Witness to a Trial by John Grisham Read Free Book Online Page A

acquired years ago before packing on the last eighty pounds.
    Willard told the jury that the police had immediately begun looking for Eileen’s husband, the defendant, Junior Mace, not as a suspect but as a family member. Oddly enough, a bartender fifteen miles from the crime scene had called the sheriff’s office around 7:00 p.m. and said Junior was sitting in his pickup truck, slumped over the steering wheel, too drunk to drive, and in need of help. The bartender knew Junior and said he was just trying to warn the cops and keep the roads safe. Willard and two other deputies raced to the bar and found Junior in his truck, unconscious and barely breathing. They called an ambulance and he was taken to the hospital in Walton County. After he was hauled away, Willard, without a warrant, searched his truck and found a Smith & Wesson revolver with two bullets left in the chamber. Under the front seat he also found a wallet belonging to Son Razko.
    State’s Exhibit No. 6 was the Smith & Wesson, an unlicensed firearm with the registration number filed off. No. 7 was the wallet, complete with Mr. Razko’s Florida driver’s license, one credit card from a bank, one from an oil company, and $17 in cash. These were passed around the jury box.
    Months earlier the defense had attacked the warrantless search on the grounds that there was no probable cause, no solid legal reason to poke around the truck. The judge, though, ruled that the search was valid; thus the gun and wallet were admissible into evidence.
    —
    The Judge.
Her name was Claudia McDover and she was forty years old. The previous year she had defeated an eighteen-year incumbent by a thousand votes. This was her first capital murder case; indeed, it was her first murder case of any variety. Before becoming a judge, she had been a small-town general practitioner with a decent reputation and modest success. Her campaign had been well financed, and she knocked on doors for months, promising, as always, a tough law-and-order courtroom. She strongly supported the death penalty and seemed determined, at least to those lawyers watching the case, to ensure a death verdict in the matter of Junior Mace.
    She felt as though she owed it to her voters, all residents of rural northwest Florida.

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    The third witness was the bartender himself. He went by Spike and it was obvious Spike had spent most of his life on one side of the bar or the other. His long gray hair was pulled tight into a ponytail. His ears were adorned with metal. A white, perfectly pointed goatee dripped from his chin. Spike seemed just as relaxed on the witness stand as he would have been pulling pints. He explained to the jurors that Junior stopped by at least once a week for a few beers after work and was generally talkative and in a pleasant mood. But on his last visit he was obviously disturbed by something. He quickly drank two beers—always from bottles, never draft or from cans—and said nothing. He sat at the end of the bar and stared straight ahead, lost in another world. A crowd came in and the bartender got busy elsewhere. He noticed Junior had moved away from the bar and was tossing darts with a man the bartender had never seen before.
    Junior always paid with cash so there was no record of how many beers he had ordered. Plus, the stranger was buying a few rounds. Spike did not see Junior leave the bar, but around 6:30 a regular had whispered to him that a drunk had passed out in the parking lot. Spike went outside, found Junior sitting against a wall, and managed to get him into his truck. When Spike asked for his keys, Junior refused and for a second seemed belligerent. Spike then called Clive Pickett’s office and said they might have a problem. Within twenty minutes Officer Willard and two other policemen were there.
    Spike said he was stunned to hear about the murders, but looking back it made sense. Something was definitely wrong with Junior that last visit.
    —
    The Bar Owner.
He owned several