That we finessed some of these findings and conclusions to keep him in the dark is a nuance Adrian can appreciate. “All’s fair,” he says.
“Glad you feel that way. Now as I’ve said I’ve got some work to do.”
“That’s only part of what I came to talk to you about. I’m looking at things. The jury is not exactly what we would have hoped for. From our side, Ingel’s voir dire”—he’s talking about the judge’s questioning of prospective jurors—“left a lot to be desired. And you,” he says, “your case is flying like some wounded duck.”
“Thank you for the appraisal, but I’ll wait for the jury’s verdict if you don’t mind.”
He puts up a hand and smiles. “No offense,” he says. “It’s what happens in trials. Things we can’t control.”
Given his creative approach to evidence, I’m surprised that Adrian would concede the possibility.
“I know,” he says, “there could be some rocky places for our side from here to the end. The stuff in the van, the broken window—who knows what a jury will make of it all? That’s why I’m here. My client is nervous. He’s dreaming about death at night.”
He does not make clear whether these visions are of the Russian’s own demise or of some bloody bodies on the Putah Creek.
“You understand,” he says, “that I don’t necessarily agree with this. But he wants me to take one more shot, to get the charges reduced.”
I can’t help myself. “You wanna plead?” I am more than a little surprised that, given the state of our case, he would even broach the subject at this point.
His look at me is almost whimsical.
“Not the same deal, you understand. Your case is not what it was when we started. Major holes in your theory,” he says. “It’s why I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
Then it hits me. This man indeed does have crystal balls. Somehow he knows. Someplace he has heard. The leaks continue. Someone has told him that we have the prime witness. The confirmation. At this moment, Adrian Chambers may not know his name, but in his heart of hearts, he knows that Cleo Coltrane will finger his client for the murder of Abbott and Karen Scofield.
“Why so generous?” I say. “It would seem to cut against the grain of nature.”
He makes a face, like these things can happen.
“Second degree, terms to run concurrent, fifteen to life,” he says. “Same deal, we package ’em all. The six,” he says. “No loose ends.”
“And he’d be out in nine,” I say.
Adrian gestures with one hand, a little swivel at the wrist, like whatever happens.
“It’s a certain result for both of us,” he says. “The judge, I think, will go for it.”
He is probably right, Ingel at this moment is not exactly a well of confidence overflowing with faith in my abilities. With Acosta no doubt heckling him from the wings, the Prussian might do anything at this point to avoid an acquittal, or worse, a dismissal of the case by his own hand, for lack of evidence.
Adrian studies my expression like a rug merchant looking for a sale.
Before I can answer, the phone rings, the back line, the one not available to the general public.
“A second,” I say, telling Adrian to be patient.
He waves me on with his cigaretted hand, like go ahead.
I reach over and grab the receiver. It’s Claude.
“Guess who’s looking for you?” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Adrian.”
“I know.”
“He’s there. You can’t talk?”
“Right. Where are you?” I ask.
“We got a problem,” he says.
“No Denny,” I say. I’m watching what I say in front of Adrian.
“No, he’s here all right, with Coltrane.”
I can hear the hum of human traffic and a PA system in the background. Claude’s at the airport.
“Problem is Coltrane won’t talk to anybody but you. He says he made the deal with you. If you’re not there, he wants to see a lawyer.”
This is a major problem for us. If Cleo Coltrane gets legal counsel, the first advice he will receive is to say nothing. It will take a week, maybe a month to negotiate the thicket with a lawyer, concessions on the federal charges. By then my case against Iganovich will be history.
I give a deep sigh. Ingel will kill me. Probably issue a bench warrant for my arrest, but I will have to send Lenore in my stead to talk about jury instructions at four o’clock.
“I’ll be there,” I tell Claude. “Tell him I’ll be there.” I take down the information from Claude, on the little calendar, the one propped up this way so Chambers can’t see. I write “Coltrane” across from the time. Claude estimates four-fifteen. I will have to make myself scarce so Ingel can’t find me.
“Where?” I ask Claude.
“Interrogation room four, ground floor of the jail,” he says.
I write this down next to Coltrane’s name.
“What’s Chambers want?” says Claude.
“Not now,” I say. “We can talk later. See you in a few minutes.”
Claude hangs up.
I look at Adrian again, seated in the chair, seemingly aloof, like he’s doing me some favor, indifferent as he plumbs my being for some answer, a sure result against the vagaries of a jury.
“A problem?” he says.
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
He smiles.
“No deal,” I tell him.
Suddenly his leg is off the other, beady little slits for eyes.
“Why not? Your case is in the shit can,” he says.
“Like I said, Adrian. I’d rather take my chances with a jury.”
There are a lot of expletives here, Adrian’s voice running the range to the soprano. I can see the shadowed forms of secretaries outside my door standing idly, listening to this tirade overflow in my office.
He finishes, his face flushed.
I look at him. “Nothing personal, Adrian.” This seems to send him ballistic.
“Fine. It’s your funeral,” he says. “See you in court.”
He slams the door going out, nearly breaking the glass.
I pick up the phone and hit the intercom button.
Lenore answers after one ring. Before she can say anything, I start.
“Listen, I’ve got a problem. You’re gonna have to take the meeting with Ingel and Adrian alone.”
We are standing in a dimly lit little room, not much larger than a closet, Claude and I, looking through a one-way mirror into an interrogation room at the county jail. For the moment it is empty. Denny Henderson is bringing Coltrane up now.
I’ve told Claude about Adrian’s eleventh-hour deal. His suspicious mind is like my own. He believes that Adrian is anxious to cut a quick deal, before this witness can bury his case, place Iganovich at the scene of the Scofield murders and end Chambers’s hopes of fixing doubt in the jury’s mind. How he got news of the witness neither of us can guess. “Maybe the man’s clairvoyant,” says Claude.
I make a face. With Adrian one never knows.
Denny taps on the door to our cubicle as he passes by, the signal that Coltrane is here, to keep our voices down.
I am holding the evening paper, the afternoon edition from Capital City. I pulled it from a rack on the way over here. It is already ablaze with unflattering headlines, the debacle with Tolar on the stand. On the front page is a three-column picture, Iganovich a beaming smile, flanked by his two lawyers. This was taken by one enterprising photographer who slipped into the courtroom in the seconds following adjournment, after Ingel left the bench and before the deputies hauled the Russian back to his cell.
Just then the door to the interrogation room opens. A man enters followe
d by Denny.
“Sit down there,” says Henderson. He points to a chair behind the steel table bolted to the floor, then leaves the room.
Noise, the shuffling of shoes on linoleum over concrete is piped in through the tinny little speaker screwed to the wall above our heads.
Cleo Coltrane has one of those faces that defies estimations of age. He is medium height, a complexion like chewed rawhide and body to match, wiry and a little bowlegged in worn jeans and cowboy boots. Shots of disheveled dirty blond hair rise from a wild cowlick on the back of his head like the crown on Lady Liberty.
His shirt is a size too big, with imitation pearl snap buttons and a lot of stitching. It hangs on his upper frame looking like a flag in dead air. For all of the wary voice over the phone, his appearance here in this bleak room under harsh light has a certain frontier innocence about it, the artless countenance of the common man.
Seated at the end of a small table he looks around at nothing in particular, though he glances hard-eyed at the mirror where we stand several times, like he suspects that maybe someone is back here.
A second later Henderson joins us in the cubicle. Off a hot plane, no shower since yesterday. I am glad that I will not be staying in here with Denny.
“Wish us luck,” I say. Henderson will watch from here, keeping notes of anything we might miss. It would not do to have too many people crowding around Coltrane if we want him to talk.
Dusalt and I head out. Seconds later we enter the interrogation room.
Coltrane is out of his chair, up on his feet as we enter. He is gangly, some nervous gestures with his hands, like he doesn’t know what to do with these. I get a kind of shy smile one might see from a stranger on the Montana prairie.
“Mr. Coltrane,” I say. “I’m Paul Madriani. We spoke on the phone.”
“Oh yeah,” he says. A guileless grin. He shakes my hand, a grip like a warmed and raspy vise. But there is no venom or animus apparent in the man. If he suffers from anxiety, it dances to the tune of a different drummer, not the rhythm I was beating to him over the phone.
I introduce Claude. Dusalt gives him his best cop’s look, a death mask of menace, a nod and no handshake.
“Sit down,” I tell him. “Go ahead. Relax. We just want to talk for awhile. Cup a coffee?” I say.
“Sure.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Just sugar,” he says.
Claude does the duty, tells the guard outside to relay the message to bring some coffee.
“You wanna smoke, go ahead,” I say.
He shakes his head.
Claude and I remain standing, Dusalt with his back leaning against the wall behind me as I do the talking.
“Mr. Coltrane, we’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
He points with his finger to his chest, like surely you don’t mean me.
“Yes,” I say. “You. We didn’t know your name. But we’ve been looking for you. As I’m sure by now you’re aware, we have a series of murders in this county, brutal crimes that have taken the lives of four college students, a distinguished member of the university faculty and his former wife. We are currently in trial on some of those charges. And we believe we have the killer.”
He looks at me from sheepish eyes.
“We also believe that you witnessed two of these murders, or at least saw the bodies being staked out on the ground, from a blind in the trees along the Putah Creek?”
He’s shaking his head. “No,” he says. “Not me. Musta been somebody else.”
I look at him a benign smile, the kind I reserve for Sarah when she tells me the dirty little handprints by the light switch in the kitchen are not hers.
“It’s what I told you over the phone,” I say. “Whoever did this. Whoever committed these murders, particularly the last one, pretty soon, that person is going to know there was a witness. He’s going to be looking for you the same way we were. It would be best, a whole lot better for you, if we catch up with him, before he catches up with you.”
I can see Coltrane’s Adam’s apple take a deep bob with this thought. He has been in trouble before, but the expression in his eyes makes me think that this is the deepest it has ever gotten.
“Can I chew?” he says.
I look at him.
He scoots forward in the chair and tugs a little round canister from his hind pants pocket. He looks like he’s going to offer me some.
I wave him off with one hand and glance at Claude. He’s rolling his eyes as if to say “we got a real winner here.”
“We know what you were involved in,” I tell him. “We know about the falcons, we have physical evidence. You might say we’ve almost become experts on birds of prey in the last few months.”
“That so?” he says. “What was I involved in?”
“We know,” I say, “that in the past you’ve possessed and trained great horned owls. They tell us, the people who know about such things, that this bird is a natural enemy of the peregrine falcon. A lot of these falcons were killed near the site of the last murder.”
He looks at me but says nothing.
“We’ve found feathers belonging to a great horned owl in the bird blind. The one up in the trees,” I say.
The first art of interrogation, to make him think we know a lot more than we do.
“We know you have a record,” Claude chimes in. “Federal violations on which you did time. We are not interested in those,” he says. “We are interested in murder.”
“I didn’t murder nobody,” says Coltrane, calm, collected. He’s packing what looks like black tar between his cheek and gum, a wad the size of a walnut.
Claude makes a face, like maybe he doesn’t believe him.
“Listen, am I under arrest?” he says.
“No. No. I told you you’re not under arrest.” My biggest fear now is that he will get smart, and either ask to leave or demand to see an attorney if we say no.
“But you think I did some crime?”
I make a face. “Maybe. We don’t enforce the federal law here,” I say. “That’s for the federal government to do. Now we could help them out, give them some of our evidence, and see what they want to do with it.”
For the first time he chooses to look the other way, not at me.
“There’s a lotta horned owls,” he says.
“I wouldn’t know,” I tell him. “All I know is that the folks down in San Diego, the Wild Animal Park. They say you own one. What’s his name again?”
He looks at me, but doesn’t volunteer.
I look at Claude.
“Harvey,” says Dusalt.
“Harvey.” I pause for a second. “Like the rabbit.” The people where he worked told us this is how he came up with the name. “You picked the name?” I say.
He nods.
Harvey is now in the hands of animal control down in San Diego. He was found on property outside of town rented by Coltrane, where he kept two horses, near a trailer in which he lived. The authorities took the animals to protect them while their owner was otherwise detained. In reality they are waiting for nature to take its course, for the bird to drop a few of its feathers in the cage where they have it confined. They cannot pluck these without a search warrant. But evidence dropped into their hands by the forces of nature. That is something else.
The coffee arrives. Coltrane stirs a little sugar into the cup while we watch him. We pass the time, idle chitchat to put him back on an even keel. I drop the rolled newspaper which I am still carrying onto the table in front of him.
“Had time to see the paper today?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Go ahead and read,” I say. “Lieutenant Dusalt and I have something we have to discuss, outside,” I say. “We’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
Claude and I step outside and close the door.
“He listens well,” says Claude. “Problem is he doesn’t talk much.”
“A good listener is usually thinking about something else,” I say. “In this case I think Mr. Coltrane is thinking about the jam he’s in.”
Claude and I are doing a quick two-step around the corner to the little observation cubicle where Denny is waiting. We step inside and close the door.
Coltrane’s still sitting at the table, reading.
“What’s he doing?” says Claude.
“Like he’s starved for news,” says Henderson. “The story at the top of page one.”
“Has he looked at the picture?” I ask.
“He keeps going back to it,” he says. “A little reading, then back to the picture.”
I see him do this as Denny’s talking.
We give him a few minutes. He’s searching for the jump on the story, the inside pages. The man should take remedial reading lessons. Sarah could teach him speed. Three times he closes the paper, turns away from the inside pages, to look at the picture on page one, and then goes back to the inside. Finally we give him enough time. He’s out of his chair walking around, stretching his legs.
“Let’s not let him get too relaxed,” says Claude. We head back in.
Back inside we have a little more idle chitchat. I tell him about a woman in my office, a good looker, a lawyer named Lenore.
“Must be nice for you,” he says.
“Ms. Goya used to work for the United States Attorney’s Office in Southern California.”
He stops smiling, like maybe he’s not interested in meeting any of her old friends from the office. It is how progress is made, little threats, some more subtle than others.
He’s back in his chair now.
Claude takes the lead this time, a no-frills approach to questioning, like an inquisition on the cheap.
“You can stash the cowboy homilies act,” says Dusalt. “I lost interest when Will Rogers died.”
Their eyes lock on each other. Coltrane doesn’t appear particularly concerned.
Prime Witness Page 38
