"You don't?"
"Honestly, Catherine, I don't know. Cuneo has…" He stopped.
"What?"
An idea had occurred to him, but he didn't inadvertently want to give Catherine any false hope. "Nothing. I'm just thinking we've still got some rocky ground ahead of us. You testifying, for example." He explained his problem with her old and brand-new alibi, how the discrepancy would sound to the jurors.
"But I have to testify if I'm going to talk about Cuneo. Isn't that our whole theory about why he kept coming after me?"
"Yes. Initially, anyway."
"Would a second trial be any different?"
"Maybe. Slightly. I don't know. A venue change might make a difference."
"Are you still mad at me?"
The question took him by surprise-talk about irrelevant-but he nodded. "Yep."
"I didn't kill anybody, Dismas. I know you don't like to talk about that. You've told me not to go on about it, but it's the truth. It really is. And I can't stay in here too much longer. I've got to see the end in sight."
"Don't do anything stupid, Catherine."
"I won't. But I can't start all this over again."
Hardy boosted himself from the table and walked across to the glass-block walls of the jail's attorney-client visiting room. He couldn't remember the last time he'd let a trial get so far away from him, and now he wasn't sure how to proceed. Most defense attorneys spend a great deal of their time trying to get delays for their clients-to put off the eventual day of reckoning and the finality of the sentence. But Catherine didn't want delay, couldn't accept it. She wanted resolution. But if he'd tried to deliver on that at the expense of a winnable strategy, a shortchange on the evidence issues, or a blunder in his refusal to press for an obvious mistrial, he stood the very real risk of condemning her to life in prison.
But maybe, he was beginning to think, there was another approach-legal but rarely invoked-that could change everything. If he could get Braun to rule that Cuneo's statements to the press were a result of deliberate misconduct on the part of the prosecution-i.e., Rosen- she might give him a mistrial for prosecutorial misconduct. In this case, Catherine-having once been placed in jeopardy by the state-would under the theory of double jeopardy walk out of the courtroom a free woman. They couldn't try her again for the same crimes, even if they were capital murder. But of course, this made it a potentially huge decision for the judge, since it would undo the efforts of the grand jury that had issued the indictments, as well as those of the district attorney and the police department. And there would be an immediate uproar from the conspiracy buffs that somehow the fix was in.
But Catherine cut him off midthought. "Can I ask you something?" she said from behind him.
He turned.
"Is this true, what Cuneo says? That the mayor asked Glitsky to intervene?" "Yes."
"Why did she do that?"
"Because she was afraid of your father-in-law's enemies. She thought it might have been about business somehow. The city's towing contract."
"And Glitsky followed that up?"
" 'Til it ended with nothing."
"And all the other leads?"
"Every one he could find, yes."
"How about the political one?"
"You mean with the mayor?"
"No, with the president. You know, the cabinet thing."
In the endless reams of newsprint leading up to the trial, the nascent potential cabinet appointment naturally got its fifteen minutes of spin and conjecture. But no one-reporters, private investigators or administration officials-had uncovered or revealed anything remotely approaching a connection to Hanover's murder. Many people, including Hardy's investigator, had looked, and all had concluded that Hanover hadn't been involved in anything controversial on the national scene. Beyond that, the nomination process itself had not even formally begun-Hanover's vetting by the FBI was still at least weeks away when he'd been shot.
Hardy shook his head. "I don't know if Glitsky has looked at that specifically. Why? Has something occurred to you?"
Hardy was more than willing to take anything she could give him. A little ripple of concern ran through him. Here he was, nearly a year into his defense of this woman, on the third day of her actual trial, and in the past two days she'd given him not one, but two, potentially important facts-the ring and the nomination- which he'd previously given short shrift. It brought him up short.
Were his own personal demons-his concern over Cuneo's conspiracy theory, allowing the personal element inevitably to creep into his representation of his old girlfriend, the media madness, Abe's personal and professional issues-were these concerns threatening his ability to conduct a competent defense, blinding him to other critical facts? The basic rule of trial strategy is that you didn't want to be surprised by anything once you got to the courtroom, and now in two successive days he realized he'd been vulnerable to broadsides twice! Luckily, it had not yet happened in the courtroom, but he'd obviously been so sloppy in his preparation that it would only be a matter of time.
It was unconscionable-he ought to go in to Braun and get a mistrial declared today and then bow out entirely. In waves of self-loathing, he realized that he'd failed Catherine and even failed himself. He was unprepared. She would go down.
But Catherine was still on the nomination. "That's what they were fighting about, you know. The nomination."
"I'm sorry," Hardy said. "Who was fighting?"
"Missy and Paul."
"When?" Hardy, all but babbling.
"Dismas. That day. Don't you remember I said they'd been arguing?" Though it didn't eradicate the disgust Hardy was feeling with himself, he did realize that he'd reread this bit of information, the arguing, while reviewing his binders last night. Though he hadn't recognized its relevance, if any. And didn't even now.
But Catherine was going on. "That's why Missy wasn't there when I was. She'd left all upset that morning."
"Why was she upset?"
"Because she didn't want Paul to go for the nomination." "Why not?"
"I think mostly it was the house. She'd just spent over a year redecorating the place. The thought of moving to Washington, D.C.? I don't really blame her."
"Is that what Paul told you?"
"What? That she didn't want to move? No. He said she was paranoid about the government and their background check, which he thought was ridiculous. She didn't even want them to start. She thought they'd be prejudiced somehow because she was foreign. She just didn't want to be involved. It scared her, he said."
"But Paul wanted it? The nomination."
"Did he want it? Did Paul Hanover want national recognition for a lifetime of public and private service? Does the pope shit in the woods? Of course he wanted it. Missy would come around, he said. They weren't going to break up over it. They loved each other. She'd see there wouldn't be anything to worry about. He told her that morning that he was going ahead anyway, and that's when they'd fought and she'd walked out."
"And then come back," Hardy said, "in time to get shot."
This sobered Catherine right up. "I know. Great timing, huh?"
In the end, though, Hardy thought with some relief, this at least was an example of a fact to be filed under interesting, even fascinating, but irrelevant. Paul and Missy's argument on the day of their deaths didn't lead either one of them to kill the other. Someone else had killed them both. Which left Hardy only with the ring, and the question of Theresa Hanover's alibi for the night of the fire.
But the bailiff now knocked at the door and announced that it was time to go over to the Hall. Hardy, in a dangerous emotional state in any event, had to bite his tongue to keep from telling the bailiff not to cuff his client, that she didn't need that indignity.
But he knew that this would have been wasted breath.
The cuffs clicked into place.
24
Marian Braun was a Superior Court judge when Barry Bonds was still playing baseball for Serra High School down in San Mateo. Her chambers reflected that longevity with an unusual sense of homeyness. She'd had built-in wooden bookshelves installed all across the back wall, put down a couple of nice large rugs to cover the institutional linoleum floor, hung several pleasant California landscapes here and there. Drapes under sconces softened the two window areas, and the upholstered furniture for her visitors marked a significant departure from the typical judge's chamber setting of a few metal chairs in front of an often imposing and distancing desk.