Key Witness (83 page)

“He laughed.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Wyatt called out. This was terrible.

“Sustained. Confine your questions to answers that are objectively verifiable, Ms. Abramowitz,” Grant said.

“Certainly, Your Honor.” She was angry with the judge. He had granted that order to seize Lieutenant Blake’s computer out of sheer sympathy for Wyatt Matthews, a friend from the fancy-lawyer’s club. When you scratched the surface, all these male lawyers were the same. Well, the hell with them. She was going to toss their little red wagons right into the fire, alongside Rosebud.

She glanced at her notes. “On August eighteenth of last year, were you keeping tabs on Agnes Carpenter?”

“Yes, I was.”

“That was the night—or a night, there may have been more than one, I presume—when the defendant, Marvin White, spent the night in Mrs. Carpenter’s house? The entire night?”

“No, he didn’t spend the night at her house. Not that night. He wasn’t there at all that day,” Petty said. “Or night.”

What the fuck? Wyatt’s head swiveled to look at Marvin. Marvin looked back at him, shrugging as if to say, “I don’t know what’s going on.”

“There were some nights he slept over?” Abramowitz asked. “With Mrs. Carpenter?”

“Yeah, there were a few nights, but that wasn’t one of them.”

“You’re certain of that night? August eighteenth?” she asked.

“This White kid couldn’t have spent that night at her house,” Petty said.

“Why not?”

“Because she wasn’t home that night.”

Wyatt felt the blood rushing to his head. He looked over at the jury box. All twelve jurors were sitting on the edge of their seats, listening.

“Agnes Carpenter wasn’t home that night?” Abramowitz repeated, trying to sound disbelieving. “Where was she?”

“New York.”

“New York?”

“Yes, New York. I saw her get on the plane with my own two eyes.” He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a small notebook. Reading from it, he said, “She took USAir flight number three-sixteen to New York, nonstop. It departed locally at ten-thirty-five in the morning, arriving at La Guardia at two-seventeen. She took a taxi to the St. Regis Hotel, where she had reserved a room. She went to the Metropolitan Opera that night, to see
La Boheme.
Prior to going to the opera she shopped at Bloomingdale’s and Bendel’s, and had an early supper at the Cafe Des Artistes restaurant. (He Americanized the pronunciation.) The next day she did more shopping, ate dinner at the Meridian Hotel dining room, and went to a concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring a person named Yo-Yo Ma on the cello. She flew home the following day on USAir flight number sixty-six, arriving here at four-thirty-five in the afternoon.”

“Did she travel alone, or in company?” Abramowitz asked.

“She went alone. She met a friend there, a Mrs. Gloria Epstein, of 935 Park Avenue, in Manhattan. They did some shopping together, and also went to the opera.”

“Thank you, Detective Petty.”

“You’re welcome.” He folded the notebook and stuck it back in his pocket.

“I have tried to contact Mrs. Epstein, Your Honor,” Abramowitz said to Grant, “but she is out of the country for the summer and has not returned my calls. I do have these receipts to place into evidence, however, to support Mr. Petty’s testimony.”

As she reached for a file Wyatt got to his feet. “This is totally improper, Your Honor,” he said, his face thick with anger. “Under the rules of discovery we must be notified of any evidence presented here—
before
the fact, not during or after;”

“We were going to, Your Honor,” Abramowitz immediately responded, “but when you allowed the defense a postponement in presenting the rest of their case—over the prosecution’s opposition, I must point out—there was no time to do so. I tried to get to Mr. Matthews earlier this morning, but he was unavailable. He was in conference with you—to which I was not invited—and then with his own detective, a meeting which I was also not privileged to attend. We tried to get this material to defense counsel, Your Honor, but he simply was not available.”

Grant ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to overrule your objection,” he said. “Under these special circumstances, I do believe that prosecution should be allowed to present their case.”

Wyatt sunk into his chair.

Abramowitz opened her file. “I would like to introduce the following items into evidence,” she stated. “One Visa receipt for an airplane ticket, round-trip to New York City. One copy of the tickets, which we obtained from USAir.” As she handed each item to the clerk a second copy was passed across the aisle to Wyatt by one of her gloating aides. “An itemized receipt from the St. Regis Hotel, room number twenty-eight twelve, for the nights of August eighteenth and nineteenth.” She droned on, listing the restaurants, stores, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall. As each duplicate was passed across the aisle Wyatt sat ramrod straight in his chair; his world was collapsing, but he wasn’t going to let the jury see that.

A
WOMAN SCORNED. THE
oldest syndrome in the book, and he’d let it happen to him. Agnes Carpenter had wanted to help Marvin, all right; but more importantly, she’d wanted to fuck her husband over, for the fucking-over he’d been giving her for years.

He’d had two alibi witnesses. Now one was dead, the other totally destroyed. And the slim hope Violet had presented him with the guy she’d seen in the bar had been nothing more—a hope, not a reality.

Yesterday, he’d been riding high, the summit in sight. At the end of the day he had felt—known—that he was going to win this case.

Now he was dead. And so was Marvin.

The signs had been there, but he’d been too blinded by his own light to see them. When Pagano and Abramowitz so casually and easily let the mistrial opportunity go by he should have smelled the rottenness of his own case. But he was so fucking sure of himself.

Hadn’t he always been a winner? Why should this case have been any different?

Hubris
—if he looked in a dictionary his photograph would accompany the definition. He had been soaring, handling difficulties left and right (so he thought) with the blithe assurance of an Olympian god. Now the reality had come home with a thunderous crash.

Darryl had been right after all. He wasn’t equipped to do this, no matter how talented and smart he was in his own field. Talent could only take you so far; then experience took over. This was a seasoned, battle-scarred criminal-defense lawyer’s job, someone who had been there before and could see three moves ahead, who wouldn’t have taken the word of a spurned woman without checking her out independently. The knowing defense lawyer would operate like a great chess master, seeing the entire match unfolding from the opening move and planning accordingly; or in a more popular analogy, doing his job the way a Magic Johnson operated on the basketball court or a Wayne Gretzky did the same on the ice.

He hadn’t done that. And now he would pay the price.

Blake’s computer. That was all he had left. He had to get his hands on it, and hope for a miracle.

Grant had given them the rest of the week to put some kind of alternate case together. A decent thing to do, but would it make any difference?

D
ORIS BLAKE HAD NOT
shown up for work, calling in sick. There was no answer at the door to her rented condo when the marshal, armed with Judge Grant’s court order, knocked. It was late afternoon, a few minutes before five, and the scorching midday heat was still lingering. The small patch of front lawn was withering brown; it didn’t look like it had been watered for some time.

Her door fronted the walkway. It faced west, in a direct line with the afternoon sun. There was no shade. The front blinds were drawn shut; the marshal couldn’t see inside. The sun beat down on his back, raising sweat through his white dress shirt. After waiting impatiently for five minutes, and knocking at regular intervals, he left. Whether her car was in the underground garage or not, he didn’t know; he didn’t look, and he wouldn’t have known which car was hers, anyway.

W
YATT WENT HOME. HE
wanted to run, really blow it out, and the hot tarry streets of the city weren’t the place to do that. And he was sick, all of a sudden, of living in a rented room. He wanted to be in his own space, sleep in his own bed.

It was late in the day and it was still hot as hell out and humid; everything was wilting. He ran along the road from his house to the highway and back, his road run, seeing again the For Sale sign posted in front of the Spragues’ house. That house was empty—they had gone to Maine to escape the heat. The timer to their sprinkler system was set to a solenoid that activated when the sun went down—water spiraled in graceful pirouettes from rainbirds situated on the corners of the front lawn, a light moist blanket on the dark green hybrid bluegrass.

Turning into his own driveway, he skirted his house, running around the back and taking off onto the trail that led into the woods. Normally he didn’t do this run if he’d done the other, but he hadn’t had a run on his own territory for some time, and he wanted to feel as much of it as he could. And he wasn’t tired enough yet; he needed to run himself into exhaustion, he realized. Run until it hurt and then push past that. For punishment, for some kind of earthbound penance. Which wouldn’t solve any of his problems, but might, in some dim, immature way, make him feel like he was paying his dues. A small down payment.

He didn’t know where he was going with his case. The marshal had reported his inability to serve the order; Blake must have been tipped off that it was coming, and had vamoosed from work. Maybe from the city entirely, even the state. If she was gone and had taken her computer with her, he’d be screwed. By the time they found her and brought her back it would be too late.

He ran for an hour and forty-five minutes. His longest run in months. He skinny-dipped half a dozen laps in the pool to cool down, went inside, threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and made himself a margarita in the blender.

He hadn’t talked to Moira and Michaela for several days—he felt guilty about that, too. He felt guilty about everything, all the guilt in the world was on his shoulders, he wanted it there. He wanted to crumble under the weight of guilt. To be buried under it.

“Hi there,” he said to Moira, who had picked up on the first ring. They were in; that was good.

“Hi, Daddy!” Michaela sang. She was on the extension. “How are you? I miss you, Dad, when are you going to be finished so you can come be with us?”

“I don’t know. Not much longer, I don’t think. Let me talk to Mom for a minute, sweetheart, then I’ll talk with you.”

“Okay.” She hung up.

“I didn’t know if I’d catch you in,” he said to Moira. “You’ve been out a lot. I never know when to call.”

“I’m expecting a call from Cissy,” she said. “There’s a problem with the store.”

“Oh. Nothing terrible, I hope.” Instant deflation. She wasn’t waiting by the phone in case
he
called, or hoping he would. She didn’t care one way or the other.

“Who knows? I’m not there. How was your day?” she asked dutifully, with the same inflection she would use to remind him to have the gardener cut back the ivy before it burned.

He told her. Leticia Pope, Agnes Carpenter, the suspect who hadn’t panned out, Blake’s disappearance.

“That’s too bad,” she said.

Too bad?
Leticia Pope was dead and Marvin White was going to be sent to the executioner and her reaction was that it was “too bad”?

“But you’ve done your best,” she went on. “Look at it this way—maybe he didn’t do what they’ve accused him of here—”

“He didn’t,” he answered sharply.

“Whatever. But he did try to kill another man. So it balances out in the end, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to.

“Have you been by the store lately?” she asked him, shifting gears as if they hadn’t been talking about his case at all.

The question threw him for a loop. “No,” he said.

There was a pause from her end. “Have you been by at all, even once?” She was clearly angry.

“I’ve been busy, Moira,” he reminded her.

“Not even on a Sunday, not once? This is important to me, Wyatt. It’s as important as your work is to you.”

Then why aren’t you here, taking care of it, if it’s that important?

“I want you to do me a favor, Wyatt. I want you to go down there. You can wait until Sunday if that’s the only time you can go”—her tone clearly implying that she didn’t believe he couldn’t go earlier—“and have Cissy explain to you what the problem is, so you can relay it to me. Will you do that?” She paused. “Or is even that too much to ask?”

He didn’t know why he said it, but he did. “I’ll try.”

“Try hard, okay? Now do you want to talk to Michaela? Don’t take long, please; Cissy should be calling any minute and I don’t want to miss it.”

Michaela came on. He told her about the drive-by shooting.

“Oh, Dad!” He could feel her sagging. “Oh, that’s so horrible. That poor girl. And your friend. Dexter, was that his name? And she was so important to your case.”

Which of them was the girl and which the mature woman?

“How are you doing, sweetheart?” he asked her.

“Better, much better.” She lowered her voice. “I wish you were here, Dad. Mom’s really difficult these days.”

“Like how?” He could imagine.

“Everything. Guilt, blame, mad at me because I can’t run around with her like she wants me to, angry at you for still being in this case. Just angry.”

Shit. He felt so impotent. “Hang in there, kiddo. It won’t be too much longer.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she told him. “I don’t want to guilt-trip you. You have so many problems already. I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me.”

“I do; I can’t help it.”

“I love you, Dad. I wish I was there.”

“I love you, too.”

He sat on the back deck, nursing a second margarita. It was dark now; crickets and bullfrogs sang their calls and responses, vibrating and booming out of the night.

A girl had been murdered, Dexter almost. Marvin was facing the gallows. Lives by the dozen were being brutalized, and Moira was angry at him because he hadn’t been out to her little vanity shop.