Chapter Thirty-three
Thirty-three
The second day of trial began with a forthwith to the judge’s chambers for Minton and me.
Judge Fullbright wanted only to speak to me but the rules of trial made it improper for her to meet privately with me about any matter and exclude the prosecution.
Her chambers were spacious, with a desk and separate seating area surrounded by three walls of shelves containing law books.
She told us to sit in the seats in front of her desk.
“Mr. Minton,” she began, “I can’t tell you not to listen but I’m going to have a conversation with Mr. Haller that I don’t expect you to join or interrupt. It doesn’t concern you or, as far as I know, the Roulet case.”
Minton, taken by surprise, didn’t quite know how to react other than to drop his jaw a couple inches and let light into his mouth. The judge turned in her desk chair toward me and clasped her hands together on the desk.
“Mr. Haller, is there anything you need to bring up with me? Keeping in mind that you are sitting next to a prosecutor.”
“No, Judge, everything’s fine. Sorry if you were bothered yesterday.”
I did my best to put a rueful smile on my face, as if to show the search warrant had been nothing more than an embarrassing inconvenience.
“It is hardly a bother, Mr. Haller. We’ve invested a lot of time on this case. The jury, the prosecution, all of us. I am hoping that it is not going to be for naught. I don’t want to do this again. My calendar is already overflowing.”
“Excuse me, Judge Fullbright,” Minton said. “Could I just ask what—”
“No, you may not,” she said, cutting him off. “What we are talking about does not concern the trial other than the timing of it. If Mr. Haller is assuring me that we don’t have a problem, then I will take him at his word. You need no further explanation than that.”
She looked pointedly at me.
“Do I have your word on this, Mr. Haller?”
I hesitated before nodding. What she was telling me was that there would be hell to pay if I broke my word and the Glendale investigation caused a disruption or mistrial in the Roulet case.
“You’ve got my word,” I said.
She immediately stood up and turned toward the hat rack in the corner. Her black robe hung there on a hanger.
“Okay, then, gentlemen, let’s get to it. We’ve got a jury waiting.”
Minton and I left the chambers and entered the courtroom through the clerk’s station. Roulet was seated in the defendant’s chair and waiting.
“What the hell was that all about?” Minton whispered to me.
He was playing dumb. He had to have heard the same rumors my ex-wife had picked up in the halls of the DA’s office.
“Nothing, Ted. Just some bullshit involving another case of mine. You going to wrap it up today?”
“Depends on you. The longer you take, the longer I take cleaning up the bullshit you sling.”
“Bullshit, huh? You’re bleeding to death and don’t even know it.”
He smiled confidently at me.
“I don’t think so.”
“Call it death by a thousand razor blades, Ted. One doesn’t do it. They all do it. Welcome to felony practice.”
I separated from him and went to the defense table. As soon as I sat down, Roulet was in my ear.
“What was that about with the judge?” he whispered.
“Nothing. She was just warning me about how I handle the victim on cross.”
“Who, the woman? She actually called her a victim?”
“Louis, first of all, keep your voice down. And second, she is the victim in this thing. You may have that rare ability to convince yourself of almost anything, but we still—no, make that I—still need to convince the jury.”
He took the rebuke like I was blowing bubbles in his face and moved on.
“Well, what did she say?”
“She said she isn’t going to allow me a lot of freedom in cross-examination. She reminded me that Regina Campo is a victim.”
“I’m counting on you to rip her to shreds, to borrow a quote from you on the day we met.”
“Yeah, well, things are a lot different than on the day we met, aren’t they?
And your little scheme with my gun is about to blow up in my face.
And I’m telling you right now, I’m not going down for it.
If I have to drive people to the airport the rest of my life, I will do that and do it gladly if it’s my only way out from this. You understand, Louis?”
“I understand, Mick,” he said glibly. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. You’re a smart man.”
I turned and looked at him. Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything further. The bailiff called the court to order and Judge Fullbright took the bench.
Minton’s first witness of the day was LAPD Detective Martin Booker.
He was a solid witness for the prosecution.
A rock. His answers were clear and concise and given without hesitation.
Booker introduced the key piece of evidence, the knife with my client’s initials on it, and under Minton’s questioning he took the jury through his entire investigation of the attack on Regina Campo.
He testified that on the night of March 6 he had been working night duty out of Valley Bureau in Van Nuys.
He was called to Regina Campo’s apartment by the West Valley Division watch commander, who believed, after being briefed by his patrol officers, that the attack on Campo merited immediate attention from an investigator.
Booker explained that the six detective bureaus in the Valley were only staffed during daytime hours.
He said the night-duty detective was a quick-response position and often assigned cases of a pressing nature.
“What made this case of pressing nature, Detective?” Minton asked.
“The injuries to the victim, the arrest of a suspect and the belief that a greater crime had probably been averted,” Booker answered.
“That greater crime being what?”
“Murder. It sounded like the guy was planning to kill her.”
I could have objected but I planned to exploit the exchange on cross-examination, so I let it go.
Minton walked Booker through the investigative steps he took at the crime scene and later while interviewing Campo as she was being treated at a hospital.
“Before you got to the hospital you had been briefed by Officers Maxwell and Santos on what the victim had reported had happened, correct?”
“Yes, they gave me an overview.”
“Did they tell you that the victim was engaged in selling sex to men for a living?”
“No, they didn’t.”
“When did you find that out?”
“Well, I was getting a pretty good sense of it when I was in her apartment and I saw some of the property she had there.”
“What property?”
“Things I would describe as sex aids, and in one of the bedrooms, there was a closet that only had negligees and clothing of a sexually provocative nature in it. There was also a television in that room and a collection of pornographic tapes in the drawers beneath it. I had been told that she did not have a roommate but it looked to me like both bedrooms were in active use. I started to think that one room was hers, like it was the one she slept in when she was alone, and the other was for her professional activities.”
“A trick pad?”
“You could call it that.”
“Did it change your opinion of her as a victim of this attack?”
“No, it didn’t.”
“And why not?”
“Because anybody can be a victim. Prostitute or pope, doesn’t matter. A victim is a victim.”
Spoken just as rehearsed, I thought. Minton made a check mark on his pad and moved on.
“Now, when you got to the hospital, did you ask the victim about your theory in regard to her bedrooms and what she did for a living?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She flat out said she was a working girl. She didn’t try to hide it.”
“Did anything she said to you differ from the accounts of the attack you had already gathered at the crime scene?”
“No, not at all. She told me she opened the door to the defendant and he immediately punched her in the face and drove her backwards into the apartment. He assaulted her further and produced a knife. He told her he was going to rape her and then kill her.”
Minton continued to probe the investigation in more detail and to the point of boring the jury. When I was not writing down questions to ask Booker during cross, I watched the jurors and saw their attention lag under the weight of so much information.
Finally, after ninety minutes of direct examination it was my turn with the police detective. My goal was to get in and get out. While Minton performed the whole case autopsy, I only wanted to go in and scrape cartilage out of the knees.
“Detective Booker, did Regina Campo explain why she lied to the police?”
“She didn’t lie to me.”
“Maybe not to you but she told the first officers on the scene, Maxwell and Santos, that she did not know why the suspect had come to her apartment, didn’t she?”
“I wasn’t present when they spoke to her so I can’t testify to that. I do know that she was scared, that she had just been beaten and threatened with rape and death at the time of the first interview.”
“So you are saying that under those circumstances it is acceptable to lie to the police.”
“No, I did not say that.”
I checked my notes and moved on. I wasn’t going for a linear continuum of questions. I was potshotting, trying to keep him off balance.
“Did you catalog the clothing you found in the bedroom you said Ms. Campo used for her prostitution business?”
“No, I did not. It was just an observation I made. It was not important to the case.”
“Would any of the outfits you saw in the closet have been appropriate to sadomasochistic sexual activities?”
“I wouldn’t know that. I am not an expert in that field.”
“How about the pornographic videos? Did you write down the titles?”
“No, I did not. Again, I did not believe that it was pertinent to the investigation of who had brutally assaulted this woman.”
“Do you recall if the subject matter of any of the videos involved sadomasochism or bondage or anything of that nature?”
“No, I do not.”