Tuesday 9/23
THE BAILIFF OPENED THE COURTROOM DOOR AND BECKONED. NINA watched Alex Zhukovsky straighten his tie and follow him in.
On Nina’s left and right, people fidgeted, always keen to see a new face. Zhukovsky walked the central aisle, all eyes fastened on him, looking as conspicuous and anxious as an executioner on his way to the hanging. Passing through the low gate, he looked toward the tables on his left and right, defense on the left, Stefan’s miserable gaze following him, the jury on the left against the wall. Klaus glared at him. Alex didn’t look at the old man but let his own glance catch on Nina, who ignored him and doodled on her legal pad. As if embarrassed by her indifference, he looked at Judge Salas, a head and black-robed shoulders visible above the massive wooden dais. He stopped where directed. The court clerk told him to raise his right hand.
“My name is Alexis Constantinovich Zhukovsky,” he said, swearing to tell the truth. He mounted a step and entered a lower, smaller box attached to the judge’s dais and turned around to the roomful of faces. He looked toward the prosecutor. The questioning began.
Sitting, not standing, the D.A., asked him a series of simple questions about his work. Alex Zhukovsky responded, sounding stiff to Nina. “I am an instructor in Russian language and history at Cal State Monterey,” he said. “I also teach other courses. I’ve been there for the past six years.” He told the court he liked his job, and was brother to the victim in this case, Christina Zhukovsky, and son to the man whose bones had been disinterred.
“My father was named Constantin Nicholaevich Zhukovsky. Our mother, Davida Zhukovsky, died in a car crash when we were young. My sister was eleven. I was only seven.”
For a while Jaime’s questions were simple, and Zhukovsky, required to explain very little, answered yes or no. Then Jaime began asking Zhukovsky about Christina, her life and work.
“How can you reduce a person’s life to a few sentences?” Zhukovsky complained. “She had many facets.”
He told the court about her work at the university. “Her last job was working at Cal State Monterey in the Romance Languages Department as the Public Affairs Officer. She helped with organizing the conference, and was very involved in all aspects of it. It was one of the largest and most successful conferences held at the college so far. People came from all over the world to attend.”
Sandoval gave him a photograph of Christina and, shaking, Zhukovsky studied his sister’s image. In this picture, which Nina also studied, Christina, wearing a neat designer suit, smiled proudly, intelligently. Her face wore hope, ambition, and all the glorious things a human face, a living face could hold, when born to optimism. Holding the photograph, Nina felt sad that nobody would ever see her again as she had undoubtedly been, with shiny brown hair and a shy way of looking up at an observer. Nina would bet she used the weak glasses to disguise a driven nature.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” her brother told the D.A. His voice quivering, he gave the pictures back with a shaky hand. Looking sympathetic, Sandoval gave his witness a minute to get composed, obviously loving this show of emotion and milking it. He wanted the jury to feel for this nice woman with a public conscience, Nina realized. Christina was just like any other friend, family member, or coworker they might call to mind. People could identify with her. She was nobody, just like them.
Except that she had been murdered.
Wasn’t this what the psychologists called cognitive dissonance? Christina Zhukovsky was nobody! She appeared so small in the picture, insignificant, and yet she loomed so very, very big in this courtroom. If Nina had known her as her brother did, would she like her as a woman or pity her as a victim?
While the D.A. returned the photo to a file, Alex grabbed for the carafe of water in front of him, poured, and drank. “Yes, I went to the police station.” He had been shown his father’s body first, what remained of it. He described what he saw, the skull, the eyebrows, the silver hair lying in strings over a dark serge suit. Bones, loosely assembled. Fine shreds of his white collar, tatters that had once been sleeves. Bits of a sash across his chest, bearing the distinctive three black strips on a yellow background, which Zhukovsky said he well remembered. But the medal of Saint George? It was gone by the time he saw his father’s body.
All this he confirmed, remembering, wiping wetness from his brow. Maybe he was having a heart attack, Nina thought.
Stefan hardly blinked at Alex Zhukovsky’s testimony, even though several of the jurors appeared squeamish at many of the details. What a self-absorbed, overgrown adolescent he must be, thinking this was easy money, Nina thought along with them. Only a fool would have agreed to do that job in the first place.
Holding up the appraisal, Jaime Sandoval started on the medal. Alex acknowledged the facts. The appraiser had assigned a value of at least five thousand dollars. He had discovered the medal was created of precious materials and seemed to be the correct age for an original, first-class war medal. He suggested it might have been privately commissioned as a memento or honorarium by someone of wealth for a courageous member of his staff or family.
The D.A. showed Zhukovsky a photo of the familiar white embellished cross with the blue stone at its center, and the tiny image of Saint George slaying the dragon. Zhukovsky barely looked. “My sister and I saw it many times in my father’s study when we were growing up. We thought it was a toy, a replica. We had no idea how he came to own such a thing. As far as I know, he never fought in a war.”
The medal and appraisal were introduced into evidence. The prosecutor had to explain why Stefan would steal Alex’s father’s body after killing his sister, and the medal seemed to be the only motivation he could come up with.
Yes, Zhukovsky reported, after identifying the other body in the grave as his sister’s, he had been taken to Natividad Hospital in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 13. He let loose with indubitable facts: his sister’s eyes bulged. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth. Her neck had blue marks. He had fainted and his head had hit the steel wheel of a cart, and had required stitches.
He was shown photos of his sister’s dead body. “That is my sister, Christina,” he said, only his voice betraying hints of his extreme dismay.
Nina watched as Alex wiped his forehead again. Were this witness’s reactions entirely within the realm of normal for a grieving brother? Naturally, these very personal, gruesome images were upsetting.
Zhukovsky went on. “I gave the key to my sister’s apartment to a woman detective because I couldn’t accompany the police to her apartment. I-couldn’t.”
The judge called a recess.
Klaus had barely moved throughout Zhukovsky’s testimony. His face showed nothing of his thoughts, but Nina felt his scrutiny of this witness as rigorous, piercing.
Questioning resumed. Jaime Sandoval wanted to know about Christina’s last days. Zhukovsky told some things about the conference, about her mood. He identified personal items of hers-her appointment book, her purse. He told them he missed his older sister.
The D.A. finally stood. He buttoned his coat, preparing himself. Nina could see how Jaime wanted to signify this moment, the heart of Alex’s testimony. Alex swallowed as if preparing to live up to the prosecutor’s hopes.
“Do you know Mr. Wyatt, the defendant over there?” Jaime asked.
Rustling and muttering burst forth from Stefan’s table. Stefan wanted to speak, but Klaus put a hand on his arm, stopping him.
“No.”
“Did your sister ever mention the names Stef Wyatt or Stefan Wyatt to you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t hire the defendant to dig up your father’s grave?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you pay him the sum of five hundred dollars in cash at any time for any purpose?”
“No, sir.”
Nina let her breath out. He had stuck to his story.
Before the trial, when they went over Zhukovsky’s statements, Jaime Sandoval had seemed certain Stefan Wyatt was responsible for killing Christina Zhukovsky. Now her brother had given the jury no reason to believe otherwise.
“Did you have any reason to wish her dead?” Jaime asked.
“My own sister? Of course not,” Alex said.
After the break, Paul stood at the counsel table. “You have plenty to attack him with,” he said. “Blow him off the stand.”
She put her lips together and blew toward the witness box. “Shoot,” she whispered. “He’s still there.”
“Yeah, well, he’s no pushover.”
Nina stood. Jaime Sandoval, the prosecutor, noticed, then turned his eyes toward the papers spread out on the table in front of him, mad. He had obviously hoped for Klaus.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Zhukovsky,” she said. “My name is Nina Reilly and I represent the defendant, Stefan Wyatt.”
“Good afternoon,” he replied coolly.
She asked him questions about the identification of his father’s bones and his sister’s body, fairly rapid-fire, but with a logical progression that she hoped made it easy to follow. She cleared up points about how he had offered a key to the police to let them into Christina’s apartment. She tried to lull him with a pleasant manner, a singsong voice, a tone that said, And we all know what’s coming next, so no worries. She watched for the tension in his shoulders to leave him. She listened for even, unsuspecting breaths.
He answered her quick questions more and more quickly, with less and less premeditation.
And she dropped a bomb upon a dumbly grazing sheep.
“Your father, Constantin Zhukovsky, claimed he was a page to the last tsar of Russia, did he not?”
Alex Zhukovsky’s pale, professorial skin whitened.
“Would you like the question repeated?” The clerk read it back. The reporters, aroused, whipped out pens, poising them like arrows.
“He told stories,” Zhukovsky finally croaked out.
“When was the first time you heard him tell you that one?”
“I was a little boy. But you know, my father wasn’t reliable. I never knew if any of that talk about his early life was true. Here in America, he was a baker, a pastry shop owner. That’s the man I knew.”
“And he told you he was a page to the tsar of Russia, did he not?” Nina said, worrying him like a ferret worries a rat.
An alarmed Sandoval said, “Objection, relevance.” He hadn’t seen this coming.
Nina left Alex Zhukovsky to sit like one of Nabokov’s moths, pinned to his seat, and approached the bench.
“Objection overruled,” said the judge.
“He told you he was a page…” Nina prompted.
“To tsar Nicholas the Second, yes,” Zhukovsky admitted. “Yes. But you have to understand. He was full of stories, like fairy tales.” He was glaring at Paul, apparently having recognized Paul as the source of his present discomfort.
“Did he tell you about how he taught the tsarevitch-the young son of the last tsar, Nicholas the Second-how he taught Tsarevitch Alexis to ride a pony?” Mrs. Peltier, having unlocked the most buried of the old secrets, had other, more detailed memories to relate, Paul and Nina had discovered during follow-up telephone conversations.
“A pony?”
“A pony.”
A pause. “Yes.”
“Being a page to the tsar would have made your father an important man historically, wouldn’t it?”
“Not really. A page was a servant, a drudge. There’s no glory in that. Anyway, there were several pages.”
“But he would have been there near the end, before the tsar’s family was taken away to Ekaterinburg to be executed. It’s one of the most important historical events of the twentieth century in Russian history, surely something that would interest a professor of Russian. Didn’t he ever mention that?”
“The family was first exiled to Tobolsk, to the Governor’s House.”
“Professor, I stand corrected.” She smiled. She had him now, down a path he could not escape. “But of course he told you he was there as the events of the Russian Revolution unfolded in 1917 and right up to the time the tsar’s family was arrested and eventually taken to Ekaterinburg?”
Jaime, nettled into pinching his brows together until they almost touched each other, objected again as to relevance. The lawyers returned to the judge’s dais to huddle and whisper. Nina won again. The judge told Zhukovsky to answer the question.
“I was told that he was present, yes,” he said. “I have no way of actually knowing.”
“Did your father’s medal, the one our client stands accused of stealing from the grave, come from those days?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t such a medal ordinarily come directly from the hand of the tsar?”
“Objection. Relevance?” This time Sandoval won.
“Did your father retain any other memorabilia from his youth in Russia?” Nina asked Zhukovsky.
“I imagine if there was anything it would have been something small that was sold when the estate was liquidated after his death. His family had fled Russia during the revolution. They spent any savings, I imagine. They traveled to Estonia, then Sweden, then Canada. After all these travels and the deaths of his parents, he had just a few mementoes of his childhood. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. I simply don’t know more.”
“Did he ask to be buried with his medal?”
“Yes.”
“You could have sold it for at least five thousand dollars and possibly much more, did you know that at the time?”
“I didn’t know it was valuable. I did as he asked.”
“Ever regret that?” she asked.
Sandoval decided to object, and his objection was sustained.
“Didn’t you subsequently decide to dig up your father’s grave in order to obtain that medal and sell it?”
“No. Certainly not.”
“Didn’t you hire Stefan Wyatt to dig up that grave for you for that purpose?”
“Not at all.”
“Come on, Mr. Zhukovsky. How would Stefan Wyatt know about the medal, except from you?”
“Anyone who attended my father’s funeral in 1978 might have seen the medal,” he said.
“Was Stefan Wyatt there? He would have been only three years old that year.”
“What’s this got to do with my sister-who was murdered?”
“How did Stefan Wyatt find out the location of your father’s grave?”
“I don’t know.”
Stefan shook his head and sighed. The judge frowned at him.
“You told him where your father was buried, didn’t you?” Nina asked.
“No,” Zhukovsky said.
“You gave him the five hundred dollars that was found in his pocket, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Tell the truth, you lyin’ sack of shit!” Stefan shouted from the counsel table, slamming his hand down. Next thing Nina knew, Salas, up to now a picture of proper judicial decorum, ordered the jury to be gone and lost his cool. The yelling took some time. His deep bellows, unleashed, scared the court silent. Stefan balled up into a corner of the table, cowed. Alex Zhukovsky shrank back from the judge’s dais, hoping to evade the hurricane.
When the judge had blown enough air to clear the Salinas fog all the way back to the coast, a mid-afternoon break was called.
When Alex Zhukovsky returned, Nina watched one of the young women on the jury come alive to glower at him. Wearing a sympathetic expression, she then turned her attention toward Stefan. So maybe Nina’s earlier strategy had paid off. Something about the witness irked this girl, or something about the client engaged her. Either way, it made Nina happy. She had gotten through to the jury. Did they finally understand that Zhukovsky had hired Stefan to bring him the medal? Maybe. Nina sure hoped so.
“Back on the record,” the judge said.
“Can I add something to my previous testimony?” Alex Zhukovsky said. “I remembered something during the break.” He grinned.
“I object to that,” Nina said, perturbed. What was with this incongruous grin? “There’s no question pending.”
Jaime spoke to the judge, but dithering, plainly wanting something beneficial to the prosecution to emerge from Zhukovsky’s testimony, but uncertain about what to expect. The courtroom scraped and scuffled while the judge considered. Finally, the judge said sternly, “Do you remember the question that you wish to answer again?”
“Yes,” Zhukovsky said. “Mr. Sandoval asked me if my sister ever mentioned the name of Stefan Wyatt.”
“Objection!” Nina said. “That has been asked and answered.”
The judge sent out the jury again, who must have been tired of all the back and forth, adjourning court for five minutes. The lawyers followed him and the clerk back into chambers. After a brief, furious fracas, during which time Nina resorted to every trick, every blackmail, every shaky legal antic she could muster, they all returned, the judge red-faced, Nina breathing fast, Jaime triumphant with glee. The jurors fell into their chairs. Four o’clock, the wall clock read. Nina couldn’t recall a longer day in her life. She took her place facing Alex Zhukovsky.
“You may supplement your answer to the question,” said Judge Salas.
The clerk read it: “‘Did your sister ever mention the names Stef Wyatt or Stefan Wyatt to you?’”
“Yes.”
“You may cross-examine on that point.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Nina said, hoping to disguise her fury, but aware that her neck wore its signaling red flag of mortification. She pulled up her collar. “Mr. Zhukovsky, why did you testify earlier that your sister did not mention that name to you?”
“I forgot she mentioned it.”
“Did you ever tell the District Attorney’s office what you have just testified?”
“No. I remembered during the break. My testimony today-being here-brought it back.”
“An hour ago your sister had no connection you knew about with the defendant, and now all of a sudden she does?” She let a smidgeon of her contempt leak into the question.
“I’m sorry,” Zhukovsky said, hanging his head. “It wasn’t very important at the time.”
Right. He’s accused of killing your sister, and you casually forgot to mention a crucial fact about that for four months. Well, screw you, Nina tried to convey with her shoulders and the twist of her mouth, you unprincipled creep. “All right, exactly what did your sister say about the defendant?” she asked politely.
“That she knew a guy who did odd jobs. She named him.”
This brutal attack on Stefan Wyatt killed all action in the court.
Odd jobs, Nina thought, stunned at this turn of events and the strangeness of Zhukovsky’s statement. Well, digging up graves certainly qualified!
“When did your sister say this?” she asked.
Zhukovsky told the court that the conversation had taken place at the end of the first day of the conference.
“What else did she tell you?”
“Nothing. That’s why I forgot it until now. But she did say that.”
Everyone understood by now. He had linked Stefan with his dead sister, defendant with victim.
Head turned away from the jury, Nina took four quick breaths and gathered all her composure. “So, Mr. Zhukovsky, is it your belief that it was Christina Zhukovsky who hired Stefan Wyatt to dig up your father’s bones? Why would she do that?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe for the medal.”
“Isn’t it true that your testimony that your sister mentioned the defendant’s name is perjured testimony?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it true that you just thought this up on the break because it casts suspicion away from you and no one can refute it?”
“I had forgotten.”
Sadistically wishing she could kick him, she enjoyed the way his knuckles tightened at the question, and a moist sheen of additional testimony sprang up to speak on his balding forehead. She waited until she could sound patient, solemn, reliable. As opposed to him. “For five months you didn’t remember your sister mentioned the name of the man you seem to think killed her?” she asked.
“I forgot.” He finally seemed to have registered how absurd he sounded, and appeared as disturbed as the jury at the notion.
“You know very well that your testimony is the first link anyone has given between the defendant and your sister, don’t you? You know how helpful this is to the prosecution? But you don’t mention it for five-”
“Objection!” the prosecutor had finally jumped to his feet.
In a move calculated to coincide with what she was sensing from the jury, Nina openly let her disgust with the witness show. She paced up and down in front of the witness box, clenching and unclenching her fists. She felt the eyes of the courtroom following her, and welcomed their notice.
“She’s badgering the witness,” Jaime said. He saw what Nina was doing but didn’t know how to stop her. He also seemed very aware of the mood in the courtroom, which could generally be described as pissed. Juries hated being confused.
“Sustained.”
“Mr. Zhukovsky, why didn’t you testify about this on direct examination?”
“I was nervous.”
“What made you nervous? Your intent to commit perjury?”
“Objection,” Sandoval said. “Your Honor…”
“Withdrawn.” Nina thought a moment, and just when Alex was beginning to compose himself, said, “So you are saying your sister, Christina, might have hired this defendant to dig up that medal?”
The outlines of Alex’s mistake became instantly clear to everyone. He had wanted to connect Christina and Stefan. Jaime Sandoval had begged for a connection, and had in fact looked pleased for that one moment, when the connection caught. But now, if the jury believed Christina had hired Stefan, Stefan might no longer be convicted of the independent felony charge of grand theft for taking the medal, because the defense would explain that Christina had hired Stefan to bring their father’s medal to her, making what first appeared to be a theft no longer a theft.
The prosecutor had carefully explained that Stefan could be put in prison for life just for stealing the medal, because it was his third felony conviction and California had a third-strike rule. Now, if Stefan didn’t get convicted for murder, he might actually go free.
Along with all the courtroom, Jaime was figuring this out, too. He was not pleased.
“Believe me,” Alex Zhukovsky blurted, taking a last stab toward credibility. “Christina wouldn’t want that medal any more than I did.”
Nina objected, trying to stop him, but he talked over her, his voice rising to overcome hers. “I expect they got to talking and she mentioned it for some reason, then Wyatt killed her and stole it meaning to sell it. Thinking he’d be rich, from killing my sister. Getting maybe five thousand crummy dollars! Killing her for that!”
The whole time he ranted, Nina shouted for him to stop, but he kept on until he had finished. “Mr. Zhukovsky, you would say anything to convict Stefan Wyatt, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Mr. Zhukovsky!” the judge said.
“Sorry! Sorry!”
“Mr. Zhukovsky, even considering the fact that you’ve demonstrated a faulty memory, let me ask you one final question,” Nina said, adamant, knowing Jaime was ready to object, but hoping he wasn’t quick enough. “Who is the one person in this courtroom with an irrefutable connection both to the victim, Christina, who was your sister, and to the man lying in that grave, who was your father, Constantin Zhukovsky?”
His face popped, his eyes bulged, his arm muscles contracted, his body appeared ready to leap forward. Why, he was so upset, his body told them all, he could strangle her.
“No more questions,” Nina said serenely. She sailed over to the defense table and sat down.
“Wow,” Paul said.
“I warned you about him,” Klaus said.
She gulped water, overwhelmed, and leaned on her elbows, facing the table so that no one could see her face.
Stefan said nothing.
Klaus’s thin fingers wound like a bony claw around her arm. He cleared his throat, which took a very long time.
“A difficult cross-exam, Miss Reilly,” he said finally, giving her arm a squeeze. “Yet you exposed that prevaricating blockhead.”
“Did I?” She remembered the fight, the clanging of the bell, the mouth guard in her mouth, the shouts from the audience. She just couldn’t recall the referee raising her hand in the air, declaring a clear victory.
He slapped his knee. “Controlled, reactive, and powerful,” he said. “Masterful.”