The Gods of Guilt(106)
“Mmm mmm mmmmm.”
Only I would have heard it. I stopped, took a step back, and leaned down to him.
“What did you say?” I asked in a whisper.
“I said, keep going, Haller,” he whispered back.
Forsythe began his cross-examination by asking Trina Rafferty if the two of them had ever met. I moved to my seat and sat down. The one good thing about Forsythe jumping on his cross so fast was that it saved me for the moment from having to tell my client how badly things had just turned. The Rafferty fiasco was a one-two punch to the guts of our case. Already, without Forsythe piling on—which he was about to do—I had lost a key piece of testimony connecting Marco and Gloria Dayton. Adding insult to that injury, she was more than implying that I was suborning perjury—paying a witness with rent money to lie.
Forsythe seemed to think that by destroying me he was destroying the case. Almost all of his cross centered on Trina’s testimony that I fed her the lines she was supposed to speak in testimony in exchange for the apartment just a few blocks away behind the Police Administration Building. And in his zeal to take me down, I saw the way to possibly salvage things. If I could show her to have lied, I stood a good chance of undercutting—in the eyes of the jury, at least—the accusations she was making about me.
Forsythe finished after fifteen minutes, curtailing his cross when I started objecting to nearly every question on the basis that it had already been asked and answered. You can beat a dead horse only so many times. He finally gave up and sat down.
I slowly got up for redirect, walking to the lectern like a condemned man to the gallows.
“Ms. Rafferty, you gave the address of this apartment I am supposedly paying for. When did you move in there?”
“In December, right before Christmas.”
“And do you recall when you first met me?”
“It was after. I think March or April.”
“Then, how is it that you think I was paying for this apartment for you when I did not meet you until three to four months after you moved in?”
“Because you were meeting with the other lawyer, and he was the one who moved me in.”
“And which lawyer was that?”
“Sly. Mr. Fulgoni.”
“You mean Sylvester Fulgoni Jr.?”
“Yes.”
“Are you saying that Sylvester Fulgoni Jr. along with me is representing Mr. La Cosse?”
I pointed to my client as I spoke, and I asked the question with a reserved astonishment in my voice.
“Well, no,” she said.
“Then who was he representing when he supposedly moved you into this apartment?”
“Hector Moya.”
“Why did Mr. Fulgoni move you into an apartment?”
Forsythe objected, arguing that Fulgoni and the Moya case were not relevant. I, of course, took the opposite view of this in my response, citing once again the alternate defense theory I was presenting. The judge overruled and I asked the question again.
“Same thing,” Trina answered. “He wanted me to say Gloria Dayton told me that Agent Marco asked her to plant a gun in Hector’s hotel room.”
“And you’re saying that never happened, that Mr. Fulgoni made it up.”
“That’s correct.”
“Didn’t you testify a few minutes ago that you never heard of an Agent Marco, and now you say Mr. Fulgoni was feeding you testimony regarding him?”
“I didn’t say I never heard of him. I said I never met him and I never snitched for him. There’s a difference, you know.”
I nodded, properly chastised by the witness.
“Ms. Rafferty, have you received a phone call or a visit within the last twenty-four hours from a law enforcement officer?”
“No, not that I know of.”
“Has anyone attempted to coerce you into testifying the way you have today?”
“No, I’m just telling the truth.”
I had gotten it out to the jury as best I could, even if it was in the form of denials. My hope was that they would instinctively know that Trina Rafferty was the liar, that she had been pressured by someone to lie. I decided it was too risky to continue and ended the questioning.
On my way back to my seat, I whispered to Lankford as I went by.
“Where’s your hat?”
I kept moving along the rail until I got to Cisco. I leaned over to whisper to him as well.
“Have you seen Whitten?”
He shook his head.
“Not yet. What do you want me to do with Trina?”
I glanced back at the front of the courtroom. Forsythe had no re-cross, so the judge was dismissing Rafferty from the witness stand. Cisco had picked her up that morning at her apartment building and taken her the three blocks to court.