Hardy: The Suspect Part 33

"There were three men pointing guns at him, yelling, 'Don't move!' He didn't move."

"No, he didn't." Gina turned and quickly walked back to her table, ostensibly for a sip of water. In fact, she didn't want her aggressiveness to get the better of her and she needed a little time to frame her last few questions from this key witness. When she was back in her place, the calm tones of her voice came as a bit of a shock even to her. "Inspector Juhle, to recap. Stuart did not know he was a suspect in this event. There was no warrant issued for his arrest when he left the city to interview some people on his own in connection with this event..."

Behind her, she heard the sc.r.a.pe of Abrams' chair, and the objection. "Calls for a narrative, Your Honor, and a.s.sumes facts not in evidence."

Toynbee sustained the objection, as she knew he would, but at least she'd put the reason for Stuart's trip down the Peninsula into the judge's consciousness, and that had been her intention.

Juhle saw his one shot and took it. "And of course, he stole license plates from another car and put them on the truck he was driving."

This, Gina knew, had been just another flat-out mistake on Stuart's part. Of course, Stuart had correctly suspected that there'd be a warrant out for his arrest shortly, and had developed the strategy to avoid detection and identification. But she wasn't here to argue that point-Toynbee would have to factor it in and draw his own conclusion.

Gina pasted on a tolerant smile, kept any rise out of her voice. "Yes, he did, Inspector. Would it be fair to say that this case has attracted about as much media attention as any case in recent memory?"

"It has had some."

"Well, you know, don't you, Inspector, that the press has been hounding Stuart since the day of his wife's murder?"

"I don't know about 'hounding.' "

"Well, how about following around with cameras and microphones in groups of five and six every time he walked out his front door? You know they've been doing that, Inspector, because you've seen it, and because we've complained about it to the Police Department."

"I'm aware you've made those allegations."

"Could it be, Inspector, that Stuart didn't want to have his truck followed by an aggressive pack of reporters who didn't leave him alone?"

"Objection. Speculative."

"Well, Your Honor," Gina said. "Mr. Abrams wants you to draw one conclusion about this license-plate business, but I'd like to suggest that there is a far more sensible one obvious to anyone who knows the facts."

"What's sauce for the goose, Mr. Abrams. I'll let it in for what it's worth," Toynbee said. "Which once again, Ms. Roake, isn't much. Let's move on."

"Now lastly, Inspector, and still on the subject of Stuart's alleged flight to avoid arrest. Can you please tell the court how you came to learn of Stuart's presence at the Hollywood Motel in San Mateo?"

This was going to be bad, and Juhle knew it. "I traced a call made from a cell phone and made its location."

"And what was the nature of that call, Inspector?"

Juhle, hamstrung, couldn't bring himself to describe it. Behind Gina, she was aware that the entire courtroom was still, hanging on Juhle's response. But it wasn't forthcoming. After a long moment, Gina broke into the silence. "Isn't it true, Inspector," she asked in her gentlest voice, "that that call to you was made by Stuart Gorman's attorney, who had heard about the arrest warrant and wanted to arrange her client's surrender the next morning at ten o'clock? And that you agreed to accept such a surrender?"

Juhle's eyes kept flas.h.i.+ng between Abrams and Gina. Finally, Judge Toynbee leaned over from the bench and addressed him directly. "We're going to need a yes or no, out loud, Inspector."

"All right, sorry, Your Honor." Juhle brought himself back to Gina. It still took him another few seconds until he finally mumbled it out, just audibly. "Yes. But you and I both know, Counselor, that a lawyer is supposed to surrender a wanted client immediately. And just because I told you I'd be around if your client decided to come in later didn't for a second mean that I was going to stop looking for him. This was a murder warrant, not an invitation to drop by the Hall of Justice."

Gina felt she could allow him the little rant. She ran through the notes she'd been balancing in her mind. Stuart's alleged consciousness of guilt was based on knowing that he was wanted and acting on that a.s.sumption by arming himself, carrying a concealed weapon, and his flight from prosecution. Satisfied that she'd touched all the bases, she now made a small bow to her witness. "Thank you, Inspector. No further questions."

The short recess was over almost before it had begun. Stuart didn't even leave the defense table, but asked Gina if he could borrow a pen and one of her yellow legal pads. When she got back from her bathroom break, he didn't look up immediately, but continued until he got to a good stopping place.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Writing a few notes. I got an idea."

"I'll take anything you've got."

"From where I'm sitting, you don't need any help. I'm almost starting to feel like we're going to beat this thing." He saw Gina try to hide the grimace. "You don't think so?"

"I hope so," Gina said. She half-turned to make sure no one was hovering near them, within listening distance behind the bar rail. Coming back to him, she spoke sotto voce. "I think we're all right up to now, but just about everything they've talked about so far, even Juhle, is just interpretation of facts, not the facts themselves."

"No. You beat him on that one."

"Not really, Stuart. Maybe I did get Toynbee to see another alternative and plausible explanation for the timing. And consciousness of guilt isn't flying too high either. That, unfortunately, leaves guilt itself. And that's where Bethany Robley comes in." But Gina didn't want to entirely deflate Stuart's newfound hopes. It was surely true that she'd stymied the prosecution's efforts up to now, and if Bethany Robley was like the other witnesses so far, then Gina might allow herself some hope about the results of this hearing, but not until then. Meanwhile, they had to get through Bethany. Gina put on a false face. "But I've got a plan that might do some good, so we'll see. Meanwhile"-she pointed to the legal pad in front of him-"what's your idea?"

He was covering the page with his hands. Casually, but definitely. "Nothing, really. It's not about this, anyway, I mean us here, what we're doing now. It's just a few random thoughts."

"Well, if you get so you'd let somebody read them, I'd be interested."

"You don't have to say that, you know." He indicated the pages. "This is just for me."

"Not for your readers?"

"Well, them, too." He paused. "I mean, there's the people who read me, but then there's the people who surround me in my life. And traditionally, those people aren't really into what I write. It's just not... it just wasn't that important." He broke a tentative grin. "Or relevant, as you lawyers would say. It wasn't that relevant to them."

Gina said, "You mean her. Caryn."

Stuart smiled, looked away, let out a breath. "I got used to it."

She was silent for a beat. "How about if I really would like to read it? If I just like the way you write."

"Well." He drew another breath. "That might be nice."

Bethany Robley, looking terrified and sleep lagged from her days of insomnia, came up to the bar rail down the center aisle on her mother's arm, though her very large mother didn't seem a logical choice to be steadying her daughter, since she herself was walking with the aid of a cane. As she pa.s.sed into the courtroom proper, Mrs. Robley let go of Bethany's arm, watched her walk on for a couple of steps, then suddenly lurched to her right, just behind Gina's back, and got ahold of Stuart's jumpsuit at the shoulder, pulling him back in his chair toward her. "How dare you threaten my daughter! How dare you!" She brought up the cane with her free hand and swung it overhand, Stuart taking the hit mostly on the arm as it glanced off the side of his head.

Immediately Toynbee was gaveling the courtroom to order, yelling for the bailiffs. Some of the media people in the front row were up and clearing out of the area, while Gina turned one way to see what was happening behind her then the other to get out of her chair and somehow try to restrain this crazy woman. Stuart, stunned as the rest of the people in the room, turned in shocked surprise. "Clair, wait!"

"Mom!" Bethany yelled. "Stop!"

But Clair Robley wasn't waiting or stopping. Swearing violently at Stuart now, in a mad rage, she pulled him off his chair and all the way back to the rail and repeatedly swung at his head with the cane as he tried to cover and defend himself. She was still swinging when the bailiff who'd been guarding the entrance got his arms around her and managed to hold her relatively still, which allowed the other two bailiffs time to get in range to restrain her further.

It was all over within thirty or forty seconds. Mrs. Robley still held by the three big guards, a crying, near-hysterical Bethany now back beyond the bar rail in the first row of the gallery, trying to get to her mother. Gina was helping Stuart get up from the floor. Once to his feet, he righted his chair himself, collapsing down into it. There was a lot of blood coming out of his forehead at the hairline.

The judge kept slamming his gavel. "Order," he kept saying. "Order. Order."

32.

There wasn't much choice. The bailiffs took Clair Robley into custody. Stuart had to get some medical attention for his bleeding head. Poor Bethany, rattled into hysteria, was in no condition to testify. Judge Toynbee recessed the hearing for the day.

With today's plan A, the hearing, suddenly scuttled, Gina's plan B, after only a little thought and all the success she'd had with Abrams' witnesses, was to return to her office to start organizing her notes for the eventual 1118.1 motion for a directed verdict of acquittal that she'd have to file when the prosecution rested after presenting its case in chief at the trial. True, this might still be most of a year away-although she was going to try to shorten that time if she could-but the morning had provided just too many opportunities to take this case apart board by board. And while her arguments were still fresh in her mind, she wanted to commit them to paper.

Of course, if they got to trial, Abrams would be a lot more careful to prepare Officer What's-His-Name from the Highway Patrol again. And Faro wouldn't try to be cute about the garbage.

But Gina wanted to be ready to pounce if any hint of these weaknesses made their way into the trial. As it stood now, the prosecution's case looked like it was all going to come down to Bethany Robley's testimony. In all, Gina was somewhat heartened-Bethany had never seen Stuart that night and, better yet, had never even said she had. So it came down to the car, and from what she'd seen in discovery, she'd never mentioned Stuart's personalized GHOTI license plate.

But as it happened, Wyatt Hunt called Gina's cell phone to report in on his morning interviews soon after she got outside the Hall of Justice and into the continuing drizzle, and it looked as though Gina's immediate implementation of plan B was going to have to wait as well. Here was Gina's chance to go down the Peninsula and personally meet up with William Blair, and she wasn't about to pa.s.s it up.

So Hunt picked her up out in front of the Hall in his MINI Cooper at a few minutes after three, and as they swung around the Hall and back onto the freeway going south, he said, "I thought this hearing was going to run all day. What happened?"

"Mayhem." She gave him the short version. "I've never seen anything like it."

Wyatt s.h.i.+fted into the freeway traffic, enjoying the story. Like most other of his fellow professionals in the field of criminal justice, Hunt found that his sympathy over any one person's individual misfortune- Stuart's, Bethany's, Juhle's-usually got subsumed in the pure joy of the absurdist theater of it all. "I wish I'd been there. A cane?"

"Big ol' cane." In retrospect, Gina was beginning to see the humor in it herself. "Pretty soon now they're going to have to rig the Hall with cane detectors."

"I can see it," Hunt agreed. "First no metal, then no cell phones with cameras, now no canes. I bet shoes are next." Wyatt put on his announcer's voice. "Coming soon to a jurisdiction near you, the Naked Courtroom. For security reasons, you must leave all your clothes at the door."

"And people think trials are ugly now."

They drove on in a companionable silence. The winds.h.i.+eld wipers slashed back and forth, the drizzle picking up into something approximating real rain. After a minute, Wyatt looked over at her. "So did Devin get to talk before they called it off?"

"He did, but I'm thinking about now he's wis.h.i.+ng he didn't. His version of things started out good, but it was all spin."

"I told him that too."

"He should have listened to you."

"Always, though he rarely does. It's tragic, really. I'll have to go over to his place and make fun of him."

But Gina shook her head. "I'd give it a couple of days, Wyatt. Seriously. It wasn't pretty. Not for him, anyway." After a small hesitation, she said, "So how'd your morning go?"

"Good. McAfee's still in play. And even though Mike Pinkert's basically got the same alibi as McAfee-in bed, except he was there with his wife-I believe him. Unless my gut is completely useless, he's just not in it."

"You don't believe McAfee?"

"Not completely. And I still like his motive more than anybody else's. Tonight I'm going to talk to the people in his condo building, see if anybody saw him go out or come in around eleven. Meanwhile, I've got to say that Pinkert's pretty much out of contention. Oh, and while we're on it, so's your Mr. Conley."

"He's not my Mr. Conley, Wyatt. He's everyone's Mr. Conley, maybe soon everybody's Senator Conley. He's alibied up?"

"Greenpeace fund-raiser with like five hundred people at the Marina Yacht Club. Unless he's got a body double. Some politicians do, you know."

Another thought that struck Gina as funny. "Not Jedd, I don't think," she said. "So, do you know where we're going now?"

"PII, right?" He pointed at the terminal screen in his dashboard. "I got it on the navigation system before I picked you up."

"Of course you did," Gina said.

Hunt nodded. "We aim to please."

Bill Blair wasn't in at first, and Gina thought that was instructive in itself.

Then Wyatt said to his secretary: "That's a shame, because Ms. Roake had some questions for Mr. Blair on the Kelley Rusnak matter. Kelley was supposed to be Ms. Roake's witness in the Caryn Dryden murder hearing. Anyway, she'd like to keep this private and hoped to give him a chance to answer a few questions. But if he's not around, she'll have to take her questions to Jeff. That's Jeff Elliott of the Chronicle. And see if he can get some answers for her. So if Mr. Blair's not here, I guess he'll just have to read the paper tomorrow and respond to that."

Though she was a woman, the secretary reminded Gina of the William H. Macy character in Fargo. Smiling miserably at both of them, she swallowed a couple of times, then said, "Let me just run and check to see if maybe he's gotten back when I wasn't at my desk."

Gina almost said, "Yah, shure," in that great Frances McDormand Norwegian accent, but stopped herself in the nick of time. "That'd be nice," she said. "Thanks."

Less than two minutes later, they were making their introductions to Mr. Blair, a short heavy man of about forty-five, with small eyes and colorless hair combed into a very short pageboy.

His corner office seemed almost to sulk behind its tinted windows on this gray afternoon. Fluorescent lighting overhead gave the room an impersonal feel that wasn't much mitigated by the view of the enormous parking lot outside, the lack of even ma.s.s-produced "art" on the two remaining walls. A ma.s.sive light oak desk was piled high with neat stacks of papers and doc.u.ments-a small sign of order perhaps hiding a larger chaos? A couple of self-consciously modern chrome-and-leather chairs sat on industrial carpet facing his work s.p.a.ce, and Blair indicated that his guests take them, then went to his own chair behind the desk and sat down.

Gina wasted no more time. "Mr. Blair," she began, "thank you for seeing us without an appointment, but time is short. Kelley Rusnak was going to be a witness for me in Stuart Gorman's hearing on the murder of his wife, which is going on in San Francisco this week. Kelley met with Stuart down here about two weeks ago. She told him she might be in some kind of danger because of her involvement with the Dryden Socket."

"n.o.body murdered Kelley. Apparently she killed herself."

"Apparently," Gina said. "Did you know Kelley well?"

Her reply, and then the following question, both seemed to surprise him. "We're a small company, but no, not really more than anyone else. Less than some. She wasn't management, after all."

"I noticed, though, that you gave the statement about her death. Is that the company policy?"

"Well, fortunately, until lately we haven't had to have a policy on that. In this case, we needed a statement for the paper, so I ginned one up. I'm afraid I don't really see anything particularly sinister about that." With one hand, he moved one of the piles of paper to a new location about a quarter inch from where it had been. "I told all this to Mr. Elliott this morning. You're trying to muddy the waters surrounding your client. Laudable in an attorney, I suppose, but actually fairly tedious for the rest of us."

So, Gina thought, the gloves were coming off early. She gave him a saccharine smile. "Be that as it may, the reason Mr. Elliott was interested in the story had little or nothing to do with my client, but with the cover-up around the Dryden Socket that both Caryn and Kelley were trying to expose."

He shook his head, his lips tight. "There is no cover-up, Ms. Roake. I don't know how these rumors get started, but there is no problem with the Dryden Socket. It's a remarkable device that marks a major improvement in the technology of hip replacement. The FDA will be issuing its formal approval any day now, and we're gearing up for tremendous worldwide demand. If we thought the product was harmful, do you imagine, one, that the FDA would give its approval and two, that we'd be so foolish as to go ahead with increased production, with all the lawsuits that a faulty product would entail?"

"One," Gina didn't miss a beat, "the FDA would give its approval if they never got wind of problems because they occurred after the formal closure of the clinical trials. And two, you would if you needed immediate cash, had huge overseas orders that you could fill first, and were already working on an improved product that you could have in the pipeline before too much damage was done." She leaned back in her chair, looked over at Wyatt, back at Blair. "This issue isn't going to go away. Some folks have suggested the possibility that Caryn Dryden was killed to shut her up."

"Don't be absurd."

"Do you remember what you might have been doing on the night Caryn was killed?"

"I don't even know what night Caryn was killed."

"It was Sunday," Wyatt Hunt offered helpfully. "Three weeks ago."

Blair scrunched his tiny eyes, the muscles in his cheeks working steadily. "This is beyond the pale," he said. "I have no idea what I was doing three weeks ago on a Sunday night. I'm quite certain, though, that whatever it was, it wasn't drowning one of my longtime stars." Suddenly he pushed back his chair and got himself onto his feet. "I'm afraid this meeting is going to have to come to an end," he said.

"The issue isn't going to go away," Gina said as she stood up.

But Blair didn't move. Safe behind his desk, he stood almost at a military attention. "I have nothing further to say to you," he said. "And you are not to return to these premises, or I'll have you removed. Go be ridiculous in the courtroom where people have to put up with you. And while you're at it, you might brush up on the libel laws before you start spreading any more vicious lies."