Easier ground. ‘He loved it,’ she said, sitting back. ‘It was like a home to him. His real home.’
‘You were familiar with it, then? You spent a lot of time on board?’ Casual.
‘Well, yes. But not so much recently… He was taking May out on it a good deal.’
‘Do you know, did you father tell you, if May Shinn had a key to the Eloise?’
Pullios stood up. ‘Your Honor, I know we’re on boats here, but this is a little too much fishing for my taste.’
‘Mr Hardy, do you have a point?’
‘Your Honor, sometime between Wednesday night, June twenty-fourth, and the next afternoon the person who killed Owen Nash brought the murder weapon back onto the Eloise. That person would need a key.’
‘Your Honor! This is outrageous. How does this unsubstantiated claim relate to this proceeding, to Mr Fowler, to anything? No evidence has been entered, even hinted at, on this point.’
Hardy knew this would be the response, but he had to get the message to Celine that he knew. He kept calm.
Her face, he noticed, had gone pale, although at the moment no one else was looking at her. He was at the center of the storm.
‘Mr Hardy,’ Chomorro said, ‘we’ve heard Sergeant Glitsky testify that he found the gun on Thursday aboard the Eloise. Do you have a witness with a different version of events?’
‘No, Your Honor, not yet.’
‘Well, this is neither the time nor the place to find it. Is there anything relevant you’d like to ask Ms Nash? Otherwise…’
He leaned over toward Celine as Hardy said no. ‘The court apologizes, Ms Nash. If Ms Pullios has no objection…?’
‘No, pass the witness,’ Pullios said.
When Hardy sat down, Fowler whispered to him. ‘What the hell was all that about? If that’s the best we got, then let me up there.’
Celine was cool, but he’d always known that. She walked by his table without a glance at him. He turned to watch her go back to her seat on the aisle. Thank God, he thought. As he’d assumed, she wasn’t leaving.
Finally Andy Fowler took the stand, and Hardy led him through the testimony they had rehearsed fifty times. He did look good up there, Hardy thought. Self-assured, confident, speaking clearly, giving the jury his attention and respect.
They went through it all from the beginning, taking the good with the bad. There were a few rough moments, such as when Hardy asked him, as they had decided he would, just why it was he had hired Emmet Turkel.
‘I didn’t hire him to find out about Owen Nash,’ Fowler said. ‘I don’t deny that was what he found, but I just wanted to know why May would not see me anymore. I thought she might even be in some trouble. I just wanted to know, and she had made it clear she didn’t want to talk to me about it.’
They went over how the fingerprints came to be on the clip of the gun, the tortuous and unlikely route that May’s proceeding had traveled to wind up in Andy’s courtroom.
‘And once it was there,’ Fowler said, ‘I felt it was too late. It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, but it wasn’t something I had contrived. It just happened – it fell in my lap.’
He admitted the lies to his colleagues, portraying himself – accurately, Hardy thought – as a man torn between his private needs and his professional position. ‘I should have asked her to marry me months before and taken whatever came from that,’ he said. ‘But I never thought about losing her until she was gone. And then, again, it was too late.’ Flat out.
As to his weekend in the Sierras, what could he say? He had gone up to clear his head, with the express purpose of seeing no one. He had succeeded only too well. He wished he hadn’t. ‘It would have saved the state’ – he took in the jurors – ‘and the jury much time, trouble and expense.’
In all, it took less than two hours of relaxed if meticulous testimony. Fowler remained composed, saying what needed to be said.
Pullios was obliged to charge not like a bull but like a terrier, holding onto his trouser leg, hoping to pull him off balance. Watching her work, Hardy was struck once again by her passion. Here was no act – every ounce of her dripped with the conviction that Andy Fowler lied with every breath he drew and had cold-bloodedly murdered Owen Nash.
‘Would you say, Mr Fowler, that you are an avid camper?’
The judge smiled. ‘No, not particularly.’
‘How many times, roughly, have you been camping in, say, the past year?’
‘Just the once, I’m sure of that.’
‘How about in the past couple of years?’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No, I’ve only gone that once in the last few years. I’m a pretty busy man. Or have been…’
‘And yet last June, out of the blue, you suddenly decided to take a weekend off and go backpacking in the high Sierras?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Would you mind telling us where you ate on Friday night? Friday night was the night you left town, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. It was one of those spots up Highway Fifty above Placerville. I don’t remember the exact name.’
‘Do you recall what town it was near?’
Fowler shook his head. ‘No, I’m really not too familiar with the area.’
‘Do you remember what you ate?’
His frown grew pronounced. ‘I believe I ate a steak.’ He tried some levity. ‘But since I’m under oath I won’t swear to it.’
She kept at it. Was it dark when he had finished dinner? Where had he spent the night exactly? When did he hit the trailhead? What was his destination? How had he found it? What did he bring with him to eat on Saturday night?
It was getting to him. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I didn’t give a great deal of thought to that weekend until after I was charged with this crime. It was simply a weekend away, not one to remember.’
‘Yes,’ Pullios said, turning to the jury, ‘we can see that.’
She moved along, as Hardy feared she would, to the stipulation about Fowler knowing not only that the gun was on the boat but exactly where it had been kept.
‘And this was after you had broken up, you found this out?’
‘Yes.’
‘When May Shinn wasn’t talking to you to the extent that you had to hire a private investigator to find out why she wouldn’t see you?’
‘Well, she talked to me that once.’
‘Why did she do that?’
‘I don’t really know. I called and she happened to answer the phone. Usually it was set to her machine. But she picked up, so we talked.’
‘And just casually talking, she happened to mention that her Beretta was in the desk at the side of Owen Nash’s bed on board the Eloise?’
‘No, it wasn’t quite like that.’
‘Would you tell us, please, what it was quite like?’
Hardy looked at the clock. She had at least another hour today and she was, to his regret, hammering at the evidence they did have, avoiding for the moment the entire consciousness-of-guilt issue, although he knew that too would come. Also, and perhaps worse, Andy seemed to be losing it a little, beginning to come across peevish.
‘Let’s talk about Mr Turkel again. You’ve testified that you were curious about why Ms Shinn was breaking up with you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And so you hired Mr Turkel?’
Short questions, little tugs on the trousers. But they were doing the job.
Fowler nodded wearily. ‘Yes, I hired Mr Turkel.’
‘How much did he charge you?’
‘I think it was about a hundred and thirty-five dollars a day, plus expenses.“
Pullios brought in the jury again. ‘One hundred thirty-five dollars a day. And did you pay for his plane fare out here?’
‘Yes.’
‘And back?’
She brought out that he had spent over $1,500 to obtain detailed information on Owen Nash and May Shinn. ‘And now, having spent all this money, what did you intend to do with this information?’