Hostile Witness

When the jury had left the courtroom the judge said in four sharp and precise syllables, “In my chambers.”

I rose as steadily as I could and followed the other lawyers into the judge’s book-lined office. I had drunk far too much wine the night before with the Bishops, graduating later in the evening to Sea Breezes. We had never gotten back to the marble-tabled conference room. Instead, Simon knew of this place on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Jersey where the women dance on your table and sit on your lap, so long as you buy them twenty-four-dollar glasses of fake champagne cocktail, which we did. One of the women in this place had the longest legs I had ever seen, bacon and eggs Jack called them, legs she could wrap twice around the pole that bisected the stage, and the Bishops bought her three champagne cocktails just to keep her on my lap. Her name was Destiny, she wore golden spikes, her breasts were like porcelain, that white, that smooth, that immobile as she danced. I liked her smile. Destiny. With real red hair and golden spikes. It was a good thing that my orders were to let Prescott do the whole of the examination because that morning my brain was so fogged and my tongue so thick I doubted a single word would have been understood by the jury.

“Mr. Prescott,” said the judge, with more than the usual tinge of anger in his voice. He was sitting behind his desk in his chambers while the rest of us stood around him in a semicircle. The court reporter had brought his machine from the courtroom and was sitting serenely next to the desk. “What kind of question was that?”

“A probative one, Your Honor,” said Prescott.

“I won’t let you bring up all the names of the women Bissonette might have been with. I gave you more than enough latitude with your questions about his stories as it was.”

“Your Honor, we believe Mr. Bissonette was murdered by Mr. Raffaello because he was having sex with his daughter.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Eggert. “I demand an offer of proof.”

“I don’t think,” said the judge sourly in his brutish rasp of a voice, “that you should ever demand anything in my chambers, Mr. Eggert. However, I appreciate your concern. Do you have any proof, Mr. Prescott, to back up this charge?”

“I can prove Bissonette was sleeping with Raffaello’s daughter, and we all know that he’s a killer.”

“Is that so?” asked the judge. “Are you going to prove that Mr. Raffaello is a killer in this trial?”

“Every one of those jury members knows who he is. Just let me ask the question, Judge.”

“Not if you can’t prove he’s a killer. Now, Mr. Eggert, is this Mr. Raffaello under investigation by your office?”

“Under federal law, Your Honor, I can’t confirm or deny that.”

“I hereby make a formal request for all the evidence you have against Enrico Raffaello,” said Prescott.

“On what grounds?” asked a surprised Eggert.

“Based on what we know, anything you may have is Brady,” said Prescott.

“We don’t have anything exculpatory and you know it. We’ve found absolutely nothing linking Raffaello to Bissonette’s murder, nothing at all.”

“Mr. Eggert,” said the judge. “Do you have enough evidence to indict Mr. Raffaello?”

“No, sir. If we did, we would have already.”

“I’m going to formally deny your Brady request, Mr. Prescott, and I am going to forbid you, under threat of contempt, to ask any more questions about Mr. Raffaello’s daughter or anyone else whom Mr. Bissonette might have slept with. Do you understand, sir?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Prescott.

“I’m not going to allow gossip and inadmissible i

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you understand, Mr. Carl?”

“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.

“All right, then let’s go out there and try this case as if the rules of evidence were still in existence.”

“What do we do now?” I asked Prescott in the courtroom as we waited for the jury to return.

“We scramble,” he said.

And scramble he did. He asked Ruffing about the waterfront deal and why exactly it had collapsed. He asked about the phone conversations with Moore and the meetings with Conca

The swelling in my head had subsided and what was left was a deep exhaustion as Prescott asked questions about areas traversed twice or thrice already and Ruffing answered them with the very same answers he had produced before. The rhythm was repetitive, drowsing, hypnotic. I could barely keep my eyes open as Prescott asked his last series of questions.

“All of your conversations with Councilman Moore were on the tapes, isn’t that right, Mr. Ruffing?”

“Most of them. Some were made on untapped phones.”

“Were the unrecorded conversations any different than the taped ones?”

“No, substantially the same.”

“Now I noticed something peculiar on the tapes of your conversations with Mr. Moore. What I noticed, Mr. Ruffing, is that nowhere in those conversations did Councilman Moore mention a specific amount of money.”

“I thought he had.”

“There was no mention of it in the tapes.”

“He mentioned contributions.”

“But never amounts and never how it was to be paid.”

“He might have mentioned it in the unrecorded conversations.”

“But you said those were substantially the same just a second ago, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, I did.”

“So we can assume if he didn’t mention specific amounts in the taped conversations, he never mentioned them at all.”

“I guess so.”

“In fact, it was only Chester Conca

“That might be right.”

“And those conversations weren’t taped.”

“No.”

“Now those checks you gave Conca

“Sure, cashed out by CUP.”

“But you didn’t get anything back from CUP for the cash? No receipts?”

“No, nothing.”

“So CUP only acknowledged payments of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that was duly reported on its books.”

“I don’t know about their books.”

“And the councilman never mentioned that he got the cash?”

“No. He didn’t want to talk specifics about that.”

“It was Chester Conca

“That’s right.”

“It was Chester Conca

“That’s what I said.”