For this Cassidy has no response.
‘If any inference is to be drawn from possession of the rug, from its washing in a public laundromat in full view of other patrons, that inference should not be one of guilt, but innocence,’ I say. ‘People with guilty knowledge don’t act in this way,’ I tell them.
Dead silence. Woodruff looking at me.
It is hard to argue with the stupidity of this act. If Laurel murdered Melanie, the antics with the scrap of carpet defy all logic.
‘Seems pretty clear,’ says Woodruff. He looks at Cassidy. ‘You can introduce the rug into evidence. But I don’t want to hear any inference about nonexistent bloodstains or powder residue on the defendant’s hands that couldn’t be found,’ he says.
‘Your honor-’
‘Is that clear?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Next.’ Woodruff looks at me.
‘What about the statement in the lab report?’ I ask him. Why settle for a half loaf if I can get it buttered? ‘We would move to have it stricken,’ I say.
An imperious look from the judge.
‘Maybe you can soften the language.’ He looks at Cassidy.
‘She put her hands in the solvent. How many ways are there to say it?’ she says.
‘Take out the word “intentionally” and we can live with it,’ I say.
‘There. How about that?’ says Woodruff.
Cassidy, shaking her head. ‘Fine,’ she says.
‘Why couldn’t you two have stipulated the point before coming here?’ The judge looks at me.
He has never tried the word ‘compromise’ on Cassidy.
‘Now… what’s next?’
Woodruff is poring over the papers.
‘Looks like a witness-identification problem,’ he says. ‘What do we have, a bad lineup?’ He looks down his nose at Cassidy. She’s not winning any points here: what happens when you circle the wagons and make an issue on every point.
‘The lineup was tainted,’ I say.
‘How?’
‘We’ve subpoenaed witnesses,’ I tell him.
‘Is that necessary?’ says Woodruff.
I think maybe he’s got an early starting time on the links.
‘I think we could handle it in oral argument,’ says Cassidy.
She would.
‘Is the prosecution willing to stipulate?’ I ask.
‘To what?’ says Cassidy.
‘To exclusion of the identification evidence.’ I’m talking about the witness who claims she saw Laurel at Vega’s house the night of the murder.
‘Not on your life,’ she says.
‘Then I’d like to call my witnesses.’
A lot of grousing from the judge. I do some groveling, assurances that I will move it along.
Looking at his watch, Woodruff gives me the nod.
‘You got twenty minutes,’ he says.
I call Jimmy Lama to the stand and have him sworn to testify.
Lama has prepped for this as well as he can under the circumstances. True to form, he has tried to sandbag us on a witness.
Margaret Miller is Jack Vega’s neighbor. Harry and I had talked to her in the weeks following the murder. She had given us dirt about Melanie’s male visitors and the fact that she had seen Laurel twice at the Vega home on the night of the murder, the first time when the two women argued on the front porch. The second visit was closer to the time of the murder, and Miller has told the police that she saw Laurel in a sweatshirt and hood out on the street in front of the house.
The problem here is one of procedure and fundamental fairness, something as alien as moon rocks to Lama.
I turn to Jimmy in the witness box.
We establish the facts, that he heads up the investigation in the case, and that he interviewed Mrs. Miller.
‘How many times did you interview her?’
Lama’s counting on his fingers. ‘Three…’ A glazed look in his eyes as he thinks back. ‘Three interviews and a lineup,’ he says.
‘And at this lineup did Mrs. Miller identify Laurel Vega?’
‘She did. She said the defendant was at the house twice that night.’
‘This lineup — it was the one attended by my colleague, Mr. Hinds?’ I look over at Harry.
‘Yeah. He was there. He didn’t object, say anything was wrong at the time,’ says Lama. Getting in his digs.
‘Was that the only lineup you conducted for this witness?’
He makes a face. ‘How do you define lineup?’ he says. Knowing Lama, he is not above a little perjury — it’s just that if he’s doing it, he wants to know it.
‘I’m talking about a live appearance of the defendant with other potential suspects before the witness.’
‘Then that was the only lineup,’ he says.
Harry has advised me that Laurel was picked out of a group of five other women, all dressed as she was, in jail togs. The women were all of the same approximate height and coloring. Each one was asked to step forward and one at a time to don a sweatshirt with a hood, and to give a full profile, both sides of her face, to the witness, who was in a booth, behind a glare screen. It was a textbook lineup, no suggestions by Lama or the other cops who were present. The problem, it appears, developed earlier.
‘Before you scheduled the lineup for the witness, did you have occasion to show Mrs. Miller some photographs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How many photographs did you show her?’
He makes a face. ‘Four, five, maybe a half dozen?’ He leaves a lot of wiggle room.
‘And was Mrs. Miller able to identify the defendant from the photographs shown to her?’
‘She was.’
‘Did you bring these photographs with you?’ I know that he has because I have subpoenaed them. It is reversible error, grounds to exclude Mrs. Miller’s identification if he cannot produce all of the pictures used.
Lama’s holding a large manila folder, an inch thick, overflowing with a couple dozen photographs, various sizes, black-and-white and color.
He hands me the folder. Jimmy’s starting to play games — hide the trees in the forest.
‘This is all very nice.’ I start to chew his ass. ‘But I subpoenaed the photographs used in the identification by Mrs. Miller, not your entire file.’
‘They’re in there,’ he says, like you find ’em.
I hand the file back to him. ‘Show me.’
He makes like a table with the railing in front of the witness box and starts propping up pictures, first one, then another.
‘I think it was this one. No. No. This one here.’ He goes through twenty shots and finds two that look familiar.
The law is clear. A defendant has an absolute right to the presence of counsel at a lineup, something that doesn’t attach to a photo identification. But there are rules. The police are free to show a witness pictures of a suspect who is in custody, as a prelude to a more formal lineup. The problem develops when the photo identification is so suggestive as to single out the defendant and therefore poison the whole process.
It is the kind of game that Lama lives for — sear some picture of your client into the mind of a witness, with all the finesse of a branding iron on a bovine’s ass, and then run the suspect through the loading chute of a lineup. This is Jimmy’s kind of sport.
It takes Lama three minutes, and he is certain only about the picture of Laurel, an eight-by-ten color photo with bright lights in her eyes and numbers jammed under her chin on a placard. As for the other four shots of women he pulls from the file, he thinks they are the ones used in the photo lineup.
These are harmless, all color shots, the same size as Laurel’s of women in booking poses with white numerals on black placards.
Lama wiggles and twists like a worm on a hook when I ask him if he’s absolutely certain that these are the photos. I press him.
‘Pretty sure,’ he says.
This gets the eyes of the judge looking at him.
‘Lieutenant, I ask you for the last time — are you absolutely certain that these are the photographs used in the identification of Laurel Vega?’
Cassidy’s looking at him. A critical piece of evidence hanging in the balance. If he says no, the fate of the witness is sealed. The law is clear. The identification must be excluded. The defense has an absolute right to see the pictures used to identify a suspect, to test the validity of the process. If the state can’t produce them, that’s all she wrote.