Freeman, wondering where all this was going, raised a finger again. 'Your Honor? Same objection.'
Villars leaned over to the witness. 'Mr. Rivera,' she said gently, 'just say what you saw him do, not how you think he felt about it.'
Rivera's composure was slipping. Throughout all of his earlier conversations with lawyers and policemen, nobody had made him respond in this way before. Welcome to jury trials, Hardy thought.
'What did Mr. Witt do then?' Powell was suddenly his good buddy, helping him, drawing him out.
'Well, he turned half-around to give the package to the boy.'
'Did you see the boy?'
'No, I didn not see him, not then. He was behind the door.'
'Then how do you know it was the boy?'
'I saw him go running off to show the package to his mother.'
At the defense table, Freeman was flipping pages on Rivera's interviews. 'You ever hear this before?' he whispered to Hardy and then, without waiting for an answer, stood. 'Your Honor, I object. The witness can't possibly know the boy's intentions going off with the package.'
Freeman appeared agitated and he had reason to be. If the prosecution could show that Jennifer had been home at 9:30, and until now nothing in the record had indicated that they could, it would be a significant loss.
Villars all but rolled her eyes. 'I'm sure Mr. Powell will rephrase.'
Powell, still not skipping a beat, smiled at Rivera and said, 'Dr. Witt handed the package to the boy behind the door. Did the boy then say anything?'
'He said, 'I'm going to show this to Mom.''
Powell turned to Freeman, stopping to make sure the jury understood what Rivera had said. 'Your witness.'
It was a classic example, Hardy thought, of why trials were both so addictive and so nerve-wracking. Freeman had interviewed Rivera twice and the man had never wavered in his story – he hadn't seen Jennifer. He had wanted to get back and hear the Golden Oldie, win a trip to Hawaii. He'd been at the door with Dr. Witt for a minute at the most.
So the entire thrust of Freeman's interview had been to establish the time of delivery – not whether Matt had gone running upstairs calling for his mother.
The old bear got up slowly, but by the time he had reached his spot in front of the bench there was no further sign that he had taken a blow. He smiled at the witness, nodded to the jury. 'Mr. Rivera, we've had a few conversations over the past couple of months, have we not?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And during those conversations, did I ever ask you if you saw Jennifer Witt while you were delivering this package on December 28?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And how did you respond?'
'I said I didn't see her.'
'Did you hear her? Was she, for example, singing in the shower or something like that? Moving furniture around?'
Freeman was taking advantage of the rules that allowed defense in cross-examination to lead witnesses, and Freeman was also using this bantering tone to get back into a more relaxed mode with Fred, showing him what a regular Joe he could be.
He got his small reward. Rivera grinned, loosening. 'No, I didn't hear nobody singing or moving things around.'
'When the boy ran off, did he yell for his mother? Did he run up the stairs yelling 'Mom!' or anything like that?'
A risky question – if the answer was yes it would hurt. But given the repressed nature of what they knew to be the tone in the Witt household, Hardy thought it would pay off.
It took a moment of reflection. Hardy glanced over at the jury. They were following every nuance. Faces were on Rivera. 'No, I don't remember that.'
Some of the damage perhaps repaired, Freeman allowed himself a breath. 'Let's go back, if we may, to what Matt said to his father. Can you tell us again what it was?'
Seeing this new trap, Powell was on his feet. 'It's in the record, Your Honor. The reporter can read back what Mr. Rivera said.'
Villars considered Powell's point a little too long for Freeman's comfort. Knowing that a trap could sometimes spring on the person who set it, Freeman withdrew the question. He did not want the jury to hear again how Matt had said 'I'm going to show this to Mom.' He had been fishing, hoping that Fred would come up with another paraphrase of the same idea, something like 'I'll see if Mom will like this when she gets home.' But no such luck.
Smiling, Freeman turned back to the witness. 'So, to summarize, you did not see Jennifer Witt in the house at 9:30?'
'That's right.'
'You did not hear her either?'
'No, I didn't.'
Freeman paused and realized that this was about as good as he was going to get, and it wasn't all that good. Giving the jury a confident grin, he said to Rivera, 'Thank you, sir. No further questions.'
Powell, smelling blood, stood quickly and said he had a short question or two on redirect. 'Mr. Rivera, when Matt went running off with this package, what was Dr. Witt doing?'
'What was he doing? I guess he took the clipboard, looked at his watch, signed it and gave it to me.'
'Did he speak to his son?'
'No, I told you, the boy went running behind him.'
'Yes, you did say that. He didn't remind the boy, though, for example, that his mother wasn't home?'
'Objection!' Freeman was up, shot from a cannon.
Villars pointed at Powell. 'Sustained, Mr. Powell, you know better. Strike the last.' And she directed the jury to disregard the question, which they would try to do. But Powell had done more damage, and he knew it as he graciously dismissed the witness.
Freeman was fuming. Over Jennifer's objections he had insisted that he and Hardy return to the Sutter Street offices. He need to vent and didn't want to do it in front of his client. 'He never, never mentioned Matt going to show anything to anybody!'
Hardy was drinking cranberry soda out of a bottle, picking pretzels out of the bag on the center of the conference table. 'Well, he did today, David. Did you ask him?'
'Shit.'
'Does that mean you didn't?'
Nothing, it seemed, dimmed Freeman's appetite. He was having liverwurst and onions on a rye roll, drinking one of the popular non-alcoholic beers that were so politically correct in San Francisco but which Hardy thought were a blight on the earth. 'I asked him ten times if he'd seen Jennifer. Was Jennifer there? You're sure you didn't see her?'
'You think she was there?'
Freeman swallowed what he was chewing. 'The jury thinks she was there, Diz. We've got to convince them she wasn't 'cause if she was, guess what?'
Hardy knew too well the answer to that one. He sat a moment, part of him savoring the experience of Freeman choking on his arrogance, a victim of his own oversight.
After lunch they breezed through the coroner, Dr. Strout again, and this time he delivered his testimony
