Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver

by Jeffery Deaver

Behind him Tribow heard the man's widow inhale in shock.

  "What were those rumors?"

  "Valdez got it into his head that Mr. Hartman'd been seeing his wife. I know he wasn't, but Valdez was convinced of it. The guy was a little, you know, nuts in the head. He thought a lot of guys were, you know, seeing his wife."

  "Objection," Tribow snapped.

  "Let me rephrase. What did Mr. Valdez ever say to you about Mr. Hartman and his wife?"

  "He said he was going to get even with Hartman because of the affair — I mean, the supposed affair."

  "Objection," Tribow called again.

  "Hearsay exception," the judge called. "I'll let it stand."

  Tribow glanced at the face of Valdez's widow, shaking her head slowly, tears running down her cheeks.

  The defense lawyer said to Tribow, "Your witness."

  The prosecutor did his best to punch holes in the man's story. He thought he did a pretty good job. But much of the testimony had been speculation and opinion — the rumors of the affair, for instance — and there was little he could do to discredit him. He returned to his chair.

  Relax, Tribow told himself and set down the pen he'd been playing with compulsively. The murder-two charge was still alive and well. All they'd have to find was that Hartman had in fact killed Valdez — as Tribow had already proven — and that he'd decided at the last minute to murder him.

  The defense lawyer called another witness.

  He was a Latino — a grandfatherly sort of man, balding, round. A friendly face. His name was Cristos Abrego and he described himself as a good friend of the defendant's.

  Tribow considered this and concluded that the jury's concerns about Abrego's potential bias were outweighed by the fact that the suspect, it seemed, had "good friends" in the minority community (a complete lie, of course; Hartman, Anglo, saw minorities not as friends but only as golden opportunities for his extortion and loan-sharking operations).

  "Now you heard the prosecution witness say that Mr. Hartman went looking for Mr. Valdez the day of the tragic shooting?"

  "Tragic?" Wu whispered. "He's making it sound like an accident."

  "Yessir," the witness answered the lawyer's question.

  "Can you confirm that Mr. Hartman went looking for Mr. Valdez on the day of the shooting?"

  "Yessir, it is true. Mr. Hartman did go looking for him."

  Tribow leaned forward. Where was this going?

  "Could you explain what happened and what you observed?"

  "Yessir. I'd been in church with Mr. Hartman —"

  "Excuse me," the lawyer said. "Church?"

  "Yeah, him and me, we went to the same church. Well, he went more than me. He went at least twice a week. Sometimes three."

  "Brother," an exasperated Adele Viamonte said.

  Tribow counted four crucifixes hanging from the necks of the jury, and not a single eyebrow among these men and women rose in irony at this gratuitous mention of the defendant's piety.

  "Please go on, Mr. Abrego."

  "And I stopped in the Starbucks with Mr. Hartman and we got some coffee and sat outside. Then he asked a couple of people if they'd seen Valdez, 'cause he hangs out in Starbucks a lot."

  "Do you know why the defendant wanted to see Valdez?"

  "He wanted to give him this game he bought for Valdez's kid."

  "What?" the widow, behind Tribow, whispered in shock. "No, no, no…"

  "A present, you know. Mr. Hartman loves kids. And he wanted to give it to Valdez for his boy."

  "Why did he want to give Mr. Valdez a present?"

  Abrego said, "He said he wanted to patch things up with Valdez. He felt bad the man had those crazy ideas about him and his wife and was worried that the boy would hear and think they were true. So he thought a present for the kid'd break the ice. Then he was going to talk to Valdez and try to convince him that he was wrong."

  "Keep going, sir. What happened next?"

  "Then Mr. Hartman sees Valdez outside his store and he gets up from the table and goes over to him."

  "And then?"

  "Ray waves to Valdez and says, 'Hi,' or something like that. 'How you doing?' I don't know. Something friendly. And he starts to hand him the bag but Valdez just pushes it away and starts yelling at him."

  "Do you know what they were yelling about?"

  "Valdez was saying all kinds of weird stuff. Like: 'I know you've been seeing my wife for five years.' Which was crazy 'cause Valdez just moved here last year."

  "No!" the widow cried. "It's all a lie!"

  The judge banged his gavel down, though it was with a lethargy that suggested his sympathies were with the woman.

  Tribow sighed in disgust. Here the defense had introduced a motive suggesting that Valdez, not Hartman, might have been the aggressor in the fight that day.

  "I know it wasn't true," the witness said to the defense lawyer. "Mr. Hartman'd never do anything like that. He was really religious."

  Two references to the archangel Raymond C. Hartman.

  The lawyer then asked, "Did you see what happened next?"

  "It was all kind of a blur but I saw Valdez grab something — a metal pipe or a piece of wood — and swing it at Mr. Hartman. He tried to back away but there was no place for him to go — they were in this alley. Finally — it looked like he was going to get his head cracked open — Mr. Hartman pulled out his gun. He was just going to threaten Valdez —"

  "Objection. The witness couldn't know what the defendant's intentions were."

  The lawyer asked the witness, "What, Mr. Abrego, was your impression of Mr. Hartman's intention?"

  "It looked like he was just going to threaten Valdez. Valdez swung at him a few more times with the pipe but Mr. Hartman still didn't shoot. Then Valdez grabbed his arm and they were struggling for the gun. Mr. Hartman was yelling for people to get down and shouting to Valdez, 'Let go! Let go! Somebody'll get hurt.'"

  Which was hardly the reckless behavior or heat of passion that Tribow had to show in proving the manslaughter count.

  "Mr. Hartman was pretty brave. I mean, he coulda run and saved himself but he was worried about bystanders. He was like that, always worrying about other people — especially kids."

  Tribow wondered who'd written the script. Hartman himself, he guessed, it was so bad.

  "Then I ducked cause I thought if Valdez got the gun away he'd just start shooting like a madman and I got scared. I heard a gunshot and when I got up off the ground I saw that Valdez was dead."

  "What was the defendant doing?"

  "He was on his knees, trying to help Valdez. Stopping the bleeding, it looked like, calling for help. He was very shaken up."

  "No further questions."

  On cross, Tribow tried to puncture Abregos testimony too but because it was cleverly hedged ("It was all kind of a blur…" "I'm not sure…" "There was this rumor…") he had nothing specific with which to discredit the witness. The prosecutor planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of the jury by asking again, several times, if Hartman had paid the witness anything or threatened him or his family. But, of course, the man denied that.

  The defense then called a doctor, whose testimony was short and to the point.

  "Doctor, the coroner's report shows the victim was shot once in the side of the head. Yet you heard the testimony of the prior witness that the two men were struggling face-to-face. How could the victim have been shot in that way?"

  "Very simple. A shot in the side of the head would be consistent with Mr. Valdez turning his head away from the weapon while he was exerting pressure on the trigger, hoping to hit Mr. Hartman."

  "So, in effect, you're saying that Mr. Valdez shot himself."

  "Objection!"

  "Sustained."

  The lawyer said, "You're saying that it's possible Mr. Valdez was turning away while he himself pulled the trigger of the weapon, resulting in his own death?"

  "That's correct."

  "No further questions."

  Tribow aske
d the doctor how it was that the coroner didn't find any gunshot residue on Valdez's hands, which would have been present if he'd fired the gun himself, while Mr. Hartman's had residue on them. The doctor replied, "Simple. Mr. Hartman's hands were covering Mr. Valdez's and so they got all the residue on them."

  The judge dismissed the witness and Tribow returned to the table with a glance at the stony face of the defendant, who was staring back at him.

  You're going to lose…

  Well, Tribow hadn't thought that was possible a short while before, but now there was a real chance that Hartman would walk.

  Then the defense lawyer called his final witness: Raymond Hartman himself.

  His testimony gave a story identical to that of the other witnesses and supported his case: that he always carried his gun, that Valdez had this weird idea about Hartman and Valdez's wife, that he'd never extorted anyone in his life, that he bought a present for the Valdez boy, that he wanted to enlist Valdez's help in putting money into the Latino community, that the struggle occurred just as the witness said. Though he added a coda: his giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Valdez.

  He continued, with a glance at the four Latino and three black jurors. "I get a lot of hassles because I want to help minority businesses. For some reason the police and the city and state — they don't like that. And here I ended up accidentally hurting one of the very people I'm trying to help." He looked sorrowfully at the floor.

  Adele Viamonte's sigh could be heard throughout the courtroom and drew a glare from the judge.

  The lawyer thanked Hartman and said to Tribow, "Your witness."

  "What're we going to do, boss?" Wu whispered.

  Tribow glanced at the two people on his team, who'd worked so tirelessly, for endless hours, on this case. Then he looked behind him into the eyes of Carmen Valdez, whose life had been so terribly altered by the man sitting on the witness stand, gazing placidly at the prosecutors and the people in the gallery.

  Tribow pulled Chuck Wu's laptop computer closer to him and scrolled through the notes that the young man had taken over the course of the trial. He read for a moment then stood slowly and walked toward Hartman.

  In his trademark polite voice he asked, "Mr. Hartman, I'm curious about one thing."

  "Yessir?" the killer asked, just as polite. He'd been coached well by his attorneys, who'd undoubtedly urged him never to get flustered or angry on the stand.

  "The game you got for Mr. Valdez's son."

  The eyes flickered. "Yes? What about it?"

  "What was it?"

  "One of those little video games. A GameBoy."

  "Was it expensive?"

  A smile of curiosity. "Yeah, pretty expensive. But I wanted to do something nice for Jose and his kid. I felt bad because his father was pretty crazy —"

  "Just answer the question," Tribow interrupted.

  "It cost about fifty or sixty bucks."

  "Where did you get it?"

  "A toy store in the mall. I don't remember the name."

  Tribow considered himself a pretty good lie detector and he could see that Hartman was making all this up. He'd probably seen an ad for GameBoys that morning. He doubted, however, that the jury could tell. To them he was simply cooperating and politely answering the prosecutor's somewhat curious questions.

  "What did this video game do?"

  "Objection," the lawyer called. "What's the point?"

  "Your Honor," Tribow said. "I'm just trying to establish a relationship between the defendant and the victim."

  "Go ahead, Mr. Tribow, but I don't think we need to know what kind of box this toy came in."

  "Actually, sir, I was going to ask that."

  "Well, don't."

  "I won't. Now, Mr. Hartman, what did this game do?"

  "I don't know — you shot spaceships or something."

  "Did you play with it before giving it to Mr. Valdez?"

  From the corner of his eye he saw Viamonte and Wu exchange troubled glances, wondering what on earth their boss was up to.

  "No," Hartman answered. For the first time on the stand he seemed testy. "I don't like games. Anyway, it was a present. I wasn't gonna open it up before I gave it to the boy."

  Tribow nodded, raising an eyebrow, and continued his questioning. "Now the morning of the day Jose Valdez was shot did you have this game with you when you left your house?"

  "Yessir."

  "Was it in a bag?"

  He thought for a moment. "It was, yeah, but I put it in my pocket. It wasn't that big."

  "So your hands would be free?"

  "I guess. Probably."

  "And you left your house when?"

  "Ten-forty or so. Mass was at eleven."

  Tribow then asked, "Which church?"

  "St. Anthonys."

  "And you went straight there? With the game in your pocket?"

  "Yes, that's right."

  "And the game was with you in the church?"

  "Correct."

  "But no one would have seen it because it was in your pocket."

  "I guess that'd be right." Still polite, still unflustered.

  "And when you left the church you walked along Maple Street to the Starbucks in the company of the earlier witness, Mr. Cristos Abrego?"

  "Yes, that's right."

  "And the game was still in your pocket?"

  "No."

  "It wasn't?"

  "No. At that point I took it out and was carrying it in the bag."

  Tribow whirled to face him and asked in a piercing voice, "Isn't it true that you didn't have the game with you in church?"

  "No," Hartman said, blinking in surprise but keeping his voice even and low, "that's not true at all. I had the game with me all day. Until I was attacked by Valdez."

  "Isn't it true that you left church, returned home, got the game and then drove to Starbucks?"

  "No, I wouldn't've had time to go home after church and get the game. Mass was over at noon. I got to Starbucks about ten minutes later. I told you, my house is a good twenty minutes away from the church. You can check a map. I went straight from St. Anthony's to Starbucks."

  Tribow looked away from Hartman to the faces of the jury. He then glanced at the widow in the front row of the gallery, crying softly. He saw the perplexed faces of his prosecution team. He saw spectators glancing at one another. Everyone was waiting for him to drop some brilliant bombshell that would pull the rug out from underneath Hartman's testimony and expose him as the liar and killer that he was.

  Tribow took a deep breath. He said, "No further questions, Your Honor."

  * * *

  There was a moment of silence. Even the judge frowned and seemed to want to ask if the prosecutor was sure he wanted to do this. But he settled for asking the defense lawyer, "Any more witnesses?"

  "No, sir. The defense rests."

  The sole reason for a jury's existence is that people lie.

  If everyone told the truth a judge could simply ask Raymond C. Hartman if he planned and carried out the murder of Jose Valdez and the man would say yes or no and that would be that.

  But people don't tell the truth, of course, and so the judicial system relies on a jury to look at the eyes and mouths and hands and postures of witnesses and listen to their words and decide what's the truth and what isn't.

  The jury in the case of the State v. Hartman had been out for two hours. Tribow and his assistants were holed up in the cafeteria in the building across from the courthouse. Nobody was saying a word. Some of this silence had to be attributed to their uneasiness — if not outright embarrassment — at Tribow's unfathomable line of questioning about the game Hartman had allegedly bought for the victim's son. They would probably be thinking that even experienced prosecutors get flustered and fumble the ball from time to time and it was just as well it happened during a case like this, which was, apparently, unwinnable.

  Danny Tribow's eyes were closed as he lounged back in an ugly orange fiberglass chair. He was replaying Har
tman's cool demeanor and the witnesses' claims that they hadn't been threatened or bribed by Hartman. They'd all been paid off or threatened, he knew, but he had to admit they looked and sounded fairly credible to him; presumably they'd seemed that way to the jury as well. But Tribow had great respect for the jury system and for jurors on the whole and, as they sat in the small deliberation room behind the courthouse, they might easily be concluding at this moment that Hartman had lied and coerced the witnesses into lying as well.

  And that he was guilty of murder one.

  But when he opened his eyes and glanced over at Adele Viamonte and Chuck Wu, their discouraged faces told him that there was also a pretty good chance that justice might not get done at this trial.

  "Okay," Viamonte said, "so we don't win on premeditated murder. We've still got the two lesser-includeds. And they'll have to convict on manslaughter."

  Have to? thought Tribow. He didn't think that was a word that ever applied to a jury's decision. The defense had pitched a great case for a purely accidental death.

  "Miracles happen," said Wu with youthful enthusiasm.

  And that was when Tribow's cell phone rang. It was the clerk with the news that the jury was returning.

  "Them coming back this fast — is that good or bad?" Wu asked.

  Tribow finished his coffee. "Let's go find out."

  * * *

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?"

  "We have, Your Honor."

  The foreman, a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt and dark slacks, handed a piece of paper to the bailiff, who carried it to the judge.

  Tribow kept his eyes on Hartman's but the killer was sitting back in the swivel chair with a placid expression. He cleaned a fingernail with a paper clip. If he was worried about the outcome of the trial he didn't show it.

  The judge read the slip of paper silently and glanced over at the jury.

  Tribow tried to read the jurist's expression but couldn't.

  "The defendant will rise."

  Hartman and his lawyer stood.

  The judge handed the paper to the clerk, who read, "In the case of the People versus Raymond C. Hartman, on the first count, murder in the first degree, the jury finds the defendant not guilty. On the second count, murder in the second degree, the jury finds the defendant not guilty. On the third count, manslaughter, the jury finds the defendant not guilty."