“No! That’s why I couldn’t tell him. I had just learned the night before about Rick’s version of what happened between him and my dad after Rick assaulted me in February. I didn’t know if I believed him; Rick was such a liar. But I didn’t want there to be any more trouble. So when I was driving over to my parents’ place with Tony, I thought about that and knew I couldn’t tell him even if I wanted to. I was afraid to.”
“You didn’t tell him?”
Braving the elements, Amy pushed back her chair and stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. Asked and answered several times over.”
Gomez finally seemed to agree that Stier had gone on long enough in this vein; she sustained this one.
Getting a bit histrionic, Stier blew out heavily in apparent frustration. But he hadn’t gotten to the point he’d been driving for, and now he came to it. “Ms. McGuire, did you ever tell anybody that you had a conversation with your father during which you told him all of these details—the drug in your drink, the rape itself, your fear and hatred of the victim?”
Wu cast a look around Moses at Hardy. Should she object again? Hardy gave his head a small shake. Though he hated it, this wasn’t the same question, not at all, that Stier had been asking in one form or another.
Brittany also got the difference. She looked to the judge, then turned back to Stier. “The question is whether I told anybody that I had told my dad any of this stuff?”
“Yes.”
“Why would I do that if I hadn’t done it?”
“Your Honor,” Stier responded, “would you direct the witness to answer the question?”
Gomez leaned over and did just that.
Brittany paused. Finally, the one perjured word: “No.”
“You never told anybody that you’d told your father about the rape sometime during that first day when you were at his apartment, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
Stier looked at her for a long moment, both stern and disappointed. “No further questions,” he said, and turned on his heel. “Mr. Hardy. Your witness.”
Gomez tapped her gavel. “If there is no objection,” she said, “we’ve all just sat through a long day of testimony, and tomorrow looks like it’s going to be the same. We’ve only got about fifteen minutes before we’d be adjourning anyway. Mr. Hardy, if you don’t mind postponing your cross-examination of Ms. McGuire until tomorrow morning, I propose we call it a day.”
“That’s fine with me, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Stier? Good. See you all tomorrow morning, nine-thirty sharp.” She gaveled again, and court was adjourned.
33
“TWENTY-FIVE WOMEN?” GINA Roake stopped pulling papers from her briefcase and looked across the expansive circular table at their investigator. “Really? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
It was five-thirty on the day of Brittany McGuire’s testimony. Wyatt Hunt had stretched his lanky frame out in a chair in the solarium at the law offices of Freeman Hardy & Roake. “That’s what Goodman said. Although he only had absolute proof from the six who identified him.”
“Six who identified who?” Dismas Hardy, coming in from his office across the lobby. “And all of those identifications, by the way, are probably no good. Ask Dr. Paley. That’ll be ten thousand dollars, please.”
Hunt looked over at Gina. “What’s he talking about?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell.” She turned to her partner. “Jon Lo’s massage parlors.”
“What about them?”
“Wyatt here was telling me that Rick Jessup was a regular customer in any number of Lo’s places and thought his job description had a clause that said he didn’t have to pay. Oh, and sometimes he’d smack a girl around.”
Hardy looked at Hunt. “Sometimes?”
“Maybe most of the time. It sounds like he’s a profoundly disturbed dude.”
“Was,” Hardy said. “Thank God. And I think we already knew that. But you got this at Goodman’s?”
Hunt nodded. “And lest they tell you otherwise, Lo and Goodman both knew about it for some time. Goodman was shopping for a new chief of staff even as Mr. Jessup was getting himself killed. It’s entirely possible that Lo didn’t think Goodman was moving fast enough or being punitive enough.”
“You got all this today?” Hardy pulled out a seat and sat.
“With all due modesty,” Hunt said, “I homered in every at bat.”
“There’s more?” Gina asked.
“Just a little bit. Do you know what Mr. Goodman did before he became a supervisor?”
“I know he was a lawyer,” Roake said.
“True, but not the same kind of philanthropic do-gooder lawyers as the present company.” He launched into a description of the Army Business. “In any case,” he concluded, “this would have been a clean way to put would-be surrogate mothers together with rich couples, and everybody’s happy. It could have been completely legal, except where’s the fun in that?
“Goodman came up with the wrinkle to hit on servicewomen who were back in the States after getting pregnant and coming back to deliver their babies. Soon, too soon, after the birth, they’d be up for another hitch in a war zone overseas, and this will shock you, but many didn’t want to go back. So Goodman paid them twenty grand out of his hundred-grand fee for brokering the deal, and meanwhile, all their medical expenses were paid by the government; plus, they remained on salary.”
Roake clucked derisively. “What a sleazeball.”
“But wait,” Hunt said. “That’s not the good part, at least for our purposes. The good part is Jessup.”
“Let me guess,” Hardy said. “Jessup helped find and identify the women.”
“Right so far. With a three-grand bonus for every one.” Silence built around the table. Hunt said, “Here’s a hint. Why didn’t Goodman fire him as soon as he found out about Lo’s girls?”
Hardy’s eyes, drawn and tired most of the day, threw a spark. “He couldn’t. Jessup would go public with what they’d done.”
“You think he was blackmailing him?” Gina asked. “Overtly, even?”
“Not impossible,” Hunt replied. “At least enough so that Goodman hadn’t figured out a way to fire him.”
“How’d you get all this, Wyatt?”
Hunt grinned. “That was probably the best part.”
ONLY BELATEDLY HAD Hardy realized that putting Wyatt and Gina in the same room might have been awkward. In spite of a relatively significant age difference—fifteen or sixteen years—the two had gone out for a couple of years. So when Hardy got back to the solarium after letting Hunt out, he addressed the issue head-on. “I hope you were okay with that? When I told Wyatt to come up, I didn’t think—”
Gina waved off the apology. “I’m a big girl, Diz. He’s a good guy. We’re cool.”
“You are cool,” he said. “Both of you. I love working with adults.” He sighed. “Especially after watching Brittany all afternoon. The poor girl is so confused. Did you ask why she cut her hair?”
“She didn’t want to be pretty anymore. She thinks that’s what got her in all this trouble.”
“She’s not all wrong.”
“It’s not the pretty,” Gina said. “It’s how you handle it. She’ll figure it out someday.”
“Spoken by one who knows.”
Gina gave him a look, then broke a wide smile. “Although sincere flattery,” she said, “always has its place.” With that, she opened her briefcase on the table in front of her. “Now, do you want to help Amy prep her cross of Brittany or talk about this new stuff?”
Hardy pondered. “I like the idea that we have two new guys in play and two new motives.”
“You really think we do? If you bring up either one, you’re essentially going SODDIT with both Goodman and Lo.” SODDIT, an acronym for “some other dude did it,” was a common defense tactic. “I’m thinking it sounds good in theory, but it’s a bit of a stretch if we’re asking the jury to believe even for a minute that one of these guy
s had Jessup killed, even if they both had a reason to. In Goodman’s case especially . . . I mean, a city supervisor. You’re stirring up a big hornets’ nest. You can expect to get yourself stung. Not to mention that as we sit here now, we can’t prove any piece of any parcel of any morsel of it.”
“I’m not worried about that. Let’s remember, Dan White was a supervisor, so we’ve got precedent.”
“Dan White was a wackjob.” That may have been true, but White did shoot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk dead in their city hall offices in 1978. “Precedent doesn’t put Goodman in our victim’s house that Sunday.”
“Maybe he hired it done.”
Roake drew her eyebrows together. “Well, one way or the other, you’d better find out what he was doing that day if you’re going to bring that up. It would be embarrassing if he was, say, in Hawaii or up at Tahoe.”
“All right, but what about Lo? He’s evidently got a whole staff of enforcers and bodyguards. They keep his women in line; maybe they keep his enemies in line, too. Or the people who beat up on his people.”
Gina sat still for a minute. “Don’t get me wrong. This is interesting stuff, and we need to get it in front of the jury to give them something else to think about. But if we’re going down that road, we ought to decide which choice is better, so we’re not just pointing at people Jessup knew more or less at random, since he was evidently a prick to everybody. And, again, it wouldn’t hurt to have at least a shred of evidence to back up whatever we’re going to propose.”
“You don’t think it’s worth it to show what a son of a bitch Jessup was?”
Roake shrugged. “There isn’t anyone on the jury who doesn’t already believe he’s a rapist. How much do you want them to hate him?”
“With all their hearts. But I get your point. He can’t get more dead than he already is. More’s the pity.” Another thought struck him. “Hey, maybe it was one of Lo’s girls. One of the ones he beat up.”
“Diz, whoa. Maybe it was Bigfoot. You’re getting carried away. When in reality, guess what?”
“What?”
“Maybe it was Moses.”
FOR REASONS TOO karmic to explain, at least two of Hardy’s favorite lifetime moments had occurred at the front door of Abe Glitsky’s duplex.
One time Glitsky had opened the door holding his daughter, Rachel, at his shoulder. She had already puked down the diaper on his shoulder, and one of her pink booties had found its way to his ear, where it hung for at least thirty seconds before Abe became aware of it and ripped it off. Hardy’s visual of it could still make him laugh out loud.
The other time, when Hardy was many years younger and in the immature phase that had probably lasted far too long, he and Abe had been coming back from wherever they’d been, and it had been pouring rain. Glitsky had thrown Hardy his keys—probably because in those days Hardy tended to take stairs two at a time—and Hardy had gotten to the door and let himself in, and then (proof that Satan was continually at work in the world) that darn devil had made him close the door and lock it in time for Glitsky’s arrival.
“Diz, you crazy person, what are you doing? Open the door.”
“Say ‘please.’ ”
“I’m not going to say ‘please.’ Just open the door.”
“Come on, Abe. Just say ‘please.’ ”
Through the peephole, he watched Glitsky stoically bear the burden, rain pelting down on his head, fat drops running down the lines of his face. After thirty or more seconds, Glitsky sighed and gave in. “All right,” he said at last through gritted teeth, “please.”
“Fuck you.” A jovial Hardy couldn’t say it fast enough. “Say ‘pretty please.’ ”
Over the years, Glitsky had tried to get him back in myriad ways any number of times, but try as he might to appear ferocious and unyielding, at base he didn’t have the streak of utter cruelty that Hardy kept in a special place close to his heart. Nevertheless, every visit to Glitsky’s door contained the tiniest germ of the possibility for adventure, revenge, and retribution.
Tonight Hardy’s stop wasn’t going to depend on fate. Glitsky had texted him that he’d be home by six, and about an hour after that, Hardy walked up the twelve steps that led to the landing and rang the doorbell.
No one answered.
Hardy rang again, heard the chime inside. Nothing.
He knocked, then put his ear to the door. Nobody home.
Swearing at the wasted precious time, especially when he was at trial, he turned and started down the steps. Abe didn’t usually propose a time and then not show up. Hardy hoped he was okay. The kids. Treya. Life with young children was endlessly uncertain. Whatever it was, he thought, Abe would have to tell him about it on the phone, or maybe they could meet somewhere in the morning. In fact . . .
Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, he got out his cell and was locating Abe’s number when the door opened above him and Rachel and Zachary called down at him: “Uncle Diz, Uncle Diz!”
“Hey, guys.” Wondering where they’d been hiding out, or maybe they’d just been in the backyard, he waved and started up the stairs, got to the landing, and saw the door was closed, so he knocked. “Guys!”
Behind the door, he heard both of them cry out in unison, “Say ‘please.’ ” And howl with laughter.
Now those jokester kids frolicked in the backyard while Hardy and Abe sat on the stairs and watched them. “No, really,” Hardy was saying. “That was great. I enjoyed it. Especially since I’m in trial and have nothing important to do with my time.”
“Your time.” Glitsky puffed out a chortle. “Maybe a minute and a half.”
“If I were Winston Paley,” Hardy replied, “that would cost you almost ten bucks.”
“Who’s Winston Paley?”
Hardy told him, then went on a bit about Brittany and her testimony.
“So it’s not going well?” Glitsky asked when he’d finished.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No? I read between the lines.”
“Actually,” Hardy said, “we may have had a little bit of a breakthrough. Wyatt Hunt found a couple of guys—you know them, Goodman and Lo—who hated Jessup and may have wanted to do him harm.”
“Did they have opportunity?”
“We’re working on that. Did you guys ever talk to them about this?”
“Us guys?”
“You. The police. Homicide.”
“You forget I was removed about that time.”
“I didn’t forget. I forget nothing. I thought it might have been before they got around to you.”
“Well. No.”
“Just thought I’d ask.” Hardy chanced a quick perusal of his friend. Clean-shaven, casually but nicely dressed, cop shoes on and laced up. In all, a significant improvement in a very short time. “But you had something for me, unless that was part of the setup for that laugh riot of a joke your kids played at the door.”
“No. That was separate.” Glitsky took a beat. “I heard back from Bill Schuyler.”
“This is turning out to be a fruitful day,” Hardy said. “What’d he know?”
“He knows your guy. Or rather, he knows the marshal who handles your guy.”
“Does he know his real name?”
“That was not happening. He’s sticking with Tony.”
“Tony’s okay,” Hardy said. “What’d he do?”
“He is evidently a cop, which we suspected. The other thing he did, though”—Glitsky drew a breath—“was kill people for money.”
TONY SAT WITH a Sierra Nevada pale ale on the couch in Brittany’s tiny living room. She sat across from him, curled up in pajamas, a towel wrapped turban-style around her head, a glass of white wine beading onto the glass-topped coffee table. A reggae playlist pumped softly out of an invisible speaker. “I let myself off early,” he said. “I booked Lynne for my shifts for the rest of the week. She was happy for the work.”
“Where are you going?”
“I�
��m not sure I’m going anywhere. But they want me in court tomorrow, and I don’t know how long that will go. I thought I’d give myself some time. Also, I wanted to see how it went with you today. I missed you down at the bar.”
“I can’t go there for a while. After the riot the other night . . .”
“No. I hear you. Of course. I didn’t expect you. You mind if I’m here?”
“Not at all. You mind if I’m not feeling particularly sexy?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t be, either, if you saw my head.”
He grinned at her. “I bet I would. But we don’t have to test the theory. I actually like the turban look. But that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Pretty obviously.”
“If it’s meant to be, it’ll be,” he said.
“So what are you here for?”
He paused, met her solemn gaze. “You, I suppose. Just you.”
“You probably think I’ve been stringing you along.”
“I probably think you got raped, is what I probably think. Anybody who doesn’t get that doesn’t deserve you.”
“Okay, but almost four months?”
He leaned back into the cushions. “Hey, if you’re trying to talk yourself into something, you won’t hear me complain. But I’m good. I’m a grown-up. I can handle waiting around for something that’s supremely worth it.”
“It might not be.”
“I’m willing to chance it.” He sipped at his beer. “So how’d it go today?”
“Pretty rough. Reliving it, I suppose. My uncle tried to ease things up a little, but he didn’t have much luck.”
“He’s a good guy,” Tony said. “Even if he isn’t much of a fan of mine lately.”
“Oh, I’m sure he is. He’s just working. He gets preoccupied.”
“Maybe.” He paused. “It’s like he doesn’t trust me.”
“Why wouldn’t he trust you?”
“Well, the Beck, for one. That was pretty shitty of me, though it never went anywhere. I just hadn’t met you yet.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I get it. I’m as guilty of that as you are. I think she’s over the whole thing, anyway. Ben’s great for her.”
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