He hadn’t. But he trusted her ears.
“Shall I close these by the bed too?”
“Not yet. The air feels like satin.”
“Wet satin, you mean?”
He heard her sigh, give her pillow a few pats, and resettle herself. “Wet earth, wet grass, wonderful …” She yawned, made a contented little sound, and said no more. He marveled at how she could find such restorative power in the very elements of nature he instinctively fled from.
He put on his pants and shirt, went upstairs, and closed the windows in the two spare bedrooms and in the room that Madeleine devoted to sewing, crocheting, and cello practice. He came back downstairs, went into the den, and got the plastic shopping bag full of the Spalter case materials Hardwick had left for him, and brought it out to the dining room table.
The heaviness of the bag bothered him. It seemed to be a crude warning.
He began spreading its contents out on the table. Then, remembering Madeleine’s unhappy reaction the last time he took over that table to examine the paperwork documenting the progress of a murder case, he picked everything up and carried it to the coffee table in front of the fireplace at the other end of the room.
The individual items included a full printed transcript of State of New York v. Katherine R. Spalter trial proceedings; the NYSP Bureau of Criminal Investigation case file on the Spalter homicide (including the multisection original incident report with photos and drawings, crime scene inventories, forensic lab reports, interview and interrogation reports, investigatory progress reports, the autopsy report and photos, the ballistics report, and scores of miscellaneous memos and phone call reports); a list of pretrial motions (all perfunctory, all cut-and-pasted out of the capital case motions manual) and their dispositions (all denied); a folder with articles, blog printouts, broadcast transcripts, and a list of links to online coverage of the crime, arrest, and trial phases of the story; a manila envelope containing a set of DVDs of the trial itself, provided by the local cable station that apparently had been granted Court TV–style access to the proceedings; and, finally, a note from Jack Hardwick.
It was a kind of road map—Hardwick’s suggested route through the daunting heap of information spread out on the coffee table.
Gurney had good and bad feelings about this. Good, because directions and prioritization could be time-savers. Bad, because they could be manipulative. Often they were both. But they were hard to ignore—as were the opening sentences of Hardwick’s note.
“Follow the sequence I’ve laid out here. If you depart from the path you’ll drown in a data shit-swamp.”
The rest of the two-page note consisted of a series of numbered steps on the route.
“Number one: Get a taste of the case against Kay Spalter. Get the DVD marked ‘A’ from the envelope and check out the prosecutor’s opening statement. It’s a classic.”
Gurney retrieved his laptop from the den and inserted the disk.
Like some other recordings of courtroom proceedings he’d seen, this one began with an image of the prosecutor standing in the open area in front of the judge’s bench, facing the jury box, clearing his throat. He was a small man with close-cropped dark hair, maybe in his mid-forties.
There were background noises of papers rustling, chairs moving, a jumble of indistinguishable voices, someone coughing—most of which subsided after a few sharp raps of the judge’s gavel.
The prosecutor glanced at the judge, a heavyset black man with a dour expression, who gave him a perfunctory nod. He took a deep breath and stared at the floor for several seconds before looking up at the jury.
“Evil,” he finally announced in a strong, formal voice. He waited for absolute silence before continuing. “We all think we know what evil is. History books and news reports are full of evil deeds, evil men, evil women. But the scheme you are about to be exposed to—and the ruthless predator you will convict at the end of this trial—will bring the reality of evil home to you in a way you’ll never forget.”
He glared at the floor, then went on. “This is the true story of a woman and a man, a wife and a husband, a predator and a victim. The story of a marriage poisoned by infidelity. The story of a homicidal plot—an attempted murder that produced a result you may well conclude was worse than murder itself. You heard me right, ladies and gentlemen. Worse than murder.”
After a pause during which he seemed to be trying to make eye contact with as many jurors as possible, he turned and walked to the prosecution table. Directly in back of the table, in front of the area assigned to courtroom spectators, sat a man in a large wheelchair—an elaborate device that reminded Gurney of the kind of thing in which Stephen Hawking, the paralyzed physicist, made his rare public appearances. It seemed to be providing support for all parts of the occupant’s body, including his head. There were oxygen tubes in his nose and no doubt other tubes in other places, out of sight.
Although the angle and lighting left much be desired, the image on the screen conveyed enough of Carl Spalter’s situation to make Gurney grimace. To be paralyzed like that, trapped in a numb, unresponsive body, unable even to blink or to cough, dependent on a machine to keep from drowning in your own saliva … Christ! It was like being buried alive, with your body itself the grave. To be trapped inside a half-dead mass of flesh and bones struck him as the ultimate claustrophobic horror. Shuddering at the thought, he saw that the prosecutor had resumed addressing the jury, with his hand extended toward the man in the wheelchair.
“The tragic story whose terrible climax brought us to this courtroom today began exactly a year ago when Carl Spalter made the bold decision to run for governor—with the idealistic goal of ridding our state of organized crime once and for all. A laudable goal, but one that his wife—the defendant—opposed from the beginning, as the result of corrupt influences you’ll learn about during this trial. From the moment Carl set foot on the path of public service, she not only ridiculed him in public, doing everything she could to discourage him, but she also withdrew from all marital contact with him and began cheating on him with another man—her so-called personal trainer.” He raised an eyebrow at the term, sharing a sour smirk with the jury. “The defendant revealed herself as a woman hell-bent on getting her own way at any cost. When rumors of her infidelity reached Carl, he didn’t want to believe it. But finally he had to confront her. He told her she had to make a choice. Well, ladies and gentlemen, she made a choice, all right. You’ll hear convincing testimony concerning that choice—which was to approach an underworld figure—Giacomo Flatano, or ‘Jimmy Flats’—with an offer of fifty thousand dollars to kill her husband.” He paused, deliberately looking at each member of the jury.
“She decided she wanted out of the marriage, but not at the expense of losing Carl’s money, so she tried to hire a hit man. But the hit man turned down the offer. So what did the defendant do next? She tried to talk her lover, the personal trainer, into doing it in return for a life of leisure with her on a tropical island, financed by the inheritance she’d receive at Carl’s death—because, ladies and gentlemen, Carl still had hopes for the marriage and still hadn’t changed his will.”
He extended his hands forward in a kind of supplication for the jury’s empathy. “He had hopes of saving his marriage. Hopes of being with a wife he still loved. And what was that wife doing? She was conniving—first with a gangster, then with a cheap Romeo—to get him killed. What kind of person—?”
A new voice was heard, out of the video frame, whiny and impatient. “Objection! Your Honor, Mr. Piskin’s emotional conjecture is way beyond anything that—”