“I know you’ve had the other one a long time, but I thought…”
Her voice started to fade into the vast obscurity of what might have been, but then she remembered-we both remembered-
that nothing was going to make us regret our second chance.
We had an early dinner in town and when we got home she curled up with a book while I tried to outline the story I would attempt to tell through the state’s own witnesses. The prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial, but if left unchallenged completely convincing. There would be testimony from the woman who first found the body, the two security guards she brought to the scene, the first police officer who arrived and took charge of the initial investigation, all of them describing what they saw and what they did. The coroner would testify that he had examined the body and determined that death had been caused by one or more wounds from a sharp instrument. Another police officer would tell the jury that the defendant had been found holding a knife that still had on it visible traces of blood.
An expert on DNA would be called first to explain the procedure by which the blood on the knife was matched to the blood of the victim, and then with various charts and graphs calculate the nearly infinitesimal chance that it might have belonged to someone else.
“Do you remember T. E. Lawrence?” I asked Jennifer, stretched out on the sofa on the other side of the library, engrossed in a paperback novel. “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”
She put the book down on her stomach and turned her head.
“I remember T. S. Eliot. Murder in the Cathedral. “
“No, T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.”
“I saw the movie. Why? Are you thinking of running away to the desert?”
“You know how you do something for a long time without quite knowing why, and then, all of a sudden, you finally figure it out?
There are supposed to be two rules of cross-examination: Don’t do it unless you have to, and never ask a question unless you already know the answer. I almost never follow the first and I frequently break the second. Years ago, I read Seven Pillars of Wisdom-it’s a beautiful book, beautifully written-and I learned something I never forgot: The way to win is to turn the greatest strength of the opposition into its greatest weakness. The greatest strength of the Turkish army was a string of fortresses from which it controlled the Arab tribes. Lawrence went around blowing up railroad tracks and as many trains as he could. Then, while the Turks concentrated on how to keep open their supply lines, Lawrence and his Arab irregulars simply left them alone, prisoners in their own fortresses, and marched around them. It’s the same thing on cross-examination: Let the other side concentrate on making the strength of their case stronger still, and while they’re doing that, attack them in a way they haven’t had time to think about.”
Jennifer swung her legs over the side of the sofa and sat up.
With her elbows on her knees she rested her chin on the heel of her hand.
“Do you work this hard on all your cases? You work past midnight every night and you’re up every morning before six.”
I closed the thick case file and shoved it to the side. “I’m worried about this case. I know the kid didn’t do it. I can’t afford to lose, and I’ve already made one mistake: I didn’t bring in that homeless man, kept him safe somewhere, so I could produce him at trial and he could testify he saw someone give Danny the knife.
I may have made another one today. The jury expects me to back up what I said about the same person being responsible for the death of both Jeffries and Griswald.”
“And you don’t think you can?”
“A lot depends on what I can do with Elliott.” As I said it, I suddenly realized that it was really the other way around. “Or, rather, on what Elliott decides he wants to do with me.”
Glancing at the clock, I remembered where I had to be. “I have to meet Flynn,” I explained as I got to my feet.
I was in the hallway, throwing on my jacket, when I thought of it. “What did you say when I asked you about Lawrence?” The paperback dangling from her hand, Jennifer was leaning against the door to the library. “The T. S. Eliot book. Murder in the Cathedral?”
“Yes. Did you read it, too?”
“A long time ago,” I said as I kissed her on my way out the door. Before it shut behind me, I leaned my head inside. “I promise I won’t be late,” I said with a mocking smile, meant to signal my abject surrender to married life and all its mundane formalities.
“I’ll wait up,” she replied with a smile of her own.
It was raining hard outside and I could barely see as I drove toward town. Water rushed through the gutters on the side of the street and splashed over the hood of the car at each low spot in the road. The lights of the city streaked the windshield with a multicolor blur, and the few pedestrians I could see on the sidewalks when I stopped at an intersection were vague black shadows that quickly vanished from view. The steady muffled drum-beat of the windshield wipers was the only sound I heard, that and the lonely, desolate noise of wave after wave of falling rain, sweeping down from the overburdened sky, as if it was the beginning of the rain that would fall forever until there was nothing left but water, endless water everywhere.
I parked down the street from the bar and bent the umbrella into the wind, holding my jacket close to my throat with my other hand as I struggled forward, a few steps at a time. Under the neon sign in front of the bar, I closed the umbrella and shook it out and tried to wipe my face dry with the back of my sleeve.
Huddled on the pavement against the brick wall, a baseball cap shoved low on his forehead, a drunk rocked back and forth without any apparent awareness that it was raining, or even that it was night instead of day.
Inside, an old man with wrinkled hands and a solitary stare sat at the far end of the bar. A woman in her forties with black lacquered hair and dark red fingernails locked her high heel shoes on the bottom rung of the leather stool around the corner toward the middle. She watched in the mirror behind the bar while I made my way through the dim yellowish light toward the booth in the rear. The billiard balls were racked in the wooden trian-gle on the pool table, ready for anyone who wanted to play. Tired and bored, the bartender raised his eyes from a glass he was rubbing with a towel.
“A beer,” I said over my shoulder as I slid into the booth next to Flynn.
They were slouched forward, nursing their coffee, Flynn and Stewart, grinning cynically while they watched each other through world-weary eyes.
“Guy comes into a bar and orders booze,” Flynn said to Stewart. Then he looked at me and asked, “What kind of place do you think this is?”
My face was still wet and my shirt collar was soaked. Water ran down my neck.
“I get here too late to watch you throw somebody into a wall?”
He shook his head and shrugged. “It’s still early.”
The bartender brought a bottle of beer and a small, dirty glass.
I took a short swig on the bottle, then put it down and looked at Stewart.
“I need a favor. I need you to testify.” When he made no response, I reminded him what he had offered before. “You said if I did this, you’d help.”
He remembered, and he had no intention of going back on his word. “But what can I testify to? I wasn’t part of the investigation. I sat in when they questioned him because, like I told you before, I thought there might be some connection between the two murders.”
“That’s what I told the jury today: that there is a connection between the two murders, and that the same person responsible for the death of Jeffries is responsible for the death of Griswald.”
“Howard was telling me about that. How are you going to prove it?” he asked.
“I don’t have to prove it, I just have to show that it’s possible,” I replied, impatient to get back to my point. “I told them that the police didn’t know who killed Jeffries and neither did the district attorney. Now Loescher has to bring in a witness to tell the jury that the police found the man who murdered Jeffries and that he confessed. She’s going to call one of the lead investigators. It has to be you. I don’t want you to testify for the defense; I want you to testify for the prosecution.”