“And before shooting him, you calmly, coolly had a drink with him, didn’t you?”
“We had a drink. I wasn’t at all calm. I was terrified. I was sitting across from the man who raped me, and who was threatening to rape me again.”
“Your Honor, I have nothing more.”
I stood and approached the witness. “Your Honor, I have a few more questions on redirect.”
“You may proceed,” Judge Grosso said.
“Miss Altman, at exactly what point did you actually shoot him?” I asked. “You said that he started toward you—did you shoot him then?”
“No. I told him to stop, to leave me alone. He just kept coming.”
“Then what happened?”
“He lunged at me. He ripped my clothes. I ran backward, I remember, and when he started at me again that’s when I shot him.”
I walked over to counsel table and removed a torn, yellow silk blouse from a bag. I returned to Lisa and showed it to her.
“Do you recognize this?”
Lisa took the blouse and held it with both hands. She stared at it for a moment. “Yes. This was the blouse that I was wearing, the one that he ripped when he lunged at me.”
“Did he scratch you when he ripped at your clothes?”
“Yes. He did. He scratched me on my stomach. I was so frightened that I didn’t even realize that he had scratched me at the time. I didn’t know that I was bleeding. I didn’t feel any pain, I was so frightened.”
I walked over to counsel table and removed an eight-by-ten color photograph from a folder. I returned to Lisa and showed her the photograph.
“Did you at my suggestion have a photograph taken of the scratches?”
“Yes.”
I handed her the photograph. “Do you recognize this?”
“This is the photograph. It was taken three days after the shooting.”
“Does it accurately reflect what the scratches looked like at that time?”
“Yes. It does.” Lisa looked up at the jury. She looked intently at each juror, one at a time, just as I had told her to do.
“Your Honor,” I said. “I would ask that this photograph be entered in evidence and passed around the jury.”
“Let me see,” Judge Grosso asked.
I handed the photograph to a court officer, who brought it to the judge. Grosso studied it, then handed it back to the court officer.
“It’s admitted,” Judge Grosso said, reluctantly. He had no choice. “Give it to the jury.”
The court officer took the photograph of Lisa from Grosso, walked over to the first juror, and handed it to her.
I walked over to John. “You didn’t think I’d forget, did you?” I whispered as the photograph was being passed around the jury.
“It didn’t enter my mind that you would,” John said.
After the photograph had finally snaked its way around to the last juror, it was handed back to the court officer.
“I have nothing further to ask the defendant,” I said to the judge.
“Nothing further,” John said.
Lisa started to step down from the witness stand.
“Just a second,” Judge Grosso said. “I have a few questions.”
Lisa returned to her chair in the witness box.
“Miss Altman,” Judge Grosso said, “in the trial against William Betz, didn’t your attorney, Mr. Roehmer, represent Mr. Betz?”
“Yes, he did.”
“What’s he up to?” I whispered to John, who was standing next to me.
“Beats me,” John said.
“And didn’t Mr. Roehmer cross-examine you in that trial where you claimed to have been raped by Mr. Betz?”
“Yes, he did,” Lisa said.
“And didn’t Mr. Roehmer get you to admit that you had met Mr. Betz prior to the time you claimed to have been raped by him?”
“The son of a bitch has gotten the transcript of the first trial,” I said to John.
“He refreshed my recollection about that,” Lisa said. “I hadn’t really met him. He had bumped into me backstage.”
“And by the way, Miss Altman,” Judge Grosso said, “the jury concluded—no doubt, in part, because of Mr. Roehmer’s searching cross-examination of you—that you hadn’t been raped, isn’t that correct?”
Lisa looked over to me for help.
“Objection,” I shouted. “The jury concluded that the state hadn’t proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt that Betz had committed the rape. That’s all the jury concluded by its verdict. And there’s even less evidence in this case that Miss Altman committed murder.”
“Save your speech for the summation, Counselor,” Judge Grosso said. “So, Miss Altman, I assume you learned a great deal from Mr. Roehmer’s cross-examination of you in the first trial, that would have helped you to prepare for this trial, isn’t that correct?”
“Objection,” I shouted. “That is sheer speculation. There is no evidence to support that.”
“Do you think so, Counselor? I guess that will be for the jury to decide. Answer the question, Miss Altman.”
“That’s just a grotesque lie,” Lisa said.
“Your Honor, may counsel approach sidebar?” I insisted.
“Counselor, I am unaccustomed to being interrupted when I am asking questions of a witness,” Grosso said.
“But Your Honor, I fear that irreparable injury may occur unless something is addressed immediately.”
“Very well.” Grosso motioned with his hand to summon the lawyers.
John and I walked to the side of the judge’s desk. The court reporter detached her machine from its tripod and carried it with her to join us.
“Yes, Counselor,” Grosso said. “This had better be good.”
“As Your Honor knows,” I said, “the prosecutor in this case is very able. He has conducted a very extensive cross-examination.”
“Of course. Get on with it, Counselor,” the judge said, his impatience evident to everyone in the courtroom.
“Your Honor, with all due respect, I think you may be unaware that your questions seem clearly to be challenging the credibility of my client. The jury would interpret this as a second cross-examination, and a much more potent one simply because it is coming from someone who is supposed to be an impartial judge.”
“I am impartial, and I do have the right to put questions to a witness, to test credibility or for any other reason.”
“But when you were asking your questions, you were speaking in a tone that indicated that you didn’t believe the answers the witness was giving, as if signaling to the jury that they shouldn’t believe those answers either. The transcript of the record the court reporter is taking down won’t show an appellate court the kind of subtle communication you have just made to the jury.”
Judge Grosso bit his lower lip in anger. “Counselor, I don’t want you muddying this record with your faulty perceptions. I know how I was speaking to this jury. I wasn’t conveying my personal feelings. Isn’t that right, Mr. Prosecutor?”
“Yes, sir,” John obediently responded. It would have been too much to expect him to do otherwise.
Grosso’s anger was clearly visible to the jury. “I can only assume that your ability to observe accurately has been impaired by your partisan zeal. Is there anything else, Counselor?”
Both Grosso and I knew that he was signaling to the jury that I had said something improper, and we both knew this would make the jury less sympathetic to me and my client. I decided I was willing to pay this price.
“Yes, sir,” I pressed on. “In a similar vein, the transcript should reflect that when you began speaking to my client, you raised your eyebrow as if you were skeptical of whatever the witness would answer. I submit, Your Honor, that you were conveying to the jury in a manner which would not be reviewable from a cold transcript the impression that you did not think the jury should believe the defendant. It was as if you were saying you would be surprised if anyone believed the defendant.”
“Counselor, I am getting tired of your personal attacks on me. Quite frankly, I find them contemptuous. I did not raise my eyebrow. I have not been communicating to the jury in some secret way. And I resent you filling this record with false and, I might say, paranoid accusations. Go back to your places, and if you have any further objections, make them when I have finished, when—as you know—it is the appropriate time to make all the objections you want.”
John and I and the court reporter returned to our places.
“Let’s see if that slows the son of a bitch down from totally burying me,” I mumbled to myself as I sat down.
Judge Grosso stared at the witness for a moment. “You may step down, Miss Altman,” he said.
Grosso was finished with Lisa. I had at least limited the damage.
Chapter 29
I WAS LEANING OVER THE rail of the jury box as the jurors listened in rapt attention. “It would be more satisfying to all of us,” I said in a near whisper, “if we could understand why a man like William Betz would torment this woman. Perhaps it was some perversion, or lust, or hatred of women—who knows? He may not have known himself. How much of the behavior in our own lives do we fully understand? He embraced some fantasy in which he would love and be loved by Miss Altman. It would be arrogant to think of ourselves as free spirits, unfettered by misdeeds done to us by others in our past. And no doubt William Betz had suffered such misdeeds or much worse in his past.”
I paused for a moment. I looked back at Lisa and then returned to the jury.
“In trying to understand Betz’s behavior or Lisa Altman’s response to it, we are left in the end with too much that is unknown and unknowable. Who knows what generated or fed his fantasies? We would prefer to think of ourselves as having been born fully grown, without some invisible hand tugging strings tied to our limbs, strings that were tied when we were too young to notice. We become hardened by the small and large wounds suffered over a lifetime. Some of us become cynical; others try to make their lives bearable by constructing elaborate fantasies. At times, our actions are simply beyond our imperfect intelligence to comprehend.”
I paused again. I looked over at Lisa, who was anxiously hanging on to my every word. She seemed like a frightened child. I turned back to the jury.
“Obviously he let Miss Altman into his apartment—there was no evidence of a break-in. Surely she didn’t hold the gun on him to gain entry—they had a drink together, at his insistence. He welcomed her after threatening her if she wouldn’t come. Miss Altman claims he attacked her. The torn blouse, the scars on her stomach, and the skin under his nails, are all proof of what she is saying.
“The law recognizes our limitations in divining motives or deeper explanations of behavior—in this case that of Betz or of my client. The only finding you must make is whether the state has proven its case against my client beyond a reasonable doubt. Given the lack of evidence of guilt and the substantial evidence of self-defense, you must have a reasonable doubt,” I said as I concluded my summation. I stared at each juror, one at a time. Each person looked back at me, but I couldn’t get any sense of whether they were at all persuaded by what I had said.
Chapter 30
I SAT ALONE ON the wooden bench in the corridor outside the courtroom, waiting for the verdict. Lisa had insisted on remaining in the courtroom in her chair at counsel table. She had told me that she wanted to be alone.
I wasn’t thinking about the jury’s deliberation or the effect their verdict would have on Lisa’s life. Instead, I thought about my own life. For years—surely up until my defense of the man who had raped Lisa—I’d had no difficulty separating myself from my clients. In some ways I had also been able to separate myself from aspects of my own behavior that I found distasteful. At times, I had even taken pride in my ability to keep so many things from touching me. But I had been paying a heavy price.
As I sat on the bench, I felt again as I often did when my work was done at the end of a trial: that all the air had seeped out of me. I took a quick inventory: the heaviness in my arms and shoulders, the effort in breathing, the beat of my pulse pounding in my left ear—I remembered all the symptoms as I had waited for the verdict in the Betz trial.
Yes, I’d had to adjust to the world I had been part of for the last twenty years. I had adjusted to the violence and the inhumanity. I had adjusted to the lies, the incompetence, and the brutality. Judge Bennett, it turned out, hadn’t adjusted, and one day his head exploded.
I had experienced each trial up until this one with Lisa as merely a battle between adversaries, a battle in which trial lawyers were simply competitors. More often than not, I had wanted to win for my own sake, and had not really given a damn about the client. Winning a case had merely meant beating the other guy. A victory furnished a high like no other. That high had justified almost anything.
I had always seen a trial as a high-stakes contest: As a lawyer I was literally playing the game for someone’s life. I had loved the role of rescuer—even when the person I rescued was despicable. Now, with a client I loved, I was having a hard time containing the desperation in my desire to win.
“How’s it going?”
Startled, I looked up to see Cheryl Hazelton.
“I’m trying a case down the hall, and I saw you sitting here looking very lonely,” she said.
“Have a seat, Cheryl. It’s good to see you,” I said.
“What are you up to, Michael?” Cheryl asked as she sat down beside me.
“The jury’s out on my murder case.”
“I’m still not used to waiting for verdicts—and murders are the worst.”
I nodded.
“You know, Michael, I’ve often thought about the things you said at Bear’s funeral. I was very moved by them.”
“I miss him a lot.”
“So do I,” she said. “When I was first assigned to Bear’s court, I was extremely conscious of his reputation—‘the pit bull of justice,’ that sort of thing—because of the way he tormented lawyers in front of jurors. So I was furious at the first assistant for putting me there.”
“Sometimes he went too far, but it was because he really cared,” I said.
“Before that I’d worked a year in the appellate section, writing briefs and arguing in front of judges who asked me polite academic questions raised by my appeals.”
“So why did you move?”
“I wanted experience in front of juries. I wanted action. But I certainly didn’t want to be thrown in with a judge who was a madman when I was fumbling through my first trials.”
“It does seem a little cruel to have started you off with Bear,” I said.
“I knew it wasn’t because I was black—the first assistant prosecutor was also black. But I’m damn sure it was because I was a woman.”
“You’re probably right.”
“But I was determined to make the best of it. I had convinced myself that Bear’s brilliance would help me learn my craft more quickly. And as far as his meanness went, well, I’d decided I would have to deal with that. Damn! I grew up in Harlem; I should know how to survive a good street fight. And besides, one way or another I’d never had a problem getting men to come around.”
“So how did it go?”
“My first trial was a fiasco. A fiasco! I didn’t know where to stand, how to have the court reporter mark the documents, how to deal with the witnesses. Nothing!”
“Well, no one does in the beginning.”
“But I really didn’t know anything. And Bear was worse than no help. He sat up there on his bench, glaring down at me, fuming with impatience.”
“He was like that with everyone when they were first starting out.”
“I remember at one point he slapped his hand down on his desk and yelled at me for wasting time. When I tried to go on asking the defendant questions, Bear interrupted me to put his own questions, and when he had finished, he ordered me to sit down.
“Well, I tell you, it was the best way
to learn. Maybe it wasn’t the most pleasant way to do it, but you really learned to prepare a case.
“Christ, I used to be in my office till midnight studying upper-court opinions, going over the testimony with witnesses, reviewing the evidence, making sure I knew exactly what I’d be doing the next day. I swore I’d never give him another chance to abuse me the way he did in my first trial with him.”
“Well, there you go. Although after all this I’m not really sure why you liked the guy.”
“Michael, I didn’t like the guy. I loved him.”
“Loved him?”
“Loved him. I thought you knew,” Cheryl said.
I shook my head.
“Remember the case we had together when I lost the heroin?”
“Of course.”
“After he threw the case out, I went to see him in his chambers. When I was alone with him, I told him that I felt humiliated, and that I was going to quit the prosecutor’s office and maybe even give up being a lawyer altogether.”
“I knew you were terribly upset.”
“When I began to cry, Bear put his arms around me to calm me down. The two of us stood together for a few minutes. When I finally stopped sobbing, he kissed me.”
I nodded, but I’d had no idea.
“He often spoke to me about his marriage to Margaret. He called it… he would say, ‘On balance, a perfectly sensible marriage.’ He knew that it would be a terrible scandal if his relationship with an assistant prosecutor became public—it would probably have forced his resignation. But somehow he was confident that no one would suspect anything. Maybe it was arrogance, or just plain wishful thinking, to believe we had managed to keep our secret, but we took some precautions: we only saw each other in his chambers or in my apartment. In court he treated me like anyone else. I guess we were just lucky.”
“I guess you miss him, too.”
She nodded.
Chapter 31
THE COURTROOM WAS CROWDED with spectators and the press. John was on one side of counsel table; I was on the other side, next to Lisa. A court officer stood behind us. The court stenographer was ready at her machine. Judge Grosso was on the bench. And the clerk was standing at his desk.
Question of Consent: A Novel Page 17
