The Last Trial Page 6

  Before the jury was brought in this morning, Marta raised the issue that got her father in trouble with the judge. The estates of all seven victims named in the indictment filed civil complaints against PT for wrongful death. Despite the prosecutors’ objections, the judge ruled that in the five civil cases still pending, brief cross-examination was proper to establish that the relative stood to get some of the money that PT was being asked to pay. It is clearly relevant to a witness’s credibility if they might profit elsewhere from what they are saying. On the other hand, the judge barred any inquiry with the two families—including the son who just got off the stand—that have already reached multimillion-dollar settlements with PT, since those witnesses will not get any further financial benefit as a result of their testimony. Before trial, Sonny had said she wanted to make this kind of case-by-case appraisal with each witness, which was why she was so angry when Stern charged ahead without her permission, making matters worse by mentioning the settlements.

  On this issue, too, Feld has, in the courtroom saying, chosen to ‘take out the sting’ by asking about the civil suits on his direct examination. Mrs. Colquitt had answered, ‘I don’t know so much about that cause my son’s been talkin to Lawyer Neucriss.’ Mr. Pratt answers similarly that the matter is in the hands of the lawyer for his wife’s estate.

  “Now, Mr. Pratt,” Marta says, when it’s her turn, “you are the heir to your wife’s estate?”

  “True,” says Pratt, spare with words.

  “And you know, don’t you, that your wife’s estate has brought a wrongful death action against Pafko Therapeutics?”

  Feld stands to object. “He said the estate’s lawyer is handling the matter.”

  The judge squints toward Feld through one eye. Like the Sterns, she clearly suspects Feld of shaping the testimony in pretrial meetings, so the witnesses can sidestep the issue of what they might gain from being here.

  “Ms. Stern was asking about what Mr. Pratt knows. Overruled.”

  “Yep,” says Pratt. “Know that.”

  “And you are being represented in this matter by the Neucriss Law Offices.”

  “Anthony Neucriss. The son.”

  “And do you know also that the Neucrisses have asked for damages from PT of $5 million?” The number produces a little ripple in the courtroom.

  “I do.”

  “And do you know also that the Neucriss firm has turned down on your behalf an offer from PT of $2 million.”

  Feld objects indignantly. This question is on the borderline and Sonny hesitates. In the interval, Pratt answers.

  “Not two million to me,” he says. “Neucriss gets forty percent, so for me it’s hardly over a million.”

  Stern catches Mrs. Murtaugh, the elderly widow on the jury, allowing her mouth to sour. There is a different face now on Mr. Pratt’s grief.

  Sonny says, “I’ll limit further cross to the ad damnum,” using a term the jury is not meant to understand. With the other victim witnesses, Marta can only ask about the amount of damages the families are seeking.

  Even with that limitation, Marta is able to point out that three of the remaining five ‘victim’ witnesses stand to benefit from the pending litigation. Two of the families are also clients of the Neucriss office, whose first cases were filed less than forty-eight hours after the Wall Street Journal story appeared. How the Neucrisses managed to track down these patients and sign them up before other attorneys is a mystery that the Sterns and the large firms that represent PT in these civil cases have had no success in solving. But Pete, the father, now almost ninety, is still known among Kindle County lawyers as the Prince of Darkness, and has been finding underhanded ways to worm into juicy personal injury matters since the days of his first marriage, when his father-in-law, a lieutenant in the Traffic Division, instructed all the cops in his command to hand out Neucriss’s card at accident scenes. Indeed, Stern recalls the wire service photos of the elder Neucriss stalking through the streets of Bhopal, India, after the infamous chemical spill there, his briefcase stuffed with retainer agreements and an Army gas mask over his face.

  After the ‘victims,’ the government next calls several of the attending physicians, who testify to their utter mystification about what was happening to their patients. There are points for cross-examination, but they can all be made with the pathologist whom the government will call next. Stern and Marta know from prior experience they have an opportunity to gain some ground with Dr. Rogers, and their hope is that the government is forced to call her before Sonny recesses the trial for today. But the judge adjourns after the last doctor climbs down. The first day of evidence in United States v. Pafko concludes with the prosecutors far ahead.

  8. Paint

  Facing his first long trial in years, Stern had known his energy could not possibly match what it once was, but he is shocked by how drained he is after court. He’s done little more than watch today, but even so, the high-tension focus the courtroom requires, combined with the drama of yesterday, has sapped him. His synapses, neurons—wherever it is that thought forms—are too fatigued to function. He even feels a few feathery traces of the tachycardia that besets him now and then and concerns Al, his internist. Stern has promised Marta and himself he will not be heroic when he wears down. After a word to Kiril, then his daughter, Stern summons Ardent and is soon in the Cadillac on the way home to the West Bank. He is well prepared for tomorrow’s crosses and he can review any materials he needs by remote connection from home. It is better to rest in advance.

  After Helen and Stern were married in 1990, both sold the houses, less than a mile apart, where they’d raised their children with their first spouses. Together they bought this place, a one-floor brick cottage with a shake roof. It has a nice master suite, an updated kitchen, a guest wing to encourage visits from out-of-town children, and the large garden Helen loved to tend. Pregnant, if unspoken, was the realization that they were both likely to die here. Now that mission is half accomplished.

  Having been widowed once before, there is a disconcerting familiarity to the vacancy Stern experiences whenever he enters the empty house. He knows how to turn on several TVs so there is a burble of background noise, how to swim through the occasional disconnected sensations of already being a ghost, just lurking here on earth. Helen’s departure, like Clara’s, had come with no warning. He woke one day as a married person and by noon was alone. Helen died of a cerebral aneurysm on the elliptical at the community health club. Is it somewhat easier because he has been through this before? Perhaps, on some level, he accepted the impermanence that’s implicit in any second marriage. After Clara’s suicide, he had been shipwrecked. But that was suicide. Now his grief feels more prolonged. With Stern’s cancer there had been a period of mourning, of leave-taking, between Helen and him, but then g-Livia had worked its miracle. Now he can only hope Helen felt his intense gratitude to her for the brilliant light, the real joy, she had shone into his life.

  Once through the door, Stern barely has the strength to stagger to the living room. Helen came into the marriage with an ill-trained little dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Gomer, and when the pooch died he was quickly replaced by Gomer II and now Gomer III. Unlike his predecessors, Gomer III did not bare his teeth at Stern when he approached Helen, but the dog was largely as proprietary of his mistress as the others. The only recognition Stern ever made of the unlikely event of Helen passing first was insisting, before Gomer III came from the rescue shelter, that his wife recruit someone else to take the dog if Stern survived her. But Gomer is too high-strung to be trusted around Helen’s grandchildren. To his unending chagrin, Stern has been left with the animal, who gives every indication of blaming him for Helen’s disappearance. He feeds Gomer III every morning and each night, and with Pinky’s help continues to arrange for the walkers and groomers. In return, he receives next to no gratitude. Gomer wags his little whip of a tail now, but only because he expects his evening victuals.

  Stern drops his briefcase and
pours a finger of scotch, then falls into the black Herman Miller chair that looks out on Helen’s garden, a wreck again this year without her tender hand. He does not know how long he has been asleep when he is awakened by Pinky rattling through the kitchen.

  “Dinner, Pops? Did you eat?”

  In the fog of waking, he actually needs a moment to recall.

  “Soup?” Pinky’s culinary skills are limited, but he seldom has an appetite at night. Chef Boyardee is good enough as a prop for his efforts at conversation with Pinky.

  Stern is still unsure if it is accurate to say Pinky lives here. Within the family, Pinky tended to have two principal defenders, Stern and Helen. Stern’s love for his granddaughter exceeds his understanding. It is simply there in his heart, and Helen, a partner who always understood what was essential to him, took up Pinky’s cause as her own. For several years, Helen had encouraged Pinky to use the guest wing here as a landing spot when, as always seemed to happen, she reached the end of a live-in relationship of roughly six months’ duration with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Stern was always secretly elated by her unannounced return. With no warning, she would drift into the kitchen around eight thirty a.m., grab something from the refrigerator, and let him know that she would like a ride to work. Given that pattern, Stern was shocked a few months back when he heard Pinky say offhandedly in the office, ‘I’m sort of taking care of my grandfather these days.’

  Stern’s children had undoubtedly encouraged her. Pinky might not be long on practical skills, but she could go to the grocery store, do the laundry, and dial 911 when, as will someday happen, she finds her grandfather collapsed on the kitchen floor. Being Pinky, however, she still disappears for days without warning.

  They eat their soup together at the breakfast bar in the kitchen as Pinky flips through messages on her phone. Gomer, who clearly has more affection for her than for Stern, plops down at her feet.

  “And what did you make of today’s court proceedings?” Stern asks when she appears to be resting her thumbs. Pinky does not always hear what is said to her, but this time she shakes her head dolefully.

  “I thought you stomped it yesterday, Pops, but today—” She stops. A fine athlete like her father, a former Division I football player, Pinky had been a competitive snowboarder until a fractured vertebra put an abrupt end to her hopes for a college scholarship. She still reverts often to boarders’ lingo. “Today, I thought they marched all over Pafko’s ass. Is it gonna be like that every day?”

  “I expect not, Pinky. I believe we have quite a bit to say for Kiril.”

  “That’s good,” she says. “But he’s guilty, right?”

  Stern actually finds himself offended for his client’s sake. Has she been listening to her Aunt Marta?

  “Pinky, why would you say that?” It would be unlike Pinky to have made a rigorous evaluation of the evidence.

  “No, I mean, the defendant’s always guilty. I mean, I was always guilty.”

  While Pinky was in high school, Stern appeared in court in behalf of his granddaughter so often after drug arrests, which increased in frequency after she broke her back, that he would grimly joke about having to jettison the rest of his practice. Finally, he found himself sharing with her a hard-learned lesson: In life there are those who get away with things and others who don’t. Pinky’s natural defiance puts her in the second group.

  For a while, Pinky’s interactions with the cops seemed to have had a beneficial effect. Like many young people who have their scuffles with the justice system, she later decided she wanted to enter law enforcement. It took her nearly six years to get her college degree in police science; then she shocked everyone, except Helen, by acing the entrance exam for the KCUPF, the Kindle County Unified Police Force. But days before she was to start, Pinky lost her place in the academy. It was not her prior arrest record, as Stern at first suspected, since juvenile offenses weren’t considered. Instead she had tested positive for Ecstacy and cannabis. To her grandfather, she expressed amazement that the surefire steps she’d read about on the Internet to thwart drug testing had failed. Abstinence, apparently, had never been a serious option.

  “Which reminds me,” she says. “I brought a letter home from the office for you.” She goes to her pocketbook on the kitchen counter and returns with a business-size envelope, folded in quarters. “Read it,” she says. “It’s kind of interesting.”

  The letterhead and logo at the top of the page belong to an outfit called Elstner Labs, a respected firm in the realm of forensic chemistry and engineering. Elstner has performed a chemical analysis on something called ‘the reference specimen.’ Two dense paragraphs follow, full of words that are beyond him: ‘X-ray powder diffractometry’; ‘Fourier transform infrared spectrometry and pyrolysis.’ Eventually, he understands that Elstner analyzed a paint sample. One testing track confirmed the major crystalline components of the paint, the other characterized its organic makeup. In the letter’s second to last paragraph, Elstner concludes that there is a high degree of likelihood that the source of the paint was a 2017 Chevy Malibu of a color called Vanilla White.

  Although Stern would prefer not to admit it to Marta, there are moments when he is entirely befuddled, when his brain seems to be grinding without establishing a connection to the world beyond. Usually, the phenomenon is over in a few seconds, but not this time. Stern has placed the letter on the quartz countertop and stares at it with his fingertips laid against his forehead, as if his hand were an antenna that will finally receive a signal. But it is futile.

  “Pinky, I am sorry, but I do not understand what this has to do with Kiril’s case.”

  “Kiril? It’s about your accident.”

  “In March?”

  “Right. I got that paint from your car.”

  He stares. “Pinky, my car was gray.” Or is that his new car? For an instant, he feels a stark fear about what he has again revealed. But no. No. Both are gray, the new Cadillac and the old Cadillac, just different shades.

  “Pops, it’s from the car that hit you.”

  “Ah,” he says with relief, now that he understands. The driver who’d smashed into Stern’s front end at ninety miles an hour never stopped. Only one witness remained on the scene to speak to the Sheriff’s Police, and she, bless her, was far more concerned about Stern’s life than recalling the offending vehicle. Her account confirmed that the collision was not Stern’s fault, but she was not someone who could tell you make and model, even if that car was sitting right in front of her. Light-colored, she’d told the police.

  That was no surprise to Stern. He had one memory of the wreck, which he dwelled on in the hospital. He recalled seeing a white sedan with the cream-colored parking decal of PT in the lower right corner of the rear window. He’d demanded that the police investigate and, with his brain healing, perseverated, requesting at least once every hour that he be allowed to communicate this information to a detective. Finally, when he was more collected, a Greenwood County Sheriff’s Police investigator stopped by in the company of a neurosurgical resident. Both were women in their thirties, and together they patiently explained the fallacies of his recollection.

  His last clear memories were of exiting the parking lot at PT’s low-slung white suburban facility in Greenwood County. As he’d left there, the resident said, he’d undoubtedly seen a car in front of him with the oval PT sticker.

  ‘When a brain has absorbed this kind of insult,’ Dr. Seau explained, ‘memories get stuck together in peculiar ways. It’s a bit like dreams. I know it’s what you recall—’

  ‘Quite vividly,’ Stern answered.

  ‘Yes,’ said the cop, now intervening, ‘but that’s not possible. The front end of that car hit you right near your driver’s side door. You never could have seen the rear window. You were already skidding at a forty-five-degree angle toward the culvert.’ Largely as a courtesy to Stern, the cops had gone to the parking lot at PT a few days after the accident, but, as they would have predicted, there was no vehi
cle there that showed front-end damage.

  Stern had recovered his reason by the time the detective and resident visited him together. He understood. But he felt like Galileo after being told that he had to accept that the sun circled the earth. He knew what he knew. And there was white paint left on his car.

  ‘That’s what I saw,’ he told Pinky, who in that period visited him every day.

  ‘And the cops won’t investigate?’

  Stern explained. Pinky nodded in her millennial way several times before saying, ‘Okay, so I’ll follow up.’

  Brain-injured or not, Stern knew this was implausible. Whatever Pinky’s education, she had neither the resources nor the attention span to duplicate a police investigation. But that she took her grandfather seriously, when everyone else dismissed what he was saying, touched him.

  To the best of his memory, Pinky’s announcement that she would look into things was the end of that effort. With Pinky, follow-through was a term best expressed with an acre of white space between the words. But she had apparently gone to the salvage yard where the Cadillac was waiting for the insurance adjuster to declare it a total loss. There she scraped off the remnants of the long streaks of white paint, which had been deposited by the offending vehicle on the crushed front end of Stern’s Cadillac, and sent them to Elstner Labs.

  He again looks at the correspondence.

  “This letter is dated in July, Pinky.”

  “Yeah, right.” The expression familiar to everyone who knows Pinky well enters her soft face, the ‘I messed up’ look, as her nice green eyes dart to the floor. “But you know, like, I never get mail in the office.”

  “I see,” says Stern. “The letter was on your desk?”

  “That’s what Vondra says. She found it the other day, because we got a past-due notice about Elstner’s bill.”

  “I see. Those are expensive tests, Pinky.”

  “You told me in the hospital I could spend a thousand.”