“Oh, I will, Victor, believe you me.” She winked. “And I’ll enjoy it, too.”
I didn’t like that wink. There was something in it that gave me a chill. Probably the usual Mia Dalton intimidation, but still, as I watched her walk out the courtroom door, I suspected she wasn’t as livid as I had hoped.
48
Mia Dalton wasn’t a rock star in court. She didn’t hold the jury spellbound in her fist, didn’t shoot off pyrotechnics in the middle of the trial, didn’t croon out like a crooner her sad, sweet ballad of blood and murder. More stonemason than Rolling Stone, she left the fireworks to the defense attorneys trying to bring down the house as she slowly and carefully laid her bricks of evidence. And that is precisely what made her such a devastating prosecutor. In the confines of the courtroom, never underestimate the riveting brilliance of sheer competence.
“She was a lovely girl, bright and lively, full of love, she was,” said Mrs. Cullen.
“And do you remember when she met the defendant?” asked Dalton.
“Oh, yes, I do, of course I do. She was head over heels. So happy she was, my little girl. So full of life and love.”
I could have stood and objected at that point. I could have yelled out “Hearsay” and the judge would have sustained my objection, and the love that Leesa Dubé told her mother she felt for my client could have been erased from the record, but what kind of idiot would do something like that? So I sat on my hands, and I let Mrs. Cullen have her say. Yes, Leesa was in love with François, yes, their wedding was storybook, yes, they were both excited about the baby, yes, everything was going so well. But of course François worked late hours at the restaurant, and of course there were the inevitable problems with money, and yes, of course, Leesa did feel abandoned and depressed after the baby came and François was less and less in evidence at their apartment.
“And then,” said Mrs. Cullen, “she found out about the affairs.”
“What was her reaction when she found out?”
“What do you think? She was devastated.”
Of course she was.
“And what did she do when she found out?”
“What do you think? She kicked the slime right out of the house and filed for divorce.”
Of course she did.
“Objection to the epithet,” I chirped.
“Sustained,” said the judge.
“Please try not to label the defendant a slime, Mrs. Cullen,” said Mia Dalton.
“I’ll try,” she said, “but it will be no easy task, Ms. Dalton, because he’s a slime if ever there was one.”
Of course he is.
Every murder trial has two questions: How and Why. When the answer to How is strong, when five people and a video camera catch the defendant take out a gun and pop the deceased, who the hell cares about the Why? But when the How is based on a mess of circumstantial evidence, as in the François Dubé case, suddenly the Why becomes powerfully important. Which explains why Dalton, ever the artisan, was holding the How for later and leading her case with Why.
After Mrs. Cullen testified about the deteriorating relationship between her daughter and her son-in-law, after she testified about the acrimonious divorce proceedings and the fights over Amber, after Mrs. Cullen was able to vent all the bile from her spleen, Dalton turned to me and said, “Your witness.”
There was so much I was ready to ask Mrs. Cullen, about her strained relations with her daughter, about how her daughter would never have confided in her about a lover, especially a bad boy like Clem, about her utter ignorance of what actually happened on the night of her daughter’s death. There was so much ammunition. I stood up, stared at Mrs. Cullen, and leaned forward as if readying to unleash the furious fusillade of my cross-examination.
“I am so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Cullen,” I said finally. “No questions for this witness.”
I have learned from our first president that sometimes retreat is the most aggressive strategy. She was the grieving mother, she had taken on the burden of the young granddaughter, she could do my client no good up there on the stand. Get her off, as quickly as possible, and move on, that was my plan. And as a side benefit, there was a little message to the twelve and two alternates who mattered. I am not going to ask her any questions,I was telling the jury, because nothing that she said is of any import to the meat of the case. Nothing she can say makes it more likely that my client killed his wife.
As Mrs. Cullen climbed down from the stand and made her way out of the courtroom, Dalton stood and said, “Prosecution calls Darcy DeAngelo.”
Of course it does.
She looked quite tasty as she walked down the aisle, Darcy DeAngelo, one of the women who’d had an affair with François. She was a sturdy woman, with her hands tightly clasped and a thin, pretty face, and she was dressed for court, a modest skirt, low pumps, her hair pinned up. She made quite the tasteful impression, though probably not the one Dalton would have liked. If Mia Dalton had dressed her, she would have worn a black bustier and high-heeled shoes with straps that climbed her thigh, she would have had long, clawlike nails and makeup smeared bright, and she would have looked like she had just come in off a late-night shift on South Street. But no such luck for Dalton, although it might have been a nice sight to see.
As Darcy DeAngelo was sworn in, I took a quick look at the audience in the courtroom. A high-profile murder case always draws a nice crowd, and this was no exception: a few reporters, an artist trying to get my jawline right, the usual gang of time wasters finding their entertainment in the criminal courts. And then a more interested crew: the Cullens and their entourage; Detective Torricelli, sitting alongside Mia Dalton at the prosecution table; and my old friend Whitney Robinson III, keeping tabs on everything.
It wasn’t much of a story, Darcy DeAngelo’s story of the affair. She worked under François in the kitchen, that she would end up under François in the bedroom was only to be expected. Commercial kitchens are like the bathhouses of the culinary set, bubbling pots of stock, prep guys with big knives, Wellfleet oysters, duck confit, earthy black truffles, demiglace, oui, oui. Late nights, after the crowd had gone home and the doors had been locked, sitting at the zinc bar François had imported from France, drinking champagne at cost, feeling the exhausted exuberance of two comrades who had just survived another night of the gastronomic wars. And she didn’t say it on the stand, but I could bet it was atop that very same bar that their affair was consummated. I have it on good authority that champagne and zinc are the two primary ingredients of Viagra.
“Mr. Carl,” said the judge after Dalton had led Darcy DeAngelo through the recitation of her affair with my client. “Do you have any questions?”
I did, actually, and I must admit that during most of her direct, I had been playing them out in my mind. “Do you like Mexican food, Ms. DeAngelo?” “Yes, actually, I do, Mr. Carl.” “I know this place on Thirteenth Street, supposed to be excellent.” “I’ve heard that it is.” “Do you think, Ms. DeAngelo, you can join me for dinner there on Saturday night?” “Oh, I think I can, Mr. Carl.” “Call me Victor.” “Okay, Victor. And please, call me-”
“Mr. Carl,” said the judge impatiently. “Do you have any questions for this witness?”
I stood, buttoned my jacket, looked at the pleasing figure of Darcy DeAngelo on the stand. The affair was a problem, absolutely, but I couldn’t deny its existence, and the witness, in her direct, had made it seem almost banal. Banal adultery was good, banal adultery is not an incentive for murder, simply an incentive for more and better adultery. There was one moment that had caused a tremor, when she testified that François had told her, “I’ll never let Leesa take my daughter from me, never.” Not good, absolutely, but in it came, over my useless objection, and there wasn’t much I could do with it. I could ask her if she ever saw violence in François, I could ask her if he was a tender lover and a tender man, I could try to use François’s adulterous lover as a character witness, but that seemed a little unseemly, didn’t it?