Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

seen a hit man in person.
    Judge Jones dismissed them for the day and said they would convene again the next morning.
     
    The face of Bill Jensen, wearing a black sports jacket and looking annoyed, flashed across television screens all over Seattle that night. He was an immense man whose face was dotted with several angry-looking eruptions. It was difficult to imagine him as he had once been—a tall, trim deputy in a perfectly pressed uniform.
    As court began the next morning, Cheryl Snow began to defuse what she was sure would be brought out on cross-examination by defense attorney James Conroy. She would beat him to it.
    “Mr. Carrothers, is it accurate to say that you have a lengthy criminal history?”
    “Yes—it is, ma’am.”
    “Is it true that you have problems with alcohol?”
    “Since I became a widower. Yes.”
    “Do you have problems with drugs?”
    “At times. I enjoy them more than they’re a problem.”
    “Is it accurate to say that, in some ways, you’ve spent most of your adult life behind bars?”
    “Yes—I’d say about seventeen years.”
    “And how old are you currently?”
    “I’m forty-two.”
    There was a rakish kind of handsomeness about Yancy. He resembled a carnival barker, fast-talking—but with a certain charisma. One expected him to wink at a female juror at any moment. He knew who he was, even though his image was hardly that of an upright citizen. As strange as it sounds, he was believable.
    He explained that he was housed with the O.G.’s (original gangsters) when he went to jail, a badge of honor among jail inmates.
    Bill Jensen’s sister Iris had given him twenty-five $100 bills at the ferry landing, he testified, but there was to be more in the way of a payoff if he should choose to carry out Jensen’s murder plot.
    “We were to meet Monday for an additional $2,500 and a bottle of OxyContin [pills] that are worth probably another $2,000 on the street. It’s a synthetic heroin and it’s very well known on TV and whatnot and shootable. It kills people and people get addicted to it a lot.”
    Bill Jensen had been prescribed OxyContin for “severe pain,” and he also had a prescription for more on his jail books.
    “How did you know that?” Cheryl Snow asked Yancy.
    “He had told me.”
    Iris Jensen was supposed to get the OxyContin and the prescription for more pills out of Bill’s property. The pills were worth from $40 to $50 apiece on the street. Yancy acknowledged that he had much experience in “turning drugs” for money.
    “Can you tell us what Mr. Jensen said to you as part of that agreement?”
    “Part of it was for if the $5,000 didn’t cover my research before the contract would have supposedly been fulfilled. It would have also been used to tranquilize the people as the accident that would have been set up occurred.”
    But the second meeting between the witness and Iris Jensen never took place, so she didn’t deliver either the pills or the second $2,500.
    Cheryl Snow asked Yancy what had happened to prevent their second rendezvous.
    “I went to a friend’s house and got intoxicated and got arrested in front of their apartment. They found me with a bottle of Absolut [vodka] in my hand, diamond rings, and a sweat suit. They thought I was a big drug dealer and they ran me in.”
    If this was a movie and not a conspiracy to commit murder trial, Joe Pesci would have played Yancy Carrothers. He was rueful, but also rather pleased to explain that he had also been holding a Gucci watch, and the sweat suit was a very high-end name brand.
    “Did you have any drugs on your person?”
    “No—but the apartment was a drug house.”
    And so Yancy had gone off to jail. He wasn’t in any danger of a long sentence, and he could do jail time standing on his head, but he was now full of anxiety that something might really happen to Bill Jensen’s family. Yancy had been confident that he could romance Jensen along, wangling money and drugs out of him, while at the same time he could avoid hurting anyone. But when he landed on the eleventh floor again, and Bill pretended he didn’t even see him, he feared that Bill might have hired someone else.
    “Who, if anyone, did you contact?”
    “First of all, I wrote a letter to Mr. Jensen, and then I tried to call Mr. Steiger. I left messages—kites, they call them. Jail mail.”
    Yancy’s letter warned Bill that nothing must happen to Sue or her sister or her daughter. He read it to the jury as the