“In case you’re feeling bad, he treated me the same way,” says Harry.
“Who?” I’m busy looking at notes, a summary of Charlie Gross’s statement to the cops.
“Tuchio. When I showed up this morning, I said hello. He was like dry ice, frozen solid and still smoking.” Harry abandons his Monopoly game with the writing implements just long enough to bring his closed fist gently up to his chest in the region of his heart. “And I have to tell you, it hurts.”
“So you want to send him a sympathy card?”
“You joke, but I haven’t felt this bad since my dog died of rabies,” says Harry.
“You don’t have a dog.”
“I know, but if I had one and he died of rabies, I can imagine that he might look a lot like Tuchio does right now. I’ve been thinking. The next time we screw him over, maybe we should try to be a little more polite. When a prosecutor starts foaming at the mouth, you have to begin to wonder what he might do if he really got mad.”
When I glance over at Harry, I get the sense that perhaps he’s only half joking.
Tuchio brings on his witness of the day, Charles “Charlie” Gross.
When the jury is in the box and Carl is planted in his chair between Harry and me, Arnsberg gives me a strange look when he sees the witness, as if to say, Who’s that?
Gross, if he is to be believed, is one of the charter members and the chief financial officer for the Aryan Posse.
According to an investigative report, Gross keeps track of the group’s beer and booty fund as well as the accounts receivable from meth and other pharmaceuticals they sell, often jotting down numbers in ink on the palm of his hand. That way he figures if he gets busted, sweat will dissolve all the evidence. I guess if the IRS wants to see the Posse’s books, they’re just going to have to cut off his hand. It’s thinking like this that got Gross right to the top in the organization.
If you saw any of his mug shots, you’d have to admit that Tuchio has done a crackerjack job of cleaning the witness up for today’s appearance. Gross looks like they’ve put him through a car wash and had him detailed.
Gone are the long, sparse, stringy strands of dirty blond hair that hung down below his shoulders from the craggy, bald summit of Half Dome. The state probably spent forty bucks having the hundred or so hairs on the top of his head styled and clipped. The back and sides of his head are as neatly trimmed as if Suki ran his mower over them.
This morning Gross is wearing a pair of dark blue cuffed slacks with a sharp crease to them, a maroon polo shirt, and a watch that looks like a Rolex, probably a knockoff from Taiwan out of the police property room. The tasseled loafers are a nice touch. No doubt Gross’s feet haven’t seen the inside of anything that wasn’t steel-toed, flapped, and hooked for lacing and that weighed less than ten pounds since he came out of the womb.
Looking at him on the stand, you might swear that you saw him playing the back nine at the village country club yesterday afternoon.
When the feds spring their trap and his pals go looking for Gross to shoot him because he was the idiot who recruited and sponsored the FBI agent, there will be no need to put him in witness protection. Tuchio’s transformation of the man is so complete the Posse will never recognize him. I’m almost wishing that Conan and his friends had gotten in. By now they’d be sitting out in the audience and asking, “Where the hell is Charlie, and who the fuck is that?”
Since he looks like your average accountant on his day off, when they asked him to raise his right hand to be sworn and Gross lifted the left by mistake and then the right, I took a good look at both palms. I wanted to see if he was still keeping books. Unfortunately, it appears as if the scrubbing must have started with the hands.
Unless I can get Gross to take off his shirt, raise his arms, and turn a pirouette, displaying the story of his life ingrained in the graffiti on his body, it’s hard to imagine how the jury is going to get the full flavor of the man.
Tuchio uses a good deal of finesse here. He moves carefully through the witness’s background, covering everything except his three felony convictions and the fact that he has spent almost thirteen years of his life in prison. This is out of bounds under the deal we cut in chambers. Tuchio knows I can’t get at it on cross-examination, so he’s free to ignore it.
But he does not try to hide the fact of Gross’s long association with the Aryan Posse. He explores this in detail, because he knows if he doesn’t, I will expose it on cross, making it look as if they were hiding it.
He takes more than twenty minutes, hitting all the possible low points in Gross’s life, including two divorces, problems with drugs, and the fact that he’s had difficulty holding jobs.
Then Tuchio makes clear his tactic with the witness: The world loves a reformed sinner.
“Let me ask you,” says Tuchio, “are you still a member of the Aryan Posse?”
“No. I’m no longer involved with that group. I want nothing to do with them.”
“Can you tell the jury when you quit this organization?”
“It was after I saw the news,” he says.
“What news?”
“The news. The man killed here,” he says.
“You mean the victim in this case, Terrance Scarborough?”
“Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Why did that make you quit your membership in the Aryan Posse?”
“Because of things I saw and heard. I was ashamed,” he says. Gross looks right at the jury as he says this. “The people in that group did some bad things,” he says, “and I wanted to change my life. I didn’t want to be involved anymore.”
If you listen closely, you can hear the violin music in the background. This is not something Tuchio pulled out of the bag yesterday or the day he lost the agent’s testimony in chambers. This has all the signs of careful stage direction and choreography.
“And why were you ashamed?”
“Because it was a bad life,” he says. “All that hate against other people because of the color of their skin. It was wrong, and I didn’t want to be part of it anymore.”
One woman, an African American in the jury box, is nodding as she hears this. Tuchio will be handing out prayer books and hymnals any minute.
“Was there anything in particular that brought you to this decision, to change your life?”
“Yeah, it was a conversation with him.” Gross sticks his arm out and points. The “him” he’s talking about is Carl.
“Let the record reflect,” says the judge, “that the witness has identified the defendant.”
If I could cut off the prosecutor right here, at this moment, I could pick up the theme and explain how my client led this man from a life of sin to redemption, and we could all march out to the strains of “The Old Rugged Cross.” But somehow I’m guessing that this is not where Tuchio is going.
“And can you tell the jury, what was it in particular that the defendant said that brought you to this point, to take your life in another direction?”
“I was drunk,” says Gross. “And he said some things…terrible things, some awful things about this man who was murdered, this Mr. Scarborough, and I was ashamed. Not right then,” he says, “but later, after he was murdered, because I had laughed when Mr. Arnsberg said this stuff. That memory stayed with me for a long time.”
“I see.” Tuchio makes all this sound as if he’s hearing it for the first time. Gross’s delivery is fervent. There’s just enough scent of the old malefactor lingering about him so that even a cynic like me-on a bad day, if someone blinded me, jammed cotton in my ears, and stuck garlic up my nose-might find myself believing him.
Tuchio carefully takes the witness through his association with Carl, the fact that the two of them had met only a total of eight or ten times, and often in bars. Gross admits that he had a problem with alcohol, but, like everything else that was bad in his life, this, too, is now behind him.