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Hardly ironclad proof of an affair. Or that it’s true. Sometimes in court you just want things to be true, as a way of stirring the pot. Or muddying the water. Or just to get a reaction out of a witness.
I get one as Miller comes halfway out of his chair.
“No!” he shouts, with much more force than before, as Ahearn is shouting out another objection.
Only to his amazement, and mine, this one is overruled.
“I’ll allow this,” Prentice says. “And please control yourself, Mr. Miller.”
Not on my account.
“I was not having an affair with Kathy Gates. No matter how many ways you ask the question.”
“Just to be clear, then, Mr. Miller. Just on the chance that I would present two witnesses in this case who would testify that you and Kathy Gates were more than friends, those two people would be lying?”
“Yes,” Miller says. “She wasnothaving an affair with me.”
“Let’s leave that there for now and move on.”
“About time,” Kevin Ahearn says, and he gets gaveled into silence by the judge for a change.
“Do you ever carry a gun with you on your late-night tours of the neighborhood?” I ask Miller now.
“No.”
“Are you sure of that? Because about six months before the Gates family was murdered, didn’t you stop a burglary at a home about a half mile down the road from yours because youdidhave your gun with you? A Glock, theEast Hampton Starreported at the time, as I recall—9mm.”
“Yes,” he says. “But that was a period in the off-season when there had been a series of break-ins in our area. So I was carrying a gun then, but no longer.”
Yesterday I was lying.
“Thank you for clearing that up. So you carried a gun?”
“Objection,” Ahearn says. “Asked and answered.”
“Sustained.”
I walk back toward the witness stand.
“Isn’t it quite possible, Mr. Miller, that on the night of the murders, when Mitch Gates and his daughter, Laurel, planned to surprise Kathy Gates by coming home early from a college visit to Boston, that Mitch walked in on you with his wife—Laurel’s mother?”
“Not then. Not ever.”
“You think this is funny, Mr. Miller?”
“No,” he says. “But I think you are.”
“And isn’t it quite possible with your well-documented issues with post-traumatic stress disorder that when he attacked you, you shot him and then everybody else in the house to cover up what was quite literally a crime of passion?”
Again I expect anger from him. This time he doesn’t answer right away, as if he’s unsure.
“No, no, no. No matter how many ways you try to ask the question.”
“You’re sure about that, Mr. Miller?”
“The only thing that I’m sure of, Ms. Smith, is that you’re insane.”
Finally,I think,a man who understands me.
