After three Philadelphia trial lawyers die by poisoning, within a few days, an anonymous tipster suggests the police question Doctor Joshua Kaiser, a retired local physician, who had a recent court battle with each of the victims.//The doctor now authors medical self-help books and historical novels. In the suspect’s most recent novel, he demonstrates detailed knowledge of domestic poisons, and an apparent antipathy toward trial lawyers.
When DNA and fingerprint evidence place the doctor at the scene of the first crime, it takes the media only a few weeks to make the country’s number-one news story, “the people’s case against Josh Kaiser, M.D.” After the Law imprisons Doctor Kaiser, without bail, three former schoolmates from the nearby town of Lancaster, offer their varied and considerable expertise to his defense. The defendant has only the truth, and the pledge of legal and financial help from his buddies, in the nightmarish battle to save his life.
The wily District Attorney, who suspects the surfeit of evidence against the “mad doctor” is no accident, gives the case to her ambitious and capable young Assistant, Neville Trent. One of Kaiser’s three oldest friends, Joseph Lambi, a “Dagwood Bumstead” look-alike, but brilliant in the courtroom, heads the legal defense team.
The state Supreme Court grants Lambi’s motion for a change of venue from Philadelphia, after the lawyer provides ample evidence the jury pool is already “poisoned” by the city’s Liberal media.
Months of preparation and legal maneuvers by both sides, and tedious investigative work by the defense, precede the trial in the Town of Reading, the County seat of neighboring Berks County. Dermatologist/ financial wizard, Claude Rosell, a second former Kaiser classmate, places his considerable fortune at the disposal of the defense. Rosell also adds his finely honed sleuthing ability to the corps of detectives seeking to find the person or persons behind Kaiser’s frame up. The doctor’s attention to detail and dogged persistence allow him to uncover the only bit of solid evidence the defense has to support its argument of a conspiracy. Someone in the legal community, the defense contends, incensed by Kaiser’s lawsuit against two incompetent and dishonest lawyers, chose to kill the said lawyers and have Kaiser blamed for the crime.
The prosecution’s most damning evidence is a distinctive amber water glass found at the scene of the crime, which bears Doctor Kaiser’s DNA. The defendant demonstrates his reputed ability to remember the tiniest details of past events by identifying the restaurant in which he used the glass, and the circumstances surrounding its use. When Rosell’s corps of detectives decide nothing beneficial to the defense will result from acting on what Kaiser remembers about the glass, Rosell investigates the initial lead, himself. He goes to Manhattan to track down the Chinese waiter who provided Kaiser the glass of water on the day Kaiser and his wife ate there. Not only does the waiter remember the Kaisers, he also remembers that a limping old man, wearing gloves, removed the water glass from the restaurant. The Chinese waiter is now attending Pratt School of Art, in Manhattan on a scholarship granted to him on the basis of artistic talent the eighteen year-old demonstrated, while still in China, with a oil painting entitled, “A Study of Three Nudes.” The defense’s only witness to a possible conspiracy provides a sketch of the old man, listing his height as “five feet, seven inches.” The waiter’s eye-witness account of the limping thief becomes the cornerstone upon which the defense tries to build its case.
The defense team, certain of Josh Kaiser’s innocence, set about finding the limping thief, and connecting him to the persons who had a reason to want Josh Kaiser charged with the capital murders. Their chief suspects are the boss of the city’s largest law firm, Harold Jarusha Fitzmorris, III, and his private secretary, Daniel Ankleroy. The two men insisted Kaiser was a total fool to file his lawsuit against the two recently murdered lawyers, while they were in their firm’s employ. Both Fitzmorris and Ankleroy are reputed to be evil and unscrupulous, but neither has ever been charged with a crime.
Claude Rosell suspects that an unidentified “vagrant,” found murdered in Fairmont Park, could be the limping thief. A former Air Force nurse, now a secretary in the Philadelphia Coroner’s Office tells Rosell, her former co-worker at Fort Dix, that Ankleroy showed interest in the dead “John Doe.” The man’s fingerprints were never sent to the FBI, for identification. Rosell insists that the Coroner correct that violation of protocol. Within two weeks, the Feds identify the vagrant as a convicted felon, named Hal Pizzo, whose wife and son live somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. Again, Rosell’s financial resources finance a massive manhunt. The woman and her son are found, but can shed no light on Pizzo’s job or connections. The son does produce a Halloween prop, a set of large canine teeth, worn inside the mouth, which provides an explanation for the Chinese waiter’s portrait of a limping thief with large teeth.
The trial provides enough surprises and unexpected turns to change the “slam dunk” expected by the prosecutors into a “nail biter”. As both sides finish presenting their case, few pundits show a willingness to predict the jury’s verdict.
At this point of the narrative, readers wise in the ways of detective fiction will sense a challenge: to render the correct verdict in a “second story,” which begins to unfold. Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hid another story in each of his “Tales of Sherlock Holmes,” the author introduces a new “problem” that throws the drama in the courtroom off center stage,
It would spoil the fun to outline the cascade of events demanding an explanation before Doctor Joshua Kaiser, the accused serial killer, is asked to rise to hear the court’s verdict: execution or freedom.
|