“Guy had a life we all could wish for. A lovely wife, two children, a house, a big house, a job with a law firm that paid well and would pay far better when he made partner, which was a lock, believe me. It was a lock because the person making the partnership decision was his father-in-law, Jonah Peale, as you will learn when Mr. Peale testifies in this courtroom for the prosecution. Guy had a life we all could wish for, but he gave it up. Why? Mr. Jefferson will claim he gave it up for money, but don’t you believe it. Prosecutors are paid less than they are worth and so they always think that money is at the root of everything, but not in this case, ladies and gentlemen. Whatever Guy Forrest did or didn’t do, it had nothing to do with money. The evidence will show that Guy was in line to make millions and he gave it up, and when you see that, you will know better than to think it was money that motivated him. Instead he sacrificed his wonderful life, tossed aside everything he had, for love.
“Hailey Prouix was beautiful, smart, sad, alluring. Hailey Prouix was a siren calling Guy away from his comfortable life into the unpredictable waters of love, and he couldn’t help himself. He abandoned his wife, his children, his job, his future, his very integrity—abandoned it all for her. Abandoned it all for love. I’m not saying he was right to desert his family and sully his profession—you have every right to condemn what he did, and he’ll have to suffer the consequences for the rest of his life—but he did it for love, and love, at least in this state, is not a hanging offense.
“Now, you’ve already heard tell of the Juan Gonzalez case, as if that will prove that Guy killed Hailey Prouix. Let me tell you now that it will prove nothing. Juan Gonzalez, a poor man with a family to support, had entered the hospital for a simple operation and ended up in an irreversible coma. Hailey Prouix represented the Gonzalez family, seeking compensation. Guy Forrest represented the doctor and the insurance company, seeking to avoid paying the family for the disastrous result. There was a file that showed that Mr. Gonzalez had a preexisting condition and which might have won the case for Guy’s clients, but Guy buried the file so that the family of Juan Gonzalez could get some money and so that Hailey Prouix, his love, could get some money, too.
“It was wrong what he did, I’m not defending it, but don’t think he did it for the money. If he was thinking only of the money, he would have stayed married to Jonah Peale’s daughter and become a partner in Jonah Peale’s firm and stood in line to inherit Jonah Peale’s fortune and ended up with more money than he could ever have spent. No, we can only imagine why Hailey Prouix got involved with Guy Forrest, we can only imagine as to her motivations, but when you hear the evidence, you will have no doubt as to what motivated Guy Forrest. He buried that file, failed his responsibilities to his clients and the law, stepped over the line for love. What he did was wrong, and maybe it was a crime, a crime for love, and maybe for that he should be tried. But he didn’t bury that file for the money, and when Mr. Jefferson says he later killed his love for that same money, you will know he is wrong.
“And you heard Mr. Jefferson tell you that Hailey Prouix had another lover and that might be why Guy killed her. You would think Mr. Jefferson could figure out whether it was the one or the other, but that is what he has come up with. And the evidence will show how Mr. Jefferson discovered that fact of Hailey Prouix’s lover, by reaching deep within Hailey Prouix’s body and pulling out evidence, by testing that evidence with the most advanced scientific techniques, by comparing that DNA with Guy’s own and showing that the complex DNA strands do not match. We will have no dispute with the accuracy of that test, but only with the idea that Guy Forrest could have conducted the same intricate scientific tests to learn that truth. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? But Mr. Jefferson will rely on such an idea to show motive when there will be not a shred of evidence that Guy knew of this other lover.
“Mr. Jefferson assumes that Hailey was leaving Guy for this other man and that was why he hit her first and then killed her. But all we know for sure is that Guy and Hailey were living together, were engaged to be married, were planning for a future as man and wife. They were going to Costa Rica for a lovers’ vacation. You will see the plane tickets in their names. Tell me, ladies and gentlemen, who was Hailey Prouix leaving for whom? You could equally assume the opposite of what Mr. Jefferson claims, that she was leaving this other lover for Guy and that was why the other man hit her when she told him it was over and then later killed her. The coroner will not be able to place exactly the time of the blow that caused the bruise. It happened before the killing, but we don’t know for sure how far before, we don’t know if it happened, maybe, at the time of the tryst with her lover earlier in the day when, maybe, she said good-bye and he lost control. And when you see Guy’s name on the ticket to Costa Rica, maybe you will consider this possibility more likely.
“So maybe, possibly, probably it was this other lover that killed her. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you should be asking yourselves, what will you learn during the trial about this other lover other than his existence, which is beyond dispute? Will you learn who he was? No. Will you learn whether or not Hailey had given him the key to her house? No. Whether or not Hailey had shown him the location of the gun during one of their trysts? No. Whether or not he was murderously angry at Hailey Prouix for leaving him? No. Whether he has an alibi for the night of the killing? No. Whether he was, instead, lurking alone outside the house, waiting until his anger forced him through the door to the hidden location of the gun and then up the stairs, into that bedroom where he shot the woman he loved with a dangerous obsession, the woman who was abandoning him to his cold, cruel loneliness, shot her through the heart? Watch as this trial unfolds, and see if any of those answers are provided, and wonder why not.
“And ask yourselves about the mysterious patch of wet carpet found by the police beside the front door, and wonder who it was that came from outside and left something there, an umbrella, his boots, something, when we know for sure it wouldn’t have been Guy. And ask yourselves about the strange man in black rushing out of Hailey Prouix’s house the night after the murder, when Guy Forrest was already in police custody.
“This is what I believe the evidence will show. The evidence will show that Guy had no motive, but that another might have. The evidence will show the possibility that another had opportunity and access to the means to commit this crime. The evidence will show that the prosecution brought this case before they found the evidence needed to answer the crucial questions I have just raised, because they thought they had discovered the ultimate answer. They have accused Guy Forrest of killing Hailey Prouix because his is the only name they could come up with and the link between Guy and Hailey was powerful and undeniable. Love. He loved her. He had given up everything for her. That is why he is on trial today, because of that love.
“And so this is, finally, what I want you to ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen: Whenever did love become a crime?”
38
WE STOOD as the jury was let out for the day, remained standing as Judge Tifaro followed. I put my arm around Guy’s back, squeezed his shoulder, said a few encouraging words before the bailiff led him away for transport back to the county jail. So it was just Beth and me at the defense table as I packed up my notebooks, my folders, my omnipresent yellow pads, when something banged hard onto the wooden tabletop beside me.
Startled, I turned to find a large brown briefcase and holding on to it a grinning Troy Jefferson.
“That was pretty good,” he said, “that song and dance of yours.”
“Thank you.”
“You should have lowered your voice and done a Barry White. I can hear him singing it: ‘Whenever did love become a crime?’ But it’s not going to fly. Doesn’t matter where you try to point the finger, the fingerprints on the gun are Guy’s.”
“We’ll get to that in the course of the trial.”
“I had thought blaming the lover might be your strategy, as good as any, but I didn’t think you’d be so foolish as to
spout it in the opening when any day, any minute he could walk right into the courtroom.”
“Well, there you go, that’s what we are, Beth and I, a couple of fools.”
“You blaming him in the opening, getting it into all the papers, might just force his hand. And it certainly forced mine. We’re twenty-four/sevening the search for the missing man.”
“Maybe you should have twenty-four/sevened it before you swore in the jury.”
“Oh, we’ll find him and his alibi. The detectives pissed and moaned about the overtime, but they’ve already got leads.”
“Speaking of the detectives, I saw Stone at the table, but not our good friend Breger.”
“He took a jaunt.”
“Anyplace interesting?”
“Vegas.”
“Gambling?”
“No. But before he left, he told me he still had some questions about that night of the murder. Once again he asked if you would consent to allow us to examine your phone logs for that night.”
“And once again I refuse,” I said. “Attorney-client privilege. And I don’t think the judge will set the precedent of allowing you to rummage around the phone records of the defense attorney after a trial starts.”
“Maybe not, but not every defense lawyer is called just moments after a murder. I suppose we’ll just have to see.” He opened his briefcase, took out a blue-backed motion, tossed it onto the table before me. “I’ve been holding this for a while, but I think it’s too hot to hold on to any longer. I’ll be filing it before we leave the courthouse. I expect she’ll rule tomorrow.”
“Let me guess, Troy. You weren’t the quiet type on the basketball court.”
“I did my share of verbalizing,” he said with his grin before he turned for the exit, followed by the two ADAs who were assisting him. Beth and I watched as the coterie departed.
I scanned the document he had given me: MOTION TO COMPEL THE DISCLOSURE OF CERTAIN TELEPHONE LOGS. “You’ll have to answer this tonight,” I said as I handed it off to Beth.
Beth snatched the motion with her good hand and quickly reviewed it. Her wrist had healed badly. The bones had needed to berebroken, manipulated into proper alignment, and fastened together with metal pins inserted by a huge pneumatic device to keep them in place. For her it had been a summer of pain, but it looked as though the doctors had finally gotten it right and this would be the last of her casts. She continued reading the motion as she said, “He’s right, you know.”
“Who, Troy? Nah, he’s just talking trash.”
“No he’s not. He seemed almost gleeful.”
“Really? I thought he seemed a bit rattled.”
“Not rattled, relieved. If you had been less specific, you would have kept your options open to the end. Any big surprises could have been accounted for. Now, if the other lover walks in, we’re sunk. What if he shows up and matches the DNA and then gives himself a perfect alibi? What then?”
“He won’t.”
“Why not?”
“He has a reason to hide. Maybe he’s married, maybe he’s engaged to someone else, maybe his gay lover is a jealous fiend. Whatever, he hasn’t come forward yet and won’t in the future.”
“But he might if he thinks the real killer is getting off because of his silence. He might suffer the embarrassment to stop a travesty of justice.”
“He’s not that noble.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t know, Victor,” said Beth, staring now at the door out of which Troy Jefferson had just departed. “It’s almost as if Jefferson already knew who the other lover was and was preparing to whisk him in as soon as you blundered into his trap.”
“Wouldn’t he have had to disclose that to us already?” I said, my voice betraying my sudden nervousness.
“Not if it was merely a suspicion that he can now send his detectives out to turn into a fact.”
I wondered on that for a moment and then shook my head. “I had to do it. To win this thing I need the jury to see the missing lover behind every question, every possibility. If I just tried to offer him at the end, it would have looked like flummery. Now he’s sitting right here at the defense table, ready to shoulder the blame when the evidence is equivocal. He’s what the jury will see when that police technician testifies that she couldn’t detect gunpowder residue on Guy’s hands at the crime scene. She’ll try to dismiss the result by claiming that the gunpowder washed off in the rain, but the jury will be wondering if maybe the police tested the wrong man. And when the DNA pattern of the semen gets put up on the chart, without my saying a word, they’ll be wondering if they’re looking at the DNA of a killer. By the time I get to closing, they’ll have argued the case for themselves and found reasonable doubt.”
Beth just stared at me, a faint amusement at my assurance in her eyes. “It sounds so easy.”
“Genius always does. But in the end all our supposes don’t matter.” I rapped her cast gently with my knuckle, the sound sharp and hollow. “Hello. Anybody there? This is what our client wants us to argue, he has told us so repeatedly, so this is the way we go.”
“I’m not used to seeing you so deferential to the client.”
“He’s a lawyer, and it’s his life on the line.”
“Let’s just hope it doesn’t blow up in his face,” she said. “Have you decided if Guy is going to testify?”
“He wants to, but I won’t let him. He’d have to say he knew about the other man and that he hit her on the night of her murder. Those two facts would kill us.”
“But what about the open door, the sudden sound? How are you going to prove up the possibility that someone else could have slipped into that house the night of the murder?”
“That’s why, dear Beth, they invented cross-examination.”
39
CROSS-EXAMINATION IS a witch’s brew. It most famously can be a truth serum for the untruthful, though that wasn’t a problem yet in our trial. There were no liars here, no falsified testimonies being used to frame up our defendant. The case against Guy Forrest was powerfully circumstantial, and the circumstances, as presented by Troy Jefferson, were basically true. It was only the natural inferences flowing from those circumstances that we had quarrel with. But that just required a different recipe of cross, an al-chemist’s potion to turn the inconceivable conceivable, the unthinkable thinkable, the improbable into a stone-cold absolute possibility, to raise phantoms and conjure them into flesh and blood.
“NOW, MRS. Morgan,” I said, “you stated in your direct testimony that you saw Mr. Forrest sitting outside his house about eleven o’clock on the night of the killing, is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Evelyn Morgan, a well-dressed matron with hair shellacked in place. She was a neighbor of Hailey’s, across the street and a few numbers down.
“And Mr. Forrest wasn’t wearing much, isn’t that right?”
“Not from what I could see, though there were shadows, so I couldn’t tell to the last inch.”
“Good thing for the shadows, right, Mrs. Morgan? Were the upstairs lights on then, do you remember?”
“Yes, they were on. Or at least I think they were on. I noticed that because earlier I seemed to remember that the upstairs window was dark.”
“And that window is to the master bedroom?”
“I was never invited inside, but I think so.”
“Good enough. And then later, after you first spied Mr. Forrest, you saw a man in a raincoat go up the steps, talk with Mr. Forrest, take something off the cement step, and then go inside. And you said that man was me?”
“As best I could tell,” she said.
“You’ve got good eyes, Mrs. Morgan,” I said. “I notice you wear glasses. Were you wearing them that night?”
“Yes I was. I wear them until I go to sleep every night. And I don’t sleep as much as I used to.”
“Fine. Now, when you saw me go up those steps, was I holding an umbrella?”
“Not that I remember.”
“A bag of some sort, any object I could have laid down beside the doorway when I went inside?”
“No, sir.”
“And I wasn’t inside long, was I, before I came out again?”
“Not that I remember.”
“And the police came soon after.”
“Yes, they did.”
“It must have been quite a sight.”
“Well, it is normally a very quiet neighborhood.”
“You’re married, aren’t you, Mrs. Morgan?”
“Yes I am, for thirty-three years now.”
“Thirty-three years. My, oh, my. And you have how many children?”
“Four, and two grandchildren, with two more on the way.”
“That is something, yes. And with all that, and of course the volunteer work you testified about, you don’t have much free time, do you?”
“I’m kept busy.”
“I bet you are, Mrs. Morgan. I can see that you’re not one of those sad, pathetic ladies who spend all their days sticking their noses out the window spying on their neighbors.”
“I should say not.”
“You’ve got too much going on in your own life to be like that.”
“Yes I do, Mr. Carl.”
“Which is why you say you saw Mr. Forrest sitting on the steps but you didn’t see him actually leave the house, because you were busy living your life, not twitching curtains to see what the neighbors were up to.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So if somebody had walked right up those steps and into the house, somebody, let’s say, with an umbrella or a bag, you wouldn’t have noticed, would you?”
“Maybe not, I don’t know.”
“In fact, a whole army could have gone in and out and you wouldn’t have seen it, because you were living your life, not sitting by the window like a spy.”
“I suppose.”
Fatal Flaw Page 30
