“Did he?” he says. Tuchio knows I didn’t, because my prints were not on the letter when the crime lab examined it.
“No. I think he may-”
“You’ve answered the question,” he says. “The answer is no. So let me ask you a different question.” He’s starting to get into a rhythm. “I know you’re not a lawyer,” he says. “But you have worked on this case, right?”
“To some extent.”
“You know what it’s about, most of the evidence, right?”
“Some of it.”
“Well, you know about the mysterious missing item?” As he says this, Tuchio turns and looks back at me.
When she doesn’t answer, he looks back to her. “The bloody letter?” he clarifies it for her.
“Yes.”
“And the hair evidence, the strands of hair in the bathroom and on the chair at the scene.”
“I know what I’ve read in the papers,” she says. Jennifer’s getting cautious now.
“That would be enough,” he says. “If someone wanted to plant evidence-say, slip it under a lawyer’s door, an item that was taken from the scene of a murder in order to show that the person who was charged didn’t do the crime, and let’s say there was evidence, clear, conclusive evidence that the defendant had in fact been at the scene of the crime-wouldn’t that present a problem?”
“I guess I’m not following,” says Jennifer.
“What I mean is, if we know that the defendant was at the scene and that the item was taken from the scene, doesn’t it stand to reason that the defendant could have taken it in the first place, and if so, how does that clear him?”
“I’m going to object, Your Honor. Hypothetical questions. Counsel is asking the witness to speculate. She’s not a lawyer. She’s not a crime-scene-reconstruction expert.”
“No, but she is here testifying as to how the envelope arrived at their office. The question doesn’t go to her expertise, it goes to credibility. If she doesn’t understand what may be happening here, then maybe she’s in the clear.”
What Tuchio is saying is maybe Jennifer thinks she is telling the truth and that she’s being used, on the stand, for this reason.
“Overruled,” says Quinn. “I’ll allow it.”
Tuchio restates the question without mentioning names. How could Carl be exonerated, cleared by the sudden and mysterious appearance of an item that was at the scene, when we know that Carl was at the scene?
“Well, if he didn’t have the item when he was arrested and he’s been in jail, how could he-”
“Deliver the item to your office?” Tuchio finishes the question for her. “Easy. He could have handed it off to someone else. A friend, a family member, a lawyer,” he says.
Jennifer shakes her head. “No. No…no.”
“How would you know?” he says. “Are you familiar with every item, every scrap of paper, every scintilla and wisp of evidence in the files at your office? Do you know what’s in everybody’s desk drawers or for that matter what they might have in their possession outside of the office?”
“How could I?” she says. “That’s not possible.”
Harry is leaning back in his chair, running his hands through his hair, trying to catch her attention, get her to take a deep breath and to stop.
“My point exactly. All you actually know is what you’ve seen. Isn’t that so?”
“That’s all anybody knows,” she says.
“Precisely.”
“No,” she says. “That can’t…no. And what about the hair?” she says.
I glance over, and Harry rolls his eyes.
“Ah, now we get to the nub,” he says. “The hair, isn’t that convenient?”
She looks at him but doesn’t answer.
“I mean, once you realize that simply producing the item taken from the scene isn’t going to do the trick, that you need something more, isn’t it convenient that this something more, whatever it is, just happens to be in the same envelope?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Well, isn’t it? Convenient, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Well then, let me ask you one final question. Who stands to benefit the most from the items in the envelope that were slipped under your office door in the middle of the night? That should be an easy one,” he says.
She looks at him.
“Come on now, isn’t the answer obvious? Who else could possibly benefit? It’s the defendant, Carl Arnsberg, Mr. Madriani’s client, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” His voice goes up a full octave from the first word to the last.
“I suppose,” she says.
“You suppose?”
“Yes.”
27
The next day, to avoid the media crush downstairs, Quinn allows Harry and me to slip out for lunch using the elevator reserved for judges and high court personnel, located in a back corridor behind chambers.
Jennifer’s testimony regarding the package slipped under our door has resparked the electronic media’s attention gap. Secrecy, “the bloody letter” wrapped in a possible scandal, how it turned up in our office-it now has them salivating.
By the time Harry, Herman, and I meet up at the pub downtown for lunch, news updates from the trial are going head-to-head with primary election returns.
We are seated at a table scarfing sandwiches, watching election numbers on Fox News on the television over the bar. We are eating fast, trying to clue Herman in on Jennifer’s testimony and Tuchio’s insinuation that for some reason we were keeping Herman out of court because he knew something about the envelope under the door.
“They’re saying I did it. Put it under the door?”
“They can’t be that stupid,” says Harry. “By now the cops have to know that you were in Curaçao with us.”
“Tuchio’s trying to throw up smoke,” I tell him.
“There is breaking news… A report from San Diego and the Scarborough murder trial in just a moment. Are…are we ready? Okay, Howard, are you there?”
I ask the bartender to turn up the sound so we can hear it.
“I am here.”
“Can you tell us what’s happening?”
“All we know at this point is that Jennifer Sanchez, a twenty-two-year-old, alluring, dark-haired paralegal, took the stand this morning. She told the jury how she found a mysterious envelope on the floor in the law office where she works last Thursday morning.”
“This is the defense lawyer, the man representing Carl Arnsberg, the defendant?”
“That’s right.”
“So I imagine the prosecution and the police are pretty suspicious at this point?”
“Suspicious is an understatement. According to sources close to the investigation, the police are so angry that there is talk that the D.A.’s office may ask for an investigation by the state bar. According to Ms. Sanchez, the envelope with whatever was inside of it was shoved under the office door sometime after eleven o’clock last Wednesday night.”
“Do we know what’s in the envelope?”
“So far there’s no solid word from investigators on any of that. But according to the testimony, and what was shown in court today, apart from the envelope itself, the one that supposedly came under the door, there was a folded piece of paper, maybe several pages-we couldn’t tell, because our producers weren’t that close. The prosecutor kept referring to this as the ‘bloody letter.’”
“The bloody letter!”
“That’s what he said. Now, this could be important, because if you remember, two weeks ago this same defense lawyer, Paul Madriani, was able to get one of the prosecution’s main witnesses, a forensics expert, to admit that there was evidence of something missing from the crime scene.”
“I remember that, a leather briefcase or a binder. Something like that.”
“No, actually, it was what the lawyer called a shadow left on the surface of a light leather portfolio by blood, what they call spatter evidence. It’s a long, complicated story, but the bottom line is that the expert witness from the police crime lab was forced to admit that this blood shadow on the leather surface of the case meant that something was taken from the scene before the police got there. Then you have to step back about a week-”