Court of Lies Read online

  “I know she had gunshot residues on her hands.”

  “I would appreciate an answer to my question, Deputy. You don’t know that Mrs. Adams ever fired a gun.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Even though you don’t know if she ever fired a gun, you want the jury to believe she did, isn’t that true?”

  “I want the jury to know the facts.”

  “Would the facts include your assumptions?”

  No answer.

  “Well, Deputy Illstead, do you want the jury to believe your assumptions?”

  Sewell: “Objection, Your Honor. He’s arguing with the witness again.”

  Judge Murray turned to Illstead. “Do you want the jury to believe your assumptions, Deputy?”

  “It’s up to them,” Illstead replied.

  Coker continued: “You don’t know if Mrs. Adams ever fired the gun in question, or any other gun, do you?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “She could get gunshot residues on her hands by simply picking up a recently fired gun, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes.” His good eye narrowed and began roving the courtroom.

  “If she touched the deceased, she could get gunshot residues on her hands as well as blood on her clothing and under her fingernails.”

  Illstead looked over to Sewell for help.

  “You can’t get your answer from Mr. Sewell, Deputy. You’ll have to answer my question yourself.”

  “Yes, gunshot residues and blood are transferable.”

  “Thank you,” Coker said. “Now that wasn’t too hard, was it?”

  Sewell came alive. “He’s badgering the witness.”

  Judge Murray: “Do you feel badgered, Deputy?”

  No answer. Only his one-eyed glare.

  “And did you test Mr. Horace Adams the Third’s hands for gunshot residues?”

  “I did.”

  “You didn’t tell us that before. Was this a secret between you and Mr. Sewell?”

  “I wasn’t asked.”

  “Did you talk with Mr. Sewell about the facts of this case before you took the stand here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In his office.”

  “Did you tell Mr. Sewell about testing Mr. Adams’s hands for gunshot residues?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Coker took a single step closer to the witness. “No? Was that just your secret in this case?”

  “Mr. Sewell didn’t ask me.”

  “The result of that test is an important fact in this case, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, it was standard.”

  “And you learned that in your schooling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you follow a rule that says if the prosecutor doesn’t ask you, don’t tell?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, I’m asking you. What were the results of the test on Mr. Adams’s hands?”

  “He was positive for gunshot residues, as well.”

  “Which means?”

  “That he either fired a weapon that night or was close to one when it was fired.”

  One could hear the gasping and high whispered exclamations from the front row occupied by the press. The Casper Star Tribune reporter hurried to the door. “Got a headline here!” he said aloud to the reporter from The Denver Post. “Gotta make my deadline.” The Rocky Mountain News reporter also jumped up and rushed toward the back of the courtroom.

  “Order!” The judge gaveled repeatedly.

  When the courtroom was cleared of reporters, Coker continued: “A man who sticks a gun up to his forehead and pulls the trigger is going to have gunshot residues on his hands, isn’t he?” Coker asked.

  “Probably.”

  “No, not probably, Deputy Illstead, not probably, but absolutely. Can you think of any circumstance when that wouldn’t be true?”

  “If he was wearing gloves.”

  “Was Mr. Adams wearing gloves?”

  “No.”

  “So why don’t you turn to the jury and tell them the truth. I will help you. Say to the jurors, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if Mr. Adams shot himself by placing his pistol to his head, and he pulled the trigger, there would absolutely be gunshot residues on his hands.’ Can’t you just turn to the jurors and say that simple truth?”

  Sewell jumped to his feet. “Objection, Your Honor. Mr. Coker is not permitted to put words in the witness’s mouth.”

  “This is cross-examination,” the judge ruled. He turned to the witness. “Deputy Illstead, do you agree with what Mr. Coker just said?”

  “Well … yes, there would likely be gunshot residues on one or both of his hands. But nothing is absolutely certain.”

  “Deputy Illstead, have you been reading a lot of True Detective magazine lately?”

  “That is utterly out of order!” Sewell screamed. “I move that Mr. Coker be admonished.”

  The judge turned to Coker and in a flat, unconvincing voice said, “You are admonished, Mr. Coker.”

  “And I want the jury instructed to disregard Mr. Coker’s gratuitous remark,” Sewell insisted.

  “Move along, Mr. Coker.”

  Sewell looked over at the judge, his face etched with anger. “I want to approach the bench.” He slammed his notebook on his table. The elderly woman juror in the front row let out a small, startled yelp.

  The judge rapped his gavel. The woman jumped again. “It’s time for a recess,” the judge said. “I’ll see counsel in my chambers.”

  CHAPTER 5

  IN CHAMBERS, SEWELL addressed the judge angrily. “You mean to tell me, Your Honor, that Coker can tell this jury that my case is nothing more than something dragged out of a pulp magazine?”

  “Keep your voice down,” the judge said. “These walls are not totally soundproof. I’ve ruled, Mr. Sewell.”

  “You certainly have. And your rulings are impeding justice.”

  “You’re verging on contempt,” the judge said.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I am reminding you of the consequences of judicial disrespect.”

  “Well, I have something to say,” Coker said. “This prosecutor withheld the fact that gunshot residue tests were taken from the hands of Horace Adams the Third, and that those tests were positive. If I hadn’t stumbled onto that fact in my cross-examination, the jury would believe that the only person in this case whose hands were contaminated with gunshot residues were Mrs. Adams’s. That was a sure road to conviction, and both Illstead and Sewell knew this.”

  Sewell shrugged, indifferent to the assertion.

  “This prosecutor,” Coker continued, shaking his finger at Sewell, “knows he had the duty to provide the defense with that exculpatory evidence before trial, and he hid it from us. I ask that Mr. Sewell be admonished and the jury be instructed that this prosecutor has intentionally withheld evidence favorable to Mrs. Adams, and that this is a violation of his duty under the law.”

  “I will reserve my ruling on that, Mr. Coker. If there are further incidents of this nature, I will give your motion renewed consideration.”

  “Your Honor,” Coker pressed, “Mr. Sewell had the further duty to tell us before trial that this gun was unregistered, and that he did not send the bullet and the gun to the FBI for comparison as is standard procedure.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sewell. Why wasn’t Mr. Coker so advised?”

  “The revolver was found at the fingertips of the deceased. The ownership of the gun is irrelevant to the question of who fired it.”

  “I see,” the judge said. “That may or may not be so. But these very troublesome facts can certainly be argued by Mr. Coker to the jury.”

  “I must observe that the weaker the prosecution’s case becomes, the more Mr. Sewell pursues his case by impropriety and dirty tricks,” Coker said.

  Sewell turned to Coker. “This is off the record. If you weren’t such a senile old bastard, I’d personally show you a trick or two.” He started to
unbutton his coat.

  Coker jerked his glasses off and dropped them on the judge’s desk. “This is off the record, too. Give it a try, you lying piece of shit.”

  Shocked, Lillian Adams retreated to the far wall.

  “There’s nothing off the record, here,” the judge yelled. “Stop this unprofessional conduct this minute!” The judge was looking for his gavel. He’d left it on the bench. He turned to the clerk. “Call the sheriff, Mr. Clerk.”

  “I don’t have to take that insult from anybody,” Sewell said. “As you can see, he’s attacking me. I want that on the record.”

  “Back off,” Coker warned Sewell. “You smell like dog shit, and that can go on the record.”

  “I find you both in contempt,” Judge Murray yelled, “and that is definitely on the record. Both of you take your seats immediately. Mr. Clerk, call the sheriff!” the judge ordered again.

  The two lawyers plopped down in their chairs like obedient but angry schoolboys.

  “I’ve already called the sheriff twice,” the clerk hollered back.

  The sheriff burst into the room. “What’s going on here?”

  The judge was holding the left side of his chest with both hands.

  “They’re in contempt of court,” the clerk said, trying to be helpful. “Did you get that, Madam Reporter?”

  The court reporter sobbed, “I can’t get this all down. Everybody’s screaming at once.”

  “I find both of these lawyers … in con … tempt,” the judge said in halting words.

  “That’s what I said,” said the clerk.

  “I order the sheriff … to forthwith lock both these alleged lawyers up … until further order of this court.”

  “Well,” the sheriff said, “we got more’n a full house. You want ’em dumped in with the drunks and the pukes?”

  “I’ll appeal this order,” Sewell said.

  “In the meantime, Mr. Sheriff, these men are not to be released without my prior order, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  The judge was still holding his chest. “And if you disobey, Mr. Sheriff, you will join them in your own establishment. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, of course, Your Honor. But we only have that one vacant cell—the padded one.”

  “That’s not my problem,” the judge said.

  “Come on, boys,” the sheriff said to Coker and Sewell in his standard preamble to an arrest. “You comin’ peacefully like gentlemen, or do you want to come the hard way?”

  The clerk called Betsy Murray, who arrived at the courthouse shortly after the sheriff had departed with his two subjects. She wanted to take the judge home.

  “I’m all right,” the judge insisted to Betsy. “One thing for sure, I am not going to let a couple of common thugs, who’ve somehow been admitted to practice in my court, to put this court into a vulgar shambles. I’m not in jeopardy.” He pulled his hands away from his chest. “What’s in jeopardy is their license to practice law. And that, too, Madam Reporter, can go on the record.”

  * * *

  The next morning, the judge, seated at his desk in chambers, called the sheriff.

  “Both your favorite people are alive and well this morning,” the sheriff reported. “They spent a night together in our padded cell.”

  “What? And they didn’t kill each other?”

  “Men will not fight in the absolute dark,” the sheriff said. “They can’t see to hit each other, and they can’t see to defend themselves. And when men fight, they secretly expect that somebody will break up the fight and stop them from killing each other.”

  The judge shook his head, astonished.

  “And, to make sure, I took away their only remaining weapons.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Yes, their shoes. They spent the night in the dark, barefooted. You can’t kick a man to death with bare feet without breaking a toe.”

  “I must remember that,” the judge said, shaking his head.

  “And both are so out of shape, they didn’t have enough energy to hurt each other anyway.”

  “What did they do in there all night?”

  “Don’t know. I had Deputy Huffsmith sit near their cell with his ear to the door. He said there was a lot of cussing going on for a while, and then it was totally quiet the rest of the night.”

  A small smile crept onto the judge’s face. “Give the prisoners a decent breakfast. Then bring them to my chambers.”

  Shortly, the sheriff ushered prosecutor Haskins Sewell and defense attorney Timothy Coker into the judge’s chambers. Their suits were a disheveled mess, their ties hanging at half-mast, their shirt collars pushing out over the lapels of their coats, their pants rumpled top to bottom. Coker’s belt was unbuckled and his pants were held up by one suspender.

  “You two look like a couple of old horses that’ve been ‘rode hard and put up wet,’” Judge Murray said. Suddenly, he felt sorry for them, their bravado fled, their anger retreating to embarrassment. “Gentlemen, are we prepared to proceed?”

  “I move the court for a recess,” Sewell said in a quiet voice. “I need to go home and change.”

  “I object to a recess,” Coker said. “Let’s get this bullshit—strike that last word—this miserable trial over with.”

  Silence.

  Coker spoke again in a strangely subdued voice. “I do not want anyone to know that I slept with a prosecuting attorney, much less one named Sewell. It would forever damage my reputation for both chastity and sanity.”

  “I will keep our cohabitation a secret, I can assure you,” Sewell said. “I wouldn’t want anyone to know the torment I’ve suffered spending the night with you.”

  “The court will take up again at one-thirty this afternoon,” the judge said. “That should give you both time to rearrange yourselves into fresh clothes so you can appear to be proper members of the bar, even though your past conduct supports the opposite conclusion.”

  CHAPTER 6

  JOHN MURRAY HAD been in private practice nearly ten years when Timothy Coker, fresh out of law school, and a recent survivor of the Wyoming Bar Examination, came bursting into Jackson Hole like a sudden springtime thunderstorm. Murray thought the kid had style, the swagger and a cock-of-the-walk attitude, and he sure wasn’t some pretty boy who’d turn off the men on a jury. Coker had done some fighting both in and out of the ring. A middleweight, he’d won a few and lost a few. The scar over his left eye and his nose, which bent slightly to the left, commemorated a short-lived campaign as a prospect. His black hair had already given up its roots at the front of his head. His green eyes looked owlish through his thick glasses. He favored pinstriped suits, and he’d marched into town in a pair of black-and-white wingtip shoes he’d ordered from Sears, Roebuck.

  Coker wanted work. Murray looked him over, sat back, and said, “You selling Fuller brushes door-to-door or what?”

  “I came to help you out,” Coker said.

  “Help me? What makes you think I need help?”

  “My uncle Les Simpson told me about you. He said you must be needing help bad because it took ‘a couple trips of the Earth around the Sun,’ as he put it, to get the first thing done in your office.”

  “Why would someone like you come to a nothin’ burg like Jackson Hole?” Murray asked. “You look like you’d be more at home pimping call girls in L.A.”

  The kid looked down. “That hurt my feelings,” he said. He waited for an apology. Finally, he said, “My uncle Simpson told me the same thing. He said, ‘You need to dress down a little. People don’t cater to fancy dudes in this little town. But I told my uncle, ‘I hear that Mr. Murray is a very intelligent man. He’ll understand that a person has to dress to please himself.’” Then in a confidential tone, the young lawyer said, “I’m not trying to please anybody except me, Mr. Murray. You have to be okay with yourself before you can ask anybody to be okay with you, don’t you agree?”

  “I never gave that much thought,” Murray said. “Bu
t—”

  “My uncle claims we’ll be a perfect match. You need a lot of help, and I need to learn a lot. He says you’re the best all-round lawyer this side of the Mississippi and a good man. That’s exactly how he put it.”

  Later, Murray said he never fully understood what happened after that, but before the kid left his office, he’d taken Timothy Coker in as a partner, not a full partner to begin with, but with the idea that one day down the line they might become equal partners. Equal partners in what—a practice that seemed destined to lead them to the poorhouse before they could find the courthouse?

  Murray made his decision without asking Coker the first word about his history. He argued that you could ask people to tell you who they are, and down where the truth hangs out, they don’t know. They only knew whom they shouldn’t be like: “Don’t be a smart-ass like Willie.” Or they’d been told they should be like Uncle Jim, who, no matter what, always had a smile welded to his face. Or they thought they should emulate some tough-guy movie star like Humphrey Bogart. Murray argued that most folks were long lost and never found themselves. Murray trusted his instincts about people.

  Over the years that followed, Murray learned a lot about his partner. He learned that Coker had grown up in a small coal-mining town called Acme, a desperate company town that housed desperate men with busted bodies who lived their lives like slaving moles in a dangerous hole, men who came up from the underground mine shafts after twelve hours of hell picking at the coal seams and loading it into those little coal wagons on tracks, all in the dark and the dust and with their faces and lungs black, because working in the mines was all the work there was, and it was better than the family starving—barely better.

  “Jesus, I’d rather shovel shit from the chicken house all day, every day, for the rest of my life than go into the mines,” Coker said. “Look what it did to the old man. He was coughing up pieces of lung and he was only forty, and he coughed out the rest of his lungs before the year was over. We buried him in the Acme graveyard alongside of Uncle Luke and all the others.”

  After his father died, Coker’s mother moved in with her parents in Sheridan, Wyoming. His grandfather, Pete McGinnis, worked as a mechanic in the Chevy garage. In Sheridan, “Little Timmy” Coker, as he was called, then about ten, sold his mother’s hot fresh cinnamon rolls to the whores up in the Rex Rooms above the Bison Bar. And he sold sweet peas that he raised in his grandmother’s garden to the cafés, two bouquets for a quarter, all done up pretty with asparagus ferns. His mother made him save the money to go to college. That’s what she said: “You have to go to college, or you’ll end up coughing up your lungs like your father.”