“In the defendant’s downtown loft, where he makes and sells his furniture.”
This is not making sense to me. “Richard, I’ve seen the reports of a previous search of the loft. It didn’t turn up then, but it suddenly appeared now?”
“My information on this is not complete; I just thought I should inform the court and defense immediately when this was brought to my attention. But there was apparently a secret, or at least a hidden, compartment in the leg of one of the tables the defendant made. The police discovered the gun in there.”
Hatchet obviously finds this as strange as I do. “What made them decide to do another search in the first place?”
Richard is himself looking uncomfortable with this. “There was an anonymous tip, I believe in the form of a phone call.”
I argue that the gun should not be allowed to be introduced as evidence, though I really have no solid grounds on which to base my objection. Hatchet delays his decision until the gun is confirmed to be the weapon that killed Walter Timmerman, but he will rule against me. I can tell he’s not pleased with this turn of events, but just as I can’t come up with a good reason to keep the evidence out, neither can he.
I ask Hatchet if we can adjourn for the day, so that I can talk to my client about this while the tests are run. Richard backs up my request, since if the gun is shown to be what we all think it will be, he’ll want to introduce testimony to that effect immediately. Hatchet grants the request, and the jury is sent home until tomorrow.
I arrange to meet with Steven in an anteroom. In a normal situation, I might start by telling him that his loft was searched again, and I would be looking to gauge his reaction for any obvious worry. But once again this case is different; I know that Steven didn’t kill his father, Childs did. So it therefore isn’t possible that Steven hid the murder weapon.
“They think they found the murder weapon,” I say. “It was hidden inside a piece of furniture in your loft.”
He recoils as if shot. “That isn’t possible. Oh, my God. How is this happening?”
“Do you ever build hidden compartments into your furniture?”
He nods. “Sometimes, when people request it. But it’s not for hiding things generally, it’s often for storage.”
“Who would know about that?”
“Almost anyone who’s ever bought a piece of furniture from me.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down much,” I say.
“How bad is this?” he asks. “Is there any chance we can recover?”
“We’ll have a better idea about that tomorrow.”
When I finish meeting with Steven, I go back into the courtroom, where Kevin is waiting for me. Also there is Martha Wyndham, who tells me she was in court today. I left word for her to come over to the house after court, and I ask if she’d mind meeting me there. She’s fine with that.
I stop at the supermarket before going home, since the four hundred people who seem to be staying at my house have, if anything, started to eat even more than before. I’m not sure, but I think I saw Marcus gnawing on the garage the other day.
Martha beats me home, and Laurie has let her in. When I get there Martha is playing with a crazed Waggy. I could wait for Waggy to calm down before talking to her, but by then Steven would be up for parole.
“Waggy looks terrific,” Martha says.
I nod. “And he’s matured a lot.”
She starts to ask me some questions about the trial, and how I think it’s going. Since I don’t want to be honest about it, I fend off the questions, including the one about why court was adjourned early. I want to keep the information about the murder weapon quiet until tomorrow, though obviously I have only limited control of that.
I finally get the conversation around to where I want it, which is Charles Robinson. “Did you spend any time with him?”
“Some. Not a lot,” she says.
“What was his relationship like with Walter Timmerman?”
She thinks about it for a few moments. “They would have said they were friends. I would describe them as competitors, but with people like that, the line is blurry.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were both all about winning, so that’s what their friendship was about. They wanted to surround themselves with people who would challenge them, people whom they wanted to beat. I’m not sure they thought about it in those terms, but to them it would make perfect sense.”
“Did you ever hear them talking about Timmerman’s work?”
“No, when it came to work the only thing they had in common was it made both of them rich. Walter was a scientist; Robinson is some kind of international financier, or trader, or something.”
Martha has no real knowledge of Robinson or his activities, and the conversation shifts to her own life in light of the death of her employers. She’s saved some money over the years, she says, and her mother left her a decent amount when she died, so finding work immediately is not necessary. She renews her offer to help us with Steven’s case in any way she can, but there’s really nothing for her to do.
“By the way, did you hear a second explosion that day at the house?”
“No, I don’t think so. But all I could really hear was myself screaming.” She grins with some embarrassment at the recollection, but I understand her reaction. It was a frightening, surreal moment.
Laurie invites Martha to stay for dinner, but I’m glad that she declines, since I need all available time to prepare for tomorrow’s witnesses. Martha offers to help out with Waggy if we need a break, but I decline that offer as well.
After dinner I receive a phone call from Richard Wallace. “Sorry to bother you at home, Andy, but the ballistics test came back and I thought you’d want to know the results.”
It’s typical of Richard that he would be giving me this heads-up. “Let me guess,” I say. “It’s the gun that shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll.”
He laughs. “Close. It’s the one that shot Timmerman from behind the Dumpster.”
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other. See you in court, counselor.”
HATCHET ALLOWS the murder weapon in as evidence, as I knew he would. Once the ruling is made, Richard calls Detective Roger Manning to the stand. Manning is the officer who led yesterday’s search at Steven’s loft, and he supervised the ballistics tests that were immediately done.
Manning testifies quite simply that the police received a call in the form of a computer-masked voice, alerting them to the location of the weapon, and that when they conducted a subsequent search, there it was.
He further says that the loft was locked when they arrived, and that they had locked it when they searched it the first time. There was no sign of forced entry, according to Manning.
Richard has him describe the manner in which the ballistics tests were performed, and he introduces photographs of the bullets, allowing Manning to show the jury exactly what he is talking about.
“So there is no doubt that this is the gun that killed Walter Timmerman?” Richard asks.
“No doubt whatsoever.”
Obviously I have no ability to challenge the scientific tests, so when Richard turns Manning over to me, I focus on other areas.
“Detective, were there any fingerprints on the gun other than Steven Timmerman’s?”
“There were no fingerprints on the gun at all.”
I do a double take, as if I am surprised. “Not even Steven’s?”
“No,” he says. “The gun was wiped clean.”
“So your view is that he hid the gun in his own loft, in his own furniture, but wiped it clean so that it couldn’t be traced back to him?”
“I can’t answer that,” he says.
“Can you think of any reason why he would do that?”
