“Three,” says Nelson. “Three times.”
“Fine, three, a half-dozen, twenty. What difference does it make? The issue is, What does this testimony prove?” he says. “That they conspired to murder Ben Potter?” Harry shakes his head. “This is what the DA wants to offer it for. But this evidence doesn’t prove that fact, and to allow the jury to jump to this conclusion is to allow them to be misled.
“No,” Harry continues. “This testimony will prove one thing and one thing only. That Paul Madriani went to a motel with the defendant-fine, three times.”
From this, he tells the court, maybe, though it is not even certain, the jury can draw inferences that the two of us had a little sack time. Maybe we were busy working on business, he says. He wonders aloud how much this motel clerk can testify to, whether he purports to have been watching through the keyhole.
“We’re not trying a cause for alienation of affections here. This is a murder trial. I would ask the court a single question. Does this fact, the fact that the defendant and her attorney went to a motel, prove that the defendant committed the murder of Ben Potter?”
“Not by itself,” says Nelson. “But together with other evidence, fair inferences can be drawn.”
“No,” says Harry. “Unfair inferences can be drawn. And that’s what you are about here, offering this kind of evidence. It’s not probative of any material fact in the case, and it is highly prejudicial to the defendant.”
“In what way?” says Acosta.
“In the way that it deprives her of competent counsel.”
“This is ludicrous,” says Nelson. “She selected Mr. Madriani to represent her and she has Mr. Madriani.”
Harry moves forward and leans on the lip of Acosta’s desk as if to put a little weight on the next point.
“It will deprive her of competent counsel, not because Mr. Madriani is any less able than he was before this evidence was introduced, but because he is no longer believable in the eyes of the jury. If this court lets this evidence in, it will transform the defense counsel into the ultimate unindicted co-conspirator,” says Harry. “You know it, and I know it, and if you allow this, an appellate court will know it.”
Nelson is laughing, scoffing at this.
“This is what it is,” says Harry. “A little character assassination goes a long way in the eyes of a jury.”
He turns to Acosta. “Have no doubt about it,” he says, “the people want to present this testimony for one reason and one reason only, to discredit defense counsel in the eyes of this jury. It’s the only way they can win a losing case.”
Nelson is denouncing this, claiming that Harry is overreaching, trying to make more of the Walker column and the testimony of this witness than they are worth.
“Fine,” says Harry. “Then drop the witness.”
“Why should we?”
“That’s enough,” says Acosta. He is mean eyes, elbows on the desk, steepled fingers as he looks at Harry. It does not take a mind-meld to deduce that he is busy searching for ways to allow this evidence, and running headlong into Harry’s logic on each.
“Anything more, Mr. Nelson?”
“I think it’s all been said.”
“You?” he says to Harry.
“No, Your Honor.”
For a time, my fate seems to hang, suspended as it were in the hiss of conditioned air that sweeps in from the register over the Coconut’s desk.
“When are you calling this witness, Mr. Nelson?”
The DA shrugs a little, like gauging time in a trial is hard to do. “Two days,” he says.
“Fine. I’ll be taking this matter under submission. I will give you my ruling as to whether this witness may take the stand, and if so, the scope of his testimony, before that time.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
“That’s all.” We are excused from the Coconut’s quarters.
Harry and Nelson are making for the door. I’m on my feet. The court reporter is packing up.
“Not you, Mr. Madriani. I want to talk to you.”
We are alone now, me and the dark brows and brooding eyes of Armando Acosta.
“I will admit it, you have gall,” he says. With only a little lighting from below he could easily be mistaken for one of Lucifer’s chief lieutenants. The dark Mediterranean tones take on a measure of evil here, so that being alone in this room with him is frightening, foreboding.
“You will learn,” he says. “You don’t do this to me. Not in my court.”
I say nothing. It is best to let him vent this without resistance. Acosta is feeling the heat. He is up for appointment to the appellate court, and now is not the time for a mistrial in a notorious case. He sees this, my part with Talia, as compromising his future, and he will not have it. To the Coconut this is not business or professional-it is personal.
“You think you have me over a barrel?” he says. There is a profane smile here. “If I let this in, this testimony, you think either you will get a mistrial or I will be slapped down on appeal, is that it?”
He waits for an answer. But I fix him with a stare, in silence, keeping the apprehension out of my eyes. It is best not to run from mangy dogs with bared teeth, or to show fear to Armando Acosta.
“You have made a big mistake,” he says. “A big mistake.”
Then unceremoniously he tells me to get out, to leave his chambers.
The process is called “filing an affidavit,” the document used by lawyers to disqualify any trial judge before the start of a case. The law allows one to a customer in any trial. It is a process that I now know I will be using with regularity in the future, whenever I have the misfortune of drawing Armando Acosta.
I have hit bottom, I think. After all of the blows, professional and personal, my career in apparent tatters, I am left to wonder if I too will be served with process, charged with Talia in Ben’s murder. With all of this it might seem strange to another that it is my failed marriage that comes to trouble me the most, my loneliness and the gnawing void that has been my life since Nikki walked out on me.
It is a nightly ritual. I wander aimlessly through the rooms of the house, always ending in the same place, standing in the doorway to Sarah’s bedroom. Little brown teddy bears on a pink lattice pattern decorate the walls of this room, barren of all furnishings. Sarah forgot a few toys during her last visit. A naked doll, its hair seeming to molt, arms and legs twisted in unnatural ways, lies forlorn in the middle of the carpet. Tonight I feel as if I share some symbiotic fate with this cast-off creature, abandoned and alone.
Increasingly I have turned my lawyer’s analytic mind to the question of how I arrived at the point of a failed marriage and a broken family, things I never dreamed life would hold for me. Like cancer or AIDS, these are afflictions we see visited on others, never ourselves.
While my affair with Talia was a symptom of my condition, I have never considered it the central cause of my current domestic distress. Talia came later, after Nikki had left me. My problems had a more central cause, my obsession with work, my unceasing need for approval from Ben, and the delusion of success that seemed to accompany these. It was these things, I think, that culminated in a terminal loss of respect in Nikki’s eyes. Like too many in our generation, I searched for acceptance and esteem in all the wrong places.
Nikki is now heavily invested, not only financially but emotionally, in Talia’s trial. It is the one positive result that has come from the hammering in the press and the whippings I have taken from the Coconut.
I’d misread her badly in that telephone conversation. It was not anger but fear that was in her voice-fear for me, that I would be charged. We have talked since. Nikki now clearly sees my life tied to the fate of this woman she has despised. It has curbed her animus and mellowed her judgment in ways I could not have anticipated.
For all of my lawyer’s analysis and after-the-fact intuition, I play childish games, bargaining with the devil to restore my life. In these Faustian episodes, in the recesses of my mind, I offer up my soul for another chance-Nikki and Sarah back in my life. Like a child stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk, believing such mundane acts will alter the fates of life, I play endless scenarios in my mind, how I can win them back. And always the same answer. My destiny is now tied to Talia’s trial. Success or failure, this contest now holds the balance of my fate. It is the anvil on which I must sever the psychic chains of doubt and dependence that had bound me to Ben, to regain the autonomy of my soul, to take Nikki and Sarah back into my life.