The Brass Verdict

emphatically from the lectern, driving home the point about Elliot being deceptive. I knew I would be able to handle this point on cross but I wouldn’t get the chance until the next day, after it had percolated in the brains of the jury for almost twenty-four hours.
    “What happened after that?” Golantz asked.
    “Well, there was still a lot of work to do inside the house. So I had a couple members of my team take Mr. Elliot to the Malibu substation so he could wait there and be comfortable.”
    “Was he arrested at this time?”
    “No, once again I explained to him that we needed to talk to him and if he was still willing to be cooperative, we were going to take him to an interview room at the station, and I said that I would get there as soon as possible. Once again he agreed.”
    “Who transported him?”
    “Investigators Joshua and Toles took him in their car.”
    “Why didn’t they go ahead and interview him once they got to the Malibu station?”
    “Because I wanted to know more about him and the crime scene before we talked to him. Sometimes you get only one chance, even with a cooperating witness.”
    “You used the word ‘witness.’ Wasn’t Mr. Elliot a suspect at this time?”
    It was a cat-and-mouse game with the truth. It didn’t matter how Kinder answered, everybody in the courtroom knew that they had drawn a bead on Elliot.
    “Well, to some extent anybody and everybody is a suspect,” Kinder answered. “You go into a situation like that and you suspect everybody. But at that point, I didn’t know a lot about the victims, I didn’t know a lot about Mr. Elliot and I didn’t know exactly what we had. So at that time, I was viewing him more as a very important witness. He found the bodies and he knew the victims. He could help us.”
    “Okay, so you stashed him at the Malibu station while you went to work at the crime scene. What were you doing?”
    “My job was to oversee the documentation of the crime scene and the gathering of any evidence in that house. We were also working the phones and the computers and confirming the identities and backgrounding the parties involved.”
    “What did you learn?”
    “We learned that neither of the Elliots had a criminal record or had any guns legally registered to them. We learned that the other victim, Johan Rilz, was a German national and appeared to have no criminal record or own any weapons. We learned that Mr. Elliot was the head of a studio and very successful in the movie business, things like that.”
    “At some point did a member of your team draw up search warrants in the case?”
    “Yes, we did. Proceeding with an abundance of caution, we drew up and had a judge sign off on a series of search warrants so we had the authority to continue the investigation and take it wherever it led.”
    “Is it unusual to take such steps?”
    “Perhaps. The courts have granted law enforcement wide leeway in the gathering of evidence. But we determined that because of the parties involved in this case, we would go the extra mile. We went for the search warrants even though we might not need them.”
    “What specifically were the search warrants for?”
    “We had warrants for the Elliot house and for the three cars, Mr. Elliot’s, his wife’s and the Porsche in the garage. We also had a search warrant granting us permission to conduct tests on Mr. Elliot and his clothing to determine if he had discharged a gun in recent hours.”
    The prosecutor continued to lead Kinder through the investigation up until he cleared the crime scene and interviewed Elliot at the Malibu station. This set up the introduction of a videotape of the first sit-down interview with Elliot. This was a tape I had viewed several times during preparation for trial. I knew it was unremarkable in terms of the content of what Elliot told Kinder and his partner, Roland Ericsson. What was important to the prosecution about the tape was Elliot’s demeanor. He didn’t look like somebody who had just discovered the naked body of his dead wife with a bullet hole in the center of her face and two more in her chest. He appeared as calm as a summer sunset, and that made him look like an ice-cold killer.
    A video screen was set up in front of the jury box and Golantz played the tape, often stopping it to ask Kinder a question and then starting it again. The taped interview lasted ten minutes and was nonconfrontational. It was simply an exercise in which the investigators locked in