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I’ve considered circling back to attacking the physical evidence, throwing more shade on the prints and hair and all the rest of it than I have already. But I am saving that for later, the way I am saving round two with Otis Miller.
Today I’m opening with Rob Jacobson’s so-called friend Gus. When Jacobson asks me why I’m leading off with Gus Hennessy, I simply tell him, “You’ll have to wait and see along with everybody else.”
“What if I order you to tell me? Being the one writing the big checks to you and all.”
“Then I will once again have to remind you that I’m the one driving this bus. And Rob? You need to hope it’s not the prison bus.”
I go over the notes I made this morning in bed, awake at 5 a.m., ready to go as soon as my eyes were open, even before Rip was awake. I’m not one of those lawyers who likes to script all the questions beforehand. Or know all the questions I’ll end up asking.
I ultimately approach every cross-examination as a conversation with the witness, one that can never be scripted out entirely, even though I so often know what to expect from the person on the stand.
Basically I’m driving that bus, too.
I might not always know exactly where we’re going to end up, the witness and me. No defense lawyer does. Sometimes a witness will surprise the hell out of me and make me feel as if I’ve suddenly been hit on my blind side.
But one of the reasons I’ve never lost a case is because I’ve managed to keep those hard hits to a minimum.
I smile to myself as I see the clock hit nine exactly, thinking that the defense is about to play offense now, in a big way.
That’s the plan, anyway.
“All rise,” the clerk says.
I practically knock my chair over as I jump out of it.
I don’t have cancer today.
Forty
GUS HENNESSY IS ALLbusiness casual. Blue blazer, open-necked tattersall shirt. But then his whole attitude seems to be casual today, as if he wants everyone in the room to think there’s nowhere he’d rather be in the whole world than on this witness stand, talking to me.
He knows better. Because Gus knows he isn’t sitting at the club now, chopping it up with his boys. Heison the stand in a murder trial.
“Goodmorning,Mr. Hennessy.”
“Good morning.”
I take a couple of minutes to remind him of his previous testimony as Ahearn’s witness, about the argument between Rob Jacobson and Mitch Gates he says he heard on the beach.
“You recall all that, correct?”
“I do.”
“Given this do-over,” I say, “would you care to amend any of that testimony?”
“I don’t see this as a do-over, Ms. Smith.”
“Of course you don’t. I’m just wondering if, given time to reflect, you’re standing strong on your version of that event.”
He smiles, as if about to close a deal, as if about to tell me that while the property he’s trying to sell me is only one acre, it really looks like two.
“It’s not my version of things. It’s what happened.”
“Of course it is!”
I smile back at him.
“I was wondering, Mr. Hennessy, just how your real estate business is doing these days.”
