The Woods

“Anyway, my investigator purchased all of the X-rated movies ordered on HotFlixxx by the frat house in the past six months, including Romancing His Bone. I would now like to show a scene I believe is relevant.”

Everything stopped. All eyes turned toward the judge’s bench. Arnold Pierce took his time. He stroked his chin. I held my breath. There wasn’t a sound. Everyone leaned forward. Pierce stroked his chin some more. I wanted to wring the answer out of him.

Then he simply nodded and said, “Go ahead. I’ll allow it.”

“Wait!” Mort Pubin objected, did everything he could, wanted voir dire and all that. Flair Hickory joined in. But it was a waste of energy. Eventually the courtroom curtains were closed so that there would be no glare. And then, without explaining what they were about to see, I hit the Play button.

The setting was a run-of-the-mill bedroom. Looked like a king-size bed. Three participants. The scene opened with very little foreplay. A rough ménage à trois started up. There were two men. There was one girl.

The two men were white. The girl was black.

The white men tossed her about like a plaything. They sneered and laughed and talked to each other throughout:

“Turn her over, Cal…. Yeah, Jim, like that…Flip her, Cal….”

I watched the jury’s reaction rather than the screen. Children playact. My daughter and niece acted out Dora the Explorer. Jenrette and Marantz, as sick as it was, had acted out a scene from a pornographic movie. The courtroom was tomb still. I watched the faces in the gallery collapse, even those behind Jenrette and Marantz, as the black girl in the movie screamed, as the two white men used their names and laughed cruelly.

“Bend her over, Jim…. Whoa, Cal, the bitch is loving it…. Do her, Jim, yeah, harder….”

Like that. Cal and Jim. On and on. Their voices were cruel, awful, hell spawned. I looked toward the back of the room and found Chamique Johnson. Her spine was straight. Her head was high.

“Woo hoo, Jim…Yeah, my turn…”

Chamique met my eye and nodded. I nodded back. There were tears on her cheeks.

I couldn’t be sure, but I think there were tears on mine too.

CHAPTER 20

FLAIR HICKORY AND MORT PUBIN GOT A HALF-HOUR RECESS. When the judge rose to leave, the courtroom exploded. I no-commented my way back to my office. Muse followed me. She was this tiny thing but she played like she was my Secret Service agent.

When we closed the office door, she put up her palm. “High five!”

I just looked at her. She put down her hand.

“It’s over, Cope.”

“Not quite yet,” I said.

“But in a half hour?”

I nodded. “It will be over. But in the meantime, there’s still work to do.”

I moved back around to the conference table. The message from Lucy was sitting there. I had managed to do my brain-partition thing during my Flynn questioning. I had kept Lucy out. But now, as much as I wanted to spend a few minutes basking in the glory of the moment, the message was calling out to me again.

Muse saw me looking down at the note.

“A friend from twenty years ago,” Muse said. “That’s when the Camp PLUS incident occurred.”

I looked at her.

“It’s connected, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But probably.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Silverstein. Lucy Silverstein.”

“Right,” Muse said, sitting back and crossing her arms. “That’s what I figured.”

“How did you figure that?”

“Come on, Cope. You know me.”

“That you’re too nosy for your own good?”

“Part of what makes me so attractive.”

“Nosiness and maybe your footwear. So when did you read up on me?”

“Soon as I heard you were taking over as county prosecutor.”

I wasn’t surprised.

“Oh, and I brushed up on the case before I told you I wanted in.”

I looked at the message again.

“She was your girlfriend,” Muse said.

“Summer romance,” I said. “We were kids.”

“When was the last time you heard from her?”

“It’s been a long time.”

We just sat there for a moment. I could hear the commotion outside the door. I ignored it. So did Muse. Neither one of us spoke. We just sat there with that message on the table.

Finally Muse stood. “I got some work to do.”

“Go,” I said.

“You’ll be able to make it back to court without me?”

“I’ll muddle through,” I said.

When Muse reached the door, she turned back to me. “Are you going to call her?”

“Later.”

“You want me to run her name? See what I come up with?”

I thought about it. “Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because she used to mean something to me, Muse. I don’t feel like having you poke around in her life.”

Muse put her hands up. “Okay, okay, sheesh, don’t bite my head off. I wasn’t talking about dragging her in here with cuffs. I was talking about running a routine background check.”

“Don’t, okay? At least, not yet.”

“I’ll get to work on your prison visit to Wayne Steubens then.”

“Thank you.”

“This Cal and Jim thing. You’re not going to let it slip away, are you?”

“Not a chance.”

My one worry was that the defense would claim that Chamique Johnson had watched the movie too and made up her story based on it or had deluded herself into thinking the movie was real. I was helped by several factors, however. One, it was easy to establish that the movie had not been playing on the fraternity’s big-screen TV in the public room. Enough witnesses would back that up. Second, I had established via Jerry Flynn and photographs taken by the police that Marantz and Jenrette did not have a television set in their room, so she couldn’t have seen it there.

Still, it was the only direction I could see them going in. A DVD could be played on a computer. Flimsy, true, but I really didn’t want to leave much of an out. Jerry Flynn was what I refer to as a “bullfight” witness. In a bullfight, the bull comes out and a bunch of guys—not the matador—wave capes around. The bull charges until exhausted. Then picadors on horseback come out with long lances and jam them into a gland behind the bull’s neck muscle, drawing blood and swelling the neck so that the bull can’t turn his head much. Then some other guys run up and throw banderillas—gaily decorated daggers—into the bull’s flanks, near his shoulders. More blood. The bull is half-dead already.