Stier picked up the narrative again. “But not Defendant. The evidence will show that she remained a silent partner, and that silence had a price. In the early afternoon on Thursday, November first, Mr. Preslee got a phone call and abruptly left work at ACT in an agitated state. At two-oh-five that afternoon he placed a call to Defendant on his cell phone. Although Defendant-again-initially denied to police that she had ever been to Mr. Preslee’s apartment, DNA and her fingerprints will in fact place Defendant at Mr. Preslee’s home right around the time of his death.”
At their table Hardy’s hand closed around Maya’s wrist, and she cast him a downward look and let out a sigh.
This last bit of evidence, of course, had caused Maya’s arrest and was in many ways the low point of the past several months. The prosecution had developed its theory about the supposed relationships and possible blackmail between Vogler, Preslee, and Maya, but without any physical evidence tying Maya to Preslee’s home, even with his telephone call to her from his cell phone, there was no practical chance that she could ever be charged with Preslee’s murder. And possibly not even with Vogler’s.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Stier went on, “we have here nearly the exact same pattern of behavior from Defendant in two related homicides. When she was in college, Defendant became involved with both victims in the sale of marijuana. You will hear evidence that Defendant both used and sold this and other drugs, and hear eyewitness testimony that her criminal partners, Vogler and Preslee, participated in robberies of other drug dealers.
“Since those days Defendant has masqueraded as an upper-class mother, a good wife, a regular churchgoer, and a law-abiding citizen. This new life was all-important to her for many reasons, but most particularly because she is a member of one of San Francisco’s most prominent political families.”
Here at last was Hardy’s first chance to stem the onslaught. “Objection, Your Honor,” he said. “Irrelevant and argumentative.”
Judge Braun frowned down at him and let him know how the wind was going to blow. “I think neither,” she said. “Overruled.”
Stier nodded at the bench, continuing smoothly. “Defendant paid dearly to keep her past secret. You will hear another eyewitness-the victim Mr. Vogler’s common-law wife-testify that her husband, with whom Defendant had been intimate, was blackmailing Defendant over an eight-year period. The blackmail mostly took the form of an exorbitant salary that he took as manager of Bay Beans West, but lately, Defendant’s financial records will reveal a pattern of money laundering through the coffee shop that corroborates the bare fact of the blackmail and provides a compelling motive for Mr. Vogler’s murder. And, in fact, for Mr. Preslee’s.
“The evidence overwhelmingly supports the People’s contention that Defendant killed both Mr. Vogler and Mr. Preslee because one had been blackmailing her and the other was about to do the same. She used her own gun to kill Mr. Vogler and-with that gun in police custody-used the nearest thing that came to hand, a kitchen cleaver, to kill Mr. Preslee. But both of these were premeditated acts that the state of California defines as first-degree murder, and that is the verdict I will ask you to deliver at the end of this trial. Thank you.”
Glitsky sat, feet up, behind his desk, which was getting pretty much littered with peanut shells. He’d opened the high blinds up sometime over the past six weeks since Hardy had last been up here, once it had become reasonable to assume that Zachary would recover, so the room was at last adequately lighted again.
Hardy and Frannie had been at the Glitskys’ home two weeks before, and while Zack still wore a football-type helmet during his every waking moment, to both Hardys he seemed absolutely normal, back to what he had been before the accident.
It was Abe, Hardy felt, who had irrevocably changed. Not a man whom anybody would mistake for Mr. Sunshine in any event, Glitsky couldn’t seem to absorb the reality that Zachary was better, and that this was good news for him and for his life. Instead, his focus tended to be on his own responsibility for the accident in the first place; his general incompetence as a human being; his unlucky star. Whatever it was, much of what had always been at best a dark and cynical spark now had ceased to throw any light at all, and Hardy found it disturbing and wearying. Not that he was giving up on his best friend, but he was constantly trying to come up with ideas that might help restore Abe to something like what he used to be.
Stopping up here unexpectedly at lunchtime today on the first day of trial with a fresh supply of peanuts, for example. The peanuts that Glitsky had always kept in his desk drawer-top left until Hardy had surreptitiously moved them one day to top right-had run out just before Christmas, never to be replaced. So even though he had his own opening argument to deliver when court resumed after lunch, he stopped by to drop off the gift and chat for a few minutes.
And it had started, of course, with a discussion of Stier’s opening, which Glitsky thought was pretty compelling. “Admittedly, though,” he said, popping a nut, “I’m the choir he was preaching to. You probably didn’t really want to ask me.”
“Oh, right, I forgot for a minute. What was the part, though, that convinced you?”
“Of what?”
“That Maya’s guilty.”
Glitsky’s hands rested together on his stomach. He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve got one for you. What part of it didn’t you believe?”
“I believed all of it,” Hardy said.
“There you go. Don’t worry about it. You’re due for a loss anyway. Nat”-Glitsky’s eighty-something father-“says the occasional loss strengthens the spirit.”
“The old ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us strong’?”
“Right.” A shadow fell over Glitsky’s face. “I have to admit, though, sometimes not.”
“When did you get a loss recently?”
Glitsky’s face went a shade darker. “Hello? You been around the last few months?”
“You’re taking Zack as a loss? Last I saw, he was bouncing off the furniture.”
“Last I saw, he was walking around in a football helmet. Maybe you didn’t notice?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear what you just said: He was walking around. The football helmet was against future injury, if I’m not mistaken. Is there something you aren’t telling me?”
“About what?”
“Zack. All I’ve heard is that all signs point to complete recovery.”
Glitsky shook his head. “They don’t know for sure.”
“But they say what I said, don’t they? All signs point, et cetera.”
“They say they’re ‘cautiously optimistic.’ That’s ’cause if they say he’s all better and something happens, they’re afraid I’ll sue ’em.”
“How about if it’s because they don’t think anything else bad is going to happen?”
“They can think it all they want. Nobody’s saying they know it. Nobody can know it. Why again are we talking about this?”
“You were calling it a loss, that’s why.”
“Yeah. Well, it’s what it is, whatever you call it.” Glitsky pulled his feet off the desk. “What were we talking about before that came up?”
“Stier’s opening.”
Staring off into the middle distance between them, Glitsky absently cracked another peanut shell. “That’s the main thing. I used to have a pretty good brain. Now, my attention span… I get one thought. It goes away. Another one stops by. I can’t string any of them together. It’s just like I’m endlessly distracted. I can’t seem to get myself out of it.”
Hardy asked, “You talking to somebody?”
“Sure. Treya, Nat, you from time to time.”
“I mean a professional.”