The Ophelia Cut

by John Lescroart

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got to get some traction someplace. I don’t need to tell you.”

  “We’re working on it,” Hardy said. “We’re working on it.”

  IT TURNED OUT—and the afternoon session proved—that Hardy was right about the truth coming out. To a generation for whom it was routine to appear in all kinds of compromising positions, in various social media outlets, the idea of a secret that was really a secret—in the sense that it was inviolable and you didn’t tell anybody—was not exactly in common currency. The afternoon in the courtroom was an object lesson in that reality.

  Besides Tony and the Beck (which was why, Hardy realized, his daughter hadn’t been on Stier’s witness list—Ugly didn’t need her), three other friends of Brittany knew, and all of them testified, that she had told them not only about informing her father but when.

  Sunday, at her parents’, before she’d gone back to her apartment.

  If nothing else, by the time they adjourned for the day, Stier had locked up motive. Whether or not anyone on the jury believed that the defendant had murdered Rick Jessup, Hardy felt they must already be unanimous in believing that he had a reason to.

  35

  DATE NIGHT TENDED to be a casualty of Hardy’s trial schedule, but today he had called Frannie after his lunch with McGuire and Gina and asked if she would meet up with him tonight. He told her he needed to see her as his counselor and adviser and, not incidentally, as the sister of his client.

  Frannie took a cab from the house, and they met at seven o’clock at the Elite Cafe on Fillmore, one of their favorite places, with great gumbo and a curtained booth—similar to the private booths at Sam’s—that Hardy had reserved before court reconvened after lunch. He caught her surprised and somewhat disapproving look when he placed his order for a Cajun martini. After the waiter had gone, he said, “You make these for me at home all the time.”

  “They make them stronger here.”

  “They just taste stronger because of the pepper.”

  “I think it might be the alcohol.”

  “Sometimes a man needs more alcohol.”

  “So they say. But most of the time you don’t, especially when you’re at trial. Is tomorrow an off day?”

  Hardy chuckled at the idea. “No, though probably it won’t be too bad. If I’m guessing, tomorrow is either more of Brittany’s unreliable friends, which Stier doesn’t really need, or he goes to eyewitnesses, who will basically cross-examine themselves, I hope. Especially after the good Dr. Paley. The bottom line is that nobody saw your brother doing anything but walking down the street.”

  “Don’t forget the shillelagh.”

  “I never would. But still, a guy with a club. So what?”

  “Not exactly a fishing pole.”

  Hardy shrugged. “None of that puts him in Jessup’s place.”

  The waiter returned, pushing back the curtain of the booth, delivering their drinks. When he’d closed it again, Frannie lifted her chardonnay and said, “If you’re not concerned about the eyewitnesses, why do you need the stronger drink?”

  Hardy sipped his martini, paused. “They nailed down motive today. Brittany’s friends were lining up to say that she had told them all about telling her dad, how pissed off he was, almost incoherent with rage. So angry that he scared her and Susan.”

  “They said that?”

  “And so much more.”

  Frannie put her glass down, untouched. Hardy saw a tremor in her hand. “You’re saying they’re going to find him guilty.”

  “I never say that until the last gavel falls. With juries, we know, anything can happen. But I have to say that after today, it gets way trickier. He knows it, too.” Hardy hesitated. “I thought maybe you could talk to him.”

  “About?”

  Hardy let out a breath. “The usual. That he’s got to watch himself, never let his guard down, especially if he’s surprised and gets mad. He’s sick of hearing that message from me, but you might remind him how important his silence on the other matter is not only to me and him and Gina and Abe but also you, his favorite sister.”

  “He already knows that, Dismas. He really does.”

  “Okay. But I think you’ll agree that when his emotions get involved, he might do something stupid and forget.”

  “And you think I could influence him?” Sitting back, Frannie met her husband’s eyes, looked away, then came back. “What do you think I could say that would make any difference?”

  “Well, that’s the other thing.”

  “What?”

  Hardy turned the stem of his martini glass. “As we know, his story now, lately, is that he didn’t kill Jessup. And if that’s true, he shouldn’t do time for it. There’s no argument to that.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But if he did do it . . . ?”

  “But he didn’t.”

  Hardy stared at her. “If he did do it,” he went on, “and the jury convicts him, you might be able to make him see that this is his solitary burden, that he brought it on himself. It’s got nothing to do with the dockside thing, but because he’s who he is, he’ll be tempted to talk about it, bring up the moral similarities. Except in this case, Jessup, Moses knew when he did it that he might get punished, probably would get punished. Hell, Jessup might have fought him off and killed him. He took the risk alone, and this is the consequence for him alone. It’s harsh, and he doesn’t want to hear it, but there it is.” He spread his hands. “You know him, Fran. He’s a philosopher. And at least that’s an argument.”

  “And you want me to make it?”

  “More than that, Fran,” he said. “I think you’re the only one who can.”

  THE HEAVY STUFF wasn’t over yet. Hardy was moving fried oysters around on his plate, his appetite having deserted him before the gumbo even arrived. “Brittany,” he was saying, “is who I’m really worried about. Especially if it’s true.”

  “You think Abe’s FBI guy lied to him?”

  “No. At least not on purpose. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t get lied to and pass along the bad information. These U.S. Marshals have been known to misdirect inquiries, get people off their trail. Unlike, apparently, the majority of Americans under thirty, they take their secrets pretty seriously.”

  “If it’s true, we have to tell Brittany.”

  “That’s what I’ve been wrestling with, Fran. What good is that going to do? Maybe, probably, she already knows. They’ve been going out for three months. He told the Beck about himself after about three minutes.”

  “Leaving out the good part, though.”

  “That he’s a professional killer? That part?”

  “What if she doesn’t know?” Frannie asked.

  “Then how would knowing about it help her?”

  “Well, if nothing else, she’d know he was truly a dangerous guy.”

  “You don’t think she knows that already? You don’t think that’s part of the attraction? She’ll never believe he’s dangerous to her.” Hardy dragged a palm down the side of his face. “Here’s what I’m really wondering. What if, purely if, it was Tony who heard about Brittany getting raped and went over and killed Rick Jessup? Because, you know, that’s what he does.”

  Frannie sat back in her seat, her eyes wide.

  “Let’s just go with it for a minute,” he continued. “If he’s in love or even lust with Brittany, will he let her father have this trial and maybe even go to prison?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t he? At least it’s not him. And, in fact, if Moses does go down, it makes Brittany even more vulnerable, doesn’t it? Then Tony’s the only man left in her life. Do you really think that’s possible?”

  “I don’t know. Ever since Abe told me last night, the possibility has kind of gnawed at me. Tony was the first one Brittany told about the rape. What stops him, after he drops her off at her parents’, from going over to Jessup’s right then, or the next morning, or sometime the next afternoon?”

  “But he didn’t have the sh
illelagh,” Frannie argued. “Moses had the shillelagh.”

  “Who says it had to be a shillelagh? It could have been the butt of a gun. It could have been a wine bottle. A wrench from the saddlebags on a bike. A rock from the garden, for Christ’s sake. Any hard, blunt object.”

  Frannie was shaking her head. “No, no, no. If somebody brought a gun, especially an ex-cop who supposedly has killed other people, don’t you think he’ll use the gun? And if he’s accustomed to a gun—and you’d have to think that’s the professional weapon of choice, wouldn’t you?—then he’s not going to try something new on the spur of the moment.”

  “He might. What if he’s really enraged? What if killing gets him off? What if he starts out with a swing at the head and it feels so right, he just keeps going? What if he didn’t have a gun at all and just felt like he needed to kill the guy right away with whatever was closest to hand? How have I not once thought of this before yesterday? How come nobody else thought of it?”

  “Because it’s been about Moses the whole time. Nobody—certainly not the cops—even looked at anybody else, did they? I mean, wasn’t that the whole deal with that different warrant? Just go get Moses and get him now?”

  “I’ve got to get Tony back on the stand.”

  The two of them sat staring at each other, numbed with the import of what Hardy had spun out. The waiter opened the curtain and cleared away the mostly untouched appetizers. When he closed the booth again, Frannie said, “You don’t want to get him on the stand, Dismas, at least not to accuse him of anything. You don’t want him thinking that you have any suspicions of him at all. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Hardy’s eyes were focused somewhere over Frannie’s shoulder.

  “Diz?” she asked.

  “It couldn’t be any clearer,” he said.

  THEY WERE IN Brittany’s apartment, in her bedroom, in the afterglow.

  Tony, naked, got up to bring back a pint of ice cream from the freezer, and she pulled the bedsheet up around her, tucking it in under her arms, covering her breasts. Through the bedroom door, she watched him padding around in the kitchen, carrying the ice cream over for a short blast in the microwave, grabbing some spoons from the utensil drawer.

  Thank God it was all over, she was thinking, her actual testimony. And Tony’s. Maybe now her life could get back to some kind of normal. She had to admit that things didn’t look good for her father, but she had a lot of faith in her uncle Dismas, who, as far as she knew, hadn’t lost a big case in his career. Of course, there was a first time for everything, but he didn’t have his reputation for nothing. She wasn’t going to worry about her father until they brought in a guilty verdict. And even then, they could appeal.

  The most important thing was knowing that her father hadn’t done it. She’d picked up enough from listening to Uncle Diz outline the stuff he’d found out about Liam Goodman and Jon Lo. Both of them had serious problems with Rick and every reason in the world to want him dead—maybe more than her father did. They didn’t have a timetable for how it must have happened, but her uncle had private investigators working on it, and she was sure they’d come up with something.

  The other great thing was that Tony’s testimony, as he’d convinced her, had made no difference. If he had been the only one contradicting what she’d said, in spite of her protestations to the contrary, it would have been a problem between them. Instead, there’d been three others. She couldn’t believe the number of people she’d told. She felt pretty stupid about that, irresponsible, but she’d learned her lesson. People say they won’t tell anybody your secrets, and then they tell their three closest friends. That had been her, too, but not anymore.

  Never.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Today,” she said. “Getting this behind me. I never want to go into a courtroom again. I don’t know how you did it all the time as a cop.”

  “You notice I’ve stopped being a cop. Now you know why.”

  She reached out for the ice cream container, scraped off a spoonful, and ate it. “Also,” she said, “I’m wondering if my uncle’s idea of how he’s going to get my dad off is going to work.”

  “What’s his idea?”

  “Get the jury thinking other people had motive, too.”

  “Did he mention any names?”

  “One of them is your old friend the supervisor.” She started to give him some of the details of Hardy’s investigation when her cell phone chimed on the bedside table. She handed the ice cream container back to Tony and, reaching over, looked at the display, then pressed the connect button and brought the phone up to her ear. “Hey, Beck.”

  Two minutes later, teary-eyed again, she had her laptop open on the bed. The Chronicle’s home page filled her screen. It was a picture of Brittany and Tony approaching the back door to the Hall of Justice that morning. The caption began: “Sporting a Giants hat and accompanied by a new bodyguard, Brittany McGuire . . .”

  “It’s never going to end,” she said. “Never.”

  Tony couldn’t seem to tear his eyes from the computer screen.

  “The Beck said the picture is also on People’s daily website, where they call you my ‘hunky new bodyguard.’ I don’t understand why they can’t just leave us alone.”

  A muscle in his jaw working, Tony didn’t answer her.

  “Tony?”

  “I’m here.” After a minute, “The guy got us pretty good, didn’t he?”

  “We should have gone for his camera and smashed the damn thing.”

  At last Tony reached out and closed the laptop. “This is going to be in the paper tomorrow?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  His face set, his eyes dark, Tony nodded several times.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m not thinking anything.”

  36

  EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY HAD played a crucial role in identifying Moses McGuire as a suspect, which was why Hardy had gone to such lengths and expense to discredit it. But when the first witness got up and took the stand on Thursday morning, Hardy found that she had little if anything of substance to contribute to the prosecution.

  Susan Antaramian was the upstairs neighbor who’d heard what sounded like a struggle in the apartment below that Sunday evening, and who’d looked out her window to see a man in jeans and hiking boots and an orange and black Giants jacket leave the building. Stier, expecting God knew what, led her through the recital, taking an excruciatingly painful twenty minutes, and at the end of that testimony, Hardy—barely hiding his impatience at this all but meaningless nonsense—finished her off in less than five. Could she identify that man as Moses McGuire, sitting at the defense table? She could not. Did she see this person in the building at all? No. Did she see him enter or leave Mr. Jessup’s apartment? No. After this man left the building, did she go downstairs to see if Mr. Jessup was all right? No.

  Indeed, Antaramian’s testimony was so inconclusive that Gomez invited counsel up to the bench. “Mr. Stier, I don’t mean to interfere with how you’re presenting your case, but I would hope that if you plan to continue in this vein with your eyewitnesses, they will have something of a little more relevance to contribute.”

  “. . . ABOUT THE MOST tedious six hours I have ever spent in a courtroom.” Hardy paced between the Sutter Street windows and the coffee station in his office. Wyatt Hunt lounged nearly sideways in one of the leather armchairs. Hardy went on. “It was exactly as I knew it would be. Yeah, it was him. Yeah, I ran into him in the street that Sunday night. Yeah, I picked him out of the six-pack of pictures and then out of a lineup. Still him. Yep, that’s him over at the defense table. Okay, I’ll point at him. Yes, that’s the defendant, Moses McGuire. Jesus Christ!

  “So then I pull out every single discrepancy, uncertainty, and inconsistency from every witness. And if they did see him, so the fuck what? Did they ever see him with the victim? Did they ever see him near the apar
tment? No? Then what the hell does it matter where else they saw him?”

  Hardy stopped. “And now here I am, haranguing you and making the day even longer, aren’t I?”

  “I can take it,” Hunt said. “Spew some more if you must.”

  Hardy went over to the counter, picked up his coffee cup, and turned around. “I should be happy we lost no ground today. That’s how I should look at it. But that was the longest day of my adult life. Moses and I started playing hangman right there at our table . . . I know, inappropriate. And if the jurors had seen it. But they couldn’t, ’cause they were all sleeping, too.” Hardy leaned against the corner of his desk, sipped his coffee, made a face. “Okay, I’m done. How’d your day go?”

  “Decent. Mr. Goodman didn’t want to see me again after the other day, but these guys, Lo and Goodman, I’m predicting a sad future for their relationship. You’ll remember that Lo gave up the fact that Goodman kept Jessup on, in spite of his bad behavior with Lo’s girls, because Jessup was blackmailing him about the Army Business.”

  “Got it.”

  “But except for Lo’s word, I had no proof or even corroboration that the blackmail was actually happening. So I thought it might be productive to ask Goodman about it directly. The Army Business.”

  “And how’d he take that?”

  “He didn’t know what I was talking about, naturally. In his law practice he’d fortunately been able to help place a lot of childless couples with surrogate mothers. What did I suppose Jessup would blackmail him about?”

  “What, indeed?” Hardy asked.

  “I told him I supposed that was the reason he called it the Army Business. That all the surrogates, or at least a large percentage of them, were still on active duty. That Jessup’s job was finding these women and putting them in touch with him, for which he got a big bonus. And that this was all defrauding the U.S. government out of the women’s wages and medical expenses.”