The Ophelia Cut (37 page)

Hardy pressed the play button again, Paley testifying that about 50 percent of people viewing the video for the first time did not notice the gorilla. As the game progressed the second time around and the gorilla came on at the same place, a great deal more laughter broke out in the courtroom—no doubt, Hardy thought, people seeing the damn thing for the first time.

When the video ended again, Paley said, “When you’re looking for a gorilla, you often miss other unexpected events.”

“So, Doctor, if people were focusing on a weapon, such as a club, do your studies indicate that they would be unreliable in processing and recollecting other observations—for example, the facial features of the person holding such a club?”

“Absolutely,” Paley said. “Studies show that an ID under those conditions would not be reliable.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Hardy looked up at the bench. “Your Honor, this concludes my direct.”

F
ARRELL HAD WANTED
to sit in on the opening statements, and last week he had done so, but he wasn’t interested in listening to Paley elucidate the many ways that an eyewitness was a worthless redundancy as far as identification was concerned. Farrell had hired Dr. Paley more than once in his earlier defense practice, and he had no doubt that, if anything, the tireless and enthusiastic expert witness would have upped his game.

Fortunately, the familiarity gave him an opportunity: if you know what your opponent will say, you should be able to turn that to an advantage. And Farrell, after the end run around his position orchestrated by Lapeer, needed to make a strong prosecutorial showing in this case. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to see Moses McGuire convicted—after all, he had known and liked the bartender for over twenty years. But Farrell’s ability to function in his job and, not incidentally, to get himself reelected, would depend on his ability to retain the loyalty and confidence of his troops, both of which had suffered a tremendous hit after the Ramey warrant.

Now, a little after five o’clock, a strangely unfamiliar Lars Gunderson sat on the couch across from him as they ticked off the points that Stier would use tomorrow in his cross-examination of Dr. Paley. Farrell had suggested that Gunderson pull the transcripts of several other trials in which Paley had testified. Taken together, those transcripts were a road map pointing the way to lines of questioning that would help to negate or severely deflate the claims that the jury had heard.

But first, Farrell had to know. “Lars, is it me, or are you sporting some kind of a different look?”

The young prosecutor broke a smile. “I cut my hair and shaved off my mustache. Paul wanted a different approach for the jury.”

“Ahh, there it is. Never let it be said that I’m not observant.”

“No, sir. Never entered my mind.”

“I had a ponytail for a couple of years early in my career. Did you know that?”

“I didn’t.”

“It was meant to be a statement. I decided I wasn’t going to cut my hair until something—almost anything—made sense.”

“How’d that go?”

“As I said, a couple of years went by.”

“Was there one thing that finally happened?”

“You mean made sense? Not really. My hair would be all the way down to my ass if I’d stuck to my guns. But you’ve got to remember, I was a defense guy in those days, so my clients tended to identify with me more than with the suits who were trying to put ’em in jail.”

Gunderson took a beat. “If I could ask, how are you doing with this McGuire thing?”

“Me knowing him and all?”

“Yeah.”

“He did the crime, he does the time.”

“Really? Just like that?”

Farrell sat with the question, then got up from the couch, picked up a Nerf basketball, and shot it at the basket over by the law books. He missed by a couple of feet. “The corollary is that if he didn’t do the crime, he walks. Personally, I hope he walks. I hope he didn’t kill that kid. But if he did . . .” He shrugged. “It’s not as personal as people made it seem.”

“You mean Lapeer?”

Another shrug. “She had her priorities. She could have come to me and sold her pitch. But she never gave me any pitch, which is where she went wrong.”

“So you think she was wrong?”

“I just said that, didn’t I?”

“So McGuire’s innocent?”

“Not at all. I hope he’s innocent. I think he’s guilty as sin. Although, vigilante at heart that I am, I kind of understand where he was coming from. Tell no one.”

“Right. Of course.”

“So? We good? Back to Dr. Paley? Ream him a new one?”

Gunderson nodded. “Back at him.”

A
T APPROXIMATELY THE
same time, Dismas Hardy was in his office, talking on the phone with his investigator, Wyatt Hunt. “At this point,” he was saying, “it’s open season on both Lo and Goodman. We know absolutely nothing about either of them in terms of Jessup, other than he worked for one of them.”

“What am I looking for, specifically?”

“Some kind of leverage he might have had.”

“Is it my imagination, or do I keep coming back to the word ‘specific’?”

“I know. I apologize for that, but I need to find another plausible reason for somebody to want Jessup dead.”

“You realize that would be a pretty big reason, right? I mean, we’re talking a motive for making somebody dead, which is not so easy to keep hidden. As of now, there’s no sign of whatever it might be.”

“Right.”

“Or evidence.”

“We don’t have to prove anything, Wyatt. It just has to be marginally plausible.”

“And you think a city supervisor looks like promising hunting grounds? Don’t get me wrong, I’d love the work, because work is always good, but Goodman is more or less a pillar of the community, is he not? And isn’t it pretty well established that the rape was the motive? Mose’s motive, I mean.”

“If we believe it was him, yes. But we don’t want the jury going away to deliberate without a couple of other theories rattling around.”

Hunt didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he asked, “And who is Lo, again?”

“He owns a bunch of Korean massage parlors.”

“And kills people, too? Kind of as a sideline?”

Hardy chuckled. “You do make it sound slightly absurd.”

Hunt said, “Not my intention. I’m just trying to save you a little money by barking up some possibly more productive trees.”

“I’ll take any and all suggestions.”

“All right. Like, what about the rest of Jessup’s personal life?”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he stole one of his friend’s girlfriends. Maybe he sold dope on the side and stiffed his supplier. Maybe he had a jealous gay lover. Maybe he ran over some crazy lady’s cat. The dude was a rapist. He had roofies, right? So there probably were other victims. What about if one of them killed him? Did he have any family?”

“He’s got a mother and a sister ten years older. Apparently he wasn’t close to either, although they were sad to see him killed and all.” Hardy heard a heavy breath over the line. “Am I getting desperate?” he asked.

“Sounds a little like it to me.”

“Can you give me twenty hours?”

“I’ll give you all the time you want. But I feel like I’m wasting your money, and I hate that.”

“If that feeling gets too bad, you don’t have to take the money.”

“Good one, Diz.”

“I know,” Hardy said. “I’m a laugh riot.”

S
USAN STOOD OUTSIDE
the bathroom door adjacent to her daughter’s bedroom and knocked softly. “Brittany, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve been in there for a half hour.”

“I know. I’m fine.”

“I don’t want to bother you, but I’m starting to worry.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Are you coming out to eat? I brought home some Chinese.”

“In another minute.”

“Okay. I’ll be at the table.”

With a heavy heart, Susan walked back to the kitchen. She put down a place mat on either side of the Formica table. On each one she set chopsticks, a cloth napkin, a plate, and a wineglass. She took a half-filled box of white wine out of the refrigerator and put it in the middle of the table. Finally, lifting the individual packages out of the paper bag on the counter, she arranged them, still closed, on the table within easy reach. Shrimp lo mein. Potstickers. Barbecued ribs. General Tso’s chicken. Steamed rice.

Stepping back, she surveyed the table and sighed. Soy sauce, she thought, and turned to grab the bottle from the pantry shelf.

Brittany was standing in front of her in the doorway to the kitchen, wearing a borrowed pair of her father’s pajamas. She had been crying; her eyes were swollen and bleary with tears, her beautiful face was flushed, almost bruised-looking, without any sign of makeup. “I so hate myself,” she said.

A guttural noise escaped from somewhere inside her as Susan walked up to her daughter and wrapped her arms around her.

Brittany, stiff and resistant, held on for a couple of seconds, then broke down and began to sob.

G
LITSKY SAT IN
the passenger seat of Bill Schuyler’s car in front of his home. The fog was in and dusk well advanced. The FBI agent, about ten years Glitsky’s junior, was never a terribly relaxed man, and here in these close quarters, he fairly hummed with tension. Glitsky had invited him upstairs, but Schuyler clearly didn’t want whatever this was about to take up much time. He didn’t want to meet the family. He didn’t want anything to be personal.

“I don’t even know why we’re having this meeting,” he said. “I told you I don’t have any pull with the marshals. It’s a different jurisdiction.”

“I understand that.”

“Obviously not.”

“Are we going to argue about this or get down to it?”

Some of the fight went out of Schuyler. “You’re lucky to be out of the business,” he said. “I’m cranky because I’m in the middle of something else. It’s making everybody crazy. One crisis after another.”

“I remember it well. And I wasn’t even federal.”

“From all I hear, you got screwed.”

Glitsky coughed out a laugh. “Well, thanks. I’m looking on it as a blessing. Doing something else with my life.”

“And yet here you are, very much in the life, calling me.”

“Doing a favor for a friend. And before you tell me for the fifth time that you can’t help me, let me tell you that my friend and I, we’ve got no interest in disclosing the identity of the witness. We just want to know what he’s in for.”

“How do you even know to ask?”

“He bragged to his girlfriend, then dumped her.”

“What a unique story. And you think what he told her might not have been the whole truth?”

“We don’t know. He painted himself, no surprise, as something of a hero. Saw some bad guys doing bad things and decided he had to step up and testify against them.”

“Out of the blue? With no coercion? No trades for a lesser plea? He just came forward?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, I can tell you from my own experience that if that’s true, it’s one of the very few times. Usually, if somebody gets close enough to be a useful witness, they’re part of it, and not way down at the bottom, either. They get turned because we’ve got something to threaten them with, and then we disappear them.”

“I know that. It’s why we’re skeptical of this guy’s story. His first name is probably Tony, last name maybe starts with an S.”

“Soprano?”

“Good guess, but maybe something else. Probably out of the New York area, maybe Jersey. The big clue is we know he’s here, working as a bartender. One of your marshals will have him.”

“And you don’t want his name?”

“We just want to know what he did. If he was a soldier or what. Particularly if he’s ever killed anybody.”

Schuyler looked across at him. “So all talk of retirement aside, you’re still in the homicide business? You’re saying this is a murder case?”

“I don’t recall using precisely those words. But I’d say they’re within the realm of the possible.”

With a curt nod, Schuyler said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

H
ARDY DIDN’T GET
home from the office until a quarter to eight.

When he wasn’t at trial, he and Frannie were relatively democratic in their division of household chores. During trials, though, Frannie made it a point to try to keep potential sources of stress out of his life, and she took over most of the domestic duties. She got up early with him, made him a good breakfast, checked to see that his suits had been pressed,
his shirts were back from the cleaners, his ties didn’t have stains, his shoes were shined. He made it a point to be home by eight, and when he showed up, she fixed him a cocktail—tonight an ice-cold dry martini of Hendrick’s gin with a slice of cucumber—while she had one glass of chardonnay.

For the next twenty minutes, while dinner simmered or baked or waited for Frannie’s return to the kitchen, they sat together on comfortable chairs, usually in their living room, and talked but did not mention anything about the trial. This was a hard-and-fast rule, arrived at early in their marriage when Hardy would get so engrossed in his work that he was unable to discuss anything except a trial for weeks at a time. Then he would stay up late, reading over his binders, after which he would usually suffer from insomnia. More often than not, his immune system would revolt and he’d get sick. Frannie finally convinced him that his trial habits were not only unhealthy for his mind and body, they detracted from his performance in the courtroom. Twenty minutes of nontrial conversation was never going to lose him a trial, and it might help him win one.

Tonight they had more than enough to fill up their talk time. Their son, Vincent, in Barcelona the summer before his senior year, had Skyped Frannie during the day, catching them up on his latest adventures—he had lost his backpack for an hour the previous night; it turned out he’d left it at a tapas bar, but miraculously, the owners had picked it up and stored it in the back room. This morning, he had climbed the curving tower of the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s ornate and monstrous cathedral. He thought he might be addicted to paella.

That day, they’d received the invitation to Wes and Sam’s wedding, which would be held in early September at Buena Vista Park, across the street from their house. Frannie had called Sam and learned that there would be only sixty guests, surprising in an aspiring politician.