Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “Is that a threat, Mr. Royal?”

  “No.” I smiled coldly. “I want to be your friend.”

  “Call me Mr. Swann,” he said, and turned his back on me.

  “Okay, Georgie.” Who said I couldn’t act like a twelve-year-old?

  He stopped for a split second, and then moved on to his table and instructed his staff to unpack the large briefcases that lawyers called trial bags. One of the young women, the lawyer, looked at me and smiled, quickly and furtively, winked, and said loud enough for Swann to hear, “He’s never lost a murder trial, Mr. Royal.” I thought she probably didn’t hold her boss in very high esteem.

  Bill and Abby Lester came in and pushed through the rail that separated the lawyers from the spectators. Abby sat down next to me, leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  Bill said, “I’ll be a phone call away if you need me.” He would not be allowed in the courtroom because of the rule of sequestration that required all witnesses who would testify to remain outside the courtroom during the trial.

  “Did Swann serve you with a subpoena?” I asked.

  “No. I was surprised,” Bill said.

  “He can’t make you testify against Abby because of the husband-wife privilege, so I guess he decided not to even try.”

  “You’re going to call me, aren’t you?”

  “Probably, but if I put you on the stand, we’ll lose the privilege, and you’ll be subject to cross-examination. I want to see how the evidence goes before I make that decision.”

  “Call me if you need me. And keep me posted.” He left.

  Abby leaned over to whisper. “The probation people came by early this morning and took off that confounded anklet. This is the first time I’ve been downtown since I was arrested. Two and a half months is a long time.”

  “We’re nearing the end,” I said.

  “How’s it look?”

  “Hard to tell.” I never wanted to get a client’s hopes up too high. I thought we had a good case, perhaps even one that the judge would dismiss for lack of evidence after the prosecution finished putting on its case. But I wanted Abby to remain sharp and focused. I didn’t want her to relax, thinking we were going to win her an acquittal.

  She smiled ruefully. “I’ve got faith in you, Matt. You’ll get me out of this, and by next week, it’ll just be a bad memory.”

  “I hope so,” I said, but my mind flashed to that old saying that no matter what verdict the jury returns, the lawyer goes home. I hoped Abby would be going with me.

  There was more activity in the back of the courtroom. I turned to watch the venire, that group of people who had been chosen randomly from the Sarasota County driver’s license roll to serve on our jury. There were about forty people in the group, most of them not happy about being there. I had found over the years that the jurors tried hard to see that justice was done, even though jury duty was an imposition. It was, as the judges invariably told them, part of their civic responsibilities. And they took that responsibility seriously.

  We would proceed to trial with twelve jurors and two alternates. The alternates’ sole duty was to step in if for some reason one of the jurors could not proceed. I thought we’d whittle this crowd down pretty quickly.

  The court reporter and two deputy clerks entered and took their seats. The reporter would take down every word said in the courtroom, making and preserving the record. The deputy clerks would handle all the documentary evidence and keep the court minutes, recording all documents offered into evidence, whether admitted or not, and noting the judge’s rulings during the course of the trial.

  A door behind the bench opened and a court deputy stepped out, stood for a moment and motioned behind him. The judge walked out and climbed the steps to the bench. The deputy intoned, “All stand. Hear ye, hear ye, the Circuit Court of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit in and for Sarasota County, Florida is now in session, the Honorable Wayne Lee Thomas presiding.”

  A chill ran up my spine. The trial was about to begin; the culmination of all that had gone before, the investigation, the evidence gathering, the depositions, the heartache, and the emotional highs and lows that lawyers and litigants always suffer. I thought I knew how that receiver standing at the goal line felt when the referee’s whistle blew, and the kicker on the other team approached the teed-up football. The game was on, and Abby’s future rested in the palms of my hands.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The day was grueling. Picking a jury is an art based on gut feelings and the little evidence given by the prospective juror on the form he or she fills out before arriving at the courthouse, and the answers given to the questions posed by the lawyers. Attorneys walk a fine line in their questioning, seeking information but not wanting to irritate the people who will decide the fate of the accused, and in this case, the perfect record of the prosecutor. We lawyers always tell the prospective jurors that we’re looking for people who can be fair to sit on our jury. That’s a crock. We want the person whom we think will be the most likely to find in our client’s favor. At best, it’s a crapshoot.

  For the most part, the venire was a cross-section of the Sarasota County community. One woman stood out briefly, at least in my mind, because I couldn’t figure out why Swann had not dismissed her. According to her information sheet, Judith Whitacre was thirty-four years old, held a master’s of business administration degree from the elite Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for a large multinational cosmetic company. She was blond, beautiful, and dressed in a dark-blue suit set off by a white blouse and a pearl necklace.

  Swann was at his most charming, his smarmy smile showing dazzling white teeth as he stood. “Miss Whitacre,” he said, looking at the blond woman, “what do you do for a living?”

  “I work for a large cosmetic company.”

  “Any particular division of that company?”

  “Fragrances.”

  Swann’s smile got bigger. “Are you one of those pretty girls who stand at the door of department stores in the mall and offer people a spray sample of your perfume?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what exactly do you do for your company, Ms—?”

  “I’m the manager of operations for the Southeastern division, covering thirteen states.”

  “Oh.” Swann said.

  “Yes.” Ms. Whitacre said, with a smile.

  Swann must not have looked too closely at Ms. Whitacre’s form questionnaire. I was pretty sure he would dismiss her, but he didn’t. I think he didn’t realize how bad a mistake he’d just made. He’d insulted a woman who was obviously proud of her accomplishments and her place in the corporate world. I asked her no questions, and for the rest of the day, she smiled at me and frowned at Swann.

  The prevailing wisdom among criminal defense lawyers is that you do not want a juror with ties to law enforcement, either by marriage, blood, or just close friendship. People always talk, and it doesn’t matter how many times the judge instructs jurors not to discuss the case, they will talk, and cops usually come down on the side of the prosecution. I thought this one might be different because Abby was the wife of a well-respected officer who had been part of the Sarasota County law enforcement community for more than twenty years. I accepted a woman whose brother was a Sarasota County deputy sheriff. Swann seemed a little smug about what he surely considered a mistake on my part, but I ignored him and hoped for the best.

  We worked all day and finally, by late in the afternoon, we had chosen the fourteen people who held the fate of Abigail Lester in their hands. It was an awesome responsibility to thrust on a small body of citizens chosen at random by a computer, and then whittled down to a jury by obsequious lawyers seeking their favor.

  Judge Thomas swore in the jury, charged them not to read anything about the case or watch any news of it on television, and dismissed us until nine the next morning.

  As Swann’s team was packing up, he sidled over to me and said, “Nice work with that cop’s sister. I
guess retirement dulled your senses.” He walked off before I could respond.

  Abby and I walked out of the courtroom to find her husband sitting on a bench in the hallway. We waited for the jurors to leave the area and then boarded an empty elevator.

  The June air was muggy, the sun still bright and the temperature hovering in the low nineties. “How’s it going?” Bill asked.

  “Let’s find someplace with air conditioning,” I said. “I could use a drink and we can talk.”

  We crossed the street and walked a block to an upscale bar and restaurant favored by the courthouse lawyers in need of a little decompression time at the end of a day of hearings or trials. We found a booth in the back and ordered beer for Bill and me and red wine for Abby.

  “I think we’ve got a pretty good jury,” I said. “You never know how they’ll play, but I feel positive about this bunch.” I told Bill about each of the jurors, why I thought each would be good for our case, which ones I wasn’t too sure about and why. “It’s always a crapshoot,” I said. “You get some you like and some you don’t, but they usually surprise me. The ones you think are good turn out to be patsies for the prosecution, and some of the ones you would have liked to have dismissed are your biggest supporters.”

  “I’m surprised this system works at all,” said Abby. “You get a bunch of people who don’t want to be there, you ask them personal questions, put them through a wringer, make them sit there for days listening to witnesses and lawyers argue, and still expect them to do justice.”

  “It does seem rather ludicrous, doesn’t it?” I said. “But it works. The system’s cumbersome and not very pretty, but it almost always spins out results that look and feel like justice.”

  “What about when it doesn’t?” Abby asked.

  “That’s what appellate courts are for. Look, the system isn’t perfect, but then no system is. Ours is just better than any other in the world.”

  “What’s up for tomorrow?” Bill asked.

  “Swann will start putting on his case. My guess is that he’ll start with Harry Robson, set the crime scene, and bring in the forensics people, set up the fingerprint identifications, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he drags that out so that he can put the FDLE guy Lucas on the stand late in the afternoon, maybe finish with direct but not leave time for cross-examination. That’ll mean the jury will go home thinking about the case the way Swann wants them to.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No. I’d rather them go home after listening to some of our evidence, but I can’t control that. The pendulum swings both ways during a trial. We’ll have our time at bat.”

  “What are you planning to say on opening statement?” Bill asked.

  “I’m not. At least not yet. I’m going to wait until we start our case to give my opening. By then, I’ll have seen all the state’s evidence. My opening becomes a bit of a closing argument, although it’s not supposed to. I can pick at Swann’s case by laying out our evidence that rebuts his. Then on closing, I just hammer it in further.”

  * * *

  I drove home, tired and looking forward to a quiet evening of doing nothing. Unfortunately, the trial lawyer’s day does not end when court does. He has to prepare for the next day, go over deposition transcripts looking for little tidbits that might amount to a weakness in the state’s case, reviewing one more time the questions he wants to ask on cross-examination of the witnesses that he expects to be called the next day, and then prepare for those he doesn’t expect to be called just in case the other side surprises him and puts the witness on the stand.

  It’s a never-ending process. You never get enough done, because there’s just too much information, too many facts, too many personalities. The fear that the other side knows something you don’t is pervasive, always knocking on the edge of your psyche, whispering to you that you’re not good enough, that your client is going to jail because of something you forgot to do. No sane trial lawyer ever gets over the fear of failure, that gnawing dread that he’s left something undone.

  The mental stress of hanging on every word said in the courtroom translates to physical stress, ulcers, insomnia, the need for alcohol, and ever more insecurity. Your mind wants to wander during a trial, but you know you can’t let it. You have to focus on every word said for fear of not being ready to object or react or jot down the note that will remind you of something that needs to be asked on cross-examination.

  So, as I drove home in the gathering dusk, all I wanted was a couple of drinks, or maybe three or four, and then eight hours of sleep. I knew I would have neither. I’d drunk two beers with Abby and Bill, and that was my limit. I wouldn’t sleep, because I never slept well during a trial. The mind won’t shut down, the fear won’t recede, the dread keeps gnawing at the perimeter of your consciousness. And I had work to do.

  I parked in the driveway of my cottage, next to J.D.’s Camry. I opened the front door to the aroma of frying chicken. J.D. was standing at the stove, oblivious to my presence. I put my arms around her and kissed the back of her neck.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  “Your friendly neighborhood stud.”

  “Oh, goody. I was afraid it was the guy who lives here.”

  She turned to hug me. Over her shoulder I could see pots of rice, gravy, green peas, black-eyed peas, and fried okra. Bread was baking in the oven and a chocolate cream pie sat on the counter next to a pitcher of tea. A Southern meal.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said.

  “I took part of the afternoon off. I kind of thought my sweetie could use a good meal.”

  “I didn’t know you knew how to do this.”

  “I’m my mama’s daughter and she grew up in Georgia. Taught me how to cook before I got old enough to be interested in boys.”

  “Ah, a hidden talent.”

  “Don’t let it out. And don’t get used to it. I only cook for special occasions. Like now.”

  “Now?”

  “Like when my honey needs to relax and get his mind off the trial.”

  The meal and the company worked magic. My mind slowed down, the stress evaporated, and I began to feel human again. When we finished, we cleaned up, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and sat on the sofa, nuzzling.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You want to hear about my day?”

  “Yes, but not now. I want you to go to bed soon, get a good night’s sleep, and get ready for tomorrow.”

  “I’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

  “Sleep, and get up early in the morning and start over. You’ll feel better.”

  “Did you make any progress on your murder case?”

  “Nothing worth talking about.” She patted me on the chest. “I’m going home now. You go to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She kissed me on the mouth, a chaste touching of lips, and was gone.

  I slept like a hibernating bear, with a stomach full of good food and a brain empty of any thought.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  George Swann was at his most pompous, strutting before the jury box, his voice rising and falling in dramatic fashion as he went through the evidence he planned to present. He talked for almost an hour, and while I thought he was a bit long-winded and his emphasis was sometimes misplaced, overall he presented his case in an orderly fashion. I did notice that Judith Whitacre, the fragrance company manager he’d insulted in voir dire, never looked at him. She kept her head down, and I thought I saw slight frowns cross her face two or three times.

  When Swann finished, I stood. I was already tired. I’d been up early to do all the work I hadn’t done the night before and the day was already long. I said, “Your Honor, I’ll defer my opening statement until Mr. Swann completes his case.” I would refer to it as “Swann’s case” throughout the trial. No sense in reminding the jury that the state of Florida was the entity prosecuting my client.

  The first witness called was the housekeeper who found the body. Swann walked her through her name address
and occupation, elicited the fact that she’d arrived for work at eight o’clock on the morning of April first and found Mr. Bannister dead on his living room floor. She immediately called the police. I had no questions for her.

  Harry Robson was the next witness. After Swann got his name, occupation, and background into evidence, he asked, “Were you called to the residence of Mr. Nate Bannister on Monday, April first of this year?”

  “I was.”

  “Why were you called there?”

  “I was informed that a body had been found in his condo unit.”

  “What time did you arrive at the scene?”

  “My log shows I got there at twenty minutes after eight in the morning.”

  “Did you identify the body?”

  “I did. His driver’s license was in his pocket. It was Mr. Bannister.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Gunshot to the head.”

  That wasn’t technically within the purview of the responding officer, but it wasn’t enough to argue about. The medical examiner would be called and he would confirm the cause of death. I stayed in my chair.

  “Did you find a weapon?” Swann asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “I take it that you ruled out suicide.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you call in the forensics investigators?”

  “Yes, sir. Immediately.”

  “These are the people who’re often called the crime scene investigators, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did they find?”

  “Quite a bit of evidence, but I’d defer to the crime scene supervisor on that.”

  “Okay, fair enough,” said Swann. “Did they find any fingerprints?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you recognize the names of any of the people who left those prints?”

  “Yes, sir. Two people.”

  “Who were they, Detective?”

  “Abigail Lester and Maggie Bannister.”

  “Who is Maggie Bannister?”

  “The wife of the victim.”