“The top of the pyramid is always slippery,” says Harry.
“And I’ve been told that time heals all wounds. But you do have to wonder,” I say. “The two of them sitting there breaking bread.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Without the Jefferson Letter, the only evidence we have is that video. That means we don’t have a choice,” I tell him. “We’ve got to find Ginnis, track him down and serve him. Shackle and drag him if we have to, but get him here, and get him into court.”
20
Harry called Herman in Washington at the crack of dawn this morning and asked him if he had his passport with him. It seems Herman never leaves home without it. The man has been chasing leads on cases long enough to know he can never be sure where the next one will have him stepping off.
As I’m heading downtown, to Quinn’s ten o’clock court call, Herman is winging his way to Miami for a connecting flight south to Curaçao.
Tuchio spends the next couple of days combing his list for witnesses to fill in some of the cracks. He calls his psychiatric witness and lays out in more detail the elements and driving mental characteristics that can detonate rage in the commission of a homicide. Among the inventory of motives the psychiatrist cites is social and political animosity, particularly the kind grounded in racial hostility. Since we haven’t put Carl’s mental state in issue, via a plea of insanity or diminished capacity, the state’s witness was not able to interview, test, or examine Carl. This is no doubt a plus for our side. There has never been a realistic hope of mounting a defense on these grounds, so exposing him to examination by a state’s expert would most likely result in a finding that Carl meets all the criteria for the commission of this kind of crime. It’s the problem with putting Carl on the stand. Tuchio would eat him for lunch, pepper him with questions about Scarborough and his book. He would turn down the lights and show Carl videos of the author in provocative interviews, and when the lights came back up, there’s no telling what might be the first words out of Carl’s mouth.
On Wednesday morning I’m climbing the courthouse steps and see a small convention of bikers, lots of leather and denim across the street. People riding Harleys today could be a clan of executives from IBM, but not these guys. I count maybe twenty of the outriders from the fabled Aryan Posse, badasses all of them.
Associates and members are estimated at close to seventy-five on the street and roughly twice that number in prisons around the country. It’s not the size of the organization but its deep roots within the Aryan prison community, where the racial divide is deep, sharp, and violent, that have the attention of authorities.
The reason they’re here this morning is Tuchio’s main attraction, his witness of the day, Charles Gross. He is one of their own. I’m guessing that the state is bringing Gross on now in order to sandwich him between other witnesses so that the rough edges don’t look so bad.
As I clear security on the courthouse main floor, I can see fifteen, maybe more, uniformed officers moving quickly toward the stairs at the back of the building. Something is happening, but I can’t tell what.
When the elevator door opens onto the corridor upstairs and I step out, I notice four of the Posse members down the hall, at the door to Quinn’s courtroom, each trying to get a ticket of admission.
After leaving thirty pounds of chain, dangling Nazi Iron Crosses, metal skulls, and other symbols of evil in a box downstairs at the security check, they still can’t get inside.
As I draw closer, I can hear why.
“Court dress code,” says the deputy. “No messages. No signs.”
They are all wearing leather vests, the uniform of the day, no shirts underneath, enough hair on their chests and in their armpits to build an entire condo complex of nests for a flock of crows. In an arc across their backs in leather, in various colors and assorted fonts are the words ARYAN POSSE.
“I been in court before. I wore this.” The one talking is six feet and well muscled, with frazzled blond hair to his shoulders, frayed and brittle enough to have been fried in a Chinese wok. He could make a good living as an extra doing Conan the Barbarian movies.
“That was then, this is now,” says the officer. “You can’t get in wearing that, not here, not today. Take it outside,” he says.
“Fuck that shit!” This comes from the Norse god who’s in the deputy’s face, in a voice loud enough so that everyone in the corridor has stopped moving, including me.
The deputies are standing in the airlock between the two sets of double doors leading to the courtroom, the outer doors are open. The inner doors look like they’re closed.
“You’re just doin’ this because of who we are. You know it, and I know it.”
His three buddies in biker boots and frayed jeans are bunched up behind him, all nodding, discrimination being a terrible thing.
“You can’t even see it if we’re sittin’ down. Hell, it’ll be up against the back of the chair.”
“Hey, I told you. I’m not gonna tell you again. No exceptions. No signs, no messages,” says the deputy. He and another officer are wedged in the door like a stone wall.
What I saw downstairs now becomes clear. By now the small army of uniforms is probably standing just on the other side of the closed door in the stairwell about ten feet behind Conan and his buddies-no doubt getting ready to play jack-in-the-box with cans of pepper spray and nightsticks if things get pushy.
The bikers move a step or so away to confer, then Odin is back in the deputy’s face. “Fine, we’ll take ’em off.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our jackets. You don’t like ’em, we’ll take ’em off.”
“Fine, take ’em off, take ’em outside, get a shirt, and come back,” says the cop.
“Where the hell are we gonna get shirts? By then all the seats’ll be taken.”
“That’s your problem. But you can’t enter the courtroom without a shirt.”
The blond one says, “Shiiit.” His arms are flexed, he’s leaning in like maybe they can just blow past the two cops, into the room, and grab seats. This has all the dynamics of a budding brawl. The guy’s ego is way out to there; he’s wearing it on his chin. A hundred people in the corridor watching it. You can feel it in the air. He’s not going to back off.
It is at this instant that a small patch of gray sticks her head out from behind and under the flexed elbow of one of the deputies in the door. Before he can move, she slips past him. She must be eighty-five and can’t weigh much more than that in pounds. She’s holding a small water cup in her hand. One of the courthouse regulars, she has picked this moment to go take her meds. Standing in no-man’s-land, she is stopped in her tracks, her eyes just at the level of the blond guy’s belt. She looks up at him and smiles.
His fighting gaze locked, he’s staring at the deputy, snorting bull breath.
She tries to squeeze through between the open door and Armageddon, but he has her blocked.
The deputy leans faintly forward as if he wants to reach out and pull her back. But he knows if he moves, it’s going to trigger a brawl, and the old lady, frail as a bird would be crushed in the middle.
She looks up one more time and says-and you can hear it clear as a bell in the silent corridor-“Excuse me.” This tiny little voice.
Like “open sesame,” something from a Stooges movie. The four bikers, their heavy boots taking baby steps in unison as if they were all connected at the hip, give her just enough room to get by. As she squeezes through, the four of them are left standing there, watching as she trundles past. Just like that, an instant of diversion and the moment passes, the time for action melts.
You can almost hear the cops in the stairwell bouncing cans of pepper spray off the walls and jumping on their hats.
The old woman heads for the water fountain, looking around in wonder at all the people standing in the hallway staring at her like statues.
As she gets up on tiptoe at the fountain with her cup, I’m thi
nking we need to clone this, package up all the parts, and ship boxes to the Gaza Strip, Beirut, and downtown Baghdad.
Then, like stop motion, people start moving again. The Posse passes me going the other way, toward the elevator. I can hear a few “goddamn”s and “kick his ass”es as they go by. They’d better watch it or the Gray Missile may get into the elevator with them.
Whether they’re here in support or measuring their friend Mr. Gross for a box after he talks, one thing is certain. Unless they have a supply of long-sleeved dress shirts in the saddlebag of one of their choppers-or they can sprint down to Nordstrom at the speed of light-they won’t be getting into Judge Quinn’s theater of thrills this morning.
Inside the courtroom I pass through the gate at the railing. Tuchio is standing at his table talking with his assistant, Harmen. She glances up and sees me.
“Good morning,” I say.
She smiles and returns the greeting.
Tuchio looks at me, a near-death stare. He doesn’t say a word. His head goes back down, and he’s talking to Harmen again. He is still stinging from the meeting in chambers and the loss of his federal agent.
As I slip into my chair at our table, Harry has already caught this.
“Man’s positively furious.” Harry is busy lining up his three pencils and a pen along one side of his legal pad. Then he reverses them and puts them on the other side. “Which looks better to you?” he says.
I smile and ignore him.
“Good news,” he says, “from the East. One of our process servers tagged Scarborough’s editor, Jim Aubrey, with the subpoena just before noon, New York time. One down, two to go,” he says.
There is still no word on Bonguard or Trisha Scott.
“In case you’re feeling bad, he treated me the same way,” says Harry.
“Who?” I’m busy looking at notes, a summary of Charlie Gross’s statement to the cops.
“Tuchio. When I showed up this morning, I said hello. He was like dry ice, frozen solid and still smoking.” Harry abandons his Monopoly game with the writing implements just long enough to bring his closed fist gently up to his chest in the region of his heart. “And I have to tell you, it hurts.”
“So you want to send him a sympathy card?”
“You joke, but I haven’t felt this bad since my dog died of rabies,” says Harry.
“You don’t have a dog.”
“I know, but if I had one and he died of rabies, I can imagine that he might look a lot like Tuchio does right now. I’ve been thinking. The next time we screw him over, maybe we should try to be a little more polite. When a prosecutor starts foaming at the mouth, you have to begin to wonder what he might do if he really got mad.”
When I glance over at Harry, I get the sense that perhaps he’s only half joking.
Tuchio brings on his witness of the day, Charles “Charlie” Gross.
When the jury is in the box and Carl is planted in his chair between Harry and me, Arnsberg gives me a strange look when he sees the witness, as if to say, Who’s that?
Gross, if he is to be believed, is one of the charter members and the chief financial officer for the Aryan Posse.
According to an investigative report, Gross keeps track of the group’s beer and booty fund as well as the accounts receivable from meth and other pharmaceuticals they sell, often jotting down numbers in ink on the palm of his hand. That way he figures if he gets busted, sweat will dissolve all the evidence. I guess if the IRS wants to see the Posse’s books, they’re just going to have to cut off his hand. It’s thinking like this that got Gross right to the top in the organization.
If you saw any of his mug shots, you’d have to admit that Tuchio has done a crackerjack job of cleaning the witness up for today’s appearance. Gross looks like they’ve put him through a car wash and had him detailed.
Gone are the long, sparse, stringy strands of dirty blond hair that hung down below his shoulders from the craggy, bald summit of Half Dome. The state probably spent forty bucks having the hundred or so hairs on the top of his head styled and clipped. The back and sides of his head are as neatly trimmed as if Suki ran his mower over them.
This morning Gross is wearing a pair of dark blue cuffed slacks with a sharp crease to them, a maroon polo shirt, and a watch that looks like a Rolex, probably a knockoff from Taiwan out of the police property room. The tasseled loafers are a nice touch. No doubt Gross’s feet haven’t seen the inside of anything that wasn’t steel-toed, flapped, and hooked for lacing and that weighed less than ten pounds since he came out of the womb.
Looking at him on the stand, you might swear that you saw him playing the back nine at the village country club yesterday afternoon.
When the feds spring their trap and his pals go looking for Gross to shoot him because he was the idiot who recruited and sponsored the FBI agent, there will be no need to put him in witness protection. Tuchio’s transformation of the man is so complete the Posse will never recognize him. I’m almost wishing that Conan and his friends had gotten in. By now they’d be sitting out in the audience and asking, “Where the hell is Charlie, and who the fuck is that?”
Since he looks like your average accountant on his day off, when they asked him to raise his right hand to be sworn and Gross lifted the left by mistake and then the right, I took a good look at both palms. I wanted to see if he was still keeping books. Unfortunately, it appears as if the scrubbing must have started with the hands.
Unless I can get Gross to take off his shirt, raise his arms, and turn a pirouette, displaying the story of his life ingrained in the graffiti on his body, it’s hard to imagine how the jury is going to get the full flavor of the man.
Tuchio uses a good deal of finesse here. He moves carefully through the witness’s background, covering everything except his three felony convictions and the fact that he has spent almost thirteen years of his life in prison. This is out of bounds under the deal we cut in chambers. Tuchio knows I can’t get at it on cross-examination, so he’s free to ignore it.
But he does not try to hide the fact of Gross’s long association with the Aryan Posse. He explores this in detail, because he knows if he doesn’t, I will expose it on cross, making it look as if they were hiding it.
He takes more than twenty minutes, hitting all the possible low points in Gross’s life, including two divorces, problems with drugs, and the fact that he’s had difficulty holding jobs.
Then Tuchio makes clear his tactic with the witness: The world loves a reformed sinner.
“Let me ask you,” says Tuchio, “are you still a member of the Aryan Posse?”
“No. I’m no longer involved with that group. I want nothing to do with them.”
“Can you tell the jury when you quit this organization?”
“It was after I saw the news,” he says.
“What news?”
“The news. The man killed here,” he says.
“You mean the victim in this case, Terrance Scarborough?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Why did that make you quit your membership in the Aryan Posse?”
“Because of things I saw and heard. I was ashamed,” he says. Gross looks right at the jury as he says this. “The people in that group did some bad things,” he says, “and I wanted to change my life. I didn’t want to be involved anymore.”
If you listen closely, you can hear the violin music in the background. This is not something Tuchio pulled out of the bag yesterday or the day he lost the agent’s testimony in chambers. This has all the signs of careful stage direction and choreography.
“And why were you ashamed?”
“Because it was a bad life,” he says. “All that hate against other people because of the color of their skin. It was wrong, and I didn’t want to be part of it anymore.”
One woman, an African American in the jury box, is nodding as she hears this. Tuchio will be handing out prayer books and hymnals any minute.
“Was there anything in
particular that brought you to this decision, to change your life?”
“Yeah, it was a conversation with him.” Gross sticks his arm out and points. The “him” he’s talking about is Carl.
“Let the record reflect,” says the judge, “that the witness has identified the defendant.”
If I could cut off the prosecutor right here, at this moment, I could pick up the theme and explain how my client led this man from a life of sin to redemption, and we could all march out to the strains of “The Old Rugged Cross.” But somehow I’m guessing that this is not where Tuchio is going.
“And can you tell the jury, what was it in particular that the defendant said that brought you to this point, to take your life in another direction?”
“I was drunk,” says Gross. “And he said some things…terrible things, some awful things about this man who was murdered, this Mr. Scarborough, and I was ashamed. Not right then,” he says, “but later, after he was murdered, because I had laughed when Mr. Arnsberg said this stuff. That memory stayed with me for a long time.”
“I see.” Tuchio makes all this sound as if he’s hearing it for the first time. Gross’s delivery is fervent. There’s just enough scent of the old malefactor lingering about him so that even a cynic like me-on a bad day, if someone blinded me, jammed cotton in my ears, and stuck garlic up my nose-might find myself believing him.
Tuchio carefully takes the witness through his association with Carl, the fact that the two of them had met only a total of eight or ten times, and often in bars. Gross admits that he had a problem with alcohol, but, like everything else that was bad in his life, this, too, is now behind him.
Then Tuchio draws him up and gets specific. He gives the witness the date and then asks him whether he remembers meeting with Carl at a bar off Interstate 8 out near El Centro.
“Yes, I remember that meeting. It was at the Del Rio Tavern,” says Gross.
Shadow of Power Page 28
