The Woods
I shook my head. We entered the courtroom.
“Another thing,” she said. “You heard of MVD?”
“Most Valuable Detection,” I said.
“Right, biggest private-eye firm in the state. Cingle Shaker, the woman I have on the frat boys, used to work there. Rumor has it they got a no-expense-spared, seek-’n’-destroy investigation going on with you.”
I reached the front of the courtroom. “Super.” I handed her an old picture of Gil Perez.
She looked at it. “What?”
“Do we still have Farrell Lynch doing the computer work?”
“We do.”
“Ask him to do an age progression on this. Age him twenty years. Tell him to give him a shaved head too.”
Loren Muse was about to follow up, but something in my face stopped her. She shrugged and peeled off. I sat down. Judge Pierce came in. We all rose. And then Chamique Johnson took the stand.
Flair Hickory stood and carefully buttoned his jacket. I frowned. The last time I’d seen a powder blue suit in that shade was in a prom picture from 1978. He smiled at Chamique.
“Good morning, Miss Johnson.”
Chamique looked terrified. “Morning,” she managed.
Flair introduced himself as if they’d just stumbled across each other at a cocktail party. He segued into Chamique’s criminal record. He was gentle but firm. She had been arrested for prostitution, correct? She had been arrested for drugs, correct? She had been accused of rolling a john and taking eighty-four dollars, correct?
I didn’t object.
This was all part of my warts-and-all strategy. I had raised much of this during my own examination, but Flair’s cross was effective. He didn’t ask her yet to explain any of her testimony. He simply warmed up by sticking to facts and police records.
After twenty minutes, Flair began his cross in earnest. “You have smoked marijuana, have you not?”
Chamique said, “Yeah.”
“Did you smoke any the night of your alleged attack?”
“No.”
“No?” Flair put his hand on his chest as though this answer shocked him to the core. “Hmm. Did you imbibe any alcohol?”
“Im-what?”
“Did you drink anything alcoholic? A beer or wine maybe?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Hmm. How about a regular drink? Maybe a soda?”
I was going to object, but again my strategy was to let her handle this as much as she could.
“I had some punch,” Chamique said.
“Punch, I see. And it was nonalcoholic?”
“That’s what they said.”
“Who?”
“The guys.”
“Which guys?”
She hesitated. “Jerry.”
“Jerry Flynn?”
“Yeah.”
“And who else?”
“Huh?”
“You said guys. With an s at the end. As in more than one? Jerry Flynn would constitute one guy. So who else told you that the punch you consumed—by the way, how many glasses did you have?”
“I don’t know.”
“More than one.”
“I guess.”
“Please don’t guess, Miss Johnson. Would you say more than one?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“More than two?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it’s possible?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“So maybe more than two. More than three?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
Chamique shrugged.
“You’ll need to speak up.”
“I don’t think I had three. Probably two. Maybe not even that much.”
“And the only person who told you that the punch was nonalcoholic was Jerry Flynn. Is that correct?”
“I think.”
“Before you said ‘guys’ as in more than one. But now you’re saying just one person. Are you changing your testimony?”
I stood. “Objection.”
Flair waved me off. “He’s right, small matter, let’s move on.” He cleared his throat and put a hand on his right hip. “Did you take any drugs that night?”
“No.”
“Not even a puff from, say, a marijuana cigarette?”
Chamique shook her head and then remembering that she needed to speak, she leaned into the microphone and said, “No, I did not.”
“Hmm, okay. So when did you last do any sort of drugs?”
I stood again. “Objection. The word drugs could be anything—aspirin, Tylenol…”
Flair looked amused. “You don’t think everyone here knows what I’m talking about?”
“I would prefer clarification.”
“Ms. Johnson, I am talking about illegal drugs here. Like marijuana. Or cocaine. Or LSD or heroin. Something like that. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“So when did you last take any illegal drug?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You said that you didn’t take any the night of the party.”
“That’s right.”
“How about the night before the party?”
“No.”
“The night before that?”
Chamique squirmed just a little bit and when she said, “No,” I wasn’t sure that I believed her.
“Let me see if I can help nail down the timetable. Your son is fifteen months old, is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you done any illegal drugs since he’s been born?”
Her voice was very quiet. “Yeah.”
“Can you tell us what kind?”
I stood yet again. “I object. We get the point. Ms. Johnson has done drugs in the past. No one denies that. That doesn’t make what Mr. Hickory’s clients did any less horrible. What’s the difference when?”
The judge looked at Flair. “Mr. Hickory?”
“We believe that Ms. Johnson is a habitual drug user. We believe that she was high that night and the jury should understand that when assessing the integrity of her testimony.”
“Ms. Johnson has already stated that she had not taken any drugs that night or imbibed”—I put the sarcastic emphasis this time—“any alcohol.”
“And I,” Flair said, “have the right to cast doubt on her recollections. The punch was indeed spiked. I will produce Mr. Flynn, who will testify that the defendant knew that when she drank it. I also want to establish that this is a woman who did not hesitate to do drugs, even when she was mothering a young child—”