The fact that the message was intended for the holiday season speaks volumes to me, since it was always a weird time in my house. My mom was raised Jewish and lit Hanukkah candles with me every year, but that was largely in self-defense. My mom did not like religious holidays in general and for whatever reason, she loathed Christmas especially. For my dad, on the other hand, Christmas was one of the few bright spots in the year when he was a kid, and he continued to look forward to it. Maybe the worst part from my mom's perspective was that the Serbs celebrate Christmas January 7, which meant that for her, the season seemed to drag on forever. She particularly hated the traditional Christmas dinners to which we were regularly invited by my dad's crazy Serbian cousins because they always served pork roast, the occasions often fell on school nights for me, and everybody got drunk on plum brandy. It was usually February before my dad and her were speaking again.
"We examined the registry files on the computer and paid particular attention to the.pst file, which contains the calendar objects," says Gorvetich. "The creation date for an object is contained in the object itself. The.pst file itself also shows a date that reflects the last time the calendar program was used in any way, even if it was no more than opening it. The object in question shows a creation date of September 28, 2008, at 5:37
p.m.
"So at this stage, I can tell the Court that this has every appearance of a legitimate object. Unfortunately, because the file was opened in court this morning, which I would have discouraged, the.pst file now bears today's date. But we have all checked our notes, and when the computer was examined and imaged by both sides last fall, the.pst date was October 30, 2008, several days before the computer was seized. As I noted when I testified, there is debris in the registry from the use of shredding software, but that debris was identified when the computer image was examined by both sides last December."
Tommy Molto stands up. "Judge, can I ask something?"
Yee lifts his hand.
"What if somebody got hold of the computer after October and rolled the clock back and then added this card?" Molto asked.
Brand clearly knows this isn't possible and is reaching after his boss. Hans and Franz are shaking their heads, too. Gorvetich says as much.
"The program doesn't work like that. In order to create proper calendaring, the clock can't be rolled back within the program."
Judge Yee is tapping his pencil against the blotter in front of him on the bench.
"Mr. Molto," he says finally, "what you gonna do?"
Tommy stands up. "Your Honor, if we may, we're going to think about it
overnight." "Okay," says the judge. "Nine a.m. for status. Jury on standby." He bangs his gavel. I come to my feet and wait to head out with my father. Although he is probably going to go free tomorrow, my dad, the eternal enigma, is still not smiling.
CHAPTER 37
Tommy, June 25, 2009
Estoy embarazada.' As he walked toward the office on Thursday morning from the parking structure, the words and the shy pride with which his wife had spoken them were still cascading through Tommy. ' Estoy embarazada,' Dominga had said when Tommy had picked up the phone yesterday after he'd left Brand's office. Her periods had always been flaky, and Tommy and she had been trying for a while, believing Tomaso shouldn't be an only child. But it hadn't seemed to be taking. Which was fine. Tommy had been blessed beyond imagining already. But now she was embarazada, six weeks along, with life again within her.
So this was how Tommy had always known there was a God. You could call it a coincidence that his wife would find out she was pregnant at the very moment he learned his long pursuit of Rusty Sabich had failed again. But did that really make sense, that things just fall out like that, with joy enough to offset any sorrow?
He had gone home early yesterday, in relative peace, and celebrated by sharing the company of his wife and son until they went to sleep, then he awoke at three a.m. to ponder. Sitting in the dark in their house, which was probably going to be too small now, he was swarmed by the doubts he had pushed aside when the prospect of the new baby remained remote. Should a man his age really be having another child-a girl, Tommy hoped for his wife's sake-who was likely to bury her father in her teens, or her twenties at the latest? Tommy did not know. He loved Dominga, he had fallen desperately in love, and all the rest of this followed, inevitably, even if the life he ended up living bore scant resemblance to anything he had expected for the nearly sixty years before. You follow your heart toward goodness and accept what comes.
With Rusty, too, he had done the right thing. Given nearly a day to reflect, Tommy realized that ending the case now was going to suit everybody. The PAs had been duped, by the victim, no less. No one could ever point any fingers at them. Rusty would walk away, but what he'd gone through was a consequence not of any bad faith by Tommy, but of the fucked-up mess Rusty had made in his own fucked-up house. If you really thought about it, Sabich was the one who should be apologizing. Not that he would.
The problem was going to be Brand, who had begun making a case after court. Even though the card was real, he said, there was no way to prove Rusty wasn't the one who had created it last September. It was on his computer, after all. He had planned to kill Barbara, hoping it would be taken as a death by natural causes, but if anybody saw through that, Sabich would haul out this suicide/frame-up stuff in stages.
And given the realities, Jimmy might even be right. After all, who killed herself to set up somebody else? But Tommy had made the essential point to Brand a long time ago: Rusty Sabich was too smart, and too wary of Tommy, to kill his wife, except in a way that would virtually prohibit conviction. Even if Sabich had orchestrated it all this way, he had the better argument. Could he have planted that card and left his prints on the phenelzine or the Web searches on his computer? Tommy and Brand were screwed. If they tried to account for the new evidence, they would be stuck trying to add a third floor to their theory, when they'd already built the house and taken the jury on a tour. Sure, if they had been allowed to prove that Rusty already got away with killing one woman, then the jurors might believe he'd schemed so elaborately to murder another. But Yee was not going back on those rulings at this stage. And as far as the record was concerned, it was Barbara, not Rusty, who was the computer geek and knew how to seed that card in September to bloom at year end.
If the PAs hung tough on their case, then Yee would probably dismiss them out. You could see that on the judge's face yesterday. They could try now to persuade him to let the case go to verdict, arguing that it was the jury's right exclusively to decide what witnesses to believe. But Yee would never buy that. The issue wasn't credibility. The prosecutors' evidence provided no way to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this was murder rather than suicide. It was a null set, as the math guys say-the proof came to nothing.
So they were where they were. If they stood down on the case now, they would be good guys who just did their jobs and followed the evidence where it seemed to lead. If they pressed on, as Brand would want, they would be embittered crusaders who couldn't face the truth.
By now, having again thought through everything he had pondered the night before, Tommy had arrived in the marble lobby of the old County Building, acknowledging the familiar faces arriving to start the workday. Nobody came over to chat, which was a sign of how deeply the news coverage last night before had cut. Goldy, the elevator operator, who'd looked old when Tommy started here thirty years ago, took him up and he passed through the office door.