Walters took both attorneys into her chambers following Calvin's withering assault on Jeffries, where I'm sure she chewed them out vigorously for the entire hour they were gone. When they returned, she ordered the lunch break. Two jurors actually looked over at Calvin and smiled.
Zane and I poisoned ourselves in the courthouse cafeteria, declaring Calvin's opening a landmark in the annals of jurisprudence, then hurried back to our seats in advance of the stampede. As we waited for the resumption of the festivities, a little clock inside my head kept ticking thirty days . . . thirty days . . . .
Ian Jeffries called his first witness, Inspector John Naftulin. He was in his late forties, with a chain mail canopy of graying hair, one uninterrupted eyebrow resembling a furry windshield wiper, and a nervous habit of constantly cracking his knuckles. I'd known John from my days as the new kid in homicide. He was a tough, honest, hardworking cop with a sack full of opinions and a quick tongue that often got him in trouble.
"You were the first police officer called to the scene at fifty-six fifty-six Park Drive, isn't that correct, Inspector Naftulin?"
"Yes. I was on Clement Street eating breakfast when the call came over my walkie-talkie."
"And you wrote the crime scene report and became the chief investigating officer in the case?"
"That's correct?"
"And what did you find when you arrived?"
"I found the victim, William Farragut, lying on his back in the den of his home. He'd been dead for several hours; his body was stiff."
"In fact the coroner's report later indicated he'd been dead for over eight hours, isn't that correct?"
"Yes."
"And the cause of death, was it apparent to you at the time?"
"Yes. Mr. Farragut had been shot twice in the chest, once through the heart, once through the right lung."
"And you noticed this gun on the floor approximately twenty feet from the body?"
Ian Jeffries showed the gun to Inspector Naftulin, who identified it. Jeffries had it tagged and marked as People's Exhibit One.
"What was the condition of Mrs. Farragut? Was she hysterical, crying?"
"She was agitated."
"Can you describe her for us?"
"She was breathing hard, her hands were trembling. She seemed uncomfortable."
I figured it was time for Calvin to jump up and bark "Objection!" on the grounds that Jeffries was asking for conclusions and not facts. But Calvin sat stifling a yawn and a smile as Zane frantically scribbled notes next to me.
Several more times Jeffries did it, drawing out Inspector Naftulin's opinion that he was skeptical of Colleen's story right from the start. One by one the jury began to stare at Calvin. They'd all seen enough "Perry Mason" and "L.A. Law" to know that Jeffries was leading the witness, and still Calvin did nothing.
Then Jeffries got to the part I came to hear, the one opinion I was most interested in: Jeffries placed enlarged photographs of Farragut's den on a large bulletin board and asked Naftulin to use his "twenty-five years of police expertise" to tell the jury what he saw in the room.
"A fake burglary," was all he said. Jeffries asked him to elaborate.
"I've seen enough fake burglaries in my time," Naftulin said. When Jeffries asked how many burglary reports he had written in twenty-five years with the SFPD, Jeffries stated "close to a thousand, perhaps more."
I had seen hundreds of burglaries myself in nine years with the department. I'd seen a few dozen people try to fake burglaries to collect the insurance.
As Naftulin explained and every photograph showed, the contents of drawers were flung across the room, plants were dumped upside down, coffee tables flipped over. In reality, burglars go through drawers throwing out things they don't want. If you dump them, you then have to bend over, and burglars are inveterate non-benders. Plants are rarely turned upside down, they're knocked over, usually landing on their sides and spilling dirt out like a cone. Tables are usually knocked at an angle, not overturned. Burglars, even the amateurs, are always afraid of making noise and are not prone to sending coffee tables crashing or scattering drawers about. The smart ones, the experienced ones, rarely knock over or break anything. Naftulin confirmed everything I'd thought when I saw the Farragut den and the exhibit photos in the evidence files.
It looked like someone had faked it.
And it didn't matter who had done it: whether if it was some radical nut cases who shot Farragut and tried to make it look like a burglary or a vengeful killer trying to throw everyone off his tracks, the jury would think it was Colleen.