"Lonely, if I had to choose one word."
Naturally, I'm puzzled.
"I have known your father well for thirty years, and I would call our relationship intimate. But only in a professional sense. He says very little about himself. Always."
"Welcome to the club."
"I mean only to acknowledge that I am relying on my own estimates, rather than anything he has told me. But we have interesting evenings, your father and I. I would say his chances of survival are better than mine." Stern's smile is rueful, and his hand creeps along a few inches for the missing cigar. One of the thoughts my dad and I have shared is that there really is no need to ask about Sandy's prospects of recovery. We'll know there's no hope the first time he lights up. "But I feel myself far more involved in this world than he is."
I nod. "He sometimes seems like he thinks he's out of body and just watching all of this happen to somebody else."
"Just so," answers Stern. "And very much the point. He had very little concern whether his testimony would help or hurt his case. He wanted to tell what actually happened. The piece of it he knew."
My reaction to Stern surprises even me. "He'll never tell anybody everything."
Stern smiles again, wistful, wise. One thing is clear: Sandy Stern is enjoying this conversation. He has obviously spent nearly as many nights as I have up late and preoccupied by my father's many riddles.
"But he wanted to tell you, Nat, as much as he could."
"Me?"
"Oh, I have no doubt he testified almost exclusively so he could enhance your confidence in him."
"I don't lack confidence." This is, at some level, a lie. The logic of my father's case is actually against him, even with me. But it is so contrary to my being to think of my father as a murderer that I can never cross that river of belief. If I had not already spent so many frigging years talking to shrinks, I'd probably be talking to one now, but nobody can really help you answer the kinds of questions I'm dealing with. Even if my father were guilty, it wouldn't mean he gave me an instant's less love and attention. But most of the other lessons in life I've taken from him would come to nothing. It would mean I'd been raised by someone in disguise, that I had loved a costume, not him.
"He thinks you do."
I shrug. "There's some bad stuff."
"Of course," answers Stern. We are quiet together.
"Do you think he's guilty, Mr. Stern?" He has told me repeatedly to call him Sandy, but after a year at the supreme court, where every lawyer was Mr. or Ms. and the bosses all had the same first name-Justice-I can't bring myself to do it. Instead, I watch Stern labor with my question. I know it's neither fair nor proper to put this to a lawyer trying to captain a defense. I expect Sandy to sidestep. But we have gotten far outside the legal chalk lines by now. Sandy is a father talking to a good friend's child.
"In this line of endeavor, one learns never to assume too much. But I was thoroughly convinced that your father was innocent in the first case. The recent DNA results were a terrible shock to me, I admit that, but just so, there are still several compelling hypotheses of his innocence then."
"Such as?"
"Frankly, Nat, the specimen was subject to enormous question in your father's first trial, and there are no better answers today."
Anna has said the same thing to me, that the whole thing was totally sketchy.
"But even if the specimen was genuine," says Stern, "it would prove merely that your father was the lover of the woman who was killed. You will forgive me for being forthright about that, but the evidence at trial was quite clear that your father was not the only man who fell in that category at the time of the murder. A very credible surmise is that someone else saw your father with her that night and killed her in a jealous rage after he left."
Anna had admitted to a fascination like a Trekkie's with my dad's first case, which she's been interested in since she was a kid. She recently went back and read Stern's copy of the transcript, mostly because I couldn't stand to do it myself. After that, she offered exactly the same theory as Stern. The notion has seemed utterly plausible all along, but it's even more persuasive coming from Sandy.
"So now, Nat, while I should be in doubt, my heart remains on your father's side. Certainly, I have never been impressed with the evidence in this case. The State, so far as I am concerned, cannot even prove beyond a reasonable doubt that your mother died of poisoning. If Judge Yee was unpolluted by the DNA results, I think there is a fair chance he would have granted our motion for acquittal at the end of the prosecution case. Nor do many of the other details add up to what Molto and Brand think."
"Tommy did a good job of weaving it all together."
"But that weaving metaphor is employed frequently in circumstantial cases, and it can fit for both sides. Pull one thread and the whole cloth falls apart. And we shall be tugging at it quite a bit."
"Can I ask how?"
He smiles again, a man who's always enjoyed his secrets.
"More," he says, "after you have testified."
"Will you be able to answer that stuff about his computer? It was pretty damaging."
"It's well you've raised that." He lifts a finger. "Marta will discuss this further with you, but we have been hoping you might help a bit on that score."
"Me?"
"We were thinking about asking you a little about computers. Are you knowledgeable?"
"I'm okay. I'm not like Anna or a lot of other people I know."
"And your father? Is he sophisticated?"
"If you call turning the computer on sophisticated. He's somewhere between a useless dweeb and a total ignoramus."
Stern laughs out loud. "So you don't imagine that he downloaded shredding software and removed e-mail messages?"
I giggle at the notion. Admittedly, I want to believe my dad is innocent. But I know with the kind of preternatural faith I have in things like gravity, he could not have done something like that on his own.
"We have been thinking that we should do some demonstrations with your father's computer, just to show the jurors how unlikely the prosecution's theory is. You might be the right witness for various reasons."
"Whatever," I answer.
Stern looks at his watch, a golden Cartier that seems to reflect all of Stern's elegant precision. Marta is waiting.
At the door, I say, "Thanks for talking, Mr. Stern."
"Sandy," he answers.
CHAPTER 29
Nat, June 22, 2009
When I leave my meeting with Marta, my dad is waiting for me, the sleeves rolled on his white shirt and his rep tie wrenched down from his collar. He has said he is not sleeping much, and after the long day on the stand he looks totally blasted. The flesh around his eyes seems to have gone pruny, and he's lost a lot of color. It's about the worst emotional combination imaginable, I guess, feeling both hopeless and scared.
"Tough afternoon," I say.
He shrugs. These days, my dad frequently takes on the bleary look of a bag man.
"There will be something tomorrow, Nat," he says. I wait for more, but he is silent and simply frowns. "I can't talk about it yet. I'm sorry." He stands there uselessly, knowing the rules leave him with no more to say or do but somehow unable to accept that fact. I'm sure that's where his brain has been stuck for months, looking for the keystrokes that will undo the entire situation.
"Do you need anything, Dad? Anything from home?"
He takes a second to focus on my question. "I'd really love another tie," he says as if he were asking for an ice cream, something he's been craving at the bottom of his brain. "I've been wearing the same two ties for three weeks now. Would you mind going? Bring me four or five, if you would, Nat. I'd really like the violet one your mom bought me for Christmas the year before last." I remember my mom saying that it would improve his usual low-rent style.