Jonnie Forke hangs tough on the stand, though. Too tough. They need to sand down her edges a little bit before the trial. She looks fine-in fact, she’s more attractive than Lu realized-but her personality is spiky. She’s sort of the looking-glass version of the victim, according to Lu’s investigator. A waitress at a late-night restaurant at the casino at Arundel Mills, extremely outgoing, divorced, but with grown kids and a lot of family. The night Mary McNally was killed-assuming it was December thirty-first-Jonnie Forke was at her daughter’s house for a family party, seeing in the New Year with three generations. This woman’s death would never go undiscovered for a week.
Lu asks her: “The man you saw that week-was he clean-shaven?”
Trick question. Lu knows Drysdale did not have a beard at the time. But does Jonnie?
“He didn’t have a beard, if that’s what you mean,” she says. “I didn’t get close enough to see how recent his shave was, but he didn’t have a full beard.”
Oh, she’s good.
“How close did you get?”
“Maybe ten feet. He was on the edge of the parking lot, just standing there. I noticed him because he had a big puffy coat. And it wasn’t that kind of cold that day, it was in the forties.”
“So you noticed his coat?”
“And his face. He didn’t have the hood up. So I saw his face and his hair.” A pause. “His hair was longer then.”
She’s really good. Credit Andi, who helped prepare her. Rudy Drysdale does have a fresh haircut, although the suit he’s wearing is almost greenish with age. Fred probably told his parents they didn’t need to splurge on a new suit for a grand jury proceeding.
“Still, he’s not an unusual-looking man, right? Brown hair, brown eyes. It would be easy to confuse him with someone else.”
“Not for me. People in my job, you pay attention to faces, make eye contact. It’s the difference between a decent tip and a good one.”
“And where do you work, Ms. Forke?”
“Luk Fu.” She grimaces. “It’s not like I named it. It’s a noodle bar. It’s pretty good, for the price. Those critics on Yelp can-” Lu’s eyes beseech the witness to get back on message. “They can go somewhere else if they don’t like it.”
Lu toys with her a little longer, but she’s rock-solid. Then she lets the jurors ask her questions. They, too, are curious about how she can be so certain of the ID. She’s almost too adamant, a person who never admits to being wrong. She’s certain that she never forgets a face. An unflattering thought flits through Lu’s mind: probably better with men’s faces than women’s. She just gives off that vibe to Lu. But then, Lu always feels as if she has to overtip extravagantly to make up for people’s biases about women.
Drysdale takes the Fifth, of course. Fred has instructed him not to lock in his testimony. Anything he says here can’t be contradicted in court and who knows what discovery still might bring?
They’re done by midmorning, and the grand jury hands up its indictment before lunch. Murder one.
The courthouse is theoretically within walking distance from the office-but not in January and never in four-inch heels. It’s a two-lane road with no shoulder, risky enough in daytime, dangerous at dusk. Lu drives the scant mile back to the office, parking in the permit spaces. She has no designated space here or at the courthouse, a security measure for the judges and other officers of the court. Back inside the Carroll Building, she shuts herself up in her office. This isn’t the kind of situation in which one does a victory lap. She has to act as if she never doubted she would win. Grand juries are supposed to be slam dunks for prosecutors.
She spends the afternoon attacking the usual raft of phone messages, then tries to put a dent in the e-mail. She tells Della she’s available for media calls, but there are no media calls. Mary McNally’s murder received maybe four paragraphs in the big newspapers, while Rudy Drysdale’s arrest and initial charge were considered only slightly more newsworthy. The Howard County Times, now owned by the Beacon-Light, is content to use the press release put out on the HoCoGov’s Twitter feed and Facebook page.
It is almost seven before Lu leaves, which means Teensy has fed the twins and her father, technically Teensy’s job, but something that Teensy seems to resent terribly. It has become Brant family legend that Teensy is their boss, that she’s the one who gets to pick what she does and doesn’t do, and all because she chose them over the Closters forty-five years ago. The myth is self-serving. Teensy is probably underpaid and overworked by almost any legal standard. Still, it’s a little frustrating having a housekeeper who resents any housekeeping duties that do not serve the man-of-the-house. Does Teensy consider herself Mrs. Brant, in a sense? It’s not the first time that Lu has allowed herself to consider this. It’s a tantalizing and impossible idea, one she has tried to discuss with AJ, who finds it merely impossible. It’s not that Lu thinks they have sex, her father and Teensy. Even when she came to accept that her father was a sexual being, having discreet dalliances with Miss Maude and others, she could not imagine him with Teensy. Tidewater Virginian that he once was, he resisted, for a time, the new information about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. But when he came to accept the scholarship, he turned on his former idol. During a family outing to Monticello last summer, the docents begged Andrew Brant to withhold his side lectures about Jefferson and Hemings-whom her father, rightly, calls by her real name, Sarah-until the tour was over. And yet-there is a sense that Teensy, still married to the seldom-seen Ron, considers herself the Brant matriarch. On nights such as this, she won’t even leave a plate for Lu.
It has been a bitter winter so far. The cold, when Lu pushes through the employees-only door at the rear of the building, invades her sinuses like some spiky parasite. She gasps at the shock of it, then gasps a second time, startled by a woman emerging from the shadows, moving too quickly, her speed almost menacing, yet her stature so petite that it’s hard to see her as a threat. Unnerving, but not threatening. Lu readies herself for a citizen encounter.
“Lu Brant? Eloise Schumann. I really need to talk to you.”
“I’m headed home,” Lu says automatically. “Monday, perhaps. If you call my secretary-”
“I have been calling your secretary. You never call me back.”
“Well, yes.” Might as well tell the truth. “You never say why you’re calling and I’m afraid I have no idea why you’re calling because I don’t know who you are, despite what you think.”
For a moment, the woman looks angry, insulted. She balls her hands, bare despite the subfreezing temperatures.
“How can you forget Ryan Schumann? It was one of your father’s most famous cases.”
“Schumann?” And finally Lu remembers. Schumann. Shoe. Man. That was his surname, not a nickname bestowed on him by Noel, but an inevitable pun: Shoe Man, Sheila Compson’s killer. The victim’s name is burned into her faulty memory, as is the image of that sandal, balanced on the jury box railing. That was her father’s genius, his intent. To make people remember the girl, even if this was all she had left behind. Humanize the victim, demonize the perp. Ryan Schumann.