The Gods of Guilt(93)

“Danger from whom?”

“Let me ask the questions, Mr. Fulgoni. That’s how it works in a real trial.”

There was a slight murmur of laughter from the direction of the jury but I acted as though I hadn’t heard it.

“Didn’t you, Mr. Fulgoni, understand that, by issuing a subpoena and naming Gloria Dayton as the person who planted a gun in Hector Moya’s hotel room, you were placing her in great danger?”

“That’s why I did it under seal. It was not public information. Nobody knew.”

“What about your client? Didn’t he know?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“Did you tell your father, who lived in the same prison with Moya?”

“But it doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t have killed her.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Hector Moya.”

“Mr. Fulgoni, you need to answer the questions I ask you. That way we don’t have confusion. Did you or did you not tell your father that you had identified as Gloria Dayton the woman who you believed planted the gun in Mr. Moya’s room?”

“Yes, I told my father.”

“And did you ever ask him if he had told Mr. Moya before Gloria Dayton’s death?”

“I did, yeah, but it didn’t matter. She was Moya’s ticket out. He would not have killed her.”

I nodded and looked down at my notes for a moment before continuing.

“Then why did you ask your father if he had given her name to Mr. Moya?”

“Because I didn’t understand at first. I thought maybe it was possible that he had acted out of vengeance or something like that.”

“Do you think that now?”

“No, because I understand. He needed her alive in order to win the habeas. We needed her.”

I hoped the alternative to the scenario I had just explored was obvious to the jurors. At the moment, I was being subtle about it. I wanted them to come to the understanding on their own, and then I would reinforce it with further testimony. When people think they have discovered or earned a certain knowledge on their own, they are more apt to hold on to it.

I glanced at Mallory Gladwell in the jury box and saw her writing in one of the notebooks each juror is given. It looked to me like my alpha juror had gotten the subtlety.

I looked back at Fulgoni. It would have been the perfect moment to finish, but I had Fulgoni on the stand and under oath. I decided not to miss any chance of hammering home the basic theory of the defense.

“Mr. Fulgoni, I am trying to get a fix on the timing of your habeas petition involving Hector Moya. You filed the case and subpoenaed Gloria Dayton in early November, correct?”

“Yes.”

“She was then murdered on the night of November eleventh going into the twelfth, right?”

“I don’t know the exact dates.”

“It’s okay, I do. By the morning of November twelfth Gloria was dead, and yet it was another five months before anything happened on the habeas, correct?”

“Like I said, I don’t know the dates. I think that is right.”

“Why did you wait until April of this year to get things going on the case and to subpoena DEA Agent James Marco among others? What caused the delay until then, Mr. Fulgoni?”

Fulgoni shook his head like he didn’t know the answer.

“I was just . . . strategizing the case. Sometimes the law moves slowly, you know?”

“Was it because you realized that if Hector Moya actually needed Gloria Dayton alive, there might be someone else out there who needed her dead?”

“No, I don’t think that’s—”

“Were you afraid, Mr. Fulgoni, that you had opened a can of worms with your habeas petition and that you yourself might be in danger?”

“No, I was never afraid.”

“Were you ever threatened by someone in law enforcement to stall or shut the Moya case down?”

“No, never.”

“How did Agent Marco react to being subpoenaed in April?”

“I don’t actually know. I wasn’t there.”

“Has he ever fulfilled the subpoena and sat for a deposition with you?”

“Uh, no, not yet.”

“Has he personally threatened you if you continue the habeas case?”

“No, he has not.”

I stared at Fulgoni for a long moment. He now looked like a scared little boy who would lie his way out of anything if he could.

Now was the time. I looked up at the judge and said I had no further questions.





32





Forsythe kept Fulgoni on the stand for a full ninety minutes of hardball cross-examination. If I had made the young lawyer look foolish at times, then the prosecutor made him look downright incompetent. Forsythe clearly had a mission to accomplish with his cross and that was the total destruction of Fulgoni’s credibility. I had used young Sly to get several salient points on the record. Forsythe’s only hope of undermining those points with the jury was to undermine their source. He had to leave it so the jurors would dismiss Fulgoni’s testimony in its entirety.