The Ophelia Cut

by John Lescroart

  Clearly nervous, she glanced around again. “Do you know about Jon Lo?”

  Hunt kept his expression neutral. “Vaguely,” he said. “He’s one of your big donors, I believe.”

  “That’s right. He’s also . . .” She laid it out for him. Lo coming to Goodman and then the supervisor’s brutal examination of all the male interns, everyone’s eventual certainty that the guilty party had been Jessup, although no proof had ever materialized. The point was that Jessup had threatened the job of every male in the office. Everybody hated him, and he in turn felt threatened by every one of them. Always arrogant, he became capricious and hot-tempered. Even Goodman seemed to have come around to believing that Jessup had stiffed and beaten Lo’s girls—in any event, he had put out feelers for people to interview for Jessup’s job. Diane had booked the first of the appointments.

  “How can it be,” Hunt asked, “that no one’s talked about this?”

  Diane looked hurt. “Why would we? As you just said, why would it matter? Rick was dead. We were all glad to have him behind us. You can’t imagine.”

  The door from the hallway opened, Diane stopped talking, and the next moment, Hunt was shaking the hand of Liam Goodman. “I see Diane the gem has been taking good care of you. I’m sorry to have kept you, but when the mayor calls . . .”

  THE CONVERSATION WITH Goodman started out the same way as the Lo interview, with the decided advantage that Jessup had a substantial history with Goodman. It was within the realm of logic to suppose that the supervisor had more information about his chief of staff’s personal life. Goodman did not separate himself with his desk but sat catercorner to Hunt, relaxed yet somber about the pain he was enduring associated with the loss of his second in command.

  After listening to Goodman’s first few pro forma comments about how good and loyal and competent a person Jessup had been, Hunt decided to cut to the chase. “So he was this great guy. I gather that means you don’t think he raped the girl? You think she accused him but it never happened?”

  As he’d hoped, the question stopped Goodman cold. His shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell. “It was a horrible charge,” he said. “And it got him killed.”

  “You don’t think he did it?”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know. How can we know?”

  “We can look at his behavior,” Hunt suggested. “See if there’s any kind of a precedent.”

  Goodman’s eyes ticked over at Hunt. “I don’t know what that would be. He had no criminal record of any kind. Certainly nothing suggesting rape.”

  Hunt sat back, put an ankle on his knee, spoke the absolute truth in an almost apologetic tone. “Before I came to see you this morning, sir,” he said, “I went up to Jon Lo’s office and had a little talk with him.”

  The wheels turned for a second or two. Goodman’s shoulders settled, and he turned to face Hunt square on. “I don’t know what happened to him.” Goodman pulled at the skin around his mouth, exuding sadness. “After we won the election and I made him chief of staff, I think it must have gone to his head. When it looked like we might be going further, after a few moves we made panned out, he must have come to believe that nothing could touch him. No matter what he did. So he started taking advantage of his position.”

  “Why didn’t you fire him?”

  “At first I had no proof. Besides, we had a long history, and I thought he’d come around. I liked him as a guy, at least in the early days, and I was hoping we could get back there.”

  “You eventually got proof?”

  Goodman nodded. “Jon brought Rick’s picture around, and six of the girls identified him.”

  “Six?”

  “Six we know about.” A deflated shrug. “There may have been as many as twenty, twenty-five, maybe more. There’s no way to know. To all appearances, he was out of control.”

  “And still you didn’t let him go.”

  “I’m a politician, Mr. Hunt. I wanted to have a replacement in the wings so there was no hint of instability in the campaign. Did you meet Brad, by the way? He should be back from lunch any time.”

  “I’ll catch him next time, if there is one.”

  The uncomfortable stuff over with, the supervisor perked up a bit. “But—the bad news for you—is I don’t see how any of this is going to make a difference to your client. The fact remains that Rick raped the poor woman and her father killed him for it. I mean, Rick’s history changes none of that.”

  “No. That’s true.” Hunt got to his feet. “I appreciate your time.”

  HUNT WAS GETTING out of the cab when he spotted his quarry probably coming back from lunch, all alone, crossing at the closest corner. Waiting until they were nearly abreast, Hunt stepped out in front of him. “Mr. Lo,” he said, extending his hand, “Wyatt Hunt. We met in your office this morning.”

  Lo stopped, squinting in the sunlight. He extended his hand and broke into an easy smile. “Have you been hanging out here on the sidewalk in front of my building all this time?”

  “Not exactly. I was down talking to Liam Goodman. I wondered if you could spare me a few more minutes?”

  The smile vanished entirely. Lo ostentatiously consulted his watch, his face etched in regret. “I’m afraid I’ve got a couple of meetings I’m already late for. Maybe we could set up an appointment in a couple of days, and I’ll be happy to give you all the time you need.”

  Not on your life, Hunt was thinking. No way was he giving Lo the opportunity to call Goodman and find out what they’d talked about so they could prepare a cohesive response. And no way would he give up the chance to press Lo for the real reason that Goodman hadn’t fired Jessup as soon as he’d learned of the perfidy. Hunt had both the hammer and the element of surprise, and he wasn’t going to risk losing either. “I’m only talking a couple of minutes, sir,” he said. “I could ride up the elevator with you, and we’d be done.”

  Lo flashed a grin, looked at his building, came back to Hunt, and nodded. “If you’re sure we can make it fast.”

  “Lightning,” Hunt said.

  Neither man started walking.

  Hunt said, “When we talked this morning, you told me you had met Rick Jessup at a couple of fund-raisers but had no other connection with him. You also said that, to your knowledge, Mr. Jessup had no contact with any members of your staff. Knowing I’ve just come from speaking to Mr. Goodman, would you like to amend those statements in any way?”

  “What did Liam tell you?”

  “About Jessup and your girls.” Hunt paused for effect, then continued, “Which, of course, gives you a reason to have wanted Jessup out of the way, and one of your bodyguards to actually get that done.”

  “That’s absurd. Did Liam make that accusation? Because he had as much reason as anyone to want Jessup dead. More than most. Did he mention that Rick was blackmailing him to keep his job? Did he tell you about his Army Business?”

  Hunt loved it when knaves fell out. Lo had barely heard what Goodman had revealed to Hunt, certainly nothing resembling an accusation of any wrongdoing on his part, and he was already striking back with accusations of his own.

  “I don’t believe I’ve heard about anything called the Army Business.”

  “Elaborate, lucrative, smart, and illegal.”

  “Well, that sounds fascinating,” Hunt said, “but I don’t want to keep you from your appointments.”

  Lo narrowed his eyes. “Don’t play games with me, Hunt. I may look like a sweetheart, but you’ll find I’m a very serious man indeed.”

  Something inside Hunt shuddered at the calm words and the certainty with which they were uttered. “Maybe we want to go up to your office,” he said.

  THE NEW FRONT window at the Little Shamrock had been installed that morning, Tony Solaia—who was the de facto manager—helping to supervise. At 1:20 P.M., U.S. Marshal Frank Ladoux knocked on the front door, and Tony came out from where he’d been hunkered down—invisible from the street—on the back love seat and let him in.

&n
bsp; “Can I get you a beer?” Tony asked, leading him into the shadows at the end of the bar while he went around behind the spigots. “Anything?”

  Ladoux shook his head. “Too early.”

  Ladoux was chewing a toothpick. He put a cowboy boot on the low rung of a stool. He was wearing black denim slacks and an REI jacket that didn’t hide the bulge of his gun underneath. Hooking his elbows casually on the back of his stool, he offered Tony a tired smile. “Thanks for seeing me. I thought it was time for a little face-to-face meetup.”

  “As long as you weren’t followed.”

  “Not likely. Somebody’s been asking around about you, and you know that’s not how we like to do it.”

  “Shit.”

  Frank nodded. “I thought you’d say that. Although you’ve been playing it so close to the line, I don’t know what else you’d expect.”

  “None of that, none of this, has been my fault.”

  “I’m not saying it is. I’m just saying look at what’s happened in these last months. First you’re busted at Rome, then out of all those bar busts, you get one of the squirrelly cases with those fucking Russians—”

  “Ukrainians.”

  “Whatever. Still, you’re almost in the paper. Meanwhile, you move to this bar, where your boss is going on trial for murder, and you’re on the witness list for the prosecution. Oh yeah, and you start hanging out with Miss America, and next thing you know, there’s paparazzi in here fighting to get her picture. And maybe yours with her. I mean, what the fuck, you know? You call this laying low?”

  “I like her.”

  “Yeah, well, who wouldn’t like her?”

  Tony looked at him. “So what’d you want me to do, Frank? Relocate again?”

  “It’s been known to happen. Better than getting yourself killed.” Frank moved the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “You know why we marshals have that hundred-percent safety record we’re so proud of, never losing one of our protected people?”

  “You’re world-class bodyguards?”

  “That, too. The other reason is because if somebody blows his cover enough on his own, we bust them out of the program.”

  Tony shook his head and gave his minder a cold smile. “Don’t bullshit me, Frank. You’re not busting me out of any program. You need me to testify. If I don’t, two hundred lawyers just wasted three years. You’re not going to let that happen.”

  “It’s not my decision. And I’m not down here today because I’ve been missing our special times together. Important though you are, you are not invaluable. The word is that you’re scheduled to testify in this trial you’re mixed up in, maybe as early as tomorrow.”

  Tony waved that off. “They’re not going to call me. I’ve got nothing to say. Who’s following this, anyway?”

  “My superiors. Let’s just go with that. These public appearances of yours are matters of some interest to them, and they’re concerned that your value as a witness might be compromised.”

  “How?”

  “If you give perjured testimony, for example, which is a felony. As you know, one of the rules is that if you commit a new felony while you’re in the program, then you are out of the program. And let me remind you that one of the fairly predictable consequences of losing your protected-witness status is that you’re identified by your enemies, usually sooner rather than later, and you wind up with a bullet in your brain.”

  “Well, that’s—”

  Frank held up a hand, stopping him with a grin that looked friendly and completely nonthreatening. “Please. I just want to add that perjury is a difficult felony for us to deal with, because it calls into question your basic integrity as a witness, which is where your value lies. If you’ll lie under oath in one trial, what’s to stop you from lying under oath in another?”

  “What makes you think I’m going to lie?”

  Frank shifted the toothpick around. “Let’s recall,” he said, “when you first came to me with the information that you’d talked to Mr. Stier and he wanted you to be a witness in the case. Because of concerns about your identity coming out if you testified in a high-profile trial, you told me about that meeting, and I asked what he wanted you to testify about. Does this more or less ring a bell?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Then you’ll remember telling me that you’d just spent a couple of days with Brittany and she had confessed to you that she’d told her father about the rape right after you dropped her off at their place in the middle of the night.”

  “Right.”

  “She actually thought that her father had killed Jessup.”

  “Right. She did.”

  “And now you and she are an item?”

  Tony acknowledged the fact with a shrug. “Okay?”

  “Okay, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. Stier’s going to ask Brittany if she told her father, and she’s going to say no, because if she says yes, he goes to the slammer, and she’s not going to let that happen. So then he’s going to call you, and you’re going to say no, because although that would be perjury, she’s your girlfriend, and if you said yes, that’d be the end of that.” Frank propped his elbows on the back of the bar stool. “You see the dilemma this poses for me?”

  Tony thought for a second or two. “You could just let it go,” he said. “Nobody else has to know.”

  This brought a faint smile. “There are so many ways that’s impossible that I almost don’t know where to begin. Start with if Brittany told anybody else that she told you or any variation thereof. Or somehow it comes out that I knew the truth but had a deal with you not to tell, which would effectively end my career. No, the simple fact is that you’ve got to tell the truth, because if you don’t, I will be forced to go to Mr. Stier and tell him about your perjured testimony, which will result in you going to jail under your real name because you would no longer be in the program. How long do you think you’d last in jail, Tony, before they found you?”

  32

  AFTER LUNCH, HARDY spent the better part of ninety minutes on redirect with his expert witness. In a somewhat tedious and soporific display, Paley flawlessly recited chapter and verse of every specific source that he’d quoted in his earlier testimony and, in this way, perhaps to some degree, reestablished his credibility. Included in that effort was Hardy’s attempt to spin Paley’s identification of Lars Gunderson to buttress the defense argument that eyewitness identification, even for a man as well trained and experienced as Dr. Paley, was a tenuous business at best.

  Yes, Paley had correctly identified Mr. Gunderson in spite of getting wrong most of the details about how he looked, but that only went to show that eyewitness identification was unreliable, period. That was always Paley’s point. Not reassured that the jury was buying it, Hardy could only hope that Paley had planted a seed that would bloom when the eyewitnesses testified.

  In the end, he was glad to hear the last of Paley’s testimony, although it meant that the main event was about to begin.

  Brittany McGuire’s testimony would be central to the prosecution’s case. That put her in the untenable position of supplying the motive evidence that might send her father to prison. When Stier had named her early on as a prosecution witness, she had resisted at every step. There was no way that she was going to testify to anything that would put her father in jeopardy. Taking Hardy’s advice, Brittany had hired her own attorney, Tracy Edwards, to make her case to the judge.

  There had been a hellacious hearing in chambers before the jury was sworn, with Edwards doing all in her power to persuade the judge that Brittany shouldn’t have to testify: Brittany’s attorney’s first move at that hearing was to assert the rape victim’s privilege; her client would refuse to testify about the sexual assault or anything to do with it. If someone had been charged with raping Brittany, she could have refused to testify, and there was damn little Stier could do about it. The legislature had passed a statute. The case law was clear. That would have been the end of it
.

  But Stier, no slouch, had countered that he wasn’t going to ask about the rape. Not about what happened to her, not about who did it, not about whether she’d ever been sexually assaulted in her life. He was simply going to ask whether she told her father that Rick Jessup had raped her and about McGuire’s reaction to that news.

  It had been the low point in the pretrial motions for Hardy (and Edwards) when Gomez sided with Stier. Brittany would have to take the stand and answer questions about what she had told her father and his reaction to it. Through Edwards, Brittany advised the court that she’d never told her father anything about the alleged rape, therefore arguing that her testimony was irrelevant.

  Gomez hadn’t bought it. “Mr. Stier has evidence that arguably demonstrates the opposite, Ms. McGuire. You’re going to testify under oath. I can only advise you, as I am sure your attorney has already advised you, that there are serious consequences for not telling the truth. I’ll say no more than that.”

  After the judge’s decision, Hardy realized that Brittany wouldn’t have any choice—unless she decided to deliberately perjure herself, she would have to admit what she’d told her father and when. By now, even after Tracy Edwards had lost her argument, Hardy had spent several hours with Brittany, counseling her, arguing that perjury was never a good idea.

  Especially in this case, where Brittany’s decision to lie, if she kept on in her intransigence, would accomplish nothing. As a matter of actual fact, Stier was going to present several witnesses, including Tony Solaia, who would contradict her testimony. That would leave little to no doubt in any juror’s mind that McGuire knew about the rape—from Brittany’s own admission—by early Sunday morning. There was no point in keeping to her mendacious story.

  In spite of his arguments, Hardy knew he hadn’t made much, if any, headway. Brittany understood what he was saying, but there was no way she was going to supply the jury with the motive for her father to have killed her rapist. Let her friends and acquaintances contradict her. She didn’t care. She’d go to jail for perjury if need be, but she wasn’t going to betray her father.