A Family Business (33 page)

Diamond feigned amazement. No mass spectrometry? he asked, referring to a specialized test common in making other types of analysis.

Rieders answered patiently. As far as he knew, he said, no one had ever detected the presence of oleandrin with a mass spectrometer. “You would need at least three pounds of tissue to even get it ready for such a test, and even then I don’t know what the results would be,” he said.

Could something in asthma medication have shown up as oleandrin? Diamond queried, seemingly grasping at straws.

Rieders looked thoughtful, waiting a number of seconds to reply. “There is a remote possibility,” he said slowly, “that something like that would have shown up on the radio immunoassay test, but not on the other two.”

“You don’t believe that humans naturally carry substances that would give these same results?” Diamond asked.

“Probably, but not in the concentrations in which I found them,” Rieders replied.

To his evident frustration, Diamond had little better luck in cross-examining the other prosecution witnesses than he did with Rieders.

When he questioned Richard Gray, Diamond tried to get him to say that Tim Waters had been a homosexual who frequently picked up men on Santa Monica Boulevard and took them to his room at the Holiday Inn. By taking this tack, Diamond apparently was trying to offer a theory that Tim may have been killed by one of his short-term lovers.

Judge Hunter, however, refused to allow Diamond to question Gray directly about either his own or Tim’s sexual preferences. He did, however, allow the defense lawyer to explore Tim’s unusual living conditions. Under Diamond’s questioning, Gray admitted that Tim moved frequently from one room to another at the Holiday Inn, but it was because he was worried about someone trying to rob him, not because he was hiding from anyone. He had been robbed once, Gray said, and he didn’t want it to happen again.

Diamond looked down at David, who was seated at his elbow, and shook his head, signaling that he was running up a dead-end street. A few minutes later, however, he tried again. While questioning Gray about Tim’s second business, a limousine rental service he operated in partnership with another mortuary owner, he asked: “Did Tim and his partner have female companions?”

“Objection,” yelled Rogan.

Judge Hunter looked coolly at Diamond. “I agree,” he said, “unless you’re going to argue that they all killed him.”

Diamond let the matter drop.

And when George Bristol was on the stand, Diamond tried to get him to implicate himself in some of David’s more devious schemes, hinting that Bristol had good reason to cooperate with the prosecutors so he could shift all the blame to David, thereby diverting attention from himself. But Judge Hunter slammed that door as soon as he saw what Diamond was trying to do.

“You have a fertile mind, Mr. Diamond,” he said, “but what you are implying is beyond the realm of reason.”

A few minutes later, though, Diamond scored a significant point.

While questioning Bristol about his recollections of David’s demands for a poison to kill his grandparents, Diamond asked Bristol if he thought David had been serious when he brought the subject up.

“There was a part of me that couldn’t take it seriously,” Bristol said, explaining how David had led him on about so many other things, such as being a former deputy sheriff and about having once played for the Seattle Seahawks, that he wasn’t sure when David was speaking truthfully.

Diamond jumped at the opening. “He would take credit for things he did not actually do?” he asked. “Sort of bragging and joking and boasting?”

“Yes,” Bristol replied.

Diamond look satisfied. He had successfully implanted the idea that if David
had
actually bragged or joked about murdering Tim Waters, it would be consistent with his personality and did not necessarily have any connection to reality.

But the law is a give and take profession; lawyers may win a point here, but they almost invariably lose a point there. A few minutes later Diamond lost a point.

While still questioning Bristol, Diamond was particularly insistent on getting the witness to admit that at one-time he, Bristol, had suggested poisoning Randy Welty.

Bristol denied it. And he kept denying it although Diamond persisted in asking the same question several times in slightly different form.

Giss finally lost patience. “Objection!” he screamed, jumping up. “Obviously the defense attorney does not understand the word no.”

“You know what they say,” Diamond shot back, “never take no for an answer.”

Giss smiled, assuming the role of a comedian who had just been fed a juicy line. “You’re not on a date, Roger,” he quipped, breaking up the judge and the spectators.

On re-direct, Rogan moved quickly to try to rectify the damage done by Diamond.

“Was David joking when he grabbed you by the throat?” he asked.

“No,” Bristol said decisively.

“Was he joking when Lisa Karlan kept calling and he said he would kill anyone who threatened his family?”

“No.”

“Was he joking when he
kept
asking for a poison?”

“No.”

Diamond seemed not only to be having trouble with the witnesses, but with his client as well. A take-control type person to begin with, David could hardly be expected to sit placidly throughout the hearing. When both he and Diamond were seated, David kept up an active patter, whispering almost constantly in his lawyer’s good ear. When Diamond stood to question a witness, David tugged at his sleeve or poked his arm to demand his attention. Diamond was particularly forgiving of this insistency, never showing irritation at having his questioning interrupted, or giving any indication that he was aggravated at being told by his client how to conduct his case.

Diamond also was getting direction from another source: Jerry and Laurieanne. The two were present every day, situating themselves precisely in the center of the first row of seats in the almost-empty spectator section, he in a jacket and tie, she in a stylish dress.

A heavyset, husky man with close cropped, age-thinned hair rapidly turning to gray, Jerry habitually appeared optimistic and chatted animatedly with Diamond whenever the court was in recess.

Laurieanne, her makeup meticulous, wore her salt and pepper hair swept upward in a fashionable coif and usually had a scarf tied loosely at her throat.

They both took copious notes, and at first tried to exchange pleasantries with their son. That was forbidden by courtroom rules, but rather than publicly rebuke them for it, Judge Hunter came up with a more tactful solution: He simply ordered the bailiff to seal off the first row of seats with silver duct tape, which effectively put the Sconces, parents and son, out of whispering range.

The separation, however, did not dampen their spirits. Each day they appeared outwardly confident, aloof from the others—particularly Tim Waters’s mother and sister, who also were there every day, sitting almost within touching distance in the small room—but always acutely aware. When they were not writing in their separate notebooks, they kept their eyes riveted on their son. Whenever he turned around and their eyes met, all three smiled brightly, as if the proceeding were a high school graduation rather than a preamble to a murder trial.

Despite the horrible things the witnesses were saying about his client, Diamond treated only one of them roughly. That was Jim Dame, the former employee who had opened up the entire case by contacting authorities soon after the incident at Oscar’s Ceramics.

Actually, Dame had been a thorn in David’s side for several years. While he was still working for David at the crematorium, Dame claimed, he had loaned his boss $25,000, money from his father’s inheritance that he had borrowed from his mother, to help David buy his house. The loan was never fully repaid, Dame said, so he had filed a civil suit against his employer in an attempt to get the rest. The court later ruled in Dame’s favor, but he never got the cash.

A short, slightly pudgy man with a heavy, dark mustache and a receding hairline, Dame had worked for David for more than two years and had ample opportunity to observe the Sconces’ operations.

For the most part, Dame’s testimony added little to what had already been said about David earlier by other witnesses. Except for one thing. Of all the people who had worked for David and who later came forward to testify against him, Dame was the only one who claimed to have heard his former employer specifically mention oleander as a possible poison.

It had happened, Dame said, one day when he was riding with David to pick up a vehicle at the garage. As they were driving down the freeway, Dame said he picked up a book that was lying on the floor of David’s car. “What’s this?” he had asked curiously, noting the title was
The Poor Man’s James Bond
.

Dame said that David told him it was a book about ways to kill people, especially through the use of poisons.

“Like what?” Dame had asked.

“Like oleander,” David replied.

“Oleander?” Dame had asked, puzzled.

“Yeah,” David said. “Oleander.” Pointing out the car window at the shrubs decorating the highway median: “That stuff growing there.”

It was damaging testimony, making Dame the first witness to directly link David both with the book Dave Edwards said he had loaned to him and with oleander.

The accusation did not sit well with Diamond. When the defense lawyer’s turn came to question Dame, he was so belligerent that he had to be ordered twice by Judge Hunter not to yell at the witness. However, despite his efforts, the defense attorney was not able to shake Dame’s testimony. Finally, when he saw that he was making little progress, Diamond dismissed Dame with a wave.

Notwithstanding the solemnity of the occasion, the hearing was not infrequently spiked with humor. Since there was no jury and it was not a trial, a certain looseness prevailed that would not have been present under more formal circumstances.

One witness, in response to a question from Diamond, mentioned that Galambos had been described to him before he actually saw him.

“And how was that?” Diamond wanted to know.

He was depicted, the witness said, as a Neanderthal-looking man with heavy eyebrows that met in the middle.

“That sounds like a pretty good description to me,” Judge Hunter interjected.

When Rieders was called to the stand, he appeared wearing a dark suit and white shirt, but no tie. If the court did not object, he said in his faintly Germanic accent, he would prefer to testify with an open collar because he had a bad cold, and if he closed the top button, his breathing would be restricted. “But I have a tie,” he blurted out, digging into his jacket pocket, extracting a bow tie and waving it for the judge to see. “This is my instant respectability.” The judge chuckled, apparently feeling that some amount of levity was permissible in the proceeding, which was not a formal trial.

Sometimes, however, the humor was unintentional.

With Scott Sorrentino, the boyhood friend who had spent Good Friday evening with Tim, on the stand, Diamond again tried to elicit testimony to show that Tim may have been gay.

“Was Tim Waters a homosexual?” Diamond asked.

Sorrentino looked shocked. “Absolutely not!” he answered.

“Are you?” Diamond countered.

Again Sorrentino seemed taken aback. “No!” he answered resoundingly.

In response to further questioning from the defense attorney, Sorrentino explained that Tim did not drink alcohol so it was unlikely that he ingested the oleander via a spiked cocktail.

“Did you ever use amyl nitrate?” Diamond asked, referring to a compound used to dilate a person’s blood vessels. Available in a commercial form, it is popular in some circles as an orgasm enhancer.

Sorrentino looked puzzled. “What is that?” he asked. “It sounds like something you embalm a body with.”

During his cross examination of Richard Gray, Diamond worked hard at trying to give the impression that Waters may have been given the fatal dose of oleander by practically anyone other than his client.

When he turned the witness back over to the prosecution for re-direct, Rogan could not resist an attempt to show the absurdity of the defense’s assertions, forgetting that Gray had not been present when Rieders testified about an herbal doctor in Florida who had prescribed a rectal administration of oleander to help a patient gain weight.

Rogan was solemn. “Did Tim Waters, as far as you know, ever receive an oleander enema from a Haitian witch doctor?”

Gray did not have the faintest idea what Rogan was talking about. He looked totally blank for a moment, then stammered, “N-Nooo.”

And sometimes the humor was black.

The day after Rieders testified at length about oleander poisoning, a cut-glass vase filled with creamy-white oleander blooms appeared on a desk in the courtroom. No one admitted to knowing how it got there, but at the first recess, it disappeared.

30

When it came time for Diamond to call his witnesses, he had three, but only one was really pertinent to the defense: Dr. Holloway.