This time, when he hung up, Frannie poked her head in his office. ‘In keeping with your popularity this morning,’ she said, ‘your daughter would appreciate a short audience.’
Hardy glanced at the pile on his desk – the two days’ worth of dailies, the binders and notepads, the cassettes. He raised his eyes back to his wife. She was smiling but did not appear particularly amused.
The Beck appeared on her still wobbly legs next to Frannie. Seeing Hardy, she lit up like the Christmas tree, held out her hands, yelled ‘da da da’ and started to run toward him, tripping on her own feet and pitching headlong into the front of his desk.
Hardy was up and around before Frannie could get to her. He picked her up, holding her against him, rubbing the red spot on her forehead where the bump would come up, kissing her. He hugged and rocked her. ‘It’s okay, Beck. It’s okay, honey. Daddy’s here. Everything’s all right.’
He took the dailies with him. He’d have to find the time to review them, maybe during lunch, maybe while Andy was getting dressed. He and Jane had delivered the new suit upstairs, leaving it at the guard’s desk with instructions for delivery, then he’d asked her if she could leave him to his reading until nine-fifteen, half a precious hour later.
He got settled in their little conference room, took the binders from his huge lawyer’s briefcase and spread them out, intending to start where he’d left off last night, or with where he thought he’d been – Tom’s testimony about May coming to the Eloise on Thursday.
But he couldn’t find it.
After the first pass through every word Tom had said to him, Glitsky or the court, Hardy rubbed his hands over his eyes and wondered if he had finally lost his mind. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this kind of pressure. He ought to buy a boat and move to Mexico, start a fishing fleet.
Not by bread alone, he thought. No, sleep, too. Sleep ought to come into the picture. He wondered if Pullios was sleeping. Should he hire someone to call her every hour around the clock, level out the field?
He forced himself back. All right, it wasn’t in Tom’s testimony, where it should have been. How about José‘s?
Finally he found it at the end of Glitsky’s initial interview with José. But that was wrong. It had to be wrong. Hardy reread the transcript, José answering when Glitsky asked if he remembered exactly what May had been doing when he’d seen her:
A: I don’t know. She was out there, on the street. Walking back to her car, maybe, I don’t know. I see her going away.
Q: And you’re sure it was May?
A: Si. It was her.
Q: Are you certain what day it was? It could be very important.
[Pause.]
A: I think it was Thursday. Oh sure. It must have been. I remember, I got the note from Tom he’d locked the boat, which was Wednesday, right? So I go check it. It’s still locked. Thursday, I’m sure, si, Thursday.
Had May mentioned going back to the Eloise twice on Thursday? For some reason, because Tom and José had both seen May on Thursday, Hardy had been assuming it was the same sighting. But it couldn’t have been. José was there in the morning and that’s when he saw her. Later that same afternoon, Tom said that he saw her there again.
Hardy pulled another legal pad and wrote a heading on the top. ‘Questions for Freeman.’ Someone who had talked to May more frequently might be able to supply answers. Under his heading he wrote: ‘Number of visits -Thursday?’
It didn’t even matter, or rather he couldn’t figure why it might matter, but he was starting to believe that nothing here was irrelevant.
Hardy, walking next to Jane, got to the courtroom as Celine was coming up. As she had taken to doing, she looked right through him. Maybe that was the best way she could handle it. He thought probably it was best for him too. If they were going to be seeing each other on a daily basis it would be easier, better, if she avoided communication. But here they were, face to face. He reached for her arm and stopped her.
She froze.
Hardy backed off a step and apologized. ‘I just wondered if you’d heard from Ken Farris lately.’
She tried to gain control. ‘I spoke to him last night. I asked him about the Shinn woman’s claim, now that she was dead.’ At Hardy’s uncomprehending stare, she quickly, with annoyance, added, ‘The two million dollars.’
Hardy had never had any indication that Celine gave a damn about the money. He was interested in Farris, wanted to locate him. ‘So he was home? He wasn’t out of town?’
‘I think I just said that.’
‘That’s right, you did.’ She didn’t want to talk to him and he wouldn’t force it. He was, after all, defending the man on trial for her father’s murder. ‘If you talk to him again would you tell him I’d like a word with him?’
She looked him over, glanced at Jane, came back to him. ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’
Jane, almost protectively, took Hardy’s arm, holding him as they watched her walk away.
As she opened the courtroom doors, Celine turned back to look again, seeing Hardy, Jane’s arm through his. From her perspective he realized that this attractive woman who had been at his side since the trial started was at least a new girlfriend. Celine knew it wasn’t his wife, whom she’d seen twice at their house.
More reason for her to be hostile, he thought. Celine must believe he had lied to her, that he had decided to stop seeing her not because he was married but because he had found someone new.
When Fowler was led in, Jane squeezed Hardy’s arm. ‘Oh my God.’
He was wearing the clothes Jane had brought, but he looked more like a bum wearing a borrowed suit. Everything seemed to hang wrong. The tie wasn’t tightened and his top button was undone. The pants, beltless, fell over his shoes. His hair didn’t look like it had been washed or combed. His eyes were red-rimmed.
He patted his daughter’s hand after the guard led him to the table. Smiling weakly, he told her and Hardy that he was all right, he would be fine. May’s death had hit him hard, that was all.
Jane did her best to get him fixed up before they brought the jury in – tie, top button, hair. When the disgruntled jury started to file in, she went back to the gallery, and everybody waited for the judge.
Chomorro’s first order of business was to apologize to the jury for the need to sequester them. ‘At the end of the day yesterday we had an extraordinary set of circumstances develop and I determined that, having put all of you through as much of this as we’ve already done, we would try our best to keep those efforts from being wasted in a mistrial. In brief I will tell you that a central prosecution witness in this case – May Shinn – committed suicide yesterday.’
This was not news to anyone in the gallery so there wasn’t the expected buzz, but Hardy could see the effect it had on the jury. Each of them – some more obviously than others – scanned the defense table.
‘At the time there was considerable media conjecture, as you might imagine, as to how this development related to the case we are hearing now, and my purpose in having you sequestered was to keep you from that exposure. I apologize for the need to have done that, but in my view it was essential to keep this trial on track.
‘That stricture has now been eased and I will be letting you go to your homes for the weekend. However, let me admonish each and every one of you again, do not discuss this case or the evidence you are considering with anyone while we are still in this proceeding.’ Chomorro took a sip from a glass of water. ‘You are probably going to be unable to avoid hearing opinions about the defendant’s relationship with Ms Shinn. You may also hear that Mr Fowler visited Ms Shinn yesterday morning. I must make it clear to you, however, that these two events – Mr Fowler’s visit and Ms Shinn’s death – are causally unrelated and, for the purpose of this trial, not relevant.