“Your honor, Miss Fillander is not here as a professional witness. I am allowed to establish her personal opinion of his character and state of mind that night.”
“I’ll allow it.” The judge turns to me. “You may answer the question.”
“No. I never believed him capable of such a thing, but then again I never think that about anybody,” I say quietly.
His attorney tries not to show how disappointed he is with my answer. “Did the defendant seem unhappy or stressed that night?”
“No.”
“What about in the morning?”
“No.”
“So he did not behave like a man who had just brutally and in cold blood killed a man?”
The prosecutor shoots to her feet. “Objection, your honor. He’s leading the witness again.”
“Sustained. Stop leading the witness, Counsel,” the judge cautions sternly.
Konstantin’s attorney comes closer to me. So close I can see the open pores in his skin. “Can you confirm you spent the whole night together?”
I sneak a look at Konstantin. He is staring at me with an intense expression in his eyes. “Yes, I can confirm that we spent the whole night together.”
“Thank you, Miss Fillander.” He walks away from me.
“Your witness,” he says to the prosecution’s lawyer.
The prosecutor is a sly, peroxide blonde woman. Her perfectly coiffured hair stays like a hard helmet around her face, her eyes are sharp, and her smile is as friendly as a great white shark.
She flashes me one of those.
“Can you describe the evening of the murder, Miss Fillander?”
“We went out to dinner, then we came back to our hotel. Uh… we were intimate, and then we fell asleep.” That is my first lie. I give the impression we had sex once, and then went to sleep. The truth is we had sex all night long until dawn was in the sky.
“And once you fell asleep did you wake up again?”
“No.” Second lie. I almost never slept all night.
“Are you a heavy sleeper, Miss Fillander?”
“Yes, I am.” Third lie. I’m not.
“Did you wake up at any time at all during the night?”
“No.” Fourth lie. How to wake up when I never slept all night long.
“So, if the defendant had left you in the middle of the night, let’s say between 2.00 a.m. and 3.00 a.m., which is the approximate time of death given by the coroner, would you have known?”
“No. I wouldn’t.” Fifth lie.
“Your testimony is that the defendant could have gone out of the room, committed the murder, and come back to bed, and you would never have known?”
I look at her innocently. “I suppose he could have… if he’d climbed out of the window.”
Something happens in her eyes. Suddenly, she realizes I’m not going to play ball, but she is stuck. She has no choice but to ask the next question.
“Why couldn’t he have gone out of the door?” she asks, an odd inflection in her voice.
“Well, we were staying in an old-fashioned hotel which didn’t have any surveillance so I was a bit worried about security. I locked the door and put the key inside my pillowcase.”
She swallows hard. “I see. Right. Well then, he could have climbed out of the window.”
“Yes, he could have done that if he had brought some ropes and climbing equipment.”
The packed courtroom buzzes with interest.
“Ropes and climbing equipment?” she asks bitterly.
“Yes, our room faced a sheer cliff of a hundred feet plus that dropped into the sea.”
She makes a small jerking movement with her head. She knows she’s beat. There is no more to say.
I have just given Konstantin, the perfect alibi.
Raine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOYcbod5J0w
Lost But Won
* * *
As I walk down the impressive corridor of the courthouse I see Konstantin walking towards me. We stop about six feet apart.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he mouths.
“My sister showed me a video once. It was about a dog. Its master had just returned from Iraq after two years. At first the dog put its tail between its legs and ran away. Then it came back and when it was a few feet away it did the same thing again. Eventually, it came back and jumped all over the man. You should have seen it. It went crazy. The funny thing is, my sister said the reason the dog did that is because at first it didn’t recognize the man. But I knew what she didn’t. The dog didn’t run away because it didn’t recognize its owner. It ran away because it couldn’t believe its own eyes. It couldn’t believe it’s owner had come back to it. It was too frightened that maybe it was not real. So it kept on running back. To a human that is like pinching yourself to make sure you are not dreaming.” I stop and take a deep breath. “It’s the same reason why I’m standing here.”
“Come here,” he says.
And I almost jump six feet between us into his arms. I sob like a child. “I’m yours,” I say again and again.