Reilly 11 - Case of Lies (33 page)

Nina, in the window seat, waited until he had not moved for almost an hour. Then she carefully lifted the blanket away from his chest. He wore his parka, unzipped, over a striped shirt, the top buttons undone. His naked Adam’s apple moved regularly up and down and she could see scanty chest hair.

She inserted a hand inside the parka, just above his heart. He seemed to heave a sigh as she slowly removed the notebook, as though his heart noticed and regretted the theft. No jerky movements, she told herself as the hand snaked back home with its prize.

The seat light sent its focused beam onto a thick black leather-covered notebook, about four inches square, held shut with a laughable silver lock like the one on the pink diary Nina had kept in seventh grade.

The toothpick from the dinner plate worked, though she had several other possible tools ready. She wondered how this thing that Elliott protected like a dragon could have been locked so flimsily.

But it wasn’t the lock, of course, it was where he kept it, right next to his heart. She squeezed the ends of the lock and it clicked open. Reading glasses! They were gone, no, they were on her head. Don’t get excited, she told herself. If he woke up, she would calmly hand it back and admit it.

The inside of Elliott’s universe was as neat as the toothpick that had opened it, no loose scraps of paper, no cross-outs and scrawls. Obviously this was where he kept results, not work in progress. Flipping through it, she estimated that there were three hundred pages of neatly written notes and calculations and beautiful graphs. Each page was dated.

She turned back to the beginning. The cover page said, “Elliott Wakefield’s Theory of Everything. Do Not Enter. Or you are Cursed.” There was also a boy’s drawing of a skull and crossbones, and a curlicued “EW.” On the next page, the first date showed that Elliott had been keeping this same mathematical diary for ten years. He must have been in about eighth grade when he started it.

She flipped through it again. A doodle or two, no blank pages interspersed. Elliott had been rigorous with himself, amazingly so for the boy who had begun this venture. She glanced at him, at the boy in the man this time, and realized that she really, really wanted it all to be true-that he had solved the mystery of the prime numbers.

If it was true, what she held in her sneaky hands would be immortality. Prizes and honors would only be the beginning. This book would go to a museum.

She turned back to the first pages, where the writing was bigger. He had used a fine-tipped mechanical pencil throughout. The pages had gold edges. Water had stained the tops of some of them. The notebook itself was pliant, the cover soft.

The book began with the harmonic series, in some form she could barely recognize. Even at thirteen, Elliott was ahead of her. She saw signs she recognized as calculus, and some infinity symbols and ellipses, and knew he was working with series of numbers and their limits. That pi sign meant “prime number.” “Let something be the something of something something.”

If only Mick were on this flight. If only a copy machine were back there with the chatting flight attendants, right next to the microwave. Could she copy any of it on her napkin? What should she copy? She turned to the last page and did copy the equations as well as she could, though most of the symbols were new to her. The folded napkin went down her blouse, near her own heart.

Yet she couldn’t bring herself to give it back yet. She was touching the dragon’s jewel, running her fingers over the leather, feasting her eyes on page after page of the dragon’s magic formulae. Elliott’s universe.

She wanted to keep it. But he would miss it immediately, and this was no cave she could flee.

Please be true. She wished it passionately for him, because his grief for his friends was real and deep and she might have had a hand in causing their deaths.

After a while she lifted the blue blanket again and opened the parka, slipping the book home again. Elliott dreamed on while Nina watched and wondered. Thirty thousand feet down within the still ocean, whales swam through the night, singular, extraordinary.

26

FIRST SNOW FELL OUTSIDE THE WINDOW. Betty Jo Puckett, Elliott, Sandy, Nina, and a transcriber sat around Nina’s conference table. The espresso machine coughed on the counter nearest the door, and the lamp was lit in honor of winter’s arrival.

Elliott had already told his story, changing nothing from his talk with Nina in Germany.

Betty Jo had caused no trouble about the lack of notice regarding the changed deposition. Nina suspected that she had had second thoughts about not attending and was relieved to be able to do so at Tahoe. She wasn’t her flippant self, though; she said little and listened carefully, making occasional notes.

Elliott stared at the table in front of him. He had been asked about the Heddesheim shooting, but Nina had made it as merciful as possible. Getting him out of bed this morning had been difficult. She was afraid that jet lag and grief were turning into depression.

But he did his duty, and at last an eyewitness account of Sarah Hanna’s death had been given.

“Do you have any questions to ask the witness?” she asked Betty Jo. Though it was Nina’s show, Betty Jo had every right to go over whatever she wanted. She had taken notes throughout Nina’s questioning, and as the story poured out, the card counting, the money, the shooting, the primes, XYC, she never blinked. She was on a mission and she had her own theory, that was obvious.

She regarded Elliott with her head cocked as if taking his measure. She had worn a tweed suit and UGG boots to the deposition, which did not make her look ridiculous, as she had long toned legs, and her fluff of silver hair was set off by the silver of the suit. With her steady eyes and dark eyebrows, the slight shadow of a mustache, she was formidable behind the down-home facade.

“Well, Elliott, you’ve been avoiding having to do this for a long time, haven’t you? I mean, you could have contacted Mr. Hanna a long time ago and shared this information with him, couldn’t you?”

“As I said, I was afraid. I didn’t see how I could help.”

“You were afraid to tell the truth?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Do you agree with Ms. Reilly here that the motel should have done more to protect you?”

“I-I-don’t know.”

“Ms. Reilly must have explained to you that you’re a straw defendant, that she used a legal trick that required callin’ you a defendant. You know that, don’t you?”

“She said she had to do it to get my testimony.”

“And she’s not trying to get any money from you regarding this incident, is she?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You and she are good buddies?”

“I like her all right.”

“Stayin’ at her house, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re workin’ together to get some money from the Ace High Lodge?”

Elliott looked surprised. “No, I don’t want any money.”

“But you’re helping her, to get her off your back so you can go home?”

“It’s about my friends at this point.”

“Feel guilty about them dying, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it was probably my notebook he was after. Like I said.”

“You feel guilty about rushing the robber, don’t you?”

“Not really. Maybe a little.”

“Sure you do,” Betty Jo said. “I would.” She paused and took a sip of water.

“Did you at any time see the motel clerk, Meredith Assawaroj, during this incident?” she went on.

“No, ma’am.”

“Did you at any time see the owner of the motel, James Bova, during this incident?”

“No, ma’am, unless he was the man in the mask.”

Betty Jo showed him an eight-by-ten photograph. “Defendant’s Three,” she said. “Now, I will represent that this is a recent photograph of James Bova.”

She passed another print to Nina.

“I’ll stipulate that this is Mr. Bova,” Nina said.

“Did you ever see this man? Have you ever seen this man?”

“Not unless he was the man in the mask. As I said.”

“I will represent to you that Mr. Bova is just over six feet tall. Counsel?”

“We can verify that later,” Nina said.

“I believe you said that the man in the ski mask was of medium height, is that correct?”

“It was dark. I would say he wasn’t unusually tall or short.”

“In your mind, is someone over six feet tall medium or tall in height?”

“I guess tall,” Elliott said. “I’m five-eleven and I consider myself tall.”

“So this man was not tall?”

“I didn’t notice that he was unusually tall.”

“How much did this man weigh? The robber in the mask?”

“I would say he was on the skinny side.”

“Skinny?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t have to guess,” Nina said.

“I didn’t notice anything unusual about his weight.”

“I will represent to you that Mr. Bova weighs two hundred and twelve pounds. Do you consider that skinny?”

“Not really.”

“You grappled with this man?”

“I bumped him and hit at his arm, and the gun went flying.”

“So you had physical contact with him?”

“Yes. He was hard-he worked out. That’s about all I could say.”

“Come on,” Betty Jo said. “You can do better than that. When you came into contact with him, was he taller than you?”

“I had my head down.”

“Did he weigh more than you? What do you weigh?”

“One seventy-four.”

“Did he weigh more than you?”

“I’d say so. Yeah, I was wrong. He wasn’t really skinny.”

Betty Jo didn’t like that answer. She moved on.

“After the shots, how much time elapsed before you heard the screaming of the motel clerk?”

“Does he know if it was the motel clerk screaming?” Nina interrupted.

“How long before you heard a woman screaming?” Betty Jo went on.

“Seconds.”

“How many seconds?”

“I had time to run almost all the way to my room. Approximately forty seconds, forty-five seconds.”

“She must have been very close, right?”

“Pretty close. I heard later she was at the Internet cafe next door.”

“Never mind what you heard. So you had attracted a lot of attention at Prize’s, winning all that money?”

“The pit boss was getting too interested.”

“You had made thirty-five thousand dollars at one five-dollar-minimum table?”

“At two tables.”

“Other people were watching you? Guests of the casino?”

“Sure. It was time to leave.”

“Did you ask for any security to carry this large amount of cash?”

“No, we were staying just across the street.”

“Did you make any efforts to avoid being followed?”

“He didn’t have a duty to do that,” Nina said.

Betty Jo said, “He might have. He was a pro in a dangerous business. If you can sue him to bring him here, I may as well sue him, too.” Elliott didn’t look too happy at this.

“Did you? What did you do to protect yourself from robbery?”

“There were three of us.”

“Anything else?”

“Tried to keep a low profile.”

“That didn’t work out, though, did it?” Without waiting for an answer, Betty Jo said, “You were standing right at the vending machine when this man appeared?”

“Yes. We were. Silke had just put in the money.”

“Defendant’s Four. Photo of the area around the vending machine.” The transcriber pasted an identification label on the photo and returned it to Betty Jo, who passed it to Elliott.

“How many ways in and out are there from this area?”

“Two. The street side, and the parking-lot side.”

“Three actually, aren’t there? Look again.”

“Oh, the staircase.”

“You weren’t boxed in, were you? If he came one way, you could run another way? You did run another way? And got away safely?”

“Yes.”

“The two people on the balcony-you saw them?”

“Just for a second.”

“You didn’t see the woman get shot?”

“No, I was running for my room when I heard the third shot.”

“The police report doesn’t mention any third shot. Where were you for the first two shots?”

“Going toward him.”

“And you say he shot in the air? Think he was trying to scare you?”

“You don’t have to guess,” Nina said again, but Elliott answered, “Yes.”

“And when you heard the third shot your friends were ahead of you, and had already run into their rooms? You were almost at your ground-floor room?”

“Yes.”

“So why would he fire a warning shot?”

Elliott stared at the table. “I’ve wondered about that, how it happened. He must have noticed them after he picked up the gun again. He must have just shot straight at them.”

“Excuse me,” Nina said. “Just to clarify the record, you’re speculating, right?”

“It just seems logical. We weren’t there anymore.”

“Okay,” Betty Jo said, “I want to suggest something to you. And I want you to search your heart and remember you’re under penalty of perjury, even if you’re not in court today. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“I suggest that there were a total of two shots, as Meredith Assawaroj told the police. Wait just a minute. I suggest that you were struggling with this bad guy, this robber with a gun, and you lifted his arm up, trying to get the gun, and the gun went off and hit the lady.”

“There were three shots, I know that much. I don’t care what the police reports say. And after the second shot, I saw them crouched up on their balcony.”

“Were you facing the robber?”

“Yes.”

“So he had his back to that balcony?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the one facing the balcony, struggling over a gun.” Betty Jo raised her arm and said, “I’ve got the gun and you’re going for it. You push my arm back and it goes off.”

“Objection,” Nina said. “Lack of foundation, calls for speculation, misstates the testimony. Counsel is testifying. Just for the record.”

Betty Jo said, “You want to get at the truth or not? Let’s end this here. This boy made a mad rush at an armed robber, and in the struggle an innocent bystander was accidentally killed, and it’s hard for him to admit.” She turned back to Elliott. “You seem like a nice boy.”