“That’s ridiculous,” said Eggert. “I demand an offer of proof.”
“I don’t think,” said the judge sourly in his brutish rasp of a voice, “that you should ever demand anything in my chambers, Mr. Eggert. However, I appreciate your concern. Do you have any proof, Mr. Prescott, to back up this charge?”
“I can prove Bissonette was sleeping with Raffaello’s daughter, and we all know that he’s a killer.”
“Is that so?” asked the judge. “Are you going to prove that Mr. Raffaello is a killer in this trial?”
“Every one of those jury members knows who he is. Just let me ask the question, Judge.”
“Not if you can’t prove he’s a killer. Now, Mr. Eggert, is this Mr. Raffaello under investigation by your office?”
“Under federal law, Your Honor, I can’t confirm or deny that.”
“I hereby make a formal request for all the evidence you have against Enrico Raffaello,” said Prescott.
“On what grounds?” asked a surprised Eggert.
“Based on what we know, anything you may have is Brady,” said Prescott.
“We don’t have anything exculpatory and you know it. We’ve found absolutely nothing linking Raffaello to Bissonette’s murder, nothing at all.”
“Mr. Eggert,” said the judge. “Do you have enough evidence to indict Mr. Raffaello?”
“No, sir. If we did, we would have already.”
“I’m going to formally deny your Brady request, Mr. Prescott, and I am going to forbid you, under threat of contempt, to ask any more questions about Mr. Raffaello’s daughter or anyone else whom Mr. Bissonette might have slept with. Do you understand, sir?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” said Prescott.
“I’m not going to allow gossip and inadmissible innuendo to act as a defense in any trial in my court, this is the federal courthouse, not the offices of the National Enquirer, do you understand, Mr. Prescott?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Do you understand, Mr. Carl?”
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.
“All right, then let’s go out there and try this case as if the rules of evidence were still in existence.”
“What do we do now?” I asked Prescott in the courtroom as we waited for the jury to return.
“We scramble,” he said.
And scramble he did. He asked Ruffing about the waterfront deal and why exactly it had collapsed. He asked about the phone conversations with Moore and the meetings with Concannon, the exact locations, the exact words spoken. He asked about the discrepancy between the amount Ruffing claimed to have given to Concannon and the amount actually received by CUP and whether Bissonette had deducted the full amount claimed on his tax returns, and Ruffing said he had. It took Prescott almost all of that day to ask his questions. He asked about the lighting in the back parking lot the night of Bissonette’s beating and how far away the limousine had been when he saw the men stepping out of the car and he got Ruffing to say he wasn’t totally sure who the men were but that it looked like the councilman and someone else, a black man, and to say that though he recognized the limousine as the councilman’s he couldn’t exactly say how that limousine was different from any other long black limousine with a boomerang on the back. And he asked about the back taxes that Ruffing had owed and the deal Ruffing struck with the IRS and how part of the insurance money on the burned down club went to the IRS to keep up Ruffing’s part of the deal. In all it was a solid cross-examination by Prescott, indeed he had asked almost all of the questions I would have asked had I spent the night preparing instead of drinking. But in the end, with all his bluster, all his questions, all his intimidation and insinuation, he did nothing to make Ruffing seem like a liar in front of the jury.
The swelling in my head had subsided and what was left was a deep exhaustion as Prescott asked questions about areas traversed twice or thrice already and Ruffing answered them with the very same answers he had produced before. The rhythm was repetitive, drowsing, hypnotic. I could barely keep my eyes open as Prescott asked his last series of questions.
“All of your conversations with Councilman Moore were on the tapes, isn’t that right, Mr. Ruffing?”
“Most of them. Some were made on untapped phones.”
“Were the unrecorded conversations any different than the taped ones?”
“No, substantially the same.”
“Now I noticed something peculiar on the tapes of your conversations with Mr. Moore. What I noticed, Mr. Ruffing, is that nowhere in those conversations did Councilman Moore mention a specific amount of money.”
“I thought he had.”
“There was no mention of it in the tapes.”
“He mentioned contributions.”
“But never amounts and never how it was to be paid.”
“He might have mentioned it in the unrecorded conversations.”
“But you said those were substantially the same just a second ago, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, I did.”
“So we can assume if he didn’t mention specific amounts in the taped conversations, he never mentioned them at all.”
“I guess so.”
“In fact, it was only Chester Concannon who gave the specifics about money.”
“That might be right.”
“And those conversations weren’t taped.”
“No.”
“Now those checks you gave Concannon, did they come back from the bank?”
“Sure, cashed out by CUP.”
“But you didn’t get anything back from CUP for the cash? No receipts?”
“No, nothing.”
“So CUP only acknowledged payments of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that was duly reported on its books.”
“I don’t know about their books.”
“And the councilman never mentioned that he got the cash?”
“No. He didn’t want to talk specifics about that.”
“It was Chester Concannon who talked the specifics.”
“That’s right.”
“It was Chester Concannon who told you how much to pay, how to pay it, that some should be paid in cash.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And it was Chester Concannon who threatened you after you stopped paying.”
“Yes, that’s what happened.”
“And as far as you know, that cash might never have reached CUP.”
“As far as I know.”
“And it might never have reached Councilman Moore.”
“As far as I know.”
“It might have gone no further than Chester Concannon.”
“That’s possible.”
“I have no further questions,” said Prescott.
Judge Gimbel lifted up his heavy prune face and, peering hard at me over his half reading glasses, said, “Do you have any questions for this witness, Mr. Carl?”
Still sitting, I looked around the courtroom. Prescott was back at the table, conferring quietly with the councilman, ignoring me. Eggert was looking at a yellow pad, taking notes. Concannon’s eyes were closed, like he had been put to sleep by the questioning himself. I shook my head to wake myself and stood up slowly. I found it difficult to phrase the words, my mouth dry, my tongue thicker than before, my stomach turning over. Finally, after trying to squeeze them through my lips, the words fell out in a tumble. “I’d like a few moments with my client.”
Judge Gimbel smiled condescendingly at me. “Good idea, Mr. Carl. Court is recessed for twenty minutes.”
31
WHAT HAD STUNNED ME by the last series of Prescott’s questions to Ruffing was not just that he had turned on Concannon, shifting blame to him, but that he had done it so blatantly. I would have expected him to do his damage subtly, a question here, a remark there, I would have expected Prescott to slip the knife into Concannon surreptitiously, silently, the razor-thin blade sliding through the vertebrae so cleanly that Concannon himself wouldn’t have known he was dead until his knees collapsed beneath him, and even then not be sure. But Prescott had discarded all subtlety. He had looked at the jury, smiled, and said it wasn’t my guy, it was his guy, and all of a sudden the strategy imposed upon me of trying to make my client seem not a part of the proceedings was revealed to be a sick joke.