Powell favored Hardy with one of his world-weary looks, which said okay, that's a defense attorney's answer about his client, but between us two professionals we know the truth. What he said was: 'Your Mrs. Witt's a black widow, Hardy. We're going for Murder One on these. A death sentence. This is a capital case.'
3
'You can't be serious…'
The color was gone from Jennifer's face. She simply hung her head, then after a beat shook herself, stood and walked over to the window in the visitor's room, through which she stared out into the guard's office. 'Ned killed himself, maybe by mistake… But somebody else killed Larry and Matt. I swear to God… I couldn't have killed my little boy.'
Hardy noticed she didn't say the same about her husband. He sat with his shoulders hunched over, fingers locked together on the table in front of him. 'Tell me about Anthony Alvarez,' he said.
She combed her bangs back with her fingers, twice, still facing the window. 'I don't know any Anthony Alvarez…'
Hardy kept his voice low. 'The police report identifies him as your neighbor, lives across the street.'
Now she turned. 'Mr. Alvarez? Oh, that's Anthony Alvarez? I never knew his first name. What about him?'
'What about him is that he's a lot of the reason you're here.' Hardy told her the gist of his testimony. While he talked she returned to the end of the table and sat again, kitty-corner to Hardy.
'But I didn't do that. I always start out by walking a couple of blocks to warm up. I wouldn't have just shut the gate and started out running. Not only wouldn't have, I didn't.'
Hardy nodded. 'Why do you think he says it was you? You have any words with him, anything like that?'
'I don't believe this.' Jennifer inhaled, shook herself, let it out in a sigh. 'Maybe in four years I've said a hundred words to the man. I don't think I'd recognize him if he wasn't standing near his house. Why is he doing this to me?'
'I don't know,' Hardy said, 'but for now I think we'd better concentrate on something that could help you. Was there anybody that might have seen you walking? Another neighbor?'
Jennifer shut her eyes, leaning back in her chair, revealing the curve of her body, the plane of her cheek. Hardy suddenly realized how attractive she was, even in the jail garb. Pouty lips, a strong nose. Bones well- limned.
'I passed a man,' she said, eyes still closed. 'An older guy, maybe black or Mexican, dark anyway.'
'I read about him.' Hardy sat forward now. 'I don't think he's going to fly.'
'What do you mean?' I did see somebody. I think it was, I mean it could have been the person…'
Hardy was shaking his head. She reached a hand across the table to him. 'No, no. No, listen. It was the week after Christmas, no traffic, no one around, and here's this man walking up the street, he's wearing this heavy trenchcoat, looking like he's checking house numbers. I almost stop and ask can I help him but I didn't want to be late so I keep going by.' She stopped talking, staring at Hardy. 'It really could have been him, the one… I mean, somebody had to do it…'
'Did you notice if this man had a gun?'
'No, I'd have-'
'Do you have any idea why somebody who didn't know Larry personally would want to kill him? Or your son?'
Her eyes stared into the space between them. 'If you find a yes to any questions like these, Jennifer, then we can usefully talk about him again, but I'm afraid he isn't going to do us any good right now.'
'But it might-'
'When it does,' Hardy said, 'then we'll look at it. Okay? I promise.'
Hardy reminded himself that he wasn't here to upset her. He had felt, though, he should tell her they were going capital. It was still going to be essentially Freeman's case but it wouldn't hurt to collect more impressions of Jennifer. 'Let's go on to anything else about that morning, anybody else who might have seen you.'
'But that man, he might have been…'
Hardy patted her hand, held it down on the table. 'Let's move on, okay?'
She pulled her hand away. 'You've got to believe me, I didn't do this. If it was that man…'
'If it was that man,' he said. 'There could have been somebody, all right, he might even have shot Larry, but he also might be anybody – a neighbor, a tourist, a guy just taking a walk.'
She glared at him. 'He had his hands in his pockets, both hands. He might have been holding a gun.'
Hardy almost said, Forgetting, of course, that your husband was killed with your own gun. He slowed himself down. 'Let's stop. Look, we're not here to argue. We'll come back to the man later. For now we've got to leave him, he's not going to help us unless he lives near you and we can find him. Now I'm trying to find something to hang your defense on, and he's just not it.'
Her face went all the way down to the table, within the circle of her arms. Her body was shaking as she rolled her forehead back and forth.
'Did you do anything unusual at all on your run? Anything you might already have told the police? Or forgotten to tell them?'
She stopped the rocking. As though struggling with its weight, she raised her head, sighing again. 'They didn't ask any questions like this,' she said. 'I didn't think… I mean, I didn't know they thought I was a suspect. They misled me, they never asked any of this.'
Hardy said quietly, 'I'm asking now, all right? Let's try to get something.'
Jennifer nodded, then recalled that she had stopped at the automatic teller at her bank on Haight Street. Which seemed odd to Hardy. 'You left to go running and happened to have your ATM card with you?'
'What's so strange about that?' And she explained that most of her running outfits had Velcro pockets and as a matter of course she grabbed her house key and her change wallet – in which she kept her ATM card – whenever she left the house. She told Hardy that on that morning she had walked down her block, passed the man in the trenchcoat, started running for a couple of blocks, then stopped for cash – 'It was the Monday after Christmas, we hadn't been to the bank for three days.'
At least it was someplace to start.
In some ways Hardy's involvement with Jennifer Witt was easier to explain to the client than it was going to be to his wife.
After the successful conclusion of his first murder trial – defending former Superior Court Judge Andy Fowler – Hardy had been surprised to find himself something of a property in the small world that was San Francisco's legal community. Trial lawyers – men and women who were good on their feet in front of a jury – were, it seemed, in great demand. Even in the large corporate firms, the final outcome of all the work done by offices full of bean counters and number crunchers, library rats, technical brief writers and legal strategists, paralegals and lesser staff often came down on the shoulders of the person in the firm who could convincingly present it all in front of a judge or jury or both.
Since most corporate attorneys rarely if ever saw the inside of a courtroom, many firms hired trial lawyers the way baseball teams purchased designated hitters – the role was limited, but if it came up it was far preferable to having the pitcher come to the plate with the game on the line.
Because of the sensational nature of Judge Fowler's trial and of Hardy's own role as an unknown, underdog, first-time defense attorney, it seemed that Hardy had unwittingly been auditioning for half the firms in the Bay Area. When the verdict came down in his client's favor, his phone had started ringing.
Another event that had coincided with the end of Fowler's trial had been the birth of Hardy's and Frannie's son, Vincent. So for the first month Hardy had begged off many of the interviews, pleading his new fatherhood, Frannie's desire to have him at home for a while.
