Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

No problem here, Tribow thought. He’d known about the permit.

But Hartman’s lawyer had no sooner begun to question his first witness — the doorman in Hartman’s building — than Tribow began to feel uneasy.

“Did you happen to see the defendant on the morning of Sunday, March thirteenth?”

“Yessir.”

“Did you happen to notice if he was carrying a weapon?”

“He was.”

Why was he asking this? Tribow asked himself. It’d support the state’s case. He glanced at Viamonte, who shook her head.

“And did you notice him the day before?”

“Yessir.”

Uh-oh. Tribow had an idea where this was headed.

“And did he have his gun with him then?”

“Yes, he did. He’d run into some trouble with the gangs in the inner city — he was trying to get a youth center started and the gangs didn’t want it. He’d been threatened a lot.”

Youth center? Tribow and Wu exchanged sour glances. The only interest Hartman would have in a youth center was as a venue to sell drugs.

“How often did he have a gun with him?”

“Every day, sir. For the past three years I’ve been working there.”

Nobody would notice something every day for three years. He was lying. Hartman had gotten to the doorman.

“We got a problem, boss,” Wu whispered.

He meant this: If the jury believed that Hartman always carried the gun, that fact would undermine Tribow’s assertion that he’d taken it with him only that one time — on the day of the murder — for the purpose of killing Valdez. The jury could therefore conclude that he hadn’t planned the murder, which would eliminate the premeditation element of the case and, with it, the murder-one count.

But if the doorman’s testimony endangered the first-degree murder case, the next witness — a man in an expensive business suit — risked destroying it completely.

“Sir, you don’t know the defendant, do you?”

“No. I’ve never had anything to do with him. Never met him.”

“He’s never given you anything or offered you any money or anything of value?”

“No, sir.”

He’s lying, Tribow thought instinctively. The witness delivered his lines like a bad actor in a dinner-theater play.

“Now you heard the prosecution witness say that Mr. Hartman was going to quote ‘get’ the victim and that would take care of all his problems.”

“Yessir, I did.”

“You were near the defendant and that witness when this conversation supposedly took place, is that right?”

“Yessir.”

“Where was that?”

“Cibella’s restaurant on Washington Boulevard, sir.”

“And was the conversation the same as the witness described?”

“No, it wasn’t,” the man answered the defense lawyer. “The prosecution witness, he misunderstood. See, I was sitting at the next table and I heard Mr. Hartman say, ‘I’m going to get Valdez to take care of some problems I’ve been having in the Latino community.’ I guess that witness didn’t hear right or something.”

“I see,” the lawyer summarized in a slick voice. “He was going to get Valdez to take care of some problems?”

“Yessir. Then Mr. Hartman said, ‘That Jose Valdez is a good man and I respect him. I’d like him to explain to the community that I’m concerned for their welfare.’ ”

Chuck Wu mouthed a silent obscenity.

The lawyer pushed his point home. “So Mr. Hartman was concerned for the welfare of the Latino community?”

“Yes, very much so. Mr. Hartman was really patient with him. Even though Valdez started all those rumors, you know.”

“What rumors?” the lawyer asked.

“About Mr. Hartman and Valdez’s wife.”

Behind him Tribow heard the man’s widow inhale in shock.

“What were those rumors?”

“Valdez got it into his head that Mr. Hartman’d been seeing his wife. I know he wasn’t, but Valdez was convinced of it. The guy was a little, you know, nuts in the head. He thought a lot of guys were, you know, seeing his wife.”

“Objection,” Tribow snapped.

“Let me rephrase. What did Mr. Valdez ever say to you about Mr. Hartman and his wife?”

“He said he was going to get even with Hartman because of the affair — I mean, the supposed affair.”

“Objection,” Tribow called again.

“Hearsay exception,” the judge called. “I’ll let it stand.”

Tribow glanced at the face of Valdez’s widow, shaking her head slowly, tears running down her cheeks.

The defense lawyer said to Tribow, “Your witness.”

The prosecutor did his best to punch holes in the man’s story. He thought he did a pretty good job. But much of the testimony had been speculation and opinion — the rumors of the affair, for instance — and there was little he could do to discredit him. He returned to his chair.

Relax, Tribow told himself and set down the pen he’d been playing with compulsively. The murder-two charge was still alive and well. All they’d have to find was that Hartman had in fact killed Valdez — as Tribow had already proven — and that he’d decided at the last minute to murder him.

The defense lawyer called another witness.

He was a Latino — a grandfatherly sort of man, balding, round. A friendly face. His name was Cristos Abrego and he described himself as a good friend of the defendant’s.

Tribow considered this and concluded that the jury’s concerns about Abrego’s potential bias were outweighed by the fact that the suspect, it seemed, had “good friends” in the minority community (a complete lie, of course; Hartman, Anglo, saw minorities not as friends but only as golden opportunities for his extortion and loan-sharking operations).

“Now you heard the prosecution witness say that Mr. Hartman went looking for Mr. Valdez the day of the tragic shooting?”

“Tragic?” Wu whispered. “He’s making it sound like an accident.”

“Yessir,” the witness answered the lawyer’s question.

“Can you confirm that Mr. Hartman went looking for Mr. Valdez on the day of the shooting?”

“Yessir, it is true. Mr. Hartman did go looking for him.”

Tribow leaned forward. Where was this going?

“Could you explain what happened and what you observed?”

“Yessir. I’d been in church with Mr. Hartman—”

“Excuse me,” the lawyer said. “Church?”

“Yeah, him and me, we went to the same church. Well, he went more than me. He went at least twice a week. Sometimes three.”

“Brother,” an exasperated Adele Viamonte said.

Tribow counted four crucifixes hanging from the necks of the jury, and not a single eyebrow among these men and women rose in irony at this gratuitous mention of the defendant’s piety.

“Please go on, Mr. Abrego.”

“And I stopped in the Starbucks with Mr. Hartman and we got some coffee and sat outside. Then he asked a couple of people if they’d seen Valdez, ’cause he hangs out in Starbucks a lot.”

“Do you know why the defendant wanted to see Valdez?”

“He wanted to give him this game he bought for Valdez’s kid.”

“What?” the widow, behind Tribow, whispered in shock. “No, no, no...”

“A present, you know. Mr. Hartman loves kids. And he wanted to give it to Valdez for his boy.”

“Why did he want to give Mr. Valdez a present?”

Abrego said, “He said he wanted to patch things up with Valdez. He felt bad the man had those crazy ideas about him and his wife and was worried that the boy would hear and think they were true. So he thought a present for the kid’d break the ice. Then he was going to talk to Valdez and try to convince him that he was wrong.”

“Keep going, sir. What happened next?”