Through the whole of this little speech Judge Tifaro was staring at me, giving me that look of hers, the stare that made you want to check your law license just to prove to yourself you didn’t pick it up along with a screwdriver and a fifty-foot garden hose at Sears. She was wondering why I wasn’t objecting from the first word, why I had done what I had done to let this man on the stand in the first place.
“No objection, Mr. Carl?” she said finally.
“No, Your Honor, but thank you for your concern.”
She stared, I shrugged, Jefferson continued.
“And then what happened?”
“What the hell do you think happened? She ended up dead.”
“I’d like to show you now a folder of photographs taken of the crime scene, People’s Exhibit Six, already entered into evidence, and ask you to look at it, please. I want to warn you, Mr. Cutlip, the pictures are terribly disturbing.”
Cutlip leaned forward in his chair as Jefferson brought him the folder. He opened the folder on the shelf in front of him and went through the photographs carefully, one by one by one. By the third his face was scrunched up as if against the cold and his upper lip was quivering. By the fifth he was in tears. By the ninth he was unable to look at them any longer and closed the folder. Only his soft sobs and wheezes could be heard in the courtroom.
“Mr. Cutlip…”
Cutlip wiped his eyes with the back of his big, slack-skinned hand.
“Mr. Cutlip. I have to ask you a question now. The pictures show a woman lying dead on a mattress. Do you recognize that woman?”
Cutlip gasped at the air and then said,”Yes.”
“Who is it, Mr. Cutlip?”
“It is my niece. Hailey Prouix.”
“Are you sure, Mr. Cutlip?”
“I knowed her all her life. I couldn’t be surer about nothing in this world.”
“I need to show you another set of photographs. People’s Exhibit nineteen, photographs from the autopsy. If you could just look at the first two, please.”
Cutlip nodded, the good soldier, and took the folder. He shuddered at the first photograph, winced at the second, closed the folder like it was a curse.
“Same,” said Cutlip. “It’s the same. It’s Hailey.”
“Hailey Prouix.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you miss her?”
“Mr. Carl,” said Judge Tifaro, “are you awake?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am.”
“Any objection to that question?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Jefferson, ask it again.”
“Do you miss her, Mr. Cutlip?”
“Yes, I surely do. I’m in line for the insurance money, but I’d just as soon as toss it for how I’m getting it. She was like a daughter to me, more. She was taking care of me still, she was taking care of her poor sister, and then that there man killed her. He done this to me, and now my heart weeps tears of blood. I got no choice but to miss her, to miss her ever day, ever damn day of the rest of my sorry life.”
“Thank you, Mr. Cutlip,” said Jefferson, trying unsuccessfully to hide his grin. “I pass the witness.”
The judge’s stare of inquest aimed right at my skull continued even as she asked for Troy Jefferson and myself to approach the bench. She waited for the court reporter to set up right by her side before she spoke.
“Mr. Carl,” she said, “do you have any idea what you are doing in this trial?”
“Not really, ma’am, no.”
“I didn’t think so. You backed out of a stipulation which allowed this man and his tears onto the stand. I gave you opportunities to object at every step of his testimony, and still you ignored them. Is there anything you want to do now, any motion you want to make?”
“All I want, Your Honor, is the chance to pose a few questions to Mr. Cutlip myself.”
“You want to cross-examine?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You have questions for this witness?”
“Just a few.”
“Are you sure? Don’t you think it was bad enough already? Are you certain that it might not make more sense just to leave him be, hope the jury forgets what he said, and let the prosecution rest its case?”
“Just a few questions, Your Honor.”
“Well, then, have at it, Mr. Carl. It’s time to recess for the afternoon. So tomorrow, first thing, you’ll get your chance. And do not say I didn’t warn you.”
49
ONCE BEFORE in my career, during its early, naïve stage, I had attempted to break a man on cross-examination. Carefully I prepared, laying out all my traps, hoping for the devastating blow. He was a city councilman, skilled in the use of language but hot of temper, and I believed I could make him blow. I was wrong. Oh, I brought forth flashes of anger and exposed to the jury with lovely clarity the brittle inconsistencies in his story, but that was all. He had murdered a man with his bare hands, proven later by a piece of physical evidence held closely by his wife, but on the stand I got none of that, and I felt my client’s guilty verdict deep in my gut.
It taught me a fine lesson. Cross-examination is a lovely tool for highlighting inconsistencies and evident falsehoods, for painting a witness as a hapless prevaricator or even an outright liar, cross-examination can be the death of a thousand cuts for the credibility of that witness or an opponent’s entire case, but it is not the place for the single crushing blow. There are too many formalities involved, too many safeguards. Compare the polite confines of a courtroom with a police interrogation room in the dank recesses of a precinct house, a place of intimidation, of psychological manipulation, of violence imagined or real. The interrogation room is the place to break a suspect. But Lawrence Cutlip would never submit to the interrogation room and, I suspected, in its confines, furry with sweat and fear, he would be comfortably at home, able to withstand all manner of the interrogator’s tricks. He was not the type to be badgered into confession. So there would be no interrogation here. I would have to make do with cross-examination, which, despite its fearsome reputation, is a gentler dance.
So how was I to proceed? Advice was more then plentiful.
Phil Skink: “Go right at him. Fast and furious. Get him on the ropes and don’t let up.”
“It’s not a boxing match, Phil.”
“No? You’re going in there to put him away, right?. It’s no time for subtle mercy. You need be to Jack Dempsey – hook, hook, hook, and then step into the right what breaks his jaw.”
“Have you found anything yet?”
“Don’t you think I’d have told you?”
“I need it.”
“I knows you need it, mate, and I’ll be getting it, too. But you remember what I says. Jack Dempsey. Hook, hook, hook, and then the right to the jaw. Drop him like a sack of potatoes, you will.”
Beth Derringer: “Be gentle, subtle. He can handle anger, he’s used to it, it’s all he’s ever known, but the soft emotions will confuse him.”
“Skink thinks I should be Jack Dempsey in there.”
“Guys like Skink only know one way. But there is another. Dance around the truth so he doesn’t realize what you’re getting at until it is too late. A little bit here, a little bit there. He’ll be expecting a masculine rush up the middle, a straight through line like a fullback off tackle. You should take a more circular tack.”
“Virginia Woolf as opposed to Ernest Hemingway.”
“Yes, yes. Exactly.”
“It sounds nice, but I didn’t know that the Bloomsbury group was a law firm. Woolf, Strachey, Forster, Keynes and Woolf.”
“Let me tell you something, Victor. Be glad you never met up with Virginia Woolf in court. Be very glad.”
Reverend Henson: “The thing with Cutlip,” he said when I called him for his share of advice, “is that he wants to think he is a good man, despite all he has done. None believe they are evil, even the evil. And, more desperately, he wants the world to think he is a good man, too. So he’ll deny everything, and deny it with a conviction that will be unassailable. But if he’s trapped, then he’ll change. He’ll turn ugly, turn irrational, search desperately for someone who can’t defend himself and lay the blame on him. As in the Bible, where Aaron was commanded to lay his hands upon the head of a live goat and confess over it all the sins of the Children of Israel. Leviticus sixteen, verse twenty-two: ‘And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.’ He’ll try to do the same to some poor soul, someone not able to defend himself.”