Alex Cross’s Trial

Jonah looked at me wide-eyed. Together we stared at Moody on the witness stand.

I thought I detected a hint of amusement behind her serious expression. She watched Loophole Lewis swivel all the way around to shoot a goggle-eyed look at my father. She heard the defendants whispering frantically among themselves. She was aware that her words had set off a buzz of confusion in the gallery. Even the jurors had snapped to wakefulness.

And Moody was enjoying every minute of it. Maybe she knew our cause was lost, and she was out to confound everybody. To confuse us. To throw the whole trial up in the air and see where the pieces came down.

This was every lawyer’s nightmare: the rogue witness, off on her own.

My father banged his gavel several times. “Order!” The buzz subsided. “Mr. Lewis?”

Lewis turned back to the witness stand. “Now, Miss Cross,” he said, “every previous witness, including your grandfather, claimed that they never were presented with a search warrant that night.”

“I know that, sir,” she said. “Papaw’s getting pretty old now; he doesn’t always notice everything. And when those men came with the warrant, there wasn’t anybody out in front of the house except me. I was the only one.”

I’m sure that almost everyone else thought Maxwell Lewis looked as confident as ever, but I saw signs that he was flustered. He was forgetting to slouch casually against the railing of the jury box. He was standing at attention and speaking a little too quickly. His countrified Clarence Darrow lilt had all but vanished. Moody had rattled him.

“This is, to say the least, a most unusual bit of testimony, Miss Cross.”

“Why is that, sir? You-all said they came there with a search warrant. You said they showed it to us. All I’m saying is… well, that’s exactly what happened.”

She was lying. I knew it for sure. I was with Abraham in the parlor that night, and I knew nobody came to the door with any warrant. All had been quiet, there was a clatter of horses, then the Raiders started shooting at anything that moved.

Maxwell Lewis put on an uncomfortable smile. “All right, they showed you the warrant,” he said. “And then what happened next?”

Suddenly I knew where Moody was going with this, why she was lying. What she was hoping to demonstrate with her lie.

Damn! It was brilliant! Why hadn’t I thought of it?

But of course, if I had thought of it-if I’d even asked her to do such a thing-I could have been disbarred.

As it was, she was on her own.

“Well, sir,” she said to Lewis, “I was looking over the warrant, you know, and I said, ‘I still don’t think y’all have the right to do this. But if that’s what the paper says, I reckon we’ve got no choice but to let you come on in.’ ”

“You said that?” Lewis turned to the jury, hoping they would share his skepticism.

None of them even noticed. Their eyes were on Moody. She had them under her spell, and they were finally listening.

“Yes, sir, I did, and I no sooner got the words out of my mouth than a bunch of ’em rode up on their horses and started shootin’ and yellin’ and everything. Just like Papaw said.”

“If we can,” Lewis said, “let’s return to the issue of the search warrant.”

“Yes, sir,” said Moody, as proper and polite as I had ever heard her.

“Now, who showed it to you?”

“Mr. North was the one holding the paper,” she said. “And Mr. Stephens was with him.”

“You are absolutely certain they presented that warrant to you?”

“Well, yes, sir, I mean-that’s what happened. Just like y’all said. Don’t you believe me?”

She looked the very picture of confounded i

Maxwell Lewis turned to my father and shrugged.

My father spoke from the bench in a dangerous growl: “Moody Cross. You have sworn to tell the truth in this court. Do you understand that?”

“Oh, I certainly do, Your Honor, that’s just what I’m doing,” she said. “For the life of me, I can’t figure out why me telling the truth has got y’all so confused. It’s almost like you’re angry at me.”

She even had the nerve to smile. I thought, Don’t get carried away now, don’t go too far. You’ve got them right where you want them.

Before she took the stand, Moody and her grandfather had been uncooperative liars, uppity Negroes, troublemakers. Agitators defying a legal search warrant. Now they were i

Chapter 115

THE MOMENT MOODY stepped off the witness stand, my father declared a recess until Monday.

I followed Moody, L.J., and Jonah down the steps of the courthouse into a barrage of questions accompanied by that acrid gunpowdery smell of flash powder exploding. Moody moved through that crowd of newsmen like a ship slicing through a wave, holding her head up, walking straight ahead.

We brushed off the last pesky reporters and walked three blocks to the Stringer house. We waited until we had Moody in the War Room before anyone spoke.

“What did you think you were doing?” I asked. “You got up under oath and told the biggest, fattest lie in the history of Mississippi. And all the time gri

She was gri

“Why didn’t you tell us you were going to do that?”

“’Cause if I had, you’d have told me not to do it. This way I could scare the devil out of that Loophole Lewis, and your daddy the judge, and Phineas Eversman, and everybody else who was in on the lie.”

“But you lied in order to counter their lie,” I shouted. “That’s perjury!”

“So what?” she said. “You fight fire with fire. Lewis can’t contradict me. If he does, he’ll have to admit they made up that warrant out of thin air, a long time after the raid.”

“Oh, I understand what you were doing, all right,” I said. “I just want to know what gives you the right to-”

“Ben,” said L.J. “I don’t see how this hurts us. I think it can only help.”

I sank onto a chair. “I think so too, as bad as that is. What do you think, Jonah?”

Jonah was looking out the narrow second-floor window.

“It must be six-thirty. The usual mob is begi

Then he turned from the window and faced the three of us.

“So, what do you think?” I repeated.

“I think what Moody did was… interesting. I must say, I did enjoy watching Loophole Lewis and Judge Corbett squirming like worms on a hook…”

I smiled. We had all enjoyed that sight.

“… but it won’t make any difference,” Jonah finished. “I’m afraid it won’t.”

“Yes, it will,” Moody protested. “It’ll cast doubt in their minds. It’ll make it seem like we tried to cooperate, and they attacked us anyway.”

Jonah shook his head. “Oh, Moody. Those jurors have lived here their whole lives. They don’t care who’s telling the truth and who’s lying! The phony warrant? Some of the jurors were probably down at the town hall when Eversman was writing it up.”

There was silence then. A long minute of it.

The chanting outside began again.

Free the Raiders!

Let ’em go!

Moody stood and smoothed her blue skirt. She adjusted her straw hat and slipped on her white gloves.

“I got to go. Papaw is in bad shape. Coming to the court, he didn’t hardly know who he was,” she said.

Without thinking about it I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Tell Abraham I’m coming out tomorrow to see about him.”

Jonah said, “Thank you for trying to help, Moody. From the bottom of my heart.”