Chapter 22 An Impetuous Girl #2
This was an exaggeration: it was not wrapped in my sweater at all.
When it had initially been found, we all had been told it was simply under the sweater.
My lawyer would point this out in the cross-examination, since wrapped in a sweater suggests a much higher level of intentional criminality than merely beneath a sweater.
Still, these were petty semantics: it was still in my golf bag.
“Who do you believe hid it there?”
“The defendant, Miss Winston.”
“Do you believe she removed it from the net?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Barker objected, arguing this was conjecture and there was no evidence at all that I had removed it from the net. But the judge allowed the question and response to stand.
“Had you ever had any previous run-ins with Miss Winston?”
“Yeah, the department had a little history with her.”
Again, we objected, still hoping to keep the time I had taken my father’s nine iron to Frank Pendleton’s car from the jury, but the judge had decided in the pretrial motions that he was going to allow this—assuming Mr. Lindley got there via golf.
“What happened?”
“Well, it goes back to the fact she’s kind of impetuous—at least when it comes to golf.” (There it was, the DA’s particularly artful construction he had crafted and taught his ventriloquist dummy of a detective to mouth.)
“Go on.”
“When she was fifteen years old, she took one of her father’s golf clubs and smashed in the window of a young man named Frank Pendleton’s Ford Maverick.”
“Why did she do this?”
“He was a classmate. We don’t know why because the family chose not to press charges.
So, we figured it was kind of a one-off and let it go.
She was fifteen, a minor. But, going back to the target: I wasn’t surprised she was on the list of our suspects when it came to vandalizing country club property and removing the target.
Golf and destruction kind of go hand in hand for her. ”
This time, our objection was sustained, though only that very last sentence was removed from the court record.
“So, Harry Fallows was on your list of suspects?” Cleon Barker confirmed during his cross-examination of the detective.
“Yes. That’s why we got the warrant to search his home and the country club.”
“Did you have others?”
“It really came down to just those two, logically. And, soon enough, we could rule out Harry. He wasn’t at the club on that Monday. And, of course, we found the target in Miss Winston’s golf bag.”
“Just those two.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Do you know how many people had access to Mira’s golf bag while it was stored at the country club, Detective?”
“You’re going to say lots.”
“Well, yes. In the three days between that Caddy Day and the Thursday when Kenny Foster died, no fewer than eighteen different employees, caddies, and members were in the bag room. Eighteen. Could be more. In the days between that Caddy Day and when Mira’s mother picked up her daughter’s golf bag two weeks later, it could have been three times that many. How many of them did you interview?”
“We talked to Harry’s assistant, the clubhouse manager, and the caddy master.”
“Curt Bolger. Liam Murphy. And Dom Gorski.”
“Yes.”
“Three people out of the dozens who were in the bag room. That’s it?”
“We spoke to the people it made the most sense to talk to.”
“Any members?”
“Other than Miss Winston?”
“Yup.”
“Nope.”
“Any club employees other than those three you mentioned?”
“Nope.”
“Any of the folks who maintain the golf course?”
“Nope.”
“Pool boys? Lifeguards? Busboys?”
“Nope.”
“Cooks? Waiters?”
“We did not.”
“So, your investigation into who removed the target really began and ended with two people.”
“It’s not like we have a police force the size of the NYPD.”
“Ah, it was a manpower thing,” said my lawyer, and the state objected, but the judge allowed Mr. Barker’s response into the record.
“One last question: If my client did remove the target, which she most assuredly did not, why wouldn’t she have thrown it away?
Why in the world would she keep the smoking gun? ”
“I can’t speak to what she was thinking. In my experience, people do things that they shouldn’t and don’t do things that they should. It’s why we have cops.”
“That’s a nice little bromide.” (It was. I had to hand it to him.) “But you have no explanation for why she kept the target, do you?”
“I don’t. But you used that expression smoking gun just now. Seems that expression exists because Miss Winston wouldn’t be the first criminal not to get rid of whatever it was that linked her to the crime.”
Once more, the detective had demonstrated to me—and to my lawyer and to the jury—that he’d done this before. My lawyer’s cross had not ended the way any of us wanted. The state had done a first-rate job of vilifying a once-promising golf prodigy.
And that Friday night, my parents both drank more than they usually did, and, as you know, they took great pride in having a high blood-alcohol content.
And still the state had not rested.
They wanted to leave the jury confident that I was guilty as they went home for the weekend, but they also didn’t want them to forget what I had done or their version of what had occurred, and so they had saved one last witness for Monday morning.
And whether it was the detective’s testimony or Harry Fallows’s, Mr. Barker and my father decided on Saturday that we would have to put on a defense.
They wanted to be sure they had done all that they could to send the jury into their deliberations with reasonable doubt.
I again offered to testify, but it was as if I had asked to pilot a 747 across the ocean. That was never going to happen.
Still, we spent most of Saturday afternoon in Mr. Barker’s living room, discussing whom on our long list of possible witnesses we would call.
I hadn’t slept well on Friday night, nor would I that Saturday, because—for the first time—I sensed that the two lawyers I knew best in the world, my father and his friend Cleon Barker, were as worried as I was.