49
‘I don’t blame her. Why should she want to help you?’
The ‘she’ Peter Struler was referring to was May Shinn. He sat on his ‘Molly’s’ desk, facing her in her chair, his legs on either side of her. Pullios had pushed herself back nearly to the wall and looked up at him.
‘I thought the letter made that very clear,’ she said. ‘She’s got about a half dozen civil suits going. Freeman knows her civil jury will more likely pay off on an upstanding citizen who helped the authorities solve the murder of which she was wrongly accused. Besides, all the witnesses will be cops and D.A.s. We could do her some good. She might be suing us but it’s the City that pays off.
Struler shook his head. ‘I’d just bring her in.’
‘On what?’
Straight-faced, Struler replied. ‘How about a DWO, something like that?’
Pullios knew her law, and she’d never heard of a DWO. ‘Okay, I’ll bite. What’s a DWO?’
Struler grinned. ‘You know, Driving While Oriental. Gets ’em every time.‘
There was no training this guy. ‘Is it just me, or do I get the feeling your political correctness is slipping again?’
‘Who gives,’ he said, enunciating clearly, ‘a big steaming pile of shit?’ He put his feet up on the chair’s arms. Outside the window behind Molly it was pitch black, though it wasn’t far into the dinner hour. Her door was closed. ‘So hit her with a subpoena.’
‘I know, but the minute I do that, she goes on the official witness list.’
‘Yeah, well excuse me, but aren’t those the rules?’
She graced him with a ‘get-serious’ expression, and he asked if Hardy had interviewed her.
‘She said he hadn’t.’
‘So why’d she talk to you?’
Pullios smiled. ‘I asked Freeman to clear it for me to apologize personally for what I’d put her through.’
Struler shook his head in admiration. ‘You are a cruel and terrible woman.’
‘Thank you, sir. It got her to talk to me about Fowler and the gun, but she said she wouldn’t be a witness against him.’
‘Hey, she’s not married to him. It’s not like she has a choice.’
‘I want to keep her on my side as long as I can, though. The nice letter, all that.’
‘You need what she’s got?’
Pullios nodded. ‘It’s absolutely essential.’
‘Okay,’ Struler said, ‘here’s what I suggest you do. Wait until the last possible moment so there’s no notice to Hardy, then send somebody out – some D.A. investigator like my own self – and slap her with a submeister.’
‘What’s that?’
Struler shook his head. ‘Come on, Molls,’ he said, ‘get hip. Saturday Night Live’? Submeister, sub-a-rama, Mr Sub, subster.‘ At her continued blank stare, he finally relented. ’You lawyers ought to get out more, I swear to God. A subpoena, Molly. Hit her with a subpoena.‘
Hardy plugged in the Christmas lights he’d strung up around his front porch over the weekend. Rebecca, walking now, clapped her hands, stopping to point and yelling what sounded like ‘why why why’ at the top of her lungs. Hardy picked her up and held her closer to them.
‘Light light light,’ he said.
The Beck shook her head, laughing.
‘Is she the greatest kid in the world?’ Frannie said.
‘The universe,’ Hardy said.
‘Why,’ Rebecca said. Some of the lights had started blinking. She pointed to them. ‘Why why.’
‘I think she’s going to be a philosopher,’ Hardy said, ‘like her father.’
‘Like her uncle Moses, maybe, not exactly like her father.’
Frannie, now in her eighth month of pregnancy, had her arm around Hardy’s waist. The problems that had led up to Hardy’s mugging in October were behind them. He was working a lot of hours but he was at least sharing it with her – plus they were laughing together, teasing each other, enjoying the Beck.
The car pulled up and double-parked in front of their house. ‘Who’s that?’ Frannie asked.
Hardy knew immediately. He kissed his wife on the cheek and handed the baby to her. ‘I’ll be right back.’
He’d been expecting this somehow. He walked down the few steps, then onto the path that bisected his lawn to the gate at the fence. Apprehensive, he met her there.
She was wearing a heavy coat against the chill, a cowl-like head covering pulled down around her ears. Her hands were deep in her pockets. Vapor from her breath hung in the still air a moment before it dissipated.
‘You shouldn’t be here, Celine.’
She seemed unsteady, as if she’d been drinking, but he was close enough to have smelled that and didn’t. ‘I had to talk to you, you’ve changed your phone number.’
‘You were in court all day, Celine. I’ll be there tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t know what I wanted to say then.’
He let out a breath. He had it coming. ‘Okay.’
‘I, I…’ she began, then stopped.
‘It’s all right,’ Hardy heard the door to his house close. Frannie and Rebecca had gone inside.
‘I just wanted you to know that I understand. I don’t want you to hate me, to think that I hate you.’
Hardy nodded. ‘That’s good to hear. I certainly don’t hate you -’
‘You were acting like it.’
‘No, I was trying to ignore you. That’s different. It’s something I have to do.’
‘Yes, of course, but I’ll still be there every day. You have to know that.’
‘All right. But I don’t think you ought to come by here. The last time -’
‘I know. That was a mistake.’
He recalled her panicked retreat the last time she’d come up to his gate. ‘My life is here,’ he said. ‘I forgot that for a moment. I’m sorry…’
‘No, it wasn’t that, it wasn’t even you… you just suddenly reminded me so much of my father…’ She gripped the gate, steadying herself. ‘I didn’t mean to say it like that, but your wife, your baby… what I couldn’t have.’
Hardy had his hands in his pockets. The vapor from their breathing merged in the air between them. She seemed to gather herself then, regain control. ‘Your client, the judge. You obviously don’t think he did it.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Then who did?’
‘I don’t know. We’re looking, but so far there isn’t much -’
‘Much?’
‘To be very honest, nothing.’
‘Poor Daddy,’ she whispered.
There wasn’t anything more to say. She glanced at his house behind him, nodded, turned and walked quickly to her car.
He had taken to following a routine every night. First, he was not drinking at all during the week, from Sunday through Thursday night. He would finish dinner and help Frannie with the dishes. They would talk about each other’s day. He would bounce things off her.
Then he would take a cup of coffee and go into his office for a couple of hours of what he called creative leisure – toss some darts, read over some testimony he thought he already knew by heart, play devil’s advocate with every position he could think of. Sometimes he’d call Abe just to keep the needle in. He tried not to work on the weekends, or on Wednesday nights, although he’d told Frannie that they’d have to suspend date night during the duration of the trial and, of course, for however many weekends the trial took, weekends as such would not exist.
His paper load now included six full binders, four filled legal pads and a dozen cassette tapes. It was amazing, he thought, that as many times as you went through it there was always something you’d missed. He remembered papers he’d done in college, proofing and proofing and rereading and then handing in what he thought was perfect work only to get it back with a typo or something screwed up in the first line.