The 13th Juror (9 page)

Lightner nodded.  "Yes, but I'm on very tenuous ground here, Mr. Hardy.  I know that.  Well, I've persuaded myself, that I can tell you some of what I know, things you might find out from other sources given enough time.  But I'm afraid I can't tell you
how
I know it."

It took a moment before Hardy said, "Privilege."

There it was, that familiar double-edged sword.  Lightner's head inclined a bit.  "Without my input, there still should be records that point to it.  She never said, but I believe she must have switched physicians.  They're mandated to report."

He was right about that, Hardy knew.  When the same person, a woman, say, or a child, visited a doctor with burns, contusions, abrasions, bruises, saying they fell of their bicycle, down the stairs, walked into a door, whatever — if it looked suspicious the physician by law had to notify somebody in law enforcement.  There was compelling reason to suspect abuse.

Hardy asked the obvious question.  "But you
knew
Jennifer was being beaten.  Why didn't you report it?"

Lightner was still on his hands, an unhappy look on his face.  "We're exempt from the mandate.  She refused to let me.  She was my patient.  I was her psychiatrist.  It was her right."

"So she changed her doctors so they wouldn't suspect.  Or report it.  Anything else?"

"Neighbors might know.  How many times have they moved?  Sometimes that's a clue."

Hardy pointed out that all this might be fine, but Jennifer herself was the most likely source of corroboration about whether or not she was a battered wife, and
she
was denying it.  "You'll agree," he said, "this poses something of a problem for us."

"I see that, yes, of course."

"Well?"

"I just thought you had to know.  As you said, "It's
got
to be her defense.  It's
why
she did it."

Hardy tried to straighten up in the tiny chair.  He put his elbows on the desk.  "Dr. Lightner, I've got to remind you, she denies both battery and that she killed anybody.  We went over this again and again this morning and she isn't going to go with any battered wife defense — not with Freeman, not with me, not with anybody.  And this leads me to the question… Why in the world wouldn't she just admit to being battered?  As you said, people are increasingly getting off on this defense these days.  The precedents are in place.  We told her that.  So why, since it's got a good chance, maybe the best chance, to save her life, won't she agree to it?"

"She's embarrassed."

For a second, Hardy thought he'd heard wrong.  "Say what?"

"She's embarrassed.  She doesn't want anybody to know that she's the kind of person who could live with being beaten.  Why wouldn't she just leave?"

"Exactly."

Now Lightner leaned forward, into it.  "But don't you see?  That's the problem.  They can't leave!  I know this might come across as socialized slaptrap to you, but in some cultures, it's more socially acceptable than in others to take this kind of domestic abuse, but it's not among upper-class whites in our culture."

"Well, now she herself is upper class.  She's made it and she's not going back."

"What if she's convicted?  What's she got?"

"She's still got her self-image."

"And you're telling me that's more important than her life?"

"I don't think she's ever faced that."

Hardy realized that Lightner could be right.  Stuffed into the tiny desk, his posture was getting to him.  He wedged himself out, standing.

"So Jennifer won't admit she was beaten… battered, essentially because she's embarrassed."

"That's right.  Embarrassed may be too weak a word.  Mortified is better, that she was battered, almost ritually beaten and, unbelievably, maybe even to herself, stayed around to take it."  Lightner slid off the table.

Hardy was rubbing his shoulder.  "I don't mean to offend here, doctor, but is any of this psycho-babble?  I mean, how many of your conclusions, assuming I independently discover some facts, can I depend on?"

Lightner didn't appear offended.  He nodded.  Maybe he thought it was a good question.  "All of them, I'd say."

11

In the morning daylight the Witt home was impressive.  The previous night, when Hardy and Frannie had driven by, there had been a sense of solidity to Olympia Way, high up on Twin Peaks.  Most of the street bordered the Midtown Terrace Playground.  It had been quiet, almost ghostly.  Working street lights cast their beams through the early spring foliage of the trees that overhung the street.  Hedges seemed trimmed and full-grown.

In sunlight the feeling of sheltered enclave was even stronger.  Hardy got out of his car and stood looking at Jennifer's home, two lots from the park, from the south side of the street.  To the west, the Pacific glittered, and just north, Sutro Tower stretched its rusted arms to the sky.  Hardy thought some of the two- and three-story houses could sit comfortably on Embassy Row — landscaped and majestic, these were the homes of people who might not miss three hundred thousand dollars if it disappeared slowly enough.

The Witt's hedge — at perhaps three feet — wasn't as tall as some of the others, though it was as well kept as any.  A white picket fence fronted it.  The gate to the fence was shut, but the hedge turned ninety degrees up both sides of the straight brick path to the front door.

Hardy had to remind himself that until two days ago Jennifer had lived here, coming and going, apparently unaware that the grand jury was deciding that there was sufficient evidence to indict her for murder.  It was an unsettling thought.

But no more unsettling than when he turned the key.  A dog from somewhere nearby barked and kept barking.  Hardy stood waiting for its owner to come and quiet it down, check to see what had set it off.  That didn't happen.  In fact, nothing happened, and the barking continued.  Hardy could have been a burglar with a sledge hammer instead of a lawyer with a key and no one — apparently — would have questioned him.

And this was the block that had produced two eyewitnesses for the time of the murder and more of the FedEx delivery truck?  Hardy thought Terrell must be one persuasive interrogator.

Inside, after another minute, the barking stopped.

The house was white.  The foyer was of white Italian marble with pink striations.  Soft furnishings were modern and white, tables and racks were black cast-iron.  Everything sat on light champagne wall-to-wall carpeting.  On the walls Hardy recognized one of the Mapplethorpe's that had caused the stir, along with a print of Goya's
Mother Eating Her Child
.  Up close, he studied a couple of other prints or originals that he wouldn't have hung in a locked darkroom, much less in the living room of a home with a child.

On his yellow pad he made a note to make sure David Freeman kept the media out of here.  He had to assume the stuff reflected Larry's tastes, not hers.

Downstairs everything was spotless, antiseptic.  The kitchen — a black-and-white checkerboard tile and black-and-white fixtures — looked as though it had never been used.  Copper pots gleamed from their hanging cast-iron rack over the island stove.

The silence hung heavily — Hardy found himself walking on the balls of his feet as he moved through the other downstairs rooms.  The dining room with its black lacquer table and six chairs.  A library with mostly medical books.  No novels, a lot of history and biography.  There was a tiny sitting room with a fireplace and a loveseat with a magazine stand end-table.  But there were no magazines.  A guest bedroom.  Hardy pulled down the quilt on the bed, there was no sheet under it.

He stopped at the bottom of the stairs.  Jennifer had been living here?  There was no sign of life.  He jotted another note to ask her if she had stayed somewhere else during the past months.  And if so, where?

A month after he and Frannie had moved in together he had bought her one of those little tiles at the Ghirardelli Art Fair that read:  A CLEAN HOUSE IS A SIGN OF A WASTED LIFE.  That tile hung proudly in their kitchen.  He didn't need to think he needed to search for where Jennifer kept hers.

Upstairs was more of the same.  To the left was what must have been Matt's bedroom, the bed now made, toys neatly arranged.  The evening sun was going down, bathing the room in an orange glow.  Off this was a full bath, sea-horse stencils on the wall — minimal as it was, so far it was the only sign of any comfort in the house.

Hardy passed the stairway again, stopping to look down at the living and dining rooms below him.  White.  Black.  Mirrors and metal and a growing dusk.  Whatever else he had to do, he wanted to be done and out of here in a hurry.

The master bedroom was a surprise.  The yellow police tape was still there, no longer in place across the door but lying on the rug.  He stepped over it and walked to the middle of the room.

After the police department's technicians had finished with their forensics and the cleaners had repaired the damage, Hardy was suddenly certain that Jennifer had not set foot in this room.  There were folded sheets and blankets on the bed's bare mattress, towels on the cabinet by the bathroom door, balls of dust in the corners.

He didn't know if he imagined the remains of the bloodstains — it was getting darker so he flipped on the overhead light.  It went out with a pop.  There were other lights on night tables on either side of the recessed headboard to the bed, and quickly — jumpy — he got to one of them and hit the button.  That was better.  He walked around the bed and turned on the second one.  Leaning down, he checked the white rug, running his hand over what might have been a stain.  As part of him had known, nothing came up, yet it strangely relieved him.

Hardy stood, more steady than he'd been.  Turning on the adjoining bathroom's light, he looked in.  Again, no sign that anyone had been in there since it had been cleaned.  Turning off the lights by the bed, he stopped at the hallway door for at last glance into the shadowy room where the murders had occurred.

At the end of the hallway there was another door, the last room on the left.  The overhead light, which stayed on this time, revealed an impersonal study with credenza, files, a short bookshelf filled with medical and business periodicals.  The centerpiece of the room was a neatly organized black tabletop desk with a new leather-bound green blotter.  Hardy sat at it.

Evidently no one had been in here either.  The dust was thick on the tabletop.  Hardy wondered if the police had inventoried this room, realizing there may have been no need to.  Jennifer, he remembered, had provided the damning inventory, "forgetting" that the gun was missing.

(And, of course, if she hadn't ever gone back into that bedroom, she might have been able to assume it hadn't been missing.  This could be vital.  He had to ask her, and he scribbled some more.)

Sitting, the sun all but gone now through the louvered window over the desk, Hardy tried to imagine what living here must have been like.  The degree of control and discipline everywhere palpable was, he thought, the kind of environment that could have produced internal, and external, paroxysms, convulsions.  There just wasn't any place for release, even a gradual release.  When emotions got too tightly wound here, they wouldn't unwind, they'd explode.

He had jotted his last notes on his yellow pad on the desk blotter, and as he stared at the rim of the ocean he realized he'd been picking at the blotter with his left hand.  In the upper left corner, under the triangle of leather, a scrap of paper protruded.  He pulled it out.

It was a piece of lined paper from a pocket-sized spiral notebook.  The side was frayed where it had been torn off, which seemed a little out of character for Larry Witt — those irregularities in the edge, Hardy was beginning to suppose, should have been intolerable to him.  He would have cut them off with the precise little scissors on his Swiss Army knife.

He smiled scornfully at his imagination.  There was something more immediate at hand — on the paper was the date "December 23" and the single word "No!!!" which, in addition to the three exclamation points, was underlined twice and circled.  And under that was a telephone number with a 213 area code — downtown Los Angeles.

Hardy dialed the number.

"Law offices."

Naturally, he thought.  He identified himself and asked to speak to the office manager.  His watch read five-fifty on a Thursday night, but law firms never slept — there was no hesitation.  The receptionist said that Ms. Klein would be right with him.

It wasn't immediate but soon enough.  Either Ms. Klein had had an extremely bad day or she was someone Hardy wouldn't want to party with.  "I'm sorry," she was saying, "the message wasn't very clear.  You are?"

Hardy explained again — that he was representing a client in the Bay Area and among the papers in her house had been a document on which he'd found the phone number he'd called.  He wondered what the connection might be.  The firm was?  He figured that he could play her game as well as anyone.

"Crane & Crane.  And your client is?"

"Jennifer Witt."

Ms. Klein paused.  "Well, the name isn't familiar to me."  A tired laugh:  "But that doesn't mean anything."

"How about the name Larry Witt?  He was her husband.  Maybe one of your attorneys would know?  Your managing partner?  Could I…"

Abruptly, her voice seemed to break.  "No.  No, you can't!"  Another pause, so long that Hardy thought she might have hung up.

"Ms. Klein?"

"Oh, oh, I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse me, please, I'm just to myself.  This past week… I shouldn't even be saying this…"

"Is everything all right?"

"No, Mr…. Hardy, is it?  No, everything is not all right."

"I'm sorry," Hardy said.  The tension in these big corporate law firms must be as bad as the rumors, he thought.  "I'll try back later."

"No, later won't do either.  I mean…"  Now a sob broke.  "I'm so sorry, I mean, Mr. Simpson won't be back later.  He's, he was the managing partner.  He's dead.  He was killed."

Mesmerized, Hardy listened as the facts trickled out.  Mr. Simpson was Simpson Crane, lately managing partner of Crane & Crane.  About a week ago he and his wife were gunned down at their home in Pacific Palisades.  Simpson Crane had been an anti-labor attorney and he had been negotiating some contracts.  The suspicion was, she said, that organized labor had hired someone to kill Crane, but the police didn't have many leads and said it was mostly a theory.  Simpson's son, Todd, was now running the firm for the time being, but, as Hardy could imagine, it was a very difficult time.

By the time Hardy hung up it was full dark outside.  He folded the sheet of paper and put it in his wallet.  Leaving the light on in the study, he made his way into the hall and down the stairway, across the marble of the foyer and, blessedly, at last, outside.

"Jesus," he whispered.

*     *     *     *     *

Driving home, partly to escape the feeling of unease that had clung to him at the Witt's, Hardy allowed himself to be disgusted that he had used the word "document" to describe the piece of spiral notebook paper than now resided in his wallet.  He distinctly remembered the first time he'd come on the word "document" in his law studies.  The verbiage, the pretension, the self-conscious importance — in short, everything about the definition struck him as so ludicrous, so plain stupid that he had memorized it (the alphabetical order made it easier), vowing never to become a lawyer who would use it:

"Documents" is used herein in the broadest sense and includes all written, printed, typed, graphic or otherwise recorded matter, however produced or reproduced, including non-identical copies, preliminary, intermediate, and final drafts, writings, records, and recordings of every kind and description, whether inscribed by hand or by mechanical, electronic, microfilm, photographic or other means, as well as phonic (such as tape recordings) or visual reproductions of all statements, conversations or events, and including without limitation, abstracts; address books; advertising material; agreements; analyses of any kind; appointment books; brochures; calendars; charts; circulars; computer cards; contracts; correspondence; data books; desk calendars; diagrams; diaries; directories; discs; drawings of any type; estimates; evaluations; financial statement or calculations; graphs; guidelines; house organs or publications; instructions; inter-office or intra-office communications; invoices; job descriptions; ledgers; letters; licenses; lists; manuals; maps; memoranda of any type; microfilm; minutes; movies; notes; notebooks; opinions; organization charts; pamphlets; permits; photographs; pictures; plans; projections; promotional materials; publications; purchase orders; schedules; specifications; standards; statistical analyses; stenographers' notebooks; studies of any kind; summaries; tabulations; tapes; telegrams; teletype messages; videotapes; vouchers; and working drawings, papers and files.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

And now this piece of paper with a date, a phone number and the word "No!!!" written on it had come out of his mouth, like water through a sieve, without an editing thought, as a "document."

It didn't thrill him.

*     *     *     *     *

Rhea, the woman who resembled Jennifer Witt, had been yelling and swearing into the telephone at her Jimmy for so long that, finally, when the guard had come in and taken the phone from her, hanging it up, she just shook her head and walked silently back to her cell.  Jennifer, in the next cell, propped herself on an elbow on her cot.

"That didn't sound too good."

"That shit!"  After the thirty-second break, Rhea was getting her vocabulary back.  "That cocksucker Jimmer says I've got to wait another
few days
, maybe a
week
in here!  Maybe a week!  Shit!  If he's fucking somebody else I'll kill the son of a bitch."

"What did he say?"  Jennifer hoped her calm would be contagious.  That language was all right when everybody was laughing, teasing, being together.  But when you mixed anger in, it reminded her of too many other times — with Larry, with others, with what came next.  Even hearing Rhea like this, she was getting cramps in her stomach.  She curled her legs up, trying to get comfortable on the stained mattress, trying to keep the cramp from seizing.  "About bail?"