John Lescroart: The 13th Juror

Jennifer nodded. "Larry wanted to be sure that… if he died he could have the house paid off and give me and Matt security. It didn't seem too much when we got it and Larry could afford it. But now they think I killed" – she paused, fought it again – "killed for the money which is ridiculous. We had enough money. I mean, Larry made six figures."

"But you'd have more if he wasn't in the picture?" Testing. He felt he had to.

"Yes, but…" She reached out to touch his sleeve. "I guess that's the other thing. We were fighting."

She shrugged. Her mouth parted, closed again. "I'd been seeing a psychiatrist, and Larry… anyway, we'd had some fights but we hadn't even gotten to talking about a separation. Neither of us wanted that. We had Matt."

"How long had you been married?"

"Eight years."

Hardy had taken out his pad but mostly he was listening, waiting for a false note. Now he stopped her, realizing they'd been avoiding the main issue. "They didn't arrest you because you had a couple of fights with your husband, Mrs. Witt. There has to be something tying you more directly to the crime or there's no case. They tell you what that might be?"

She was biting down on her lower lip. "It must have been the gun, but the inspector asked me about that when they found it and I told them I didn't know anything about it."

"What about the gun?"

"It was Larry's gun… he was shot with his own gun. But at first they didn't know it was our gun, it wasn't found in the house."

"I don't understand."

"We kept it in the headboard, but they found it like two weeks later. The inspector said somebody found it under a dumpster and it had my fingerprints on it. I told him of course it had my fingerprints on it, I pick it up to dust inside the headboard every couple of weeks."

Hardy let his silence answer.

She shook her head. "I'd been out jogging. We live, lived-" She made a fist and hit the table. "You know what I'm trying to say."

"You're doing fine," he said. "Just tell me what happened."

Jennifer stared at her hand, the balled up fist. She covered it with her other hand and brought it back toward her. "The house is on Twin Peaks, you know, pretty far up. It was morning, maybe nine-thirty or ten o'clock. Larry lets me… I mean I usually run three times a week. When I got home there was a police car in front of the house, and the man was standing by the front door, which I remember thinking was strange because if he had knocked why wouldn't Larry or Matt have opened it, right?"

"Right."

"But he was just standing there, so I opened the gate and asked if I could help him and he said he'd gotten a call about some shots. First some yelling and then some shots."

"Did you have a fight that morning? You and Larry?"

She seemed to duck again and Hardy found himself getting a little impatient with it. But her hand came back to his sleeve, tacitly asking for his indulgence. "How long had you been gone?" he asked.

"When? Oh, an hour. I had to be back within the hour." Seeing Hardy's reaction, she pushed on. "Larry worried if I wasn't home. He knew where I ran and how long it should take, so that… the hour thing… it was like a rule."

"Okay, let's go on. The policeman is waiting at your door."

"So I asked him if he'd knocked and he said yes but there wasn't any answer and I told him there had to be. I mean, I was sure Larry hadn't left. It was the week after Christmas, his first week off since last summer. Anyway, by now I'm starting to get worried. But maybe Larry's in the shower, or Matt is so they can't hear or something, right? But there's still no answer, so I take out my key and we go in and I'm calling 'Larry' and 'Matt' and I start to go upstairs, but this policeman tells me to wait and I go to the couch. Then he's at the top of the stairs saying 'Don't come up, stay right there now.' And I know. God, then I know."

Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. Finally she gave up the effort. She sat with her hands crossed in front of her, tears rolling off her cheeks and puddling on the table.

Hardy was not a popular man on the third floor of the Hall of Justice. The previous summer he had gotten caught in some political crossfire with Christopher Locke, his boss at the time, the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco. They had exchanged a rather unlawyerly bit of badinage, after which Hardy had quit, gone to the defense side and beaten the Assistant DA, who had stolen his case from him, and by extension Locke himself, in court.

Now whenever he had occasion to walk the once-familiar halls he felt crosshairs on his neck. Still, he owed it to himself and to David Freeman – and Freeman's client if it turned out that she stayed that way – to test the waters here.

At the end of the public hallway, he stopped at the double-glass reception window and asked for Art Drysdale, the Chief Assistant District Attorney, with whom he had always had a cordial, even friendly, relationship, although that too had been compromised by the events of the last year.

"Is that all she told you?" Drysdale had pushed himself back from his desk and stopped juggling his baseballs, but he held three of them in one enormous hand against his cheek. "I think she left out a little tiny bit."

"Art, I just spent an hour talking to her. She didn't kill her son."

Drysdale, more or less expecting this, nodded. "Maybe not on purpose."

"What does that mean?"

"It means let's say the kid got in the way."

"Of what? "

"Of Mrs. Witt killing her husband."

Hardy turned in a half-circle. "Please…"

Leaning forward, Drysdale said, "Please yourself, Diz, this indictment is rock solid. The kid was there and died while she was committing the crime of murdering her husband. As if you didn't know, that makes the son a Murder One, too. Just like if a bank robber shoots a guard by mistake. Sorry, but Murder One."

"Have you talked to her?"

"Oh, sure. Everybody gets arrested, I run upstairs and protect their civil rights 'til they're processed. Then I hold their hand until bedtime and make sure they get tucked in. Give me a break, Diz."

Hardy knew Drysdale was right – of course there had been no reason for him to have talked to Jennifer Witt. But Hardy couldn't let it go. "She didn't even do it by mistake, Art."

Baseballs were getting juggled again, a bad sign. "That's why there are trials, my man. Figure out what really happened."

"But you've charged her."

Again, reluctantly, Drysdale stopped his routine. "Traditionally that precedes an arrest. You want, you can have a copy of the discovery on Larry Witt and Matt Witt. Read it yourself."

"You want to tell me about it?"

Art Drysdale, his old mentor, the man who had hired him back to the DA's office a year before, said, "I'd like to, Diz, but it's not my case. I don't know much about it."

Baloney. Art Drysdale knew the nuts and bolts of every case of any import that got charged, especially any murder case. "It's Dean Powell's case. You know where his office is, don't you?"

In other words, bye-bye, and don't stop back on your way out. You're on the other side now. See you around."

Hardy decided he would rather not talk to Dean Powell, not yet. Instead, he went upstairs to homicide, hoping to run into Sergeant Inspector Abe Glitsky. Hardy and Abe had started out together as policemen walking a beat. While Hardy had gone on to law school, then to the DA's office, Abe had progressed through the SFPD for almost ten years until he made it to homicide, the place he called home. If Drysdale no longer was any kind of inside source, Hardy had no doubts about Abe, who was sitting at his desk, looking down at some papers and chewing ice out of a styrofoam cup.