The tape lasted ninety minutes, climaxing with a visit from a telegram stripper who sang a song to the groom-to-be, dropping lingerie on his head as she removed each piece. In the video, Church seemed embarrassed to be seeing this, his eye more on the groom than on the woman.
Bosch pulled his eyes from the screen to watch the jury and he could see the tape was devastating to his defense. He looked away.
After the tape was finished, Chandler had a few more questions for Wieczorek. They were questions Belk would have asked but she was beating him to the punch.
“How is the date and time set on the video frame?”
“Well, when you buy it, you set it. Then the battery keeps it going. Never had to fiddle with it after I bought it.”
“But if you wanted to, you could put in any date you wanted, anytime you wanted, correct?”
“I s’pose.”
“So, say you were going to take a video of a friend to be used later as an alibi, could you set the date back, say a year, and then take the video?”
“Sure.”
“Could you put a date on an already existing video?”
“No. You can’t superimpose a date over an existing video. Doesn’t work that way.”
“So, in this case, how could you do it? How could you make a phony alibi for Norman Church?”
Belk stood up and objected on the grounds that Wieczorek’s answer would be speculation, but Judge Keyes overruled him, saying the witness had expertise with his own camera.
“Well, you couldn’t do that now ’cause Norman’s dead,” Wieczorek said.
“So what you are saying is that in order to make a phony tape you would have to have conspired with Mr. Church to make it before he was killed by Mr. Bosch, correct?”
“Yes. We’d have to have known that somewhere down the line he’d need this tape and he’d have to’ve told me what date to set it on and so on and so forth. It’s all pretty farfetched, especially because you can pull the newspapers from that year and find the wedding announcement that says my friend got married September thirtieth. That’ll show you that his bachelor party had to have been the twenty-eighth or thereabouts. It’s not a phony.”
Judge Keyes agreed with Belk’s objection to the last sentence as being nonresponsive to the question and told the jury to disregard it. Bosch knew they didn’t need to have heard it. They all knew the tape wasn’t a phony. He did, too. He felt clammy and sick. Something had gone wrong but he didn’t know what. He wanted to get up and walk out but he knew that to do so would be an admission of guilt so loud the walls would shake as if during an earthquake.
“One last question,” Chandler said. Her face had become flushed as she rode this one to victory. “Did you ever know Norman Church to wear a hairpiece of any kind?”
“Never. I knew him a lot of years and I never saw or heard of such a thing.”
Judge Keyes turned the witness back over to Belk, who lumbered to the lectern without his yellow pad. He was apparently too flustered by this turnabout to remember to say, “Just a few questions.” Instead he got right to his meager damage-control effort.
“You say you read a book about the Dollmaker case and then discovered this tape’s date matched one of the killings, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you look into finding alibis for the other ten murders?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“So. Mr. Wieczorek, you have nothing to offer in terms of defending your longtime friend against these other cases a task force of numerous officers connected to him?”
“The tape put the lie to all of ’em. Your task-”
“You’re not answering the question.”
“Yes I am, you show the lie on one of the cases, it puts a lie to the whole shooting match, you ask me.”
“We’re not asking you, Mr. Wieczorek. Now, uh, you said you never saw Norman Church wear a hairpiece, correct?”
“That’s what I said, yes.”
“Did you know he kept that apartment, using a false name?”
“No, I did not.”
“There was a lot you didn’t know about your friend, wasn’t there?”
“I suppose.”
“Do you suppose it is possible that just as he had that apartment without you knowing, that he occasionally wore a hairpiece without you knowing?”
“I suppose.”
“Now, if Mr. Church was the killer police claim him to be, and used disguises as police said the killer did, wouldn’t it be-”
“Objection,” Chandler said.
“-expected that there would be something such-”
“Objection!”
“-as a toupee in the apartment?”
Judge Keyes sustained Chandler’s objection to Belk’s question as seeking a speculative answer, and chastised Belk for continuing the question after the objection was lodged. Belk took the berating and said he had no further questions. He sat down, sweat lines gliding out of his hairline and running down his temples.
“Best you could do,” Bosch whispered.
Belk ignored it, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.
After accepting the videotape as evidence, the judge broke for lunch. After the jury was out of the courtroom a handful of reporters quickly moved up to Chandler. Bosch watched this and knew it was the final arbiter of how things were going. The media always gravitated to the winners, the perceived winners, the eventual winners. It’s always easier to ask them questions.
“Better start thinking of something, Bosch,” Belk said. “We could have settled this six months ago for fifty grand. Way things are going, that would have been nothing.”
Bosch turned and looked at him. They were at the railing behind the defense table.
“You believe it, don’t you? The whole thing. I killed him, then we planted everything that connected him to it.”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe, Bosch.”
“Fuck you, Belk.”
“Like I said, you better start thinking of something.”
He pushed his wide girth through the gate and headed out of the courtroom. Bremmer and another reporter approached him but he waved them away. Bosch followed him out a few moments later and also brushed the reporters off. But Bremmer kept stride with him as he took the hallway to the escalator.
“Listen, man, my ass is on the line here, too. I wrote a book about the guy and if it was the wrong guy, I want to know.”
Bosch stopped and Bremmer almost bumped into him. He looked closely at the reporter. He was about thirty-five, overweight, with brown, thinning hair. Like many men, he made up for this by growing a thick beard, which only served to make him look older. Bosch noticed that the reporter’s sweat had stained the underarms of his shirt. But body odor wasn’t his problem; cigarette breath was.
“Look, you think it’s the wrong guy, then write another book and get another hundred thousand advance. What do you care if it’s the wrong guy or not?”
“I have a reputation in this town, Harry.”
“So did I. What are you going to write tomorrow?”
“I have to write what’s going down in there.”
