Against the Wind (24 page)

“I’ll tell you what,” I say, “I’ll stay here with you ’till you fall asleep.”

“I’ll wake up again.” She snuggles closer. “Please, daddy. I won’t toss around.”

I sit her on her bed, sit next to her.

“I can’t, Claudia. Not tonight.”

“Why?” She doesn’t understand; why should she? “We did last time.”

“Because I’ve got someone with me.”

She stares at me for a second, then jerks away, turning to the wall, crying. I reach out to touch her; she slaps at my hand.

“Claudia …”

She wheels on me, enraged.

“This is our weekend together,” she yells through her tears. “You promised me.”

“It is.”

“Alone. Not with some other person.” She turns away again, her body racked with sobs.

“Honey, I …”

She starts throwing a fit. Major. Slamming her fists against the mattress, kicking, screaming into the pillow. I back off, sitting on the edge of the bed. There’s nothing I can do but let it work itself out.

“Will.” Mary Lou is whispering from the hallway.

I turn. She’s standing in the dark, fully dressed. I get up, walk to her, closing Claudia’s door.

“I’m leaving.”

Either way I turn, I’m fucked.

“I don’t want you to.”

“It’s all right, Will, I understand. I know exactly how she feels; I want you for myself, too.” She touches my cheek. “There’ll be other times. Soon.”

I walk her down the sidewalk to her car, kiss her goodbye. Then I go back inside, carry Claudia into my room, tuck her in. She isn’t asleep, as I thought; she sits up, facing me.

“I don’t want to share you, daddy,” she says.

“You don’t, angel. Not the way it counts.”

“I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to move.”

What can I say to that? That I don’t want her to either? She knows that; the rest is not for me to decide.

“You’re still here. Let’s worry about moving when it happens.”

That doesn’t satisfy either of us.

“I wish you weren’t having this stupid trial,” she says. “I wish I could come over every day and we could be together every day.”

“It’ll be over pretty soon,” I say. “And you know I’m always with you in my heart.”

She likes that; it’s something, anyway.

“Daddy?” she asks.

“What, angel?”

“Promise me you won’t have anybody over when I’m here anymore.” I take her in my arms. My little baby.

“I promise.”

“
IS SHE ALL RIGHT?
”

“She’s fine, yeh.”

Mary Lou and I are in the courthouse coffee shop, downstairs. Just the two of us, an hour early. Paul and Tommy haven’t shown yet. That’s good; we need a private moment.

“What about you?” she asks.

I sigh, looking at her. I didn’t sleep well last night, thinking about this.

“I can’t see you anymore.” I stir the sugar in my coffee that I already stirred when I put it in. “Not until she’s moved and this trial’s over.”

“Will …”

I shake my head. “I’ve got her and I’ve got this trial. I can’t handle more than that now. Shit, Mary Lou, I’ve got other problems as well, stuff you don’t even know about.”

“I think I do.”

“Yeh?”

“Your partners?”

I look at her, not acknowledging anything one way or the other.

“It’s no secret on the street you’re thinking maybe you should be moving in another direction. That’s why you took the leave, isn’t it? To think things out?”

“Partly,” I say.

“Anyway,” she says, “about us. I don’t know what to say. I like you and … maybe I shouldn’t say any more.”

“I like you too, Mary Lou. A lot.”

“Funny way of expressing it.”

“I’m over-loaded emotionally. I couldn’t do us justice; whatever us is.”

“This isn’t going to be easy,” she says.

“For me either. I want you real bad, I didn’t expect it, but I do, but we’ve got to cool it for awhile.”

“As long as it’s just for awhile.”

“It is.”

“You’re a funny guy, Will,” she says. “You definitely don’t fit the mold.”

“I used to think that was cool,” I tell her. I look up; Paul’s come in, spotted us. He’s ambling over. “Now it’s getting old. There’s something to be said for being square, you know.”

“That isn’t you,” she laughs. “I could never go for that.”

I give her a half-assed grin. She puts a hand on mine for a moment, then withdraws it as Paul looms close.

“I’ll be good,” she whispers, teasing. “But only until the trial’s over.”

“I hope so,” I tell her. I do. I honestly do.

“CALL DR. MILTON GRADE.”
Dr. Grade strides down the aisle, through the gate, to the dock. He stands ramrod straight as the oath is administered, carefully crosses one leg over the other as he sits, pulling his pant leg up with forefinger and thumb, making sure the crease stays crisp. Local legend has it he’s the only man in New Mexico who has his suits tailored in London. He’s pretty old now; the state mandatory retirement age has been waived for him, twice. He looks good, though; full shock of white hair, piercing blue eyes, strong Roman nose. The great American doctor.

There’s a life-size blowup on an easel between the stand and the jury box of Bartless as he was received at the morgue. It’s black-and-white, and since it’s a blowup it’s grainy, but it’s still ugly as hell. The defendants look at it with curiosity; they don’t seem particularly repelled, but more importantly to me, they show no signs of ever having seen him, at least not in this condition.

The photograph casts a powerful spell on everyone in the courtroom, particularly the jury. When Moseby revealed it I first looked to my clients, of course, and second to the jury. There were some sharp intakes of breath, some mutterings, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d dreaded; if one of the women had screamed I’d have moved immediately for a mistrial.

I turn away from the jury and look at the victim’s mother. She stares intently at the picture, but to my surprise doesn’t make a sound. Either she was prepped by the prosecution, warning her she’d get thrown out of the room if she got out of hand, or it’s too alien to her to register.

Moseby leads Grade through his testimony, and how he arrived at his conclusions, particularly the one that the victim didn’t die of the gunshots, but of the stabbings. Grade dwells, a bit too long for my taste, on the emasculation, how it was probably performed, and whether or not the victim was dead before he was separated from that particular body part. To his credit, Grade asserts that the victim was ‘almost certainly’ dead before they cut his pecker off.

Grade is a good, professional witness. Direct, precise, his testimony specific and factual. He makes few assumptions, and those he does make are hard to challenge; he’s been doing this a long time, he’s an expert at not letting himself get tripped up. He’s testified in virtually every state in the country over the last thirty-five years, and there’s never been a conviction overturned on appeal because of something he said. Defense lawyers can have a hard time dealing with him, because juries cotton to him; his credentials are first-rate and proven, not a common commodity in a small state like this. And he’s likable, he smiles on the stand, no pomposity; a patrician who doesn’t act superior to people, talks like a regular guy.

The prosecution takes all morning, they want to cover the bases. They conclude just before the lunch recess.

When we resume, Paul takes up our case. He asks various questions about the way Grade arrived at his conclusions regarding how Bartless was killed; he’s trying, we all will as we cross-examine, to find a chink in the armor that would make it, if not impossible for our boys to have done it—we have no expectations of pulling a rabbit out of the hat with this witness—to at least cast some doubt on what happened up there, so that we can cast our seeds of ambiguity.

“Regarding the stab wounds … forty-seven in all … that you claim are the specific cause of death, Dr. Grade,” Paul asks.

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t the victim bleed more? You stated in your autopsy report that there was hardly any loss of blood.”

“That’s correct, yes.”

“Shouldn’t there be, sir? With all those stab wounds?”

“Under normal circumstances, of course,” Grade answers easily. He shifts his position slightly, leaning forward. “But these were not normal circumstances.”

A faint buzzing starts inside my head. What was it that Rita Gomez had said? Something about the way they had stabbed the victim with the knife? It was something out of the ordinary. Since our claim is that they weren’t there in the first place, none of her specifics resonated. I’m going to want to review that section of her testimony during a break.

I look at Paul. He’s sensed something’s not quite kosher as well.

“Let’s move on to time of death,” he says, deftly changing gears. “There would seem to be cause for a conflict of opinion as to the exactness of that, wouldn’t you agree, due to the deterioration of the body?”

Grade answers professionally. I’m only half-listening—that beat in Grade’s earlier reply is lying uneasily in my stomach.

Tommy handles the rest of the questioning of Grade. Nothing new—he’s a buttoned-down expert. We didn’t expect much; our case will be made in a different direction, irrespective of medical expertise.

We wrap up shortly before four-thirty. Judge Martinez is checking his watch; he’s ready to call it a day.

“If we are finished with this witness …” he begins.

Moseby’s on his feet. I’ve never seen him so nimble.

“I have a couple of questions to ask on redirect, your honor.”

“Fine. We’ll start in tomorrow.”

“With the court’s permission, I’d rather ask them now. They won’t take long, and I want to pursue something that was brought up earlier.”

Martinez cocks his head in our direction.

“If it won’t take long, we have no objection, your honor,” Mary Lou states for the defense.

“Let’s proceed, then,” Martinez says. “If it appears to me that we’re going to get embroiled in detail, I’ll adjourn until tomorrow.”

“I’ll try to ensure that we don’t,” Moseby assures him.

He turns to Grade.

“You’ve previously stated that the victim died of the forty-seven knife wounds, not the gunshots to the head.”

“That is correct.”

“And you’ve also stated that there was an abnormally small amount of bleeding,” Moseby says.

“Yes, I also made that statement.”

“Shouldn’t he have bled a lot? I mean, forty-seven stab wounds. You’d think a man would be practically drained from that many stab wounds.”

“Under normal circumstances, yes,” Grade says. “But as I stated earlier, these were not normal circumstances.”

“How is that?”

“The victim was stabbed with a knife or knives that were hot. The heat would have sealed the wounds and prevented any substantial bleeding from occurring.”

“That’s an interesting theory, doctor. Rather unique. What made you think of it?”

“I had come across a comparable case in a medical journal,” Grade says, “not too long before I examined this corpse. The similarities were too close to ignore.”

The hair on the back of my neck stands up. Rita Gomez had testified that the bikers held their knife over a fire before they stabbed Bartless. We’d assumed that was a bunch of crap, like everything else she was saying. Now here’s Grade with a theory that confirms her, almost perfectly.

“Excuse me, your honor.” I’m on my feet, glancing at my partners. They look at me; they’re as confused as I am. “I’ve read everything in Dr. Grade’s autopsy report and the subsequent reports he’s made pertaining to this case. I’ve never seen anything in there about hot knives.” I look at Moseby. The fucker’s standing there like the cat that ate the canary. “If the prosecution has withheld material from us, your honor, material pertinent to our case, we’d like to know. Now.”

‘So I can file for a mistrial’ is what I leave unsaid. Martinez hears my unspoken remark loud and clear. He leans forward, looking at Moseby.

“Counselor?” he queries.

“We haven’t withheld anything, your honor,” Moseby says, seemingly without guile. “And anyway, we didn’t raise this issue. Defense did, in their cross-examination less than two hours ago. They ‘opened the door,’ and if Dr. Grade came across some interesting material in a journal, as he’s now informing us—material that while it would not necessarily be linked to the direct cause of Richard Bartless’s death, might help explain a certain incongruity in the way the corpse was presented, I think we’re entitled to hear about it. It might strengthen the connection of the defendants to the murder,” he adds.

Paul’s first on his feet. It was his question that gave Moseby this opportunity. “We need some time, your honor.”

“Granted. We’ll adjourn until tomorrow morning.” Martinez bangs the gavel and exits immediately.

Grade leaves the stand. Moseby strolls over to his side of the room. Something’s wrong here; he spent the whole trial setting this trap for us, and we walked right into it.

We huddle; nobody’s heard anything about this, or knows about it. Hot knives? Some kind of ritual, what? We’d discounted what Rita Gomez had said, she’s an obvious liar and freak. But to have a pathologist as prominent as Grade confirm it in virtually the same language scares the shit out of me.

We send Ellen out to start cross-checking it in the medical and legal journals, then question our clients. The bikers don’t know what Grade’s talking about. How could they?; they were never there to begin with. The whole story of hot knives means nothing to them; just more legal bullshit to try and railroad them.

“
WHAT DID HE SAY
?”

Mary Lou hangs up the phone.

“The same thing all the others said: no.”

“Fuck!” I scream at the ceiling.

“You betchum, Red Ryder.”

It’s almost midnight. We’re in my office. For the last several hours we’ve been manning the phones like a PBS telethon, trying to locate a reputable pathologist who would be willing to rebut Grade’s testimony; or at least, cast some doubt on it. We can’t even find one who will examine the case and give us some advice; certainly not on notice this short, when the doctor concerned is someone with Grade’s bona fides.