The Match (Wilde, #2)(12)

“A little hard to make out, I know,” Hester continued. “But we can see it’s black. It’s metal. Watch now.”

Hester pressed play. The hand began to rise. Since this was extreme closeup, the hand appeared to move fast. Again: intentional. She strolled over to the exhibit table and picked up a small gun. “This is a Remington RM380 pocket-size pistol. It’s black. It’s metal. Do you know why you buy a gun this size?”

She waited a beat, as though the jury would answer. They didn’t, of course.

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s in the gun’s name. Pocket-size. So you can carry it. So you can conceal it and use it. And what else do we know? We know that Lars Corbett owns at least one Remington RM380.”

Hester pointed again to the blurry image.

“Is that the gun right there in Lars Corbett’s hand?”

Again she paused, shorter this time.

“Right, exactly, so we already have reasonable doubt, don’t we? That’s enough to end all of this. I could sit down right now and not say another word, and your vote not to convict is obvious. But let’s continue, shall we? Because I do have more. Much more.”

Hester motioned dismissively toward the defense table. “We heard testimony that Lars Corbett’s Remington RM380 was ‘found’”—Hester put the word in sarcastic air quotes—“in his basement, but really? Do we know that for certain? Corbett owned a lot of guns. You saw them during this trial. He had a fetish for all sorts of destructive weaponry—big scary assault rifles and machine guns and revolvers and Lord-knows-what. Here, let me show you.”

She clicked the remote. The prosecution had tried to keep this photograph found on Corbett’s Facebook page out of the case. It didn’t matter, Paul Hickory had valiantly argued, what a victim looked like or wore or how he decorated his home. During voir dire, Hickory had asked Judge Greiner, “If this was a rape case, would you let Ms. Crimstein show the jury a photograph of the young woman in racy clothing? I thought we were beyond that.” But Hester argued that there was probative value because a man who had made public his vast gun collection would conceivably be more likely to draw a weapon, or at least, Richard Levine’s “state of mind”—his believing he was in real danger from Corbett—could thus be better explained.

But there was a bigger reason why Hester wanted the jury to see this photograph.

“Do you really think this man”—she pointed to Corbett—“only bought guns legally? Do we really think it’s not possible he had several small handguns and that what we see in his hand”—now she enlarged the blurry black mass in Corbett’s hand—“is one of them?”

The jury was paying attention.

Hester didn’t want them looking at the black mass for too long, so she clicked her remote and moved the image back to the photograph of Corbett with the assault rifle. She slowly walked back to her table so that they could stare at the photograph a little longer. Lars Corbett sported a crewcut and smirk. But the backdrop was the key.

Behind Corbett was a red flag with a swastika in the middle.

The flag of Nazi Germany.

But Hester didn’t say anything about it yet. She tried to keep her voice even, unemotional, detached, reasonable.

“Now Mr. Hickory has claimed, with very little proof, that this isn’t a gun in Lars Corbett’s hand but an iPhone.” In truth, Paul Hickory had very solid evidence that it was an iPhone. He had blown away this he-saw-a-gun theory pretty conclusively during the trial. He had introduced other photographs of the hand and used several videos and eyewitness testimony to support his claim that it was indeed an iPhone, that Lars Corbett was raising it in order to film the encounter, that we could all see, after the bullet went through Corbett’s head, his phone drop to the pavement.

Hickory had been convincing, so Hester didn’t dwell on it. Instead she tried to spin it another way.

“Now maybe Mr. Hickory is correct,” Hester allowed in her best conceding-the-point-aren’t-I-fair? tone. “Perhaps it is an iPhone. But I don’t know for sure. And you don’t know for sure. Think about that image of that hand I showed you. Now imagine you have a split second. Your blood is pumping. You are in fear for your life. You are standing in front of this man”—she points to the photograph of the smirking Lars Corbett in front of the Nazi flag—“who wants to kill you and your entire family.”

She turned back to the jury. “Would you bet your life on it being an iPhone? Me neither.”

Hester slowly circled so that she stood behind her client and put both hands on Richard Levine’s shoulders. Warmly. Maternally.

“I want you to meet my friend Richard,” she said with her kindest smile. She looked down at him. “Richard is a sixty-three-year-old grandfather. He has no criminal record. He has never been arrested before. Not once. He has no DUIs. Nothing. In his life, he has one speeding ticket. That’s it. He is—and I’m not a fan of this term but I have to say it here—a model citizen. He’s a father to three children: two sons—Ruben and Max—and a daughter, Julie. He had two grandchildren, twins Laura and Debra. His wife Rebecca died last year after a long battle with breast cancer. Mr. Levine took a long leave from his job just to care for his dying wife. He has worked for the past twenty-eight years in the corporate head office for a popular drugstore chain, running their accounting department for most of it. Richard was elected three times to the town council in his hometown of Livingston, New Jersey. He serves on the volunteer fire department and gives his time and money to a host of worthy causes. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a good man. No one has come forward and said otherwise. Everyone adores Richard Levine.”