was wrong and Stafford was guilty?
David thought about Ashmore and Tony Seals. He felt sick. Once more he saw the autopsy photographs of the little girls that Ashmore had molested, then killed, and once again he heard Jessie Garza describe crawling down the mountain. What was he doing defending these people?
And Larry Stafford, where did he fit in? David could see the gash in Darlene Hersch’s throat. That was why any lawyer worth his salt fought so hard to keep out pictures of the victims in death. Death could be handled and sweet-talked in the abstract, but pictures made it real for a jury. Made the jury feel and smell and taste the horror that is violent death. David could touch that reality now. The steel shell he had built around his sensibilities had started to crumble with Ashmore, and all his defenses were now down. But his fear of being responsible for setting loose another killer was still at odds with his feelings of love for Jenny. He felt used, he felt a fool, but he still loved her. In the end he no more knew what he would do than he had when he’d left her.
4
“Iknow everything,” David told Larry Stafford. They were seated in a vacant jury room that Judge Rosenthal permitted them to use for conferences. Stafford was dressed in navy blue with a light-blue shirt and navy-and-red- striped tie. Just the right amount of cuff showed, and his shoes were polished. Only his complexion, turned pasty from too much jail time, did not fit his young-lawyer image.
“I don’t understand,” Stafford said nervously.
“Jenny told me. Oh, you don’t have to worry about her. I figured it out. She didn’t volunteer anything.”
“I’m still not sure what you mean,” Larry answered warily.
David was tired of the games, and just plain tired. He had not slept last night, and he was having trouble handling even the simplest thoughts. He came to the point.
“I know that you and Jenny lied when you testified that you were together on the evening of the murder. I know you had a fight and she left the house. You have no alibi and you both committed perjury.”
Stafford said nothing. He looked like a little boy who was about to cry.
“Did you kill her, Larry?” David asked.
“What does it matter? Would you believe me if I said I didn’t?”
“I’m still your attorney.”
“It’s been like this my whole fucking life,” Stafford said bitterly. “So close. Then, bam, the door snaps shut. I marry this dream girl. She’s beautiful, wealthy. And she turns out to be a bitch who thinks only of herself.
“I kill myself to get through law school, get into the best firm, and the bastards won’t make me a partner, because I don’t have the right breeding.
“But this is the biggest joke of all, and I’ll probably end up in prison.”
“I asked you if you killed her.”
“You won’t believe what I say any more than Jenny did.”
“Then why do you suppose she lied for you?” David asked, angered by Stafford’s display of self-pity.
“How would it look? Jennifer Dodge of the Portland Dodges, who already married below her station, married to a murderer. How could she hold her head up at the horse show?”
“You’re a fool, Stafford. You’re so self-centered, you can’t recognize-”
“I recognize when I’m getting the shaft. I know what that little bitch wanted out of this. I was one of her charity projects, like that school she teaches at. Take a poor boy to lunch-or, to tell it like it was, to bed. She was slumming, Nash. But as soon as I wanted to make something of myself, she started in. She never understood me. That I didn’t want to owe her anything.”
“But it didn’t bother you when she perjured herself and risked prison for you?”
“If she hadn’t run out on me that night, none of this would have happened.”
“None of what?” David demanded. Stafford stopped, confused.
“None of…my arrest. Look, it’s obvious I didn’t do it. You proved that. I mean, Grimes already said that the killer had long brown hair, and what about those pictures and what Walsh said about the car?”
“What are you trying to do, Larry? Convince me you’re innocent? Let’s look at the facts the way I would, with my information, if I was prosecuting this case.
“The killer wears a shirt identical to a shirt that you own and wears pants similar to pants you own. He drives the same make and color car. He has the same build. And a trained police officer swears under oath that he is you. What do you think the statistical odds are that two people in Portland would own the same pants, shirt, and expensive car?
“You had the opportunity. No alibi. And it would be natural for a man who has just had a fight with a woman who has cut him off sexually…”
Stafford’s head snapped up.
“Yes, I know about that, too. It would be natural for such a man to go out looking for a woman.
“Then there’s motive. If you had been arrested for prostitution, your marriage would have been endangered and your tenuous chance to make partner destroyed.
“Arrayed against these motives and amazing coincidences in dress and physique, we have the word of one old man that the killer did not have curly blond hair, some fancy statistical footwork that probably won’t get by any halfway intelligent juror who starts thinking about the sheer number of those coincidences, and a few trick photographs.
“What would your verdict be, if you were a juror?”
Stafford hung his head. “What do you want me to say?” he asked.
“What do I want…? Goddammit, you’re lucky I talked to you at all. I should have dragged your wife in front of Judge Rosenthal and made her recant on the stand. But I’m still your lawyer and I want it from you. Did you kill Darlene Hersch?”
Stafford wagged his still-bowed head from side to side but did not look David in the eye.
“I don’t care anymore,” he said. “And once the jury hears what we did…”
“If,” David said.
Stafford looked up at him, like a dog begging for food.
“You’re not going to-?”
“You aren’t the only one involved in this. I don’t know if you killed that woman or not, but I’m not going to let you drag your wife down with you, by making her admit that she perjured herself.
“And if you are innocent, there isn’t a chance that a jury would find you innocent if it learned about what you two did.”
Stafford started to cry, but David did nothing to comfort him.
“Just one more thing, Stafford. Are there any other little goodies that I should know about? And I mean anything.”
“No, no. I swear.”
David stood and walked to the door. Stafford seemed to lack the energy to move. He sat hunched over, staring at the floor.
“Pull yourself together,” David ordered in a cold, flat monotone. “We have to go to court.”
David took his place at counsel table and watched the events of the day unfold like a dream. The jury was seated in slow motion and Monica appeared, her arms loaded with law books. If he had been concentrating, this would have struck him as odd on a day set aside for closing argument, but nothing was registering for David. He just wanted the case to end, so he could decide what to do with his life without the pressure of having to care about the lives of other people.
Stafford had been brought in by the guard before the jury appeared, but he exchanged no words with his attorney. The judge came in last, and the final day of the trial commenced.
“Are you prepared to argue, Ms. Powers?” Judge Rosenthal asked.
“No, Your Honor,” Monica replied. “The State has one rebuttal witness it would like to call.”
“Very well.”
