Bunny opened her mouth to speak; then she closed it again and pressed her lips together in a hard line.
Martin paced up and down before the witness box, hands behind his back, studying the carpeting, forehead furrowed in concentration, a pose that Dahlia had called “junior Clarence Darrow.” At last he stopped and looked Bunny Williams right in the eye.
“When you take methadone, does it produce a feeling of well-being?”
“You mean, a buzz?” she said.
“If you want, a buzz, a high,” Martin said.
Bunny thought for a moment. “Maybe a little,” she said. “It’s what I need just to keep me going, keep me normal, like everyone else.”
“And had you taken methadone on the day of the murder?”
Bunny nodded. “I went to the Farragut Clinic that afternoon,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of it.”
Martin felt his ears tingle. “And that night, in the VIP room of Naked Party, did you have anything to drink?”
Bunny hesitated. “I’m not sure,” she said.
“Yes or no,” Martin said.
“I had a gin and tonic,” Bunny said. “One lousy gin and tonic. And it cost enough, seven bucks!”
Martin stopped pacing and positioned himself so he faced both the woman in the witness box and the jury. “So the night in question, when you witnessed my client strangle Ms. Volovnaya in a dark corner of a dark room, you were taking methadone, which produces a high, and drinking, which, as I’m sure many of us here are aware, also produces a high, a disorientation of the senses. Is that correct?”
“Not like you mean it,” she said.
“Yes or no, Ms. Williams,” Martin said in a voice that held all the authority of legal procedure.
Bunny Williams hung her head. Angry tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Yes,” she said.
Later that evening, after the trial had adjourned for the day, Martin took the Red Line from Judiciary Square to Cleveland Park and walked up the long block from the Metro station to the Broadmoor. He was exhausted; his feet hurt; his briefcase felt like a lead weight in his hand. He let himself into the front door with the key Dahlia had given him, took the elevator to the eighth floor, and let himself into her apartment. The place was dark; Dahlia wasn’t home from work yet. Martin poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen, then collapsed on the couch with the local news on the television.
When Dahlia came home an hour later, she found him asleep there, snoring gently, one of the couch pillows balanced over his face. She managed to get him up, get the clothes off him, and get him into the tub in the pink bathroom. Then she disrobed and joined him in the warm water. It was the last moment of twilight. Traffic hummed along up Connecticut; a pleasant darkness lit by the yellow windows of the mansions descended over the neighborhood. Dahlia opened a jar of pink bath salts and dropped a handful in the water beneath the running tap. In less than a minute the suds threatened to engulf them both.
The water felt smooth as oil against Martin’s skin. This was the first bubble bath he’d had since he was a kid. He leaned back against the rim of the tub. Every muscle ached. For him, being in court was a physically exhausting process, like running the marathon or digging a trench. Dahlia faced him from the other end of the tub, the faucet perched like a parrot over her right shoulder. Her breasts seemed to float in the water, half hidden by the bubbles. He didn’t think he’d be able to make love to her tonight. He could barely summon the energy to wiggle his toes.
Dahlia had turned the lights out in the bathroom and put candles on saucers on the sink and the floor. A bottle of white wine and two glasses lay on ice in a Styrofoam cooler within arm’s reach. This wasn’t a celebration of anything, she said, just the halftime event.
“You’ve got the wine and woman right here,” she said, reaching down to pour a glass. “All you’ve got to do now is sing.”
“Please,” Martin croaked. “I can’t even whisper.”
“You just lie there, honey,” Dahlia said. “Soak it all out.”
Martin dozed off for a moment and woke himself up talking about the case: “... why they didn’t have any solid witness...”
“What’s that, honey?” Dahlia put her glass of wine on the floor.
Marlin rubbed his face with a damp washcloth and sat up. “There were supposed to be a dozen witnesses that saw Smerdnakov do the deed,” he said. “But this ex-hooker was all the prosecution could come up with. One single eyewitness, with a criminal record to boot. Something’s not right here.”
“Maybe you’re just too good for them,” Dahlia said. “Maybe Rossiter knew you’d chew them to pieces in the cross.”
“That can’t be true,” Martin said.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she said. “You’re a good lawyer and getting better every day.” She slid toward him through the bubbles. When she had wedged herself against him, Martin felt his energy returning.
“Still, it’s strange,” he murmured. “I really thought they had a tight case.”
“Who knows, maybe God’s talking to you right now,” Dahlia said. “Because you’re defending an innocent man.”
Martin smiled. “God doesn’t talk to lawyers,” he said.
“But whatever you do tomorrow, don’t give them what they think they’re going to get.” Her voice was serious now; her eyes showed deep concern. “Hit them with something new, something they haven’t seen. Astonish them.”
Martin thought about what he’d have to do to astonish Malcolm Rossiter, and he almost laughed. The man had seen every trick in the book in his fifteen years with the U.S. attorney’s office. Then, suddenly, he remembered a piece of advice out of first-year law: for half a semester he’d had a professor named Alden Clarke, a broken-down old southern drunk, who in the 1930s and 1940s had been one of the most famous trial lawyers in America. Clarke, at least eighty then, used to wear white Colonel Sanders suits gone yellow with age and black string ties more like a scribble on his shirtfront than a real tie. He was a relic from another era, a vanished South of dusty white courtrooms, fans pulling slowly overhead, last veterans of the Civil War, ancient as mummies, dozing in the sun on benches on the other side of the square.
Martin could remember the exact class session. Clarke had entered the auditorium twenty minutes late, his battered leather portefeuille under his arm, smelling faintly of bourbon. Upon attaining the podium, he’d fixed the class with one watery, jaundiced eye. “The law is complex,” he had said. “But juries are simple. Therefore, the best way with a jury is always the simplest.”
Martin hadn’t thought much of this plain advice at the time, but now it came back to him with the clarity of a revelation. What could be simpler than an innocent man protesting his innocence?
The prosecution rested. A cold winter light filtered through the stained glass rosette behind Judge Deal’s head. She was framed in the glow like a haloed saint in an icon, as stern and unyielding.
“Mr. Wexler, are you ready to present the case for the defense?” she said.
Martin rose to his feel unsteadily. His mouth fell dry; he seemed incapable of uttering a single word. Inexplicably his knees ached. Nonetheless, his voice came out clear and strong.
“I am ready, Your Honor,” he said.
Judge Deal blinked, wise as an owl. “Proceed,” she said.
Martin cleared his throat for theatrical effect and advanced to the center of the courtroom, halfway to the jury box, but no farther. It was as if he intended to present his case to a wider audience, to the world itself.
“I call to the stand” — he indicated the defense table with a dramatic sweeping gesture — “Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov!” For a long moment the Russian stared. He hadn’t expected this; no one had expected this. At the prosecution table Rossiter and his cohorts looked startled, then utterly relieved. This was the blunder they had been waiting for.