Thursday morning, nine o’clock, and our first witness hits the stand. When you’re cruising through a magnetic minefield, it’s best to do so in a slow boat made of wood. So you might say that our opening witness is a bit dull-except for one thing: He can explain to the jury how the murder weapon, the hammer, found its way into the hands of the killer.
From the inception Tuchio and the cops have been welded to the theory that Carl possessed special access both to the victim in his hotel room and to the murder weapon, the hammer, because Carl had access to master card keys due to his job in the hotel. All their evidence has confirmed this-from Carl’s supervisor, who verified this fact and testified to it on the stand, to Carl’s own boasting and bravado at the Del Rio Tavern, where he bragged about having access to Scarborough because of master keys. It is one of the linchpins of their case, that only someone with access to the locked maintenance closet could have gotten the hammer. That pin is about to be pulled.
Wally Hettinger has worked for the Presidential Regis Hotel for almost eight years. He is a maintenance man, one of eleven people working around the clock to keep the hotel running smoothly and to repair any problems that may crop up twenty-four hours a day.
After he’s given his name and background and told the jury where he works, the first thing out of Hettinger’s mouth in response to a question is that the lock on the maintenance closet on the top floor of the Presidential Regis was broken. This is the place where the state claims the hammer was stored.
This is one item of evidence that catches Tuchio by surprise. Herman found the witness in the way Herman finds everything, by hanging around and talking to people, often people on the bottom corporate rungs.
“If you tried to turn the knob on the door, it would feel like it was locked,” says Hettinger. “But if you pulled on it, the door would open. It had been that way for a while.” He shrugs a shoulder. “The latch bolt on the lock didn’t quite meet the opening on the metal striker bar that fits in the doorframe. It’s a common problem on doors. It was a big problem at the hotel. You ask me, I think it’s a problem with the way they were manufactured-I mean the doors at the Regis.”
This draws an objection from Tuchio. “The witness is not an engineer or an expert on door manufacture.”
Quinn strikes the witness’s comment and tells the jury to disregard the bit about manufacturing problems.
“Were you required to repair hotel doors often?” I ask.
“All the time.” The witness tells the jury the doors were heavy, solid-core metal. “So over time gravity gets a hold, and they sag,” he says. “Either the screws in the hinges work loose and the door slides down a little-doesn’t take much, eighth of an inch sometimes is all-or else sometimes just the screws in the top hinges come loose and the door will lean a bit in the frame. Either way,” says Hettinger, “the bolt from the lock won’t hit the opening in the striker right, and the lock won’t catch. In which case the door may look closed, but it’s not locked.”
“Why didn’t you fix it? The maintenance closet door, I mean?”
I can see Tuchio and Detrick at their table poring over my witness list trying to find Hettinger’s name buried in all the chaff. Six hundred names in all. We stuck him somewhere in the middle, so that if they started checking them out, working from either end, Hettinger might be the last they would get to.
“I had that door on a list for repair,” he says, “but it wasn’t priority. Guest rooms are priority.”
“Did you tell the police that the lock on the maintenance-closet door was broken?”
“No. Nobody ever talked to me. When it happened-the murder, I mean-I was on vacation. Visiting my brother up in Idaho.”
Of course the cops talked to the hotel maintenance manager, who didn’t know anything about it, since no one had ever told him.
“I mean, he knew about the problem with the doors,” says Hettinger. “A major headache,” he says. “But he didn’t know about that particular door. If we told him about every door every time it happened, none of us would ever get anything done.”
According to Hettinger, he had become a kind of specialist at fixing the doors, he and one other maintenance man. If there was a problem with a door lock anywhere in the hotel, they got the call.
Whether the cops knew that the lock on the maintenance-closet door was broken and chose to keep it out of their notes, or whether they simply tried turning the handle, assumed it was locked, and had one of the hotel employees use a card key before they actually pulled the handle, opened the door, and checked out the closet, we will never know. But if I had to guess, I would say it’s the latter. They simply didn’t know.
No doubt Tuchio will try to play with this on cross. That if the police couldn’t figure out that the maintenance-closet door wasn’t bolted and locked, how could a random phantom killer be lucky enough to figure it out? The problem for Tuchio is that he can’t know what’s coming next.
I ask Hettinger if this problem-the bolt on the door locks hanging up-to his knowledge had ever occurred on the doors to the Presidential Suite, the room Scarborough was staying in the morning he was killed.
He says, “Yes.” He remembers fixing them a couple of times. According to the witness, they were a particular problem because they were double doors, a six-foot span instead of just three, with one of the doors bolted to the floor and the doorframe above and fixed in place, while the other door swung open and closed.
I then put on a pair of latex surgical gloves and have the clerk retrieve the hammer, the murder weapon, from the evidence cart. I show this to the witness.
“Have you ever seen this hammer before?”
He looks at it closely, puts on a pair of glasses. “Is that it?” He seems surprised. “Is that the hammer that was used to kill the man?”
I assure him that this is the murder weapon and ask him again if he has ever seen it before.”
“Well, yeah,” he says. “The paint marks there on the handle and the number stamped into the top. That was one of the hammers I used all the time to fix the doors. I just thought somebody stole it when I came back from vacation. I didn’t even put in a claim, ’cuz I knew the hotel wouldn’t pay for it. So I just bought another one. Replaced it,” he says.
“We’ll get to that in a moment,” I tell him. “For now, let me ask you a question. If this hammer was inside the maintenance closet on the top floor of the Regis, and the lock on the door to that closet was broken so that it didn’t catch, is it not a fact that anyone could have pulled on that door, opened it, and taken the hammer?”
“I suppose so.”
“Would they have needed a key to open the maintenance-closet door?”
“Not if the lock wasn’t working,” says Hettinger. “But it really wouldn’t have mattered,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Because that hammer, the one you got there, it wasn’t in the maintenance closet.”
This sets off a stir out in the audience. Tuchio, who has been making notes, points of attack to use in coming at the witness on cross-examination, puts down his pen.
“If it wasn’t in the maintenance closet, where was it?”
“Oh, we kept a couple of hammers in that closet, but that one, because of the straight claws on it”-he points with his finger-“that one I kept on an open shelf in the main staircase on the eighth floor.”
“Why would you do that?”