The 13th Juror

by John Lescroart

  Hardy went back to the defense table and took another sip of water, gathering his thoughts. “The last point, ladies and gentlemen, concerns a crucial factor that has thus far been missing in the record of this trial—and that is the fact that because no one actually saw Jennifer kill Larry and Matt Witt, the possibility must remain that someone else could have done these deeds.”

  Powell stood quickly. “Your Honor, the verdict is in.”

  But again he was overruled. Hardy was not arguing a logical inconsistency nor, strictly, was he arguing hypothetically. He could continue, but “Walk carefully, Mr. Hardy. There’s a thin line here.”

  Acknowledging Villars’ warning, Hardy turned to the jury. “I am not here to prove to you that your verdict was wrong. You worked long and hard coming to your decision and I respect your work. But the fact does remain—someone other than Jennifer conceivably could have had a reason to kill Larry Witt, and someone other than Jennifer conceivably could have done it. So as this portion of the trial proceeds, you are going to be hearing some about Larry Witt—the kind of man he was, his business dealings, some of the other matters he was involved in. I believe that a number of these considerations are persuasive and might bring you to that lingering doubt I mentioned earlier.”

  He paused, took a breath. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is one last, painful thing. Mr. Powell has gone to great lengths in his opening statement—”

  Powell wasn’t having it. “Objection. This is not the time for rebuttal.”

  Villars didn’t hesitate. “Sustained.” She waited. Hardy almost felt she was daring him.

  “All right,” he said, turning to the jury, including them in his frustration out of Villars’ line of sight. “Now I must, I must, say a word about the death of Matthew Witt.” Again he paused, and it was not just for dramatic effect. He could not tolerate having the tragedy of the boy’s death, however it had transpired, misrepresented to the jury. “No evidence has been introduced, nor will any be, that Jennifer Witt was an abusive mother. If there were doctors out there who could testify that Matthew Witt was the victim of any kind of abuse, believe me, they would be here as witnesses for the prosecution. There are none.

  “And why is that?” Hardy turned and pointed now at his client. “Because Jennifer Witt was a remarkably good mother. No one contends or even suggests that she was not. She loved her son. She has been devastated by his death. She did not concoct any plan that—however remotely—might have put her son in danger. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the plain truth.”

  Hardy glanced at Villars, waiting for Powell to object again and this time be sustained. But it did not come. He had kept it vague enough and, after all, this was just an introduction. Letting out a breath, he decided this was about as good as he was going to get at this stage. He thanked the jury and sat down.

  It was six-thirty and Hardy was sitting at the bar of the Little Shamrock, working on a Black & Tan, a mixture of ale and stout. Moses and Hardy (back in his full-time bartender days) took pride in how they made the drink, separating the two brews cleanly, stout on top. But the new kid, Alan, had not gotten the knack, so that the fresh drink tasted old, flat. Maybe it was just the way the day had gone, how Hardy felt.

  After the full day at the trial, the emotional drain of finally getting up and beginning to work, Hardy didn’t think going home with his edge on would be wise. The shift in personal mode from near-adversary to ally was not a toggle switch, and he had called Frannie explaining he needed some unwind time—if she could handle it, if she wasn’t too burned on the kids.

  That early on a Monday, there were only five other people at the bar, two couples at tables near the dartboard and a really lovely young woman up by the window talking to Alan. Hardy spun his pint slowly on the smooth wood before him. Willie Nelson was singing Paul Simon on the jukebox, about the many times he’d been mistaken, the many times confused. Hardy understood that.

  The young man behind the bar brought a new attitude to the Shamrock. Moses called it the “look of the nineties”—short hair, shaved face, dress shirt and slacks. Moses said they were getting a lot more single female customers than they had had with Hardy behind the rail, to which Hardy had replied that maybe that was true, but probably they were shallower people, into the good-looks thing. He—Hardy—was into substance, character, depth, real stuff. Moses said the real stuff was all right, but it didn’t sell as much booze. Besides, Moses said, since Susan, he’d been into the good-looks thing himself. Times changed.

  The woman by the window said something and Alan laughed. Swirling, checking on Hardy’s progress with his drink, he was smiling as though no one had ever lied to him. Maybe that was it, Hardy thought—I’m in a business where most everybody lies. It’s expected.

  He took a last sip for politeness’ sake, pushed a few bills into the gutter, raised a hand saying good-bye. A stranger in his own bar.

  It was just getting to dusk, and there was one light on in the DiStephano house, in the front left window. No cars in the drive.

  Hardy parked down a half-block. He put the foldedup subpoena form in his shirt pocket.

  Going up the walkway, heart pounding, he wondered how Frannie would feel about this segment of his unwind time.

  He walked a few steps onto the lawn. Through the lighted window he saw Nancy moving about in the kitchen. On the porch, he stopped to listen. There was no conversation. If Phil was home he would bull his way through, or try.

  He rang the doorbell.

  The overhead light flicked on. She stood inside the screen. “Hello,” she said. She looked around behind him, up and down the street.

  “Phil isn’t home?”

  Shaking her head no, she opened the screen door. “He’s on a call.” Again, Hardy was struck by how young she looked—Jennifer had gotten her good bones from her mother. He thought those bones had played a big role in getting their men—perhaps it wasn’t the blessing it was cracked up to be.

  “I wanted to come and ask you if you’d like to talk about your daughter. On the witness stand.”

  “Talk about Jennifer? What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to talk about how much you love her.”

  Nancy swallowed, her eyes wide. “I do love her,” she said.

  “I know you do. I want you to tell that to the jury.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it might help save her life. Because it’s something they can see, something human.”

  Her eyes became hooded, haunted. Jennifer got that way often enough, too; Hardy thought it was whenever either of them thought they were about to do something that would get them hit.

  He pressed the point. “I need you, Nancy. Jennifer needs you. The DA is pulling people out of the woodwork and they’re painting a very bad picture of Jennifer.”

  “I know. I watch TV.” She scanned the street again, then stood silent, volunteering nothing.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s him.” Hardy had met women before who referred to the current man in their lives, always, without preamble, as “him.” And it always chilled him.

  “Phil would want you to save his daughter’s life, Nancy. Don’t tell me he wouldn’t want that.”

  “This whole thing . . . ” she began, then stopped again. “He hates it. He hates that everybody knows it’s his daughter on trial.”

  “He’s worried about how that affects him?”

  “He’s not just worried—he’s furious. He said he wishes we never had her. He won’t even let me talk about it, about her.”

  “Nancy, how’s he going to feel if they execute her? How are you going to feel?”

  The plea in her eyes was clear—don’t ask me such a question. She loved her daughter and was scared to death of her husband. If he had to bet on it, she hoped more than anything at this moment that he would just go away.

  But he didn’t drive out there just to go away. He took the paper from his breast pocket. “This is a subpoena for you to appear, Nan
cy. I need you to be there. I need somebody to say that Jennifer loved her son, that she herself has something to offer, that she is at least worth saving. Show the jury that somebody cares.”

  Nancy held the paper close to her.

  “Nancy, how old are you?” Hardy asked suddenly.

  She tried to smile but it came out broken. “Forty-eight,” she said.

  “It’s not too late,” he said.

  She clutched the subpoena form against her, in a fist held tight against her stomach. She sighed, almost shuddering. Any trace of even a broken-down smile was gone. “Yes, I’m afraid it is,” she said.

  In the middle of the night, the telephone rang. It was Freeman. “You heard yet? Anybody call you?”

  Hardy blinked, trying to focus the clock. Four-thirty.

  “No, David, nobody’s called me.”

  “Well, they called me. Jennifer’s mother just tried to kill her old man.”

  45

  They were both at Shriners’ Hospital—Phil under the knife in emergency surgery, Nancy in a guarded private room. Hardy was down there before six, before the sun was up, before any other lawyers or the media.

  “She’s going to be all right. Him I don’t know.”

  The inspector, Sean Manion, had had a long night, but he worked out of Park Station; he had known Hardy from the Shamrock and they got along. They were standing in the hallway outside Nancy’s room now. She had been sedated and was not going to be giving interviews to anybody for a while.

  “What happened?”

  Manion was strung tight. He was shorter than Hardy by half a head, with a pockmarked face, a reconstructed cleft palate, a monk’s tonsured hairline. Perpetually hunched, hands in his pockets, chewing gum, he talked in a rapid staccato. “Guy beat her once too often, I guess. She grabbed a knife and stuck him. Four times, I think. No, five.”

  “How bad?”

  “Three on the arms. Standard slash, but a couple of belly whacks. Could have nicked his heart; they weren’t sure last I checked. Guy lost a ton of blood. She called us, you know. After.”

  “You gonna charge her?”

  Manion chomped his gum. “I don’t know. Ask the DA. I doubt it. With what?”

  “Attempted murder?”

  Manion snorted. “Nah, shit, this was self-defense. You ought to see her. Son of a bitch ought to die. If he lives, anybody gets charged with anything, ought to be him.”

  “Sean, did you call David Freeman on this?”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Maybe she did before you got there.” Hardy motioned back toward the room. “She’s out, though, huh?”

  Manion nodded. “Dreamland. Check her around noon.”

  “Can’t,” Hardy said, “I’m in trial.”

  “Lucky you.” The inspector spread his hands. “Well, there you go. She’ll still be here tonight. She’s not going anywhere, I’ll tell you that. Not today.”

  “That bad?”

  Manion bobbed his head. “Pretty bad. But hey, she’s alive. It could be worse.”

  Hardy knew he had caused it. If he hadn’t gotten the idea in the first place, if he hadn’t gone down with the subpoena, if he hadn’t tried to talk Nancy into testifying . . . Then she and Phil had gotten into it and now they were both in the hospital.

  From his lack of a night’s sleep, he should have been exhausted, but when he entered the small interrogation room on the seventh floor at a little after eight, the adrenaline rush hadn’t let up. He felt like he’d had a half-gallon of espresso.

  Jennifer had not yet dressed for court. She was escorted in wearing her red jumpsuit. “So what’s today’s advice?” she began. She acted like she was losing hope in him.

  He told her.

  She had been standing in what had become her usual posture in that room, arms crossed, leaning back against the door. Before Hardy was half done, she sat down, shell-shocked.

  “Jennifer?”

  “I’m here.” Then: “What does this mean?”

  “I think it means your mother was going to testify for you and she and your dad had a fight about it.”

  “But why would she risk that? She knows him . . . ”

  “How about because she loves you?”

  Jennifer just stared at him, her mouth working in silence. She put her head down on her arms and began to sob.

  A very unhappy Harlan Poole was back on the witness stand. The dentist appeared to have lost some fifteen pounds in the two weeks since he had been up before. This time he was not going to be relating hearsay.

  Dean Powell was zeroing in. The election was around the corner and the candidate’s whole rhythm was picking up. “Dr. Poole, you have said that after Jennifer’s first husband died, you decided to call things off with her. Is that correct?”

  Poole, sweating almost before he had begun, agreed.

  “Can you tell us what happened then between you and Jennifer?”

  “We . . . I just kind of tried to distance myself.”

  “Although she worked with you every day, did she not?”

  Poole nodded. “She was my receptionist.”

  “And yet you needed to distance yourself.”

  “I . . . we stopped being intimate.”

  Poole seemed to be looking in all directions at once, pulling at his collar. He mumbled it out, just into the range of audible. “I couldn’t perform . . . It may sound strange, but I was afraid of her—”

  Hardy jumped up, objecting, but was overruled. He began to argue with Villars, saying that Poole didn’t answer the question of whether or not he had stopped being intimate. Villars, pointing a finger, asked Hardy if he were hard of hearing—she had ruled on it. He had to stop. He risked a contempt citation, but worse, he risked losing the jury’s respect. The former he could handle, but the latter could doom Jennifer. He sat down.

  Powell, for his part, was not about to risk a mistrial repeating why Dr. Poole had been afraid, but then, of course, he didn’t have to—the jury would remember about Ned. He didn’t need it anyway, as it turned out—the direction he did take was damaging enough. “So then what happened?”

  “I tried to tell Jennifer it was no good, that it just wasn’t working anymore, but she, uh, she . . . ” He looked at Jennifer again.

  “Take your time,” Powell said.

  Poole thought about how to put it. “I finally decided I’d have to break it off with her and fire her at the same time.”

  There was a little rush in the courtroom. Several members of the jury sat forward. So did Hardy. Once again, he hadn’t heard about this one.

  “And what happened then?”

  “Well, she got pretty crazy . . . ”

  “How do you mean crazy? Threatening? Violent?”

  “Both.” He stopped and swallowed a few times. “I don’t know what to say, sir. I’m sorry.”

  Powell was prepared. “Did she physically attack you?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a weapon?”

  “Well, some things at the office, yes.”

  “Sharp things? Medical instruments?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “She scratched me pretty badly on my arms and face.” He shook his head. “She was pretty crazy.”

  Hardy stood up again. “Your Honor, this is the second time this witness has characterized the defendant as crazy.”

  Villars, deadpan, addressed the jury: “Disregard the characterization,” she said. “You’re sustained, Mr. Hardy.” She gave him a cold smile.

  Powell picked it right up. “She scratched you on your arms and face?”

  Hardy instinctively rose again. “Asked and answered, Your Honor.”

  Powell turned back to him, to the jury, arms outstretched. Villars wasted no time.

  “Let the prosecutor question this witness, Mr. Hardy. You’ll get your chance. Overruled.”

  For the third time, the jury heard that Jennifer had scratched Poole’s arms and face. Powell now asked: “Yo
u’ve also said that the defendant threatened you. What was the nature of that threat?”

  Poole swallowed and croaked it out. “She said if I didn’t take her back she’d kill me.”

  “She’d kill you,” Powell repeated.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you think she would?”

  Hardy, hating to but having to—Powell was baiting him—stood to object again, but Powell graciously smiled. “I’ll withdraw the question. Your witness.”

  Now was when the fatigue was hurting him. If Powell had found his own rhythm, Hardy felt that he had lost his, but there was nothing to do but press on.

  “Dr. Poole,” he began, “this attack you suffered at the hands of Jennifer Witt—was it after you broke up with her or after you fired her?”

  “Well, they were . . . It was pretty much the same thing.”

  “Okay. How long had you been intimate with Mrs. Witt before that time?”

  “I think about six months.”

  “You don’t remember exactly?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  This was Hardy’s favorite answer from a hostile witness. He thought he’d try for it again. “All right. Would you please tell us what weapons she used against you—the sharp ones you mentioned earlier?”

  “Well, they were office instruments.”

  “Yes, you said that, but which ones?”

  Poole frowned. “I don’t remember exactly. She was throwing a lot of them.”

  “Oh, she was throwing things at you? You broke up with someone you had been intimate with for six months, taking advantage of your position as her employer—”