The Concrete Blonde Part 12

"So, if I can recap, you are telling this jury that two years after the murders, when this book came out, you read it and immediately realized you had an ironclad alibi for your dead friend. Am I missing anything, Mr. Wieczorek?"

"Uh, just the part about suddenly realizing. It wasn't sudden."

"Then what was it?"

"Well, when I read the date-September 28-it set me to thinking and I just remembered that the bachelor party was on September 28 that year and Norman was there at my house all that time. So then I verified it and called Norman's wife to tell her he wasn't what they said he was."

"You verified it? With the others at the party?"

"No, didn't have to."

"Then how, Mr. Wieczorek?" Belk asked in an exasperated tone.

"I looked at the video I had of that night. It had the date and time down in the corner of the frame."

Bosch saw Belk's face turn a lighter shade of pale. The lawyer looked at the judge, then down at his pad, then back up at the judge. Bosch felt his heart sink. Belk had broken the same cardinal rule Chandler had broken the day before. He had asked a question for which he didn't already know the answer.

It didn't take a lawyer to know that since it was Belk who had drawn out mention of the videotape, Chandler was now free to explore it, to move to introduce the videotape as evidence. It had been a clever trap. Because it was new evidence from Wieczorek, not contained in his deposition, Chandler would have had to inform Belk earlier if she planned to draw it out on direct examination. Instead, she had skillfully allowed Belk to blunder in and draw it out. He now stood there defenseless, hearing it for the first time along with the jurors.

"Nothing further," Belk said and returned to his seat with his head down. He immediately pulled one of the law books on the table onto his lap and began paging through it.

Chandler went to the lectern for redirect.

"Mr. Wieczorek, this tape you mentioned to Mr. Belk, do you still have it?"

"Sure, brought it with me."

Chandler then moved to have the tape shown to the jury. Judge Keyes looked at Belk, who lumbered slowly to the lectern.

"Your Honor," Belk managed to say, "can defense have a ten-minute recess to research case law?"

The judge glanced at the clock.

"It's a little early, isn't it, Mr. Belk? We just started."

"Your Honor," Chandler said. "The plaintiff has no objection. I'll need time to set up the video equipment."

"Very well," the judge said. "Ten minutes for counsel. The jury can take a fifteen-minute break and then report back to the a.s.sembly room."

While they stood for the jury, Belk was flipping pages in the heavy law book. And when it was time to sit down, Bosch pulled his chair close to his lawyer's.

"Not now," Belk said. "I've got ten minutes."

"You f.u.c.ked up."

"No, we f.u.c.ked up. We are a team. Remember that."

Bosch left his teammate there while he went out to smoke a cigarette. When he got to the statue, Chandler was already there. He lit a smoke anyway and kept his distance. She looked at him and smirked. Bosch spoke.

"You tricked him, didn't you?"

"Tricked him with the truth."

"Is it?"

"Oh, yeah."

She put a half-smoked cigarette in the sand of the ash can and said, "I better get back in there and get the equipment set up."

She smirked again. Bosch wondered if she was that good or it was Belk who was that bad.

Belk lost his half-hour argument to keep the tape from being introduced. He said that since it was not brought up during deposition, it was new evidence which the plaintiff could not submit at so late a date. Judge Keyes denied his claim, pointing out what everyone knew, that it had been Belk who had brought the tape to light.

After the jury was brought back in, Chandler asked Wieczorek several questions about the tape and where it had been for the last four years. After Judge Keyes dismissed one more objection from Belk, she rolled a TV/VCR combination to a position in front of the jury box and put in the tape, which Wieczorek had retrieved from a friend sitting in the gallery. Bosch and Belk had to stand up and move into the gallery seats to get a view of the TV screen.

As he made the move, Harry saw Bremmer from the Times Times sitting in one of the back rows. He gave a small nod to Bosch. Harry wondered if he was there to cover the trial or because he was subpoenaed. sitting in one of the back rows. He gave a small nod to Bosch. Harry wondered if he was there to cover the trial or because he was subpoenaed.

The tape was long and boring but was not continuous.

It was stopped and started during the evening of the bachelor party but the digital readout in the lower right corner kept the time and date. If it was correct, it was true that Church had an alibi for the last killing attributed to him.

It was dizzying for Bosch to watch. There was Church, no toupee, bald as a baby, drinking beer and laughing with his friends. The man Bosch had killed, toasting a friend's marriage, looking like the All-American nerd that Bosch knew he had not been.

The tape lasted ninety minutes, climaxing with a visit from a telegram stripper who sang a song to the groom-to-be, dropping lingerie on his head as she removed each piece. In the video, Church seemed embarra.s.sed to be seeing this, his eye more on the groom than on the woman.

Bosch pulled his eyes from the screen to watch the jury and he could see the tape was devastating to his defense. He looked away.

After the tape was finished, Chandler had a few more questions for Wieczorek. They were questions Belk would have asked but she was beating him to the punch.

"How is the date and time set on the video frame?"

"Well, when you buy it, you set it. Then the battery keeps it going. Never had to fiddle with it after I bought it."

"But if you wanted to, you could put in any date you wanted, anytime you wanted, correct?"

"I s' pose."

"So, say you were going to take a video of a friend to be used later as an alibi, could you set the date back, say a year, and then take the video?"

"Sure."

"Could you put a date on an already existing video?"

"No. You can't superimpose a date over an existing video. Doesn't work that way."

"So, in this case, how could you do it? How could you make a phony alibi for Norman Church?"

Belk stood up and objected on the grounds that Wieczorek's answer would be speculation, but Judge Keyes overruled him, saying the witness had expertise with his own camera.

"Well, you couldn't do that now 'cause Norman's dead," Wieczorek said.

"So what you are saying is that in order to make a phony tape you would have to have conspired with Mr. Church to make it before he was killed by Mr. Bosch, correct?"

"Yes. We'd have to have known that somewhere down the line he'd need this tape and he'd have to've told me what date to set it on and so on and so forth. It's all pretty farfetched, especially because you can pull the newspapers from that year and find the wedding announcement that says my friend got married September thirtieth. That'll show you that his bachelor party had to have been the twenty-eighth or thereabouts. It's not a phony."

Judge Keyes agreed with Belk's objection to the last sentence as being nonresponsive to the question and told the jury to disregard it. Bosch knew they didn't need to have heard it. They all knew the tape wasn't a phony. He did, too. He felt clammy and sick. Something had gone wrong but he didn't know what. He wanted to get up and walk out but he knew that to do so would be an admission of guilt so loud the walls would shake as if during an earthquake.

"One last question," Chandler said. Her face had become flushed as she rode this one to victory. "Did you ever know Norman Church to wear a hairpiece of any kind?"

"Never. I knew him a lot of years and I never saw or heard of such a thing."

Judge Keyes turned the witness back over to Belk, who lumbered to the lectern without his yellow pad. He was apparently too fl.u.s.tered by this turnabout to remember to say, "Just a few questions." Instead he got right to his meager damage-control effort.

"You say you read a book about the Dollmaker case and then discovered this tape's date matched one of the killings, is that right?"

"That's right."

"Did you look into finding alibis for the other ten murders?"

"No, I didn't."

"So. Mr. Wieczorek, you have nothing to offer in terms of defending your longtime friend against these other cases a task force of numerous officers connected to him?"

"The tape put the lie to all of 'em. Your task-"

"You're not answering the question."

"Yes I am, you show the lie on one of the cases, it puts a lie to the whole shooting match, you ask me."

"We're not asking you, Mr. Wieczorek. Now, uh, you said you never saw Norman Church wear a hairpiece, correct?"

"That's what I said, yes."

"Did you know he kept that apartment, using a false name?"

"No, I did not."

"There was a lot you didn't know about your friend, wasn't there?"

"I suppose."

"Do you suppose it is possible that just as he had that apartment without you knowing, that he occasionally wore a hairpiece without you knowing?"

"I suppose."

"Now, if Mr. Church was the killer police claim him to be, and used disguises as police said the killer did, wouldn't it be-"

"Objection," Chandler said.

"-expected that there would be something such-"

"Objection!"

"-as a toupee in the apartment?"

Judge Keyes sustained Chandler's objection to Belk's question as seeking a speculative answer, and chastised Belk for continuing the question after the objection was lodged. Belk took the berating and said he had no further questions. He sat down, sweat lines gliding out of his hairline and running down his temples.

"Best you could do," Bosch whispered.

Belk ignored it, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

After accepting the videotape as evidence, the judge broke for lunch. After the jury was out of the courtroom a handful of reporters quickly moved up to Chandler. Bosch watched this and knew it was the final arbiter of how things were going. The media always gravitated to the winners, the perceived winners, the eventual winners. It's always easier to ask them questions.

"Better start thinking of something, Bosch," Belk said. "We could have settled this six months ago for fifty grand. Way things are going, that would have been nothing."

Bosch turned and looked at him. They were at the railing behind the defense table.

"You believe it, don't you? The whole thing. I killed him, then we planted everything that connected him to it."

"Doesn't matter what I believe, Bosch."

"f.u.c.k you, Belk."

"Like I said, you better start thinking of something."

He pushed his wide girth through the gate and headed out of the courtroom. Bremmer and another reporter approached him but he waved them away. Bosch followed him out a few moments later and also brushed the reporters off. But Bremmer kept stride with him as he took the hallway to the escalator.

"Listen, man, my a.s.s is on the line here, too. I wrote a book about the guy and if it was the wrong guy, I want to know."

Bosch stopped and Bremmer almost b.u.mped into him. He looked closely at the reporter. He was about thirty-five, overweight, with brown, thinning hair. Like many men, he made up for this by growing a thick beard, which only served to make him look older. Bosch noticed that the reporter's sweat had stained the underarms of his s.h.i.+rt. But body odor wasn't his problem; cigarette breath was.

"Look, you think it's the wrong guy, then write another book and get another hundred thousand advance. What do you care if it's the wrong guy or not?"

"I have a reputation in this town, Harry."

"So did I. What are you going to write tomorrow?"

"I have to write what's going down in there."

"And you're also testifying? Is that ethical, Bremmer?"

"I'm not testifying. She released me from the subpoena yesterday. I just had to sign a stipulation."

"To what?"

"That said that to the best of my knowledge the book I wrote contained true and accurate information. The source of that information was almost wholly from police sources and police and other public records."

"Speaking of sources, who told you about the note for yesterday's story?"