An Eye For Justice Page 15

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Your honour,’ Stahl broke in. ‘The resources of NYPD and the DA’s office are limited, and bringing over a peripheral at best, witness, from the UK to testify can’t be justified. Defendant is free to call his wife if he so wishes.’

  ‘He’s right Mr Calver,’ Judge Gonzalez predictably intoned. ‘Move along.’

  I was getting nowhere, and running out of ideas. Querying the CCTV when we had no evidence to challenge its validity was pointless, so I couldn’t venture into that area either, so I was left with a few pitiful scraps to argue about.

  ‘Detective Daly, you’re of course aware that in the UK I am an experienced criminal lawyer?’

  ‘So they tell me,’ Daly said, half smile still in place.

  ‘If, as was the case, I had spent the evening and part of the night with the victim, and then strangled her with my green silk tie. As an experienced trial attorney, does it make any sense for me to leave the crime scene in that state and admit to my ownership of the tie used to strangle her?’

  ‘You were drunk, counselor, just like when you tried to strangle your wife. When I buzzed you up the morning the body was found, you didn’t know where you were, let alone what you had done. You had consumed virtually all of the three bottles of red wine found in your room, over a short period of around three hours. And that’s a lot of booze for anyone, even a heavy drinker like you, Calver.’

  Time to call a halt. If I went on digging I’d end up in Australia. ‘I have no further questions,’ I said, and sat down heavily. I could feel it all slipping away from me. We had to come up with something to fight back with, but Pascal was giving me nothing. All I could see to do was to try and drag things out as long as I could in the hope that she might come up with something to save my bacon. It was no strategy but it was all I had.

  * * * *

  Pascal considered Daly over the rim of her beer bottle. When he had texted her suggesting they meet in the bar where she’d had her bust-up, she’d thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t, so here they were again, sitting at the same table. Daly had just come from court so he looked a deal smarter than last time; blue suit, and a shirt and tie.

  ‘Your guy’s dying, you know,’ he finally said in his slow drawl. There was no triumphalism in his voice, it was just a statement of fact.

  Pascal carried on looking at him over her beer. ‘Thanks, Daly,’ she said. ‘If you’ve got any more helpful comments like that, do me a favour. Keep them to yourself, yeah?’

  He smiled. ‘Calver may be great shakes in an English courtroom full of faggots in wigs, but in the good ol’ US of A, he just aint cutting it. Maybe he should hire himself a big hitter US attorney. Or he should cut a deal with Stahl, but if he leaves it any longer, Stahl won’t give him shit. Why would he need to? He’s got a nailed on conviction.’

  ‘Look, Daly. Can we talk about something else?’ Pascal said. ‘You’re beginning to depress me.’

  ‘Sure. What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Hey, you texted me, so I’m guessing you wanted to tell me something, right? Like John Palmer was murdered, and you’re going to give me a copy of the deeply flawed autopsy report, if there was one.’

  ‘Oh, there was one alright, but its going down as accidental death at the moment. I’ve been too busy with the murder trial to have a closer look, but what you said about him not touching alcohol was kind of arresting. Stopped me in my tracks a little bit, if you like. Its something we need to have a look at. What’s your proof, anyway?’

  ‘Calver was told by Palmer’s sister, the murder victim, but I’m sure her mother, Hannah, will confirm it for you.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll do some more digging, and I’ll call you.’

  Pascal was disappointed that was all he seemed to have for her - nothing - but she kept it to herself. Daly was under no obligation to help her, and giving out confidential information from NYPD was no doubt a pretty serious infraction of their rules, so she would just need to stay patient for now. She nodded when he hailed the barman for another round of beers, wondering just why he seemed to be so keen on meeting her again. Maybe he was lonely and wanted a date she thought, but then another idea struck her from left field, and she jumped straight in. ‘I was out the other night, Daly, chasing down a lead for Calver. Not of course acting as a PI, cause that would be illegal, right?’ she said.

  ‘Glad you’re keeping you’re nose clean. What of it?’

  ‘Well, I was out in some burg called, Crotona Park, in the East Bronx.’

  Daly raised his eyebrows. ‘Boy, you sure get around. You should be careful out there on the street, can be dangerous.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I found that out. But a couple of things. I’ve got a name, that maybe you can run down for me. And I’ve got a serial number for a Beretta 8000, .357 caliber semi-automatic, associated with that name. Interested?’

  Daly’s eyes showed nothing, but she could tell there was a faint gleam of interest there, just under the surface. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Talk to me.’

  Pascal gave him a highly edited and partial version of why she had wanted to meet with Chantelle Latifah, and where the lead had originated from. Then she described the scene she had encountered when Chantelle’s door had opened, sticking pretty much to the truth.

  ‘Big black guy answered the door, name of Montell Castro. Tall, skinny, about 28, tats all over, but I’m not familiar with what they mean. Looked like a gang-banger and he was definitely putting the squeeze on her - she was scared. I’d guess loan sharking, or maybe drugs, although she didn’t seem like a junkie.’

  ‘What happened, and where does the Beretta Cougar come in?’

  ‘He threatened me and tried to throw me out, so I kicked his ass.’

  Daly laughed. ‘Get outta here,’ he said, appraising her with a keen look.

  ‘He tried to hustle me out, so I disabled him, frisked him and thats when I found the Beretta. I kicked him out and gave him the gun back, less the clip, but I clocked the serial number and memorized it when I gave it back.’

  ‘So, I guess this Latifah chick, she was pleased, right?’ Daly said.

  ‘Not exactly. In fact, she wasn’t. She said I’d just made it a whole lot worse and he’d be back. And then she refused to talk to me’

  Daly looked at Pascal speculatively. ‘So you want a way to get into her good books, and maybe getting this Castro guy off the street will do it?’

  Pascal returned Daly’s look, expressionless. Then she took a drag from her bottle, and he took a sip from his Bud, still watching at her, weighing things. Then he said, ‘don’t get your hopes up, but its odd he has a gun with a serial number on it. These gang-bangers almost always file them off.’

  Pascal scrolled her smart phone and then read Daly the serial number she had noted down out in the East Bronx. Before leaving, all Daly would say was that he would take a look, and get back to her, on both things. Maybe next time they could have dinner?

  Pascal didn’t say anything, then they left. She hoped she’d planted a couple of seeds that might bear fruit, that might edge Daly a little closer to trusting her, and maybe even coming on board and helping Calver. Daly never said why he had asked to meet.

  Chapter 16

  People v Calver - Manhattan Supreme Court

  Day 4

  Stahl was up and running again as we ground into the morning session. He told the judge he would be calling a couple of heavyweight experts; the Medical Examiner and then a surveillance expert. Just in case, he said, with a virtual wink to the jury, the defendant was going to be foolish enough to challenge the hotel CCTV evidence.

  So first up we got Dr. Oskar Reitman the ME who had carried out the autopsy. He was a big bear of a man with a large halo of frizzy brown hair streaked with grey, and as you would expect, he was a more than competent witness. His testimony was given in short bite sized pieces, for easy digestion by the jury, and they ate it up like nobody’s business.

 
Essentially he told them that Helena had died from Asphyxia caused by the ligature, my green silk tie, around her neck, which caused cerebral hypoxia. That is, low levels of oxygen in the brain, contributed to by the constricted blood flow caused by the pressure on both carotid arteries in the neck. And here he livened things up by showing the jury - over my futile objections Gonzalez rejected out of hand - horror inducing blow-up crime scene photographs of the body. In particular a photograph showing Helena’s neck with the green tie almost lost from view because it had sunk so far into her flesh. And then another with the tie removed showing the awful bloody tracks it had left, followed by a wholly gratuitous photograph of her face with bulging eyes.

  He then moved on briefly to time of death, where he was able to isolate a window of sometime between 2.30 and 9 am when she was likely to have expired. Here he also mentioned the steaks consumed by myself and Helena at around 8.30 pm in the early evening preceding the murder. The evidence of her stomach contents - the steak had been partly digested and moved into the small intestine, a process that usually takes between 4 − 6 hours - essentially corroborated his time of death assessment.

  He then moved on to the sexual aspects of the case. If the jury were expecting anything juicy here they were to be disappointed. In the end what they got was a lot of dry medical testimony, and I could see their eyes begin to glaze over - a good sign for me. Essentially what Reitman told them was that he found evidence of sperm in the vagina, and DNA testing confirmed it was mine, something of course I would have freely admitted they would find. There was no evidence of bruising or abrasions around the vagina or labia minora suggestive of force or assault; conclusion: this particular sex was almost certainly consensual. However, there was significant bruising and abrasions evident around the victims anus and also lacerations, but no spermatozoa present there. Reitman’s conclusion here: non-consensual, indeed violent, anal sex had been perpetrated upon the victim.

  As Reitman concluded his examination in chief I could see the jury looking at me in a different way, as if maybe they had lost a bit of warmth towards me, which I guess was not surprising given what they had just heard.

  Judge Gonzalez, nodded at me. ‘Cross examination, Mr. Calver?’

  ‘Yes indeed your honour,’ I said, rising to my feet, still trying to work out how to come at the estimable Dr. Reitman, the big fuzzy-haired hit-man. I regarded the guy for a couple of beats, mulling my approach. He stared back owlishly, calm and collected.

  ‘Doctor Reitman, you testified there were, apart from the ligature, some significant scratch marks and abrasions, possibly from fingernails, at the front of the victims neck, beneath her chin, yes?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘But none at the back of her neck?’

  ‘Correct again.’

  ‘Now doctor, I guess we all know, and the Kama Sutra certainly tells us so, that there are many ways and positions for having consensual sex, not all of which involve the conventional face to face missionary position,’ I said. ‘But those neck scratch marks presumably could only have been inflicted upon the victim by a perpetrator positioned behind her?’

  I could see some puzzlement on the faces of the jurors as to where I was going with this, but Reitman nodded affirmatively, and said, ‘yes I would say that is probably so.’

  ‘So taking that a step further, doctor. Given the violence of the alleged anal assault - the bruising and lacerations - and the fact that this was almost certainly accomplished by a perpetrator from behind the victim, wouldn’t you say its likely that these neck injuries were also inflicted during the alleged anal rape?’

  ‘Again, all I can say is that that is a probability. So What?’

  ‘I’ll get to that,’ I muttered. Then, ‘so, okay, doctor, so let me summarize so far, and for the moment we’re not considering the ligature or the strangulation. We have consensual vaginal sex with evidence of semen and no bruising, then we have violent non consensual anal sex accompanied by scratch and fingernail marks to the front of the neck, and, crucially, no semen?’

  ‘Are we going somewhere with this, your honour?’ Stahl interjected lazily from his seat, trying to break up my flow.

  ‘Your honour—’ I began, but she stilled me with her hand.

  ‘No. I am interested in where Mr. Calver is going with this, and I think the jury are too. So I am going to give him a little leeway here,’ she said, surprising me for once. ‘Proceed.’

  Reitman looked slightly flustered for the first time, not understanding where I was going either. ‘You have made a statement of fact, Mr. Calver with which I wouldn’t disagree,’ he answered, rather convolutedly, but in the way I wanted.

  ‘So, given the distinct differences between the two sexual approaches, if you didn’t know better from other extraneous sources of evidence, could you categorically assert that these two distinctly different sexual behaviors had not been carried out by two different people?’ I asked. Then added, ‘forget the CCTV, witness statements and the green tie for a moment and consider just the medical evidence produced by your autopsy.’

  ‘Of course, Mr. Calver, its a hypothetical, and on that basis, I would clearly not be able to categorically assert that two people were not involved, particularly in the absence of spermatozoa, and therefore DNA, from the anal rape.’

  ‘And isn’t there another difference, doctor, in that the consensual sex took place in my hotel room, and the assault in her room. So the two incidents have yet another differentiating factor?’

  ‘We don’t know that for a fact, although its a probability, yes.’

  ‘And just out of interest, doctor, have you ever heard of a case, where you have a couple having wonderful consensual sex, and then, shortly after, that same guy brutally rapes and murders his erstwhile partner?’

  ‘It is highly unusual I’ll grant you, but not unheard of. I have had the odd case where sex has taken place and then something has happened, one party becomes aware of an affair, for example, and murder follows, although sexual assault then, is unusual.’

  ‘But that couldn’t be the case, here, doctor, discovery of an affair, because I’d only just met her?’

  Reitman merely shrugged. I flicked a glance across the jury box. There was certainly interest there, they were starting to think about and question the scenario I was trying to sketch out with my questions.

  I moved on. ‘Did you or any of your colleagues examine and take scrapings from under my fingernails?’

  ‘Yes we did.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Nothing, apart from traces of red wine and grease from the steaks.’

  ‘So no scrapings of the victims skin or DNA were found under my fingernails despite the clear evidence of scratches, abrasions and lacerations to the victims neck?’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘How do you account for that?’

  ‘I can’t, really, and you are asking me to speculate. Maybe you just cleaned up,’ he said with a wry smile.

  ‘But not the steak and the wine,’ I said as a contemptuous throwaway, then ploughed on. ‘Now, given the ferocity of this assault, and now I am including the strangulation in our discussion, wouldn’t you have expected the victim to have fought like crazy to try and save her life, and wouldn’t you further expect that the perpetrator would at the least have suffered some cuts, bruises and maybe scratches from the victim?’

  ‘Not necessarily, if the perpetrator wore protective clothing or immobilized the victim before the rape.’

  ‘Was there any evidence of that, doctor?’

  ’No,’ he replied, slightly less sure of himself.

  ‘Did you examine the victims fingernails as well, given that she may have tried to fight off her assailant?’

  ‘Yes we did.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What, no broken nails; no trace evidence; no reside under the fingernails?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t you find
that odd?’

  ‘No. I believe someone may have cleaned under her nails post mortem.’

  I thought I’d gone about as far as I could with Reitman, which wasn’t very far at all. So I finished off my questioning and sat down. Stahl immediately re-examined his witness neutralizing all the small gains I had made. He essentially got Reitman to reiterate his autopsy findings and then brought the elephant back into the room, the CCTV tape evidence, and asked Reitman whether he thought any other perpetrator could have done it. And there was only one answer to that. Bottom line: that CCTV was everything to the prosecution; it was unassailable and unanswerable - so far. If we couldn’t find a way to challenge it, I was dead. And with that depressing thought, judge Gonzalez adjourned for lunch.

  * * * *

  Southern District Court

  Day 6

  Morganna took up the questioning again. ‘And around this time I believe your sister was born?’

  ‘That’s right. Helena was born on April 30th 1942,’ Hannah replied, smiling briefly at the memory, then looking sombre again. ‘It should have been a joyous occasion of course, but things were so bad by then that I think my mother might have preferred if Helena hadn’t been born at all. There was so little food and we had to barter for everything. We sold most of our possessions, but we refused to sell the golden pendant and brooch.’

  Hannah turned to the jury. ‘You see,’ she said, voice intense with emotion. ‘The pendant had become a kind of symbol to me, like a talisman. I wanted it to be like a testament to my family’s refusal to kowtow to the Nazis. It wasn’t a religious cross, but I, in my naive adolescence, kind of wanted it to have the same kind of effect, of giving my family succour and empowering us to fight the Nazi’s and never give in.

  ‘But all the while around us the round-ups and the deportations continued, and we were so frightened of what would become of us. Helena was so small and helpless, and the world seemed so cruel. We tried not to despair, hoping salvation would come,’ Hannah said, looking down at her hands, her eyes hooded and intensely sad.