I turned to find Morris sitting in the back of the courtroom. His eyes rose in exasperation and with a series of flicks from his hand he urged me on.
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
“You must answer the question, Mr. Gardner,” said the judge.
“And it doesn’t matter who it hurts? It doesn’t matter if my date has been happily married to another for twenty years, that doesn’t matter, I am still required to tell it all to the tabloids?”
“Answer the question, Mr. Gardner,” said the judge.
“So tell us, Mr. Gardner,” I said as he turned back to me and dared me with his eyes to ask the question again. “Who were you with in the limousine that night?”
“This is personal,” he said. “I don’t believe in all this so-called outing going on, angry young men invading other people’s lives. I don’t care, really, but others do and it’s not right. The Constitution applies to us, too. We might as well be living in Colorado.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gardner,” I said. “But please answer the question. Who was with you in the limousine that night?”
There was a long pause and a sigh and a shake of the head. He laughed to himself and then shrugged. “All right, then.”
“Who, Mr. Gardner?”
“Michael,” he said. “I was with Michael that night.”
“Michael who?”
“Michael Ruffing.”
There was a gasp just then. It wasn’t loud, it didn’t last long, but I heard it in all its sharpness and pain. And I didn’t have to look to see who it came from. It hadn’t come from any member of the jury, or from Prescott, or from Jimmy or Chester or the judge. It had come from the long pale throat of Marshall Eggert, who had just seen his arson claims against Concannon and Moore disappear and had just seen the credibility of Michael Ruffing, his star witness, who on the night of the fire at Bissonette’s had been in a limousine much like the one seen leaving after the arson and who had used the insurance proceeds to pay his tax bill and stay out of jail, the credibility of that Michael Ruffing be crushed to scrap by the aggrieved voice of Leonard Gardner.
52
ON MY WAY OUT of the courtroom Prescott stopped me by grabbing hold of my arm. I looked down at his hand reaching around my biceps, but he held it steady there with a tight grip despite the force of my gaze. I could have said something sharp and clever just then if I had thought of it as he gripped my arm, but nothing sprang to mind, so I stayed quiet.
“Nice bit of investigation, pulling out that Gardner fellow,” he said finally. “You’re a constant source of surprise.”
“I’m just shocked that with all the resources of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase you didn’t find it yourself.”
“Maybe we did.”
“But why blame Ruffing when it was so much more convenient to put the arson off on Chester?”
“You subpoenaed Veronica Ashland,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.
“That’s right.”
“My advice, for what it’s worth…”
“Not much anymore,” I said.
“My advice, Victor, is not to call her. You know, of course, if you do call her to testify I’ll have no option but to bring out your sordid affair with her.” I had figured they had known, but I looked away from him anyway. On the other side of the courtroom, through a watery blur, I could see Jimmy Moore talking with a small group of supporters but staring at me as hard as a hypnotist. “The jury will think that rather strange,” Prescott continued, “calling your lover as a witness.”
“Our relationship is in the past. It ended the instant I realized she had information relevant to this case. But whatever the jury thinks, they’ll think she’s telling the truth.”
“Her testimony is not going to be all you expect.”
“I think we’ll give her a shot.”
“She doesn’t want to testify.”
“That’s why God invented the subpoena.”
“Jimmy doesn’t want her to testify.”
“I’m sure of that,” I said.
“We seem to have the damnedest time communicating, Victor. I apologize if I’m not being clear. Jimmy has told me that he is worried about the pressure of testifying on her fragile physical condition. He believes that forcing her to testify at this most difficult time in her life could be dangerous to her health.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“Don’t be silly. But Jimmy wanted you to be aware of all the possible consequences of putting that girl on the stand.”
“Because if that’s a threat,” I went on, “that would be obstruction of justice.”
“I was just voicing a concern that had been explained to me by my client.”
“Maybe I should call Eggert over here, and Special Agent Stemkowski. Maybe you could voice Jimmy’s concern to them.”
He smiled at me. “That won’t be necessary,” he said, then he turned around and walked over to his client. It would have been a small moment of triumph for me, except for that smile. It wasn’t a nervous smile, there was no tension in it, no worry. It was a chess player’s smile, as if he had opened with P-Q4, I had countered with P-Q4 and he had replied with P-QB4, offering his queenside bishop’s pawn for capture. I had played enough chess in the geekdom of my youth to know the price of accepting that pawn. His smile was the smile that invariably accompanies a gambit and I didn’t like it one bit.
Morris was waiting for me outside the courtroom. He had agreed to drive with me to the office, my protector now that I was under attack. The thought of Morris protecting me was oddly comforting. I was going straight to the office because I had decided to skip Chuckie’s funeral, decided for the best of all possible reasons: naked fear. Together Morris and I walked down the hall to the elevator.
“You could have told me what Gardner’s testimony would be at the first,” I said
“So where would be such fun in that?”
“This isn’t fun. I’m dying here and you’re talking about fun.”
“Such kvetching. You drew it out of him in the end. A lawyer as grand as yourself, Victor, I knew you would be getting to the bottom of what he had for the telling.”
I looked around the hallway. “Where’s Beth? Have you seen her?”
“I sent her off on a little errand,” said Morris.
“To pick up your dry cleaning?”
“That too needs doing,” he said. “Now quiet please, I have news for you from Corpus Christi.”
“You found Stocker?” I asked.
Morris stopped walking, took out his glasses and little notebook, and searched through the notebook’s pages and the scraps stuck inside those pages for his notes. “Aaah, yes. Here it is.” He pulled out a piece of envelope with a tight scrawling over it and began walking again, squinting through his glasses all the while at the tiny print. “It seems there is a Mr. Cavanaugh at the Downtown Marina on a Bay Shore Drive in Corpus Christi that bears a striking resemblance to our Mr. Stocker. This Mr. Cavanaugh is in a thirty-six-foot sailboat. He sailed over from the west coast of Florida. He is renting his berth at the marina by the week. He has no visitors, no friends, he drinks like a carp, and talks of sailing to South America. And this Mr. Cavanaugh makes calls from the marina’s pay phone, which just happens to be the same number that has placed calls to that Mr. Prescott whose office you burgled like a cat.”
“And you think Cavanaugh is Stocker?”
“Of course I think that, such a dorfying you are sometimes, Victor. Why else am I telling all this to you?” We reached the elevators and Morris pushed the down button. “But whether it is so or not, we can only know by going down and finding out.”
“So go,” I said.
“No, thank you,” said Morris. “Where would I eat in Corpus Christi? You think they got a kosher deli in Corpus Christi? You think they got pastrami in Corpus Christi?”
“You’re not going down?”
“After this trial, maybe, you and Miss Beth can make the trip.”
“Why not now?” I said. “It doesn’t do us any good if you find out that it’s him and then he sails away to Paraguay.”