Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver

He continued, with a glance at the four Latino and three black jurors. 'I get a lot of hassles because I want to help minority businesses. For some reason the police and the city and state — they don't like that. And here I ended up accidentally hurting one of the very people I'm trying to help.' He looked sorrowfully at the floor.

Adele Viamonte's sigh could be heard throughout the courtroom and drew a glare from the judge.

The lawyer thanked Hartman and said to Tribow, 'Your witness.'

'What're we going to do, boss?' Wu whispered.

Tribow glanced at the two people on his team, who'd worked so tirelessly, for endless hours, on this case. Then he looked behind him into the eyes of Carmen Valdez, whose life had been so terribly altered by the man sitting on the witness stand, gazing placidly at the prosecutors and the people in the gallery.

Tribow pulled Chuck Wu's laptop computer closer to him and scrolled through the notes that the young man had taken over the course of the trial. He read for a moment then stood slowly and walked toward Hartman.

In his trademark polite voice he asked, 'Mr. Hartman, I'm curious about one thing.'

'Yessir?' the killer asked, just as polite. He'd been coached well by his attorneys, who'd undoubtedly urged him never to get flustered or angry on the stand.

'The game you got for Mr. Valdez's son.'

The eyes flickered. 'Yes? What about it?'

'What was it?'

'One of those little video games. A GameBoy.'

'Was it expensive?'

A smile of curiosity. 'Yeah, pretty expensive. But I wanted to do something nice for Jose and his kid. I felt bad because his father was pretty crazy —'

'Just answer the question,' Tribow interrupted.

'It cost about fifty or sixty bucks.'

'Where did you get it?'

'A toy store in the mall. I don't remember the name.'

Tribow considered himself a pretty good lie detector and he could see that Hartman was making all this up. He'd probably seen an ad for GameBoys that morning. He doubted, however, that the jury could tell. To them he was simply cooperating and politely answering the prosecutor's somewhat curious questions.

'What did this video game do?'

'Objection,' the lawyer called. 'What's the point?'

'Your Honor,' Tribow said. 'I'm just trying to establish a relationship between the defendant and the victim.'

'Go ahead, Mr. Tribow, but I don't think we need to know what kind of box this toy came in.'

'Actually, sir, I was going to ask that.'

'Well, don't.'

'I won't. Now, Mr. Hartman, what did this game do?'

'I don't know — you shot spaceships or something.'

'Did you play with it before giving it to Mr. Valdez?'

From the corner of his eye he saw Viamonte and Wu exchange troubled glances, wondering what on earth their boss was up to.

'No,' Hartman answered. For the first time on the stand he seemed testy. 'I don't like games. Anyway, it was a present. I wasn't gonna open it up before I gave it to the boy.'

Tribow nodded, raising an eyebrow, and continued his questioning. 'Now the morning of the day Jose Valdez was shot did you have this game with you when you left your house?'

'Yessir.'

'Was it in a bag?'

He thought for a moment. 'It was, yeah, but I put it in my pocket. It wasn't that big.'

'So your hands would be free?'

'I guess. Probably.'

'And you left your house when?'

'Ten-forty or so. Mass was at eleven.'

Tribow then asked, 'Which church?'

'St. Anthonys.'

'And you went straight there? With the game in your pocket?'

'Yes, that's right.'

'And the game was with you in the church?'

'Correct.'

'But no one would have seen it because it was in your pocket.'

'I guess that'd be right.' Still polite, still unflustered.

'And when you left the church you walked along Maple Street to the Starbucks in the company of the earlier witness, Mr. Cristos Abrego?'

'Yes, that's right.'

'And the game was still in your pocket?'

'No.'

'It wasn't?'

'No. At that point I took it out and was carrying it in the bag.'

Tribow whirled to face him and asked in a piercing voice, 'Isn't it true that you didn't have the game with you in church?'

'No,' Hartman said, blinking in surprise but keeping his voice even and low, 'that's not true at all. I had the game with me all day. Until I was attacked by Valdez.'

'Isn't it true that you left church, returned home, got the game and then drove to Starbucks?'

'No, I wouldn't've had time to go home after church and get the game. Mass was over at noon. I got to Starbucks about ten minutes later. I told you, my house is a good twenty minutes away from the church. You can check a map. I went straight from St. Anthony's to Starbucks.'

Tribow looked away from Hartman to the faces of the jury. He then glanced at the widow in the front row of the gallery, crying softly. He saw the perplexed faces of his prosecution team. He saw spectators glancing at one another. Everyone was waiting for him to drop some brilliant bombshell that would pull the rug out from underneath Hartman's testimony and expose him as the liar and killer that he was.

Tribow took a deep breath. He said, 'No further questions, Your Honor.'

* * *

There was a moment of silence. Even the judge frowned and seemed to want to ask if the prosecutor was sure he wanted to do this. But he settled for asking the defense lawyer, 'Any more witnesses?'

'No, sir. The defense rests.'

The sole reason for a jury's existence is that people lie.

If everyone told the truth a judge could simply ask Raymond C. Hartman if he planned and carried out the murder of Jose Valdez and the man would say yes or no and that would be that.

But people don't tell the truth, of course, and so the judicial system relies on a jury to look at the eyes and mouths and hands and postures of witnesses and listen to their words and decide what's the truth and what isn't.

The jury in the case of the State v. Hartman had been out for two hours. Tribow and his assistants were holed up in the cafeteria in the building across from the courthouse. Nobody was saying a word. Some of this silence had to be attributed to their uneasiness — if not outright embarrassment — at Tribow's unfathomable line of questioning about the game Hartman had allegedly bought for the victim's son. They would probably be thinking that even experienced prosecutors get flustered and fumble the ball from time to time and it was just as well it happened during a case like this, which was, apparently, unwinnable.

Danny Tribow's eyes were closed as he lounged back in an ugly orange fiberglass chair. He was replaying Hartman's cool demeanor and the witnesses' claims that they hadn't been threatened or bribed by Hartman. They'd