Disturbed Ground (31 page)

Sure enough, Clymo pounded away at Growl's criminal background during cross-examination. Williamson put up a shield of objections, but Clymo slash away at her credibility.  Meanwhile, Vlautin scribbled notes. The defense would work damn hard to make sure that nothing Michelle Crowl said would ever reach a jury.

Ex-cons weren't Williamson's first choice as witnesses, but he called two others to the stand. It cut both ways: These were impeachable sources, but since Puente was an ex-con herself, who else would she confide in? Who knew her better than her sisters in crime?

Joan Miller, a thin elderly woman with long stringy hair and a meek
look, took the stand to say she'd been an inmate with Puente in Frontera during the mid-eighties. She claimed that Puente had told her that she'd used "over-the-counter medications, like eye drops, Visine, and she'd put it in people's foods ... as a means of keeping people under control."

Visine? That colorless liquid that gives relief to "itchy, sticky, watery eyes"? Spectators scoffed. Reporters snickered. Even the attorneys seemed amused. During the next break, Peter Vlautin kidded with the press, joking about how much Visine would be needed to drug someone: "Three barrels? A bathtubful?"

Meanwhile, a young AP reporter used her time more wisely. She slipped down the hall and phoned the Poison Control Board.

Another ex-con, a slow-speaking, round, untidy woman named Brenda Trujillo, later took the stand. Trujillo, who admitted to being on methadone, said she'd met Puente "in a holding tank downtown in '82." She'd served time off and on until December 1986, and then had been paroled to Puente's boardinghouse
.

Williamson asked, "Did you and the defendant have any conversations about the tattoos on your hand?"

She nodded. "She wanted me to go to the hospital and get the tattoos taken off because they were too easy to ID, Trujillo explained.

"Why?" Williamson wanted to know.

"She wanted me to go to high-class restaurants to drug people and take their money."

Williamson asked what types of drugs Puente had suggested.

Dorothea had told her to put "a couple drops of Visine" in their drinks.

Here it was again.

Moreover, Trujillo added, Dorothea had boasted that "she could get any kind of drugs she wanted" from her psychiatrist. "Valium, codeine, Dalmane—all she had to do was pick up the phone."

Slow and unimpressive as Trujillo seemed, this was damning testimony, and Clymo was eager to launch his cross-examination. He shot out of his seat and berated her as a liar and a heroin addict.

Williamson did his best to protect this witness, but she seemed determined to sabotage her own testimony. Her memory was cloudy, her record stained, her answers lethargic—sometimes she even stopped in the middle of a sentence to confess that she forgot what she was saying.

During his next cigarette break, Williamson considered her testimony: "The only thing Trujillo has going for her is that she's too stupid to have made any of this up. How could she know that Joan was going to testify to Visine, too? How could she know that Dalmane was going to come up again and again?"

By then, the industrious AP reporter had returned with startling news from the Poison Control Board: Visine's active ingredient, tetra-hydrozoline, can induce coma.

CHAPTER 33

Outside, May 15 was a sparkling spring day. Inside, Reba Nicklous sat in the hallway, weathering that combination of nerves and boredom that is the province of those waiting to be called into court. Since the day her Everson had been identified, she'd been steadily pulled toward this encounter, and now the day had arrived. She'd flown down from Oregon to confront the woman who, she was convinced, had killed her older brother.

Reba had never met Dorothea Puente, but over time her belief that Puente was responsible for Everson's disappearance had congealed and hardened. She'd worn the idea smooth with years of reexamination, turning it over and over like worry beads, until now it had been polished to a lapidary certainty. Dorothea had killed him and put him in that box. She knew it.

Reba sighed, remembering Everson's kind, round face. He'd been too softhearted, she thought. He had courted disaster when he courted Dorothea Puente.

The bailiff came out and called Reba Nicklous to the stand. She entered the court and all eyes watched as she strode toward the
witness stand. Despite her frosty hair, there was a sturdiness about her that defied those who might try to guess her age.

Her long face showed determination as Williamson guided her through the foundation of her testimony. In a strong, full voice, she told the court how her older brother, Everson Gillmouth, had left Baltimore after his wife's death and had come to settle in Oregon. For a few years, he had lived quietly with Reba and her husband, crafting elaborate wood carvings to fill his time.

Then, in the fall of 1985, he'd driven his red Ford truck down to California to meet Dorothea Puente, whom he planned to marry. When time passed and she hadn't heard from her brother, Reba grew concerned and contacted the Sacramento police, who went to Dorothea's house to check on him. Her chagrined brother soon called and apologized for not having kept in touch. "That was the last time I heard his voice," she said, casting an accusingly look at Dorothea.

In mid-October 1985, Reba Nicklous received a handwritten letter from Dorothea, which Williamson entered into evidence. It was just a short, cheery note, with nothing particularly odd other than the line: "Said he did not want you to have the police out again."

It ended: "I’ll try & drop you a line every couple weeks. We might get married in November."

If this seemed peculiar, the next letter, which arrived a couple of weeks later, was even more so. This longer, chattier letter brought the surprising news that the couple was planning "to go to Palm Springs next month so he can sell most of his carvings."

Shortly thereafter, Reba and her husband had received a strange telegram. Reba recalled that it said "that he was leaving Dorothea Puente and going south. And not to try to stop him."

"Was it ostensibly from your brother?" Williamson asked.

"I don't believe it was," she replied.

"Objection!" Clymo shot out. "Speculation."

Reba Nicklous glared at the defense attorney and shot back, "I
know
it wasn't."

As Williamson's questions continued, Nicklous explained that the family hadn't received any further word about her brother until April 1986, when a suspicious card came from Sacramento, bringing a woman named "Irene" into the picture. On the outside, the card said "Thinking of You."

Spectators in the court leaned forward, quietly straining to catch
every detail as Reba Nicklous opened the card and read its contents. Suddenly, Everson and "Irene" from Tulsa were planning a move to Canada. And Everson (who was quite dead in April 1986), had "lost about fifteen pounds and feels much better." The writer also assured them: "We go to church each week."

The family felt unnerved. The card was signed Irene, but they suspected that it, too, had been written by Dorothea Puente. Not knowing what else to do, they'd called everyone named Puente in the Sacramento phone directory, but none professed to know anything. Then they called the police. A cop reportedly stopped by 1426 F Street, but later he phoned Reba to state that Dorothea Puente, whom he guessed to be about Everson's age, "looked innocent."

(Reba later scoffed: "How can you say that anybody
looks
innocent?")

Clymo sped through cross-examination and quickly got Reba Nicklous off the stand. She was crusty, difficult to impeach, highly sympathetic, and truly dangerous to his client. With her testimony, Williamson had established a pattern of criminal behavior. When Everson had disappeared and Puente wanted to cover her tracks, she'd sent a letter. And when Bert had disappeared years later, she'd done the same thing.

Those cheerful, clumsy letters. It had seemed to work the first time, so she'd just repeated the same old cover-up.

Focusing on the discovery and identification of Everson Gillmouth's body, Williamson called several more witnesses. Then, almost as punctuation to their testimonies, he called Ismael Florez.

Puente sat placidly, but her stomach must have dropped when she saw her old friend enter the courtroom, his own attorney in tow.

Williamson started with the unassailable fact that Florez had possessed a red pickup truck that had once belonged to the deceased Everson Gillmouth. How had that happened?

In a soft voice, Florez explained that, late in 1985, he'd done some work for Dorothea, and the truck had been figured into his payment.

“What sort of work?”

“Mostly paneling,” he claimed.

“Did she ask you to build something else?”

“A storage box.” It was about six feet by three feet. “She told me the measurements.”

In simple language, Florez described how they’d gone together to buy the lumber. Then he’d built the box right in her living room, leaving the lid on the floor next to it.

“When was the next time you saw the box?”

“Three or four days later. Only now it was in the kitchen, and the lid was nailed on.”

Dorothea asked him to take the box to storage, and he and another man used a dolly to load the heavy box into the pickup. Then Dorothea climbed in next to him, and he drove while she pointed directions. Finally, they’d ended up outside of town, out by the river.

This would do, she told him.

He unloaded the box, rolling the dolly down the river bank. “We left it by the river. She said it was just junk inside.”

“Do you remember when this was?” Williamson asked.

“December. Before Christmas.”

“Did you notice a smell?”

“No.”The instant Williamson uttered “No further questions,” Clymo was out of his seat and in front of the witness, pounding the point that he’d been offered immunity for his testimony, insinuating that he’d been offered a deal for his lies.

“Was it your decision to put two-by-fours in the bottom?”“Yes.”

“And it’s reinforced?”

“Yes.”

“With reinforced corners?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t know what would go inside it?” Clymo exclaimed incredulously.

“No.”

“Didn’t Dorothea tell you that a man had a heart attack and she needed it strong so she could put him in it?"

"I don't remember that."

A heart attack?
Eyebrows went up around the courtroom.

Clymo hammered on, "You don't remember
what
she told you,
do you?"

"I don't remember."

Clymo handed Florez a transcript of a detective's interview with him and asked him to read it. Painfully slowly, Florez read through, then looked up and said, "Yeah, I told that."

"Was that true?" Clymo demanded.

"No."

"You lied to him?"

He nodded, saying, "He lied to me, too."

"How was that?"

"He told me I wasn't gonna be arrested."

Either Ismael Florez was stupendously gullible, or he had a wide venal streak. In either case, this obtuse little man was no innocent. Clymo had amply suggested that he'd not only known about the body, but that it had been his idea to build a very strong coffin.