Motion to Suppress (27 page)

Paul rustled the paper. "Sounds like a long process."

"Not always. It depends. We’re ordering a beta scanner next month. Then we’ll be able to have answers in about half an hour."

"We need the second set of results as quickly as possible," he said.

"Three weeks would be the earliest. We’ll fax the results."

Michelle arrived at Nina’s office promptly at ten o’clock the next day. She wore shorts, a sleeveless overblouse, a sun visor, and a deep tan to set off a blinding smile.

Nina had never seen her so happy before. It must be the baby.

"I brought you a present," she said, handing Nina a basket wrapped in pink cellophane. Inside, fruits and vegetables from the San Joaquin valley nested: dates, walnuts, figs, grapes, asparagus, a head of garlic, and deep-green broccoli. "For your family."

"Thanks." Nina picked up a walnut.

"See, you hold two of them in your hand like this and squeeze." A crack and Michelle opened her hand, handing Nina a chunk of the walnut meat. "It was so hot coming up the valley," Michelle said. "I’m going to go swimming when we’re done."

"How are you feeling?" Nina said.

"Healthy. I’m seven months now. See how big?" She lifted her shirt, the same way she had that day in the office to show Nina her bruises. "Being at home helps. The folks keep to a routine. Boring but peaceful. I’m still off the booze."

"Good. Good."

"Tell me how it’s going."

"We’ll be ready, but we had bad news on the writ." Nina explained about how the confession would come in, and how they were going to have to get into Michelle’s problems. "Has your mother told you about the phone call I made to her earlier this week?"

"About me coming up?"

"About something else, as well."

"She’s been awfully busy. She’s been out of the house a lot." Michelle finally seemed to catch Nina’s mood. "What’s up
^?
"

"We have a lot to talk about, Michelle. Some of it’s going to be hard for both of us. There’s plenty of time. Let’s go over your testimony first."

Nina took Michelle through her rehearsal. She had a transcription of her first interview with Michelle, and she had drafted her questions from it. There was a lot to cover, Michelle’s background, her amnesia, her marriage to Anthony, her depression, her affairs, her drinking, her decision to go to Dr. Greenspan, her job, the night of April twenty-sixth, the morning of the twenty-seventh. They broke for lunch at twelve and started again at twelve-thirty. By four Nina was satisfied that Michelle would know how to answer her questions.

Michelle was tired when they finished. She was planning to drive back to Fresno, and it would be a long three hours with what Nina had to say now.

Nina started with the DNA. She was tired too. "We got the results from the lab."

"Oh. I’m not sure I want to know."

"I’m going to tell you anyway. Michelle, we tested for a match with Anthony, Tom, and Steve. None of them matched. Now, who did you forget to mention?"

Michelle put her hand on her stomach and started rubbing it. "How weird. They made a mistake. There’s nobody else."

"You know, it hurt me, Michelle," Nina said, "to think you were lying to me. And if you were lying about this, you could be lying about everything." The Vesuvius inside her shot up clouds of smoke and superheated ash.

"Nina—"

Nina erupted. "Let me get this out," she said, standing up and walking around the littered office. "I should have known better. I’ve been in this business long enough to know better. I trusted you, even though my common sense said you sounded like a liar. Maybe I should have been harder on you, confronted you, laughed at you until the truth came pouring out. Maybe the simple truth is, Michelle, that you had a fight, and you won; that you took Anthony out on the boat and dropped him off the side, figuring his body wouldn’t be found. Maybe we could even have made a self-defense argument. Well, it’s too late now. You’ve outsmarted yourself, thinking I could win you an acquittal."

Michelle was shaking her head, her eyes filling with tears.

"How about you let me in on it at this late date? I’m thinking maybe you need a new lawyer. Riesner. A guy as slick as—"

"Nina, don’t talk that way. We’re friends."

"You’re making a fool out of me, Michelle. I’m new in this town, and I’m trying to establish a practice, and you’re going to hurt me just like you seem to hurt everyone else."

When Nina finished her tirade, Michelle said, "Nina, sit down and listen to me."

Nina sat. Her angry energy had evaporated. She had said what she had to say, not very gracefully, as always.

"I didn’t lie to you, Nina. I swear."

"Yeah, right," Nina said.

"The lab made a mistake."

"We’re double-checking that now."

"They’ll catch it this time. Can’t you give me the benefit of the doubt, just a little while longer?"

Nina shook her head and turned her eyes to the desk.

"We almost died together. I trust you, Nina. You can trust me."

Nina didn’t look up for a long time. She scratched out a picture of a Bronco falling down a hill, two figures inside, their mouths stretched wide in a Munchian O.

"We’re giving the test one more try. Then we’ll see."

"Thank you," the girl said gravely. "And now, what about my mother?"

Michelle finally came home to Fresno at midnight. Her mother was waiting up for her, sitting in her recliner with the red afghan over her legs, reading Ladies’ Home Journal, the lamp on the table beside her shedding the only glow in the living room. She looked up and smiled, but Michelle wasn’t fooled.

"Where’s Dad?"

"Gone to bed."

"Get him up," Michelle said. When her mother wouldn’t budge, Michelle went into the bedroom and woke him up herself.

When they were both sitting there, faces riddled with guilt, Michelle said to Carl Tengstedt, "You’re not my father."

"Oh, yes, I am," he said. "A good father."

"A liar," Michelle said. "Don’t lie to me anymore."

"We never lied, Michelle," her mother interjected. "A long time ago, it seemed like you forgot. And we were grateful to God."

"I want to remember now. Tell me about my real father. Tell me!"

"Don’t shout," her mother said. She moved close to Carl Tengstedt on the couch, adjusting first her pink curlers and then her glasses, still holding the afghan around her knees. He wore the threadbare plaid robe Michelle had bought for him out of her allowance, for his birthday, when she was fifteen. His unshaven cheeks looked sunken into the square, military face. He was looking back at her, with that same shamefaced, defiant look she recognized from her own face.

"I make no apologies, Michelle. And I don’t intend to go into it at this time. Your mother and I feel that the Lord took the memory from you in His infinite grace, to spare you. It is not our place to interfere."

"Don’t you realize, until I remember, I can never get well?" Michelle said, her voice shaking.

They didn’t move or talk. They adopted a defensive pose, huddling together like mice on the couch.

They looked old, so old! How had she not seen how old they were getting?

"Listen to this," Michelle continued in a low voice. "He’s Death, and he’s coming toward us.... We’ll never stop him, Mommy, he’s too strong.... He’s taking us to Hell with him, you said so...." She closed her eyes and lived it. But her mother came forward to hold her. And Carl Tengstedt broke the spell with his arms around them both.

"Tell... me... the... rest."

Still infected by the horrible vision, she heard her mother singing and felt cold hands smoothing her forehead as they had when she was a little girl, but the touch scared her, and the voice aroused a wild fear. " ’Hush, little baby, don’t say a word...’ "

Michelle broke the vise and ran, crying, "You will tell me."

Carl Tengstedt held his wife back with strong, muscled arms.

A few minutes later he knocked on Michelle’s door, the weak sobbing of his wife far behind him.

Michelle didn’t answer.

He opened the door a crack and kept his hand on the knob. "Michelle," he said in a voice so low she had to strain to hear him, but she could smell the familiar, safe smell of him, this man she had trusted to love her and take care of her for so many years. "You are my daughter and I tell you now, this will stop before you kill your mother."

She heard him like she had a thousand times before, the demand for respect backed up by the threat of his power over her, his physical strength and his fatherhood.

"You understand me?"

Inside the room, she sat down on a chair, her arms folded. "I won’t ask her again if you tell me."

He shook his head, sagging, and pulled the door shut in her face. She heard the key turn in the lock. She threw herself at the door, pounding and yelling, but no one came.

25

SIX-THIRTY A.M. Monday morning, on the first day of the trial, Nina took a long shower and dressed in the usual getup, a navy blue suit with a silky white blouse, her mother’s gold earrings, black stockings, and heels. She ate a plain bagel cold, drank some milk, looked through the stacks of paperwork, the motions in limine, the statement of case, the proposed jury instructions, the trial brief, the evidence file, the research file, the pleadings, the witness files... everything was still there. She loaded them into the Bronco in two trips.

Eighty-six prospective jurors in varying moods of boredom and curiosity milled around the hall in front of the large main Superior Court courtroom. They turned to watch as Nina walked by, pulling her wheeled cart of briefcases and books, her posture erect, her expression resolute, her knees knocking together.

Inside, under the bright lights, another crowd thronged; the media, the courthouse cronies, some police, and the players. Up front, looking calm and confident in dress grays at the table on the right, Collier Hallowell and his paralegal pitched their tent of files and papers with the ease of nomads. Michelle sat with Paul at the table to the left, her hair spotlighted, wearing a beige maternity jumper. They both looked relieved to see Nina rolling her cart up the aisle.

The bailiff, a smiling, older Japanese man whose uniform had grown too tight around the middle, chatted with the judge’s clerk at her desk just under Judge Milne’s dais. The court stenographer had already set up her curious machine on its tripod and was threading her paper through it.

At nine o’clock precisely, the bailiff went to his desk at the left wall under the clock, the clerk looked sharply around, and the stenographer straightened her back. "All rise," the bailiff intoned, and Judge Milne appeared in full black regalia, seating himself upon his sparse throne with the ceremony of a pharaoh. "Be seated." Murmurs and rustling, coughing and half-suppressed laughter stirred as they all sat down. Milne frowned slightly; a hush fell.

"People of the State of California versus Michelle Tengstedt Patterson," the clerk read.

"Counsel?"

"Ready for the prosecution."

"Ready for the defense, Your Honor."

"Let the record show the defendant is present and we have a jury roster of eighty-six. Counsel, I’m hoping that will be enough. I’ll be asking the jurors the basic information. Then you can ask the questions we’ve already gone over. Deputy Kimura, bring in the jurors."

The bailiff returned with the jury panel, who took the vacant seats reserved for them in the courtroom. Milne’s usually sour visage took on a warm and friendly cast as they came in. He sounded downright avuncular. "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," he said with a smile. "Thank you for doing your duty and appearing here today."

He made a few more introductory remarks, and introduced the attorneys, then said, "This is a case in which the defendant has been charged with the crime of murder. She is charged with the death of her husband, Anthony DiNatale Patterson."

Fourteen men and women were called to the jury box on a random basis and took their turns answering the questions Milne read to them, then the lawyers’ questions. Milne never lost his courteous attitude, but he moved them along remarkably quickly.

Michelle, sitting next to Nina at the counsel table, leaned over and said in a low voice, "How can you tell who to pick?"

"Inspired guessing is the biggest part of it," Nina told her lightly under her breath. She was tapping her pen on the diagram in front of her, a seating chart that contained fourteen numbered boxes. She had written the name of the person sitting in each box. The bailiff had also handed her questionnaires that had been filled out by each of the people in the seats.

Some big law firms conducted background investigations on the entire jury panel, spending tens of thousands of dollars to find out political leanings, financial status, and many other interesting tidbits that could not easily be asked in court. These facts were then compared to an ideal-juror profile prepared specifically for the case by a highly paid consultant. A number of expensive and authoritative-sounding books had been written on the subject of juror selection. The way Nina saw it, they made dandy paperweights.

A few of the stereotypes did seem to make sense. Conventional wisdom held that women judged women defendants more harshly, especially if the defendants were young and good-looking; that members of minority racial groups went easy on each other, as well as members of the same occupational group; that young people tended to be broader-minded. There were supposedly "defense" occupations— teaching, publishing, anyone in the arts, athletes, the unemployed. The "prosecution" jobs included engineers, medical workers, anyone who wore a uniform at work. But these notions were changing rapidly too. A black accountant might judge a black man who had stolen money sternly, but feel sympathetic toward a young white single mother who had done the same.

Nina had her own set of standards for judging the jurors, gleaned from many sources. She wanted jurors who could stay alert and not be put off by the sometimes lurid details of Michelle’s recent life. She wanted skeptics with some life experience who would not be swayed from their own convictions. Most important, she intended to send on their way all the opinionated blowhards, usually male. These folks made up their minds early and pestered weaker-minded jurors into going along with them. The point was to try to have twelve independent-minded people available to weigh the facts.

Some jurors were excused simply because they worked at Prize’s. Some had pressing obligations elsewhere, which hadn’t amounted to an automatic exemption. Some felt prejudiced by newspaper accounts they had read. One man in his twenties kept staring at Michelle, broke into a broad smile, and finally said, "I know her. That’s Misty. Listen, you don’t want me on this jury." Michelle looked down at Nina’s nine-dot doodles.

He joined the others excused for cause. Another member of the panel heard her name called and made her way to the box for questioning.

The peremptory challenges went faster. Hallowell, looking earnest and morally upright, excused the young women. Nina excused the older, conservative types, who might be too tempted to make moral, not legal judgments. Both of them courted the jurors with their questions. They remembered names and occupations, they made harmless jokes, and they began the job of influencing the jury.

One boy hardly looked old enough to be there and didn’t seem able to comprehend what was going on; Nina did the honors and thanked and excused him. Another joker enjoyed all the attention, displaying an offhand regard for the issues. Hallowell excused him.

They did not finish that day, or Tuesday. Milne stopped allowing even good excuses, apparently worried that he would run out of juror candidates. Finally, on Wednesday at four o’clock, Milne dismissed the lucky chosen twelve, along with the two alternates, and the remaining half dozen who had not been chosen, and called the lawyers into chambers. Hallowell opened the door for Nina, and she went in first. Milne said, "Hey, Collier," giving her only a curt nod.

Milne’s chamber, the closely guarded inner room of the pyramid, accessible only by invitation, was filled with personal treasures: family photos, certificates, golf clubs, a thank-you poster from a third-grade class, and a collection of pipes on the bookshelf. A wide window overlooked the forest. His bird’s-eye maple desk gave off the smell of furniture polish. In this serene room, he signed orders that changed lives. Protected from all disturbance, flanked by his staff, comfortable as Cheops, he had only one duty, to decide. Most of the time his decisions would be carried out. Few jobs in American society created so much respect and fear; few wielded such power. Small wonder Milne treated the jurors, his voters, so kindly.

"I asked you this Friday, when we were going over some other matters, and I’m going to try one more time. I want to know why this case is going forward," Milne said to Nina from his high-backed red leather chair. "I read the trial briefs over the weekend. There’s a confession. No amount of hocus-pocus psychiatric testimony is going to take that away. And if you don’t put up a defense, just to keep that confession out, Collier’s going to run away with the case. Not that I have any preconceived ideas, here. I’m just going by what I see in the briefs."

"We offered a second-degree, Judge," Hallowell said. "She has no prior record. She’ll get fifteen years with the mitigating circumstances and be out in ten." He didn’t look at Nina.

"This can’t be good for your client’s health," Milne said coldly. "She’d better not go into labor in my courtroom."

"She wants a trial, Your Honor. That’s what we’re going to have," Nina said. "The baby’s coming whether we like it or not and she wants to take her chances. She knows what she is up against. The district attorney hasn’t made an acceptable plea bargain offer. This woman was in an abusive marriage. There’s no evidence of premeditation."

"He was hit twice," Hallowell said. "She neutralized him with the first blow. She could have left the house, called the police. She had time to think about it, and she decided to kill him. That’s premeditation."

"At the very least, there was a fight. She has psychiatric problems. The so-called confession on tape is unreliable as evidence." She resisted the disapproving judgment emanating from the two men. Milne thought she was showing off. He looked at Hallowell and shrugged his shoulders.

"Mizz Reilly," the judge said, his drawl of the word implying disrespect, "don’t misunderstand me. You’re the lawyer; you think you have some kind of Twinkie defense, try it. But, in the interests of all concerned, including the interests of judicial administration and the interests of your client, I think you ought to take Collier’s offer seriously."

Nina considered all the responses she would like to make, and discarded them. Nothing she could say would change Milne’s ideas about the case, or his opinion of her, at this point. "Mmmm," she said. Mel Akers had taught her that. When in doubt, mumble.

"All right, then, let’s not waste any more time. We’ll start with opening statements at nine A.M. tomorrow. If you people reach a plea bargain before that time, call my clerk immediately." Milne picked up a letter.

She followed Hallowell into the hall, glad to exit the room.

"I believe my client might still be willing to accept voluntary manslaughter," she said stiffly.

"I’ll talk to my boss again, Nina," Hallowell said. "But don’t expect miracles." They were shoulder to shoulder, his up higher, moving down the empty hall behind the courtrooms. Nina spun around and faced him. The tension, anxiety, and paranoia of the preceding months disintegrated the last tatter of her self-control.

"You know, Collier, I have an unpleasant thought that I want to share with you today: You would offer Riesner that plea. He told Michelle you would. So why not me?"

Hallowell said nothing.

"Riesner, who told you about Dr. Cervenka, handed over this live torpedo, all to blow up my defense. A real guy thing, right? A trade, a deal. He saves your office an intensive-care headache, grabs my client, pleads her out quickly, and everyone goes home early to eat meat."

He regarded her calmly. Up close, he was still unreadable. His steady eyes and firm mouth, his damnable composure, infuriated her even more.

"Tell me who told you about the hypnosis," she demanded.

"Not Riesner."

"Prove it."

"I don’t have to prove it."

"You and Riesner gonna go get drunk, after; share a few jokes about the trial, pat each other on the ass?"

"Don’t look too far for someone to blame for how you’re handling this case," he said easily, but he was breathing harder, letting her feel his scorn.

"Who withdrew a decent plea bargain? Who’s wasting state time prosecuting an innocent pregnant girl who had an abusive husband? Who’s got a lot of jive and no real evidence of premeditation, or for that matter murder in any degree?"

"Careful, Nina," Hallowell said. "You attack me personally, you’ll wish you hadn’t."

"You can’t put this case into a tight professional compartment in your mind, Collier," Nina said. "I won’t let you. She’s a human being, not a case file."

"Save it for your fans on the jury," he said.

Andrea made supper, but Nina couldn’t eat. She struggled with Bobby over some long-division homework. They finished late, both tired and strained. Outside, an enormous yellow harvest moon floated in the sky. She pulled on Matt’s warm leather jacket and followed it. Leaving the street, she walked off into the woods to a ghostly white-speckled boulder not far from the house. Up at the top was a flat place covered with pine needles, just wide enough so that she could lie down. Heat from the still-warm granite flowed through her bones as she stretched out, staring up through the dark branches into the brilliant night.

She allowed her mind to drift through the mistakes of the day. She had let the pressure get to her. She had lost her temper and blurted out some half-baked thoughts she only half believed, because Milne’s attitude stung her and Collier’s refusal to offer her a better plea bargain at this last moment scared her.