This was going backward again. Hardy wasn’t going to entertain it. ‘May didn’t lie, Abe, that’s where we’re at.’ He understood Glitsky being upset with May Shinn. She had, after all, named him personally in her suit for false arrest. And hadn’t she lied to him about not going to Japan? Hadn’t that been what moved him to arrest her?
‘Okay, all of the above,’ Hardy said, ‘but she thought this coat was there. She called David Freeman about it, mentioned it to Fowler when he came by. She jumped all over Struler.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Wouldn’t I what?’
‘If you had a scam like this, wouldn’t you play it up?’
Hardy couldn’t agree. He was going to run with the idea of May telling the truth until he got to a wall. This might not make sense in the face of it, but it wasn’t yet a wall. Still, Glitsky was on his side and he wanted to keep him there. ‘Maybe,’ he conceded, ‘but either way this helps -’
‘It doesn’t help me. Everywhere I look there’s more of nothing. You find anything about Farris?’
‘No. I got a call in. Speaking of which…’He grabbed Glitsky’s telephone and pushed some buttons. ‘Lunch break,’ he told Frannie. ‘Any calls?’ When he hung up he shook his head.‘Nothing.’
‘He out of town or what?’
Hardy shrugged. ‘Probably just busy. Plus I’m not on his side anymore, remember? I’m defending Nash’s killer. Now if you wanted -’
‘No way. I’ve already done him up and down. If you get a line on some physical evidence I’ll see what I can do, but… Now you’ve got Shinn telling the truth and Farris lying for no apparent reason, neither of which I think I buy. I know Farris didn’t kill Nash. He was in Taos. You’re barking up the wrong tree.’
Hardy didn’t argue – he knew better than to push any further. ‘All right, maybe he’ll call me back. If something pops, though, I’m going to call you.’
Glitsky finished chewing his ice, loudly. ‘That knowledge gives meaning to my life,’ he said.
‘Can I have these?’ Hardy asked, gathering the inventories.
‘Not only can you have them,’ Glitsky replied, ‘you must have them. I had to wait all morning for the office to empty out so I could make you some copies.’
Hardy tapped his palm against Glitsky’s cheek. ‘You’re such a sweet guy,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever change.’
Glitsky growled. ‘I wasn’t planning to.’
Fowler and Jane were sitting at the defense table when Hardy entered the courtroom at one-twenty. Celine was already at her spot on the aisle in the second bench. He found himself slowing down coming abreast of her, then forced himself along through the swinging doors.
Fowler didn’t look much better. Hardy pulled up his chair and placed a hand on his back. ‘You holding up?’ Jane, on the other side of her father, gave Hardy a worried look. He forced a show of enthusiasm. ‘We’ve got a couple of interesting developments.’
‘I’m a fool, Diz, been one all along.’ Physically, Andy’s eyes looked better. The redness had gone down, the black bagginess under them had receded. But the expression in them – or rather the lack of it – was almost more unsettling. ‘She never cared a damn at all, did she?’
Why beat around about it? ‘No,’ Hardy said. ‘No, I guess she didn’t, Andy.’ Jane frosted him from across her father but he ignored it. ‘Now how about you stop having to suffer for what she’s done to you? She’s gone. Didn’t you tell Jane once you just had to treat it as though it was a friend that died? Well, now that’s what it is.’
‘She lied to me.’
Hardy was getting tired of the explanation – to himself as well – that May lied as the answer for everything. ‘Did she? Or did you lie to yourself?’
Jane fairly hissed at him. ‘Dismas!’
‘You know, Andy,’ he pressed on, ‘maybe you just needed more, that was all. She gave you what you were paying for, which was a fantasy. And you’re a guy, Judge, who can make things happen, maybe even make your fantasy come true. You weren’t like the other guys, the lesser types whose lives passed through your hands every day -’
‘Dismas, stop it.’
Jane said it loud enough this time that several jury members looked their way. Hardy saw the reaction and gave a controlled nod in that direction. He lowered his voice. ‘The fantasy’s over, Judge. You’re reduced to being a mortal. I can’t say I blame you for crying over it, but at least it’s a real place to start.’
Fowler’s eyes had gotten something back in them -anger or hatred or both. Either, Hardy thought, was better than nothing.
‘You’re a big help, Dismas, thanks a lot.’ At least Jane had modulated her voice.
Fowler straightened up. ‘Don’t tell me I don’t want her back. You don’t know…’
Hardy nodded. ‘You’re right, Andy, I don’t know. What I do know is that you never had a chance to get her back because you never had her in the first place.’
‘What do you suppose this is doing, Dismas?’ Jane asked.
‘It’s all right, hon,’ Fowler told her.
Hardy kept at it. ‘Damn straight, it’s all right. You ask what it’s doing, Jane? I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting a little tired of wading through all of this while the ol’ judge here sails on overhead.‘ He spoke to his client. ’Andy, I’m sorry, but you’re not some tragic hero. I can’t just sit here and watch you waste away over some fairy tale you’ve concocted that’s pretty well destroyed everything you’ve worked for.‘ Hardy softened his voice, put his hand on Fowler’s back. ’The woman’s dead, Andy. She’s not coming back. It’s time to wake up and this is your wake-up call.‘
David Freeman, famed defense counsel, was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case, and Elizabeth Pullios knew it. Thus far they had established beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Andy Fowler had been devastated by May, had hired a private investigator to find out why she had stopped seeing him, had found out it was because she had fallen in love with Owen Nash, or acted like she did, and had kept a surveillance on the movements of Nash for the next several months, until the man’s murder. To nearly everyone he knew – except for Gary Smythe -he had told less than the truth, had indeed lied, about Owen Nash. He knew the location of the gun on the boat and his fingerprints were on it. He was an expert sailor in his own right and could easily have taken the Eloise in and tied it up after dark, even in rough water.
All that established, however, Hardy still thought the jury would have a difficult time bringing in a murder verdict, especially after Fowler testified for himself (assuming Hardy could move him to do so). So far everything the judge had done – a couple of white lies, a more or less natural curiosity to understand more about why a lover, as perceived by him, had tired of him, a plausible explanation of how fingerprints came to be on the murder weapon – could be explained, Hardy hoped, by the overriding fact that he had merely wanted to keep an illicit and embarrassing relationship secret.
Up to now, Hardy believed, none of this showed sufficient consciousness-of-guilt to prove anything to secure a conviction. When David Freeman took the stand, however, all that would change. In spite of Freeman’s private support, it was going to get ugly, Hardy thought. He was prepared to object to every question if need be, and if the jury didn’t like him for it, so be it. The bare facts of Freeman’s testimony would be damning enough – he at least wanted to try to contain any interpretation of them.
Pullios, playing affable and deferential, began to walk Freeman gently through some establishing testimony, then commenced zeroing in on the events of the previous June.