The 13th Juror dh-4

by John Lescroart

  Hardy started to say that the right representation could make all the difference. But her gaze was a blank. He wasn't getting through. "Mrs. Witt?"

  She wasn't there. Or rather, as far as she was concerned, Hardy wasn't there. She shook her head from side to side. Eventually, a pendulum winding down, she stopped. "No," she said. "I mean Matt. My baby."

  Hardy took in a breath himself and held it a moment. He, too, had lost a son. Over the years he had gotten better at keeping it out of the front of his mind. But he would never forget, never even approach forgetting.

  Looking at this woman – frail now in the jail's jumpsuit – he found himself feeling a strong connection. It was unguarded and maybe unprofessional, but there'd be no harm in letting the legalities wait a few minutes. God knew, once they began they'd go on long enough. "How long has it been?" he asked.

  She pulled at a strand of her hair. "I can't accept it." Her voice was hoarse now, her eyes distant. "Nothing seems real anymore, you know?" She gestured around the tiny airless room. "This place. I feel like I'm sleepwalking in a nightmare… I want to wake up… I want Matt back…" She swallowed, seemed almost to gulp at the air. "God, I don't know. What can you do? What do you care?"

  "I do care, Mrs. Witt."

  She took that in without a blink, not a sigh, not a glance at him. Inside herself again.

  Hardy looked down at his hands, linked on the table between them. Jennifer Witt wasn't worried about her lawyers and their games, about her bail and her baggy yellow jumpsuit. She'd lost her son and nobody was going to bring him back. She was right. Nothing Hardy could do would make that better.

  *****

  There was a square of light from an outside window over one of the guard's desks. It had moved nearly a foot since Jennifer had been brought in.

  She had begun to open up, to listen. The details of Hardy's proxy representation accepted for the moment, they were finally getting down to it. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life in jail, did she?

  "Not for something I didn't do, Mr. Hardy."

  "Okay. But let me ask you, what did you mean when you said you deserved it? Deserved what? "

  In a reaction that struck Hardy as pathetic, she ducked away, as if she were going to be hit. "Nothing, anything… this…"

  "What?"

  "I shouldn't have let it happen. I wasn't there. Maybe if I'd been there…" She shook her head again.

  "What did happen? Why do the police think you did this?" Hardy wanted to hear her version. Never imagining he'd have any part in it, he'd followed the news of the crime casually as it appeared in the papers or on television, just another of the many stories of domestic woe that came and went to help sell soap or hamburgers or newspapers.

  "I don't know. I don't understand. When they came to arrest me I asked them-"

  "And what did they say?"

  She shrugged, apparently mystified. "They got to talking about my rights, warned me about anything I said, that I could have a lawyer, that kind of thing."

  "But you saw this was coming? You must have-"

  She stopped him, interrupting with a dry noise that sounded bitter when it came out. "I haven't thought about anything, don't you understand that? I've been trying just to get through the days."

  Hardy knew what she meant. She scraped a fingernail over the tabletop, staring at the yellowing strip of varnish that lifted and flaked away. Again, she swallowed – as though keeping herself from breaking down. But her voice – the tone of it – sounded almost matter-of-fact, if weary. He was sure the coloring was protective. Well, she would have to try to soften it if her case ever went to trial, if she ever testified. She would come across as too cool. Even cold.

  But that, if at all, was a long way off.

  "I was just getting used to the awfulness of it. I mean, okay, there might have been somebody who was robbing the house or had some problem with Larry – I don't know what. And Larry gets shot. Larry, Jesus… But Matt…?"

  She was losing the fight with her tears.

  Hardy was with her. "The papers always said Matt must have been an accident, he walked in at a bad time, something like that."

  She nodded. "That's what I've been thinking about, Mr. Hardy. If only he hadn't been there, if it had been a school day, if Matt hadn't walked in or said something or whatever it was he did… Or if I had stayed home, could I have protected him?" She bit her lip, hit the table with her small fist. "That's what I've been thinking about, not the goddamn reasons somebody might have thought it was me. And that's all I've been thinking about." A tear hit the table and she wiped at it with her hand. "Goddamn it," she said. "Goddamn it."

  Again sounding tough.

  "It's okay," Hardy said, meaning the language, the loss of control.

  "Nothing's okay."

  Hardy sat back in the hard chair. She was right. And he believed her.

  Eventually she came up with something.

  "I guess maybe they thought it was the insurance, but it wasn't-"

  "How much insurance?"

  "Well, Larry… he was a doctor, and you know… maybe you don't, but doctors are crazy about insurance. They have to be, with malpractice and all. Anyway, Larry was insured for two-and-a-half-million dollars."

  Hardy took that in. "Double for violent or accidental death?"

  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.

  2

  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.

  Hardy walked through the open room of the Homicide Detail, poured himself a cup of old coffee, pulled up a chair and waited. After a moment or so, he sipped loudly. Abe looked up. Then back down with no change of expression. "The element of surprise," he said, "in the right hands, can be a powerful weapon."

  Hardy sipped again, more loudly than before. Glitsky raised his head and chewed some ice with his mouth open. One of the homicide detectives walked by behind Hardy and stopped. "I'd give it to Glitsky on points," he said. "Those are real attractive sounds."

  Hardy swallowed his coffee and brought the file up, laying it on the desk. "What do you know about Jennifer Witt?"

  After a last look down at the papers in front of him, Abe closed the folder. "I wasn't doing anything."

  Hardy smiled. "You've told me many times that nothing you do when you're in the office is important, isn't that a fact?"

  Glitsky ran a finger around his expressive mouth, caressed the scar that ran top-to-bottom between his lips. "I like the way you say 'isn't that a fact?' instead of 'isn't that true?' like the rest of humanity would. It's very lawyerlike. Witt isn't my collar. You representing her? Of course you are," Abe answered himself.

  "Not completely true."

  "Forty percent true?"

  Hardy pretended to be thinking about the answer. "She's David Freeman's but he's in court. He asked me to go make her feel better."

  "Which, of course, you did."

  Hardy shrugged. "It's a modest talent."

  Glitsky seemed to want to follow it up, find out how his friend got even this much involved with this particular client, but he resisted the temptation. He'd no doubt get it sometime. He took the folder over his desk and flipped some pages. "Terrell made the arrest." He craned his neck, checking the room. "Terrell here?" he called out.

  "Who's Terrell? Do I know him?"

  "OFO," somebody answered.

  "OFO?"

  "Secret police code which I'm not allowed to reveal under penalty of death." He leaned forward, whispering, "Out fucking off." He went back to the report. "You've seen Terrell around. White guy, brown hair, mustache."

  "Oh, yeah, him. When I was at school, there was a guy like that."

  Glitsky himself was half-Jewish, half-African-American. He stood six feet some, weighed two hundred something and had blue eyes surrounded by a light brown face.

  "Terrell's okay," Glitsky said.

  "But…"

  "I didn't say anything. I said he was okay."

  "I heard a 'but'."

  Abe chewed more ice, then spoke quietly. "If God's in the details, Wally and God aren't that close." He leaned back, spoke in a more conversational tone. "He's a big picture guy, only here in homicide, what, a year? Gets and idea, a theory, a vision – I don't know – but it seems to keep him running."

  "Isn't that what all you guys do?"

  "No. What most of us do is talk to people, collect evidence, maybe some picture starts to form. Wally's a little heavy into motive, and motive only takes yo
u so far. I mean, any victim worth a second look, there's five people with motive to have done him. Wally finds a couple of motives and starts digging around them rather than the other way round."

  "So why's he still here?"

  "He's been lucky. Twice he's hauled in perps with nothing – Frank wrote him up a reprimand, the second one was so sloppy – and both times, guess what, it turns out he was right. So what are you gonna do, bust him? It'll catch up to him."

  Hardy tapped the file. "It might have here."

  Abe glanced down, turned a few pages, shook his head. "Doubt it," he said. "Jennifer Witt was righteously arrested. See here? Police reports, witnesses, physical evidence. Plus, as you might have noticed, the public has been introduced to her. She seems like a swell person."

  "I thought it might be helpful to talk to Terrell."

  Glitsky raised an eyebrow. "I don't know if you remember, but if you're in defense mode, my colleagues here won't tend to view you as an ally."

  "Maybe you could vouch for me – you know, character, judgment, taste, generally refined nature. Sometimes everything doesn't make it to the file."

  "You shock me." Closing the file, he pushed it back across the desk. "I'll see what I can do, but as always-"

  Hardy beat him to it. "Don't hold my breath."

  Glitsky nodded. "Words of sublime wisdom," he said.

  *****

  Although Hardy was not yet legally entitled to it, Art Drysdale had done Hardy the favor of arranging for him to pick up the discovery on the Witt murders, which was basically a copy of the DA's file on the case.

  Drysdale, it turned out, had been half-wrong and half-right when he said that Jennifer Witt had left out a few tiny things. Right about leaving out some things, wrong about them being tiny.

  They included the testimony of an eyewitness, Anthony Alvarez, a retired fireman with a drawerful of decorations. Sixty-four years old, he lived with his invalid wife directly across the street from the Witts and had heard two shots. If there had only been one, he might have thought it was a backfire and not even bothered to look. As it was, he didn't really suspect shots even after he heard them – it had been more of a curiosity, that kind of noise. He'd gone to the window and seen Jennifer Witt in front of the gate to her house, looking back toward her door. His initial thought was that she had stopped, was wondering about the noises herself. She stayed there a couple of seconds, then began running.