Rabid (70 page)

Her name rang through the courtroom: “Leila Sage Faris!”

Damn, she had thought she would have some time to read.

She shoved the paper in her purse and hurried up to the witness box.

As she got up to the witness stand and looked back at the blinding camera lights and silhouetted crowd, Dante pushed open the door into the courtroom and stood, staring at her.

Leila couldn’t breathe.

~~~~~

The jury fidgeted and watched Leila Sage Faris.

Chessa Kendrall scratched her eyebrow and felt too much whisker up there. She should wax her eyebrows tonight. That golden California lawyer Heath Sheldon, the slick defense guy, had smiled at her the day before and she’d had a quick mental flash of what he would be like in bed, doing all those dirty West Coast things. Last night she had shaved her legs and groomed her pubic hair into a heart but all that was for naught if she was sporting a monobrow.

In the back of the courtroom, Kirin Oberoi was busy tapping notes into her new super-tiny notebook computer and didn’t notice the triangle of glances ricocheting past her, from the grad student to the accused wife to the priest splayed on the doors at the back of the courtroom. If she had seen the recognition whirling among the three people who had survived the apartment that night, she might have written her article that night with less sympathy.

Hara Carson, in the seventh juror position, craned her neck to see over that boor, Blake Kellen, who sat in front of her and seemed to instinctively angle his pompadour hair to block her view of the witness and the exhibits. Not that she particularly liked looking at the gory pictures or hearing the descriptions of the lurid details, mind you, but she needed to have an accurate opinion about whether a crime had been committed or not. Jury duty was more than a civic duty, after all. It was a sacred duty, to sit in judgment of another human being as if one were God, and the woman on trial was a Godly woman. A priest, a young priest, had sat behind this Beverly Sloan the entire trial, every day. Though Hara herself did not cotton to the Catholic faith, she liked their values, their ideas about marriage and family, even if that celibate priesthood thing smacked of cults. Hara had to be very careful how she judged this Beverly Sloan, lest she herself be judged.

Blake Kellen leaned on the arm of his chair, trying to get comfortable. When that didn’t reduce the sciatica jolting down his thigh, he leaned on the chair’s other arm and found some relief. Behind him, that bitch Carson woman sighed extravagantly and flopped around. He had had it with her. She proselytized in the lunch room about Jesus. She prayed before morning and afternoon session to know God’s will and do the right thing. He wished her could vote her off the fucking jury.

Gabriela Rossetti, sitting beside Hara, had forgiven her husband the many times he had beaten her until her skin sagged with bruising blood, and he had struck her many, many more times than once. The testimony from the medical examiner about the bruises on Dr. Sloan’s face and wrist bothered her. This Beverly Sloan might have hit Dr. Sloan more than once, might have abused him, and might have finally killed him if she was, as the prosecution said,
enraged
when he left her. Her ex-husband had battered the windows and doors of her sister’s house,
enraged
, before Gabby had received the restraining order. Beverly Sloan might be more like her ex-husband than Gabby cared to examine.

~~~~~

Dante pushed back the heavy wooden doors and stopped, struck still.

Leila was walking to the witness box and fussing with some papers. She looked up, beautiful there in her crisp white shirt and black skirt, and she saw Dante in the back of the courtroom with his eyes too wide and full of hope and his lips open.

Beside the door, a camera swung and hot television lights bore down on him.

Leila glanced at Beverly Sloan, who had turned at the defense table and stared at Dante.

Bev’s mouth opened, and her jaw shifted forward.

Leila looked back to Dante.

The stares of the two women pinned him against the courtroom’s doors. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair and shook as if they held guns on him. The doors behind him rattled in their frames.

Judge Washington rapped her gavel and said, “Ms. Faris, if you please?” She didn’t know what nonsense this was but they had a full day of testimony. She had already postponed the next trial on her calendar a week because that damned prosecutor felt the need to object to everything and because Heath Sheldon was wasting time playing to the LawTV cameras. She should not have allowed the cameras in her courtroom.

Dante blinked and, shoving one hand in his pocket, composed his expression and tried to hide the vulnerable anxiety in his eyes. Last night, his arms and legs had coiled around Leila all night long, as if she were a ruined column rife with vines.

This morning, when Leila had been dressed and ready to leave her apartment, well-armored in crisp clothes, she had touched Dante’s bare shoulder and he had jumped and flipped toward her, entangling himself in the red sheets, and his eyes had been large and black and hungry.

He had said he hadn’t slept in weeks and he needed her.

She sprinted out of the apartment, nearly tripping over her dog to escape.

The prosecuting attorneys conferred together over their lawyerly notes at their table, their briefcases standing open around them like grammar school books corralled at the desk perimeter, hiding answers from the bully across the aisle. George Grossberg muttered under his breath until he remembered how to exactly phrase that all-important question near the end of Leila’s testimony so that she could produce the equivocal answer they desperately needed.

Leila stepped up to the witness stand. The bailiff swore her in.

When Heath tapped her shoulder, Bev turned to the front of the courtroom and watched Leila, with her shining hair so carefully twisted into a French knot, swear to tell the truth.

Dante found his usual place behind Bev and her lawyer. Bev’s friend Mary removed her satchel from the seat beside her for Dante. He smiled at her, and she bobbled her blonde head to reply.

She set the bag at her feet and removed a small embroidery project. The gold and green leafed pattern matched the church’s Easter altar cloth.

Dante touched Heath Sheldon’s shoulder and, when Sheldon turned, made writing motions, asking for a pen. The lawyer passed back a thick black felt-tip pen and a legal pad.

~~~~~

“Ms. Faris, could you tell us what happened that night?” George Grossberg asked.

Leila recited the pithy, skeletonized answers that they had agreed on:

Conroy had been alone in the apartment when Leila arrived around ten o’clock.

George the avid prosecutor nodded, and his curly brown hair flopped at his hairline cresting the crown of his skull. He checked his notes on the yellow legal pad.

Leila’s fingernails scraped the wooden witness chair. That terrible night, the first thing she had told Conroy was that he was an idiot. She had tried to fix his stupid mistakes, leaving his wife, blowing his career. She had told him what to tell his wife, and yet he couldn’t find it in himself to keep his life together, to become the department chair and to receive the grants and prizes and to have his family, as if he had been happy to throw it all away.

He had turned his face toward Leila, that besotted, sentimental, dear avuncular face, and he had said he loved her and that he couldn’t stand being without her, the tragic idiot.

He had written a note for Beverly, Conroy said.

A note.

Blithering idiot.

Leila recited her lines.

She had left the apartment, and Beverly went in.

George glanced toward the jury box and smiled, trying to charm them. His eyes were Ashkenazi-variegated hazel, a green pond rimmed by black. He gazed at Leila and blinked, scrunching his eyes at her, an affectionate gesture and far too intimate for a prosecuting attorney and his witness.

She pushed back into the crusty witness chair, adding inches of airspace between them.

Leila had waited outside and had seen no one else go into the apartment. Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi had arrived minutes later and waited with her in the cold February night.

She had only seen Dante a few times in the two weeks before that terrible night: twice at the church, once at the Dublin, once drunk on her doorstep.

Behind the defense table, Dante braced one arm against the railing that separated the gallery from the court, as if he were ready to vault over it. His forehead was crumpled and his lips were open, as if he were watching her burn.

Conroy had declared that he was ready to rip apart his entire life for Leila.

The priest, last night, had clung to her.

She destroyed men.

She and Dante had entered the apartment, and Leila found Conroy unconscious on the kitchen floor with a knife in his chest.

Conroy’s long arms and legs were tossed carelessly on the vinyl linoleum and that knife stuck in his chest, like a child’s amateurish mounting of a grasshopper with a silver pin on a white board, and Leila’s throat had exploded and she had screamed.

Conroy’s breath rattled in his chest, pneumonic.

She had leapt at the floor with her hands and tried to help him breathe because he was suffocating. He might have thought he was in a well or a cave or buried alive. The damned priest had tried to pull her away but
Conroy couldn’t breathe
.

The priest had seen what happened to people who loved Leila. He should take that to heart. He shouldn’t have said those things this morning.

And this damned George lawyer shouldn’t be smiling at her.

Leila wasn’t a harmless mote. She was as poisonous as if she had been weaned on foxglove and nightshade, an apoptosis ligand incarnate.

Saving anyone she latched onto was impossible.

Apoptosis was her nature.

George Grossberg smiled and pressed down his steel wool hair. They had gotten through the first few questions quickly, as they planned.

George reached the end of his questioning and walked back to his desk. As an apparent afterthought, he asked Leila, “And what was your relationship with Conroy Sloan at that time?”

Here was the place for the equivocating answer.
Your relationship
and
at that time
meant that she should answer about what she thought their relationship was on that night, not what he thought and not previously. If the defense raked up other muck, they would look like they were trying to smear the murder victim.

The prosecution had decided to sacrifice Peggy as Conroy’s mistress and thus the sole root of Bev’s
rage
because they needed Leila to look like an unbiased witness.

But Leila wasn’t an unbiased witness. She’d fucked Conroy until he had ripped apart his whole life, and his wife and his daughters had been caught up in his insanity.

It was Conroy’s own fault that he had been entangled, but she was the spider and she was the web.

It would hinder her professionally when the story slithered out that she had been screwing her professor, but maybe it would warn off any stupid man who thought he should get involved with her, like the Roman-collared Monsignor who had clung to her last night, who now sat behind the sad Beverly Sloan. That Leila had liked Dante, that there had been some small tenderness toward him, that she thought of last night as
one perfect night
meant nothing. Her presence and her flesh would destroy Dante, too.