He grinned back at her. ‘And now that you know? If you’d known back then?’
‘It probably wouldn’t have made any difference.’
‘Which is my point,’ Hardy said.
‘No,’ Frannie countered. ‘It’s my point. Sarah Evans is a cop and she loves him. She doesn’t care if he’s a murderer or not.’
‘He’s not.’
‘I hope not, Dismas. I hope you’re both right. But listening to Mr Soma, I have to tell you I’m not so sure.’
There it was, Hardy thought – an honest take on the respective opening statements, and from his own wife no less, who might have been expected to give Hardy’s side the benefit of the doubt. If Frannie’s reaction was anything like the jury’s – and he had to assume it was close – he was in more trouble than he’d realized.
And he’d thought he’d been in it up to his eyeballs.
27
From his days as a prosecutor Hardy knew that one of the first orders of business in a murder trial, prosaic as it might seem, was to establish the fact that a murder had taken place. For this reason he predicted that Dr John Strout, the coroner for the city and county of San Francisco, would be the first witness Soma would call. But he was wrong.
It was the first workday of the week. It was directly after the lunch recess. Drysdale and Soma’s first witness was Mario Giotti. Apparently, even Salter had known of this arrangement; the two jurists entered the courtroom from Salter’s chambers. Maybe they’d even had lunch together.
Hardy surmised that this timing had been arranged entirely for Giotti’s convenience. He could come down to the Hall from the federal courthouse during his lunch break, testify immediately, say his piece for the record, endure a (hopefully) brief cross-examination, and be back in his chambers by two o’clock. What galled Hardy was that he and Freeman had been kept ignorant while every other principal in the trial had known about this arrangement. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. Giotti was on the stand, taking the oath.
Judge Salter had restricted the attorneys’ access to the witness box. He didn’t want either Hardy or Soma to intimidate any witnesses by getting too close to them physically. They were to ask their questions from the center of the courtroom. Soma stood there now.
‘Mr Giotti,’ Soma began, ‘can you tell us your full name and occupation please?’
When he got to ‘federal judge,’ there was an audible buzz in the courtroom. Several members of the jury glanced at one another – a lot of juice up there. Soma, shamelessly obsequious, asked Salter’s permission to address the witness either as ‘Judge’ or ‘Your Honor.’ Trying to make a gracious joke, Salter said he would allow it if the court reporter had no objection. He leaned over the podium and asked her approval. She wouldn’t get confused? Everybody had a chuckle, the universe bending over backwards to be nice to the federal judge.
Hardy dared not object. What would he object to? It would alienate Salter and possibly Giotti, and it was better luck to be hit by a truck than to get a judge mad at you.
‘Judge Giotti,’ Soma began, ‘on the night of Friday, May ninth, of this year, can you tell us what you did?’
Giotti knew a thing or two about how to give testimony, and he looked at Soma, then the jury, then sat back and told his story. Although technically witnesses weren’t permitted to give long answers – the lawyer was supposed to ask a series of questions – Giotti evidently wasn’t inclined to do it that way, and Soma let him go on.
‘I went out to dinner with my wife, Pat, to Lulu’s. After we finished, she took her car back home. She’d been downtown earlier in the day and I decided to pick up some papers that I’d left at my office so I could review them over the weekend. My office is at the federal courthouse on Seventh Street, which happens to abut the alley where Sal Russo had his apartment.
‘Mr Russo and I had been friends for many years and I’d made it a habit to buy fish from the back of his truck on Fridays, put it in a cooler in the trunk of my car, take it home for the weekend. On this Friday, Sal hadn’t shown up so I thought I’d go check and see if he was all right. I knew he’d been sick. I was in the neighborhood anyway.’
‘And what did you do then?’ Soma prodded.
The heavy brow clouded. Giotti didn’t appreciate getting prompted. He knew what he had to say and he’d get to it. The scowl faded slowly as he went on. ‘I walked up and knocked on his door. There was a light on inside, but no one answered, so I tried the doorknob and it opened and I saw him – Sal – lying on the floor in his living room.’
‘He was lying on the floor?’ Soma asked.
Giotti’s eyes narrowed. Soma wasn’t scoring points with the judge. ‘I said that, didn’t I?’
Trying to recover, Soma stammered. ‘Yes, you did. I’m sorry, Your Honor. So Sal Russo was lying on the floor? What did you do next?’
Giotti had delivered his message to Soma. Hardy wasn’t about to object. The judge went on without interruption for another couple of minutes. He’d called 911, waited for the paramedics and the police – first two uniformed officers and then the inspectors – noticed the DNR sticker on the table, the syringe and vial, the bottle of whiskey. He didn’t touch anything; he knew the drill. So he just waited, then answered the police questions and went home.
Though he’d guessed wrong on the timing, Hardy had assumed that Soma would call Giotti as a witness at some point, not because of any real strategic reason but simply because it was natural that the person who first came upon the body would be a necessary step in drawing the picture of what had happened. Giotti would fill in that blank.
But that was not Soma’s only rationale. After asking Giotti one or two innocuous questions – a chair had been knocked over in the kitchen; the syringe and empty vial were on the low coffee table – he got to some meat.
‘Your Honor, you’ve testified that Sal Russo was lying on the floor, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was there a chair or something nearby he could have been sitting on?’
Giotti closed his eyes, visualizing. ‘His chair. He had an old recliner he liked. He was on the floor in front of that.’
‘In other words, between the recliner and the coffee table?’
‘Yes.’
Soma went back to his table, grabbed a photograph passed to him by Drysdale, had it entered as People’s Exhibit One, and asked Giotti if the picture captured the reality he’d witnessed upon entered the apartment.
‘That’s the way it looked,’ he agreed. ‘Sal was on the floor, on his side, just like here.’
The image was clear and damaging, its message undeniable.
If something benign had happened, wouldn’t Sal have been sitting in his favorite recliner, at least? Wouldn’t his deliverer have tried to make him comfortable in his last moments? Instead, the victim lay on his side, in a hump on the floor. As though he’d been poleaxed.
Soma left the jury to ponder all of these things. He’d gotten what he wanted, so he thanked the judge and sat down.
Hardy felt that he and the federal judge were basically on the same side, although Giotti was, technically, a witness for the prosecution. His testimony in a fair world – ha! – should have come a little later in the trial, and Hardy had been almost looking forward to it; he thought he’d be able to put some points on the board. But first, now, he’d have to undo some of Soma’s damage.
‘Judge Giotti,’ he began, ‘you were good friends with Sal Russo, weren’t you?’
A nod, genial. ‘I’d known him for years, although we didn’t socialize much anymore. We were close acquaintances.’