“I mean whatever.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
Hardy chewed and swallowed. “Not my issue. My issue is my client.”
“What if it doesn’t help her?”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Sorry, but those are the rules.” He hesitated. “Look, if it’s any help, give it to Stier too. I just wouldn’t like to see whatever it might be disappear, the way Lori Bradford did.”
Hardy, by now unexpectedly hopeful at the possibility of having the resources of the entire police department working on his behalf, nevertheless didn’t want to push. He had the cards here and Glitsky either would recognize that fact or not. He took a sip of his club soda, pushed some buttered capers onto his fish.
“It would be discoverable,” Glitsky said.
Hardy shook his head. “Before that. Under the table-under this very table if you want-but before it goes through Stier and company. From what you say, Jackman’s going to back you and so’s Batiste.”
“They’re my troops,” he said. “Bracco and Schiff. I undermine their case…”
“I get it. Though one could argue that it’s already undermined and they deserve whatever happens. But again, Abe, not my problem. And, hey, what I have might be nothing.”
It took Glitsky another full minute, maybe more, Hardy eating with gusto and apparent contentment, tasting none of it.
Finally, Glitsky capitulated. “You want me to sign an affadavit, or is my word good enough?”
Hardy put down his fork. Took a steadying breath against the rush. “There’s a guy who may or may not be named Paco who knew both Levon Preslee and Dylan Vogler back in college and who showed up from time to time at BBW to buy his weed. But not since October.”
“May or may not be named Paco.” Now dismissively. “That’s what we’ve been negotiating about?”
Hardy shrugged. “It’s what I got, Abe. Ruiz was looking out for him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ruiz was going to get in touch with Wyatt Hunt if he came back into BBW. And by the way, it looks like the whole crew down there was getting cut in.”
“Yeah, we’re assuming that. We’ll be talking to all of them this time, instead of a select few. But this Paco, is he on Vogler’s list?”
“No.”
“No, of course not,” Glitsky said. “He wouldn’t be. How’d you find out about him?”
“Well, Ruiz, first. Then Maya.”
Glitsky’s eyes narrowed. “She knew him too.”
“Knew of him. The name. Back at USF. He hung out with Vogler and Preslee and-maybe-killed a guy in a liquor store they held up.”
This stopped Glitsky midbite. “Maybe.”
Hardy shrugged. It was what it was.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Except it was probably in the mid-nineties-ninety-five or -six.”
“It might have been in the papers. There would have been an investigation. Maybe a suspect.”
“Knock yourself out,” Hardy said.
“Did Paco know Ruiz was looking out for him?”
“No idea. Anybody working there could have told him, though.”
Glitsky put down his fork. “You’re not making this up?”
“Not any of it.”
After lunch Hardy stood and approached the forensic accountant in the witness chair, seemingly as relaxed as he’d been all morning. “Mr. Schermer,” he began, “you have given a great deal of technical testimony about accounting practices, working with numbers. Are any of these numbers subject to a margin for error?”
“Well, yes, of course. Some to a greater extent than others, but generally, yes.”
“Referring to the analysis you offered on BBW’s gross income versus the amount of raw coffee bought over the last fiscal year, would this have a greater or lesser margin for error than some of the other calculations you performed and shared with the jury?”
“Rather on the high side, I’d think. It is, after all, an estimate.”
“An estimate, with a margin for error rather on the high side. I see. And is there an industry standard that enumerates the margin for error in this kind of analysis?”
Here, for the first time, Schermer’s face creased into something like a frown. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, I mean you take a certain weight amount of a raw product-coffee in this case-and you do an analysis that shows it takes, say, a pound of coffee to make a certain amount of cups, and then you deduce that the business didn’t buy enough raw coffee to make as many cups as it claimed it sold. Isn’t that the basic idea?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Well, then, can we assume that this type of analysis is a standard tool in the industry?”
“In a general way, yes.”
“With other products, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“How about with coffee? Is this a test with a long history of analysis and comparison with other similar tests?”
“Well, no. This was specific to this one business. BBW.”
“Specific to this one business? Do you mean to say that other licensed and accredited forensics accountants such as yourself, and in fact the organization to which you belong, have not established benchmarks to measure the reliability of these analyses?”
“Well, no, not exactly, but-”
“No is sufficient, thank you, Mr. Schermer. Now, can you please tell the jury a little about the methodology you employed to measure the amount of coffee needed to make a cup at BBW?”
Finally given a chance to simply discourse on his specialty again, Schermer leaned back in the chair and faced the panel. “Well, I gathered information from other coffee shops in the city, both chain and individually owned, and took the average of the number of cups of coffee produced from every hundred pounds of beans.”
“How many coffee shops did you use for your comparison?”
“Ten.”
“And how many different kinds of beans were represented in your answer?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, beans come from a lot of different places. South America, Africa, Jamaica, and so on. So what kinds of beans were represented in your sample?”
“As I recall, most of them were from Colombia.”
“And is that the sole source of BBW’s beans, Colombia?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“They came from all over the world, did they not?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“All right. And do you know how many bags were delivered from all over the world over the course of the fiscal year to BBW?”
“I don’t know that, exactly. Perhaps hundreds.”
“But several thousand pounds of coffee, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, at least.”
“And did you test to make sure that all of that coffee had the same density? That is, approximate number of beans per pound?”
“Uh, no.”
“So the representative sample you used for your analysis might have been stores that used more or fewer beans to make a cup, isn’t that true?”
“I guess so. Yes.”
“And in fact, BBW was a very popular coffeehouse, was it not?”
“Yes.”
“Could that popularity have been based on the flavor of its coffee? That is, that its coffee was stronger or more mild than the shops you used in your sample?”
“I have no way of knowing that.”
“All right, then.” Hardy glanced over to the jury, all of whom were with him, following the cross-examination with none of the more common postlunch torpor. “Let’s talk for a minute, if we may, about the coffee made from these beans. Is there a standard BBW uses for various strengths of coffee? Strong? Medium? Weak?”
“I used medium, which is their house blend strength.”
“But do they serve other coffees of different strengths?”
“Yes.”
“Both stronger and weaker?”
“Yes, which is why I used medium, to be about average.”
“But do you in fact know the percentage of coffee actually brewed there that is weak, medium, or strong?”
Schermer took a breath, no longer enjoying himself at all. “No.”
“And what about espresso?”
“What about it?”
“It was a rather large percentage of the coffee sold at BBW, was it not?”