“Were these warnings in writing and part of your personnel file?”
“No, they would never put anything like that in writing, because they knew it wasn’t true.”
Marcus Mason objected and successfully got Kitchens’s answer struck, but the message was delivered.
I checked the clock again. It was after 4:15 and I needed another set of questions to get to the finish line.
“Naomi, after you were fired, did you have difficulty getting your next job?” I asked.
“I went back to academia because I couldn’t get an interview for an ethicist position anywhere in Silicon Valley,” Kitchens said.
Marcus objected to the answer being overly broad, but to my surprise the judge let it stand. I then made what became one of my biggest mistakes of the trial, if not my career. I did not ask the judge for the night to consider whether I was finished with my direct examination of Kitchens. I thought it had gone so well and that it was so late in the day that I was bulletproof.
“No further questions for Dr. Kitchens,” I said, getting in one last reminder to the jury of my witness’s pedigree and standing.
“Very well,” the judge said. “We will recess for—”
“Your Honor,” Marcus Mason interrupted, “I have only a few questions for this witness. If you’ll permit that, we could start tomorrow with a new witness and perhaps allow Ms. Kitchens to return home rather than spend another night away.”
“It is four twenty-two, Mr. Mason,” Ruhlin said. “If you are confident you will be finished in eight minutes, you may proceed.”
“Definitely, Your Honor,” Mason said.
“Then go ahead,” Ruhlin said.
As I left the lectern for my table I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew I had somehow misplayed the last minutes of the day and that something unfortunate was about to happen.
Mason took the lectern and looked at Kitchens. The look of unflinching defiance I had seen in her eyes in the hallway after lunch was gone. Kitchens seemed to know that something unexpected was coming her way.
“Ms. Kitchens,” Mason began. “Wouldn’t you say—”
“Objection, Your Honor,” I said. “The witness has a doctorate and should be accorded the respect of that achievement by counsel.”
“Mr. Haller makes a point,” Ruhlin said.
“Of course, Your Honor,” Mason said. “Dr. Kitchens, wouldn’t you say that it would be wrong for an ethicist to lie to a jury in a court of law?”
“I haven’t lied,” Kitchens said.
“But it would be wrong if you did, correct?”
“It would be, but I have not lied.”
“What about a lie to the company that the ethicist works for? Would that be wrong?”
“I think lying in any circumstance is wrong.”
“In fact, would that not be one of the major rules of being an ethicist? Do not lie?”
“Yes.”
“You have claimed in front of this jury and this judge that you were fired for supposedly speaking out about your concerns about this project, isn’t that right?”
“It’s what happened.”
“And you swore an oath to tell nothing but the truth, correct?”
“I did.”
“But you lied to the jury, didn’t you?”
I stood up and objected.
“Counsel is badgering the witness,” I said. “How many times and ways does she have to say she hasn’t lied?”
“Mr. Mason,” Ruhlin said. “It’s time to get to the point. Or we can recess for the day.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Mason said. “I will indeed get to the point.”
Ruhlin signaled for me to sit down. Mason turned his focus back to Kitchens. The bad feeling in the pit of my stomach had grown to the size of a baseball. I knew Mason had something, or at least he thought he did.
“Dr. Kitchens, I ask you,” he said, “were you not terminated from your job at Tidalwaiv by Mr. Matthews because you were involved in an improper and unethical relationship with a fellow employee you had a supervisory position over?”
There it was. Mason had his own smoking gun and I had handed it to him with the barrel pointed at my witness.
“That is not true,” Kitchens said.
“What is not true, Dr. Kitchens?” Mason pressed.
Kitchens was calm enough in the moment to turn to the jury to state her case.
“They fired me because I objected to the training,” she said. “They didn’t want to hear that, so they got rid of me. That’s all.”
“Dr. Kitchens,” Mason said, drawing her eyes back to him, “did you or did you not engage in an unethical sexual relationship with a code writer assigned to Project Clair named Patrick May?”
I saw the hurt and disappointment come all at once in my witness’s eyes. And I knew that no matter how she answered the question, everything she had said in her previous testimony was now suspect.
“It was a relationship we had started before I ever took the job,” Kitchens said.
“So you didn’t feel an obligation to reveal this while being recruited and hired by the company?” Mason asked.
“No, I did not.”
“And was that ethical, Dr. Kitchens?”
Kitchens dropped her head. The courtroom was as silent as a grave.
“Maybe not,” she finally said. “But I—”
“I have no further questions, Your Honor,” Mason said.
35
Bruce Colton was waiting for me at the gate to the gallery. He was three inches shorter than me and came up close to stick a finger into my chest. His face was red with anger. He looked as if he’d been holding his breath the whole time he was waiting for me.
“What the fuck, Haller,” he said. “I don’t know which is worse, if you knew about her boyfriend and tried to cover it up or if you didn’t even fucking know.”
“Get out of my way, Bruce,” I said. “I have work to do.”
“Work? Are you kidding me? You talked us into giving up fifty million dollars. Fifty! And now you want to walk away from me? You better call those lawyers who just outsmarted your ass and get our fucking money.”
“I’m not doing that, Bruce. We still have a winnable case. Now, for the last time, get out of my way.”
He finally took a step back and laughed without a shred of joy. I noticed Cisco come up behind him in case I needed him.
“You know what’s going to happen?” Colton said. “You don’t win this case, I’m going to sue you for mal-fucking-practice. I’ll get my money one way or the other.”
“Good plan,” I said. “You do that, Bruce.”
I shouldered past him.
“Let’s go,” I said to Cisco.
We headed toward the courtroom door. I needed to get out of there to rethink and retool, to find some way of salvaging the case after the day’s disastrous ending. I had told Lorna to take Naomi Kitchens down to the attorney conference room. When I got out to the hallway, there were three reporters waiting for me. I pushed by them too.
“I’ve got no comment right now,” I said. “I need to talk to my witness.”
The conference room was crowded. Lorna sat at the table with Kitchens and her daughter. Lily was trying to console her mother, who had tears streaming down her face. McEvoy was standing, apparently to leave the fourth chair at the table for me.
“Okay, look, it’s too crowded in here,” I said abruptly. “Lorna, can you take Lily into the hall? Jack, you go with them. Cisco, you stay in case we need to work on something tonight.”
“I want to stay,” McEvoy said. “Fly on the wall, remember?”
“Okay, fine, whatever,” I said.
Lorna and Lily left the room without protest. I took the seat vacated by Lorna and sat directly across from Naomi. Cisco was to one side. McEvoy started pulling the remaining chair way back from the table, apparently taking the fly-on-the-wall metaphor literally.