‘Are these the pictures that Lieutenant Lama showed you at the time of the photo identification?’
‘I can’t be sure of some of them,’ she says. ‘But two I know are missing,’ she tells the court.
‘Which are those?’
‘The black woman,’ she says.
Woodruff is incredulous. ‘He showed you a picture of a black woman?’
She nods to the judge.
Lama’s ducking for cover, slinking in his chair.
‘Lieutenant. None of these pictures, the ones you picked out, shows a black woman.’ Screw the fact that Lama isn’t on the stand. The judge wants an answer.
Shoulders and a lot of shrugging from Lama.
‘What about it?’ says Woodruff.
‘I think the witness is mistaken,’ he says. Left with an alternative, admitting to perjury or impeaching the memory of his own witness, Lama’s made his choice.
‘You also missed the one that looked like my granddaughter,’ says Miller. ‘Remember? We talked about it.’ If the devil is in the details, Lama’s on his way to hell.
It was the question about the black suspect from Mrs. Miller on the phone that alerted me. Why would a police officer show her a picture of a black woman when she had told him repeatedly that the figure she saw that night outside the Vegas’ house was white?
I offer her the folder and ask her to look through it. She finds the black woman in twenty seconds, a mug shot of a face with corn-rows, a severe birthmark going up the side of her face into the hairline. There would be no confusing this with pictures of Laurel. It takes her a couple more minutes to find the other four photos. Like debutantes at a ball, these are not mug shots, but black-and-white glossies, like something from a high-school yearbook. Lama must have scoured the files of some local modeling agency for these. If you were going to pick a doer from among the bunch, it would not be this lot.
‘I told him that this one here looked like my granddaughter,’ says Miller. She holds up one of the photos, proud of the good-looking girl in her hand, all-American youth, a good twenty years younger than Laurel.
‘Your honor, I move that the identification of the witness be excluded.’
Cassidy is hissing profanities into Jimmy Lama’s ear, feeling victimized by his shoddy practices. She breaks off in midsentence to salvage what she can.
‘Your honor, the witness may have an independent recollection of the defendant, untainted by the photographs.’ Morgan’s out of her chair, open palms to the bench, the supplicant. ‘It could be harmless error,’ she says.
‘You have a strange notion of error, counsel.’ Woodruff bearing down from the bench. It is one thing to argue legal points, another to mislead a court. Lama has crossed the line. The only question for Woodruff is whether Cassidy was along for the ride.
Woodruff, for a show of fairness, allows her a chance to redeem the evidence. A token gesture. I think he’s already made up his mind. What happens when you drag lies before a court.
Cassidy’s off-balance. She throws a few softball questions at Mrs. Miller. Whether she had a firm recollection of the figure she saw that night in front of Vega’s house. Whether she had a clear view.
Rattled, and now unsure of what is happening, thinking that perhaps she has done something wrong, Mrs. Miller is filled with equivocations, not certain of her recollections. It’s been a long time; it was dark that night; the woman wore a hood — enough backstroking for an Olympic medal. Try as she will, Cassidy can’t get the witness to hurdle the fence back to the land of certainty.
Finally she puts an end to a painful process.
‘Your honor, we would argue that any error is harmless.’ She makes a final stab. But no gold ring.
‘The motion is granted,’ says Woodruff. ‘The identification of the defendant by this witness is excluded.’
‘Is there anything else?’ he says. Woodruff is looking at Cassidy. He is clearly angry, a sense that he has been badly used by Lama. What a judge feels when he knows he’s been lied to. If jeopardy had attached, and I had some plausible grounds for dismissal, I would lay them before the court at this moment.
A pained expression on Jimmy’s face. Woodruff wants to see him in chambers after lunch. Lama had better hope that the judge takes his from a bottle and that Woodruff is a happy drunk.
Chapter 18
‘Hey, baby.’ Clem Olsen is speaking to me while he is ogling Dana with lupine looks and yammering in a gravely dialect.
‘Long time no see. Got a shake for the Wolfman?’ he says.
All the while his eyes are eating up Dana.
We’ve both come here in separate cars, directly from other engagements, me from the office, Dana from some political soirée across town. She has accepted my invitation, but says she can’t stay long.
‘Gonna introduce me?’ Clem wants to know. His hands are doing a quick routine of a shake in moves I cannot follow, all variations on a common theme, aping that half of the social order Clem feels is cooler than himself.
I do the honors, introducing Dana. She gets an embrace and one of Clem’s sloppy specialties on the cheek, which she rubs off with the back of her gloved hand as soon as he turns away.
Clem has formed a one-man reception line at the door tonight, greeting everything that moves, looking down the front of a lot of dresses, and copping a few good feels under the aegis of kisses and hugs whenever he can.
Some things never change. Clem is one of them.
McClesky High’s Twenty-fifth Reunion, and we are gathered in the main ballroom of the Regency, downtown, across from the Capitol. Olsen is decked out in ruffles and formal wear. What little hair he has left on his head is slicked back and thinning, a younger version of Mel Ferrer. He is tall and slender, but with a cop’s gut. From the bulge under his coat I know that he is packing. Cummerbund or not, without a hunk of case-hardened steel wedged in his armpit, Clem would have a terminal identity crisis.
There are people in stretch limos pulling up outside, women in furs so toxic with moth repellant that these could only have come from some rental warehouse, men with beer bellies and callused hands in alien suits and ties, craning and twisting their necks like cheap imitations of Rodney Dangerfield. Some of these bear faces recognizable from adolescence under unfamiliar domes of balding heads. People putting on the dog, covering the warts of their lives from others they haven’t seen in years, and won’t see again for many more, still hustling the peer groups that eluded them in youth; others striving to recapture the popularity they haven’t known since.
A slap on the arm. ‘Later on, buddy. I’ll catch you for a drink.’ Clem gives me a wink and a wave. He has already moved on to the next group coming through the door, rationing the charm. I see one of his hands has slipped low on the silk-encased rump of a woman, one of the pom-pom girls of yore.
‘How about if we find a table?’
‘Great,’ says Dana.
She takes my arm and we walk, heading toward the back so we can leave early. I steer her past the punch bowl and the no-host bar, spouses of alumni who don’t know anybody, all jockeying in an effort to put themselves into an early alcoholic buzz, their port in this social storm. Anything to get through the evening.
Some guy sticks his hand in my gut, stops me in midst ride.
‘Mike Wagner, city fireman,’ he says.
Vague recollections of football, some animal of intimidation from my youth who at fourteen had a beard, and a body like Attila, who towered over me, but who hasn’t grown a millimeter in a quarter century. I now have twenty pounds and three inches on him.
I shake his hand. ‘Paul Madriani, lawyer,’ I say.
No conversation, but he introduces his wife, brunette and twenty-eight if she’s a day, dressed in a slinky black outfit, chewing gum and shifting weight from one thigh to another like some taxi dancer with her meter running. I have vague recollections of his first wife, a high school sweetheart who, if she is here, is no doubt throwing daggers from across the room with her eyes at this moment. I move out of target range.