A Fool for a Client (29 page)

“It
’
s funny how something so small can stop something so big.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Murphy, confused, and sensing a growing hint of menace in her voice.

She picked up the bottle with a malicious gleam in her eyes.

“Oh all sorts of things,” said Justine. “A clever woman against a strong man for instance.
Or a petty cause against a grand ideal.
Or a five pound bomb against a hundred and fifty pound man.
Or a loud
-
mouthed mediocrity against an unsung genius.”

“Talk sense will you!” he shouted, the fear giving way to anger.

She put the bottle down with a thud and looked Murphy in the eyes revealing for the first time the intense implacable anger that she had been concealing for too long.

“You want me to spell it out to you?
I
’
m talking about people who think their causes count for more than their neighbours lives!
It
’
s time some one stood up to you.”

She held up her full glass of tequila in front of Murphy, reminding him by the gesture that she had drunk none of the tequila that she had brought along.

“Well now we
’
re fighting back.”

She picked up the bottle with her free hand and inverted it, along with the glass, emptying the glass and pouring away most of the contents of the bottle.
Then she slammed them both down.
Still uncertain of the implications of her outburst and thoroughly confused by her latest action, he picked the up bottle and looked at it while she walked back into the house.

Suddenly the recollection of the last hour all flooded back to him, and he realized what had subconsciously been puzzling him about her behaviour.
She had brought the tequila to drink with the meal.
But she didn
’
t drink any herself
.

He heard the sound of the front door slamming, and all of a sudden the realization hit him with full force.

“The bitch poisoned me!” he wailed.

How much time?
he asked himself.
How much fucking time?

He knew that she had deliberately given the game away and let him know that she had poisoned him.
It was part of her cruel and vicious game.
She wanted to him to know that she was killing him.
She hadn
’
t said why.
He wondered if she was a Unionist... or a British intelligence agent. But he knew that it wasn
’
t just anger in the end. She was a cold, hard calculating bitch who had set him up from the beginning.
If she made it clear to him at this stage that she had poisoned him then it must already be too late, he reasoned.

Still, where there
’
s life there
’
s hope.

Grabbing the bottle from the table and screwing the lid back on, he rushed out to his car.
With any luck he could still make it to the hospital.
He wasn
’
t feeling the effects yet, apart from the sweating hands and the pounding heart and the dry throat.

I
’
m going to get over this, he told himself.
And then I
’
m going to get the bitch.

After the salvaging of his case with the smooth passage of Lieutenant Hogarth
’
s testimony, Abrams was beginning to think that it would be plain sailing from now.
He had established most of what Justine had done, and barring a sympathy verdict for Justine, was more or less of sure of getting a conviction.
The sympathy vote would probably merely mean a lower category of homicide.
He could live with second degree manslaughter although he thought that technically at least first degree manslaughter was indicated.

The trouble was that the faces of the jury told another story.
They didn
’
t look convinced.
He had learned through many years of courtroom experience to read the jurors
’
eyes.
Sometimes you could tell things from their postures or the way they held their heads, especially if they were bored or afraid to look at the defendant.
But it was the eyes that really betrayed their feelings.
The jurors were looking at Justine with quiet respect, more so than before after her cross-examination of Ostrovsky.
One juror in particular was looking at her with obvious approval bordering on admiration.
He decided to have the jurors checked out again.
Especially as the one who seemed so captivated by Justine was a hard-headed businessman who had voted for guilty on his previous jury service and looked until now as if he had all the emotions of an eighteen-wheel truck.

Abrams
’
witness was a girl who worked as a sales assistant at the drugstore.
She had taken a lot of effort to track down.
The police had checked around the drugstores near where Justine lived in ever increasing circles until they got a positive answer.
But Abrams was convinced that it was worth it.
He didn
’
t want any loose ends in his case.
One minor humiliation had been quite enough.
He had to hammer his facts home so forcefully that there could be no doubt as to those facts.
If Justine wanted to play silly games, quibbling about the elements of homicide, he would give her a lesson in the law when the time came... as long the jury didn
’
t go overboard with their misguided sympathy.

Some one must have given the girl instructions in how to dress so as to tantalize the male members of the jury, thought Abrams.

On second thoughts, he realized that these days most girls didn
’
t
need
any instruction.

She was wearing a print-patterned, knotted shirt and a pair of tight-fitting jeans that could easily have been mistaken for her skin, but for the fact that they were a faded blue.
Her hair was cut in an early Beatles/Donny Osmond fringe, the bangs covering her forehead and almost reaching her eyes.
But if the haircut was boyish, the bare midriff, the well-rounded buttocks and the long eye-lashes all emphasized her femininity in much the same way as Justine
’
s eyes underscored hers.

“Have you ever seen the defendant before?” asked Abrams after dispensing quickly with the preliminaries.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“On September the sixth of last year,” said the girl.

“How can you be sure of the date so accurately?”

If Parker had been conducting the defence Abrams wouldn
’
t have asked this question.
He would have waited for Parker to try to discredit the witness and given him the opportunity to fall flat on his face.
But with Justine in control and offering no more than a minimalistic defence there was no certainty that she would rise to the bait.
It was important that the jury should know that the witness wasn
’
t exaggerating or worming her way into a case for the sake of enjoying a moment of glory, as some eagerly volunteering witnesses had done at the expense of the credibility of the DA
’
s office.

“It was the week after I came back from my vacation in
Florida
.”

“And where did you see the defendant?”

“At the drugstore where I work.”

“What was she doing there?”

“She bought insecticide.”

“How come you remember so accurately?”

“Well she bought about three ca
–
I mean she bought three cans.”

Abrams almost winced at the slip, the small slip that would not have undermined the credibility of this lovely well-rehearsed witness, even if emphasized under cross-examination, had she not emphasized it herself by correcting it.
Now it was as if she was wearing a sign that read “I
’
ve been coached.”

“Do you remember what
brand it was?”

“Yes.
DeBug.”

“Your Honour I
’
ve brought along a can of DeBug and I would like to introduce it as an exhibit although it has no direct connection with the defendant, for the purpose of showing that it contains pyrethrum.”

Justine was on her feet.

“Your Honour I
’
m ready to stipulate that DeBug contains pyrethrum,” she said quietly.

“Let the record so indicate,” said the judge as Justine sat down.

“That
’
s really all I have to ask the witness,” said Abrams returning to his seat.

“No questions,” said Justine without waiting to be asked by the judge.

The next witness was the man who had sold Justine the tequila.
It was the same story.
He identified Justine and Justine let him pass without cross-examination.
But there was much inter-departmental politics at work behind the scenes in this little episode.
The Police Department had been resentful about having to do so much leg work to tie up the lose-ends.
They thought their resources could be better spent els
e
where, solving other crimes and patrolling the streets, rather than chasing up the minor details of an open and shut case in which the mai
n facts weren
’
t even disputed.

They would have preferred to settle this case quietly with a plea-bargain.
Even the Irish-American contingent in the police bore no malice towards Justine, and thought that a lesser charge and a non-custodial
sentence
were justified.
But once the press picked up on the word “vigilante” and the Irish-American community at large had come into open conflict with the Jews, with demonstrations and counter-demonstrations outside the DA
’
s office, they knew that they had to follow through on this one and let the law take its course.

“Have you ever seen the defendant before?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In my liquor store.”

“Did she buy anything?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“A bottle of tequila?”

“Thank you.
Your witness
,
Miss Levy.”

“No questions.”

And that
’
s that, Abrams told himself.
Maybe not one more nail in Justine Levy
’
s coffin, but certainly one more bar on her cell.

The pieces of the snub-nosed revolver lay before Declan, spread out on the folded white sheet like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
It had taken him only four minutes to strip the gun down, and he could probably have done it blindfold.
Such was the thoroughness of his training.
But putting the pieces back together again would be harder.
Not that he lacked the skill or training to re-assemble the gun
, or even the manual dexterity.

But when it came to re-assembling the gun he would be operating under different conditions.
Instead of the flat of a rigid surface of a solid oak kitchen table, he
’
d be sitting on a toilet in the court building with the sheet spread across his knees, struggling to keep it steady, while others would probably be queuing up outside waiting to use the toilet.
But he knew that he would be able to assemble it if he had to, even under those conditions.

The question was, how many of the pieces could he smuggle in past the metal detectors at the courthouse in one trip?
The metal detectors were calibrated to respond only to large metal objects, so as not to be set off by keys or belt buckles.
So merely splitting the parts of the gun over different pockets would enable him to get several parts through and thus reduce the number of trips he
’
d have to m
ake.

But on the other hand, if one of the pieces
did
set off the metal detectors, he
’
d have a lot of explaining to do.
And if any lynx-eyed bailiff then noticed the shape of the objects and figured out what they were, he
’
d be back in jail on another gun charge, this time more serious that mere possession.

The kid who sold him the gun for 200 dollars assured him that it had no history.
But he couldn
’
t be sure of that, and if it turned out the gun had been used for another crime he
’
d be forced to rely on the dubious alibi of having entered the country under a false name for a purpose that he could hardly disclose without digging a deeper pit for himself.
So from every point of view he had to get the parts of the gun into the courthouse undetected.
There was no margin for error.