The doorbell rang again, and again Maya went out to answer it.
“You think she’s telling the truth?” Fisk asked, his body language saying he didn’t.
“She’s my client,” Hardy said. “I have to believe her. If there’s no evidence placing her at Levon’s, no blood on her shoes or clothes…”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No, but-”
Maya’s returning footsteps closed out the discussion as Hardy turned to see her coming back into the kitchen. “It’s your investigators,” she said. “They’re wet and said they’re good waiting out in the lobby. You asked them to come out here?”
Hardy shrugged, standing up. “I didn’t know what was going down exactly when I called them. I knew your children needed rides to school. But sometimes cops serving search warrants get carried away. It never hurts to have backup. Witnesses tend to keep things copasetic. Although it doesn’t look like that’s needed today. I’ll go and talk to them.”
Out by the front door Wyatt Hunt stood dripping in hiking boots, jeans, and a Giants slicker, and Craig Chiurco looked a bit more well-defended against nature with a natty tan trench coat. But the weather wasn’t foremost on their minds. They didn’t even notice Hardy as he approached them, so intent were they on their conversation, whispering back and forth.
Until he stopped two feet away from them, and hearing Chiurco’s last words, “… don’t have to say anything about it?” Hardy said, “About what?”
Hunt shook him off. “Nothing.”
“Ah, the famous nothing.”
“You don’t want to know, Diz,” Hunt said. “Really.”
“I like knowing stuff,” Hardy countered. “It’s one of my hobbies.”
“You really might not want to know this, Diz. I promise. The only way you want to know this now is if it comes out some other way later and you didn’t hear it here first.”
“You’re saying I’d be pissed?” Hardy leaned in toward them and lowered his own voice. “Maybe I should get to decide. I hate surprises later. So I decide yes now.”
Hunt motioned off with his eyes behind Hardy, over toward the kitchen. He stopped, turned to Chiurco, and shrugged, then shook his head. To all appearances, he had a bad taste in his mouth.
“You’re the boss,” Chiurco said. “Your call.”
Hunt hesitated another moment, then finally let out a long breath. “Craig saw her.”
“Who?” Hardy asked, his empty stomach suddenly bunching up on him. For of course he immediately knew who, and when, and where.
Two minutes later they were all back in the kitchen. Joel had appeared from his duties elsewhere in the house and now stood over by the sink, holding Maya’s hand. They’d all been in a spirited conversation talking about something but stopped when a firm-jawed Hardy trooped in with Hunt and an especially disconsolate Chiurco in his wake.
Without any preamble Hardy looked around to Joel and Harlen and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak to Maya alone for just a minute if I could.”
Joel, on edge in any case and perhaps emboldened by his interactions over the past hour or so with the police, moved a half-step over in front of his wife, protectively. “That’s not happening. We’ve already told you our decision on that. We’re fighting this together, Maya and me, all of it.”
“All right, then,” Hardy said. “But if that’s the case, I have to tell you that you’ll be doing it without me.”
“Fine,” Joel said. “We didn’t-”
Maya held up her own hand. “Wait!”
“Maya.” Joel, warning her, scolded her back into her place.
“No!” She turned her gaze to Hardy. “Dismas, can’t you just say whatever it is in front of Joel? We are in this together.” She turned to her husband, met his eyes. “We really are, Joel. But”-coming back to Hardy-“but I’ll go talk with you if you need me to. If that’s the only way.”
“There’s no only way, Maya. There’s no one way. There’s just the way it’s worked for me. The way I do it.”
Joel, adopting a reasonable tone, said, “Mr. Hardy, all right. Maya wants to keep you on, we’ll play it your way if you need to. But I’m telling you that you can say whatever you need to in front of me. And Harlen, for that matter. He’s family too.”
Hardy, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the postadrenaline slump after what he’d just heard from Chiurco, felt his shoulders sag, and this tweaked the crick in his neck anew. This was not the way the practice of law was supposed to work. To be effective you had to maintain control over the client, the family, the flow of information. And now he was feeling it all inexorably swirling away from him. “I very much appreciate all of your cooperation with one another,” he said, “and your mutual trust. But as I’ve told you, this is just not how I do it. I’ve got to talk to Maya first and alone. She’s my client and I’ve got no choice.” He turned to her. “Maya?”
She looked around at the room full of men, brushed her husband’s arm, and moved around him. “We’ll be right back,” she said.
“He’s sure?” she said.
“He said he’s one hundred percent sure. You’ve got a memorable face, Maya. You passed right by him as he was going in.”
“I don’t remember him.”
“No,” Hardy said, “maybe you don’t.” Thinking that it was probably because she had just killed someone. “But you were in fact there, weren’t you?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Maya?”
She looked up at him. “I didn’t think anybody would believe me if said I went there but he wasn’t home. But that was what happened.”
“Why did you go there?”
“He asked me to. He told me he needed to see me. That he’d tell about me and Dylan and him if I didn’t.”
“Just like Dylan?”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what Dylan threatened you with if you didn’t come down too.”
“No. That was different. That was the shop. I already told you that.”
Hardy took a beat. “You also told me you didn’t go to Levon’s.”
Again, silence. Finally, “So what are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you going to tell the police?”
“No. Of course not. I’m on your side here, Maya. We can’t let the police find out about this at all. We’re just lucky it was my investigator who saw you. He’ll never tell a soul. I’ll never tell a soul. And there is no way we can ever be made to testify against you. But I think it’s time we stop answering any more questions at all. Someone wants to talk to you, you refer them to me.”
But no sooner had they walked back into the kitchen than Maya walked and then ran the last few steps up to her husband, hugged him, and started crying.
“Hey. Hey,” he said, holding her. Then, at Hardy, “What did you say to her?”
Hardy stood his ground. “There were things she had to understand. She’ll be all right.”
“She’ll be all right! She’ll be all right! Look at her. She’s crying now, for God’s sake. She’s not all right at all.”
“I’m sorry,” Hardy said. “I didn’t mean to make her cry.”
“Well, whether or not you meant it…” He brushed his hand down over her hair. “It’s okay, babe. It’s okay.”
She pulled away and looked up at her husband, her voice breaking, hysteria coming on. “It’s not okay. It’s not going to be okay. Maybe not ever again.”
“Sure, it will. We’ll get through this and-”
“No, Joel. You don’t understand. I was there. I was there.” She turned and pointed to Chiurco. “He saw me. Oh, God! Oh, God! I’m so, so sorry.”
Three days later, after the lab confirmed that both Maya’s fingerprints and DNA were on the doorknob of Levon’s apartment, Schiff and Bracco took Maya into custody.