Debby Diaz asked another question or two, to which I gave similarly vague answers. She probably realized I was shining her on by then, but I really didn't care. Finally, she smacked her thighs and headed to the door. Once she had it open she snapped her fingers.
'Say, what's your girlfriend's name? Might be I need to talk to her.'
I had to keep from laughing. Some detective. Standing in the woman's condo and absolutely no clue. But I shook my head as if I didn't know the answer. Diaz gave me a really tough look then. We were both done pretending.
'Well, that can't be a secret,' she said. 'Don't make me have to find out.'
I told her to leave a card and said I'd get it to my girlfriend.
I had reached my dad on his inside line before the detective was through the lobby downstairs. He'd voted when the polls opened, then gone to work as if it were a normal day, even though there were no normal days for either of us just then.
He sounded so happy when he heard my voice. He always is when I call. But I couldn't speak for a second. I hadn't fully realized what I was going to say until just then.
'Dad,' I said. 'Dad, I'm really scared you may be in trouble.'
CHAPTER 24
Tommy, June 22, 2009
Tommy Molto had always had mixed feelings about Sandy Stern. Sandy was good, there was no doubt about that. If you were a cobbler and took pride in your craft, then you had to admire somebody who found flawless leather and made shoes that wore like iron and felt like velvet on the foot. Sandy was a maestro in the courtroom. An Argentinian who'd come here in the late 1940s during the turmoil with Peron, he still played the polished Latin gentleman sixty years later, with a trace accent that enhanced his speech like some fancy seasoning-truffle oil or sea salt-and the manners of the staff in an expensive hotel. His routine went down better than ever these days, when an occasional aside en espanol could be interpreted for other jurors by at least two or three of their number.
But you had to watch Sandy. Because he appeared so elegant, so proper, he got away with more stuff than the average drug court hustler. Tommy knew that all the crap that rained down on him during Rusty Sabich's first trial, the subtle accusations of taking part in a frame-up, had been concocted by Sandy, who in the years since acted with Tommy as if nothing of consequence had happened, rather than putting a place holder on Tommy's life that was still there today.
At the moment, Sandy was tussling with cancer. From the look of it, things were not going well. He had the Daddy Warbucks haircut and had parted with a good sixty pounds, and the drugs had given him a rash that seemed to be literally burning through his face. Just a few minutes ago, before court resumed, Tommy asked Sandy how he was doing.
'Stable,' said Sandy. 'Holding my own. We'll know more in a few weeks. Some good signs with the latest round of treatment. Despite becoming the Scarlet Pimpernel.' He pointed to his cheek.
'In my prayers,' said Tommy. He never told someone that without carrying through.
But that was how it went with Sandy Stern. You prayed for his soul, and he mounted you from the rear. The defendant never testified first. The accused was always the last act in a trial, the star attraction, who went on at the final possible minute, so the wisdom of testifying could be evaluated in light of all the other evidence and so the defendant would make the biggest impression on the jury as they deliberated. Not that Tommy has been taken totally by surprise. He had figured all along Rusty might be coming, ever since Judge Yee's pretrial ruling, in chambers, out of earshot of the press, that nothing of the first trial-not the new DNA results nor Carolyn Polhemus's murder, nor any of the related legal proceedings-was ever going to be mentioned in this courtroom. But Tommy was planning to spend the next few nights preparing, getting Rusty's cross sequenced, playing it through with Brand. Now it was going to be like Tommy's days in drug court thirty years ago, when there were so many cases that you couldn't get completely ready for any of them and had to cross from the seat of your pants. In those days, when the rare defendant chose to testify, the first thing you wanted to ask him was to remind you of his name.
Standing at the defense table, pretending to examine his notes as if there were actually some order to what he'd scribbled down, Tommy was visited by a stillness that had been with him throughout the case. Nobody would ever mark Tommy as relaxed in the courtroom, not in this trial or any other, but at night, when the trial process usually left him a mass of teeming anxieties, he had been more or less at ease, able to sleep through the night beside Dominga, rather than rising several times as had been his routine over the years. The impact of this verdict on his future and his family's, on the way he would forever be perceived, was so large that he knew he simply must accept the will of God. Ordinarily, he did not like to believe God wasted His time worrying about a creature as unimportant as Tommy Molto. But how could Rusty have come around again, against all the odds, if the outcome in the first case didn't cross some rule of divine justice?
Tommy's mood had also been fortified by the fact that the prosecution evidence turned out to make a prettier package than he had foreseen. After trying cases for thirty years, Tommy knew that at this stage of the proceedings, you drank your own Kool-Aid. You needed to believe you were going to win to have any chance of convincing the jurors, even while you had to remain in the grip of paranoia. And he was wary. There was no telling yet what Stern was up to, but from long experience with the man, Tommy expected the unexpected.
The opening statement Sandy gave when the trial began two weeks ago was a bland mantra of 'reasonable doubt,' in which Stern invoked the term 'circumstantial proof' no fewer than eighteen times: 'The evidence will not show a confession, an eyewitness. The evidence instead will consist almost entirely of the conjecture of various experts about what might have happened. You will hear experts from the prosecution, and then equally if not more qualified experts from the defense who will tell you that the prosecution's experts are quite likely wrong. And even the prosecution's experts, ladies and gentlemen, will not be able to tell you with any certainty that Mrs. Sabich was murdered, let alone by who.' Before the jurors, Stern had paused with a troubled frown, as if it had just occurred to him how inappropriate it was to charge somebody with murder on such a flimsy basis. He was gripping the rail of the jury box for support-having come several feet closer to them than any judge in this county would normally permit. Despite the summer heat outside, Stern wore a three-piece suit, undoubtedly from his stoutest period, so it hung on him as shapelessly as-no coincidence-a hospital gown. There was nothing that happened in life that Sandy Stern would not contrive to use to advantage in the courtroom. His whole being was tilted that way, he couldn't help himself, the same as some guys who could not stop thinking of sex or money. Even looking as repulsive as a figure from one of the Friday the 13th movies was something he had figured out how to use for his client's benefit, Sandy's mere presence seeming to suggest that he had risen from his deathbed to prevent a savage injustice. Free Rusty, he seemed to say, and I can die in peace.
There was no telling if the jurors were buying that, but if they were paying attention at all to the State's evidence, they had to recognize that the prosecutors had a point. After some debate they had called Rusty's son, Nat, to start the case. That was risky, especially since Yee had already ruled that when Nat climbed down from the witness stand, he would be allowed to remain in the courtroom to support his father, notwithstanding the fact that he was going to testify again for the defense. Still, it was always a nice touch when you got your evidence from the other side, and Nat was a straight kid, who, sitting here day after day, often looked to have his own doubts. On the stand, the younger Sabich gave up what he had to-his father not wanting to call the cops after Barbara died, or the fact that the night before she bought it, Rusty had cooked the steaks and poured Barbara's wine, giving him ample opportunity to slip his wife a lethal dose of phenelzine.