by Scott Turow
"So was that the full extent of your conversation with Mrs. Sabich?" he asks.
"No, hardly."
"Well, tell us what else happened," says Brand, as if that's the most natural question in the world, as if he just can't understand why Marta wouldn't ask herself. The art of the courtroom continues to impress me, the theatrical improvisations and the backhanded ways of communicating with the jury.
In response, Marta in her printed silk jacket comes to her feet but says nothing as Mrs. Belanquez answers.
"Well, after she saw the cashier's check, she wanted to know if there were others and how they got paid for, and whatnot. And so we got to going back and forth with other checks and statements and withdrawal slips and deposit slips. Lots of transactions. We were there most of the day."
"Judge," says Marta, "I think we're pretty far beyond the scope of the direct. We're now talking about documents Your Honor has ruled several times have nothing to do with this case."
"Anything else, Mr. Brand?" Judge Yee asks.
"Guess not," says Brand. But he's regained a little ground, let the jury know that something else was going on. Mrs. Belanquez is excused and clacks out of the courtroom in her tall high heels, casting a small smile at Marta, whom she must like. Her heavy perfume lingers behind her as she passes me on the front pew.
I'm not sure any of the spectators besides me, including the jurors, have absorbed the full impact of Mrs. Belanquez's testimony. But I have that feeling again that my heart is pumping hot lead. I'm not supposed to be surprised. I have said all along my mom knew. And yet it is unbearable, particularly as I add in the contents of those documents the jury will never really know about. I see it all-Mrs. Belanquez's desk in the bank, with the usual phony colonial furnishings, and customers and employees streaming by on every side, and there is my mom, who sometimes needed half a Xanax before she went out in public, who despised feeling observed or exposed. And now she is sitting in front of nice Mrs. Belanquez as she pieces together what was going on, first that my dad has been to see Dana Mann, a divorce lawyer, for professional advice, only a few weeks earlier, and then fifteen months before, he had been cleverly bootlegging money from his paycheck and spending it on things like a payment to a clinic to test for sexually transmitted diseases. She knows right then he's been unfaithful, that he's lied to her nonstop in half a dozen ways, including, worst of all, about whether he is going to continue to be her husband, and she has to take in all of that with a stone face and a breaking heart as she sits across from Mrs. Belanquez, knowing Rosa Belanquez can see the wedding ring on her finger and, therefore, the magnitude of her humiliation.
By now, I am in the corridor outside the courtroom, crying. It's all clear now, that she returned home that Tuesday and sooner or later went through my dad's e-mail and learned whatever else there was to discover about who he had been fucking the year before. Did they fight that week before she died? Did they scream and shout and knock over the furniture and just put on a good face the night Anna and I arrived? Or did my mom take all that with her? It had to be the latter way, I think. She'd known for close to a week by the time we came to dinner and obviously had kept it to herself. She'd been smiling and scheming, considering her alternatives and, I am sure now, planning her death. My dad had picked up the phenelzine for her two days after my mom had been to the bank.
Marta Stern has come out in the hall to find me. She's not within six inches of my height as she reaches up to my shoulder. She's wearing a heavy necklace of hammered gold I haven't noticed before.
"It was so wrong," I tell Marta. I doubt she knows exactly what I mean, because until I speak I'm not sure I know myself. My dad didn't kill my mother in the meaning of the law. But it doesn't change what happened. He deserves to walk out of the courtroom, but when he does, somewhere in my heart, he will always be to blame.
CHAPTER 33
Tommy, June 23, 2009
Marta wanted a recess to set up Rusty's computer for the next witness, and Yee did not look pleased. In the last couple of days, it had become clear that the judge's patience was wearing out. He was living out of a suitcase several hundred miles from home and was still trying to manage his docket of pending cases back in Ware by phone. It would take him months to clear up the backlog once he returned. Rather than consume an hour to remove the shrink-wrap and seals now, Yee instructed the lawyers to have the computer ready in the morning. He would send the jury home and spend the balance of the day on the phone with his chambers, trying to deal with two emergency motions downstate.
That was just as well. Tommy and his team needed a break. Brand and Marta reached an agreement that the PA's techs would remove the shrink-wrap, and the experts from both sides would cut off the last of the evidence tape and set up the machine before court tomorrow morning. With that, the prosecution team and their trial cart rattled back across the street to the office. Once they were by themselves in the elevator in the County Building, Rory Gissling started apologizing.
"I should have fucking known," she said.
"Bullshit," Tommy told her.
"I should have smelled it out," said Rory, "asked around. When the bank got all those documents together in a nanosecond, I should have guessed they'd already done it for somebody else."
"You're a detective," said Tommy, "not a mind reader."
It wasn't bad in and of itself, what the Sterns had proved, the fact that Barbara had known her husband was planning to leave her-not to mention screwing around, which the jury was never going to hear squat about. It was all so-what, really. So she knew. That opened the door to a million possibilities that worked for the prosecution. Rusty and Barbara fought like minks, and he ended up cooling her. She threatened to go to the kid. Or the Trib. God knows what. It was a trial; they'd find a theory to fit the facts if they noodled for a day or two.
But the defense had proved something far more consequential: The prosecution didn't know everything. Those nice men across the room were ignorant about a major piece of evidence in a circumstantial case. It was as if the PAs had drawn a map of the world and missed most of North America. The prosecutors said Rusty killed Barbara, and the defense came back and said, See, these guys don't have the entire picture. Barbara got some sad news, and that's why she quietly ended her life.
The four of them, Brand and Tommy and Rory and Ruta, sat in Tommy's office with the door closed. Tommy looked through the message slips on his desk, just to pretend he wasn't that upset, but all he really wanted to do was think about the case and try to figure out how bad the damage was.
Brand went out to get a pop and came back.
"How can soda from that fucking machine be eighty-five cents?" he asked. "Can't we talk to Central Services? Jody gets it at Safeway for twenty cents a can. People in business, really. They're just fucking thieves."
Tommy reached in his pocket and handed Brand a quarter. "Tell Jody I want a Diet Coke, extra ice, and keep the change."
"He makes that call, Tommy," said Rory, "and you'll finish trying this case yourself."
Jody had been a deputy PA when Brand met her and had her picture in the dictionary next to the phrase "Tough cookie."
"I can't get Central Services to paint the walls or fix the heat," Tommy said when the four of them had passed through the momentary laugh.
The group reverted to silence.
"So Harnason is a coincidence?" Brand finally asked. He was trying to figure out what Sandy was going to argue to the jury in closing.
"They covered that," said Rory. "Barbara knew about that case."
"Right," said Tommy. "They covered that. Harnason's case is what gave her the idea she could kill herself with a drug that would look like natural causes and wouldn't show up on a tox screen. So she could slip off to the great beyond without shaking up the kid even worse. That's what he's going to be saying up there, Nat? How protective his mom was. He's going to back up this whole story."
It was bad, Tommy was realizing. The suicide thing was going to take Rus
ty out.
"What are his fingerprints doing on the phenelzine?" asked Brand.
"Well, now he's got one bad fact to explain instead of six. Everything else fits. They're going to have her on his computer. You know that, right? That's what they want to set it up for. They're going to show she could have gotten into his e-mail. You're basically going to ask this jury for a guilty when our own expert admits she could have handled the bottle without leaving prints, and Rusty was always picking up her meds."
Brand sat there looking at the wall. Tommy had never quite finished furnishing in here. He was the acting PA, and it seemed presumptuous to fill the walls with his own plaques and pictures. He had hung up a few nice shots of Dominga and Tomaso and an old photo of his mom and dad with him at law school graduation. But there were several chalky spots where hunks of paint and plaster had been pulled off when Muriel Wynn vacated four years ago that Central Services, despite regular calls, had never come around to fix. Brand seemed to be focusing on one of them.
"We're not going to lose this fucking case," he said suddenly.
"It was rough sledding from the start," Tommy told him.
"It's gone in beautifully. We are not going to lose."
"Come on, Jimmy. Let's take a night off. Think it over."
"There's a flaw," said Brand, referring to the new theory of defense.
"Probably more than one, if you really want to know," the PA answered.
"Why does she wipe his computer?" Brand asked. "Okay, she reads what's on there. But why ax the messages?"
"Right," said Tommy. They would think of a lot of questions like that over the next day. They needed time to adjust. And, being honest, to catch up. Because Sandy and Marta had been thinking of those questions and making up answers for months now. Wanting to feel better, Jim pressed now.
"If she's planning to kill herself quietly," said Brand, "no note, et cetera, why does she leave tracks behind by deleting his e-mails?"
It was Rory who first realized what the defense was going to say.
"So Rusty will know," she said. "The messages he'd kept, he'd kept for a reason. Maybe he liked to reread his love notes from his little girlfriend. But whatever it was, when he goes back, he'll see that all of those messages are gone. He'll know that Barbara shredded them one by one. And that's how he'll know the missus found out about everything and snuffed herself. That's maybe why she searched around about phenelzine on his computer, so he'll realize just how she did it. But he'll be the only one. The kid, the rest of the world, they'll think she died of her bumpy heartbeat. But Rusty will rot with guilt."
Brand was staring, just staring, at Rory, his mouth parted slightly in that oh-fuckme way.
"Shit," he said then, and threw his empty soda can at the wall. He was not the first ever to do that. There was a triangle of damaged plaster Tommy and his deputies had been creating for years now when they acted out, mashing fists and paper balls there and tossing objects. But Brand's aim was better. The can hit right in the center and dropped into the trash can positioned below to catch what was flung from time to time.
They all watched in silence. In the morning, Tommy told himself, he would take a look to see if there was something else down there in the garbage can. What he would be looking for was their case.
CHAPTER 34
Nat, June 24, 2009
It is seven thirty a.m., and the streets of Center City are beginning to fill with the morning's pedestrians and drivers, urgent to get on to the business of the day. Anna brings the silent Prius to the curb and drops me in front of the LeSueur Building.
"I hope it goes well." She reaches out to take my hand. "Text me as soon as you're done." I lean over to receive a quick embrace and then depart. I have not yet managed to give up the student look and mash my nice suit under the straps of my rucksack, swinging it on before I head inside.
It was a bad night. Anna was mortified to hear about the banker's testimony and seemed to take it every bit as hard as I did. She kept saying how sorry she was, which ended up irritating me because it felt like she was expecting me to comfort her. Perhaps she was trapped in the same place as I was, thinking about my mom laying the table for the four of us on the porch that night and knowing that her life was all but over.
With all the drama, I was in no condition yesterday to go over my expected testimony with Marta, so she has come in early this morning instead. With three kids at home, that isn't easy for her and her husband, Solomon, but she brushes off my thanks as she leads me through the office to the coffeepot.
Watching Marta in court over the weeks, I've realized she will never quite have the career of her father. She has the same intellect as her dad, but not the same magic. She is warm and approachable, whereas her father gains from being formal and remote, but it doesn't seem to matter to her. She is one of those people who likes who she is and what has happened in her life. I tell her all the time she is my role model.
"Was it weird when you decided to practice with your father?" I ask her as we are watching the carafe fill. It's a question that's lingered with me for a couple of weeks now, but in the rush of trial there hasn't been much time to ask.
She laughs and admits she never quite made a decision. There was a family crisis years ago after her mother died-she does not mention it, but I am pretty sure that Clara, Marta's mom and Sandy's first wife, was a suicide, a weird thought this morning. Sandy, in her words, was "at sixes and sevens," and Marta slid into the role of her father's sidekick without a lot of thought.
"It's what people mean, though, when they say that things turn out for the best," she says. "I've loved practicing with my dad, and the truth is that if my mom hadn't died, it might not have happened. He's the best lawyer I've ever met, and we have this harmony in the office that we can't find anywhere else. I don't think we've ever raised our voices here. But if I bring him home for dinner when Helen is traveling, I'm screaming at him by the time he's through the door. He breaks every rule I have for the kids. I love my father," Marta adds then as a sudden afterthought, and flushes so quickly that I don't realize at first what's happened. It's the clearest declaration anybody has made yet that Sandy Stern is dying. She stares down into her coffee.
"I haven't recovered from my mother yet," she says, "and that's nearly twenty years."
"Really? I keep waiting to feel normal again."
"It's just a new normal," she says.
Whatever professional distance there is supposed to be between Marta and me has largely vanished. We just have too much in common. Both attorneys. With moms who met untimely deaths and these lawyer dads who seem big enough to block the sun but are each currently imperiled. We have, figuratively speaking, made it through this case holding hands, and I actually put my arm on her shoulder for a minute as we are walking back to the office. She is going to be one of those people I ask for advice the rest of my life.
We go over my testimony quickly. A lot of it is tender stuff after yesterday, but there is no debating the necessity.
"What's the deal with the computer?" I ask her.
"We're taking a little flyer. It was your dad's idea. He says there's no risk. We'll see. But I want you to be able to say in front of the jury that we didn't discuss that part in advance. So just follow my instructions. It won't be complicated."
The point is obvious anyway, to show how easy it would have been for my mom to have signed herself on to his machine.
When I head out to use the john before we go to court, I bump into my dad. He stayed clear of me yesterday, and even now there is, as usual, not a lot for either of us to say.
"I'm sorry, Nat."
My mom was short, so it seemed to surprise everyone, especially me, that I grew a couple inches taller than my father. For the longest time, I felt crazy weird about the fact that I was looking down at him, if just a bit. He grabs my shoulders and I stumble into some kind of hug, and then he goes off in his direction and I go in mine.
The first time I testified, I was an absolut
e mess. I had never seen a trial before, and here I was, the first witness in the case, called by the prosecution to give evidence against my father for murdering my mother. I just sat up there like a lump and answered as quickly as I could. Judge Yee kept telling me to keep my voice up. When Brand was done, Marta asked me a couple of questions designed to show that my dad seemed to be in a state of shock when he argued with me about calling the police. Then she told Yee she'd reserve any remaining examination until I was recalled in the defense case.
When I ascend this time to the chair under the walnut canopy, it's easier. I'll be seeing this courtroom in my dreams the rest of my life, but I am, in a very strange way, at home.
"Please state your name and spell the last name for the record."
"Nathaniel Sabich, S, A, B, I, C, H."
"You are the same Nathaniel Sabich who testified during the People's case?"
"Same guy." A young Latina in the front row of the jury smiles. She seemed to think I was cool when I was up here the first time.
"And since you testified, you have been present here in court each day, is that right?"
"I have. I'm the only family my dad has got, and Judge Yee said I could be in here to support him."
"But to be clear, Nat, have you discussed the evidence in this case with your father, or your testimony here today?"
"No. You know, he's told me he didn't do it and I've told him I believe him, but no, we don't talk about what the witnesses have said or what I'm going to say."
These last answers, which stray beyond the strict bounds of the rules of evidence, were worked out with Marta in advance. She would have been just as happy to see Brand object when I said I believed my dad, only to reemphasize that fact for the jurors, but I could see Molto touch Brand's wrist as he was about to spring up. By all accounts, Molto was kind of a hothead as a young guy, but time and responsibility have apparently chilled him out. He knows the jurors have seen me here day after day and have to realize whose side I'm on. The dude's my dad, after all. What else am I going to believe?
