Wes chuckled. “I love when you ask that, Gina. Like perjury’s a surprise.”
“I’m not surprised so much as disappointed it keeps happening. And what’s in it for Jansey is, I guess, what I’m getting at.”
“I think, first, mainly,” Hardy replied, “is she’s in no-man’s-land and this is her ticket out. Early on, Stier or Schiff or somebody probably told her something like, ‘We’re not interested in how much you knew about Dylan’s dope business, or what you got out of it, or if you’re still in it. We’re interested in Maya killing him, and if you can help us out on that, we’ll just conveniently forget about the rest.’ So she’s heavily motivated to give them something. And what better than a bunch of stuff Dylan supposedly said to her, which no one can ever check or even refute? It’s perfect. And she probably thinks Maya did it anyway, that is if Jansey didn’t do it herself…”
“You think that’s possible?” Gina asked.
Hardy shrugged. “Somebody did. Jansey’s alibi’s squishy at best. She’s got a new boyfriend already, probably had him before. She’s one of the best bets to have gotten her hands on the gun. But, though I hate to say it, Maya still doesn’t look too bad for it either.”
“Attaboy.” Farrell had a strong and, it must be admitted, oft-justified prejudice that the client was always guilty. “Don’t wimp out on that now.”
“Don’t worry. I’m pretty secure, although I admit there’s a small chance I could still be swayed.”
“By what?” Farrell asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. A new fact or two.”
“Well,” Farrell said, “that’s not going to happen, not at this stage.”
“Actually, it might,” Hardy said. “In fact, maybe it already did.” He told them about Lori Bradford, new to Stier’s witness list. “I’ve already sent Wyatt out to talk to her, see what she’s got to say.”
“What’s in the police reports?” Gina asked.
A rueful grimace. “It seems they never got around to writing it up.”
“You shock me,” Farrell said.
“I know,” Hardy agreed. “It’s rocked my worldview. But the fact remains, she’s got to have something to say or Stier wouldn’t have made such a fuss about getting her on the witness list. Even if he’s not going to call her. He’s hoping I’m going to let her slide too.” He smiled at his two partners. “But I’m afraid I’m going to let him down on that. At least until I know what she’s got, or not.”
Seven-thirty P.M., killing time until Craig Chiurco’s expected arrival, Hardy sat at his desk. As was his habit, he was reviewing his files, hoping something among this amorphous mass of kindling might spark. The files now ran to four thick black three-ring notebooks, into which he’d crammed, in some semblance of order, forensics reports, police reports, interview transcripts such as those he’d used with Jansey in the courtroom today, photographs, private notes of Schiff and Bracco-the endless accretion of litigation.
At last, having reviewed his notes on Jansey’s testimony-forty-seven pages’ worth-for the second time, he closed the binder and leaned back into his chair. Though part of him yearned to recall her to the stand and pick apart individual strands of her testimony that he’d left unaddressed that afternoon-which was, after all, most of it-he also realized that he’d succeeded in doing his main job, which was discrediting her so that all of her testimony was suspect. Besides, he couldn’t ignore his gut feeling, his pure instinct, that there was nothing in her perjured story that, were the truth known, would likely change any juror’s opinion about Maya’s guilt. The basic facts remained-whether Maya had had an affair with him or not, Vogler had been blackmailing her, she’d been paying the blackmail (which meant she was guilty of something), she’d gone down to BBW and over to Levon’s.
Why? Why? Why?
Jansey was undoubtedly lying, but lying for all of her own, probably very good, reasons. In the end he believed that nothing she said was going to make any real difference.
Hardy got up, walked first over to the window where he looked down on Sutter Street, then came around to another recessed cabinet on the wall across from his desk, this one holding his dartboard. He opened the doors of the cabinet and slid them back into wherever they went, then grabbed his tungsten beauties from their slots and retreated to the dark cherrywood throw line in his polished white oak hardwood floor.
Twenty. Double twenty. Five.
From the board to the line.
One. Five. Twenty. Then one, one, five. Another four or five lost rounds-terrible, atypical shooting-before he finally rang up twenty, twenty, twenty.
Okay.
Leaving those darts where they’d landed, he lifted himself back onto the desk.
Chiurco, again in his coat and tie, sat in a wing chair across from Hardy in the more informal of the two seating arrangements in the office. He seemed nervous, so Hardy did the initial lifting. “So. Levon Preslee.”
“Okay.”
“Remind me. How did his name come up in the first place?”
“Wyatt had put me on Dylan’s old robbery conviction. He thought there might be some tie-in to whatever he was using to blackmail Maya. Or, even better, we might turn up somebody else who wanted to kill him.”
“So how’d you get to Preslee?”
“I just did a Web search. I found Vogler. That gave me the robbery in 1997. And there’s his codefendant, Levon. So I run him on the Web and find out he’s working for ACT. You’re not going to believe this, but he’s also listed in the phone book. I figure he works in the theater, he’s probably home during the day, so I drove out there. I didn’t even know that Wyatt had run across him, too, until I heard about that from you guys.”
“You didn’t call him first?”
“No, sir. I thought in case he wasn’t right with all this stuff, I might get better answers if I caught him off guard.”
“So then what?”
“Then I get into his lobby, and there’s this woman standing there at the door.”
“How’d you know it was Maya? Had you met her before?”
“No, but she’s our client. I saw her picture in the paper. It was her.”
“As it turns out, you’re right.”
“But anyway, I didn’t know what she was doing there, or what I should do, so I just stood there for a minute.”
“Then what?”
“Well, she told me he wasn’t home, and walked out past me. Mr. Hardy, honest to God, I think she was jiggling the doorknob like she was trying to get in, but I got there a split second too late, and I can’t be absolutely positive. But really, that’s what I think I saw.”
“Well, then, if that’s the best you can do for us, then that’s what we’re going to go with. At least it’s something. If I call you to testify, don’t try to improve it. That’s what you’ve got to say. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Okay, then. So write it up just like that and sign it, because if I decide to call you, I’ll need to give the discovery to the DA.”
“Cool.”
“Okay, then. Have a good night.”
“You too.”
“She’s an old lady,” Wyatt Hunt said, “but I don’t know where they got senile.”
Hardy had remembered to call home and tell Frannie he didn’t know when he’d be in-common enough during trials-but at the same time he’d remembered that he’d also forgotten to eat. So when Hunt had checked in after his meeting with Lori Bradford, saying he was at his own office just around the corner on Grant, Chinatown’s main street, preparing to go out to grab some Chinese, Hardy invited himself along.
Now they sat on high stools, sharing a tiny two-top in the front window, the only two customers, eating shrimp and pork and no sign of souvlaki lo mein à la Lou the Greek’s. A good thing.
“So what’s her story?”
Hardy chewed and listened while Hunt laid it out. For all of its simplicity the implications, Hardy realized, might be enormous-nothing less than a complete restructuring of the theory of the case. More importantly, there was no set of facts he could imagine that would be consistent with Maya having been involved in this two-shot scenario.