The preliminary hearing is a circus. We are immersed in the din of the curious-reporters, courthouse groupies, old ladies and retired men in straw hats with nothing better to do, lawyers with an idle hour between appearances. They are all crowded here in department 17 of the municipal court.
Just behind the press seats, there are four good-looking women in their early thirties with stylish tans who have followed the case closely. Tod is with them. They are sending strong signals of support to Talia, who occasionally looks back at them and smiles. These, I assume, are friends, from the tennis or country club.
Talia is drawn and pale. Reports of her arrest in the papers reflected a mere formality, an appearance at police headquarters in the company of a lawyer, me, to be printed, booked, and released on bail-$200,000. For this we used some of the equity in Talia’s house, avoiding the premium that would be collected by a bondsman. Though she is at the moment starved for cash, $200,000 for a woman of Talia’s apparent means is viewed by the players in this matter as a pittance. The court, at least for the moment, is satisfied that my client does not present an overly great risk of flight. In Talia’s case it is a certainty. Everything she holds dear in life is here, in this town.
In the darkening hollows around her eyes, I can see signs of stress. It is as if the trauma of the past several months, Ben’s death, and now the state’s implication of her in that sordid and murky affair have finally begun to take their toll.
The working news moguls are here in strength-graying bureau chiefs for the large metropolitans from the south and around the bay, local reporters stringing for national publications, crews for the three network affiliates, and a sea of reporters from smaller papers-all clamoring for seats in the front two rows.
The klieg-light set and the minicam crews with their belted battery packs are left like waifs outside the door.
There is a man I see for the first time today. He is alone at the other counsel table, closest to the empty jury box. I have never met him, but I know from photos in the newspaper who he is. Tall and dark, a brooding presence with deep-set eyes and a shock of raven-black hair over a forehead etched deep with furrows drooping at the temples toward hollow cheeks. It is a face which might appear noble, even Lincolnesque if masked by a growth of beard. He stands emptying the contents of a worn leather briefcase onto the table: an assortment of books, a single pad of legal-length yellow paper. The sheets at the center of the pad are uniformly impressed to an onion-skin texture by the heavy scrawl of handwriting. Despite the stories I’ve heard from Sam Jennings and others, Duane Nelson does not cut the image of a political hack.
“All rise.” A beefy bailiff to the far side of middle age marches out around to the front of the bench. A heavy revolver slaps his thigh as he walks. “Remain standing. Municipal court of Capitol County, department 17, is now in session, the Honorable Gail O’Shaunasy presiding.”
Those in the aisle scurry for seats.
O’Shaunasy whisks out of chambers and ascends the stairs to the bench, a flash of swirling black robes and authority. In her early thirties, she is the latest rising star on the muni court bench.
“We have a few preliminaries,” says O’Shaunasy.
There is some minor jostling that follows, Cheetam rising and in the affected erudite English of an aging beefcake actor launching a number of pretrial motions. These have been hatched by Cheetam and Ron Brown. They are aimed at excluding evidence-the carpet fibers found at Talia’s house and some shotgun cartridges seized in Ben’s study.
Nelson rises to the occasion, citing chapter and verse the case law for the proposition that a search warrant wasn’t necessary. “Mrs. Potter,” he says, “consented to the search.” Then the coup de grace. It seems that Ron Brown, whose role it was to address all prehearing motions, has failed to inform Cheetam of the court’s forty-eight-hour rule. Cheetam has blown it, delivering his motions to the DA that morning.
O’Shaunasy is clearly angered by Cheetam’s cavalier attitude toward the local rules of court. Parochial as these may be, their willful violation is the fastest way to alienate a local judge who helped write them.
Cheetam pounds the table and speaks of the seriousness of the charges against his client.
O’Shaunasy puts up a single hand to cut him off.
“Mr. Nelson is right. The evidence here points to consent for the search. I’ve read your points and authorities, Mr. Cheetam. I see nothing in the facts which would lead me to conclude that the police had begun to focus suspicion on the defendant at the time mat they visited her home for this inquiry. Is there something I don’t know?”
Cheetam stands, confronted with the law. Unable to say “yes” for want of anything to follow it with, and unable to say “no” for fear of losing on the issue, he says nothing.
“On this issue, this one time, I will overlook your clear violation of the forty-eight-hour rule, Mr. Cheetam. Do not do it again. Do you understand me?”
Cheetam nods like a schoolboy.
“But on the merits I find that the search was pursuant to the defendant’s consent, without duress and before she became the focus of suspicion in this case. Your motion is denied.”
The only one moved thus far by Cheetam’s strategy and argument, it seems, is Talia, who appears almost terrified that the first blood shed in this battle is her own.
Contrary to all that I have been led to expect by Sam Jennings, Nelson is an imposing presence. He projects just the right mix of authority and public benevolence.
The state calls its first witness, Mordecai Johnson, an aging detective with a balding head of gray. Johnson is one of two evidence technicians called to the scene at Ben’s office the night of the killing. He testifies about the hair follicle found in the locking mechanism of the shotgun, and links it not exclusively but close enough to Talia to be damaging.
“Consistent,” he says, “in all respects with hair samples taken from the head of the defendant, Talia Potter.”
Johnson labors only briefly over the blood in the service elevator-just long enough to establish the direction of travel with the body, and raise the implication that Ben was already dead when he was carried into the office.
Nelson’s finished with the witness. Cheetam takes him on cross. Science has yet to devise a universally accepted method for identifying the hair of a specific individual. Cheetam manages to get this admission from the witness.
“Then you can’t say with scientific certainty that the hair found in the locking mechanism of the shotgun actually belonged to Mrs. Potter?”
“No,” concedes Johnson. “Only that it is identical in all major characteristics to samples taken from the defendant.” He sticks the pike in a little deeper.
For all of his famed pizazz, Cheetam is notoriously slow on his feet. With no question before the witness, Johnson is allowed to give a quick and dirty dissertation on the characteristics of hair, the pigment in the cortex, the thin medulla, all identical with the sample from Talia’s head, he says. Cheetam fails to cut him off. All the while O’Shaunasy’s taking notes.
I’m scrawling my own on a yellow pad. Cheetam returns to the counsel table to look at the forensics report. I push my pad under his nose like an idiot board. He pages idly through the report for a second while glancing sideways at my note, then returns to the witness.
“Mr. Johnson, do you know where the shotgun found at the scene was normally stored or kept?”
“I was told, by Mrs. Potter and others, that that particular weapon was usually kept in a gun case in Mr. Potter’s study.”
“At the Potter residence?”
“That’s correct.”