Shoveling Smoke Read Free Page B

Stroud said gravely. “It’s a condition of the lower extremities. My colleague has been stricken with a serious case of it. His podiatrist insists on constant ventilation. I assure you we meant no disrespect to the Court.”
    The judge gave me a hard look, then shrugged and bid the prosecutor call his first witness.
    “Bromohydrosis?” I whispered to Stroud as he sat down.
    “A serious case,” he replied.
    I shook my head and started to tell him what I thought about feeding lies to a judge, when the old man shoved some black-and-white photos in front of me that choked my protest in my throat. The photos revealed a large man, naked except for boxers, lying facedown in an inky puddle.
    “When you shake your head in front of the jury, be sure you’re looking at these,” the old man whispered. “And look concerned! You may be up in a moment. Don’t piss in the on-deck circle, Tiger.”
    The State called Jolene Biggs, widow of the deceased. Mrs. Biggs took the stand and was sworn in, a large, doughy woman wearing a shiny green dress, her bright red hair unraveling from a bun on the top of her head. As the prosecutor coached her through her rehearsed testimony, Stroud slid a manila file over to me. In it were photos of Lanier Biggs, the dead man, on the coroner’s table. They were shocking, not so much for the two terrible shotgun wounds in the man’s stomach as for all the old, healed wounds. Smears of scar tissue, some waxen and smooth, some badly puckered, covered the body. It looked like Lanier Biggs had carried a scar for every day of his life. The body was big and well muscled, the face appallingly brutal: one eyebrow shredded by scars, a broken nose, a huge, truculent jaw. Lanier Biggs was nobody I would have wanted to meet in an alley.
    “Why do you suppose our prosecutor hasn’t offered these photos in evidence?” Stroud whispered.
    By the time the prosecuting attorney turned Jolene Biggs over to the defense for cross-examination, she had explained, in a calm, disaffected tone, how she had watched Hardesty shoot her unarmed husband twice with a shotgun and then drive away. The prosecutor, giving a tug to the ends of his string tie, nodded to Stroud and said, “Pass the witness.”
    Stroud climbed to his feet, shuffled through some papers on his desk, picked up a blank sheet of paper and studied it. He walked, with the slight limp I had noticed earlier, to the center of the courtroom, trailing after him the vaporous, rainy-sweet scent of Garden Mist air freshener. He gave the witness a dignified bow.
    “Mrs. Biggs, I am sorry for your loss.”
    That seemed to confuse the woman on the stand. “Beg pardon?” she replied.
    “I’m referring to your loss of Mr. Biggs, the deceased. You must have loved him very much.”
    “Oh, yes, sir. He was my husband.”
    “Mrs. Biggs, were you ever afraid of your husband?” At this the prosecutor objected, saying it had no bearing on the case at hand.
    Stroud withdrew the question. “Now, Mrs. Biggs, you have testified that you saw the defendant, Clifton Hardesty, drive into Lanier Biggs’s driveway shortly before the shooting occurred, isn’t that right?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And Mr. Biggs went outside to speak to Mr. Hardesty, correct?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And Mr. Biggs, your husband, made it very clear to Mr. Hardesty that he wasn’t glad to see him, didn’t he?”
    The prosecutor objected, saying the question was not relevant to the facts of the case. Stroud explained to the judge that he was merely following the line of inquiry that the prosecutor himself had opened up, trying to reconstruct as thoroughly as possible the events leading up to and following the shooting. The judge overruled the objection.
    In the next ten minutes there were to be several more objections from the prosecution, each more strident than the last, as Stroud coaxed facts from Jolene Biggs that the prosecutor had left untouched. It is customary for a lawyer to stick to yes-or-no