A Checklist for Murder (35 page)

In his opening remarks, Donald Green called allegations against his client a “Grand Illusion” consisting of unprovable accusations against a man who simply could not be placed at the crime scene by the prosecution. He promised the jury that they would soon see that despite the theory of
guilt against his client, there was no proof. There would be plenty of that golden commodity, reasonable doubt.

But then Craig Richman began. The experts came again as they had for the preliminary hearing years before. The paramedics, the doctors, the coroner, the evidence technicians. Piece by piece, the story was laid out for a jury who were hearing it all for the first time.

This time the new addition to the witness list was Sonia Siegel. At the time of the preliminary hearing she had still been convinced that Robert was innocent and had been embroiled in legal troubles of her own, facing charges of conspiracy in the crime. By now the authorities had concluded that she’d had nothing to do with the Peernock crimes but had been a silent victim that night. They believed that her love had been prevailed upon as a source of alibi and her trust manipulated to provide Peernock with an accomplice during his flight from arrest.

She was now a principal witness against him.

Sonia explained that it had been Detective Castro who had called her with the bad news on the day after the murder and asked her to have Robert contact the police—not Detective Fisk, as Peernock had claimed in his postarrest statements. Peernock had insisted it was Fisk who’d been on the phone during that call to Sonia’s house and that Fisk had promised to frame Robert, saying, “This time we’ll make it stick.” She confirmed that in the years she and Robert had lived together he had never once stayed at Claire’s house unless he was there with his youngest daughter. But he had left the little girl at Soma’s house that night.

She went through the checklist for murder with Craig Richman and sadly agreed that despite all of the many lists she had seen Robert make, she could offer no innocent explanations for what those ominous items might be.

Sonia’s most poignant moment came when Craig Richman showed her a doctor’s form that Robert had filled out for the
plastic surgeon in Las Vegas. She went through all the fake information point by point, until they reached the date of birth. At first she confirmed that the birth date was accurate, then she paused and said, “Wait a minute, the year is right but the month and day are wrong.” For some reason, the month and day that Robert had listed were not for his birthday. They were for hers.

With a sad smile, she added softly: “He remembered.”

Tasha stood before the mirror on the morning of her first day of testimony and studied the strange reflection. She looked like somebody else. Friends had brought her a dress to wear in court, some pink feminine outfit that looked just fine on her except for the fact that she never wore pink and never wore this style of clothing. On somebody else it would have been a pretty dress; on her it was a costume.

But Craig Richman had been adamant that the jury would not have time to get to know Natasha, might not appreciate her artistic nature and her recent tendency to dress entirely in black. They might find it foreboding or intimidating. They might even wonder if black clothing made her a bad person.

What, after all, was she going to do if her father walked away?

So she stepped outside with the bodyguards who had come for her and she rode with them to the courthouse hoping that the weirdness she felt inside wouldn’t show to the jury.

The bodyguards took her in by the back entrance. Reporters had the front staked out and there was still concern that a hired killer could be there among the journalists, the free-lance writers, the thrill seekers, and the curious observers.

But by now she was a pro at keeping cool under fire. She kept away the fear and the nerves and the dread by focusing on happy little things. She knew from Craig’s daily phone calls to update her during the course of the trial that her
father had been freaking out pretty regularly in court, getting himself thrown out. It seemed that people were finally seeing her father as she saw him, right there in open court. This time it wasn’t taking place in some civil trial or some minor hearing, it was the main trial, the prime test of truth. And she knew that a lot of experts had been heard already and their testimony had all helped to bolster her story. It was a good feeling, all these strangers using their expertise to say that, yes, she must be telling the truth even though her own father kept saying that she was a liar, had always been a liar.

She smiled to herself, down inside where the guards waiting beside her could not see. Because she had lied to her father in the past about where she was going with friends, and she had lied to her mother about whether or not she had any homework to do at night. But this time she wasn’t the one who had to remember the lies and keep the story straight. All she had to do was stay calm and say what had happened just as she had done a hundred times before. And try not to look like a weird, artsy-fartsy kid. She knew from experience that some people just hate those types. If one of those people was on the jury, he or she might be inclined to sit and wonder if she was actually capable of the horrible things her father claimed about her. All it would take was that one juror to turn her father back out into the streets. And if he went free, how long would he let her live, knowing what she knew about him?

So she used one of the tricks she had learned many years before, when the fighting at home was unbearable but she couldn’t leave the house and couldn’t keep from hearing it and didn’t dare speak up because it might draw the rage down upon her.

She sang.

Much later, she described how it worked. She sang silently to herself, out loud inside her head but not moving her lips, not even the smallest amount. The songs were her private
mantra, leaping and spinning and dancing inside her head where no one could hear it except her.

The police bodyguards took care of her physical safety, but the songs took care of her heart. Warding off the outrage and the sadness and the dread, the song/mantras played on invisibly inside her.

This way, when they finally called her name and brought her into the grim-faced courtroom, and when they walked her down the aisle and sat her down in the witness stand, she wasn’t smiling anymore. But she still felt strong enough to tell them all about it, one more time.

Hour after hour after hour.

For the next three days she allowed Craig Richman to gently pull the details of every event out of her. She held fast to her memories when Donald Green stepped forward to retrace every detail from a different angle, trying to expose some uncertainty on her part, some conflict of fact, some aura of dishonesty.

Shortly after she had taken the stand she noticed that sitting forward on her witness chair was the only position from which she could actually see her father at the defense table. If she leaned back, the corner of the judge’s bench blocked Robert from her view. Not long afterward it turned out to be a handy detail. When the lawyers were called forward to the bench to quietly go over some technical detail, Tasha, sitting forward, felt eyes boring into her. Before she could stop herself she glanced up to meet her father’s piercing stare.

He silently mouthed something to her, steadily burning into her with his gaze. She felt the natural reaction of trying to read someone’s lips, but it was a response she immediately switched off. A little feeling of freedom burst through her as she realized that it didn’t matter what he was trying to tell her anymore; she didn’t have to figure it out. She didn’t even have to watch.

She just leaned back in the chair while the lawyers continued haggling at the bench. Her father was blocked from view, simple as that. Whatever little message Daddy had for his girl was lost with that single movement. She turned up the music inside her head and watched events play out before her as if they were some odd passion play that she could only hope would someday soon have very little to do with her life.

She made it through most of her testimony calmly. The mantra failed her only once, when she was led through the details of being hog-tied and hooded and left to lie on her mother’s bed while she listened to the thudding impacts vibrating the floor of the family room. Tasha felt the invisible wall that she had learned to hold up around her feelings turn to vapor and leave her raw emotions exposed. She broke down and sobbed quietly.

Finally the questioning paused long enough to give her time to recover her composure.

Then it began again.

At the end of the third day, after Craig Richman had finished laying out her story for the jury and Donald Green had gone back over it to try to cast doubt upon her testimony, working to give Robert Peernock that one little slice of reasonable doubt that had to be found somewhere, Richman got back up for the last time for a very short redirect examination. With it, he laid to rest once and for all any thoughts in the jury’s minds that Natasha Peernock had somehow conspired to set up her father for murder.

“Whether you know it or not”—Craig smiled at her up on the stand—“you’re quite the clever person.” He pulled out a pile of papers and showed them to her.

“Do you remember signing any of these documents?”

“No, I don’t”

“Do you know what these documents are?”

“They’re papers to release money for the funeral expenses.”

“You signed these documents in order to pay for your mother’s funeral; is that right?”

“Correct.”

“And you used an insurance policy to do that, at least that’s what these documents say; is that correct?”

“Yes,” she answered softly. Talking about her mother’s funeral seemed to turn off the music inside again. Now there was just the thick silence of the courtroom. She later spoke of feeling the jury’s stares on her skin. She could almost feel their thoughts flying through the room as they sized up every word she said.
Is this true? Is that a lie? Do we believe her
?

Craig seemed to feel their thoughts too. And he was ready to lead them to the answers.

“Your father, as far as you know at least, he wasn’t around to handle the insurance proceeds and to take care of the funeral and things like that; is that right?”

“Correct.” She kept her answers short and sweet, as Craig had told her to. Don’t confuse the jury with detail. Let the simple truths work on them.

“They came to you on July thirtieth to ask you to release your mother’s body from the coroner’s office so that she could be buried?”

“Correct.”

“Do you think that would be something that a husband would deal with as opposed to a daughter?”

“Objection,” Donald Green shot out. “Calls for a speculation.”

“Sustained.”

“But as far as you know, Father wasn’t around to take care of burying Mother?”

“Objection. It’s been asked and answered, Your Honor.”

“Overruled.”

“… Did you arrange to have your father go to Las Vegas and register in a hotel under an assumed name?”

“Objection, Your Honor. It’s argumentative.”

“Overruled.”

“Did you do that?”

“No.”

“Did you arrange to have your father get plastic surgery to change his face?”

“No.”

“Did you arrange the handwritten notes that were found in your father’s car that the jury will decide whether or not they have anything to do with this murder?”

“No.”

“Did you plant the insurance policies that were found in your father’s house that deal not only with you, but with your mother?”

“No.”

“That would be pretty clever, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you arrange to have your father at the house that night as opposed to any other night—reminds me of a Passover service”—he grinned, shaking his head—“Did you arrange to have your father at that house that night?”

Natasha: “No.”

“Did you arrange to have your father force-feed alcohol to you?”

“No.”

“Thank you. No further questions.”

And with that, Tasha was finally excused. The rest of the day went by in a blur: being taken out of courtroom and hustled through the court building by armed guards, being driven back to Louise’s house.

Her emotions were in a shambles. There was no single feeling at that point, but among the mix was a small, quiet sense of simply being glad that Craig had laid it out for the
jury so clearly. It had been completely unlike the last time on the stand during the civil case, where her father had been his own attorney and had managed to combine cross-examination with sneering insults and mockery. This time her portion of the testimony was kept simple by Craig Richman and dignified by Donald Green. This time she finally had the chance to tell it as clearly as possible.

And with that her participation in the four-year process of courtroom nastiness came to a close. As she left the building she felt hungry to rub the soiled energy off herself, to get away from anything that might remind her of the case.

She needed to be among young people who didn’t wear suits and who didn’t know about this awful case and who wouldn’t ask her the same endless, probing questions. The idea of dancing all night to very loud music tugged at her like the thought of a hot shower after a long and bitterly cold day.

If any of the guys she ran into in the dance clubs should be crass enough to ask about her facial scars, she could always give them the old car-wreck story—and then ask if they had come there to dance, or what.

A Prosecution Witness: “May I have a drink of water?”

Judge Schwab: “Bailiff, get the witness a glass of water, please.”

Donald Green: “May I have a drink, too, Your Honor?”

Judge Schwab: “Certainly. Bailiff, please bring Mr. Green a glass of water, or some tea if he prefers.”

Donald Green: [
mutters
] “Actually, I was thinking of something a little stronger.”

CHAPTER

27

V
ictoria Doom found out that she was going to be the very last of the dozens of witnesses called by the prosecution. By the time her turn came, trial had been going for nearly two months and the case had dragged out for more than four years. Up to that point she had kept up with progress reports and with Peernock’s evolving alibi stories through phone calls to Craig Richman.