Poisoned Dreams

by A. W. Gray

  That morning, with Big Daddy still on the witness stand and the prospect for more lurid details imminent, the Lyon trial completely upstaged the courtroom dramas down the hall. As Guthrie prepared to continue his cross-examination, his audience included two young ladies who folded their copies of The Silence of the Lambs into their purses, and four well-dressed black businessmen who occupied seats on the back row. On this day John Wiley Price could battle the county on his own.

  Before Guthrie was ten minutes into his questioning, however, defectors from the other trials fidgeted and glanced toward the exits, their feelings clear. What’s all this crap? Get on with the sexual stuff. Instead of diving immediately into the incest issue, Guthrie opened with a series of fifty-dollar canceled checks. What boredom.

  The checks were a means to an end, but that wasn’t apparent at first. Guthrie had gone through the Lyons’ joint account, and now showed Big Daddy a series of drafts that Nancy had written her father for various inconsequential items, had Big Daddy identify the checks and Nancy’s signature thereon. So harmless did the checks appear, when Guthrie returned to his folder for some common pieces of notebook paper, spectators yawned. Jerri Sims wasn’t bored, though. She looked at the new evidence with a sort of resignation. She knew exactly what was coming, and so did Big Daddy.

  Having gone through the procedure of having the papers marked as evidence, submitting them through Judge Creuzot, and passing them through the jury box, Guthrie approached the witness and laid the papers on the rail. “Mr. Dillard,” Guthrie said, “I show you these pieces of evidence and ask that you identify them.”

  Big Daddy held the pages at arm’s length and examined them through the lower portion of his bifocals. “Notes of some kind.”

  “And having identified those checks to be in Nancy’s handwriting,” Guthrie said, “could you please tell us if you can identify the writing on those pieces of paper.”

  “It looks to be Nancy’s.” Big Daddy’s voice was tired.

  “And are these notes which Nancy took during incest counseling?”

  “I wouldn’t know that,” Big Daddy snapped.

  “Mr. Dillard, do you know that your daughter was in fact in counseling for incest?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you do acknowledge that that writing appears to be hers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” Guthrie leaned forward to read over Big Daddy’s shoulder. “If you would, sir”—pointing at one of the pages—“please read the jury, beginning here, the rest of this page.”

  Big Daddy shifted his position. He didn’t want to do this. “Beginning here?” he said.

  Guthrie nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Big Daddy cleared his throat and, hesitantly, began to read. “Trying hard to have the June Cleaver family … wanted to be better behaved … angry, frustrated, anxious … lack of time for one on one … working hard, giving, demanding, controlling … when I don’t have power, I feel inadequate.” Big Daddy looked up as if to say, Is that enough?

  “Please go on, sir,” Guthrie said.

  The elder Dillard tensed in his chair. He glanced at Jerri, then at Judge Creuzot, both of them watching intently. As if he saw no way out, Big Daddy finally continued. “… fear of Bill and what his desires are … sex … sick sex … incest issues with me? … my girls?”

  There were long seconds of pin-drop silence. From the rear of the courtroom came a nervous cough. Finally Guthrie took the pages from Big Daddy’s now trembling fingers. “Thank you, sir,” Guthrie said.

  Having accomplished his goal of establishing the incest and pointing the finger in Bill Jr.’s direction, Guthrie now directed attention to David Bagwell. He returned Big Daddy to the hospital scene. The elder Dillard grudgingly acknowledged Bagwell’s presence at the hospital, and also verified that David’s brother John had been doing work at Presbyterian during Nancy’s final hours. Guthrie then dropped the Bagwell issue; he would extract more information relating to Bagwell from other witnesses. Having scored hits in all directions thus far, Guthrie then changed the course of his cross-examination to a discussion of Richard, and here the defense strategy is puzzling.

  Guthrie introduced a string of recommendation letters that Big Daddy had written in Richard’s behalf in the past. Some were job references, some were glowing accounts of Richard’s achievements for the consideration of the membership committees of various civic organizations, all were addressed to well-known business leaders. Under Guthrie’s direction, Big Daddy read each letter aloud. Evidently the defense strategy was to show that Richard was civic-minded, industrious, and a leader in the community, and that, at some point at least, Big Daddy had considered his son-in-law virtually a jewel. But there was a problem in all this. The letters were overlong, and dropped many names, and this jury of everyday folk with jobs weren’t interested in who Richard and Big Daddy had counted among their circle of friends or how much money any of the principals possessed. After an hour or more of hearing Big Daddy read letters to Dallas’ equivalent of the Carnegies and Rockefellers, the jury was clearly fidgeting. Additionally, it was during this session that Guthrie, inadvertently to be sure, permitted Big Daddy to somewhat turn the tables.

  The elder Dillard, as he prepared to read the umpteenth in the series of recommendation letters, seemed to falter. He closed his eyes and cleared his throat.

  Guthrie’s face showed concern. “Are you uncomfortable, sir?”

  “Well, I have been talking for several hours,” Big Daddy said.

  “Would you like a drink of water?”

  “Yes, that would help. Please.”

  Guthrie approached the defense table, on which sat a chrome carafe and several empty glasses. As if on cue, Richard bent quickly forward, righted one glass, uncapped the bottle and poured, and handed his lawyer a full glass of water. Guthrie carried the drink to the witness stand and handed it to Big Daddy.

  Big Daddy hammed this one up quite well. He looked at the glass in his hand, stared at Richard, then squinted closely at the water in the glass. “I don’t know if I should drink this or not,” Big Daddy said. Then, as the courtroom vibrated with laughter, the elder Dillard took a huge gulp and swallowed hard.

  The foregoing byplay aside, and excluding the string of less than stimulating recommendation letters, Guthrie scored points during the elder Dillard’s cross-examination. As Big Daddy finally stepped down after a day and a half’s testimony, in fact, the defense had rammed the ball over the goal line several times. The prosecution at that point had tallied, at the very most, a field goal.

  36

  “I’ve already showed you the duty nurse’s record, Doctor. I’m asking if Nancy Lyon was in restraints at the time you entered her room.” Dan Guthrie, calm and collected, his confidence growing by leaps and bounds. Day Five.

  Dr. Ali Bagheri seemed confused. “I don’t recall,” he said. Bagheri’s coal black hair was immaculately groomed, his mustache clipped in a measured line. A huge and quite undoctorlike gold medallion hung from a chain around his neck. During Jerri’s direct examination, Bagheri had testified about the wine and pills and the Coke in the movie, all of which he’d said Nancy told him in her room. Guthrie was in the process of attacking the doctor’s testimony with both barrels.

  “Well, you’ll agree, won’t you,” Guthrie said, “that the duty nurse recorded the placing of the patient in restraints because Nancy was struggling to get up, and the time of the nurse’s note was one hour before you visited. Will you agree to that?”

  “It’s on the hospital record,” Bagheri said. “I’d have to say it was so.”

  “I see.” Guthrie made eye contact with one of the jurors, as if he was about to tell one strictly between him and the jury. “When you spoke to Nancy,” Guthrie said, “and when she told you these stories to which you’ve testified, did you remove her breathing tube?”

  Bagheri shi
fted nervously in his chair and didn’t reply.

  “The record states,” Guthrie went on, “that she had a breathing tube, which she constantly tried to remove—another reason for the restraints—and that she was on oxygen. So I’m asking, when you talked to her, did you first remove her breathing tube?” Some of the jurors were sitting forward; Guthrie now had their undivided attention.

  “She did tell me those things,” Bagheri said, rather huffily.

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  “It’s possible to talk with a breathing tube,” Bagheri said.

  “What about an oxygen mask? Did you remove that?”

  “She told me those things,” Bagheri doggedly repeated.

  Jerri, zeroing in as usual on the main issue, offered few objections. Whether or not Nancy had told Bagheri the stories no longer mattered; whether or not to believe the doctor was the jury’s choice. What mattered was that Bagheri’s testimony was an exception to the hearsay rule, that the stories were now before the jury, and that Jerri had more witnesses who could now repeat Nancy’s tales on the stand as backup to what Bagheri had to say.

  As Guthrie continued to hammer at the witness, a stranger sat among the writers on the second row of the spectator section. The newcomer was a slim and attractive lady of around thirty, and she was vigorously taking notes. Precise notes. She wrote down every question that Guthrie asked, also recorded Bagheri’s answer, and had gone through the same meticulous procedure during Jerri’s direct examination. Seated among writers who scribbled reminders to themselves on napkin edges—and sometimes had to turn their houses upside down to find the notes they’d taken—this lady stood out.

  One writer leaned over and whispered to the stranger, “Are you with a magazine?”

  She went on with her note taking and didn’t answer.

  The local scribe attempted a second question. “Are you a lawyer?”

  She snapped her head around and hissed, “Why do you ask?”

  “What you’re putting down. You know the difference between direct and cross-examination, and the average yo-yo in court doesn’t know that much.”

  She favored the man with a look that would melt solid steel, scootched away from him on the bench, and continued to write. She now covered her work with her free hand.

  As he had throughout the trial, Guthrie continued to make serious inroads into the prosecution’s case. Before he was finished with the doctor, Guthrie had elicited the information that the hospital personnel had administered Compazine to Nancy in the emergency room, and that Nancy’s bedside records showed that she’d been in restraints, breathing tube and oxygen mask in place, when she’d had her alleged conversation with Dr. Bagheri. The dashing defense lawyer had also trotted out reams of hospital records for the doctor’s identification, and had gone over every treatment given to Nancy before she died. On most of these treatment prescriptions Bagheri stood firmly behind the Nuremberg Defense; he was only a resident, consultant doctors had ordered the treatments, and the hospital merely had been carrying out orders.

  When a tired-looking Dr. Bagheri finally stepped down, Judge Creuzot called for a recess. As Park Citizens and writers stood, stretched, and moseyed for the exit, the note-taking young lady did an excellent imitation of a broken field run, dodging in and out among spectators as she hustled out the back door and headed directly for the witness waiting room. She reappeared immediately after the break, assumed her seat among the newspaper folk and authors, and began her note-taking anew.

  The next witness, coincidentally, was also a Presbyterian Hospital employee, Genevieve Eisman, a registered emergency room nurse who was on duty the night that Richard brought Nancy in. There was no break after Nurse Eisman’s testimony—which consisted merely of her observations during Nancy’s admittance—but our mystery lady once again rose, pad in hand, and left the courtroom, returning just before another Presbyterian employee, Kim Grayson, gave chain-of-custody evidence regarding her acceptance of the wine and pills from Lynn Pease in the hospital lobby. All through Nurse Grayson’s stint as a witness, the lady continued to write like mad. Nurse Grayson finished her testimony. The mystery lady bustled out. Jerri Sims called her next prosecution witness, Misty Don Thornton, another Presbyterian nurse, and the mystery lady returned to her seat. There she sat, notepad on her lap, ballpoint ready for action. Dan Guthrie rose grandly from the defense table and faced the court.

  “Your Honor,” Guthrie said, “information has come to us that someone has been going in the witness room and briefing the prosecution witnesses on previous testimony.”

  Now the mystery lady made tracks. She excuse-me’d her way into the aisle and hustled toward the exit as if the building suddenly had caught fire.

  Guthrie turned and pointed. “I think it’s that lady there.” The lady disappeared into the hallway with a swish of swinging doors.

  “Bailiff.” Creuzot indicated the exit. “Go bring that woman back in here.”

  The bailiff, a burly young sheriff’s deputy in his twenties, took off up the aisle in pursuit of the mystery lady. He left the courtroom, then returned with the slim young woman in tow. Her cheeks were the color of ripe plums.

  Creuzot beckoned. “Come down here, please, ma’am.”

  As the mystery lady went hesitantly through the gate and walked toward the bench, Jerri Sims stood to one side of the prosecution table. Rather sheepishly she said, “She’s helping me, Judge.” Jerri is fortunate that she never chopped down her father’s cherry tree; like George Washington, she’d be unable to lie about it.

  Creuzot, sensing a possible mistrial, had the bailiff usher the jury out. He then gathered both sides, Guthrie and Jerri, before the bench, and placed the mystery lady squarely in between them. The judge demanded in no uncertain terms to know what was going on.

  The mystery lady, it turned out, was a lawyer. Creuzot, noting that there seemed no shortage of lawyers already involved in the case, inquired as to the young woman’s function. The lady replied that she represented Presbyterian Hospital (more specifically, she represented the hospital’s liability insurance carrier, but for the court’s purposes at that moment, the two clients were one and the same), and that since none of the hospital personnel had previously testified in court, the hospital wanted to be certain that its people minded their p’s and q’s on the witness stand. The judge wanted to know what was on the lady’s notepad. The incriminating evidence dangling in plain sight near her hip, the lady had no choice other than to show the judge. Judge Creuzot regarded defense attorney Guthrie with inquisitive, upraised eyebrows.

  Clearly, the call here was up to Guthrie. The court’s granting of a mistrial on the defense’s motion at that point was by no means automatic; had Guthrie made such a motion, Creuzot would have questioned each hospital witness individually to find out what their lawyer had or had not said to each of them prior to their taking the stand, then would have made a ruling based on the witnesses’ knowledge of previous testimony. Should Guthrie have made a mistrial motion, however, the odds seemed clearly in his favor.

  Guthrie declined to move for mistrial and, twenty-twenty hindsight be damned, one cannot fault his strategy. At that point the defense felt that it had the prosecution on the ropes, and no one who’d been present at the trial up to then would likely disagree. Creuzot dismissed our mystery lady with a stern warning, returned the jury to the courtroom, and bade the trial go on.

  Propriety of the mystery lady’s actions aside, the reasons for her presence at trial bear scrutiny. The hospital, having confessed to giving Nancy the wrong drug in the emergency room, to not checking for poison as a matter of course, and to not ordering so much as a toxology screen on Nancy’s blood until a day and a half after she’d entered the hospital, had its neck thrust out elastically. Dr. Bagheri, the only witness available to the prosecution whose testimony skirted the hearsay rule—and whose testimony, once again, was quite poss
ibly as accurate as on-the-spot photography—was the only physician treating Nancy who was a paid employee of the hospital, the others being outside consultants in private practice. There are likewise no ear-witnesses to what the mystery lady said to the various hospital people; rather than making sure that the witnesses had their stories straight, she may have been protecting the insurance carrier’s interest in making certain that Dr. Bagheri and the nurses involved were enrolled in the hospital’s group health care plan. However, since Richard as Nancy’s surviving spouse would be the proper party to bring any malpractice suit against the hospital, it was clearly to the hospital’s best interests that Richard be convicted. Thus from all outward appearances, it would seem likely that Presbyterian Hospital was, heavily, into CYA.

  Just when it appeared that the game was turning into a rout, Jerri Sims went on a little scoring spree of her own. It is true that most of her points during the streak were emotional ones, but often, where a jury is concerned, emotional points are the most important.

  Mary Henrich told of representing Nancy as divorce counsel, and repeated her versions of the wine and pill and Coke-in-the-movie stories—all of which now became admissible as corroboration to what Dr. Bagheri had said—but these tales were now old hat. Everyone in the courtroom was convinced that Nancy had indeed related the stories, if not to the doctor, then to others, and the only question left was whether or not Nancy herself had been truthful. Something Ms. Henrich said from the witness stand, in fact, might make one wonder whether Nancy had been fibbing.

  According to Ms. Henrich, Nancy had refused to bring the suspect items to her own lawyer’s office, stating that she didn’t want anyone knowing she was suspicious of Richard, and for a woman concerned that someone was trying to poison her, this seemed strange behavior indeed. And for the same woman to allow the suspect to move in with her later … well, the overall picture was enough to give pause. Any damage done to the prosecution by Nancy’s unusual reaction to the items on her doorstep, however, Ms. Henrich made up for in her reading of a letter.