“Why was it different in the beginning, Charlie?” Agar asked—question number twenty-one on the list.
“Because I really didn’t want no part of it. But then, she almost got caught, and I couldn’t stand it. She got all cut up, and I couldn’t stand seeing her that way, and I told her if we had to keep doing it, then I’d do the arsons.”
“Did you change your mode of arson at that point?” Agar tried asking. Charlie hadn’t explicitly said that Tonya had lit the first fires, and Agar wanted that clarification.
Charlie shook his head in confusion at the word “mode.” “I don’t know what you mean by that,” he said.
Agar tried again: “Who lit the fires in the beginning?”
“Tonya did.”
“And after that, were there other fires?” Agar asked.
“Yes.”
“And who lit the next fire?”
“She did.”
“And who lit the next fire?”
“She did.”
Agar asked Charlie a few questions about how they would select properties, and then consulted his notes again. “Now, on April 1, did you and Tonya Bundick leave the house in Hopeton that evening?”
They had, Charlie said. On the evening of April 1, they had been out as usual, riding around. They had eventually ended up at The Wine Rack to get gas. After The Wine Rack, he said, “I went to go burn down a house.”
“You went to go burn down a house?” Agar repeated.
At first they had driven down Texaco Road to burn a house there, Charlie said, but it was too close to the state police barracks, and they decided it wasn’t safe, so they headed toward Melfa instead, and while they drove they made plans for the evening.
“What, if anything, were you talking about?” Agar asked.
“I was going to burn down a house.”
“What did you say?”
“That I was going to burn down a house.”
“And what, if anything, did Tonya Bundick say?”
Charlie shrugged. “Nothing, really. Just that she didn’t think it was smart to burn that one in front of the road that came out in front of the state police barracks.”
She had suggested they go farther into Melfa, at which point they selected the house on Airport Road, at which point Charlie told Tonya he worried it was a setup, at which point she said it wasn’t, so he got out to burn down the house, calling Tonya once to tell her he was about to do it, and again while it was being done.
“Did you do a whole lot of planning for that operation?” Agar asked.
“No.”
“Why is that?”
“Because,” he said, “we’d done it before.”
Agar had finished his direct examination. Judge Tyler called a recess then, until the next morning. It was after 5 p.m., he never liked to go beyond 5:30, and he assumed the Zaleskis would take longer in their cross-examination of Charlie Smith than half an hour. The reporters, who had been required to leave their cell phones and laptops outside of the courthouse, ran to their cars so they could Tweet and file updates from the trial. “Eastern Shore arson suspect’s fiancé testifies,” they wrote. “At arson trial, all eyes on Tonya Bundick’s former lover.”
The next day the cross-examination started. Christopher Zaleski would be handling it. He had a more fiery questioning style than either Agar or his father, and a slight smirk that implied he didn’t believe any of Charlie’s answers, even before they were given.
“You’re pretty comfortable up there today?” he began.
“I guess as good as I can be?” Charlie said, appearing confused by the question.
“Well, you’ve done this before. This isn’t the first time you’ve testified in a courtroom, is it?”
“Testified?”
“Been sworn in.”
“Oh.”
“Gave statements under oath.”
“No, it’s not.”
Agar had been right in his assumption that the Zaleskis would gravitate toward Charlie’s criminal past; it was the surest way to set him up as an unreliable witness. The younger Zaleski pointed out that Charlie had testified before, because he’d been in trouble before, and when he’d been in trouble, he’d cried, just as he had on the stand the day before.
“No,” Charlie said, he hadn’t cried.
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Christopher scoffed. “You blamed it on the drugs, though, didn’t you?”
The Zaleskis’s plan, it became clear, was to paint Charlie as unreliable from multiple angles. He was unreliable because he was a repeated convicted felon. He was unreliable because he was a drug user, who had relapsed multiple times. He was unreliable—this whole trial, by de facto, was unreliable—because Charlie was on a first-name basis with the sheriff, because Godwin had told him, “We’re going to help you out, Charles,” on the night that he was arrested. Charlie, the drug-addicted repeat offender who was personally acquainted with the police, knew that the only way to help himself out was to throw someone else under the bus and hope for a good deal in exchange. “Your plan was to implicate her, wasn’t it?”
“No.”
“Okay. But you did.”
“I know I did.”
“You’re doing this to get some assistance, aren’t you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“To get your time cut?”
“Ain’t nobody offered me nothing.”
Eventually, Christopher came around to the real reason that Charlie’s testimony should not be considered reliable by the jury: because he loved Tonya. Too much, unhealthily. He wanted to own her.
“Own her?” Charlie repeated.
“You wanted people to know she was taken. Didn’t you write, ‘I want you to wear a ring so people know you’re taken’?”
“Well, yeah. That was after she wrote me a letter saying to buy her a ring.”
“You would do whatever it takes to be with her, right?”
“Yeah,” Charlie said.
“And you know if you’re in here and she’s out there, she’s not going to wait around, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, I’m concerned about that.”
“Because you know you’ve got thirty-one felony convictions plus these new ones, right?”
“Yes.”
“It would kill you if you found out that she was dating somebody else, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, it would.”
“You love her so much it isn’t funny?”
“Yeah.”
Christopher moved on to his next point: that Charlie had been the one to volunteer in the fire department—the one to excel there, to learn how to move around in the dark, to learn how to set fires without accelerants. What about the fact that Charlie wasn’t on good terms with the fire department, and must certainly have wanted revenge on the members there? Wasn’t that a sign that he must have been in a pretty desperate place, the kind of place that might lead someone to light fires? And finally, what about the bedroom issues he was having with Tonya?
“There were problems with your relationship,” Christopher said. “I mean, she was your girlfriend. You were supposed to be doing things.”
“Yeah.”
“You couldn’t perform physically with her, could you?”
“No, I couldn’t.”