Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (46 page)

The first time jurors heard the voice of Carlos Gonzales was when the clerk flipped on a reel-to-reel tape recorder that had been brought into the courtroom. It was Tuesday morning. Judge Morano had spent much of Monday night listening to FBI tapes and had ruled that exactly three minutes of a conversation that Gonzales had held with Antonio Hernandez and his fellow officer, Andy Bravero, was relevant to our trial and could be played. After Judge Morano called court into session, I quickly moved through the legal steps necessary to get the snippet admitted as evidence. Once that was done, the court clerk had turned on the player.

The first voice was Gonzales’s.

“You don’t think I got big enough cojones for murder? Is that right? Well, let me tell you both something that might surprise you. I snuffed my old lady, man. I did her. And the cops—they’re so stupid they think she killed herself.”

Judge Morano had decided that the person who spoke next did not need to be identified by name but rather would be referred to during the trial simply as voice one. I recognized him. It was Antonio Hernandez.

“Okay, Carlos, tell us, how’d you snuff your old lady?”

“I used blow, man. I mixed it with milk and then had my kid take the glass up to her in our bedroom. The dumb bitch didn’t have a clue she’d been poisoned until it was way too late.”

“Why’d you do her?”

That question came from a different voice. I assumed it was Hernandez’s partner, Bravero.

“She was gonna take the kids and leave me. She threatened to go to the cops. I put five grams in that milk, man. It took forever to dissolve.”

“She must have checked out higher than a kite,” voice one could be heard saying.

“Naw, she started vomiting. I was with her in the bedroom to keep her from going for help. I held her down. Looked right into that bitch’s eyes when she was dying. So don’t tell me I don’t have big cojones.”

The tape came to an end.

I announced, “I’m done with Agent Longhorn as a witness.”

Pisani knew he was in trouble. But he also knew that he had a friendly witness sitting in the chair who wanted to help him.

“Agent Longhorn, as an FBI agent, you could have charged my client with murder when you first heard his words on that tape. Isn’t that correct?”

“I could have.”

“But you didn’t. Why?”

“Shucks,” said Longhorn, falling back into his good ol’ boy voice. “I thought he was exaggerating to impress the other men on that tape. I thought what he was saying was hogwash.”

I stared at Longhorn with complete disgust. He was bending over backward to help Gonzales go free—and for what? He’d told me earlier it was for a “greater good,” but I knew that the true greater good was that Gonzales was going to help Longhorn’s career.

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I rested my case.

Pisani announced that his client would not testify. He also said the defense didn’t need to call additional witnesses. “The defense rests,” he announced in a confident voice. He immediately asked Judge Morano to dismiss the murder charge, claiming that I had failed to prove the elements of the crime of murder beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge Morano declined.

After a short break, we returned to court for our closing arguments.

Having studied nearly all of Pisani’s performances in earlier cases, I was well familiar with his tactics. I suspected he would begin with a personal story so he would appear to be just an average fellow, just like the jurors. He would attack the evidence, submit an alternative theory, and finally talk about “reasonable doubt.”

Just as I’d thought, Pisani began with a short anecdote, hoping to touch jurors emotionally.

“I’m not married,” he said, and then, looking at me, he added, “Of course, neither is Ms. Fox there. But I have many friends who are, and while it may be hard for you to believe it, these married couples actually get into arguments on occasion.” He gave the jurors a smug smile and wink. “Sometimes these friends have dragged me into their arguments, and when I listen to them, I realize I am hearing two very different sides to a story. That is what we have here today.”

Pisani took jurors through the testimony just as I had, but he led them down a completely different path. Dr. Swante had ruled Benita’s death was a suicide until he was asked to change his opinion by the prosecution. There was no new evidence, no reason to switch, except for a request from Ms. Fox. Dr. Swante had testified that Benita wasn’t a frequent user and then had admitted that she might have been one. How believable was he? Dr. Treater had never met Benita Gonzales so how did she know whether or not the deceased was depressed? Dr. Treater had thought one of her own patients, whom she’d known well, was not suicidal and he’d blown his head off fifty-five minutes later. So much for her credibility.

Officer Whitey McLean had not seen anything suspicious on the night when the victim’s body had been found in her bedroom. He’d told the coroner that the death looked to him like a suicide. As for Yolanda Torres, she was an admitted alcoholic and proven liar who had once falsely accused her boyfriend, saying that he had beaten and threatened to kill her, only to admit later that she’d fabricated the charges. Maria Hildago had testified that she was high on drugs when she thought the defendant might have told her something about his wife’s death. Chances are she was simply hallucinating.

Having undercut those witnesses, Pisani attacked Carmen’s testimony. She’d told jurors that Carlos beat Benita that night, but the autopsy didn’t show any evidence that Benita had been beaten. How did the prosecution explain that inconsistency?

Carmen also had admitted that she was bitter and angry at her father. “She is not a credible witness. She is an angry witness.”

Finally, Pisani explained the tape recording of the defendant discussing his wife’s death. It was braggadocio, a man trying to appear macho. “Agent Longhorn, himself, said he didn’t believe Gonzales had murdered anyone.”

Having done his best to undermine all the evidence and the witnesses’ testimony, Pisani suggested an alternative theory about what had happened the night Benita died.

Benita was clearly unhappy in this marriage. That much was certain. Carmen had brought her a glass of milk. That much was certain. Depressed, unhappy Benita kissed her daughter good night, sent her to her bedroom, and then reached into the dresser where she and Carlos kept cocaine. It always had lifted her spirits before when she was feeling blue. Benita had always been careful to hide her cocaine use from her children and everyone else. She carefully sprinkled the particles into the milk and stirred it—perhaps with her own finger. She drank it. Her husband heard her cries later, raced upstairs, and saw her already dead on the bed. “This is not a murder. It is a tragedy. A suicide.”

Pisani added, “This is not just the defense’s theory about what happened that night. It is what the police and the coroner believed happened at the time. What changed their minds? Was it scientific evidence? No! It was an overzealous prosecutor named Dani Fox with an ax to grind.”

Pisani was now making me the villain—a bitter, unmarried woman.

One of the first lessons that I’d learned as a prosecutor was that oftentimes a subtle bond is created between a defendant and jurors during a trial. Sitting together through tedious testimony, hearing intimate details about a person’s life and personality, and knowing that another human being’s fate is in your hands can create the impression that a defendant is not so different from the persons judging him. There was a tendency for jurors to think that defendants were just like them. That they shared the same values. It was difficult, I’d learned, for jurors to look at someone so ordinary, so seemingly respectable, and think of them violently poisoning their spouse. Jurors wanted to believe the good in a person. Sadly, jurors tended to empathize with defendants without even realizing it.

Pisani was using that to his full advantage.

Continuing his attack, he said, “Look at what sort of witnesses Ms. Fox is asking you to believe. An assistant medical examiner who is so weak-spined that he changes his ruling just because she asked him to. A psychiatrist who discharged a young patient only to have him kill himself. An alcoholic best friend who is an admitted liar. A hallucinating stripper and the defendant’s own bitter daughter. Who would want their fate determined by such questionable testimony? If you look for cold, hard evidence, you will find that there is none. The only evidence is that this poor woman died from an overdose taken in milk. No one knows who put that cocaine there or why.”

Pisani ended in his traditional manner: by discussing reasonable doubt. “Your job is to determine whether the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This means you must decide if the evidence is truthful and compelling. I know you’ve all seen photos of Lady Justice. She is wearing a blindfold and holding a scale. As jurors, you are required to put guilt on one side of that scale. On the other side, you put reasonable doubt. Under our legal system, if there is even the slightest bit of reasonable doubt—even the weight of a feather—on those scales, then the law requires you—it doesn’t really give you a choice—it demands that you to find the defendant not guilty regardless of what’s on the other side—no matter how heavy that side is.”

Continuing, Pisani said, “Every accused person in our society is presumed innocent until the state proves otherwise. The law demands that you begin your deliberations by recognizing that my client is innocent. It’s up to the prosecutor to prove him guilty. The defense doesn’t have to solve this case or explain loose ends. That is not our responsibility. The law says my client is innocent until the state presents such evidence that every one of you is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed this crime. When you retire, remember those scales, remember that if there is the slightest feather of doubt—and I promise you that there is plenty of reasonable doubt in this case—then you must acquit my client.”

I had to hand it to Pisani. He’d used every trick in the book: equating reasonable doubt with a feather, yelling at times and whispering at others, making his closing a call to justice that any law-abiding citizen would acquit this murderer. He was good.

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