The tape stopped after the shop owner fired his shotgun and ran out of frame toward the door in the direction in which he had fired. Marvin was not shown being shot—the camera didn’t cover that action.
Abramowitz turned off the VCR. “Lights, please,” she asked.
The lights came back on. She looked with intensity across the room toward the defense table, where Marvin was sitting, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing.
“Look at her,” Wyatt whispered. “Now!”
Marvin turned and faced Abramowitz. She was standing in front of the jury, so that looking at her meant he was also looking at them. The jury was staring at him intently.
“Keep looking at her,” Wyatt ordered him.
It took everything he had, but Marvin kept his eyes focused on Abramowitz.
She broke eye contact, turning back to her witness. “You clearly heard the defendant’s gun misfire, is that correct? That he tried to pull the trigger. His intention was to shoot you so he could take the money, but the gun didn’t go off—which is the only reason you are able to be here in court today, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” the man hissed. “He try to kill me. Gun no good. Otherwise I dead man.”
Abramowitz looked toward the jury. “This man had a gun to his head,” she said, pointing to Kwon, the store owner. “If it hadn’t misfired, the defendant would be on trial for that murder as well. We are pointing out the venality of this man,” she forcefully told the twelve men and women who had watched the videotape. “This man that raped, sodomized, and murdered a woman, then calmly walked a few blocks away and tried to rob and kill an innocent store owner.”
“Objection,” Wyatt said. “Prosecution is giving her summation, not eliciting testimony. The defendant has not been convicted of anything, Your Honor, and there is no proof he was trying to kill this man here. The pictures are highly ambiguous.”
“Maybe to you,” Abramowitz fired at him. “But not to anyone who can see. Or has compassion for these seven innocent victims.”
Grant hammered his gavel. “Objection sustained. Please restrain from this type of editorializing,” he admonished her.
Abramowitz gathered her paperwork. “No further questions, Your Honor.”
Wyatt waited until she was seated, then walked over to the prosecution table and leaned down over his knuckles, so that he was right in her face. “Can I have the control gizmo for that tape player of yours?” he asked her.
Startled, she drew back in her chair, pushing the remote across the table in his direction. “Thanks,” he smiled at her. Walking to the lectern, he turned to the deputies guarding the door. “Would you fellows please douse the lights again for me?”
The room went dark again. Wyatt hit the rewind button, playing the tape backward until Marvin was first seen, approaching the counter where the store owner stood with his back to him. As soon as Marvin entered the frame, Wyatt hit the pause button.
The picture froze on the television screen. A high black-and-white shot from above, the figures small in the frame. “Could I have the pointer, please?” Wyatt asked.
A deputy brought it to him. He walked to the television set, making sure he wasn’t blocking the view of any of the jurors. He pointed to a small bar code imprint in the right-hand bottom of the screen.
“Could you tell us what that bar code is for?” he asked the witness.
Mr. Kwon stared at the screen. “Identification,” he said in a flat, inflectionless voice.
“Identification,” Wyatt repeated. “The tape is bar-coded to identify it, is that correct?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“So you can tell it from other tapes?”
“Yes.”
Wyatt pushed the play button again. As the picture came to life, the bar code changed. He let the tape play a few seconds, then froze it again.
“If the tape is merely for identification,” he asked, “why is the bar code changing?”
“Objection,” Abramowitz called out immediately. “The bar code is irrelevant, Your Honor.”
“Overruled,” Grant said immediately. “Answer the question,” he told the shop owner.
Wyatt put a restraining hand up. “Let me get back to that in a minute, okay, Your Honor? There’s another line I should clarify first, if I can.” He turned to the shop owner again. “Why do you think the defendant picked your store to rob?” he asked. “Little mom-and-pop convenience store, you couldn’t have too much in the register. It looked like less than five hundred dollars. There must be other stores around with more cash at hand.”
“Objection,” Abramowitz called out. “Calls for conjecture by the witness regarding a motive he couldn’t possibly know.”
“This bears directly on this bar code thing,” Wyatt said quickly before Grant could sustain her. He went over to his table, got some papers, and brought them up to Grant for inspection. The judge looked them over. “If you want to enter this into evidence it should come during the presentation of your case in chief,” Grant pointed out.
“That’s fine,” Wyatt said. “I wanted to authenticate the accuracy of prosecution’s evidence, that’s all. I’m not fighting what’s on that screen, Your Honor. I’m agreeing with it. I want that to go on the record.”
He walked over to the television set and pointed at the bar code on the bottom of the screen again. “Isn’t this bar code really a time code?” he asked. “Each different bar represents a different time, doesn’t it?”
“Objection!” Abramowitz yelled.
“Overruled,” Grant said sharply. “Answer the question,” he told the witness.
The shop owner stared at Wyatt. “Means time code,” he agreed.
Wyatt glanced over at the prosecutor’s table. Abramowitz looked like she had swallowed a ten-pound lemon. “Did the prosecution … did Ms. Abramowitz ask you what the bar code was for?” he asked.
The witness nodded. “Yes,” he answered after hesitating.
“Did you tell her?”
“Yes,” again.
“And she was shown how to decode it? So she could read the times that bar code represented?”
“Uh,” the man grunted.
“That’s a yes, I take it.” Without pausing, Wyatt punched up rewind on the tape machine, again pausing it when Marvin was first seen entering the picture. Walking over to the defense table, he picked up a computer printout with similar bar code symbols on it, each one followed by a specific, sequential number. “Let me show you a matching bar code to the one on the TV.” He handed the printout to the witness and pointed to the top set of numbers. “Would you read those numbers for the jury?” he asked the witness.
The man squinted at the sheet. “Twenty-two-twenty-five thirty-eight,” he read in his fractured English singsong.
“Twenty-two-twenty-five thirty-eight,” Wyatt repeated. “Would that mean that the time represented on the screen right there is exactly ten-twenty-five and thirty-eight seconds in the evening?” he asked. “This is set up on military time, is that correct?”
The man bobbed his head. “That what it mean.”
“So Marvin White walked into your store at ten-twenty-five at night. These tapes confirm that. Now let me ask you another question about these tapes, Mr. Kwon. You have a camera in your store that recorded these tapes, is that correct?”
The man stared at him. “Yes.”
“The camera is in operation whenever your store is open, is that also correct?”
“Yes.”
“Your store hours are six in the morning until midnight, seven days a week?”
“Yes,” again.
“So eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, this camera is operating and recording tapes, right?”
“Yes.”
“Is that in case a crime is committed? So you would have a record?”
“Yes.”
Wyatt walked back to the defense table, looked at whatever lay on top without reading it, then walked back to the defendant, standing between h
im and the television set. “If the point of having this camera and recording on these tapes is to document a crime in your store, why do you keep the tapes? You don’t recycle the same tape,” he said, “you store them. Two weeks at a time. Why do you keep those tapes, if there’s nothing on them?”
The shop owner stared at him without answering.
“And the camera,” Wyatt continued, not waiting for an answer. “It’s hidden from the public’s view, isn’t that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t the point of having a camera recording the activities in the store to deter a crime? It’s standard procedure when you go into a store, or a bank, or whatever, to see signs posted saying ‘This store is under video surveillance.’ The point is to deter crime, not to have a record after the fact, isn’t it?”
Another reluctant “Yes.”
“But your camera is hidden, and there are no signs stating that your premises are under surveillance.” He turned to the jury. “That’s because you don’t want people to know there’s a camera there. Isn’t that right, Mr. Kwon?”
The shop owner sat motionless.
“Which brings me back to the question of why someone who had just raped and murdered a woman, who was already the subject of a massive manhunt because he had already raped, sodomized, and murdered six times, would risk robbing your store. If he had done what he is alleged to have done, wouldn’t he get away from there as quickly as possible?” He paused. “Unless there was a lot more cash in that store than your normal little corner grocery should have.”
“Objection!” Abramowitz yelled. “This is irrelevant and immaterial.”
“Isn’t the real reason Marvin tried to rob your store because it’s a numbers drop for the Thai Mafia?” Wyatt shot at the witness, his face inches from the Korean’s. “That he’d been scoping it out and knew that you were holding over twenty thousand dollars? Isn’t that the reason he tried to rob you?” he thundered.
The storekeeper seemed to be trying to shrink into the back of the chair.
“And isn’t that the real reason your store’s activities are recorded and the tapes kept? So that your bosses can make sure you aren’t skimming their profits? The tapes aren’t to catch criminals, are they! They’re an eye on you, to make sure you don’t rob them of their illegal gains. Why don’t we play the tapes of you handing off twenty thousand dollars to your bagman, to keep all this in proper perspective?”
“Objection!” Abramowitz was screaming, running around the front of her table and rushing up to the bench.
“Sustained!” Judge Grant’s gavel resounded in the vaulted chamber. “The jury will disregard that last line of questioning! Whatever business is transpiring in that store, legal or not, is not germane to our purpose.” He stared down at Wyatt. “You are crossing the line of propriety,” he admonished Wyatt. “If you don’t moderate your behavior you may not be trying your case much longer.”
Wyatt stared back at him. “Sorry,” he bit off. He pushed the power button on the tape player. The television set went blank. “No further questions.”
HE WENT HOME FOR the weekend, taking his files with him in five large boxes. They were spread out all over his dining-room table. It felt good to be home, in his own space. The lawn, front and back, was lush and green, and all the trees and bushes were in full summer bloom. He ran both Saturday and Sunday mornings, long, slow, cleansing runs. And he played his trombone. He brought it into the house and set it on its stand in the corner of the dining room. Whenever he felt like taking a break from reviewing the work in front of him he picked it up and blew a few tunes, or just notes.
The house felt empty. He missed his family life, Michaela especially. She was going to be out of their lives soon, away to college. Every minute he could have with her between now and then, he wanted.
But he couldn’t have that. Not now. Coming up were the prosecutor’s biggest guns. Violet Waleska, the woman who saw Marvin in the parking lot where the murder had been committed; and Dwayne Thompson, the state’s key witness, the master informant who had heard the confession of a mass murderer.
And there was that secret between Violet and Dwayne. It would have blown a hole in the state’s case an 18-wheeler could drive through, maybe even gotten the case thrown out. Violet and Dwayne, sister and brother. Only they knew, and they would never tell. The prosecution didn’t know; they would have had to disclose the information. How sweet it would have been to throw that one in Abramowitz’s and Pagano’s faces.
But he couldn’t; not now. He had compromised his professionalism and worse, much worse—he had compromised his ability to successfully defend his client.
He had tried to rationalize to himself that it didn’t matter—that they hadn’t collaborated, exchanged information. Violet had only seen him the one time, long after she and Dwayne both had told their stories. And he wanted to use her testimony to bolster his own case, to debunk the prosecution’s timetable.
All that was true, and it was all bullshit.
Anyway, that they had made love to each other was secondary. What mattered was that she had told him of the relationship voluntarily—a woman pouring her heart out to a man she didn’t even know and yet seemed to care about in some deep, unfathomable way. He could no more have exposed her after that confession than he could quit the case.
He prided himself on being a tough hombre, and he was—you don’t get to the position he was in without making hard choices and leaving some bodies in your wake. But everyone has to draw his line in the sand somewhere, and he drew his with Violet Waleska.
Dwayne was a different story, in its particular way even more complicated than his convoluted relationship with Violet. How was he going to break this bastard down and catch him up in a lie, something that would unravel the state’s entire case?
These thoughts recurred in his mind all weekend. He ran, he played the trombone, and he studied. He also talked to his wife and child. Michaela’s leg was steadily getting stronger, Moira informed him, and so was the bond between them. The shooting had been an accident. Moira didn’t secretly hate her, nor was she subconsciously acting out some dark revenge fantasy against him. Sometimes there aren’t ulterior motives—sometimes there are only accidents.
“I’ll call you whenever,” he said as they signed off with each other. “It’s hectic.”
“We’ll be here. We aren’t going anywhere.”
VIOLET SAT UP STRAIGHT in the witness chair, one leg demurely crossed over the other, hands folded in her lap. She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress that broke over her knees. Her stockings were sheer, her shoes low-heeled bone pumps. No jewelry, no makeup save for a slight touch of pale lip gloss. Her thick brown hair was pulled back into a loose bun.
He could sense from where he sat, twenty-five feet away, that she was tense. He had watched her walk up and take the stand, swear to tell the truth, arrange herself in the chair. She hadn’t wanted to look at him—he could feel that vibration humming across the distance between them. When she finally had, and their eyes locked for a split second, it was as if an electrical impulse passed between them. She had quickly looked away, and hadn’t looked in his direction since.
He was glad he wasn’t cross-examining her yet. He needed a few minutes after seeing her for the first time since that night to get his equilibrium rebalanced to a more even, manageable keel.
“The man you identified as being in the parking lot outside the nightclub on the night Paula Briggs was raped and murdered,” Abramowitz said. “Is that man in the courtroom today?”
“Yes,” Violet answered.
“Would you point him out for the jury, please?”
Violet looked to the defense table. “He is sitting at the defense table.”
Everyone was looking at Marvin.
“Deep breaths,” Wyatt counseled him. “Stay calm.”
Abramowitz milked the moment. Then she took up her questioning again. “Describe for the court, please, the circumstances under which
you saw the defendant.”
Violet nodded. “I had to go out to my car,” she began. “My time of the month had started unexpectedly and I didn’t have any Tampax in my purse. There was a box in my trunk, so I went out to get it.”
She told the story as it had happened, simply, without embellishment or histrionics. That upon approaching the car she had seen a young black man looking in the rear window, as if trying to see whether the car was unlocked. Her first thought had been that he was preparing to rob her, so she had called out to him to move away from the car.
“Did you think that was dangerous?” Abramowitz asked. “Challenging someone at night, alone, who you thought might rob you?”
“No. I didn’t think of that. I wanted him to move away from my car.”
Abramowitz frowned—that wasn’t the answer she had wanted. “You didn’t feel any fear?” she asked.
“Not when I yelled at him. Not at first,” she added.
“What about when you approached him? Were you at all afraid then?”
Violet thought for a moment, recalling the event. “As I ran toward him I did for a brief moment, I guess,” she said. “But I was more concerned about him breaking in than I was afraid. It was a public parking lot,” she added, “there were people out there. I wasn’t alone.”
Wyatt made a note. That had been a mistake on Abramowitz’s part—he could see the chagrin in her body language. He could, and would, use that.
Violet went on, explaining how she had gone right up to the car, so that she and the defendant were close to each other, staring at each other.
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