“And since then?”
This time, in frustration, Hardy held up his hand. “Objection. Relevance.”
“Goes to motive, Your Honor,” Stier replied. If he wasn’t going to convince the jury about the blackmail, he’d take the jilted lover as a backup position.
Braun nodded in her brusque fashion and again shot Hardy down. “Overruled.”
“Since they finished college, then, Ms. Ticknor, did Mr. Vogler tell you that he’d had an intimate relationship with Defendant?”
“Yes. Up till a little before he met me.”
Hardy felt a tight grip over his forearm and Maya’s voice sharp in his ear. “That’s a damn lie!” Loud enough for all the courtroom to hear it, and maybe even the one next door.
Judge Braun slammed her gavel.
But Maya, all but inert for much of these proceedings so far, suddenly had come alive. “That’s just not true,” she said to Hardy, then turned the other way in her seat, toward the jury, and addressed them directly. “That’s not true,” she repeated.
Bam! Bam! “Mr. Hardy, control your client! Bailiffs.”
But before either of the two bailiffs could get to her, Maya had turned completely around to face her husband, sitting in the row behind her. “It’s not,” she said, “it’s not.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I believe you.” And he went to put an arm out to touch her.
But by this time the first bailiff had come up and gotten in between them, knocking Joel’s arm away, looking up at Braun for instructions. And as if in response to this escalation the entire gallery seemed to erupt at once over the steady cadence of the gavel.
When at last, after nearly a minute, a restive silence, if not true order, had been restored, Braun glared down from the bench, looking to Hardy as if she’d suddenly aged ten years. Real fright that her courtroom had so quickly gotten out of her control showed in her face, in the set of her mouth. Maybe it hadn’t happened to her in a while, but whatever the reason, she had been unprepared. As Hardy’s heart pounded in his ear, from one pulse to the next, Braun shifted from intimidated oldster to wrathful prelate. She wielded her gavel, randomly, it seemed, in the near silence, and then dropped the little hammer again, until the silence was complete.
Gathering herself, she summoned Stier and Hardy to sidebar. She spoke with an exaggerated quiet. “Mr. Hardy, any further outburst from your client such as the one we’ve just all endured, and I will order her removed from the courtroom. She can watch these proceedings on closed circuit TV if she can’t control herself. Is that about as clear as I can possibly make it?”
“Yes, Your Honor.” He could have gone on with a bit more of a floral apology but decided to leave it at that. If nothing else, his client had just achieved one of his primary objectives-humanizing herself to the jury.
Hardy went back to counsel table and squeezed Maya’s hand.
Stier, for his part, seemed to have enjoyed the blowup as well, for his own reasons. He would be happy to grant the defendant’s humanity, too, so long as it was a humanity characterized by a hot temper and a dismissive disregard of authority.
He came back to his witness. “Ms. Ticknor, how long did this intimacy between himself and the defendant go on after Mr. Vogler got out of prison?”
“Until he met me.”
“And when was that?”
“About six years ago.”
Hardy had one hand over Maya’s own hand on the table and his other hand firmly holding her arm just above her elbow.
“So they broke off their relationship because of you?”
“Yes.”
Maya leaned over and whispered to Hardy. “Why is she saying this?”
Hardy thought he might know, but this really wasn’t the time to talk about it, so he shook his head very slightly and squeezed her arm tighter.
Braun frowned in their direction.
And Stier went on. “Yet, after this breakup, Mr. Vogler kept working for her at BBW. As his domestic partner, did you know Mr. Vogler’s salary there?”
“Yes. Ninety thousand dollars a year.”
A few gasps from the gallery greeted this intelligence.
“Did your partner share with you why he was paid so handsomely?”
“Your Honor”-Hardy showing some exasperation-“hearsay, relevance, facts not in evidence, conclusory. None of this entire line of questioning is probative.”
“It all goes to motive,” Stier put in, “as will be clear shortly.”
“Very well,” Braun said. “The objections are overruled. Go ahead, Mr. Stier.”
Stier repeated the previous question, and Jansey nodded with some enthusiasm. “She wanted to keep him around because she loved him. She thought she’d get him back.”
“And how did you feel about that?”
“I didn’t like it, of course. I resented it.”
“Did you ask him to quit his job?”
“Several times.”
“What reason did he give you for not quitting?”
“He couldn’t make anywhere near as much anywhere else. Besides, he could sell the marijuana out of BBW without any hassles. He had the perfect situation, he said. He couldn’t be fired. She was paying him just to keep him around.”
“So, to your knowledge, did Mr. Vogler tell you that Defendant knew about the marijuana sold out of her shop?”
“Yes, of course.”
Another whisper from Maya. “That lying bitch!”
Another upper-arm squeeze from Hardy.
Stier paused for a moment. Pure theatricality. “Ms. Ticknor, did anything change between Mr. Vogler and Defendant in the last year?”
“Yes.”
“And what was that?”
“They started up an affair again.”
“And how do you know about this?”
“Dylan wasn’t coming home when he usually did and I called him on it.”
“So he admitted it?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you do?”
“I moved out. In with my parents.”
“When was this?”
“About this time last year. Say six months before-before he was killed.”
“And what happened next?”
“After a couple of weeks, he stopped it-the affair. He told me he’d made a mistake and begged me to come back to him, which I did. Mostly because of Ben. Our child. I wanted our son to have a father.” Jansey ran a fingertip under one of her eyes, then the other.
“Yes, of course,” Stier replied with an admirable sanctimonious-ness. He turned to the jury, including them in his heartfelt emotion. Now, returning to his witness, he cleared his throat. “After this second and most recent rejection of Defendant by Mr. Vogler, did things change at BBW?”
“Yes.”
“In what way?”
“Now she wanted to punish Dylan for dropping her, to fire him, but he couldn’t let her do that. He had too much stuff going on at the store. He couldn’t let it go.”
“So what did he do?”
“Well, mostly he threatened to tell her husband about the affair, and also some of the stuff they’d done in college.”
“In other words, he started blackmailing her.”
“If you want to call it that. Yes.”
“Thank you.” And turning, he said to Hardy. “Your witness.”
In spite of Maya’s outburst both she and Hardy had known the gist of Jansey’s testimony before she’d gone onto the stand-they had heard a similar version of it during the preliminary hearing. Hardy had hoped that much of Jansey’s testimony would never in fact be heard by the jury because so much of it was hearsay.
Well, that would show him.
But against the urge to hope, he was always prepared. Taking some pages from his binder, he walked up to his place in front of Jansey, handing them to her. “Ms. Ticknor,” he began, “do you recognize these pages which I’ve just handed to you?”
She glanced down at them, turned them over. “Yes. They’re transcripts of the talks I had with the inspectors.”
“You’ve had a chance to read them and to compare them to the original tape-recorded statements that you gave police?”