father was dead?”
Tears were streaming down the boy’s cheeks. He nodded and said, “Many times.”
Jack couldn’t move. Another lawyer might have asked the next logical question, but Jack couldn’t do it. He’d taken Brian far enough. He would leave it right there. “Thank you. No further questions, Judge.”
Jack returned to the table for the defense. Lindsey had tears in her eyes, and she grasped Jack’s shoulder the instant he took the seat beside her. He didn’t dare look at her for fear that just one glance might set her off, a broken mother sobbing into her lawyer’s pinstripes. Jack glanced at Sofia, who seemed entirely at a loss for words. In another case, with another witness, she might have leaned over and whispered, Excellent job, Jacko! But not in this case. Not with this witness.
Jack closed his eyes, then opened them. He didn’t often think this way, at least not since he’d stopped defending death row inmates. The words were right there, tumbling around in his mouth, ready to be shouted out at the top of his lungs. They were bitter words, words so true that sucking them back was like swallowing a handful of rusty nails.
God, I hate this fucking job.
51
The case went to the jury just before noon.
Jack had some time on his hands, but he didn’t know how much. The general rule was that a quick verdict was bad for the defense, which didn’t really mean anything, except that it was a show of confidence for the prosecutor to hang around the courthouse while the jury deliberated, and it was a show of optimism for a defense lawyer to leave and go about his business. So Jack went.
He was doing his best to appear optimistic.
Jack hadn’t identified a single misstep in the prosecutor’s closing argument, especially the rebuttal-the last words to the jury. In his mind, Jack kept playing that crisp delivery over and over again, each time hoping to discern a flaw in the prosecutorial logic, some inconsistency, some semblance of reasonable doubt that a strong-minded juror could cling to and force the others to vote for Lindsey’s acquittal. But Torres’s words kept jabbing at him like a lance.
It wasn’t every day that a federal prosecutor accused him of falsely painting his own son as the fall guy for murder.
“Blame it all on the child,” Hector Torres said, repeating his mantra to a riveted jury. The courtroom was stone silent, as if the crowd knew that this was the prosecutor’s last shot at reclaiming the momentum that he’d let slip away. “Does it surprise you, ladies and gentlemen, that the defense would adopt this eleventh-hour strategy? It shouldn’t. These people will stop at nothing to bring shame on the Pintado family.
“Mr. Swyteck did his best to paint the child as a murderer, but let me remind you that I was the only one who asked Brian Pintado if he shot his father, and he denied it under oath. I could go on and on, but I’ll leave you with these three thoughts.
“One,” he said as he raised his index finger, counting off his final points. “It is undisputed that Lindsey Hart’s fingerprints were found on the murder weapon.
“Two, it is undisputed that Lindsey Hart was having sex with a man who was not her husband.
“Three-remember the testimony of the government’s expert witness, Dr. Vandermeer? He was the fertility doctor who told you that Oscar Pintado had a very high count of this ‘assassin sperm,’ which meant that he was a very jealous man. I find that quite interesting, and you should, too. When you go back to deliberate, ask yourself this question: If Oscar Pintado was forcing his wife to have sex with another man-if this threesome went down the way Lindsey Hart said it did-then why was Oscar so jealous? If he enjoyed watching his wife have sex with another man, then why did it bother him so much that it had a scientifically measurable physiological effect on his body? Why? I’ll tell you why.”
The prosecutor paused, eyes narrowing as his gaze drifted toward the defendant. “Because Lindsey Hart is a liar and a murderer.” He faced the jury and said, “Treat her like one.”
A honking horn jolted Jack from his thoughts. Traffic was moving again, but just barely. Jack inched his car forward a few feet, then hit the brake, slowing to a dead stop in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone. A long trail of orange tail lights blinked on and off ahead of him. Enrique Iglesias sang his heart out on not one but three different stations that Jack tried on the radio. Latin dance music blasted from the boom box in the convertible that was caught in traffic beside him. Driving south out of downtown Miami after four o’clock in the afternoon was like getting stuck at the end of the world’s longest conga line.
He turned off U.S. 1, wound his way behind a car dealership, and found himself next to Mario’s, that little Cuban market where Abuela loved to shop-which got him to thinking.
He steered into a parking space and reached for his wallet. Tucked behind his driver’s license was the business card that Kiko had given him when Jack and Abuela had visited the market in the middle of trial, though now it seemed like a thousand years ago. He removed it, then checked the name and the telephone number that Kiko had written for him on the backside.
El Pidio-the man who had told Kiko that Hector Torres looked like Jorge Buston, the man who’d dated Jack’s mother back in Cuba.
Jack had never followed up, too caught up in Lindsey’s trial to be searching for additional distractions. Or maybe he was like Abuela, not sure that he wanted to know the truth. But the way this case had played out-or was about to play out-he felt as though he needed more truth in his life. If nothing else, his meeting with Torres’s ex- wife had his curiosity about his own mother flowing once again. It bothered him that she’d used the word obsessed to describe Torres’s attraction to his mother. The more he considered it, the more curious it seemed that his half brother-“Ramon,” according to that gravestone back in Cuba -had died the day he was born. Jack’s instincts continued to tell him that something was not quite right.
He flipped open his cell phone and dialed the number.
An old man answered in Spanish. Jack responded in kind, if you called Spanish with a John Wayne accent “in kind.”
“Mr. El Pidio?”
“Not ‘Mr. El Pidio,’ ” the man said, grousing. “Just El Pidio.”
“This is Jack Swyteck. I’m-”
“Ah, Swyteck. I know who you are. Kiko told me you’d probably give me a call.”
“I understand you knew my mother in Bejucal.”
“Yes. I was her doctor. I delivered her baby.”
Her doctor? So many questions were suddenly racing through Jack’s head, but he got back to what was most important, the one thing that was almost too difficult to ask. “Then you must know… How did my brother die?”
There was silence. Finally, his voice crackled as he breathed a heavy sigh and said, “That’s a very complicated matter, young man.”
52
At dusk, Jack caught up with his father at the Biltmore driving range. Harry was perched atop a grassy knoll, dressed in knickers, argyle socks, and a classic tweed golfer’s cap, the kind of getup that a man didn’t dare wear without a single-digit handicap. Jack watched from the bench as Harry, deep into his rhythm, popped one ball afer another onto the range. It looked as if manna had fallen from heaven, hundreds of little white balls scattered across the green grass before them.
“Dad?”
Harry halted in the middle of his backswing, slightly annoyed by his son’s timing. “Yes?”
