It’s one thing to have the feeling yourself, but when the judge says this, it becomes clear: Quinn senses that my client is going down.

“The wisest and safest course at this point is not to allow it. I’m going to sustain the objection. I think you should move on to another subject, Mr. Tuchio.” He sends us back out.

Gross is looking around as if he’s not sure whether to answer the question. Even though Tuchio never got a chance to finish it, the witness knows what it is. No doubt they have practiced it enough times.

As soon as I sit down, Carl is in my ear. “What happened?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s okay,” I lie.

Tuchio is back, centered in front of the witness again. “Let’s leave the shooting range for the moment. Let’s go back to the tavern. To the Del Rio,” he says. “You testified earlier that the defendant talked to you and made statements regarding a possible kidnapping of the victim, Terry Scarborough, is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

“That he said he could hit the victim over the head and dump him into a laundry cart.”

“Yes.”

Tuchio thinks for a moment.

“During your meeting with him that day at the tavern,” he says, “back at the Del Rio, besides kidnapping, did the defendant ever say anything else to you, anything that you thought that was in any way…Let me rephrase this.”

Tuchio seems to be having trouble here, trying to change gears in a ham-handed way, and I’m wondering why, if he’s back at the Del Rio, he didn’t remember to bring whatever it is up earlier.

“When you were there at the tavern, at the Del Rio, did the defendant, Mr. Arnsberg, ever tell you how he might gain access to Mr. Scarborough if in fact Mr. Scarborough was in his room at the hotel behind a locked door?”

“Yes, he did.”

“And what was that?”

“At one point he was talking about how he had access. How he could get into rooms at the hotel real easy because he could get a master key.”

Carl’s sitting next to me, shaking his head, whispering, “I never said that.”

“And then he said, because he could get right up to him real easy, he said it would be real easy to hammer ’im.”

Out in the audience there is murmuring. What did he say?

“Were those his exact words?” asks Tuchio. “That he could hammer him?”

“That’s what he said.”

“That’s a lie!” Carl says it out loud now, and there is an eruption of voices in the audience. Two of the reporters in the front row break for the door at the back of the room.

Quinn slaps his gavel. “Keep your client quiet,” he tells me. Carl is pulling on my arm. He wants to tell me it’s a lie. But I already know it.

“Officer, stop those people right now,” says the judge. The two reporters stop dead in their tracks halfway up the main aisle. “Sit down,” says the judge. “You can file your stories during the break.”

Before Quinn can even put down his gavel, Tuchio turns to me and says, “Your witness.”

21

Quinn takes the noon break. I ask for a meeting in chambers, and all of us, the lawyers and the judge, end up hovering over his desk in the back.

“The man’s lying.” Harry’s had a bellyful of this. He’s leaning with both hands against the edge of the judge’s desk, bearing down on Quinn, who is seated in his padded black leather chair. “Look at the transcript of the wire,” says Harry. “There’s not a word in there about any of this, a master key or anything about hammering the victim.”

“You’ve got a good point, except for one thing,” says Quinn. “The wire transcript and the witness who was attached to them are not in evidence. As I recall, that was based on an agreement made right here in chambers by your partner, Mr. Madriani.”

“It’s one thing to keep evidence out,” says Harry. “It’s another to suborn perjury.”

“I resent that,” says Tuchio.

“Resent it all you want,” says Harry. “How do you explain the fact that these inventions by your witness don’t appear on the wire transcript?”

“Very easily,” says Tuchio. “The agent, aka Mr. Henoch, who was wearing the wire, was not with Gross and your client during the entire time of their conversation at the bar. It seems he stepped out twice-once to go to the john and again to make a telephone call from his cell phone outside, because he couldn’t get reception in the bar. At least that’s what he told us.”

“And unfortunately, we can’t put him on the stand to ask him,” says Harry.

“That’s not my fault,” says Tuchio. He smiles.

Harry glances at the judge, who gives him a shrug.

“And I should remind you,” says Tuchio, looking at me now, “that I never asked the witness whether anybody else was present during the conversation at the Del Rio, and you better not either. If the wire transcript and the agent are off-limits, that means as far as the jury is concerned he doesn’t exist. Am I right, Your Honor?”

Quinn nods. “That’s correct.”

My turn in the tumbler with Gross on cross-examination reveals just how well Tuchio has trained him. I ask him how many times he has met with the prosecutor, his assistants, or the police to discuss his testimony before appearing here today.

“Quite a few times,” he says.

“How many is quite a few?”

“A lot,” he says. He can’t remember the number of times or the precise duration or location of all these meetings, but they were held at various places, including a hotel downtown where he admits that the state picked up the tab for four nights immediately preceding his testimony here.

I ask him why they put him up in the hotel.

“It was for security.” He smiles and just lays it out there like a land mine waiting for me to step on it.

If I probe further, what he’ll say is that he’s putting his life on the line and that he’s in danger from his former friends in the Posse because of his testimony today, the inference being, why would a man put his life in jeopardy just to come here and lie?

I ask him if he has any criminal charges pending against him in this state or any other state at the federal level or anywhere in the universe, now or at any time since the police started talking to him.

He says, “No.”

I ask him whether the police or the prosecutor have offered him anything in return for his testimony.

Again, his answer is no. To listen to him, Gross is just your average, ordinary citizen willing to take a bullet in order to tell the truth.

“Have they offered to put you in any witness-protection program following your testimony here?”

“You mean the police? No,” he says.

“Or any other level of government, including the federal government?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. Instead his eyes make a beeline for Tuchio’s table.

“Bench conference,” says Tuchio.

Before we even get to the side of the bench, it’s clear what has happened. The feds have rolled Gross up in their investigation and eaten him like an enchilada. They won’t need any pending criminal charges to cut a deal and gain cooperation. And because there were no charges pending, Gross wouldn’t even have a lawyer. For the man who extended a friendly hand and invited the feds to join the Posse party, a few months in the club for Agent Henoch and a peek at his badge would turn Gross into jelly.

As soon as the rest of the Aryan world found out, they would chain Gross, tasseled loafers and all, to the back of one of their choppers and drag him between here and Alamogordo a few hundred times, just to make sure he had no additional handwritten notes on other body parts.

At the side of the bench, a smiling Tuchio explains to the judge that while the federal government has not in fact made any formal offer of protection to Gross, they have discussed the possibility of such an offer in the future.

Of course they have, just as soon as they squeeze every seed and all the pulp out of him. In the meantime they’ll have him tucked into a cave complex somewhere on the other side of the moon, reminding him every few seconds of just how dangerous the world is. No wonder he’s dried out and off drugs. In such an environment, there would be no need for a prosecutor or the cops to suggest anything by way of invention regarding Gross’s testimony. The thought of being turned into an asphalt sled tends to make the mind not only cooperative but highly creative. A few newspaper clippings about the case, the evidence at hand, and rumors of what’s to come and Gross could fill in the blanks. After all, you always want to keep the people who are keeping you alive happy.