Edgar was silent a moment before replying.
“Yeah, but why would Pounds talk to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe Bremmer. He could have told her, even though it wasn’t in his story.”
“The story says she couldn’t be reached for comment. It’s got to be somebody else. A leak. Probably the same person talked to Bremmer and Chandler. Somebody who wants to fuck me up.”
Edgar didn’t say anything and Bosch let it go for now.
“I better head back to court.”
“Hey, how’d Lloyd do? I heard on KFWB he was the first wit.”
“He did about as expected.”
“Shit. Who’s next?”
“I don’t know. She has Irving and Locke, the shrink, on subpoena. My guess is, it will be Irving. He’ll pick up where Lloyd left off.”
“Well, good luck. By the way, if you’re looking for something to do. This press gig I’m holding will hit the TV news tonight. I’ll be here waiting by the phones. If you want to answer a few, I could use the help.”
Bosch thought briefly about his plan for dinner with Sylvia. She’d understand.
“Yeah, I’ll be there.”
The afternoon testimony was largely uneventful. Chandler’s strategy, it seemed to Bosch, was to build a two-part question into the jury’s eventual deliberation, giving her clients two shots at the prize. One would be the wrong-man theory, which held that Bosch had flat-out killed an innocent man. The second question would be the use of force. Even if the jury determined that Norman Church, family man, was the Dollmaker, serial killer, they would have to decide whether Bosch’s actions were appropriate.
Chandler called her client, Deborah Church, to the witness stand right after lunch. She gave a tearful account of a wonderful life with a wonderful husband who fawned over everybody; his daughters, his wife, his mother and mother-in-law. No misogynistic aberrations here. No sign of childhood abuse. The widow held a box of Kleenex in her hand as she testified, going to a new tissue every other question.
She wore the traditional black dress of a widow. Bosch remembered how appealing Sylvia had been when he saw her at her husband’s funeral dressed in black. Deborah Church looked downright scary. It was as if she reveled in her role here. The widow of the fallen innocent. The real victim. Chandler had coached her well.
It was a good show, but it was too good to be true and Chandler knew it. Rather than leave the bad things to be drawn out on cross-examination, she finally got around to asking Deborah Church how, her marriage being so wonderful, her husband was in that garage apartment-which was rented under an alias-when Bosch kicked the door open.
“We had been having some difficulty.” She stopped to dab an eye with a tissue. “Norman was going through a lot of stress-he had a lot of responsibility in the aircraft design department. He needed to expend it and so he took the apartment. He said it was to be alone. To think. I didn’t know about this woman he brought there. I think it was probably his first time doing something like that. He was a naive man. I think she saw this. She took his money and then set him up by calling the police on him and giving the crazy story that he was the Dollmaker. There was a reward, you know.”
Bosch wrote a note on a pad he kept in front of him and slid it over to Belk, who read it and then jotted something down on his own pad.
“What about all of the makeup found there, Mrs. Church?” Chandler asked. “Can you explain that?”
“All I know is that I would have known if my husband was that monster. I would have known. If there was makeup found there, it was put there by somebody else. Maybe after he was already dead.”
Bosch believed he could feel the eyes of the courtroom burning into him as the widow accused him of planting evidence after murdering her husband.
After that, Chandler moved her questioning on to safer topics like Norman Church’s relationship with his daughters and then ended her direct examination with a weeper.
“Did he love his daughters?”
“Very much so,” Mrs. Church said as a new production of tears rolled down her cheeks. This time she did not wipe them away with a tissue. She let the jury watch them roll down her face into the folds of her double chin.
After giving her a few moments to compose herself, Belk got up and took his place at the lectern.
“Again, Your Honor, I will be brief. Mrs. Church, I want to make this very clear to the jury. Did you say in your testimony that you knew about your husband’s apartment but didn’t know about any women he may or may not have brought there?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
Belk looked at his pad.
“Did you not tell detectives on the night of the shooting that you had never heard of any apartment? Didn’t you emphatically deny that your husband even had such an apartment?”
Deborah Church didn’t answer.
“I can arrange to have a tape of your first interview played in court if it will help refresh your-”
“Yes, I said that. I lied.”
“You lied? Why would you lie to the police?”
“Because a policeman had just killed my husband. I didn’t-I couldn’t deal with them.”
“The truth is you told the truth that night, correct, Mrs. Church? You never knew about any apartment.”
“No, that’s not true. I knew about it.”
“Had you and your husband talked about it?”
“Yes, we discussed it.”
“You approved of it?”
“Yes…, reluctantly. It was my hope he would stay at home and we could work this stress out together.”
“Okay, Mrs. Church, then if you knew of the apartment, had discussed it and given your approval, reluctantly or not, why then did your husband rent it under a false name?”
She didn’t answer. Belk had nailed her. Bosch thought he saw the widow glance in Chandler’s direction. He looked at the lawyer but she made no move, no change in facial expression to help her client.
“I guess,” the widow finally said, “that was one of the questions you could have asked him if Mr. Bosch had not murdered him in cold blood.”
Without Belk’s prompting, Judge Keyes said, “The jury will disregard that last characterization. Mrs. Church, you know better than that.”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor.”
“Nothing further,” Belk said as he left the lectern.
The judge called a ten-minute recess.
During the break, Bosch went out to the ash can. Money Chandler didn’t come out but the homeless man made a pass. Bosch offered him a whole cigarette, which he took and put in his shirt pocket. He was unshaven again and the slight look of dementia was still in his eyes.
“Your name is Faraday,” Bosch said, as if speaking to a child.
