"Well, I'm not writing you a check for another hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that off chance, I'll tell you that. And you can take that to the bank."
Hardy pushed himself away from the table, draped an arm over the back of his chair, and looked into the callow and handsome face. With an air of sadness, he came forward again. "Will. I know that you're through with Catherine, however this comes out. I appreciate you coming down here to trial and putting on the face of the good husband. But I also think I know why you're really doing it, and that's because you don't want to lose the respect of your kids."
Will shook his head in disgust. "I've had enough of this. You don't know what you're talking about." He started to stand up.
"I'm talking about Karyn Harris, Will. Your secretary."
Sitting back down, he said, "There's nothing between me and Karyn Harris."
Hardy nodded. "That's been the party line, anyway, that you've worked so hard to keep from your kids. You weren't having an affair. It was just Catherine who was crazed, right?"
"Right." Defiant still.
"And so to your kids, you're still the good guy, aren't you? The dad they can trust, who's holding the whole thing together?"
"That's right."
"But what if they found out you've been lying to them the whole time, too? How would they feel about that? About you?"
"I haven't been lying to them. There was no affair."
Hardy stared at him for several seconds. When he spoke, there was no threat to his voice or in his manner. It was more the measured tones of disappointment that things between them had come to this pass. "Will," he said. "Do yourself a favor. Take a look at the statements I've sent you over the past months. You're going to notice payments totaling about five grand to an entity called The Hunt Club. You know what that is? No? It's a private-investigator service."
Will's initial expression of disdain turned to disbelief and then a distillate of fear itself.
Hardy went on. "If you weren't having an affair, one of the things I considered early on was that you had the same motive to kill your father as Catherine did. You'd gone to some lengths to create an airtight alibi. You would have been perfect. So I had to know, you see, if you were really in San Francisco on May twelfth, or down south."
He let the words hang in the air between them. "Understand that I don't have to bring up any of this for Catherine's sake, and really never planned to. For my purposes, it's enough that Catherine believed you were being unfaithful, and suddenly she needed to go see Paul to find out where a divorce would leave her. But if you in fact were having this affair, and the jury knew it, they might view Catherine in a more sympathetic light. And all other things being equal, that's always to the good."
Will's hands were shaking; his color had gone gray. "You're blackmailing me," he said.
"I've had this for four months. If I was blackmailing you, I would have started then."
Will glanced back at the gallery, which had started to fill for the afternoon session. In the bullpen, the popular court reporter Jan Saunders was sharing a laugh with a bailiff. Several of the jurors had wandered back in and taken their seats. "Where is all this stuff?" he asked.
"Locked away," Hardy said. "No one ever has to see it. No one ever will."
Hardy kept his poker face straight. No one would ever see the documentation of Will's affair with his secretary because it didn't exist. The Hunt Club had come to the conclusion that Will and Karyn had spent their four days aboard the Kingfisher. The captain of that boat, Morgan
Bayley, wasn't talking-Hardy's private investigator was of the opinion that the newly wealthy Will Hanover had sent him a quiet bundle of cash to keep his mouth shut. And had given Karyn a nice raise.
Hardy was running a pure bluff, and wasn't one hundred percent sure he was right until Will stood up and growled down at him, "You'll get your fucking check by the weekend."
21
"Sergeant Cuneo, did you have a specific reason to question the defendant on the night of the fire?"
"Yes, I did."
"And what was that?"
"Well, I was called to the scene to investigate a double homicide. The defendant said that she was related to the owner of the house. That alone justified talking to her. But she also admitted that she'd been to the house that afternoon and had talked to Mr. Hanover."
"Did she say what they'd talked about?"
"At first, yes. She said they'd talked about family matters. But when I asked her if she could be more specific, she became evasive."
"Evasive?"
Hardy stood up with an objection. "Objection. Witness is offering a conclusion."
Braun overruled him, and Rosen barely noticed the
interruption. "When you asked the defendant to be more specific about these family matters, what did she say?"
"She asked why I wanted to know."
"And what did you tell her?"
"I said I was going to need to know everything that happened in Paul Hanover's last hours, which included what she'd talked to him about."
"And did she then go into the substance of her discussion with Mr. Hanover?"
"No. She did not."
"Did you specifically ask her about this?" "Yes. Probably half a dozen different ways." "And she did not answer?"
"Not the substance of the questions, no. She kept saying, 'It's private,' or 'That was between me and Paul,' or 'I can't think about that right now.' "
"Did you press her on this issue?"
"No, not really."
"Why not?"
"Because she was obviously distraught over the fire. She'd acted like she'd just learned that her father-in-law, her children's grandfather, was probably dead. She became very upset after a while. At the time, I thought she had a pretty good reason. I decided to let it go."
Hardy thought this was pretty good. Rosen letting Cuneo present himself as sensitive and empathetic. And now he was going on. "All right. Now, Inspector, did you have occasion to notice anything specific about the physical person of the defendant?"
"Of course. I'm supposed to notice things. It's my job. I checked out her clothes." "And what was she wearing?"
Hardy squirmed in his chair. He wanted to break this up, object on relevance, but he knew that Braun would overrule him. Catherine had been wearing what she'd been wearing and there wasn't anything he could do about that now.
"A blue blouse under a leather jacket. And jeans."
"Would you please tell the jury why you particularly recall the defendant's clothing that night?"
"Sure." Accommodating, Cuneo faced the panel. Hardy wondered if he might have taken a Valium or two during the lunch recess. There was little sign of the trademark jitteriness he'd exhibited before the break. "When we interviewed witnesses later, someone described a woman who had left Paul Hanover's house just before the fire wearing a blue blouse under a leather jacket and jeans."
"But you didn't know that on the night of the fire?"
"No."
Rosen wore his satisfaction on his sleeve. He paused for a drink of water, then came back to his witness. "Sergeant, we may as well address this question now. Did you make a comment to Inspector Becker about the defendant's attractiveness?"
Cuneo handled it well. They'd obviously rehearsed carefully. He shrugged with an almost theatrical eloquence. "I may have. I don't remember specifically, but if Inspector Becker said I said something of that nature, I probably did."
"Does a remark like that seem out of place to you in that context? At the scene of a fire and double murder?"
"I don't know. I don't even remember saying it or thinking about it. It was a nonevent."
"All right, Sergeant, moving along. On the day after the fire, did you see the defendant?"
"Yes. I went to her house."
"And what was your specific purpose on that visit?"
"I had two reasons. First, she'd mentioned the night before that the victims had been fighting, and I wanted to find out a little more about that. Second, I wanted to get some answers about the family issues she'd talked to him about."