Even Abe broke into a trot.
At night, Rita put down the fold-a-bed and slept behind a screen in the living room in the front of the duplex. That fact wasn't in the front of Glitsky's mind when he bought the largest tree he could find, and now the never-spacious living room was all but impassable.
His own overstuffed easy chair and ottoman had been relegated to the kitchen to make space for the tree, which made the kitchen tight as well. Rita had lost more than half of her precious counter space.
The scent of the new Christmas tree permeated the house and Rita had made hot spiced apple juice. They had Lou Rawls doing Christmas out of the speakers, the lights were strung up, the old bulbs, and now the boys were hanging tinsel.
Glitsky sat hunched on his ottoman in the open doorway between the kitchen and living room, drinking his mulled cider, taking it all in as though from a great distance. Rita was on the couch, directing the boys to any open spaces on the tree.
He had come home early. He'd taken the boys out for the tree, and now he was home in the midst of his family, wishing he was anywhere else, wishing he could try harder not to show it.
Flo wasn't here. Everything else was here, and not his wife. So what, exactly, was the point?
When the telephone rang, Glitsky knew it was work – it was always work – and Isaac yelled that he shouldn't answer it, let the machine get it. But he was already up, at the wallphone in the kitchen.
It was Amanda Jenkins. 'I'm working on motive,' she said, 'and tomorrow it's fish or cut bait.'
No, 'Got a minute, Abe?' No, 'Hello,' even. But there was no fighting it. Like it or not, he was in trial time, and simple politeness suffered as a matter of course.
He took a sip of his juice – the tang of cinnamon. She was breezing right on. 'I want your take on his second chair, Carrera. I know we've been trying to decide between insurance and whether his wife was a drunk, an embarrassment, but I'm just watching the tube and this picture of the two of them kissing, it's turned up the heat.'
'I saw the picture, Amanda. We talked about it, remember? It wasn't exactly X-rated. I wouldn't even give it an "R". It's a good-night kiss.'
'At his house. They're alone, in the dark,' she countered.
'So what?'
'So in spite of all the tabloid speculation, it's really the first actual proof that these two have something going, and if they do, it's a lot stronger than anything else we've got.'
'That picture doesn't prove anything. They're not upstairs in his bedroom, half-dressed, anything like that. This is a kiss like you give your mother. Besides, even if you had major groping, how are you going to prove they had something seven, eight months ago, which is when it would have had to be?'
'I don't have to prove it,' she said. 'We can assert it, show this picture, let the jury draw the inference.'
Glitsky moved some dirty dishes to one side and seated himself on the crowded counter. He, of course, had wrested with this issue himself, so he decided to give Jenkins the argument that had stopped him. 'That assumes she was in on it, too.'
'She might have helped him plan it, Abe. Now she's defending him for it. It's not that far-fetched.'
'Then you'll have to explain why we didn't charge her, too.'
'Because there was no proof of conspiracy. We just couldn't arrest her without…'
Glitsky sipped the juice, giving her time to hear herself, to wind down. This was the last-minute panic to bolster a case that he'd seen dozens of times.
'It sucks, doesn't it?' she asked.
'Insurance,' he said. 'Juries tend to understand money.'
'You think?'
'It's your decision.'
Jenkins sighed. 'Something tells me it's her, Abe.'
'You don't need motive. Amanda. You might just want to let it go, prove the facts.'
A long pause, then, 'Okay,' and then a click and a dial-tone.
No hello, no goodbye. Trial time.
Across town in his apartment, Wes Farrell sat at his Formica kitchen table, which was littered with yellow legal pads, manila folders, three days' worth of newspapers, a manual typewriter, four coffee mugs, and a thick three-ring binder that he'd divided into sections labelled Evidence, Argument, Witnesses, and so on.
Each of these sections was further divided into subsections, and each subsection contained color-coded tabs in a particular order. Farrell had been living with this binder for the past six months and by now felt he could wake up and put his finger on anything he wanted in pitch darkness.
Bart was under the table and the clock radio, which had been keeping him company with old rock 'n roll, suddenly broke into Jingle Bells. Immediately, he reached over and turned the dial and thought he'd found another soft rock station when he realized it was Mary Chapin Carpenter telling her lover that everything they got, they got the hard way.
Somehow, he couldn't find the will to turn it off. He'd been consciously avoiding country music since he and Sam split, but this song, intelligently invoking passion and spark and inspiration, was ripping him up. Sitting back, he ran his hands through his thinning hair, then reached for one of the mugs of tepid coffee. He forced down a swallow.
His eyes roamed the empty apartment – the same blank walls, thrift-store furniture, the same space.
He'd called Sam twice after the first big fight and they'd had a couple of bigger ones after. And now Thomasino had ruled that Diane Price was going to be allowed to testify after all, and Christina was going to take her part, and Sam would probably be in the courtroom, counselling her.
Shaking his head to clear it – this was going nowhere – he flipped off the radio. He and Sam were finished. Pulling his typewriter through the debris, he thought he'd put this negative energy to some good use by working on some notes for his opening statement, but as he reached for his legal pad, he had to move the morning Chronicle, and The Picture hit him again.
Jesus, he thought, could it be?
Aside from the strategic disaster the photo represented, he was having trouble overcoming his own sense of personal betrayal. Though Mark and Christina had both denied that anything untoward had taken place between them, the fact that they'd met at Mark's house, at night, alone, without telling him about it, was more than unsettling.
It had thrown him back on his own demons.
This was the real reason for the tantrum he'd thrown at them this morning before they went to court. This wasn't just another trial for him, where he'd have to pump himself up with some second-hand, third-rate rationalization that his actions were relatively important.
It was far more personal – a last opportunity, dropped into his lap by a benevolent fate, finally to do something meaningful with his life. With the responsibility and the commitment to Mark's defense, something had already changed inside himself, motivating him to summon the discipline he needed to lose the extra weight he'd carried for years, giving him confidence to try a new face-softening mustache, a crisp and stylish haircut. He'd present the new, improved Wes Farrell to the world, and to that end had bought five new suits (one for each day of the working week), ten shirts, ten ties, two pairs of shoes. Perhaps these changes weren't fundamental, but they indicated that his image of himself, of who he could be, was changing. He even started vacuuming his apartment, cleaning up his dinner dishes on the same day that he ate off them. Unprecedented.
This trial was going to be his last chance. It was life itself, a test of all he was and could be.
He had to believe.