We stood in an awkward silence. It seemed a farewell of sorts.
“Well,” he said.
“Well.”
“If you ever need anything…” He picked up his left hand, then let it drop, in some sort of strange half salute that made me think he’d gotten the gesture from a TV show and had copied it in a mirror. “Yeah,” he continued. “So let me know.” Another TV-detective hand gesture. “I’m pretty good at making problems disappear or taking care of them quickly.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means.”
He didn’t explain.
I took a step toward him. He almost looked a little nervous.
I held out my right hand.
He looked at it. Shook it. And walked away.
36
From a doorway down the hall, Valerie watched Izzy and the detective. A minute earlier, Valerie had slipped out of the courtroom, skirting around them and went to the restroom. When she came out she saw them shake hands. Now the detective turned away, walking the hallway with officious, succinct hits of his heels.
Valerie turned herself and headed toward the empty courtroom, the one where she always went during breaks or before court started. There, she would meet a bored law clerk from the Bristols’ office, someone barely older than her daughter, and that clerk would, essentially, babysit her. It was an embarrassing situation. But Valerie couldn’t handle the stares she got in the main courtroom—from Amanda’s friends, and from people she didn’t know but who all looked at her with a certain mix of insatiable curiosity and hatred.
She was almost to the quiet courtroom, her sanctitude, when a door opened. The men’s room. She kept her head down and tried to dodge around the door, but the person actually put out a hand, as if to block her. It was only then she looked up.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. Finally, she said his name. “Zavy.”
She hadn’t come face-to-face with him for nearly a year. She had only seen him in court, where he always avoided looking at her.
“Valerie,” he said. He wasn’t avoiding her now. He was staring at her. “I thought I would feel anger toward you,” he said. He shook his head. “But it’s only pity.”
She stalled, her mouth open, her whole body frozen, and yet someone was screaming—one long, loud tone in her head. Finally, she managed to speak around it. “Excuse me,” she said. She stepped around him this time, trudging, zombielike, that voice still screaming, toward the empty courtroom and her law clerk babysitter, where she could sit in silence. And she would try not to think about Xavier Miller.
37
“Counsel, what’s up next?” the judge asked from the bench.
“We have a snafu,” Ellie Whelan said. “Sorry, Judge.” She threw a smile at Maggie and me that made it clear she wasn’t truly sorry about whatever she was about to say. “We planned for two other detectives to testify this afternoon, but we’ve determined that we don’t need them. We’d like to call the coroner.”
“He’s available?”
“Yes. He was in the courthouse for another case.”
“Son of a bitch,” Maggie muttered, then addressed the bench in a loud voice. “Your Honor, we request a continuance. Counsel had originally indicated to both the court and to us that Dr. Rosen wouldn’t be called for a few days.”
The judge sighed, gave a small glare at the state’s attorneys, then addressed Maggie in a tired voice. “Counsel, I’ve got a jury that just waited through a lunch break to hear testimony. We’ve got to keep this trial moving. No continuance.” He looked at the state’s attorneys. “Don’t let this happen again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When will Dr. Rosen be here?”
“He’s here now,” Tania Castle said, speaking up.
“Judge, we need some prep time,” Maggie said.
“Fifteen minutes.” The judge stood and left the bench.
I turned to Maggie, my eyes wide. “Are you kidding me? He’s just going to let them call an expert witness with no notice?”
“Dirty trick,” Maggie said, glaring at the state’s attorneys over my shoulder. “But that’s how it goes around here.”
I said nothing, stumped. Never, ever would this have happened in a civil courtroom, where the lawyers realized that it took a hell of a lot of time to prep for the cross of a highly trained physician. “It’s ludicrous,” I finally blurted out. “I mean, surely, we can do something. Let’s ask again. Let’s get the judge out here. Let’s…”
“Hey, Lawyer For Hire,” Maggie said, cutting me off. “This is how it goes around here. You never know what’ll come flying at you.”
“And so now a forensic pathologist is flying at us?”
Maggie looked at her watch. “You just blew one of our fifteen minutes.” She sighed. “The truth is, there’s usually not much to cross a coroner on.”
We spent the next fourteen minutes looking through Dr. Rosen’s testimony from the grand jury and found Maggie was right. There wouldn’t be much material with which to pick apart his direct testimony. And that testimony wasn’t going to be pretty.
The coroner was a man who looked very, very tired. From his testimony about when he’d gone to college and medical school, it sounded like he was in his late forties, but his skin was as gray as the corpses he worked on. His eyes were bloodshot slits.
Maggie leaned over and whispered in my ear, “They work these guys like dogs. They have huge backlogs of cases.”
“Doctor,” Tania Castle said to the coroner, “in connection with your duties, did you have occasion to perform an autopsy on the body of a woman named Amanda Miller?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And did you take notes or produce any kind of report regarding your examination of the body?”
“I took notes and then I wrote what we call a postmortem report.”
Tania marked the report as an exhibit and approached the witness. She took the doctor through how the autopsy was performed, how they weighed the body and measured the length of it. He described his external and internal examinations.
“And what did those examinations reveal, Doctor?”
“The internal exam was unremarkable. The external exam showed some bruising about the wrists.”
“What would have caused that?”
“I received information that Ms. Miller had fallen on the night of her death and her husband had caught her by the wrists. The bruising could be consistent with that.”
“So your initial opinion as to the cause of Amanda Miller’s death?”
“Inconclusive.”
“Doctor, what is a toxicology screen?”
“It’s testing of blood, urine and gastric contents to determine the presence of drugs or other toxicants that might be present in the body.”
“Is that routinely done?”
“It’s often done in cases like this with an otherwise healthy person and no evident cause of death.”
“What did the toxicology screen reveal in this case?”
“Nothing initially.”
I looked at the jury and saw some of them giving each other puzzled expressions.
“What happened next with respect to your examination of the body of Mrs. Miller?”
“At the urging of detectives, we ordered additional toxicology to look for one drug in particular.”
“What drug was that?”
“Propranolol. It’s a beta blocker, which means that it blocks the effects of adrenalin on the cardiovascular system. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure.”
“And what are the most common medical uses for Propranolol?”
“Hypertension and cardiac arrhythmias.”
“Do you know why the detectives requested a tox screen for Propranolol?”
“Because Mrs. Miller had been in possession of the drug. Apparently, she did a lot of speaking at charitable engagements and she used Propranolol for stage fright.” He looked at the jury. “The drug is also used for anxiety. At some point, the detectives or Mrs.
Miller’s husband realized that the Propranolol she usually had was missing.”
“What did the toxicology screen show?”
“A large dose of Propranolol in her system.”
“Doctor, why didn’t the initial tox screen show that?”
“It’s not included in the basic screening. We can’t test for the presence of every drug. It’s far too expensive.”
“Doctor, based on your training and experience, did you reach an opinion as to the cause of Mrs. Miller’s death?”
“Yes, I did. She died as a result of cardiac arrhythmia, brought on by the large amount of Propranolol in her system, which was ingested from the food she had eaten that night.”
“Do you have an opinion to a reasonable degree of certainty as to how the Propranolol got in the food?”
“Objection,” Maggie said, standing.
“Judge, I’m not asking who did what here,” Tania said. “I just want the doctor’s opinion from his review of the body.”
“Overruled,” the judge said. “Continue, counsel.”
Tania restated her question.
“Yes, I do have an opinion,” the doctor said. “An additional review of the stomach contents showed that a number of Propranolol tablets had been crushed and then mixed into the food she ate.”
“What happens when that amount of the drug is in the body?”
“Cardiac arrhythmia can occur, which causes the BP and heart rate to drop dramatically, and the person can slip into shock and die.”
“And is that what occurred here?”
“Yes.”
“And the Propranolol, what form does that come in?”
“Tablet.”
“What color are the tablets?”
“Blue.”
“Would you say it’s the same shade as blue corn meal?”
“I’ve never seen blue cornmeal. I don’t cook.”
“Thank you, Doctor. That will be all.”
Tania sat down.
“Cross?” the judge said.
I looked past Maggie to Valerie, who was hanging her head, eyes closed. I wanted to tell her to look up. I wanted to tell her she looked guilty, but Maggie and I had to talk fast about what to do now.
We huddled together. “I don’t think there’s anything,” I said.
“I don’t, either,” Maggie said, “but I hate to not cross a witness who was so harmful to us.”
We thought for a second.
“Counsel?” the judge said.
Maggie’s eyes went bright. “I think I have something,” she whispered.
She stood but didn’t move around the table. “Just one question, Doctor. Would a physician, an average internist, know about a drug like Propranolol and what dosage would be lethal?”
Tania stood now, too. “Objection to relevancy.”
“Judge, there has been testimony that the Millers were in a feud with their neighbor, Dr. St. John, who is an internist. Since the witness is also a physician, I want to ask him what the average internist might know about this drug.”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said.
“Thank you, Your Honor.” She looked at the witness. “Doctor, should I repeat the question?”
“No, I remember it, and the answer is yes, an average internist would know about a drug like Propranolol and what dosage would be lethal.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Nothing further.”
38
“Am I even married to Spence?”
My mom and I were in her bedroom. I sat on the bed, talking with her as she changed clothes for the evening, something she did nearly every night whether she and Spence were going to the opera or merely having Charlie and me for a visit, like they were that night. I, on the other hand, hadn’t done this since I was a kid—watch her get ready. Well, the truth was, with her depression, she sometimes wore the same clothes for days back then. And so when she changed at night, I knew she was in a good mood. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I was at your wedding.”
My mother disappeared into her walk-in closet. She called out, “But I was still married, technically, to your father.”
I tried to think about this through the eyes of the law. I’d never encountered a dead-then-not-dead-husband scenario in my legal career. “I’m sure you’re married. You believed, reasonably, that your husband was gone.”
My mom stepped out of the closet, threading a black patent-leather belt through the loops of her white wide-legged pants. She halted a moment, seemed to be remem bering something. “Spence was my Onassis. I felt like Jackie Kennedy.”
I wanted her to talk more, but she said nothing, just continued to fasten her belt, then went to the large mirror where she always stood to refresh her makeup. “That’s not a bad thing,” I ventured. “That you felt like he was your Onassis.”
“No. God, no. It saved me. But it required me to give up what I thought I knew, that your father was alive, that your father and I were meant to be together.” She sighed. “Meant to be together. I’m too old for these things.”
“You’re not too old for anything.”
She looked at me now. “No, of course not.” I got the feeling she was saying it more for me than for herself. “But really, this idea of two people being two halves of a whole, it seems silly to me that I bought into that.”
I didn’t know what to say. I believed that. And as I watched my mom, I realized I didn’t want her to think differently. So much of my life, my belief system, I guess, was based on that idea.
My mother seemed to sense my unease. “Don’t listen to me.”
“You dressed, Mom?” Charlie called then from the hallway.
“Yes, hon, come in.”
“Don’t listen to me about what?” Charlie said, loping into the room. He wore jeans and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He fell onto my mother’s bed with a tired ummph.
My phone rang. Mayburn. I hopped off the bed and stepped out of the room to answer it.
“Hey, Iz,” he said. “Your dad and I—we got some information on Sylvia Zowinski.”
“Who?”
“The nanny for the Millers.”
“Great. What kind of information?”
“Her husband is a bad guy,” Mayburn said.
“Sounds like she’s a bad guy, too, with all those things she was convicted of.”
“That’s the thing. She got convicted, but it definitely appears her husband was the mastermind behind the whole thing. Looks like she finally got the balls to leave him, and that’s when she took the job with the Millers. She was with them for a few years and had no other criminal problems.”
“Where’s the husband now?”
“Can’t find him.”
“Any reason to think he might have wanted to kill Amanda Miller? Or that she did?”
“Not sure. We know the husband wasn’t happy about his wife leaving and going to work for them. But as I said, she had worked for the Millers for some years and there were no incidents that we know of.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“She left the country.”
“Whoa. Really?”
“Yeah. She’s from Honduras—Zowinski was her married name. Her real last name is Cordova. She told people in the Millers’ neighborhood, after Amanda died, that she was going home to be with her family.”
“Or was she running from something she did?”
“But what’s the motive?”
“Maybe she was running from something her husband did.”
“We’ll keep looking into it, but as of right now, we’ve hit some dead ends.”
Despite the message, I liked hearing him say we. “How do you like working with my dad?”
“Well, since it’s the first day, it’s hard to tell.”
“What’s your impression?”
“That he’s a bit of a cold fish.”
“Oh, and you’re so warm and fuzzy?” I felt a little defensive. I could certainly complain about my father. But I didn’t want any
one else to.
“You’re right.” Mayburn laughed. “It’s going fine. I’ll talk to you later.”
I went back into my mom’s bedroom and crawled on the bed next to Charlie. “How was work?” I asked him.
“Great. I love it.”
My mom, who was threading gold earrings through her lobes, gave me a happy how-crazy-is-that? look.
“What were you guys talking about before?” Charlie said, propping some pillows behind his head. “Two halves of a whole?”
“We were discussing two people being right for each other,” I said.
“We were talking about me getting old,” my mom said.
“You’re not getting old,” Charlie scoffed.
“It’s true.” I pointed at my mom. “Look at her. She’s more beautiful than ever.”
My mother blushed, something she did not normally do.
I sat up. “You know, you do look really good.” My mother looked remarkably…what was it?…refreshed, I guess.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Have you been getting a lot of sleep?”
My mother half shrugged, seemed sheepish. “Something like that.”
I looked closer at her. “What’s going on with you?”
She shrugged again, but she was looking down. My mother had always been the most honest of people, even with her emotions. Especially with her emotions. She had never been able to hide a moment of melancholy or anything else that she felt. I always wished she had some sort of filter. But now, she was clearly holding something back, and I didn’t like the feel of the shield she seemed to erect.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked again.
My mother looked at the ceiling now, appeared to be trying to glean some guidance from the heavens. Finally, she spoke. “I went to the dermatologist,” she said. She explained that her dermatologist had done various “procedures,” and she was considering others.
“You mean surgery?” I said, surprised. My mother’s best friend, Cassandra, had undergone a number of “touch up” procedures, and my mother had always sworn she wouldn’t do the same.
“No, of course not. I just had some things…done. A little of this, a little of that.”
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