“Yes.”

“Do you know what kind of vehicle the defendant was driving on the day in question, the day her husband died?”

“I believe it was a Mercedes, the small two-door sports coup. Five hundred SL,” he says.

“During the course of your investigation did you happen to check the capacity of the fuel tank on that vehicle?”

“No,” he says.

“Would it surprise you to learn that the model will hold twenty-one point one gallons of fuel, that it gets seventeen miles to the gallon on the highway, that it has a range of over three hundred fifty miles, that it could have traveled between Capitol City and Vacaville more than seven times without refueling?”

“If you say so,” he says.

“But you didn’t check these facts?”

“No,” he says.

“So why are you surprised that you didn’t find gasoline credit card slips for the trip in question?”

“I didn’t say I was surprised, only that we looked.”

“I see,” I tell him, “checking out a real long shot, were you?”

He doesn’t answer this. I don’t expect him to. Some of the jurors are smiling in the box.

Like a trip to the dentist, this is not for Canard to enjoy.

I ask him how many days elapsed before they dusted the lockbox for Talia’s prints. He doesn’t know, but concedes it was several.

I ask him if he has any idea how many real estate agents might have fingered that box in the intervening period. Again he has no idea.

“Did you bother to ask the defendant whether she stopped to eat during this trip, either coming or going?”

“No,” he says.

“I see. It was easier to come here and tell this jury that you tried to verify the defendant’s alibi but could not, is that it, Detective Canard?”

“No,” he says. “We did an up-front job. We tried to verify it and couldn’t.”

“But you never asked the defendant whether she stopped to eat, maybe paid cash for a meal, or maybe she wasn’t hungry, maybe she wanted to wait until she got home to have a late dinner with her husband? You never asked her, did you? You were too busy assuming that because she didn’t cry on command she was guilty of murder.”

“No,” he says.

“Objection, Your Honor. Counsel’s badgering the witness.”

Canard’s stopped trying to ward off the blows, to cover up, now he just wants out. The myopia of their investigation is starting to show, the price a prosecutor pays when under pressure to nail someone in a notorious case. It is my first turn playing spin doctor, beating on the theme of the state’s unseeing obsession with Talia as the only possible perpetrator. And from the expressions I can see on the jurors’ faces, some of them are listening to the music.

CHAPTER 30

Day three of the state’s case and I glimpse a wicked scene. Eli Walker, the dean of yellow journalism, and Jimmy Lama are conversing in the corridor outside the courtroom. Lama is puffing on a cigarette and leaning against the wall, one hand in his pocket. What is more, Walker actually appears sober. This is not strange, I think. Walker and Lama running together, the corrupted reporter and bad cop, each in his own way an outcast of his respective cult.

Lama has not said a word or approached me since his tirade on the steps outside. His deadline has passed, his ultimatum so much bluster. I have made a diligent effort to find Hawley, more to blunt any criticism the court might level at me than to humor Lama, but the lady knows how to lose herself. My guess is she has picked up sticks and moved to another city, perhaps another state.

Harry arrives with Talia. Lately he has been chaperoning her from the office to court while I run diversion by coming in from another door. It seems that the news moguls ask fewer questions, get less pushy when Talia and I are not together.

After the first week they backed away from Harry. Knees and elbows, Harry has his way with the press. Some of the cameramen are beginning to feel as if they’ve been up against the boards with Magic Johnson.

We bull our way into the courtroom, leaving the furor outside the door.

Today, Nelson puts Willie Hampton up. The young janitor is all spiffy, black shirt and white tie, pleated pants, enough material for a hot air balloon, and Italian basket-weave loafers, black sides and white tops, like spats. He looks ready to join Michael Jackson on stage.

This time Hampton is more polished. There is no stumbling, no overt signals from Nelson as to what is expected. It seems Hampton has memorized his script well.

He tells the jury that he found the body and calmly retreated to the reception station, where he called police. The picture he paints is one of composed professionalism, what every building manager dreams of in a four-dollar-and-thirty-cent-an-hour janitor.

Without leading, Nelson extracts from him the only critical element, that Hampton heard the report of the shotgun in Ben’s office at precisely eight-twenty-five P.M., a full hour and twenty minutes after the time of death the medical examiner will determine.

With that Hampton has had his fifteen minutes of fame. Nelson turns him over to me, and I waive off. The cardinal rule of cross-examination. Don’t get up and talk unless there’s a reason. Hampton has done us no harm. No crime, no foul. I let him go, and he seems relieved.

Nelson calls Mordecai Johnson, the evidence technician, to talk about the blood in the elevator and the single strand of hair that looks like Talia’s, caught in the locking mechanism of the shotgun.

“This blood in the elevator,” says Nelson, “from this you can tell that the body was moving or being moved?”

“Yes,” he says. “More likely the body was being moved. The victim would appear to have already been dead.”

“You can tell all this from a single drop of blood?”

“Yes. From the slight quantity of blood available for dripping, we believe that the heart had already stopped. This blood does not appear to have come from an active bleeding site.”

Johnson asks if he can use a chart, and the bailiff pulls a piece of butcher paper off an easel that has been propped near the witness box. Pointer in hand, Johnson does a little play-by-play for the jury.

The chart is a picture of a mammoth black spot against a stark white background, a magnified drop of blood in black and white, a hideous Rorschach. Around the edges on one side of the spot are needlelike comets radiating from the drop. Johnson explains to the jury that the edge characteristics of the drop, the little comets, will indicate the direction of travel whenever free-falling blood hits a smooth horizontal surface. From his examination of the blood in the service elevator, Johnson can conclude that Ben was already dead, and that he was being carried out from the elevator as the drop fell. A few friendly questions from Nelson, and Johnson puts down the pointer and returns to the box.

They’ve changed their tune on the sample of hair since the preliminary hearing. Nelson has been busy trying to shore up this critical piece of evidence, one of the few items linking Talia directly to the crime scene. What he doesn’t know is that we are no longer singing from the same sheet of music on this one either.

“Officer Johnson, can you tell the jury how you discovered this strand of hair?”

“During the laboratory examination of the shotgun found at the scene, we performed a routine examination for fibers and hair on the weapon.”

“And what did you find?”

“A single strand of human hair lodged in the breech of the shotgun.”

“Did you have an opportunity to perform any kind of a comparison of that hair with samples taken from the defendant, Talia Potter?”

“Yes, we took several exemplars of hair from the defendant and performed microscopic comparisons.”

“And what were the results of those comparisons?”

“The strand of hair found lodged in the shotgun matched in all respects the microscopic characteristics of the exemplars taken from the defendant, Talia Potter.”