‘Your honor.’ Cassidy’s out of her chair. ‘Unless I’ve missed something, the victim wasn’t killed by a bomb.’
‘If you could bear with me, your honor.’
Woodruff motions with his hands, like hurry up.
‘So all this stuff — bombs and silencers — can be handmade if you have some skill and know what you’re doing?’
‘Sure.’
‘For example, if somebody came up to you and asked you how to make a silencer, what would you tell them?’
‘For starters that possession’s illegal,’ he says.
‘Of course. But just as an example, if you wanted to, you could tell them how to make one, couldn’t you.’
‘Sure.’
‘How?’
‘Right here?’ he says.
‘Why not? The information’s not illegal, is it?’
‘No.’
I motion for him to go on.
‘You get two pieces of metal tubing,’ he says. ‘One quite a bit larger in diameter than the other. You drill a lot of holes in the smaller tube, like Swiss cheese,’ he says. ‘Then you put the smaller tube inside of the bigger one. You gotta leave an air pocket between ’em. You find some way to fasten the two pieces of tube together, usually some kind of a flange. The inside tube has to be just a little bigger than the bore on the barrel of the firearm. You figure a way to fasten it to the end of the barrel. Usually threaded.’
‘That’s it?’
‘You’d want to pack some kind of material to deaden the sound. Put something into the air space between the two tubes,’ he says.
‘Like what?’
He makes a face. ‘Something that wouldn’t burn if it got hot. In the old days, the wise guys in New York and Chicago, some of ’em used little sheets of asbestos, rolled up,’ he says. ‘Guess if they did much business, their lungs went to shit.’ He laughs, all alone.
Nico gives Woodruff a nervous grin. ‘Sorry, your honor. My language. But I guess you could say poetic justice,’ he says.
‘So what do they use today? To deaden the sound?’ I ask him.
‘Whatever won’t burn. Steel woo-’ He stops before the words clear his lips.
‘Yes?’
‘Steel wool. Some people use steel wool,’ he says. The look in Perone’s eyes at this moment is perhaps the most I will receive by way of a fee in this case.
‘And when you pack that steel wool, pieces would work their way through the little holes of the inside tube, wouldn’t they?’
Nico’s nodding his head like he’s in a daze.
‘Wouldn’t they?’
‘They could,’ he says.
‘So that a bullet travelling down that tube might pick up tiny threads, small fragments of low-quality steel, steel wool,’ I say. ‘And the bullet might carry these, might deposit them in a wound. Isn’t that right?’ I say.
By now Perone is no longer responding to my questions. Instead he is looking at Cassidy, wondering what degree of wrath he will receive when she gets him outside of the courtroom. He has delivered to her doorstep, packaged and ticking, the one thing any good trial lawyer hates, surprise.
‘The steel wool of a silencer might leave little unexplained grooves and ridges in the lead of a soft, unjacketed bullet? Isn’t that right, Mr. Perone?’
He’s nodding — grudging concessions from the stand.
‘Answer the question,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s possible.’
‘A silencer would answer a lot of questions,’ I say. ‘Wouldn’t it? Like why there was no little soot or gunshot residue on the victim. Why there was no tattooing on the body.’
Much of this would have been filtered by the silencer, and Nico knows it.
‘It might,’ he says.
‘It would also explain why no one heard the shot that killed Melanie Vega, wouldn’t it?’
He looks at me, stone-cold eyes.
‘A possibility,’ he says.
‘That’s all I have for this witness.’
As I turn for the table it is with some sense of satisfaction. All of this leaves the prosecution to make a considerable reach if it is going to sell the theory that Laurel pulled the trigger. She must either run in circles of intrigue that rival James Bond or they must have the jury buy into notions that my sister-in-law is the modern merger of Henry Ford and Annie Oakley, a woman who not only loads her own ammunition, but is master of the tool and die, somebody capable of fashioning to tight tolerances a silencer for a semiautomatic handgun — the things that can stretch credulity in a trial.
Chapter 25
This afternoon the courtroom is cloaked in the muted light of flickering images from a large television monitor, rolled out in front of the jury panel, the overhead lights turned low.
Harry and I, Cassidy and Lama, jockey for location at each end of the jury box to see the screen. Laurel has moved from the counsel table and is shadowed in the courtroom by a matron who hovers a few feet behind her with each step that she takes. The judge is off the bench, white hair, bushy eyebrows, and flowing robes, a phantom in one dark corner of the room.
On the screen are the florid images of Laurel captured on color videotape, charging across a crowded corridor in this same building, seven months ago, two floors below where we now stand, to lash out with her purse like a leaded sap. It crashes on Jack’s shoulder, skimming an inch past Melanie’s face, sending the purses of both women crashing to the floor, their contents scattered.
Cassidy asks that the tape be shown again. This time it is rewound further back. In her headlong charge, Laurel knocks down an old man who had the misfortune to wander into the path of fury. Laurel does not even break stride. The unmistakable explosion of her rage, tracking on Melanie like a heat-seeking missile. For lawyers attempting to make out a motive for murder, it is the pictorial equivalent of a million words.
Caught dead center on the screen, Laurel’s face is flushed, filled with fury, and while the video images afford no sound, angry words can be read on her lips, threats being spit like venom from a cobra.
It takes three people to ultimately block her way. I am one of these. The broken strap of Laurel’s handbag is outstretched in her hands at Melanie Vega’s throat as I haul Laurel away. Melanie’s purse is on the floor, and as I struggle with Laurel, the camera catches me roller-skating on a cylinder of lipstick. So much for grace.
Cassidy has these images played back a third time for the jury just in case they missed some part of it, this last rendition in slow motion so that they can fully appreciate the choreography of this rage.
Then the monitor on its cart is rolled to one side.
Lama is puffed up with himself. It was Jimmy who found the tape and brought it to Cassidy, ferreted it out, information from the courthouse groupies who told him about the brawl.
As the lights come back up, Morgan has a witness on the stand. He is midway through his testimony, having been interrupted only long enough to show the video. George Ranklin, the bailiff who was outside of Department Fourteen the day of the altercation, has laid the foundation for introduction of the tape. Lama spent ten minutes outside the courtroom prepping him.
Morgan quickly gets Ranklin to testify that he was close enough during the courthouse incident to hear angry words spoken by Laurel.
‘Officer, can you tell us, as you sit here today do you recall what it was exactly that Laurel Vega said during the attack on the victim?’
‘I heard her say, “I’ll kill the bitch.” ’
It is one of those seminal moments in a trial, an alleged perpetrator spouting prophesies, the kind of statement which after an act of murder makes little hairs stand out on the neck of those who hear them. Several of the jurors now take a moment to study Laurel.
At this moment, when she is the object of their interest, Laurel is in my ear, an ardent plea that this is not true.
‘You were there,’ she says. ‘You heard it. You know I didn’t say that.’
The ‘b’ word is evident on the tape; the rest of it I think is some artful suggestion by Lama. I have no such recollection of any death threat, though in private moments, in the confidence of the jailhouse cubicle, Laurel has said as much to me, that if someone else had not acted first, she could indeed have killed Melanie.