Arthur’s manner turned far more sober when Wentworth described his own less-than-halcyon day. “Carlos was in Los Angeles?”
“Yeah. Jeez, I’m sorry.”
A very long pause. “Well, we’ll just have to work around it.”
“What about Cudworth?”
“He will hang himself with his own tongue.”
“What if he insists?”
“Then I walk out!” A beat. “Forgive me. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Oh, boy, he was pissed. Wentworth hadn’t mentioned Pomeroy, and a powerful sense told him not to. “Right. Tomorrow. Um, well, have a good night.” He clicked off, sunk into himself, depressed, the bearer of bad news.
“You lost Carlos, eh?”
Wentworth jumped.
“You should’ve stocked up with more suspects, they have dwindled to a precious few.” Brian rose a little, had trouble clearing his throat, winced as he touched his neck.
Wentworth got up, poured him a glass of water. Weird how he just woke up like that. As if he hadn’t really been sleeping. “How was your day?”
Pomeroy drank, coughed, cleared his airway. “In your traditional parlour room mystery, Miss Marple picks out the stableboy from a host of household staff. Your suspects, however, have sneaked off like thieves in the night before you even got started on the last chapter. You’ve done it all backwards.”
“Are you aware you tried to hang yourself a little while ago?”
“I changed my mind. This is your lesson for the day. ‘When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”
“Widgeon?”
“He’s been written out of the script. Get with it. Conan Doyle’s most famous line.” A coughing fit. “Get me a cigarette.”
Wentworth arrived at the courts bleary, bedraggled, still bugged by his romantic megaflop, and in a total funk. He’d slept badly, waking when he sensed Brian wandering to the balcony for a smoke, then turning the television on, a dumb movie, followed by a cooking show and the 6:00 a.m. news. Headline item: film industry prominents swept up in drug conspiracy.
Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth…Cudworth remains. He was at his usual station in the great hall, but with a smaller corps of the usual clinging groupies-there’d been desertions, telling proof of Florenza’s persuasiveness. Cud was ignoring Felicity, staring dully at nothing, looking not a little hung over. Wentworth had called him last night to pass on the boss’s confirmation: Cud would not be starring in his own show.
He hurried to the barristers’ quarters. On top of everything, he was late, his taxi had got trapped in the Lions Gate squeeze. No sign of Arthur in the commotion of lawyers in the gowning room. One of them called out to him: “A twenty-spot for manslaughter must be sounding pretty good right now, hey, Chance?” He didn’t parry, wasn’t in a mood to try.
On tier six, the usual milling crowd, the daytime soap fans now outnumbering Cud’s diminishing army. Shawn and Ebbe eyeing each other warily, at pistol-duelling distance. Loobie avoiding him; maybe he’d run out of blind alleys to send them down. Wentworth played with the thought of confronting him, accusing him. Sure, right, make an utter fool of himself.
The court was locked, but a deputy let him in, and there was Arthur, conferring with Abigail, Chekoff, and a suit, presumably the DEA guy. Arthur didn’t look happy but didn’t look down. Didn’t look anything. He had to be masking pain.
He finally took his seat, told Wentworth the defence had no option but to admit as a fact that on the evening October 13, 2007, Carlos Espinoza was closing a deal on a quarter kilo of coke in a Hollywood restaurant-otherwise the U.S. agent would be called, and more made of the matter than necessary.
Wentworth still hadn’t mentioned Pomeroy’s clumsy suicide effort, it could throw the boss off balance in his most important hour. The deputy opened the room, and as it filled, the jury came in. They didn’t look ready to decide anything, seemed restless, unsatisfied, itching to hear the other side. That’s how Wentworth read them, but maybe they’d had bad Mondays.
The chief justice, however, was in rare high spirits, more bounce to his entry now that he was on the country’s highest honour roll, straighter of back, chin up, a smiling nod of recognition to his underlings at counsel table.
Abigail read out the admission of fact about Carlos’s whereabouts on October 13, jurors frowning, digesting this unexpected blow to the defence. We’ll just have to work around it. Wentworth hoped Arthur had a plan for doing that.
“That is all the evidence for the Crown.”
“Thank you. Done expeditiously, commendable job. I will hear from Mr. Beauchamp.”
“Well, milord, given that one could probably drive a tank through the holes in the prosecution’s case, we elect to call no evidence.”
That didn’t come close to spoiling Kroop’s hearty start to the day. “Save the rhetoric for the final speech, Mr. Beauchamp.” Adding with a puckish smile, “I’m going to have to watch you today. Hmf, hmf.” This didn’t bode well. Whenever Kroop had a good day, Arthur had a bad one.
“Madam prosecutor, you have the floor.”
Abigail assembled a few notes, warmed up the jury with a few remarks about their vital, historic role, then reeled off a fluid summary of evidence, concise, organized, straightforward, evenhanded. Wentworth hadn’t expected much less, but she was terrific, especially the way she anticipated the defence.
“Mr. Beauchamp will urge you to disbelieve Ms. LeGrand, but you will have examined her words and manner closely, and, yes, you will conclude she’s lived a life of too much ease. You may have found her naive, saucy, irreverent, even sinful-shamelessly sinful. But she offered herself to you without disguise. Blunt, forthright, and with unembarrassed honesty. How easily she could have held back the truth, pretended she saw nothing, shielded from harm the man for whom she’d proclaimed her love.”
As she patched up some of the holes Arthur poked in Flo’s evidence, a few heads nodded in the jury box. Abigail’s hopes to lasso Florenza had been dashed, but she was determined to leave court with at least one scalp. You couldn’t blame her; no barrister worth her salt wouldn’t covet victory over mighty Beauchamp.
Abigail didn’t waste any time crowing over how the Carlos theory blew up on the defence, and dismissed the political cover-up angle as remote and fanciful. Despite her learned friend’s valiant attempts, none of his “shadowy suspects” had ever taken form.
As to Astrid Leich: “You will recall how coherently her evidence flowed until…well, she had difficulty at the end, but who under the demanding gaze of judge and counsel and jury might not have faltered? Think of the pressure that good, decent woman was under in this tense, crowded courtroom.” Leich had made a little slip, a forgivable lapse, soon corrected.
“Bear closely in mind that the man she first pointed to, Brian Pomeroy, the defendant’s former lawyer, is the very man she saw at 2 Lighthouse Lane only six weeks ago. They are of similar age, and not dissimilar in body proportion, and from fifty metres not vastly dissimilar in features-close enough in hair colour, facial structure, broad foreheads, strong chins.”
Wentworth felt she was making a lot of hay with this. Their noses, he wanted to shout. Look at their noses. Tom Altieri was studying Cud, maybe buying into this, or wanting to. Strong-chinned Cud was slouched there, hungover, brooding.
“The telling fact, and it’s beyond contradiction, is that the accused fled the scene in a stolen car. Why? What would possess an innocent man to rush off in such blind haste? Who runs but the guilty? The cowardly, maybe, but Mr. Brown has demonstrated himself to be anything but that.”
Wentworth didn’t dare another peek at Cud, but this, above all, must have hurt. The thing is, man, I panicked, I turned yellow. Maybe the truth, finally, the unmanly truth. Too late.