"Now he said something else," Washburn continued, "after he said he'd kicked Mr. Nolan's ass, didn't he?"
"He said, 'Goddamned right.'"
"Before he said that, you said that Ron Nolan was dead, correct? But you have no way of knowing whether he understood you when you said that, do you?"
"Well, no, not for sure."
"He was drunk, beat up, and more than a little incoherent, correct?"
"Yes."
"So to repeat my question, do you have any way of knowing whether he heard or understood you when you told him that Ron Nolan was dead?"
"He was pretty out of it. I can't honestly tell you that he understood anything that was going on."
"Did Patrolman Scholler say anything else while you were transporting him to the police station?"
"Nothing coherent. Just gibberish."
"Your Honor!" Now Mills was on her feet, truly enraged. "Sidebar, please."
Clearly, tempers all around were fairly raw by this time. Tollson gave the request a full thirty seconds before, muttering, he nodded and waved the two attorneys forward for their third sidebar of the afternoon.
When they got to the front, Tollson was waiting, pointing a finger at them as though he were a schoolteacher. "I'm getting more than a little tired of this bickering, Counselors. This is not the way we do a trial."
But Mills, fire in her eyes, came right back at him. "I'd prefer we didn't have these issues, either, but Mr. Washburn's conduct here is unconscionable! You just sustained my objection about the word incoherent and now the witness gets it in, barely disguised."
"In such a way that his answer was not conclusory as to my client's mental state, Your Honor. That was, I believe, the objection. Lieutenant Lochland is certainly qualified to call gibberish incoherent."
But Mills wasn't giving up. In a restrained voice, she said, "Your Honor. Obviously, if Defendant was incoherent, then his earlier words don't have nearly the same power."
Washburn had a great deal of experience in situations like this one. The temptation was to begin responding directly to your opponent, and this invariably infuriated judges. So he kept his eyes on Tollson, his voice modulated and relaxed. "That is, of course, more or less my intention in pursuing this line of questioning, Your Honor. The distinction between an incoherent epithet and an incriminating answer to a question, though perhaps too subtle for my opponent to grasp, is hugely significant."
"All right. That's enough of that, both of you. I'm going to allow the question and the answer to stand. Ms. Whelan-Miille, you, of course, may redirect." He pointed down at them once again. "I will not be entertaining any more sidebar requests today. This witness has been up here for nearly an hour, and two-thirds of that time we've been up here arguing about four or five words. It's got to stop. If you have objections, raise them in the usual way and I'll rule as best I can. But that's the end of this quibbling nonsense. Understood? Both of you?"
Washburn nodded genially. "Yes, Your Honor."
Mills stood flatfooted, apparently still too angry to talk.
Tollson brought his hard gaze to rest on her. "Counselor? Clear?"
At last she got the words out. "Yes, Your Honor."
Lochland was still on the stand, having established that on the Saturday of his arrest, Evan had been a fount of incoherent and meaningless babble. Washburn could be forgiven for feeling that things were going his way. After he passed around to the jury the booking photo, Defense Exhibit A, in which a completely disheveled Evan stared blankly at the camera, further establishing his incoherence, Washburn, in his courtliest manner, half turned to Mills. "Redirect."
Mills looked up at the clock, which read four forty-five. She could probably get in a question or two about whether or not Scholler's "Goddamned right" had sounded coherent or not to the lieutenant, but in the end she decided that this would only serve to underscore Washburn's thrust-that nothing Evan said that day meant much of anything. Even "Goddamned right," which she had worked so hard to get in. It was what he'd said, and she had no doubt what it had meant-it was tantamount to an admission that he'd killed Nolan and Washburn knew it. But whether or not the jurors would come to see it that way was anyone's guess. She was going to have to trust that they would use their common sense.
All she wanted at the moment was to put this day behind her. She'd get another hack at Washburn tomorrow, and she had the cards-Evan Scholler was guilty and the jury was going to see it and that was all there was to it. Raising her eyes to the judge, she felt the urge to smile begin at the corners of her mouth. She looked over to the jury, to Washburn, back up to the judge. "No questions," she said.
Tollson brought down his gavel. "Court's adjourned until nine-thirty tomorrow morning."
25
Fred Spinoza was a far cry from being a hostile prosecution witness.
In fact, he felt seriously abused that someone who worked for his department, played on his bowling team, got his help finding the address of the house he was planning to break into, where he would then commit murder, and had even come to his own home and played the war hero with his children…
Every time Spinoza thought about it, it roiled his guts. He believed that there was a special section in hell reserved for someone who could have done that to his kids.
Never mind what Evan Scholler did to Ron Nolan.
Resplendent in his dark blue uniform, Spinoza settled himself into the chair hard by the judge's platform. He'd put in a lot of time on the witness stand in his career, and rarely had he looked forward to the experience more than today. Now here came Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille up from her table in the packed courtroom, to a space about midway between him and the jury.
Mills and he had shared drinks on several occasions, once they'd gotten to know each other over this case. There had been a short time in the first weeks when he thought she might be coming on to him, but though he found her quite attractive, he loved Leesa and had made that clear enough to Mills that, if she was in fact trolling, she chose to back off.
But some chemistry, he knew, still sparked between them.
He knew that this would play well for a jury-it was just another one of those intangibles that sometimes came into play during a trial. A major People's witness and an assistant DA working in understated sync could bring a sense of rightness, of unassailable conviction, to a prosecution case.
Mills seemed rested and confident as she nodded to the jurors, then smiled at her witness as though she meant it. "Lieutenant Spinoza, what is your position with the police department?"
"I'm the head of the homicide detail."
After she went over the details of his service, she got down to it. "Defendant was a patrolman, was he not, Lieutenant?"
"Yes. He'd been a patrolman working a regular beat before he went overseas, and when he came back, he went back to his former position."
"How was it, then, that you came to know him?"
Spinoza shot half a grin at the jury, then shrugged. What was he going to do? It was the truth. "He was on my bowling team."
"Can you tell the Court, please, Lieutenant, about the first time you ran across a connection between Defendant and the victim in this case, Ron Nolan?"
"Yes. I was in the office on a weekend. The Khalil murders had just taken place, so I was working overtime. I happened to run across the defendant at one of the computers, and I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was trying to locate the address of a drug dealer."
"Did you ask him the name of that drug dealer?"
"Yes. He told me it was Ron Nolan."
"Is that against department policy?"