She jumped to her feet. “Your Honor, I object.”
Shawn glanced at her, and he saw. Saw the sealed Wet-Nap sticking out of her jacket pocket. The spot of barbecue sauce on the sleeve of her white silk sleeve. And, sitting in her open purse, a small bottle of hand cream-the kind placed in hotel bathrooms. Then he glanced at the judge. And saw a small red spot in his otherwise meticulous white beard.
The judge gaveled for order. “She is not being charged with any crimes. You are. How do you plead?”
“Your Honor,” Shawn said. “At this time I’d like to call my first witness.”
“Objection!” Willingham said. “This is an arraignment. You don’t call witnesses at an arraignment.”
“In that case, I’d like to send out for some lunch,” Shawn said, staring at the judge. “You don’t happen to know a good barbecue place, do you?”
The judge’s face reddened under the white beard as he banged his gavel. “The defendant will sit down.”
“Okay, don’t tell me,” Shawn said. “I’ll ask around. I’m sure someone saw you having lunch today.”
Gus sank his head in his hands. He was pretty confident that the judge at an arraignment couldn’t actually sentence them to death, but Shawn seemed to be doing everything he could to find out. After a long moment when the judge hadn’t spoken or gaveled, Gus looked up again.
The judge was glaring at Shawn. Sarah Willingham was glaring at the judge. And the defense attorney was desperately trying to figure out what was going on. Apparently, whatever Shawn had seen was something he wasn’t supposed to.
The judge banged his gavel again.
“One witness,” the judge said. “And then a plea.”
“Your Honor, I object to these proceedings,” Willingham said.
“If you’d done that before lunch, I wouldn’t be getting away with this,” Shawn said sweetly, then turned to the courtroom. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury-”
The judge gaveled again. “Once again, there is an arraignment, not a trial. There is no jury here.”
“Fine, whatever,” Shawn said. “Ladies and gentlemen whose opinion means nothing to this court, I’d like to introduce you to my first witness.”
Shawn tapped their lawyer on the shoulder, and the man produced a small metal and plastic rectangle. Shawn took it and held it up for the onlookers to see. “I present to you Izzy the iPod,” Shawn said.
“Your Honor, this is ludicrous,” Willingham complained in a voice that suggested she knew he wouldn’t do anything about it.
“Now you may be wondering what a simple iPod has to tell us about the terrible crimes we’re accused of,” Shawn said. “Let’s find out. I’m going to put Izzy in shuffle mode.” Shawn worked the central wheel, then looked at the screen. “What have we got? ‘Killing Me Softly.’ ‘Innocent Bystander.’ ‘Run Like a Thief.’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’ ‘The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game.’ ‘Free the People.’ Do you see what it’s saying, aside from the fact that my lawyer apparently doesn’t own any songs recorded after my birth?”
“Who cares?” Willingham said.
“It’s trying to tell you something,” Shawn said. “About a murder, and the innocent bystanders who were caught up in it. How they had to flee to England where they caught a group of murderous smugglers, and now they should be set free.”
Gus still wasn’t sure what Shawn was doing, but he noticed that the judge seemed to be intrigued. At least he did until the prosecutor spoke.
“Your Honor, that’s a list of songs generated at random by a computer algorithm,” Willingham said. “Any meaning we might find there is simply a product of the human brain’s need to find patterns in any set of data.”
“Exactly!” Shawn shouted. “Which is exactly what my former client Langston Kitteredge spent the past decades doing. Only he’s smarter than we are, so he didn’t do it with iPod songs. He took bits and pieces from all sorts of books and paintings and kept messing them around until they fit in a pattern.”
“And he became so enamored of this pattern he let it replace any sense of reality,” Willingham said. “That’s called paranoid schizophrenia, and if the professor wants to claim it was this mental illness that caused him to murder Clay Filkins, he only has to enter the plea. And this would be a good time to do it, since we’re in the middle of his arraignment.”
For a moment, Gus had been feeling pretty good about what Shawn was doing. He hadn’t had any idea what it was all about, but it definitely seemed to have a direction. Now it looked like he had played right into the prosecutor’s hands. Because if Kitteredge did plead not guilty by reason of insanity, that still left Gus and Shawn guilty of accessory and obstruction and who knew what else.
“No pleas just yet,” Shawn said. “I’d like to call my first witness.”
“You just called your first witness,” Willingham said. “That iPod.”
“An iPod can’t be a witness,” Shawn said. “That’s ludicrous. Now if it were a Walkman, maybe. At least there’s a person in there.”
“Your Honor,” the prosecutor said.
“I’ll allow it,” the judge sighed.
“I call Flaxman Low to the stand,” Shawn said loudly.
Chapter Forty-six
Low stood up and strode to the docket, where he took aseat. Gus glanced over at Kitteredge to see if he’d acknowledge his old friend, but he just stared down at the table.
“I remind the witness he is still under oath,” Shawn said.
“What oath?” Willingham said. “He never swore an oath.”
“I solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” Low said. “Can we get on with this now?”
“ Now I remind the witness he is still under oath,” Shawn said. “Mr. Low. May I call you Flaxman?”
“If you’d like,” Low said wearily.
“Really?” Shawn said. “How about Flax? Or Man? If I were you, I’d go with Man. It doesn’t sound like something you’d eat to boost your fiber.”
“Your Honor!”
The judge didn’t even bother to overrule Willingham but just waved at Shawn to continue.
“So, Flaxy, you’ve known the defendant Longbow Crispirito for a long time,” Shawn said.
Behind him, Gus heard the sound of a hand slapping a forehead and wondered if that was Henry or Lassiter. Maybe both. It had taken all of his self-control to keep from doing the same thing.
“I’ve known Langston Kitteredge for many years,” Low said.
“And you’ve known about his belief in a conspiracy involving King Arthur’s sword, and some artists no one has ever heard of?” Shawn said.
“We have had many discussions about his belief that William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had found Excalibur, and that a secret organization had been searching for it ever since,” Low said.
“Would you say he was convincing?” Shawn said.
“I wouldn’t have spent so much time on the subject if he hadn’t been,” Low said. “I believe you’ve had the experience yourself. Once he started weaving facts together, it was impossible to see where he was wrong. And while you may want to claim that this was nothing more than your iPod hypothesis, a search for patterns in unrelated data, I don’t see that anyone has disproved his main thesis.”
At this, Kitteredge did look up briefly, then returned his gaze to the tabletop.
“So if the professor said he had proof that Rossetti had painted a final picture and it had all these great clues in it, people would believe him, even if no one had ever seen the thing,” Shawn said.
“He’s the authority,” Low said.
“Which means that if someone else painted that picture, but Kitteredge said it was the real thing, whoever had it could sell it for jillions of dollars,” Shawn said.
“It’s hard to imagine a forger good enough to fool my friend Langston,” Low said.
“Even if he was only allowed to see the picture for a few minutes before it was stolen?” Shawn said.
“Your Honor.” Willingham didn’t even bother to get out of her chair this time. “What does this have to do with the defendants’ plea?”