The Ophelia Cut (53 page)

Hardy stood up. “Your Honor,” he said, “the defense rests.”

F
OR ALL THE
heat and bombast of the trial, on Tuesday morning, the closing arguments from both sides were more or less methodical and anticlimactic.

Stier, going first, laid out the evidence that he’d presented—the eyewitnesses, the blood, the shillelagh impressions, the backstory between McGuire and Jessup, the immediate motive on the Sunday of the crime. He barely mentioned Gina Roake’s testimony except to dismiss it as a feeble attempt to mislead the jury in a last-ditch effort in a losing cause.

For his part, Hardy spent the first chunk of his time talking about the blood on McGuire’s boots and jacket and in his car, which simply had to be dealt with. He segued from that into a lengthy riff on Dr. Paley’s identification issues, arguing once again—the third time the jury had heard it—that if officers administering identification procedures knew or thought they knew the “right” answer, they could and would unconsciously cue an eyewitness to guess the one suspect out of six “correctly.”

Clearly, the officers in the case had been under undue pressure from their chief to identify McGuire and only McGuire as the prime suspect. Their urgency and certainty that Moses was guilty had no doubt conveyed itself to the eyewitnesses, fatally tainting their testimony. Hardy spoke about the physical evidence that the prosecution had not provided: there was no sign—no fingerprint anywhere, no DNA evidence, no fabric evidence, no nothing—that Moses had ever set foot in Jessup’s apartment. This was no small thing, especially considering the violent acts that had gone on there that afternoon.

Finally, he came to the trump play: “Ms. Roake came forward on her own, under great duress. She knew that her testimony, especially its eleventh-hour nature, would subject her to torment and even ridicule. Only
when events in the courtroom had forced her hand did she reluctantly come forward, knowing that the damage she would do to herself and the defendant’s family would be significant. Still, she was willing to pay that price to prevent the conviction of an innocent man.

“Moses himself, meanwhile, had been the victim of his own guilt.

“But it wasn’t murder he was guilty of. If you are to believe Ms. Roake’s sworn testimony, it was adultery. He had made up his mind that he would rather spend time in prison if that meant sparing his wife the pain of learning about his betrayal, or sparing his daughter additional pain about the rape she’d endured and the inconstant, perhaps even evil, nature of men.

“Rather than a coldly calculated trial strategy, as I’m sure Mr. Stier would have you believe, Ms. Roake’s decision could not have been more agonizing to her and to everyone else it affected, and she will have to live with its consequences for the rest of her life. She has accounted for the whereabouts and activities of Moses McGuire on that Sunday afternoon and evening last April. The plain fact is that if you believe Ms. Roake—and remember, this was testimony given under oath—then the absolute truth is that Moses McGuire did not kill Rick Jessup.”

Hardy considered sitting down, but there were a couple of last arguments he felt the jury needed to hear. “Who did kill him, then?” he asked. “We don’t know. What we do know is that Mr. Jessup was a despicable human being whom any number of people might have wanted to kill. Do you seriously think that Brittany McGuire was his only victim, the only woman he ever assaulted? A man who lures her to a bar with drugs in his pocket, coldly planning this most brutal of crimes? What about his other victims? Could not any of them have killed him? What about their lovers? Their brothers? Their boyfriends? Did none of them have a father who became as angry, as upset, as potentially violent as the prosecution claims Moses McGuire became?

“That reaction is a natural one. Any one of us, any one of you, might have had it. But the prosecution in this case never tried to find any of those other people who had the same understandable, if not justifiable, motive to kill this very bad man.

“But that vigilante, the man who killed Rick Jessup, was not, could not have been, Moses McGuire. Moses McGuire was somewhere else
at the time the murder occurred, and now you have heard where that was. Let us remember one last time that there was no physical evidence implicating Mr. McGuire in Mr. Jessup’s apartment.

“Finally, who did those witnesses see walking on the Marina sidewalks, holding something that came to be called a club, the more it got repeated?

“The answer is that they saw a man of average height and average weight in a Giants jacket, jeans, and hiking boots. As you have no doubt noticed sitting here in the same room with him during this trial, Mr. McGuire is of about average height and about average weight. He has brown eyes and brown hair with streaks of gray and no visible distinguishing marks such as tattoos or scars.

“So the eyewitnesses who testified in this trial saw some man who looks like Mr. McGuire, wearing the most popular jacket in the city of San Francisco. We don’t have to know who that man was. We simply have to know that it was not Moses McGuire. And it could not have been. He was not there at that time.

“Remember, it is not up to us, Mr. McGuire’s defense team, to prove that he was not the killer, although we have done precisely that. Rather, it is up to the prosecution to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that among Mr. Jessup’s other victims and their boyfriends and yes, fathers, there was not another man of average height, of average weight, wearing a Giants jacket as common as any garment in the city, with the same motive, who could have—indeed, who must have—committed this crime. They didn’t do that.

“Sadly, because of the politics that have tainted this case at every juncture, they never even tried to do that.

“And that is why, for all of these undeniable reasons, because of all these reasonable doubts, you are obliged by law and your oaths as jurors to find Moses McGuire not guilty. Thank you.”

A
BOUT FORTY MINUTES
later, Hardy and Glitsky were sitting out in the main room at Sam’s. Hardy had brought his martini over from the bar, and Stephano had just served him a glass of cabernet and a veal chop wrapped in bacon. Glitsky, Mr. Low Cholesterol because of his past heart attack, was having grilled petrale with a side of steamed spinach and iced tea.

“You ought to go wild,” Hardy was saying, “and ask Stephano for a lemon wedge.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Who said need? We’re talking pleasure, flavor, good stuff. Lemon goes great on spinach. It’s great in iced tea. It’s great on petrale. Nothing on your plate has any kick to it.”

“I don’t need kick. I’m high on life. Ask anybody.”

“You want, for a buck, I’ll give you a sip of my martini.”

“I don’t want a sip of your martini. How long have we been friends and you keep trying?”

“Friends? We’re friends?”

Glitsky drank some tea. “Better than you and Farrell, I’m guessing.”

“Wes will get over it. What’s he gonna do?”

“I don’t know. Throw you in jail. Have Gomez cite you for contempt or perjury or something.”

Hardy sipped his martini. “Gina’s a very serious woman, I’ll give her that.”

“She or somebody she works with.”

“You’re saying I had something to do with her testimony? You don’t think she’s telling the truth?”

Baleful, Glitsky raised his eyes. “Please.”

“I’m serious.”

After pushing his food around for a second or two, Glitsky put his fork down. “Here’s my concern, and it’s a real one. You think they’re going to let this go, and they’re not. Sher and Brady not only look like fools, you’ve accused them of being sloppy slipshod cops. That’s not going to go away. To say nothing of Vi Lapeer. So they’re going to find something that proves Gina’s lying.”

“Her phone was off that entire afternoon,” Hardy said. “She checked.”

“There! That’s what I’m talking about, that little detail. The bare fact that you know she checked that. Why did she do that? And what about Mose’s phone? Did they have a GPS on that for the day?”

Hardy shook his head. “He didn’t bring it with him that day when he went over to Gina’s. It was at his place all day.”

“You’re sticking with that? Really?”

Hardy popped a bite of veal. “Got to. As far as I know, it’s the truth.”

“It was slick how, just when Gina admitted they’d gotten together—”

“I think she said they’d been intimate.”

“That, too. Right then Susan gets up and leaves the courtroom, right when Moses hangs his head in deep chagrin. It was almost like it was choreographed. To your credit, I think the jury noticed it.”

“The choreography?”

“No. The actual display of emotion.”

Shrugging, Hardy said, “Natural reactions. I hope Moses and Susan don’t break up over it.”

“Just for fun, I’m going to keep at this until I find a crack. But Sher and Brady and Stier, they’ll be at it in earnest until they stop breathing.”

“Well, I wish you luck. Them, too, while I’m at it. But how can you argue with the truth?”

“You’re not giving this up, are you?”

Hardy drank a little more gin. “Probably not. Not that there is anything to give up. But even if there were. No.”

B
EHIND HIS CLOSED
office door, Hardy in his shirtsleeves was throwing darts.

There was no point in pretending that he was going to think about, much less concentrate on, anything else until the verdict came down, which would happen when it happened—today, tomorrow, a week from now.

He was playing a solitaire game, twenty down, and was now on “eleven,” having thrown only four rounds of three, which meant he’d missed twice. He was locked in, a thin current of adrenaline pumping through him, keeping him focused and alert.

As he was pulling his darts from the board, the phone on his desk—his direct line to Phyllis—buzzed, and he went over to pick it up. “Yo.” Phyllis always hated when he did that, which was why he almost always did.

“Mr. McGuire’s wife and daughters are out here to see you.”

“Give me a second and I’ll be right out.” Hardy straightened his tie, put on his suit jacket, and dropped the darts into their place behind the cherry-wood closet that hid his dartboard. Opening his door, he stepped out into the lobby area, across to his in-laws, and hugged them each in
turn, making appropriate noises, leading them into his office, where they could sit and have some space to relax—Susan, Brittany, and her younger sister, Erica, whom he hadn’t seen since the whole thing had begun.

When they’d all taken seats, Hardy offered them water, coffee, tea, wine, anything, and after they all turned him down, he boosted himself onto his desk. “I’m glad you came by. It’s so good to see all three of you hanging together. And this is really the hard part,” he said. “The waiting.”

“This is nothing,” Susan said. “The hard part’s been the last three months. Now it seems that no matter how it comes out, we’re going to be in the middle of more controversy again, Diz.”

“You don’t need to be.” He looked at each of them in turn. “None of you need to be. Are you being hassled by reporters?”

Brittany spoke up. “Only every minute of every day.”

“We just tried to have lunch at Lou’s,” Susan said. “We finally decided maybe we needed to hide out up here. I hope you don’t mind. It was crazy in there.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Hardy said. “That was a good thought, although it might be a while until the verdict comes in. If it drags on, you can all come over to our house and stay with me and Frannie, then come on back in here and hide out more tomorrow, no problem.”

“Well,” Susan said, “actually—”

Her younger daughter cut her off. “That’s not the main thing. The main thing is if Dad really slept with that woman.”

Susan cleared her throat, waited until she had everyone’s attention. “I already told the girls, Diz, that they shouldn’t concern themselves with that. Gina pulled me out of the courtroom and told me what she was going to say, and also that it was a lie.”

Hardy’s eyebrows went up. “She told you that?”

Susan nodded. “Trying to spare my feelings.”

“Right,” Brittany said, “but you know what the problem is with someone who tells you they’re lying?”

Hardy knew. He nodded. “They might be lying about that, too.”

“So what’s the truth?” Brittany asked him. “Do you know?”

“What do you think, Uncle Diz?” Erica asked. “Did he tell you? Do you know for sure?”

“I know what I believe, but I can’t know for sure, Erica.”

“And what’s that?” she pressed. “What you believe?”

But Hardy refused to be drawn into this discussion. “The point,” he said, “is not what I believe. It’s that you don’t need to say anything.”

“But they keep asking . . .” Erica continued.

Hardy nodded, understanding the great vulgar maw of the media and what these women were going through. “Let them ask,” he said. “That’s their job. Your job is not to respond. I’m afraid you’ve got to decide what you believe for yourselves.”

“But,” Erica said, “if Dad didn’t have this relationship with this woman, that means he went and killed Jessup.”

“Not necessarily,” Hardy said. “Maybe somebody else killed him. But listen up. You’re all laboring under the impression that you have to say something, that you have to explain things or even have an opinion. Well, here’s the easy answer: you don’t have to say a word to any of these people. Just say, ‘No comment.’ Whatever they ask you. ‘No comment.’ Not even ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I couldn’t guess’ or anything else. Just ‘No comment.’ ” He broke a tight grin. “You guys want to practice? It takes practice, believe me. It’s weird and unnatural, but it has to happen. If you want, I can ask you questions all afternoon, and you can tell me ‘No comment.’ ”

“But that seems like we’re actually hiding something,” Erica said.

“Like what?” Hardy asked.

“Like we’re covering up for this lie. Gina’s lie.”

“How do you know it’s a lie? Or which part of it is a lie?”

“Dismas,” Susan said, “come on. Am I supposed to tell my friends that the reason I know my husband didn’t kill that man is because he was being unfaithful to me at the time? And I’m okay with that? Hey, it’s no big deal?”