“Why would I kill my best friend?”

“Maybe she knew more than she should have. Maybe she knew enough to prove adultery to your husband and ruin your marriage, not to mention your bank account. All those years with Takahashi wasted if he could enforce the adultery provisions of the prenup. So Leesa had to go, and to keep attention away from you, you framed the husband. You sneaked into his apartment after the deed, dropped the gun in his shirt, smeared some blood on his boot. A perfect frame.”

“You’re being silly.”

“Am I? Or am I so dead-on it’s scary?”

“It’s scary, all right. The thing is, Victor, your motive is empty. I’ve never cheated on my husband.”

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“No, of course not. Why would you? It’s only the truth.” She pulled her hands away from the manicurist. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. I have a meeting.”

“To figure out another lie to tell?”

“One mustn’t become bitter, Victor. Life is full of wonderful surprises, so long as you aren’t looking too hard for them. Like love, when you thought you were incapable. I still have some time here. Why don’t you take over the rest of my appointment? Your hands could use some work, and I don’t even want to imagine your feet.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“No, really, Victor. Take advantage.” She lifted her feet off the pads, slipped them into a set of slippers, stood up from the chair, waved her hands in the air in an effort to dry the polish. “Minh is the best in the city.”

“I’ll pass.”

“You don’t think much of me, do you, Victor?”

“No, actually.”

“Well, I might agree with you. But quick, choose: love or money?”

“Both.”

“And so you have neither. I wasn’t satisfied with that option.”

“I don’t see you going for the daily double,” I said.

“You’re not looking hard enough.” Velma pursed her lips at me as if to air-kiss. “We’re all just trying to get by, Victor. Doing the best to get what we want. Is that so bad?”

“When someone else pays the price.”

“Oh, Victor. Someone is always paying the price. Win a case, and someone else loses. Marry a man, and someone else is heartbroken. Become a saint, and someone else’s beatification is delayed. I didn’t invent the world, I’m just a little girl doing my best.”

And then she was off, out of the curtained cubicle down toward the dressing room, leaving me alone with the two manicurists. I was about to run after her, but what was the point? So I just stood there for a moment and tried to gather my thoughts.

Then one of the women motioned me to the chair.

I shook my head, but she took hold of the fabric of my suit and gently tugged. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the chair as Minh slowly untied my shoe.

56

I was strangely serene when I returned to the office that afternoon. And for some reason I had the bizarre notion to go out and buy a pair of sandals. But Beth, waiting for me in the conference room, wasn’t so calm.

“Are you trying to sabotage this case?” she said. “Because from what I saw today, it looks like you are tossing our client to the wolves.”

“It was all a lie,” I said as I pulled out a chair and sat down. In front of me on the conference table was the photograph of Leesa Dubé, taken before her murder. She was pretty, she was smiling, she was alive. I had stared at that photograph enough over the last few weeks that it had become oddly familiar, like an old friend. And still, after all this, I didn’t know what had really happened to her. All I knew now was that the killer of this lovely woman wasn’t some motorcycle maniac. “The whole story about Clem and Leesa was a lie.”

“How do you know? Maybe Sunshine is lying now. Maybe to get his little deal, he took the stand and said just what Mia Dalton wanted him to say.”

“She wouldn’t put on a lie.”

“But she put on a liar, because if Sunshine was telling the truth today, then he lied to us.”

“Yes, he did.”

“So you didn’t think it was valuable to point that out to the jury?”

“Dalton already did that for us. We can argue it at closing.”

“Oh, that will be effective. Why don’t we save time and let her put on our entire case? Tell me truthfully, Victor. Is this some misguided attempt to save the poor damsel in distress?”

“Is that what you are?”

“You’re no white knight, and I don’t need your help.”

“Beth-”

“Or are you just jealous? Is that it?”

“Maybe I am, a little.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“But that’s not why I did what I did.”

“So then tell me why, Victor, because I don’t understand. How can you be so sure which was the lie and which was the truth? And if you are certain, why didn’t you cross-examine the lying bastard anyway? Any first-year law student could have destroyed Sunshine’s credibility up there. Afterward, we could still have put Velma on the stand to tell her story about Clem. It would have been a she-said-versus-he-said, and he would be a proven liar. It would have been reasonable doubt.”

“It would have been a disaster,” I said.

“What makes you so certain we couldn’t pull it off?”

“Because there’s a tape.”

“A tape?”

“Of Velma asking him to lie, a tape in which she details the story she wants him to tell and he agrees to tell it.”

“Oh,” she said. “A tape.”

“Yeah.”

“Extrinsic evidence of a prior consistent statement.”

“Right.”

“That wouldn’t have been so good, would it?”

“No.”

“Then maybe I was a little out of line.”

“Just a touch.”

Beth might have been angry and confused, but she was always a terrific lawyer and saw the issue right away. If there was indeed a tape of Velma convincing Sonenshein to lie, the rules of evidence prohibited Mia Dalton from playing it during her direct examination. But if in my cross-examination I tried to show that Sonenshein was lying on the stand, suddenly Dalton could play the tape to disprove my point. It’s a bit complicated and legalistic, but suffice it to say that Dalton expected that I would attack her witness, opening the door for her to play the tape for the jury. It was a trap I had barely slipped out of.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Sure enough. It was in the way Sonenshein sat on the stand, smugly confident. It was in the way Dalton stared at me, almost like she was hoping I wouldn’t fall for it. And because it was little Jerry Sonenshein, the AV geek up there. Remember how the bartender at his club said that he was always taping the help, to see if they were stealing? Real James Bond stuff, he said. And remember how wherever we ran into him there was a little flower in a vase that he was always fiddling with, both in the cigar lounge and in his downstairs office? He was taping us, and if he was taping us, he was taping her.”

“That means we can’t use Velma either.”

“Right.” Because Dalton would simply play the tape to refute her story.

“So now we have nothing. We’re in the middle of a murder trial without a strategy, without a theory, without a suspect.”

“But we’ve got each other.”

“Oh, God,” she said as she put a hand over her face. “It’s hopeless.” And then, with her hand still over her face, she began to cry. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t maudlin, it was mostly just a few shakes of her shoulders, but it was enough to tear at my heart. I looked again at the picture of Leesa Dubé, who had once loved François, and then at the woman with apparently the same affliction, crying a few feet away. It was a plague.

“Tell me about your father,” I said quietly.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, shook her head as if she were shaking a rattle, squinted at me. “What?”

“I asked about your father.”

“I heard you,” she said, giving a quick rub to her nose. “What does he have to do with anything? He lives in Cherry Hill, he’s getting a hip transplant, he plays golf.”