Conclusive Evidence

by Al Macy

  “Can you tell us what you teach at this school?” Here it comes.

  “Cliff diving.”

  A few murmurs sounded in the courtroom.

  “That’s fascinating. Can you tell me more?”

  “We have some wonderful cliffs and waterfalls in my homeland. People come from around the world to learn how to jump off them and into the river safely.”

  “On November eleventh of last year, did a Mr. Angelo Romero come to your school?”

  “He did.”

  “Did you teach him how to jump off a cliff?”

  “I did,” Yazzi said. “He was good. But he was better after my lessons.”

  “I see. Did you get the impression he’d done it before?”

  “Yes, a little. He said he’d been to South Point on Hawaii. That’s where he started learning.”

  “Did he want to learn fancy maneuvers? Like flips and such?”

  “No, not at all. I told him he was a natural and he could be good at it, but he just wanted to be able to jump without hurting himself. It can be dangerous if you don’t have a good instructor. It’s a wonderful sport. I recommend it to everyone. Anyway, Angelo did it over and over, from different heights.”

  “Anything else?” I’d told Mr. Yazzi the general points I wanted to cover, but we hadn’t done practice sessions. I wanted him to sound natural, which he did.

  “He said he was going to go to La Quebrada in Mexico. That’s another good cliff diving destination. They have a school there. I’ve been there.”

  “But if Mr. Romero was so good, why did he want to go to yet another school?”

  “He said he needed to learn how to judge waves. There are no waves in Havasu. At the ocean, you have to jump at just the right time. If you land between the peaks of the waves, you can hit the bottom and die. That’s another reason you need instruction.”

  Finn had no questions.

  * * *

  “The defense calls Mr. Wenzel Rozetti back to the stand.”

  The roly-poly crabber looked even more nervous than he had before. Now I know why.

  “Mr. Rozetti, you testified that you saw the body in the ocean straight out from the jetty. It was floating faceup, but when you tried to get it to the boat using the boat hook, it flipped over. You saw the tattoo on the back of Mr. Romero’s neck. You tried to get the body to the boat, but it sank. Is that about right?”

  “Yeah, that’s just right.” His body relaxed, like, I see, they just want to confirm what I said. He hadn’t heard any of the testimony since his.

  “Why did you use the boat hook?”

  He looked at me as if I’d asked why the ocean was wet. “What do you mean? To get the body, of course.”

  “Why not use your hands?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No, the body was too far away.”

  “You couldn’t have just brought the boat right up next to the body and grabbed it, tried to bring it into the boat, or tied it up?”

  Finn stood. “Objection. Relevance. Where is this going? What does it matter exactly how it happened? We know the boat hook came in contact with the body.”

  I looked at her. She must have caught on.

  I turned back to the judge. “Your Honor, the relevance will become apparent very soon.”

  Stevens pulled on her ear. “I’m going to allow it, but let’s keep things moving, counselor. You may answer the question, Mr. Rozetti.”

  I led him through questions that made it clear the boat hook wasn’t really needed.

  Changing the subject, I asked, “You’ve said that you didn’t know Mr. Romero, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  I shrugged and lifted my hands. “Never saw him before?”

  “Maybe I’ve seen him. It’s a small town.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “You didn’t work with him?”

  “No. I’d have—no, I didn’t.”

  “Have you heard of a company called DialUSA?”

  The blood drained from his face. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”

  “Yes. Yes, I have.”

  “And did you work for them, off and on?”

  He swallowed. “Yeah.”

  “Was this an off-the-books job?”

  “No.”

  “Did you report these earnings on your tax returns?”

  Finn stood. “Objection. Mr. Rozetti is not on trial here.”

  “Overruled.”

  “Some of them.”

  “Is it true that there are some bad dudes involved with that company? That they do illegal things?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “And yet they must have told you they weren’t reporting your earnings to the IRS. Wouldn’t that make them criminals?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mr. Rozetti, is it true that just a few days before you reported seeing Mr. Romero’s body, you purchased a very expensive flat-screen TV?”

  “Absolutely. Sure.”

  “Did you ever see Mr. Romero working at DialUSA?”

  “Ah, yeah.” He actually snapped his fingers. “That’s where I’d seen him, yeah.”

  “Mr. Rozetti, had Angelo done anything to anger the bad dudes at DialUSA? The ones from out of state?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know that?”

  I would like to have said, “Let the court record show that Mr. Rozetti has started sweating profusely.” I looked at the jurors. Are they noticing?

  “Mr. Rozetti, did Angelo pay you to make it seem that he’d died by falling into the ocean so he could disappear and the bad guys would think he was dead?”

  “What? No! Of course not.”

  “Remembering that you are under oath, did Angelo cut himself, or otherwise get some of his tissue on your boat hook, then tell you to put it in a bucket of seawater, and take it out on your boat so you could come in and give it to police to test?”

  “No.”

  “Louder, please.”

  “No!”

  “Did he give you a good look at his new tattoo so that you could describe it to the police as part of this whole cock-and-bull story about seeing his body out in the ocean?”

  “No.”

  The airhorn they found at Tepona Point!

  “Isn’t it true that Angelo Romero is alive and well? He told you that he was going to blow an airhorn so that the surfers would look up, and then he’d jump from the cliff and make it look like he fell. He was going to time his jump with the waves so that he would survive, then he would swim in and run away. Everyone would assume he was dead, and they’d be sure of it once the DNA from your boat hook was a match. Isn’t that so?”

  Even the slowpokes in the courtroom got the idea at that point. I loved the murmuring.

  “No. That’s crazy talk. I saw his body in the ocean just like I said.”

  A Perry Mason moment was too much to hope for. That is, to have a witness jump up and say, “Yes! I admit it. It’s all true!” Those don’t happen in real life.

  Before I got a chance to say that I was done with the witness, a bailiff banged in through the doors, rushed up the aisle, went to the bench, and handed Judge Stevens a folded note. Her eyebrows flew into the stratosphere.

  “I’d like to see counsel in my chambers, right now.”

  As soon as we were seated, Finn started in. “Your Honor, this whole ridiculous fantasy—”

  The judge gave her the traffic cop treatment. I didn’t even want to look at Finn.

  Stevens took a breath. “Mr. Angelo Romero’s body has turned up.”

  I was speechless.

  “Apparently it washed up on a remote beach south of Crescent City, in a protected cave. Some hikers found it. The medical examiner up there just completed a quick DNA test and confirmed it was Mr. Romero. We’re keeping this under wraps until an examination is performed, but it’s likely him.”

  Crescent City was to the north, confirming the Coast Guard officer’s assessment
of the currents.

  “I hate to do this,” the judge said, “but I’m going to declare a mistrial.”

  “No!”

  She frowned. “But, Mr. Goodlove, you said, not ten minutes ago, that Mr. Romero was alive and well.”

  “True. I was clearly wrong. But my theory, which I have a lot of confidence in, can’t be rejected because of this. He planned to be alive and well, but his plans went awry. I think I can explain why that happened. We do not want to go through this again. The state doesn’t want to pay for yet another trial.”

  “Ms. Finn?”

  “May I confer with Mr. Goodlove?”

  “You may not.”

  I suspected Finn wanted a deal. A quid pro quo: She wouldn’t oppose a mistrial, and I wouldn’t bring up her misconduct. That would have been a tough decision for me. I was glad I didn’t have to make it.

  “Ms. Finn, will you be cross-examining Mr. Rozetti?”

  “No,” Finn said.

  “How many more witnesses will you need, Mr. Goodlove?”

  “One, only. We can finish today, with closing arguments tomorrow.”

  The judge sighed. “Okay. Let’s git ’er done.”

  Apparently Judge Stevens was a fan of Larry the Cable Guy.

  * * *

  Before stepping to the lectern, I looked over the spectators. Nicole! My daughter must have taken time off from law school to come watch her dad. I smiled at her and winked.

  At the lectern, I said, “The defense calls Ms. Bridget Dundon to the stand.”

  I’d excluded Bridget from the courtroom for everything that followed her testimony; I’d had a feeling she was involved. I’d also sat Carly down and told her it was Bridget who’d had the long-term affair with her husband. She’d freaked but not quite as badly as I’d expected. She gave me her word that she’d keep herself under control, but she tensed significantly when her disloyal friend walked up to the witness stand.

  I didn’t waste any time. I signed my questions to her, and the ASL translator converted them into English for the rest of the people in the courtroom. “Ms. Dundon, were you having an affair with the deceased, Mr. Angelo Romero?” Did she know that Angelo was, in the words of the Munchkin coroner, most sincerely dead?

  “No … yes.” She made the “sorry” sign again, but Carly kept her eyes on her hands in front of her.

  Time for the shotgun blast between the eyes. “Were you part of Angelo’s scheme to fake his own death?”

  Bang! Her head jerked back. She’d turned white as a Beluga whale. “No! What? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she signed.

  “The bad guys were after him. He thought they had a contract out,” I said. “You two schemed to fake his death then run off and live together. Take on new identities. Did you suggest that he throw a dummy off the cliff, but he said he could jump without killing himself?”

  Jen and Carly looked at me like, Where is this coming from? But Bridget’s expression said to me, and perhaps to the jury, How did he know that?

  She tried to disguise her shock as confusion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I asked a question to which I didn’t know the answer. It was safe, though. I couldn’t think of an answer that would hurt us. “Were you there with Angelo when he jumped off the cliff?”

  Before she answered, a shriek came from the spectator seats. I spun around.

  Ms. Dowzer stood and pointed at Bridget. “She’s the one I saw. It was her!”

  I looked at Bridget then at my sister. Of course. I hadn’t noticed it because I’d grown up with Carly, but to a stranger, the two women looked remarkably similar. And they both had Bizet hoodies.

  Why hadn’t I figured that out? I’d had all the pieces. When the anonymous woman told Carly about the affair, she’d written, I thought it was you, but when I got closer, I saw it was someone else. When telling me of the affair, Toby had said, “I always thought men had affairs with women who are really different from their wives. I guess that’s not always true.”

  Pandemonium. Stevens rapped her gavel multiple times. I was hoping she’d say, “Order! Order in the court!” because I’d never heard that in real life, only in movies, but that didn’t happen.

  Then I got the hunch that put all the puzzle pieces together. Angelo’s body tumbled through the air, as the surfer had testified, but he hadn’t learned how to do flips. And there had been a delay between the sound of the airhorn and Angelo’s fall. Should I go for it?

  “Ms. Dundon,” I said, “Angelo’s body has been found. Not just some fake DNA evidence that you and he cooked up. Your boyfriend is dead. Isn’t it true that you were with Angelo when he was ready to jump off Tepona Point? He blew the airhorn then hesitated. You thought he was chickening out, so you helped him.”

  “Objection! Leading.”

  “Sustained.”

  I kept going. “You pushed him. But he wasn’t chickening out. He was waiting for a big wave, for just the right time to jump. But you pushed him, so he fell at the wrong time, in between wave peaks. He was killed when he slammed into the rocks. Isn’t that what happened?”

  She buried her head in the hands. Her crying sounded subtly different from a hearing person’s sobs.

  Then it happened: Bridget nodded.

  Judge Stevens said, “Let the record show that the witness nodded. Ms. Dundon, can you please answer with a yes or no?”

  But of course Bridget couldn’t hear what the judge was asking her to do.

  I guess Perry Mason moments do sometimes happen in real life.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Judge Stevens had heard enough. She dismissed the charges and cracked her gavel. With that sound, Carly’s nightmare was over.

  We celebrated in the office with pizza and champagne, rehashing the whole trial.

  “What the hell was all that about a dummy?” Carly asked.

  “Dummy?” I frowned but couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

  “C’mon, boss, spill it,” Jen said.

  “I had some information from a secret source that there was a dummy in Dundon’s house.”

  “Louella didn’t break in, did she?”

  “No. The dummy was made with sticks and rocks tied together with fishing nets. Throw it off the cliff, and from a distance, say three hundred meters, it would look like a person falling. A regular mannequin wouldn’t work. It might wash up on the shore, and the jig would be up. But this dummy would sink and break up in the surf.”

  Jen looked up at the ceiling. “But one of them decided there was a better way.”

  Carly signed, “That would be Angelo.”

  We all looked at her.

  “Angelo always wanted to do things the risky way,” she said. “It’s why he was always involved in one barely legal scheme or another. Will Bridget go to jail?”

  “She’ll likely be charged with involuntary manslaughter. She didn’t intend to kill him, she was probably just trying to help. Unless she was mad. Like, ‘C’mon, you big pussy, just jump already.’ But in any case, what she did was inherently reckless, and she would have known that. Maybe, because she’s deaf, Angelo wasn’t able to communicate quickly enough that he was waiting for the right moment to jump.”

  Nicole said, “But what they did was part of the commission of a crime.”

  “What crime was that?” I asked.

  “It’s got to be illegal to fake your own death, right?”

  “Surprisingly, no. But if it turns out that Bridget stood to get some money from a life insurance policy, for example, that would be fraud.”

  Carly signed, “I’m going to push her off a fucking cliff.”

  I didn’t think it was funny.

  * * *

  Louella woke from her coma a few days after the trial was over. Jen and I drove to St. Joe’s to see her.

  A full recovery was out of the question. Because of the delay between the heart attack and the treatment, she’d lost too much cardiac muscle. There would be some imp
rovement, but she’d always have a weak heart. Gail said they were looking into the possibility of a heart transplant.

  Irrationally, I kept wishing I had tried harder to make her quit smoking. Jen said that she’d never have listened.

  At the bedside, we had to lean in close to hear her.

  “Is the trial still going on?” she whispered.

  I smiled. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Where am I?’”

  She shook her head. “Already did that. What happened?”

  “It’s all over, thanks to you.” I filled her in.

  She told us about the intruders.

  “The FBI is rolling up the DialUSA operation. They caught the guy that shot at you.”

  A nurse told us that Louella had to rest, and we said our goodbyes. Hopefully not our final goodbyes.

  Up at the psych ward, I visited with Toby. He was beginning to respond to the administration of lithium, and the docs felt it was a clear sign that he had bipolar disorder. He was emotionally flat, and his hands shook, but his doctor assured me that would improve as they dialed in the correct dosage. He’d be released in a week.

  Crawford lost his job but wouldn’t face criminal charges for his suborning of perjury. He moved out of the area. Finn denied any knowledge of the fraud, so I set up a conference in Judge Stevens’s chambers.

  As soon as we sat, Finn said, “Goodlove is just out to get me, Your Honor. I don’t know what kind of grudge he’s got. Of course I didn’t know anything about what that sleazeball Crawford was doing.”

  Stevens sighed and turned to me. “I tend to agree with you, Mr. Goodlove, but there’s simply no evidence that Ms. Finn was in on it.”

  “May I read a transcript?”

  “A transcript?”

  “This is what Ms. Finn and Detective Crawford said right before they called the jailhouse snitch.”

  I read from the sheet in my hand:

  “Finn: No. They’ll see through it.

  “Crawford: I don’t care. Without Heron’s testimony, the bitch will walk.

  “Finn: It’s all your doing. I want no part of it. I’ll say I knew nothing.

  “Crawford: Fine. You don’t know a thing. This will work.”

  I’d had to fill in some of the words Carly had been unable to speech-read, but it was close enough. The dramatic flush of Finn’s pale face, seen by the judge, was as good as a confession.