Try Try Again (23 page)

Liv spoke up. “Hub and I were going to question you, that’s
all. I’m used to questioning people on the stand, so Hub and I thought I could
be of some use here. But now the show’s director has decided you didn’t cheat, I
really don’t believe you’re required here, or me, for that matter. – Hub?”

Jill looked positively distraught at this. Maybe Liv didn’t
mean it the way it came out. Well, yes, Jill would have meant it that way, so Liv
would have meant it that way.

Hub ignored the byplay between the two women, said “Since
you’re here, Jill, you know there’s still a mystery and maybe the three of us
can figure it out. About Charley, I mean. And about why your hundred and
fourteen and a half seconds of fame, happened just when it did.

“And I don’t want to leave either of you stranded until the
Awards Ceremony tomorrow. Hospitality. Get to know each other, the three of us,
talk about the show.” He looked at both women. “Now drink up,” he said, looking
desperate, “and let’s get into the tub. Changing rooms are to your left.”

Liv had seen the “tub” earlier that day, but the place was
new to Jill. She stopped short and took it in: it looked like a bathtub, but it
was a good twenty feet long and twelve wide.

Hub laughed. “This is the ‘Hub tub,’ my friends call it. I
had my indoor pool built this way because ever since I was a kid I got my best
ideas in the bathtub, and now I share it with special friends, and sometimes
they get ideas, too.”

The three got in, arranged themselves in various ways. Hub
pulled a lever and a large tray swung out over the tub, with liquor and mixers
and ice.

The three helped themselves, Liv eagerly. Both Hub and Jill
noticed this, and Liv suddenly caught them glancing at her.
What am I doing
?
She wondered. She’d never actually got drunk,
had she
? Not for a long
time now, surely. But she hadn’t been drinking this much before going to the
Stirrup. Well, maybe. But drinking alone was a kind of downer. With friends,
however, …

Jill, to be polite, took a glass of something but didn’t
drink.

After a while being comfortable in the warm water, their
conversation eased, and the women were no longer looking at each other as some
evil separated-at-birth succubus.

“Let’s look at the show,” Hub said, “right where Jill
started winning. Season one and then season two.

Hub waved his waterproof float-remote. “On screen!” he said
dramatically. Three virtual screens descended from the ceiling and hovered over
the pool side by side.

“I set this up a few days ago in case we decided to take a
close look today,” he said, “and I looked at the episodes but didn’t get very
far in figuring things out. Episode four of season one is on the left, season
two on the right. The screen in the middle is the real-show-time statistical
monitor of how many agonists are doing which character and how they’re doing,
and so on. It’s synced right now to season one but we can sync it to season two
later, if we want to.

“Let’s look at season one first,” he said, “beginning in the
middle of the commercial that precedes Charley’s startle or whatever we want to
call it – epiphany, moment of truth,…”

“Jockey-shorts-pinch?” said Jill, still smarting from Liv’s verbal
assault. Hub and Liv ignored her comment.

Season one began in the middle of a ChronoSwiss watch
commercial. Two minutes later the screen went black for just an instant. When
the picture came back the three could see Charley’s stricken face in motion,
eyes wide, elbows forward and shoulders hunched, as if he were about to rise
from the defense table. Hub stopped the tape.

“Do you remember this, Liv?” Hub asked.

“Just barely,” said Liv.

Hub resumed the tape. Now Liv was glancing over at Charley
with a slight frown, head ducking toward him just a little.

Jill and Hub looked at Liv. “…I guess … I guess I remember,
I thought Charley was going to stand up,” Liv said, “that he had some kind of
problem. That wouldn’t be proper at this point in the trial. But then, he
didn’t get up.”

“Now,” Hub said, “what did you think of his face at the time
– how he looked? Seems perturbed to me, like he just had a jolt.”

“I don’t remember,” said Liv. “Maybe I wasn’t looking at his
face at all. In any case, I just don’t remember.”

“Now I’m going to back the tapes up to just at the end of
the commercial again,” said Hub, “and let it roll from there. Watch the data on
the middle screen. Remember it’s set for season one.”

Hub let four minutes of tape go by. “Now what did you see?”

“Not much,” said Jill. Just a bunch of numbers that didn’t
change much.”

“Right,” said Hub, “That’s the point. The number of Very
Wells, Wells, Averages, and Poors stayed pretty level, although agonists
playing Charley had a few seconds of trouble. Now let’s look at the numbers in
season two.”

He backed up the tape again to the commercial, British Foods
in season two, and again he played forward four minutes. “Watch that middle
screen,” he said.

After a minute, Liv said “the average scores went down at
the end of the commercial.”

“That’s right; that’s what I was getting at. Agonists
playing every character fell off – they’d practiced on season-one timing and
suddenly it was different in season two because WizWhiz had deleted about a
second and a half.”

“Wouldn’t that slip in scores be true everywhere WizWhiz
made a cut?” asked Jill.

“Yes, and it was. But in those other cuts, no one did what
Jill did here – adjust to the change and stay with the show. “Now let’s look at
Jill’s performance curve when Charley’s startle began, and watch the middle
screen. I’m isolating on Jill’s numbers, now.”

The tape rolled forward. “What did you see?”

Jill looked at the other two. “I guess my performance fell
off.”

“Right!” said Hub, “It did. But everybody else’s performance
fell off more, or wasn’t very good in the first place. For the next hundred
fourteen point five seconds, no one’s performance was better than Jill’s,
although from T-slice to T-slice many agonists scored as high as she did, at
the top of the Very Well quadrant. So now we’re not looking at how you won, Jill,
but how the other agonists lost.”

Jill brightened. “That’s proof, isn’t it? I didn’t cheat.
Everybody did poorly for two minutes, but I did less poorly than anyone else.”

“Right again!” said Hub. “So the show is safe and I’m safe
and Jill’s safe. And Liv never was in trouble.”

Jill smiled broadly but Liv was frowning.

“What’s the matter, Liv?” Hub asked.

“OK,” said Liv hesitantly. “So you two are off the hook, and
the producer too, and WizWhiz, and the network, and the show. But – I keep
thinking of Charley’s letter to me, the one he wrote the day, I guess, before
he was killed a year and a half ago.”

“Why?”

“I turned the letter over to Brent and he filed it
somewhere. Not that it had to be kept secret, just that almost everything in it
was moot when Charley died, volunteering some information and promising to
‘tell all’ if his daughter were protected. There was the information that
‘George’ was George’s last name not his first name, lived somewhere in
Maryland. Searching FBI and other databases turned up one man who might be our
guy, but he was untraceable.

“At the time, I didn’t think to wonder what moved Charley to
turn informer when for months he’d said either nothing or nonsense. But now I
think it might be connected to that startle: something came up in that trial he
didn’t expect, something that put the murder in a new light.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but we need to look at the tape from before
the commercial, not only after it. I think Chief Gardner was on the stand then.
He’d been testifying for a while, and Brent looked like he was about to say
“Your witness.” I think something was going on, and it had nothing to do with
Jill’s three million dollars.”

Jill was still annoyed. “So you’ve decided not to confiscate
my money?” Hub and Liv responded with a moment of embarrassed silence.

Liv spoke up. “So should we look at season one, or season
two maybe for this Gardner testimony?”

“There were no season-two cuts during Gardner’s testimony,”
Hub said. “We wouldn’t have cut in the middle of a witness’ turn in the box anyway
– so it doesn’t matter. But let’s go with season one, and now we won’t need the
datascreen anymore.”

Hub swiped some tiles on his remote. “Here it is,” he said,
“from the moment when Chief Gardner steps into the witness box, until just
before the commercial break. That’s ChronoSwiss in season one, British Foods in
season two. I’m going to fast forward over a few sections as we come to them,
just to speed things up. Anytime you want it slowed down, just say so. This is
your friend Brent Nielsen, Liv, ruining your case. Here it is.”

The tape rolled. Prosecutor Nielsen was saying, “Officer
Gardner, everyone appreciates your courage and resourcefulness that day, and
your valiant bravery in having sustained a wound in the service of justice.”

“What a suckup!” Liv interjected, laughing, “and he’s my new
Congressman!” The others nodded.

“We’re going to review the events,” Neilson continued on the
tape, “surrounding this crime from your point of view – a privileged point of
view because you were not only close to the victim and the shooter, but because
your training, experience, and expertise makes you a more reliable witness than
the ordinary citizen.”

Hub stopped the tape. “Couldn’t you have objected there,
Liv?” he asked.

“I did, and it was sustained. But Gardner wasn’t going to
add much to what other witnesses had already said.”

Hub inched forward on the tape, pausing to see if either
Jill or Liz had anything to say. Gardner was testifying, “Thank you. You’re
right. I’m trained to see things ordinary citizens might miss.”

This time, Jill laughed. “What an asshole!’” she said.

Hub said, “I’m going to skip around here until we get to
Gardner’s confusion or uncertainty about those shots: how many, who shot, and
so on. That seems to be what set Charlie off, and that startle that’s now made
Jill a millionaire.”

He swiped a few tiles. Neilson was saying, “Now please
describe what Congressman Barnes did when he got to the bottom of the steps,
and what you did.”

And Gardner said, “I guess – I mean, as I remember he raised
his hands over his head and put them together, you know, like a boxer? And
shook them. Then he turned left. His assistants – I guess they were his
assistants, had formed a line between the deceased and his campaign bus. Kinda
like a rope line, only there weren’t no rope.”

Hub stopped the tape. “So,” he said, “Charley could tell
exactly where Barnes was going to go to get back to that bus.” He turned the
tape back on. Nielsen was saying, “Now where were you in relation to him right
then?”

Gardner responded, “Ah, I was right behind him, maybe five
feet, scanning the crowd y’know, like I’m s’posed to.”

Nielsen continued. “And where was Mr. Sullivan?”

And Gardner said, “He came right down those steps behind me.
I glanced back and saw him there.”

“Where are we going with this,” Liv said. “I don’t see
anything useful yet.”

Hub didn’t look at her, mumbled “just wait.”

“A man – the defendant - came toward the deceased from the
side and stretched out his left hand. I thought that was funny, funny-odd I
mean, maybe he was a cripple or something – disabled we’re supposed to say now,
I guess, and couldn’t use his right hand. The hand I could see, the left hand
that is, was shaking pretty bad. ... And then the deceased, he reached out to
shake the man’s – the defendant’s – hand and I could see, having a side view of
the deceased, he was a little confused about how to shake hands with a man who
didn’t have the use of his right hand. ... But the deceased went ahead anyway
and reached out with his right hand toward the other man’s - the defendant’s –
left hand, and then the man – the defendant - pulled his right hand out of his
pocket and there was a gun – he was holding a gun – it was shaking - and he
pointed it at the deceased. ... I could see him real well. That guy, I mean, the
defendant. He pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket with his right hand and
shot the deceased.”

At that point on the tape, Liv had said, “Objection!” and
Judge DuCasse had said “Sustained.”

“What was that all about?” asked Hub.

“Just wait,” said Liv.

Hub resumed the tape. Gardner was saying, “OK, shot in the
direction of where the deceased was, it seemed to me that that’s where the gun
was pointed.”

“So how many shots was that, and where were they going?”
asked Hub.

Jill spoke up. “That’s coming out in the testimony in just a
minute. Hold on.”

Gardner was saying, “I thought about Jerry Sullivan right
behind me, that he was probably pulling his weapon out right then, and I was in
the line of fire and what the hell would I do now? I’d never worked with him
before and as I said, he was right behind me. So I waved my hand like this with
my hurt hand I mean, so he wouldn’t fire, not only for my safety but there were
a lot of people around, y’know? Citizens. Too reckless to take a shot right
then.”

Then Gardner said, “The killer – the defendant, I mean –
he’d turned and started running, like I said, so he didn’t seem like an
immediate threat. But I thought we could take him once he was past the crowd,
away from any citizens. We could shoot him down then.”

“But they missed, Gardner and Sullivan both missed,” said
Hub.

“Just watch,” said Liv. “I remember just then I was
wondering how I could cast some doubt on Gardner’s testimony,” said Liv. “Not
how I could challenge the basics of his story, but how I could make him look a
little confused, unsure of what Charley did and what he himself did. But I
couldn’t come up with anything. But let’s get back to the trial. Brent Nielsen
is asking Gardner a critical question that has never had a definitive answer.”