The Ophelia Cut (33 page)

“That he didn’t do it? Didn’t kill Jessup?”

“Right.”

Hardy hung his head.

Frannie said, “You don’t believe it.”

Hardy looked at her. “What’s changed?”

“You don’t believe him?”

“I haven’t even heard him say it, Fran, so it’s not a question of believing him.”

“Maybe you should ask him.”

“I will. Now. I will. Absolutely. But you must admit the possibility that he told Susan what she wanted to hear so she wouldn’t give up on them staying together.”

“You’re saying he lied to her?”

Hardy was silent.

“He wouldn’t have done that,” she went on. “That’s not who he is.”

“What, do you think—?” Hardy stopped, scratched at the table, raised his eyes to Frannie’s. “What happened to the shillelagh?”

R
EACHED AT HIS
daughter’s soccer game, Stier had a little trouble hearing Hardy on his cell phone but picked up the gist in the end. “You want me to let you poison the jury with your expert witness telling them the many ways that my eyewitnesses’ testimony is flawed, so they’re primed
to disbelieve everything those eyewitnesses say before I even call them? Why is it that I would agree to that?”

“Couple of reasons.” Hardy, the voice of, plowed on. “First, if I don’t get Paley, I’m asking for a mistrial. That’s not a threat. That’s a statement of fact. Half my defense is attacking the value of your eyewitness testimony. If I can’t do that, I’ve got to punt. Then we’re another sixty days out, starting from scratch. Neither of us wants that.”

“Why would I mind it?”

“Your eyewitnesses are that much further from the event. We get a whole new jury you might not like half as much. My private eye finds an alternate suspect. Somebody gets run over by a bus. Who knows?”

“In your dreams,” Stier said.

Conceding the point, Hardy kept up his press. “All right, how’s this? If Paley testifies for me up-front, he’s that much further from the jury deliberating. They’ll have heard your eyewitnesses, with basically no rebuttal. They’ll remember the testimony, not the ways it might be flawed.” Hardy did not really believe that, but he thought it made a good argument. “The main thing is that I don’t believe it’s going to help or harm either of our cases. Paley’s testimony is going to come in someday, now or later, and how they take it is going to be part of the jury instructions when we’re done.”

After a lengthy pause—Hardy heard the wind blowing, the other parents cheering—Stier spoke. “Tell you what, Mr. Hardy, I’ll give this some thought and have an answer for you Monday morning. How’s that sound?”

“It doesn’t sound like a ‘no.’ Thanks for considering it.”

As soon as he rang off with Stier, Hardy punched up Dr. Paley’s number and left an unequivocal message that the DA had agreed to the Monday testimony and Paley should cancel his patients and plan on being in San Francisco for the start of the court day.

As Hardy put down his phone, he realized that this was nothing if not an out-and-out lie. Which reminded him that he needed to go downtown and have a talk with his client.

I
NSIDE THE GLASS-BLOCK
curvature of the attorney visiting room, Hardy paced against the long wall, over to the admitting door, back to the far end.

Moses sat at the table in his jumpsuit. “I don’t try to tell you how to run your business,” he was saying. “You say you don’t want to know, I take you at your word. Call me a literalist. If I say I didn’t do it, you think I’m lying. If I say I did, then you’re defending a guilty man, and why do you want to do that?”

“Actually, I’m good with defending you if you’re guilty. Somebody did what Jessup did to the Beck, I might have done the same thing. I understand it.”

“Susan wasn’t understanding it so well. All this time, she’s thinking I went and killed this guy and—”

“You let her go on believing that? What was that about? You could have told her right off and saved her a load of grief.”

“You’re assuming she would have believed me.” Moses pushed at the bridge of his oft-broken nose. “I was pissed off, to tell you the truth. Everybody’s so ready to believe it was me. Even Susan. Even Brittany. You. Okay, if that’s who they really think I am, I’ll be that person for a while. See how they like living with that.”

“And it would have killed you to set any of us straight?”

“Fuck that guilt trip. I’m thinking it wouldn’t be so ridiculous if my wife and daughter and, oh yeah, my best friend, simply believe in me. Believe I’m not the kind of guy who goes and beats a kid to death, even if he did deserve it. Did it ever occur to you that I might feel a tiny bit abandoned by the people who know me best? Do you think it might tend to piss me off?”

Now Hardy stopped. “You’ve got a history, Mose.”

A dull light flared in McGuire’s eyes. His voice came out in a low rasp. “You’ve got the same one, Diz. How about that? Did that slip your mind in all the excitement?”

“It’s not the same.”

McGuire threw up his hands in emotion. “Goddamn right it’s not the same. That’s my point. That time we had an overt warning that they were going to murder our children. They’d already killed Sam Silverman and David Freeman. That was an ongoing vendetta, and they had us against a wall with no other options. Five of us were in agreement on what we had to do. No choice. Life or death. That was not the situation with Jessup. But everybody jumped on the old Moses bandwagon, didn’t they? Meanwhile,
do you see anybody believing that you, for example, are capable of cold-blooded murder? Why me and not you? Not anybody else?”

“Yeah, well guess what? You remember what Ugly said yesterday: blood, DNA, eyewitnesses? You must admit, they add up.”

McGuire sighed. “That’s why I finally told Susan.”

“The truth?”

“That’s right. The hard-to-believe, honest-to-God truth.”

“Everything before wasn’t?”

“I never said anything about it, either way. Those were your instructions, if memory serves, and they suited me fine. If people were going to believe what they believed, I wasn’t going to help everybody out. To hell with ’em. The evidence remained the same. You were going to get me off either way, right?”

Hardy, hands in pockets, leaned against the admitting door. He stood planted across the room, at least halfway because if he went closer, he didn’t trust himself not to take a swing at his client. He stared off, trying to get a handle on his temper, cursing his Irish genes. Cursing McGuire’s. The whole situation.

“So,” he said at last, “you want to tell me what happened? You’re trying to tell me you really did go fishing?”

“No. I didn’t go fishing.”

“Your alibi is a lie?”

“So sue me. I knew what the cops were thinking the first time they came by. I knew Jessup had been killed. I had to think of something. Nobody’s going to come along and disprove it, so who gives a shit?”

“The jury might, if I decide to tell them the truth, except for ‘oh yeah, the alibi.’ ”

Not amused, Moses chuckled nevertheless. “You’re not going to do that. Nobody believes I went fishing anyway.”

“What did you do?”

“I drove down there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe kill him, definitely hurt him. It wasn’t all thought out.”

“And you brought the shillelagh?”

“Of course. Last time I’d hit him, my hand was sore for a week.”

“You got there and . . .”

“Knocked on his door, no answer, so tried the knob, and it was open. He was lying on the floor just inside, blood pooled out under him.”

“So what’d you do then?”

“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. Stood there a minute, thinking, Shit. Maybe I prodded the body a time or two with the shillelagh.”

“Maybe? A time or two?”

“Maybe more than that. I don’t really remember. He was dead, which meant I was in trouble just being there. I might have whacked him another time out of frustration. Then I had to get out of there.”

“How about the eyewitnesses?”

McGuire shook his head. “I don’t remember any of them. I just wanted to get to my car and be gone.”

“And you didn’t tell Susan?”

“I didn’t
do
anything. There was nothing to tell her.”

“How about the bare fact? Jessup being dead.”

“We were all going to find that out soon enough, weren’t we? If I could avoid it, I didn’t want Susan thinking I was any part of it. I was trying to save her some anguish. She had enough going on, dealing with poor Brittany. It was a rough day or two. I told her I went fishing to clear my head.”

“And the shillelagh?”

Moses’s shoulders settled. “I shouldn’t have taken that. I loved that old thing. It’s someplace out at the bottom of Stow Lake.”

Hardy came across the room, sat at the table with Moses. He spoke in a conversational tone. “You’re asking me to believe that somebody else altogether came to Jessup’s place before you did?”

“I don’t know when anybody came, Diz. He was dead when I got there.”

“Why?”

“I thought that was your job.”

“Something totally unrelated to Brittany?”

“I don’t know. I’ll keep saying I don’t know as long as I don’t know. All I do know is that I didn’t kill him. You can believe me or not, I don’t care. But it’s the truth.”

“Really, this time, huh?”

Moses met his gaze. “Yep.”

“Well, thanks for sharing,” Hardy said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Absolutely unconvinced, although believing with all his heart that Moses had at last come up with the explanation—weak and in many ways indefensible as it was—that his client was going to live with from now on, Hardy stood up, walked across to the admitting door, and knocked to call the bailiff.

B
Y MID
-
JUNE, THE
conspiracy racketeering charges against Tony Solaia, his fellow bartender Rona Ranken, and their boss, Tom Hedtke, had fallen apart. Their Ukrainian accusers, Igor Povaliy and Vadim Gnatyuk, hoping to parlay their testimony into a couple of special work permits, had woven a web of fraudulent detail that they weren’t able to keep up with. The cases against the Burning Rome defendants were settled with light fines. Povaliy and Gnatyuk were deported back to the Ukraine. Burning Rome reopened, although its prime-time mixologist had moved on to the full-time position at the Little Shamrock once held by its owner, Moses McGuire.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Tony changed the entire ethic of the place—after all, the Shamrock was a tiny and unassuming Irish dart bar that had been at its current location since 1893—but on the weekends, the crowds picked up dramatically, while the average age of the clientele dropped by about ten years. Tony was pouring drinks whose names McGuire wouldn’t have known if he’d been there to see them. New ingredients—infusions of herbs, fruits, homemade bitters, and digestifs—lined the bottom shelf behind the bar. Wheat beer appeared on tap for the first time. They went from the old jukebox to a downloadable stream of music controlled from behind the bar and ten decibels louder.

Stuck in his jail cell, McGuire saw no reason to stay involved. Whatever happened to him with this trial, Moses was in his sixties. Maybe it was time for him to pass along the day-to-day bar duties to someone with more energy and even, dare he think it, more charisma. There was no arguing with the bottom line, and gross sales at the bar in Tony’s first six weeks were up 22 percent.

What recession?

They still had the back dart room, wide with low ceilings, and it was packed to the seams. Brittany was back there now, ten-thirty on Saturday
night, playing darts on a team with her mother—by no means a regular before McGuire’s arrest—against a team of her cousin and Rebecca’s new boyfriend, Ben Feinstein. With the encroachments of unwanted celebrity, Brittany had retreated to her family—making amends with the Beck and Ben, then matchmaking and watching things between them start to develop nicely, albeit slowly. Susan was riding the rush, believing her husband innocent for the first time. She’d called Brittany to share the news, see if they might celebrate in some way, and the bar was where they’d all wound up.

Susan had just retrieved her darts and was turning around when she was blinded by a flashbulb in the hall leading back to the main bar; at the same time, a woman screamed out in the front, and a tremendous crash seemed to shake the whole building.

The room they were in contained four dartboards and comfortably held about twenty people, about half the number trying to push into the narrow opening to the hall.

“Brittany!” a male voice called out as another flash exploded. “Brittany McGuire!” Another flash.

Susan reached for her daughter, got hold of her arm, then yelled, “Ben, grab the Beck! Back this way.”

Someone had started turning the lights on and off, but Susan didn’t need them. Although the mob was pushing in the opposite direction—toward the hallway that led to the main bar—she held on to Brittany and kept moving steadily toward the door at the back, always locked while the bar was open, that led outside to a covered, fenced-in storage area where they kept kegs and cases of beer, snacks, liquor.

Susan had her master set of keys and got the door open. Another eight or ten customers followed them outside as Susan switched on the floodlight.

“What’s going on?”

“Is everybody all right?”

“What happened up front?”

More screams, the sounds of panic, too many bodies in too small a space. And somewhere, off in the night, the sound of sirens.

T
HE FIGHT EVIDENTLY
started with one of the drunk photographers hassling a cluster of attractive women for pictures. The eventual recipe for the melee included lots of inebriated young adults, an overcrowded, overheated, overloud bar, and several chivalrous testosterone-laden boyfriends. No one seemed to remember who threw the first punch, and things got out of hand in a hurry. The cops came and helped restore order and sent a bunch of people home.

“That guy is the kiss of death,” Hardy said.

In bright warm sunlight the next morning, he stood on the sidewalk in front of the Shamrock, hands on hips, staring with disbelief at the plywood where the front window used to be. The Beck had called the Hardys at nine-thirty and given them the short version. Hardy, as the unjailed partner in the Shamrock, felt they ought to go over and check out the damage, the makeshift repair.