Barbara Holloway: Desperate Measures Part 30

"This dense canopy is the orchard," Barbara said, pointing. "You don't have to be exact, just indicate approximately where you thought you saw the sungla.s.ses."

He took several seconds before he put his finger on the map. Barbara put a little yellow disc on the spot.

"Now let's see if we can retrace your steps from that day. Just start where you think you emerged from under the filbert trees."

After a moment he put his finger on the map. "About here, I think."

"Could you already hear hammering?"

"Yes."

"All right. There's a ma.s.s of bushes and ornamental trees there, and you were behind them, on the side closer to the road. Is that right?"

He nodded, and studied the map. "Yes," he said. "That's right."

"From there you could not see the rear of the property, could you?" Barbara said, studying the map with him.

"No, not from there," he said after a moment.

"Then where did you go?"

"I think I came around in front of the roses," he said.

"Let's talk about the rose bed for a moment," she said, pointing to it. "It's about twenty feet by eight, isn't it?"

"I don't know," he said. "I think it's about that."

"We can find out," she said easily. She went to her table and picked up a yardstick. "I'm sure there's a scale on the map. Yes, here it is."

She measured, then said, "That's it, isn't it? Twenty feet by eight feet."

He nodded, then said yes. His hands were shaking again, she noted sadly.

"All right," she said. "Then where did you run?"

He moistened his lips and said in a nearly inaudible voice. "To the front door."

"You didn't cut back through the shrubbery on the other side of the roses?"

He shook his head. "No."

She knew he could see as well as she could, as well as Judge Mac could, that the only place where he might have had a clear line of sight to the back of the property was from in front of the roses for about seven or eight feet. The garage, two apple trees behind the house, the house itself, the buildings on the rear of the property, the high deer fence around the vegetable garden all would have obscured his vision from anywhere else.

She pressed the point, going over the route he had taken bit by bit, using the yardstick to demonstrate that he could not have seen the blackberry tangle except from those few feet in front of the roses.

"You may resume your seat," she said then. After replacing the yardstick on her table, she faced him again.

"Mr. Marchand," she said, "I'd like to clarify some of the testimony you gave earlier. Mr. Novak asked if you saw another person on the property and your answer was 'I think so.' When did you think that?"

"I don't know," he said. "I wasn't thinking of it at the time. I was just running."

"You also said you were running behind bushes again after you saw something, but you were in front of the roses, weren't you? Not dodging bushes?"

"I guess so," he said. He was looking younger by the minute, and more wretched by the second.

"Do you mean yes?" she asked, keeping her voice easy, not demanding or hard.

"Yes."

"All right. Mr. Novak asked if you saw any other detail, and your answer was, 'A cap, like a baseball cap. That's what I thought.' Is that correct? That you thought at the time that a person was back there wearing sungla.s.ses and a baseball cap?"

"I don't know," he said miserably. "I don't think that's what I thought at that very minute, maybe later on."

"How much later?"

"I don't know. A day, maybe two days. I thought maybe that's what I had seen."

"You said earlier that you had seen Alex Feldman on his property on occasion. Did you ever stop to chat?"

"No."

"Did you speak to him at all?"

"No."

"What was he doing when you saw him on that property?"

"Cutting brush, or getting the mail, something like that."

"Did he speak to you?"

"No."

"Did he appear threatening?"

He hesitated, then said no.

"Were you afraid of him?"

Daniel glanced at the spectators, then back to Barbara. "When I was small, I was a little afraid of him."

"Why was that?"

"I don't know. He was weird, that's all"

"Did you talk about him at your house?"

He glanced again at the spectators, and this time Novak objected. "This is beyond the scope of the direct examination," he said.

"Your Honor," Barbara said, "this witness saw something that could have been sunlight reflected from leaves, but days later, after several sessions with investigators, that something crystallized into sungla.s.ses and a baseball cap. I am trying to learn if Mr. Marchand was predisposed to interpret that fleeting glance as Alex Feldman."

Judge Mac considered this for a moment, then said, "Overruled. You may continue, Counselor, but this is not a fis.h.i.+ng expedition, understand."

"Thank you, Your Honor." She turned back to Daniel. "Did your family discuss Alex Feldman?"

"Not really 'discuss,' just mention him, and not often."

"When he was mentioned, what name was used? Did you know his name?"

He shook his head. "Not until now. I mean, recently. When he was arrested, I learned his name."

"What was he called when he was talked about then?"

He looked at his hands, at her, the spectators, anywhere but at Alex. "The freak," he said in a low voice.

"What else?" she asked. She was keeping her voice low, conversational, as unintimidating as she could manage; Daniel obviously was frightened, and she did not want him to become more frightened. Not yet.

"Devil, or devil freak," he said, even lower.

"Anything else?"

"Devil sp.a.w.n."

"Who used those names, Mr. Marchand?"

"I don't know. Maybe we all did."

"Did you ever hear him referred to any other way?"

"My mother just said the boy next door, or our neighbor."

"Was that why you were frightened of him when you were younger, because he was called devil?"

"I guess so," he said.

"Did you think he had horns, or had had horns that had been surgically removed?"

"When I was little," he said.

"Do you think that now?"

Novak objected, and this time Judge Mac sustained the objection. "You've made your point, Counselor," he said to Barbara. "Move on now, if you will"

Silently she agreed; she had made her point. "If you had seen an intruder that day, would you have mentioned it to your mother or father?"

"I guess so," Daniel said after a moment. "There wasn't any time to tell them."

She walked to the map and pointed to the yellow disc. "If a person had been here, or even within fifty feet on either side of this spot, he would have been visible to anyone on the back porch of the house, wouldn't he?"

"I don't know," Daniel said helplessly.

"Well, it's a clear line of sight from the back of the house to most of the brambles, so that spot would have been visible also. Do you agree?"

"Yes, I guess so."

"Is there an opening in the brambles back there?"

"No, it's thick. You can't get through them."

"So if anyone had been at that spot, he would have had to approach from the orchard side, or from the woods on the other side. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"And from the woods side, once he cleared the house, he would have been visible to anyone on the back porch, wouldn't he?"

Daniel said yes.

"And then he would have had to cut through the backyard on a diagonal path away from the house, or else follow the edge of the mowed area, keeping near the brambles in order to arrive at that spot. Is that correct?" She traced a path as she spoke, and it appeared as far-fetched as it sounded.

"Objection," Novak called out finally. "This is getting too hypothetical. No one knows what that person did or why."

"Sustained. Move on, Ms. Holloway," Judge Mac said.

She nodded. "It has been shown that the spot where the boys parked was a quarter of a mile from your driveway, and from the map here we can determine how long the driveway is." She measured it and said, "Two hundred feet. Are you a good math student, Mr. Marchand?"

"Pretty good," he said.

"Do you remember the rule about the square of the hypotenuse being equal to the sum of the square of the two legs of a right triangle?"

He looked wary and uncertain. "I think so."

"In my day we said the square hippopotamus was equal to two square legs," she said smiling. Daniel did not smile. "Let me draw the figure." She picked up a drawing pad from her table and propped it up on the easel, then drew a line. "This represents the quarter mile on the road from where Ben Hennessey parked, to the driveway," she said. "A quarter mile, or one thousand three hundred twenty feet." She drew a very short line downward, perpendicular to it. "And this is the driveway, two hundred feet." She connected the two lines, finis.h.i.+ng the triangle. "And this line represents the route you took, cutting through the orchard and yard to get to the house. It's not exact, of course, because there were trees and bushes, but it's a fair approximation. We'll label them A, B, and C, just like in the old geometry books. Now, according to Euclidian geometry, the sum of A squared plus B squared equals C squared. We'll use a calculator for the arithmetic." She did the math and wrote the figures on the paper, then said, "So C equals one thousand three hundred and thirty-three feet, and that's the distance you covered, give or take a foot or two."

"Objection," Novak said. "This is not the time or place for a math lesson, and there's no point in wasting our time this way."

"Oh, I have a point," Barbara said. "Just a little longer, Your Honor. I'll make my point."

"I certainly do hope so, Counselor," Judge Mac said dryly. "You may continue for a very short time. Overruled."

She had been doing the math on the newsprint pad. She returned to it and said, "You were gone for four minutes and thirty-two seconds, and thirty-nine seconds of that time you were in the house, which means you were running for about two hundred thirty-three seconds altogether, or one hundred sixteen seconds in each direction. I think we can forget half seconds for the purposes of this demonstration and instead allow for a plus-or-minus factor of a second or two either way." She was adding the figures to her paper as she talked, labeling them all.

"All right," she said then, "if you covered one thousand three hundred and thirty-five feet in one hundred sixteen seconds, it means you were running about eleven and a half feet per second."

She looked at Daniel then and asked, "Have you followed the math? Do you agree to the conclusion of about eleven and a half feet per second?"

"I guess that's about right," he said.

Clearly he had no idea if that was right, but Judge Mac was following along just fine, Barbara noted.