Fatal Flaw (38 page)

48

“WE HAVE
time for one more witness this afternoon, Mr. Jefferson,” said Judge Tifaro. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Your Honor. The People call Lawrence Cutlip to the stand.”

“Lawrence Cutlip? I don’t see a Lawrence Cutlip on your witness list, Counsel.”

“It’s a late addition, Judge, in light of Mr. Carl’s decision to abrogate his agreement on the stipulation about the identity of the victim. Mr. Cutlip will identify her as Hailey Prouix.”

“Ah, yes. Any objection, Mr. Carl?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“I thought not. All right, then, Mr. Jefferson, but keep it short.”

“I aim to, Your Honor, yes I do.”

The doors in the rear of the courtroom swung open and a cold breeze slipped in, followed by the decrepit remains of Lawrence Cutlip.

Cutlip, in his wheelchair, was dressed in his good jeans, with a fresh flannel shirt and clean white sneakers, all spiffed for the occasion. His thick grizzle was shaved close, and his wild ruff of white hair was combed back and fastened to his skull with grease. Even his dentures were in place, clean white pieces of plastic interspersed among the brittle natural teeth to which his gums still hesitantly
clung. The oxygen tank was sympathetically hanging from the rear of the chair, its clear plastic line hooked around his ears and under his nose. Cutlip occasionally and noticeably wheezed as he was pushed forward by a large woman in short-sleeved nursing whites.

As the old man slid down the aisle between the benches and into the well of the court, he hunched in the chair, looking about himself suspiciously, not sure what to expect. When he saw Beth and me, he smiled awkwardly, as if we were old acquaintances of uncertain temper, and we smiled back warmly, as if we were old friends. We kept smiling even as the woman, biceps bulging, lifted Cutlip’s chair to the witness box, even as Cutlip raised his hand, even as Cutlip gave and spelled his name, gave his address, swore his oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing nothing nothing, so help him God, but the truth.

“Mr. Cutlip,” said Troy Jefferson, “how are you related to Hailey Prouix?”

“She was my niece, poor girl, the daughter of my sister.”

“Does she have any other family?”

“Well, her daddy was a Cajun boy who died when she was young, and her mama left off this earth not ten years back. That leaves just me and her sister, Roylynn. But Roylynn ain’t exactly all there, if you know what I mean, not even able to take care of herself. So that about leaves only me.”

“Were you close to her?”

“Yes, sir. You know, my sister wasn’t so disciplined, not really hard enough to get along in this world, so when her husband, he died in that lumber accident, she needed some help with them girls. I was living my life, minding my own business, but I saw that she and the girls needed me, and so I moved on in and supported them girls as best I could until they was old enough to take care of themselves.”

“That was quite a thing, Mr. Cutlip.”

“I couldn’t let them pretty little girls just drift away like that. The way I saw it, I never had no choice. I only done what I had to do. Anyone with half a heart would have done the same.”

“Did you stay close to Hailey through the years?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you aware that she was engaged to Guy Forrest?”

“Yes, I was. She told me all about him.”

“So you knew he was married.”

“Yes, with them kids, too. I told her it was a mistake to get involved with the likes of him. He didn’t seem the most stable, from what she told me, and from what he done to his wife and kids, not the most loyal neither. And then when she told me they was fighting over money, I got scared for her. I told her to get away from him, to get out before it was too late. There’s no telling what a man like that could do. I told her, I did, but when it came to boys, she never did listen to me. She never listened to nobody.”

Through the whole of this little speech Judge Tifaro was staring at me, giving me that look of hers, the stare that made you want to check your law license just to prove to yourself you didn’t pick it up along with a screwdriver and a fifty-foot garden hose at Sears. She was wondering why I wasn’t objecting from the first word, why I had done what I had done to let this man on the stand in the first place.

“No objection, Mr. Carl?” she said finally.

“No, Your Honor, but thank you for your concern.”

She stared, I shrugged, Jefferson continued.

“And then what happened?”

“What the hell do you think happened? She ended up dead.”

“I’d like to show you now a folder of photographs taken of the crime scene, People’s Exhibit Six, already entered into evidence, and ask you to look at it, please. I want to warn you, Mr. Cutlip, the pictures are terribly disturbing.”

Cutlip leaned forward in his chair as Jefferson brought him the folder. He opened the folder on the shelf in front of him and went through the photographs carefully, one by one by one. By the third his face was scrunched up as if against the cold and his upper lip was quivering. By the fifth he was in tears. By the ninth he was unable to look at them any longer and closed the folder. Only his soft sobs and wheezes could be heard in the courtroom.

“Mr. Cutlip…”

Cutlip wiped his eyes with the back of his big, slack-skinned hand.

“Mr. Cutlip. I have to ask you a question now. The pictures show a woman lying dead on a mattress. Do you recognize that woman?”

Cutlip gasped at the air and then said,”Yes.”

“Who is it, Mr. Cutlip?”

“It is my niece. Hailey Prouix.”

“Are you sure, Mr. Cutlip?”

“I knowed her all her life. I couldn’t be surer about nothing in this world.”

“I need to show you another set of photographs. People’s Exhibit nineteen, photographs from the autopsy. If you could just look at the first two, please.”

Cutlip nodded, the good soldier, and took the folder. He shuddered at the first photograph, winced at the second, closed the folder like it was a curse.

“Same,” said Cutlip. “It’s the same. It’s Hailey.”

“Hailey Prouix.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Mr. Carl,” said Judge Tifaro, “are you awake?”

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

“Any objection to that question?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Go ahead, Mr. Jefferson, ask it again.”

“Do you miss her, Mr. Cutlip?”

“Yes, I surely do. I’m in line for the insurance money, but I’d just as soon as toss it for how I’m getting it. She was like a daughter to me, more. She was taking care of me still, she was taking care of her poor sister, and then that there man killed her. He done this to me, and now my heart weeps tears of blood. I got no choice but to miss her, to miss her ever day, ever damn day of the rest of my sorry life.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cutlip,” said Jefferson, trying unsuccessfully to hide his grin. “I pass the witness.”

The judge’s stare of inquest aimed right at my skull continued even as she asked for Troy Jefferson and myself to approach the bench. She waited for the court reporter to set up right by her side before she spoke.

“Mr. Carl,” she said, “do you have any idea what you are doing in this trial?”

“Not really, ma’am, no.”

“I didn’t think so. You backed out of a stipulation which allowed this man and his tears onto the stand. I gave you opportunities to object at every step of his testimony, and still you ignored them. Is there anything you want to do now, any motion you want to make?”

“All I want, Your Honor, is the chance to pose a few questions to Mr. Cutlip myself.”

“You want to cross-examine?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have questions for this witness?”

“Just a few.”

“Are you sure? Don’t you think it was bad enough already? Are you certain that it might not make more sense just to leave him be, hope the jury forgets what he said, and let the prosecution rest its case?”

“Just a few questions, Your Honor.”

“Well, then, have at it, Mr. Carl. It’s time to recess for the afternoon. So tomorrow, first thing, you’ll get your chance. And do not say I didn’t warn you.”

49

ONCE BEFORE
in my career, during its early, naïve stage, I had attempted to break a man on cross-examination. Carefully I prepared, laying out all my traps, hoping for the devastating blow. He was a city councilman, skilled in the use of language but hot of temper, and I believed I could make him blow. I was wrong. Oh, I brought forth flashes of anger and exposed to the jury with lovely clarity the brittle inconsistencies in his story, but that was all. He had murdered a man with his bare hands, proven later by a piece of physical evidence held closely by his wife, but on the stand I got none of that, and I felt my client’s guilty verdict deep in my gut.

It taught me a fine lesson. Cross-examination is a lovely tool for highlighting inconsistencies and evident falsehoods, for painting a witness as a hapless prevaricator or even an outright liar, cross-examination can be the death of a thousand cuts for the credibility of that witness or an opponent’s entire case, but it is not the place for the single crushing blow. There are too many formalities involved, too many safeguards. Compare the polite confines of a courtroom with a police interrogation room in the dank recesses of a precinct house, a place of intimidation, of psychological manipulation, of violence imagined or real. The interrogation room is the place to break a suspect. But Lawrence Cutlip would never submit
to the interrogation room and, I suspected, in its confines, furry with sweat and fear, he would be comfortably at home, able to withstand all manner of the interrogator’s tricks. He was not the type to be badgered into confession. So there would be no interrogation here. I would have to make do with cross-examination, which, despite its fearsome reputation, is a gentler dance.

So how was I to proceed? Advice was more then plentiful.

Phil Skink: “Go right at him. Fast and furious. Get him on the ropes and don’t let up.”

“It’s not a boxing match, Phil.”

“No? You’re going in there to put him away, right?. It’s no time for subtle mercy. You need be to Jack Dempsey—hook, hook, hook, and then step into the right what breaks his jaw.”

“Have you found anything yet?”

“Don’t you think I’d have told you?”

“I need it.”

“I knows you need it, mate, and I’ll be getting it, too. But you remember what I says. Jack Dempsey. Hook, hook, hook, and then the right to the jaw. Drop him like a sack of potatoes, you will.”

Beth Derringer: “Be gentle, subtle. He can handle anger, he’s used to it, it’s all he’s ever known, but the soft emotions will confuse him.”

“Skink thinks I should be Jack Dempsey in there.”

“Guys like Skink only know one way. But there is another. Dance around the truth so he doesn’t realize what you’re getting at until it is too late. A little bit here, a little bit there. He’ll be expecting a masculine rush up the middle, a straight through line like a fullback off tackle. You should take a more circular tack.”

“Virginia Woolf as opposed to Ernest Hemingway.”

“Yes, yes. Exactly.”

“It sounds nice, but I didn’t know that the Bloomsbury group was a law firm. Woolf, Strachey, Forster, Keynes and Woolf.”

“Let me tell you something, Victor. Be glad you never met up with Virginia Woolf in court. Be very glad.”

Reverend Henson: “The thing with Cutlip,” he said when I called him for his share of advice, “is that he wants to think he is a good man, despite all he has done. None believe they are evil, even the
evil. And, more desperately, he wants the world to think he is a good man, too. So he’ll deny everything, and deny it with a conviction that will be unassailable. But if he’s trapped, then he’ll change. He’ll turn ugly, turn irrational, search desperately for someone who can’t defend himself and lay the blame on him. As in the Bible, where Aaron was commanded to lay his hands upon the head of a live goat and confess over it all the sins of the Children of Israel. Leviticus sixteen, verse twenty-two: ‘And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.’ He’ll try to do the same to some poor soul, someone not able to defend himself.”

“I don’t understand how that helps us.”

“Because his efforts to hide his guilt through use of a scapegoat are necessarily futile. Hebrews ten, verse four: ‘For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.’ You can only create a scapegoat by following the biblical command to confess. It is a necessary part of the process. When he tries to shift blame onto his scapegoat, then will his sins be evident for all to see.”

To this counsel I added one piece more, lifted from the book I had been reading,
Crime and Punishment.
I often found literature of little use in the bare-knuckle world of the law, the psychological gap between the fictional and real is often so wide, but no one ever came as close to spanning that canyon as Dostoyevsky. In the book the investigating magistrate stalks Raskolnikov with an ingenious psychological method that I thought might be the only tactic to crack a hard nut like Cutlip. He patiently waits for Raskolnikov, guilty of ax-murdering two old women, to come to him. “He won’t run away from me, even if he had some place to run to,” says the investigator, “because of a law of nature. Ever watched a moth before a lighted candle? Well, he, too, will be circling round and round me like a moth round a candle. He’ll get sick of his freedom. He’ll start brooding. He’ll get himself so thoroughly entangled that he won’t be able to get out. He’ll worry himself to death. And he’ll keep on describing circles round me, smaller and smaller circles, till—flop!—he’ll fly straight into my mouth and I’ll swallow him!” And true to the method, 446 pages after the murders, Raskolnikov staggers into the St. Petersburg police station and exclaims, “It was I.”
Cutlip seemed willing, almost desperate, to talk about his niece. He couldn’t help himself. It would be my job to keep him talking, to keep him circling, to find a truth to which he felt compelled to get closer, closer, closer, until that truth, no matter how ugly, became bright enough to burn.

I took the schemes of all my advisers and swirled them together into a single desperate strategy. I would force Lawrence Cutlip to confront his crimes, edging him subtly when possible, shoving and badgering him like a boxer when necessary, spiraling him closer and closer to the flame of truth until the fire grew so hot upon his soul that he was forced, not to confess, because that was not his way, but instead to do as the Reverend Henson said he would do, find a scapegoat and shift the blame. Onto whom would he shift it, I had no idea. Bobo? Guy? Jesse Sterrett? It wouldn’t matter, once it shifted, it would be apparent. And once it was apparent, the story would be over, Guy would be acquitted, and Cutlip would be under arrest. That was the upside. That was what I focused on as I prepared.

But there was a downside, too, a downside I couldn’t ignore. If I failed, if my cross-examination proved to be too gentle a dance to dent Cutlip’s armor, then consequences would befall my client and myself. Guy’s defense would be exposed as a fraud. It would seem he was trying to foist blame on the grieving uncle, who had sacrificed his youth to care for his young nieces. And once the phone records were disclosed and Breger connected all the dots, the pointed finger aimed at the unknown lover would look just as fraudulent. A life sentence, no doubt, possibly death, or, at best, a mistrial, declared by Judge Tifaro, based on my behavior. And as for me, well, my legal career would be over for sure, a good thing, considering, but still. Thrust headfirst and unprepared into the cold black street of capitalism, I would be forced to find some other form of income, accounting maybe, or the wonderful world of retail. I heard that the Gap was hiring, which was a great comfort, let me tell you.

So it was strategy that I focused upon, but not only strategy. I brought to my apartment everything I had found about this case, from the forensic reports of the murder to the notes I had taken of
my trips to Pierce, West Virginia, to the notes of testimony already collected, to the contents of Hailey Prouix’s safe-deposit box. I examined everything, questioned every assumption, turned everything upside down and downside up, twisted back to front and vice versa. I reviewed my notes of Cutlip’s direct testimony, and as I did so, and examined everything else, something seemed not right, something seemed out of order.

And then it came clear, in a sudden burst of insight, something I had badly mislabeled, something that was very much other than what I had thought it to be.

Now I had something, something definite, something to work with, something that might just force Cutlip to come face to face with his past, force him to describe smaller and smaller circles around the truth, until—flop!—and that would be the end of him.

And it had been there, the crucial piece of evidence, been there almost the entire time, right in front of my face.