The Motive (31 page)

He patted her back, gradually easing her away, kissing her chastely on the cheek. Without another word, he picked up his briefcase, went to the door and knocked for the guard, and was gone.

The courtroom was Department 21 on the third floor of the Hall of Justice. Hardy had been in it on many occasions by now, but never failed to be disappointed by its lack of grandeur. More than twenty years ago, the city had installed extra security for the trial of Dan White, who’d shot Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in their offices
at City Hall. Now heavy doors and bulletproof glass separated the gallery from the well of the courtroom in Department 21. Except for these amenities, the room might have been a typical classroom in a marginally funded school district.

In front of the bar, Hardy sat at a plain blond library desk on the left-hand side of the nondescript, windowless, fluorescent-lit room. His counterpart with the prosecution—Rosen, with case inspector Dan Cuneo next to him—sat at an identical table about ten feet to his right. Beyond them was the varnished plywood jury box.

They’d finished jury selection yesterday, and now the box was filled with four men and eight women; with three African Americans, two Asians, two Hispanics, five Cau-casians; one dentist, one high school teacher, three house-wives, a city employee, a computer repairperson, two salesmen, three between jobs. Hardy had been living with the endless calculations of the crapshoot of the makeup of the eventual panel for nine working days. Now here they were and he’d done all he could. He even felt pretty good about some of the people; but he still wished he could start again. But it was always like this—something you just couldn’t know or predict.

He’d entered the courtroom through the back door, coming up the hallway by the judge’s chambers, to avoid the reporters and the general madness, and now at his table he ventured a half-turn to catch his wife’s eye. Frannie was in the first row, the first seat by the center aisle, next to their friend, the “CityTalk” columnist Jeff Elliot. Frannie didn’t often come to court with Hardy, but for his big trials she tried to be there for his opening and closing statements. He caught her eye and put his hand over his heart and patted it twice, the secret signal. She did the same.

Behind her and Elliot, it was bedlam.

Every one of the twelve rows, eight wooden, theater-style seats to a side, was completely filled, mostly with media people. Hardy also recognized not just a few people from his office who had come down to cheer him on, but several other attorneys from the building, as well as what appeared to be quite a sizable sampling of regular folks
and trial junkies. And now, before the entrance of the judge, everyone was talking all at once.

On Hardy’s side, Will Hanover sat with the other adult members of his extended family who would not be called as witnesses for the prosecution—Catherine’s two sisters-in-law and their husbands. Unbelievably, Hardy thought, given the testimony they’d supplied to Cuneo, Beth and Aaron, like Will, still considered themselves to be on Catherine’s side. Despite their comments in police reports to the contrary, none of them actually seemed to believe that Catherine was guilty. Yes, she’d known where Paul kept his gun. Yes, she’d been worried about the inheritance. Yes, she’d repeated many times that somebody would have to kill Paul and Missy. Either they didn’t believe in causality or they didn’t understand the gravity of their statements, but nonetheless, by their very presence on Catherine’s “side” of the gallery, they would be living and breathing testimony to the fact that they still cared about her—and in the great nebulous unknown that was the collective mind of the jury, this might not be a bad thing.

Cuneo, of course, was turned around at the prosecutor’s table and sat jittering nonstop, talking to a couple of assistant DAs from upstairs in the front row, down for the show. But then suddenly the bailiff was standing up to the left of the judge’s utilitarian desk. “All rise. Department Twenty-One of the Superior Court of the State of California is now in session. Her Honor Judge Marian Braun presiding. Please turn off all cell phones and pagers, be seated and come to order.”

Without any fanfare, Braun was seated almost before the bailiff had concluded his introduction. She scowled out at the gallery, as though surprised at its size, then faced the clerk and nodded. The clerk nodded back, then looked over to the second bailiff, who was standing by the back door to the courtroom, on Hardy’s right. They’d already called the case number and read the indictment for special circumstances double murder when they’d begun jury selection so long ago. So now, today, there was little of that earlier formality—the defendant merely needed to be in the courtroom so that she could face her accusers.

The back door opened and Catherine Hanover appeared
to a slight electric buzz from the gallery. The loss of the fifteen pounds hadn’t hurt her looks. Neither had the light makeup, the subtle lipstick, the tailored clothing. In the brassy fluorescence of the courtroom, she seemed to shine, and Hardy was not at all sure that this was a positive. Good looks could backfire. He glanced at the jury for reactions and suddenly wished there were at least eight men on it and four women, instead of the other way around. Or even twelve men, all of them older and self-made.

During jury selection, he’d convinced himself that the women he’d accepted were of a traditional bent, and hence would be deeply suspicious of Missy D’Amiens and her unknown and thus arguably colorful and potentially dangerous past. On the other hand, he suddenly realized—and Catherine’s appearance today underscored this—that these same women might have a great deal of trouble identifying with this attractive woman whose husband’s six-figure income wasn’t enough to support her lifestyle. In the end, he’d gone along with impaneling all the women because women, at least the sort he hoped he had left on the jury, tended to believe that sexual harassment happened. But he shuddered inwardly now, suddenly afraid that he might have outright miscalculated.

He tore his eyes away from the jury and brought them back to his client. He stood and pulled out the chair next to him for her, glad to see that she had apparently found her husband and in-laws in the gallery and acknowledged them.

Then she was seated. Hardy whispered to her. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

The judge tapped her gavel to still the continuing buzz, then turned to the prosecution table. “Mr. Rosen, ready for the people?”

Rosen got out of his chair. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Hardy?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“All right, Mr. Rosen, you may begin.”

Chris Rosen was a professional trial attorney with nine years of experience and a specialization in arson cases.
He’d prosecuted three homicides and a dozen arsons in that time, winning four of them outright and getting lesser convictions with substantial prison time on the others. So he could say with absolute truth that he’d never lost a case, which in this most liberal city was an enviable, almost unheard of, record. Maybe Rosen hadn’t always gotten a clear win, either, but Hardy knew the truth of the defense bias in San Francisco—indeed, it was one of the factors involved in this case for which he was most grateful—but this was cold comfort as he watched his young, good-looking opposite number rise with a quiet confidence and a friendly demeanor to match it.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Good morning. We’re here today and for the next few days or weeks—let’s hope it won’t be too many weeks—to hear evidence about the murders of two people, Paul Hanover, a lawyer here in San Francisco, and his fiancée, Missy D’Amiens.” Hardy noticed that Rosen came as advertised—he was playing it smooth. He didn’t refer to the dead impersonally as “the deceased” or even “the victims.” Rather, they had been real, live people until they had been “murdered.” He continued to the jury in his serious, amiable voice. “On Wednesday, May the twelfth of last year, someone set a fire at the home that Mr. Hanover shared with Missy D’Amiens. Firemen coming to fight the blaze found the bodies of a man and woman, burned beyond recognition, in the foyer of the house. Wedged under one of the bodies was a gun. Both victims had been shot in the head. The evidence will show beyond a reasonable doubt that neither wound was self-inflicted. Neither victim killed the other and then him- or herself. These people were murdered in their home, and the murderer lit a fire in the hope of destroying the evidence that would connect him or her to the crime.”

Rosen paused to collect himself, as these grisly and dramatic events would obviously upset the psyche of any reasonably sensitive person. Clearing his throat, excusing himself to the jurors “for just a moment,” he took a few steps over to this desk, where Cuneo pushed his glass of water to the front edge of the desk. Rosen took a sip, cleared his throat again and turned back to the jurors.

“We will prove to you, ladies and gentlemen, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person who fired those shots into the heads of each of these victims was the defendant in this case, Mr. Hanover’s daughter-in-law, Catherine Hanover. She did it for a common and mundane reason—Mr. Hanover was going to change his will and name Missy D’Amiens his beneficiary. When he did that, his inheritance of nearly fifteen million dollars would go to Missy, and the defendant would get no share of it.

“On the very day that he died, according to the defendant’s own statement to police, Mr. Hanover told her that he was thinking of changing his will in favor of Missy before the wedding date, possibly as early as the following week. Spurred by this confession of his plans, the defendant resolved to kill Mr. Hanover before he could change his will.”

Here Rosen turned and faced Catherine, his body language as well as his tone suggesting that it pained him to make these accusations against a fellow human being. But she had brought it on herself; he so wished that she hadn’t. He raised an almost reluctant hand until his arm was fully outstretched, his index finger wavering in controlled indignation. “And shoot him she did. At point-blank range, in the head. And shot Missy D’Amiens, too, because she’d had the bad fortune to come home and be in the house.”

Recounting the tale was imposing a great burden on Rosen, and he needed another sip of water. Hardy thought this was overdoing the sensitivity a bit, and he was glad to see something about which he could—privately, at least—be critical. He knew that juries had a way of sniffing out a phony, tactical interruption, and they might resent it. Otherwise, Rosen was presenting a textbook opening statement—recounting the facts the prosecution had and would prove, without any editorializing. He had even avoided the potential minefield of Missy’s presence in the house—clearly the killer had intended the scene to look like a murder/suicide, which would have ended the investigation before it began. But Rosen didn’t accuse Catherine of that. He steered clear altogether. Hardy, with a grudging admiration, had to let him continue unchallenged.

“The relevant events of this tragic day are relatively
straightforward and really began around noon. We will prove to you that the defendant, Catherine Hanover, stopped at a Valero gas station on the corner of Oak and Webster, about three blocks from Paul Hanover’s home on Alamo Square. A worker at that gas station will testify that he saw the defendant get out of her car, a black Mercedes-Benz C240, and fill a portable container with gasoline and put it into her trunk.

“According to the defendant’s own statement, she went to visit her father-in-law later that same afternoon to discuss the finances of her immediate and extended family. We will show you that the defendant came back to Mr. Hanover’s home later in the day. You will hear two witnesses testify that she left Mr. Hanover’s home a few moments before the fire broke out. You will discover that the defendant lied to the police about her actions at this time. She said that she was at home alone during these critical hours. But her own daughter’s diary disproves her story.”

Hardy covered his mouth with his hand, hiding from the jury his displeasure. Heather’s diary was perhaps the biggest issue he’d lost in pretrial. Although Hardy had argued bitterly against its inclusion, there was no question of the importance and relevance of the diary entry. So one way or another, it was going in. And in the normal course of events, that evidence couldn’t have been admitted—it wouldn’t have had a foundation—if Heather as a prosecution witness against her own mother didn’t testify in court that she’d written it. Understandably, this was a scenario that Catherine, in a genuine display of motherly protectiveness, wanted to avoid at all costs. The psychological damage to her daughter could be incalculable. But Rosen needed the evidence, which meant he needed Heather. And no one could stop him from forcing her to testify. The only solution had been for Hardy to cut a deal to allow the diary entry without the foundation. But even without Heather’s testimony, it was a bitter pill, and potentially devastating for his client.

Meanwhile, Rosen was gliding easily over the last of the evidence. “Finally, you will learn that the same type of gasoline used as an accelerant to start the fire in Mr. Hanover’s home exactly matches that found in fibers of
rug from the trunk of the defendant’s black Mercedes-Benz C240.” He paused for one last sip of water.

“As I said at the outset, this is a straightforward story, and I’m nearly through with it. On May the twelfth of last year, Paul Hanover himself told the defendant that within days, she and her entire family would be written out of her father-in-law’s will. That they would lose millions of dollars. She decided to kill him to keep that from happening, and to use his own gun that she knew he kept loaded in the headboard of his bed. She bought gasoline to set Paul Hanover’s house on fire to cover her tracks. She had the means. By her own admission, she’d been at the house during the afternoon, and you will hear witnesses place her there again just before the fire broke out. Opportunity.”

Rosen let out a little air. “We will show you, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that Catherine Hanover killed her father-in-law, Paul Hanover, and Missy D’Amiens for money by shooting them both in the head. This is first-degree murder with special circumstances under the law of the State of California, and that is the verdict I will ask for. Thank you very much.”