“Not that. I mean about the possibility of reversal and remand if she puts on very little evidence in mitigation. Could you do a little research for me on that issue?”
Was that all Tom took away from Sarah’s story? How it might affect his trial result?
“Sure,” I said. “Interesting issue.”
Tom stood up. “Sarah isn’t going into the penalty phase totally bare, you know. She could always put Richard on to tell his story. It’s unusual for a defendant to take the stand, but on this one Sarah just might try. Remmy could be a good witness, now that he’s clean and sober. Sarah has some other witnesses—one person who knew the family long ago, her two experts, and she just might turn up the siblings from Illinois. She’s a powerful advocate. She’ll have a case. I need to look at the reversals—see how her evidence compares to other cases that have been sent down for retrial because ‘incompetent counsel’ didn’t muster enough mitigation. Could you do a little research on cases reversed because the defendant didn’t have much mitigation?”
A new assignment. “Today is Friday, Tom. I hope next week is time enough.”
“Get on it as soon as you can,” Tom said. “State reversals only. I don’t worry much about federal habeas any more. With the new restrictions on post-conviction relief, the burden of proof shifts completely once the state system has been exhausted. If we’re good enough for the State of Louisiana to have confidence in the outcome, we’re home free.”
Just hearing reference to the new federal law we call AEDPA, the Antiterrorism and Death Penalty Act, gave me a chill. Thank God Tom hadn’t asked me to study that one. If he had, I wouldn’t see daylight for days. I had enough to do researching State reversals.
Tom glanced toward the library door to see if anyone was about. He tipped up my chin. A very sweet kiss.
Then he delivered a sock in the gut.
“I’ve got to make a run up to north Louisiana this weekend to see my parents, Mandy. I haven’t been in six weeks. With what’s ahead, I may not get loose for awhile.”
Pow! Truly a kiss off. Our preoccupation with trial prep had crowded out time with one another. I’d been counting on some catch-up this weekend. My Dad planned to take Taddy out to the marsh Saturday afternoon to repair wood duck houses on his lease. I’d hoped Tom and I could go too. Taddy needed to get out from under Mom’s constant watch, and I needed distraction from thinking about the Bar results due Monday.
Another downer hit me. Tom hadn’t invited me to meet his parents.
Key Witnesses
KNOWING THE BAR Association website would be jammed on Monday morning, I logged on fifteen minutes before nine. The screen refreshed shortly after the hour. Second on the list, the name Amanda Aguillard leapt from the screen. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I raced around the office with the news.
The whooping and hollering brought Mr. Strait out from his office. “Congratulations. And Mandy, I have a matter I want to discuss with you. Check with Bonnie later this morning. She’ll figure out a good time for us to talk.”
For a second, I wondered what he needed to talk about, but emotion swallowed my question. At last, sixteen years of study and tests, three years of super hard work and serial anxiety over semester exams, then the big one—the Bar Exam—all history. Life provided few enough of these super highs and fresh starts. For now, I would enjoy, enjoy.
Tom’s response—a hug like to a co-worker—pricked, but when I got to my office, a spectacular bouquet of alstroemeria, my favorite flower, left no room on my desk for me to drop my purse. Congratulations and love, Tom. This gift took thought. Tom must have consulted with my mom and had faith I’d pass.
Or maybe not. He might have thought I’d need consolation for a disappointment. Damnit. This guy could yank me.
The next morning I remembered Mr. Strait had asked me to come to see him. I encountered Bonnie in a major fluster.
“Oh, Mandy,” she stammered, “Mr. Strait just called to say he’d be here in fifteen minutes. I thought I’d deliver a couple of fresh bottles of water to his desk and freshen things up a bit.” Her pursed lips, short steps, and fussy mannerisms told me she not only enjoyed service to her boss, she fantasized about making attention to his needs more than a day job.
“He’s not going to be a happy camper, I’m afraid,” Bonnie buzzed on. “See that man sitting out there on the bench? Whoops, no. He’s not sitting on the bench. Now he’s pacing up and down the hall. Mr. Andry. Do you know him? He’s an architect by training, and quite an artist. He and his wife Evelyn have the little restaurant on Main Street. Lagniappe, they call it. A little something extra. There’s a basket at the desk for you to pick up a piece of homemade chocolate when you pay your bill.”
“I know, and I love the place. Especially the banana mango cake! I’ve been for lunch a few times, and Tom and I went to dinner the night Brother Andry unveiled the caricature he did of Mr. Strait. What’s the problem?”
“Wait. I can’t tell you now. I just heard the boss coming in the back. I’ve got to warn him about what’s waiting.” She disappeared into Mr. Strait’s office.
When Bonnie came back she beckoned me to go on through, giving me a knowing wink as I passed her desk. Did she know everything that spun around in the office?
Unlike my first solo meeting with the boss, this time I had Mr. Strait’s full attention. With a welcoming gesture, he invited me to sit down across his desk. He removed his round glasses and laid them carefully on the surface. And he smiled—a rarity in itself. But still no small talk. He tented his hands and looked me in the eye.
“Ms. Aguillard, Mandy, I have been impressed with your work. I’d like to offer you a permanent job as one of my assistants.”
A jumble of thoughts fought each other for space in my brain. I should have realized my internship would soon come to an end, and passing the Bar Exam put a deadline in play, but I’d been distracted by the coming trial. What about the new information Deuce had dug up about the man following Taddy? The guy was still out there. Did I need to quit everything else and concentrate on my little brother’s safety? How would working in this office affect my relationship with Tom, and where was that going anyway? Way too much to deal with. I hope my face showed proper appreciation of his offer as I stalled.
“Mr. Strait, thank you very much for your consideration, but—”
He sweetened the deal. “You’d be a real Assistant DA, Mandy. Not Tom’s girl.”
He’d seen that professional relationship for what it was.
“I’d start you off in St. Martin Parish handling misdemeanors—the crash course in how to conduct prosecutions. You’d screen cases and file the bills, handle all the misdemeanor defendants who come in looking for a deal. On trial day, you’d pick up a file, put your witnesses on the stand, cross-examine the defense witnesses, and argue your cases, one after another. Felonies would be down the road, when you might feel ready.”
I think I told Mr. Strait I needed time to think. I hope I did, anyway. He smiled again.
“I’ll give you some time to consider. We have three weeks until you get sworn in as a lawyer.”
Three weeks! I had a three-week deadline to decide how I’d spend the rest of my working life. For at least two of those three weeks I’d be occupied being backup for a capital murder trial.
Mr. Strait was not finished. “I know I have the reputation for being unapproachable, Mandy, and I find that position useful for me and beneficial for those who work here, but I’m always available for my assistants when there are serious matters to decide. Tom, Ritchie, and you are deep into this Richard case, and a death penalty trial stretches us all to the limit. Feel free to come to me with any problems you might be having.”
He’d already categorized me as one of his assistants.
“In the meanwhile, do you have a few moments to talk to Brother Andry out there? He’s giving Bonnie fits about wanting to see me and I absolutely have to get on the road to Baton Rouge for a legislative hearing. Andry can’t understand wh
y we’re declining prosecution of some woman he found in his house. You just have to listen to his story—actually it’s one of our better ones—and give him a chance to vent. Bonnie!” Mr. Strait called out. Bonnie appeared in a nanosecond. “Give Mandy the police report on the Andry investigation.” Bonnie scurried off to do her boss’ bidding. “Bottom line, there’s no criminal intent. Give me a few moments to slip out the back.”
I returned to my office, picking up the police report and a cup of coffee on the way, straight caffeine being my medicine of choice for the headache taking up residence behind my eyes. Talking to a victim was going to be a new experience, and it scared me. I still hadn’t had lunch. Not a problem. I couldn’t have digested anything.
First I called home to check on Taddy. All OK there. I closed my eyes to block everything out and tried relaxation from tip to toe. Then I went to the front to greet Mr. Andry and show him in—not to my cubbyhole but to the library. I figured I deserved decent space for this duty.
Andry swept his arm out to invite me to sit first—as if I were a guest in his restaurant.
“So what can we do for you, Mr. Andry?”
I could tell from the skeptical look on his face, that he was well aware he’d been shunted down to the lowest person on the staff.
“Well...” I could also tell he couldn’t resist telling his story to a fresh pair of ears. He began—and then stood up to enhance his performance. “It was a week ago Wednesday. Evelyn and I went back to the house after we finished cleaning up from lunch. You know where we live? Out Highway 182 on the way to Lafayette. Cypress house, well screened from the road by a jungle of bushes. Must have been about three in the afternoon when we got there. To be accurate, I went home first, Evelyn came about a half hour later.”
I’d heard about that routine. Most people thought Mr. Andry’s contribution to Lagniappe was limited to being host extraordinaire, putting on his natty tweed sport coat, meeting and seating the customers, mixing a drink or two, then wiping off the bar when the day was done. Not so, Tom had told me. He shopped, supervised the maintenance, and kept the books. And let’s face it, he made Lagniappe a fun place to be.
“The front door of our house seemed to be bolted from the inside. Puzzling—we never do that—so I waited for Evelyn in my studio. She had a key to the back. We went on inside together. Well, we knew right away something was amiss.” He flipped his left hand out in a gesture of disgust. “Pillows disturbed in the den, a picture off the wall. And then, in the bedroom, we saw... Well, let’s just say we knew someone had been there.” He pantomimed someone throwing back the covers. “Dis-gusting! Then we heard a woman’s voice, humming at the top of her lungs. We opened the bathroom door. A vision to behold! A dome of bright orange hair in a pool of bubbles.”
Mr. Andry told his story with the panache of a Saturday night British comedy on PBS.
“I know I shouted, probably screamed like a banshee. ‘What the hell are you doing in my house?’ A woman stood up, turned around, one hand on her fat hip, stark naked. In her pelt, as my grandmother liked to say. Enormement! That woman had boo-boos down to her knee caps. She could’ve nursed an elephant!”
I know a smile broke out of my face. I couldn’t help it. My grandmother would have said, C’est une valentine.
“Look, Ms. Aguillard. This isn’t funny. You know what she said to me? ‘Your house? This isn’t your house.’ A sassy shake of her head. ‘This is Stephen’s house.’”
“Who’s Stephen,” I asked.
“Hell, I don’t know.” Mr. Andry sat down. “I was in full rage, but Evelyn had her wits about her and called 911. You know what the woman told the deputy who came? She’d met this guy named Stephen at the E&L Lounge, and he invited her to come to his place. He left her there, in my house, and went out for beer. Ms. Aguillard, that woman was in our house, in our bathroom. She’d been in my bed—and probably not alone!”
I struggled to keep hold of some sort of professional demeanor. “I have the sheriff’s report right here, Mr. Andry. They arrested her, right?”
“Yes, they arrested her, and they took her down to the station—after she’d put on some clothes, thank God. They kept her for just a few hours and let her go.”
I had a grip on my funny bone now and could think like a lawyer. “I’m looking at the report, Mr. Andry. Apparently the bartender at the E&L remembered her, that she’d had a drink with some guy and left with him, but the bartender didn’t know either one of ‘em. On follow-up, not the bartender, not the woman, no one, knew the man’s last name or ever saw him again.”
“So that’s it? That woman was in my house, damnit!”
“Yes. I understand. She claims she was invited—”
“That’s absurd. She must have known it wasn’t some Stephen’s house.”
My mind ran through the possible charges. Burglary? The woman didn’t enter to steal anything. Nothing taken except a couple inches of bubble bath. Unauthorized entry? She thought Stephen had asked her in. Criminal trespass? Implied authority. She said Stephen just opened the back door. I felt like I was answering a law school exam question, but I couldn’t think of a single charge for a woman invited to have a romp.
“Sir, the District Attorney has a problem bringing a charge. Think about this for a moment. Suppose the DA took the case to trial. Two witnesses, you and the woman. No Stephen. She says Stephen—boyfriend as of the previous couple of hours—invited her to come to his house. What do you think would be the verdict?”
Mr. Andry stood up again, paced around the table, muttering. “A three-hundred-pound woman in a bathtub of bubbles, in my house, in my bed, and the law isn’t going to do thing about it. Dickens was right.”
“Dickens?”
“Yeah. Charles Dickens. The law is an ass.”
We talked it out together. Mr. Andry understood the concept of criminal intent. None here. I learned a good lesson. What people need most is a willing ear. He left thanking me. At least not every case coming into the office involved a capital murder.
I kept checking with Bonnie, but Tom still hadn’t returned.
I picked up the Falgout/Boudreaux material, now no longer contained in one red file or even two, but packed onto a rolling cart. For the rest of the day, and the day following, I poured over the record. I listened to tapes and reread every word by and about our three key witnesses for the guilt/innocence phase of the trial—Dudley LeBlanc, Skipper Domingue, Deputy Mark Hamilton. I reviewed my taped interview with our penalty phase star, Lydia Falgout.
The tape of the Falgout interview puffed me up a bit. I’d done a good job. Lydia Falgout clearly stated she’d seen no one other than Remmy Richard. But, and a big but at that, would she have seen another person if he’d been there? She had no clear answer one way or the other. When Remmy came to her door, Mrs. Falgout had not looked inside the truck he came in. She’d been hit from behind as soon as she came out of the back of her house with her money.
I could see no value in talking to Lydia Falgout another time. Her testimony was good for us as it stood; I’d be shooting myself in the foot to muddy the water. We had given Sarah everything we had. And anyway, Mrs. Falgout would be a penalty phase witness at least a couple weeks down the road. I checked her testimony off my list of concerns and turned to the material on the key witnesses for the guilt phase of the trial.
Dudley LeBlanc seemed to know quite a bit about his cousin Remmy Richard, but what did he know about Remmy’s buddies? About his drug suppliers? Did any of them have an accent? Rereading Dudley’s statements, I found no indication anyone had asked him the critical question. Dudley’s knowledge about Remmy’s friends might well bolster Sarah’s other dude defense, and we wouldn’t want what he knew to come out for the first time in Sarah’s cross examination. We needed to ask cousin Dud if he’d ever had contact with someone who had a Tennessee accent, and we needed to ask him ASAP.
Then I looked at all the material concerning Skipper Domingue. Skipper had described the scene of
two men he overheard talking in The Southern Wave, the bunkhouse down the highway toward Intracoastal City. And he overheard what they said. Incredibly, here, too, I could find no mention anyone asked Skipper about their voices. Did one of them, by any chance, have a Tennessee accent? We needed to run that down right away.
I felt good about the testimony of our third key witness. As an experienced officer, Mark Hamilton would know how to handle himself on the stand. We could leave him alone.
My conclusion? We didn’t have all the information necessary to go to trial. I walked over to Tom’s office, talking to myself all the way. Bonnie stopped me in the reception area.
“Tom left for an appointment with the jury consultant, Mandy. He asked me to tell you he’d see you in the morning.”
Damn.
“Is Ritchie around?”
“I think he’s just about to leave. I’ll see if I can catch him.”
She couldn’t. He’d gone to be with Tom. Frustration fired my gut.
Bonnie read me and threw out a lifeline. Distraction, really. “See the guy out there in the hall leaning on the his supply cart? Ti-Pop’s his name. I need to get him to change a couple of burned out bulbs. I heard you were asking about the courthouse ghost. Ti-Pop’s a believer. Wanna come?”
“Sure.” Anything to whip my foul mood.
We stepped out into the hall and Bonnie introduced me to an old white man with rheumy eyes and a drop of spittle in the corner of his mouth. Bonnie tended to her light bulb request and moved on to ask about the courthouse ghost. Ti-Pop’s eyes dropped to the floor.
“Miss Bonnie, you t’ink me a crazy ol’ man.”
“No, I don’t think that.”
Ti-Pop shuffled his feet, placed the light bulb he had in his hand back on the cart, and slanted a look in my direction. “Well...”
“Mandy’s cool, Ti-Pop. You can talk in front of her. Tell me.”
He did, glancing around to make sure no one could overhear. He spoke directly to Bonnie, his face showing a shadow of suspicion each time he glanced in my direction.
Blood in the Lake Page 24
