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“Wait, Your Honor. I’m happy to answer the question, if that’s all right with you.”
“You may answer the question,” Judge Prentice says.
Otis Miller says, “It actually happened pretty much the way Ms. Smith described it, right around last call that night. We were the only two people in there, along with the bartender, who’s an old Army friend of mine, which is why I stop by there from time to time. Mitch showed up, pretty well lit, and told me to stay away from his wife. I told him he had it all wrong. He took a swing and missed. I got my arms around him to discourage him from taking another. Cal, the bartender, got him out of there. That was the end of that.”
“Didhe have it wrong? About you and his wife?”
“He couldn’t possibly have been more wrong—trust me.”
“Mr. Miller, I’m going to ask you something I’ve asked you previously and remind you that you are still under oath here. Wasn’t the reason Mitch Gates accused you of having an affair with his wife because youwerehaving an affair with his wife?”
Otis Miller smiles. “We’re really doing this? Again?”
“Sadly, we are.”
“I actually thought you were going to drop it after I testified that first time around that this narrative is insane.”
“It was me you called insane, just to be clear.”
“As you just pointed out,” he says, smiling again, “Iamunder oath.”
“Boy, are you ever.”
“For the last time,” he says, “I was not having an affair with Kathy. I was her friend, at a time when she needed a friend. She had a complicated relationship with her daughter. Her husband was away a lot that summer. There was something else bothering her, I could tell, but something she never wanted to talk about, at least not with me. So I was there for her, nothing more.”
“At all hours?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. If she needed someone to talk to, I was just up the road.”
“How there for her would you say, exactly?” I ask.
“So here we are again,” he says. “You want me to admit that I was having sex with Kathy Gates, no matter how many times I say I wasn’t.” He shakes his head and chuckles now. “My ex-wife used to sound like this when she was accusing me of cheating on her.”
“Did you cheat on her with other women?”
“Should I plead the Fifth on that?”
It’s almost as if he’s enjoying this back-and-forth,I think.As if he’s the one cross-examining me.
“I only want you to admit to an affair with Kathy Gates if it’s the truth, Mr. Miller.”
“Only it’s not,” Miller says, “no matter how much you want it to be.”
He looks past me, seems to wink now at someone in the gallery. But I stay on him.
“I know I should have cleared this up the first time I was on the stand,” Otis Miller continues, “but I thought that my private life ought to remain private. And that we, meaning you and I, both knew you were making shit up.”
“Language, Mr. Miller,” Judge Prentice says. “Even if it’s Ms. Smith to whom you’re speaking.”
“I apologize, Your Honor.”
“Your private life gets to stay private unless and until it’s relevant to a murder trial,” I tell Miller now. “At which point it becomes everybody’s business.”
“So you’re saying that it’s everybody’s business that I’m gay?” Otis Miller says.
Boom.
It’s like a hockey hit in that moment, the way I used to feel when I’d get slammed into the boards and the butt end of my stick would go into my midsection and I couldn’t get my breath and would just sit there on the ice until I could.
