John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

At last, having reviewed his notes on Jansey’s testimony-forty-seven pages’ worth-for the second time, he closed the binder and leaned back into his chair. Though part of him yearned to recall her to the stand and pick apart individual strands of her testimony that he’d left unaddressed that afternoon-which was, after all, most of it-he also realized that he’d succeeded in doing his main job, which was discrediting her so that all of her testimony was suspect. Besides, he couldn’t ignore his gut feeling, his pure instinct, that there was nothing in her perjured story that, were the truth known, would likely change any juror’s opinion about Maya’s guilt. The basic facts remained-whether Maya had had an affair with him or not, Vogler had been blackmailing her, she’d been paying the blackmail (which meant she was guilty of something ), she’d gone down to BBW and over to Levon’s.

Why? Why? Why?

Jansey was undoubtedly lying, but lying for all of her own, probably very good, reasons. In the end he believed that nothing she said was going to make any real difference.

Hardy got up, walked first over to the window where he looked down on Sutter Street, then came around to another recessed cabinet on the wall across from his desk, this one holding his dartboard. He opened the doors of the cabinet and slid them back into wherever they went, then grabbed his tungsten beauties from their slots and retreated to the dark cherrywood throw line in his polished white oak hardwood floor.

Twenty. Double twenty. Five.

From the board to the line.

One. Five. Twenty. Then one, one, five. Another four or five lost rounds-terrible, atypical shooting-before he finally rang up twenty, twenty, twenty.

Okay.

Leaving those darts where they’d landed, he lifted himself back onto the desk.

Chiurco, again in his coat and tie, sat in a wing chair across from Hardy in the more informal of the two seating arrangements in the office. He seemed nervous, so Hardy did the initial lifting. “So. Levon Preslee.”

“Okay.”

“Remind me. How did his name come up in the first place?”

“Wyatt had put me on Dylan’s old robbery conviction. He thought there might be some tie-in to whatever he was using to blackmail Maya. Or, even better, we might turn up somebody else who wanted to kill him.”

“So how’d you get to Preslee?”

“I just did a Web search. I found Vogler. That gave me the robbery in 1997. And there’s his codefendant, Levon. So I run him on the Web and find out he’s working for ACT. You’re not going to believe this, but he’s also listed in the phone book. I figure he works in the theater, he’s probably home during the day, so I drove out there. I didn’t even know that Wyatt had run across him, too, until I heard about that from you guys.”

“You didn’t call him first?”

“No, sir. I thought in case he wasn’t right with all this stuff, I might get better answers if I caught him off guard.”

“So then what?”

“Then I get into his lobby, and there’s this woman standing there at the door.”

“How’d you know it was Maya? Had you met her before?”

“No, but she’s our client. I saw her picture in the paper. It was her.”

“As it turns out, you’re right.”

“But anyway, I didn’t know what she was doing there, or what I should do, so I just stood there for a minute.”

“Then what?”

“Well, she told me he wasn’t home, and walked out past me. Mr. Hardy, honest to God, I think she was jiggling the doorknob like she was trying to get in, but I got there a split second too late, and I can’t be absolutely positive. But really, that’s what I think I saw.”

“Well, then, if that’s the best you can do for us, then that’s what we’re going to go with. At least it’s something. If I call you to testify, don’t try to improve it. That’s what you’ve got to say. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Okay, then. So write it up just like that and sign it, because if I decide to call you, I’ll need to give the discovery to the DA.”

“Cool.”

“Okay, then. Have a good night.”

“You too.”

“She’s an old lady,” Wyatt Hunt said, “but I don’t know where they got senile.”

Hardy had remembered to call home and tell Frannie he didn’t know when he’d be in-common enough during trials-but at the same time he’d remembered that he’d also forgotten to eat. So when Hunt had checked in after his meeting with Lori Bradford, saying he was at his own office just around the corner on Grant, Chinatown’s main street, preparing to go out to grab some Chinese, Hardy invited himself along.

Now they sat on high stools, sharing a tiny two-top in the front window, the only two customers, eating shrimp and pork and no sign of souvlaki lo mein à la Lou the Greek’s. A good thing.

“So what’s her story?”

Hardy chewed and listened while Hunt laid it out. For all of its simplicity the implications, Hardy realized, might be enormous-nothing less than a complete restructuring of the theory of the case. More importantly, there was no set of facts he could imagine that would be consistent with Maya having been involved in this two-shot scenario.

“No,” he told Hunt, “think about it. There’s only one shot from the supposed murder weapon, right? Right. So what did she do, shoot once-at what? Dylan? Some kind of warning shot? Unlikely. But the main thing is if there’s that second shot from the one gun, the magazine would have been light two bullets, and it wasn’t, just one. And to get back to that one, she would have had to reload. And that’s just plain absurd.”

“Stier’s going to say it didn’t happen, period. He’ll even use your own argument of no evidence. No second casing, no second slug, no nothing. It didn’t happen. It was a backfire.”

“Yeah. Right. I know. But let’s pretend for a minute.”

“All right. So what do you see?”

“Got to be two guns.”

“Two?”

Hardy, into it, put down his chopsticks. “Whoever came to shoot Dylan had his own gun and knew Dylan carried, so he stuck him up at gunpoint for the other gun first.”

“Why? Why didn’t he just shoot him, bang?”

“He knew him. Maybe first he thought they could talk it out, whatever their differences were. Maybe Dylan tried to stall him somehow.”

“So they had a meeting planned? With Maya too?”

Hardy shook his head. “I don’t have that one figured yet. How would this woman, the one you saw tonight-”

“Lori.”

“Right. How would she be on the stand?”

“Pretty good, I’d say. Sincere and smart. Knew exact times for the shots and remembered the day and date even after all this time. She’s no dummy, Diz.”

“So. What is it? Did Stier just not believe her? I mean, why leave her out up front instead of trying to find some way to explain her story? And, PS, it’s pretty easily explained, as you’ve already done about a minute ago.”

“He might not have known about her.”

“Till when?” Then Hardy pointed a finger, recalling the tense lunchtime gathering at Lou’s with Glitsky and Jackman and the inspectors. “Maybe lunchtime today, huh?”

“The thought crossed my mind, to be honest.”

“This could do it,” Hardy said. “For the verdict, I mean.”

Hunt popped a shrimp. “It might,” he said, then cocked his head with a question. “Is there something else? Besides the verdict?”

“There’s who really did it, Wyatt. If it wasn’t Maya. And if there were two guns…”

The idea set back Hunt in his chair. “Well, now,” he said, and stared out the window into the misty street. “An innocent client? Wes swears that never happens in real life.”