemed pleased. A connoisseur of skillful manipulation, he grinned like the Cheshire Cat. Legs leaned over to whisper something to him, probably about how juries hate gloating. He blew her a kiss. His mother, sitting stone-faced, looked away.
With Crandall’s careful prompting, Orlo told the jury pretty much what he’d told me. He had been well coached. He spoke about the nature of his relationship with Lottie with warmth, not rancor, and stuck pretty much to the facts of finding her on his doorstep the night of the murders and bringing her inside.
“Did Ms. Nusbaumer say anything when you were helping her inside?” Crandall asked.
“Objection,” Reardon called, “hearsay.”
“Sustained,” Secrist said before Crandall could argue.
Crandall shrugged as though it did not make that much difference and went on. Orlo embellished only by using the language from my story; he said that the bloody palm prints on his door looked like rose petals. Crandall’s gaze cut sideways to the jury at that one. He apparently did not know Orlo read the papers closely.
Reardon did.
“A reporter visited you that night, did he not?” Reardon asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You talked to him at length then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve talked to him several times since, have you not?”
“’Bout ever’ day.”
“His name is Clayton Ambrose, and he was at the scene of the murders that night, was he not?”
Orlo suddenly looked shrewd, an expression that had not visited him before in my experience.
“That’s his name. Can’t say where he was that night, other than my place.”
“Didn’t he seem to know quite a bit about what had happened at Ms. Nusbaumer’s trailer?”
“It’s a double-wide.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not just a trailer. It’s a double-wide.”
“Very well. What’s the answer to my question? Mr. Ambrose seemed to know quite a bit about what happened at your lover’s double-wide, did he not?”
“I reckon he did.”
“Wouldn’t the fact that he seemed to know quite a bit about what had happened at Ms. Nusbaumer’s trailer suggest to you that he’d been there.”
“Well, I reckon.”
“How’d he get to your place?”
“Don’t know. Just said he needed a ride.”
“Did he? That would suggest he did not have a car, would it not?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t ask. Just took him into town.”
Reardon smiled and moved on.
“You had shotguns, did you not?”
“Then? Yeah.”
“The police took those from you on that night, did they not?”
“Yeah.”
“And they didn’t return them to you, did they?”
“Not yet, no.”
“And they questioned you about the murders, true?�
��
“Well, yeah.”
“And they asked you whether you liked the children Lottie Nusbaumer took care of?”
“Well, not like that they didn’t.”
Reardon turned to the defense table where Legs was making a show of holding a file folder above her head. She apparently thought things were going very well. With his back to the jury, Reardon scowled at her as he took the folder from her.
“Remember the deposition you gave me?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember me asking you what you and the police talked about?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember you telling me that the police wanted to know how you felt about Lottie’s babysitting, and you telling me that it just took time away from you and her?”
“But that don’t mean I felt one way or ‘nother about them kids.”
“Didn’t it?”
“No.”
Reardon raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
“Mr. Ratliff, what’s your shoe size?”
The sudden shift threw Orlo. In fact, most of us in the gallery were little puzzled by that one. He paused, his expression glazed.
“Twelve,” he said finally, “I think. Depends on who makes the shoe.”
“Twelve,” Reardon repeated. “Nothing further.”
The abrupt ending of the cross made it memorable, as Reardon no doubt intended. I was pretty sure we’d hear more about Orlo’s shoe size later, and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.
Crandall asked only two questions to rehabilitate Orlo.
“You were never charged with anything as a result of the shootings, were you?”
“No, sir.”
“And as you sit here today, you are a free man, are you not?”
“Yes, sir.”
Orlo’s testimony concluded on Friday afternoon, the end of the first week. When Crandall told Secrist his next witness would likely take more time than remained that day, Secrist seemed more than willing to turn us loose for the weekend, just as we were more than eager to light out for home.
We managed to keep Crandall and Reardon in the room long enough to tell us that each of them thought the week had gone well and that Crandall likely would start the next week with the forensic types. Then they—and the twinks—bolted. About a half dozen of us, admission limited to members of the print clan, stopped outside the courthouse for what had become the end-of-day ritual: Gene’s question.