The Ophelia Cut (42 page)

“Don’t worry about it. Really. This happens all the time.” Gina leaned in and kissed the top of her head. “Nice ’do, by the way. Quite the statement.”

Brittany managed a note of laughter through the tears. “I’m just so sick of it all.”

A
T THE DEFENSE
table, they spoke in whispers.

Moses said, “I’m going to go up there and hug her.”

“Move away from this table, and the bailiff will kill you,” Hardy said.

“She’s breaking my heart.”

“Mine, too. But she’s doing fine. She’s tough.”

“I don’t want her to be tough. She’s gone through enough, don’t you think?”

“More than enough, but it’s a long way from over, here. Ugly’s just making points, being a good guy for the jury, giving her this little break. He comes back, it’s going to get serious in a hurry. You watch.”

Moses looked across the room at his daughter, with Gina’s arm still around her, the two women talking, head to head. “I never wanted her to have to do this,” he said. “Or any of us, for that matter.”

Hardy started to say that it was a little late for that sentiment, that Moses should have thought things through a little more clearly back when it would have made a difference and he could have saved everybody all this grief. But in the end, he bit his tongue. What the hell was a lecture going to accomplish?

All of them were committed to their positions. There was nothing else any of them could do.

“M
S.
McG
UIRE.”
S
TIER’S
voice had taken on a slight edge, as though his patience was wearing thin. In fact, he was well into the second hour of Brittany’s testimony, having taken her from her arrival at Susan and Moses’s—where she told Susan only that she’d drunk too much and wanted to walk back and get her car near the Shamrock in the morning—to her visit to the Rape Crisis Counseling Center at seven-fifteen
A.M.
Now, according to her testimony, she was back at her parents’ place at about ten-thirty that Sunday morning, and they were having breakfast in the kitchen. Stier had clearly decided it was time to turn up the heat. “Do you mean to tell the jury that when you came back to the house that morning, your father did not ask where you’d been and what had happened the night before?”

“That’s right.”

“Was it a common occurrence for you to stay over at your parents?”

“Not very, but it happens.”

“And on that morning, having just returned from reporting your rape at the hands of Mr. Jessup, you mentioned nothing about it to either of your parents?”

“That’s right.”

“You did not?”

“No.”

“To be precise, I’d like you to tell the jury specifically. Did you tell your father that the victim had put a date rape drug in your drink at Perry’s?”

Amy Wu was up as though shot from a cannon. “Your Honor, objection! The witness has already answered this question.”

“Overruled.”

Stier: “Ms. McGuire?”

Brittany: “No, I didn’t.”

“Did you tell him that you woke up in Mr. Jessup’s apartment and knew that you had been raped?”

“Objection!”

“Overruled.”

“No.”

“Did you tell your father that the victim had sexually assaulted you?”

At this point, Hardy himself could take it no more. “Your Honor, if the court please . . .” He was aware of the frisson of energy flowing through the audience behind him, but he didn’t care.

Gomez, slamming her gavel, glared first at him, then over his head at the gallery. “The court will not please, Mr. Hardy. Counsel will approach the bench.”

Hardy and Wu got to their feet and came around either side of their table. Stier fell in beside them in front of the podium. Gomez leaned down so they could hear her fierce whisper. “I’m not going to tolerate this tag-team approach. As to any given witness, either you, Ms. Wu, or you, Mr. Hardy, will address your objections to the court, but I will not allow both of you—”

“Your Honor,” Hardy said, “meaning no disrespect—”

Gomez held up her index finger, cutting him off. “I’d advise you to exercise great care in what you say next, Mr. Hardy. It’s my experience that lawyers who start off with ‘meaning no disrespect’ often follow it up with statements that can get pretty offensive. If that happens here, there will be immediate and serious consequences. Have I made myself clear?”

Swallowing his bile, Hardy said, “Yes, Your Honor. But Mr. Stier is clearly badgering this witness, who is a victim. She’s already said that she didn’t tell her father she’d been raped.”

“He is having her clarify her position so the jury knows exactly what she did or did not do. I made it clear that I would permit him to ask her what she told her father. You made it clear, as did Ms. McGuire’s attorney, that she was prepared to testify about the entire incident. Now, all of you, let’s get the show back on the road.”

Hardy and Wu returned to their table. No sooner were they back in their seats than Stier had the court recorder reread his previous question. “Did you tell your father that the victim had sexually assaulted you?”

Brittany, tight-lipped, shook her head. “No.”

Stier went on. “Did you tell your father that you felt violated and hated the victim, after which your father became angry?”

“No.”

“In fact, wasn’t his reaction to your situation so violent that you feared he would do something drastic?”

“No! That’s why I couldn’t tell him. I had just learned the night before about Rick’s version of what happened between him and my dad after Rick assaulted me in February. I didn’t know if I believed him; Rick was such a liar. But I didn’t want there to be any more trouble. So when I was driving over to my parents’ place with Tony, I thought about that and knew I couldn’t tell him even if I wanted to. I was afraid to.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

Braving the elements, Amy pushed back her chair and stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. Asked and answered several times over.”

Gomez finally seemed to agree that Stier had gone on long enough in this vein; she sustained this one.

Getting a bit histrionic, Stier blew out heavily in apparent frustration. But he hadn’t gotten to the point he’d been driving for, and now he came to it. “Ms. McGuire, did you ever tell anybody that you had a conversation with your father during which you told him all of these details—the drug in your drink, the rape itself, your fear and hatred of the victim?”

Wu cast a look around Moses at Hardy. Should she object again? Hardy gave his head a small shake. Though he hated it, this wasn’t the same question, not at all, that Stier had been asking in one form or another.

Brittany also got the difference. She looked to the judge, then turned back to Stier. “The question is whether I told anybody that I had told my dad any of this stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I do that if I hadn’t done it?”

“Your Honor,” Stier responded, “would you direct the witness to answer the question?”

Gomez leaned over and did just that.

Brittany paused. Finally, the one perjured word: “No.”

“You never told anybody that you’d told your father about the rape sometime during that first day when you were at his apartment, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

Stier looked at her for a long moment, both stern and disappointed. “No further questions,” he said, and turned on his heel. “Mr. Hardy. Your witness.”

Gomez tapped her gavel. “If there is no objection,” she said, “we’ve all just sat through a long day of testimony, and tomorrow looks like it’s going to be the same. We’ve only got about fifteen minutes before we’d be adjourning anyway. Mr. Hardy, if you don’t mind postponing your cross-examination of Ms. McGuire until tomorrow morning, I propose we call it a day.”

“That’s fine with me, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Stier? Good. See you all tomorrow morning, nine-thirty sharp.” She gaveled again, and court was adjourned.

“T
WENTY-FIVE WOMEN?” GINA
Roake stopped pulling papers from her briefcase and looked across the expansive circular table at their investigator. “Really? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

It was five-thirty on the day of Brittany McGuire’s testimony. Wyatt Hunt had stretched his lanky frame out in a chair in the solarium at the law offices of Freeman Hardy & Roake. “That’s what Goodman said. Although he only had absolute proof from the six who identified him.”

“Six who identified who?” Dismas Hardy, coming in from his office across the lobby. “And all of those identifications, by the way, are probably no good. Ask Dr. Paley. That’ll be ten thousand dollars, please.”

Hunt looked over at Gina. “What’s he talking about?”

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell.” She turned to her partner. “Jon Lo’s massage parlors.”

“What about them?”

“Wyatt here was telling me that Rick Jessup was a regular customer in any number of Lo’s places and thought his job description had a clause that said he didn’t have to pay. Oh, and sometimes he’d smack a girl around.”

Hardy looked at Hunt. “Sometimes?”

“Maybe most of the time. It sounds like he’s a profoundly disturbed dude.”

“Was,” Hardy said. “Thank God. And I think we already knew that. But you got this at Goodman’s?”

Hunt nodded. “And lest they tell you otherwise, Lo and Goodman both knew about it for some time. Goodman was shopping for a new chief of staff even as Mr. Jessup was getting himself killed. It’s entirely possible that Lo didn’t think Goodman was moving fast enough or being punitive enough.”

“You got all this today?” Hardy pulled out a seat and sat.

“With all due modesty,” Hunt said, “I homered in every at bat.”

“There’s more?” Gina asked.

“Just a little bit. Do you know what Mr. Goodman did before he became a supervisor?”

“I know he was a lawyer,” Roake said.

“True, but not the same kind of philanthropic do-gooder lawyers as the present company.” He launched into a description of the Army Business. “In any case,” he concluded, “this would have been a clean way to put would-be surrogate mothers together with rich couples, and everybody’s happy. It could have been completely legal, except where’s the fun in that?

“Goodman came up with the wrinkle to hit on servicewomen who were back in the States after getting pregnant and coming back to deliver their babies. Soon, too soon, after the birth, they’d be up for another hitch in a war zone overseas, and this will shock you, but many didn’t want to go back. So Goodman paid them twenty grand out of his hundred-grand fee for brokering the deal, and meanwhile, all their medical expenses were paid by the government; plus, they remained on salary.”

Roake clucked derisively. “What a sleazeball.”

“But wait,” Hunt said. “That’s not the good part, at least for our purposes. The good part is Jessup.”

“Let me guess,” Hardy said. “Jessup helped find and identify the women.”

“Right so far. With a three-grand bonus for every one.” Silence built around the table. Hunt said, “Here’s a hint. Why didn’t Goodman fire him as soon as he found out about Lo’s girls?”

Hardy’s eyes, drawn and tired most of the day, threw a spark. “He couldn’t. Jessup would go public with what they’d done.”

“You think he was blackmailing him?” Gina asked. “Overtly, even?”

“Not impossible,” Hunt replied. “At least enough so that Goodman hadn’t figured out a way to fire him.”

“How’d you get all this, Wyatt?”

Hunt grinned. “That was probably the best part.”

O
NLY BELATEDLY HAD
Hardy realized that putting Wyatt and Gina in the same room might have been awkward. In spite of a relatively significant age
difference—fifteen or sixteen years—the two had gone out for a couple of years. So when Hardy got back to the solarium after letting Hunt out, he addressed the issue head-on. “I hope you were okay with that? When I told Wyatt to come up, I didn’t think—”

Gina waved off the apology. “I’m a big girl, Diz. He’s a good guy. We’re cool.”

“You are cool,” he said. “Both of you. I love working with adults.” He sighed. “Especially after watching Brittany all afternoon. The poor girl is so confused. Did you ask why she cut her hair?”

“She didn’t want to be pretty anymore. She thinks that’s what got her in all this trouble.”

“She’s not all wrong.”

“It’s not the pretty,” Gina said. “It’s how you handle it. She’ll figure it out someday.”

“Spoken by one who knows.”

Gina gave him a look, then broke a wide smile. “Although sincere flattery,” she said, “always has its place.” With that, she opened her briefcase on the table in front of her. “Now, do you want to help Amy prep her cross of Brittany or talk about this new stuff?”

Hardy pondered. “I like the idea that we have two new guys in play and two new motives.”

“You really think we do? If you bring up either one, you’re essentially going SODDIT with both Goodman and Lo.” SODDIT, an acronym for “some other dude did it,” was a common defense tactic. “I’m thinking it sounds good in theory, but it’s a bit of a stretch if we’re asking the jury to believe even for a minute that one of these guys had Jessup killed, even if they both had a reason to. In Goodman’s case especially . . . I mean, a city supervisor. You’re stirring up a big hornets’ nest. You can expect to get yourself stung. Not to mention that as we sit here now, we can’t prove any piece of any parcel of any morsel of it.”

“I’m not worried about that. Let’s remember, Dan White was a supervisor, so we’ve got precedent.”

“Dan White was a wackjob.” That may have been true, but White did shoot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk dead in their city hall offices in 1978. “Precedent doesn’t put Goodman in our victim’s house that Sunday.”

“Maybe he hired it done.”

Roake drew her eyebrows together. “Well, one way or the other, you’d better find out what he was doing that day if you’re going to bring that up. It would be embarrassing if he was, say, in Hawaii or up at Tahoe.”

“All right, but what about Lo? He’s evidently got a whole staff of enforcers and bodyguards. They keep his women in line; maybe they keep his enemies in line, too. Or the people who beat up on his people.”