*Draft assembled 2026-07-21 — 32746 words* --- # The Case of the Whiskey Island Alibi ### *Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — Book One* ------ ## Prologue: The Drop-In The sleet had come on as rain a little after six and by ten it was striking the windows of the twenty-third floor in long diagonal hisses. Irene Miller stood with her back to it and watched a woman come apart in front of her. She had turned off the overheads an hour ago, when it became clear this was going to be a long one, and left only the green-shaded desk lamp burning. In its amber pool sat Vivian Novak, on the front two inches of the client's chair, both hands wrapped around a waitress's apron as if it were a small animal that might bolt. She had been sitting like that for the better part of forty minutes, and in that time Irene had brought her coffee she did not drink, a glass of water she did not touch, and every reasonable argument she owned. None of it had landed. "I'm going to say it one more time," Irene said, in the even, unhurried voice she used on desk sergeants and process servers, "and then I'm going to stop saying it, because I don't like repeating myself and you don't like hearing it. You call the police. Tonight. You hand them that gun, you tell them exactly what you told me, and you let them do the worrying. An innocent person's best friend is the truth told early." "You don't understand." Vivian wound the apron strings once around her finger and let them go. She was perhaps twenty-eight, with the kind of face that would have been striking under better circumstances — dark, deep-set eyes that went around a room like a set designer's, cataloguing where the light fell and where it didn't. Right now those eyes kept sliding to the office door. "You don't understand what it's like to have them look at you. Once they've decided. Once you're the — the story they've already agreed on." "I understand better than you'd think." "They came to the theater with a warrant, Miss Miller. Two of them. In front of everyone. Made me open my locker, my purse, my — and there was nothing, because I hadn't *done* anything, but that didn't matter. For three weeks I was the girl who stole from the children's fund. My picture in the *Press*. And then when it turned out it was somebody in the box office all along, do you know what I got? A paragraph. Page eleven. No picture." Her voice had climbed. She brought it down herself, deliberately, the way you'd lower a hot pan onto a trivet. "I know what it is to have them decide. I won't walk into a police station and hand them a *gun*." Irene let the silence hold. Outside, the sleet ticked at the glass. She had, in years of gatekeeping this office, developed a fairly reliable instrument for telling the guilty from the merely unlucky, and everything about the woman in the chair read as unlucky. "All right," Irene said. "Then you'll tell it to him, and he'll tell you the same thing I have, and maybe it'll take from him because he charges for it." "You said he'd come." "I said he'd come." She glanced at the brass clock on the credenza. "Mr. Sterling doesn't keep evening hours for anyone with a checkbook. He kept them for you because I asked. Try to remember that when he walks in." She had, in fact, tracked him down at a dinner he'd been glad to leave, and she'd have felt worse about it if the woman on the other end of the telephone hadn't been half a breath from screaming. There were nights the switchboard closed and the building emptied and a genuine emergency came up the elevator anyway, and you learned to tell those from the other kind — the drunk husbands, or the men who wanted a lawyer at ten at night mostly to have an audience. This wasn't that. Irene had known it wasn't that within thirty seconds of picking up. The outer door opened. It did not open loudly — Vance Sterling was not a man who announced himself with hardware — but the room changed anyway, the way a room changes when weather comes into it. He was a large man, broad through the shoulders and in no hurry about anything, still wearing his good overcoat with the sleet melting off it in dark commas. He set his hat on the rack without looking at the rack. His eyes had already gone to the chair. "Miss Novak," he said, and the name arrived on a baritone that came up out of the floor. It was a voice built for large rooms, and he had a courtroom trick of using only a fraction of it, so that you always had the sense of a reserve held back, a further gear he had chosen, for now, not to engage. "I'm Sterling. Forgive the coat. I came directly." Vivian half rose, uncertain what the etiquette was for a thing like this. He waved her back down with two fingers, shrugging out of the overcoat as he came around the desk, and Irene took it from him without being asked and hung it beside his hat, and neither of them acknowledged the handoff because they had long since stopped needing to. Sterling did not sit behind the desk. He drew the second client's chair around so that it faced Vivian's at a slight angle — close, but not squared off — and lowered himself into it, and for a moment he simply looked at her, taking a reading off the surface of things. "Irene's given me the shape of it over the telephone," he said. "But telephones lie by leaving things out. So tell it to me again, from the top, and leave nothing out because you think it makes you look foolish. In my experience the foolish-looking parts are usually the true ones. The polished parts are what people rehearse." Vivian looked at Irene, who gave her a small nod, and then she told it. She was a designer, she said — sets, mostly, and some costume work, though costume work was where the money was and the money wasn't much. She waited tables at the Ambassador, the diner on Euclid across from the Palace, to keep the lights on between shows. Everyone at the Ambassador had a locker in the back hall by the walk-in, and everyone's locker had a padlock, and hers was a good one, a brass Yale her father had given her when she moved into the city because he did not trust Cleveland to leave a young woman's things alone. She had worn the only key on a chain around her neck for four years. Tonight she had come off the dinner rush at nine, gone to her locker to change out of her uniform, and found the padlock hanging open. "Not broken," she said. "Open. Hanging on the hasp like I'd left it that way, except I never leave it that way, I've never once left it that way in four years." Her hands had begun to work at the apron again. "And I thought, all right, all right, somebody's a thief, count your tips. But my tips were there. Everything was there. And then I picked up my apron to bring it home to wash, and it was — heavy. Wrong. There was something in the front pocket." She stopped. "Show him," Irene said quietly. Vivian laid the apron across her knees and, with the exaggerated care of someone handling a thing she is afraid of, folded back the flap of the wide front pocket that waitresses use for order pads and rolls of quarters. She did not reach inside. She simply opened it and tipped it slightly toward the lamp so the two of them could see what was there. The gun caught the amber light along its short barrel. A snub-nosed revolver, blued steel gone a little gray at the muzzle, the checkering on the grip worn smooth. A .38, Irene thought, or near enough — she had typed up enough of Cruz's reports to know the family if not the individual. It sat in the pocket of the apron with an obscene ordinariness, the way dangerous things do when you find them somewhere domestic. A snake in a mailbox. Sterling did not reach for it either. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at it for a long moment as he might a document opposing counsel had entered into evidence — reading it, but reading also the fact that it had been offered to him, and by whom, and to what end. "Is it loaded?" he asked. "I don't know. I didn't — I couldn't make myself touch it. I closed the locker and I put the whole apron in my bag and I walked to the car with it and I sat there in the lot for I don't know how long, and then I drove home, and then I couldn't go inside, so I sat in the car some more, and then I called the bar association referral line and they gave me three names, and Miss Miller answered at the second one." She said it in a rush, all one breath, the way you confess a thing. "I know how it sounds. I know exactly how it sounds. A gun *appears* in my locker that I keep locked and I decide the whole world's against me. But somebody opened that lock, Mr. Sterling. Somebody I've never seen put that in there for me to find, or worse, put it there for somebody *else* to find, and after last spring I —" She stopped. Started again, lower. "I can't be the girl in the paper again. It'll be the last time. There won't be a page-eleven correction the second time. Everybody already knows the story on me now. All somebody has to do is remind them." The office was quiet except for the sleet and the small tick of the radiator. "May I?" Sterling said, and this time he did reach — not for the gun but for the apron, drawing it gently off her knees and onto the desk. He took a pencil from the cup and used the eraser end to nose the revolver over, far enough to read the stamping on the flat of the frame and to bring the face of the cylinder around into the light, where five brass circles sat in their chambers. He held it there a moment. Then he set the pencil down and left the thing where it lay, in the pocket, in the cloth. "It's loaded," he said. "And it hasn't been fired recently — no smell to it, and the barrel's clean. So it was put in your locker whole and ready. That's worth knowing." He said it flatly, a fact among facts, but Irene saw the particular stillness come over him that meant a piece had gone into a slot somewhere in that architectural mind. *Ready.* "Miss Novak," he said, sitting back. "I'm going to tell you three things, and then I'm going to give you two instructions, and I'd like you to do the instructions even though your whole body is going to tell you to argue with them. Can you manage that?" She nodded, mute. "First thing. Irene is right. In nine cases out of ten, the correct move is to call the police tonight, hand them the weapon, and tell the truth before anyone can shape it for you. She gave you good counsel and you should know that she did." He let that sit, a small act of loyalty performed in front of the client, and Irene looked at the window and pretended not to have heard it. "Second thing. This may be the tenth case. You've told me the lock was open, not forced. That means whoever did this either had a key or had the skill and the patience to defeat a good padlock in a back hallway where the whole staff comes and goes. It was deliberate, and it was aimed at you specifically." "So we're not calling them." "We are calling them. In the morning, and I'll do it myself, and I'll walk that revolver into Captain Thorne's office and put it in his hand." He said it without any particular emphasis, which was how Irene knew he'd already decided it an hour ago on the telephone. "I want you to hear the distinction, because it will matter later even if it doesn't matter tonight. I am not going to sit on this. I am going to decline to hand the only physical object in the whole affair to the department that put your face in the *Press* over the box-office fund until I can hand it to them along with the name of whoever opened your locker. Cruz — my investigator — will have that by noon or he'll have the reason he doesn't. Evidence given up naked gets read however the reader likes. Evidence given up with an explanation attached is a good deal harder to misuse." "Third thing," Sterling said, more gently. "You are not going to be the girl in the paper again. Not while I have the file. That's not a comfort I'm handing out to settle you down. It's a professional opinion, and I don't give those away, so consider yourself billed." Vivian let out a breath that was half a laugh and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "Now the instructions." He rose, and the room reorganized itself around the fact of him standing. "The gun stays here tonight. It goes in my safe, and nobody touches it again until it goes across Thorne's desk in the morning. That's the first instruction, and it's the easy one, because all it requires is that you leave something behind." He crossed to the far wall, where a dull landscape of the old Superior Viaduct hung in a heavy frame, and swung it back on a hinge Vivian clearly hadn't suspected, revealing the steel face of a wall safe. He began working the dial without hurry. "Second instruction is the hard one, because it requires you to spend a night somewhere that isn't your own bed, and the whole point of your own bed is that you know where all the exits are." He spoke to the safe, his back to them, the dial ticking under his fingers. "You are not going home tonight. If someone went to this much trouble to put a loaded gun where you'd find it, I'd rather you not be at the address they can look up in the telephone book while I figure out what they want. There's a motel out in Lakewood — the Bay Vista, on Clifton. Quiet, and the man at the desk knows better than to have opinions about who checks in after dark. Irene will call ahead so there's a room in your name spelled however you like it. You'll go straight there, and you'll answer the door for nobody until you hear from this office in the morning. Can you do that?" "I — yes." Vivian was on her feet now too, gathering herself, the crisis of decision past and the smaller crises of departure rushing in to fill the space — where was her coat, where were her keys, what did one do with one's hands. "Yes. Thank you. I don't — thank you." "Thank me when it's over and the bill's fair." The safe door came open with a well-fed *chunk*. "Irene, would you—" "Already going." Irene was crossing to the coat tree by the door, where Vivian's damp trench coat hung dripping onto the parquet. She held the coat up and Vivian turned to put her arms into it, and reached back across the desk for her belongings — keys, the small clutch of her handbag, the apron. She folded the apron against her body as she shrugged into the coat, edges to the middle, a waitress's automatic fold, four years of muscle memory, and pushed it down into the mouth of the heavy tote bag on top of everything else. The bag was already heavy with the day. Irene straightened the coat's collar at the nape of her neck. On the desk, in the amber pool of the lamp, a faint clean rectangle lay in the dust of the blotter. "You have the address? The Bay Vista, on Clifton," Irene said, walking her to the door with a hand light between her shoulder blades. "You'll see the sign from Clifton, it's shaped like a sailboat, you can't miss it even in this. Straight there. Door locked. Nobody till morning." "Straight there," Vivian repeated, like a line she was learning. At the threshold she turned back. "You're sure I shouldn't just—" "I'm sure of very little at this hour," Irene said. "But Mr. Sterling is sure, and he's wrong less often than anyone I've met, and I've met a great many people. Go on. It's late and the roads are worse than they look." Vivian Novak went out into the corridor, and the elevator arrived with a soft chime, and Irene stood in the doorway until the doors had closed on her — a pale, tired woman holding a heavy bag against her chest, going down twenty-three floors into the storm — and then she stepped back inside and shut the office door against the draft. Sterling had gone back to the desk and was reaching for the yellow pad, the client's face and the client's trouble organizing themselves into the first spare notes of a matter he intended to win. "Frightened woman, straight story, opened lock." He clicked his pen. "Somebody's building something and she's the ground they mean to build it on. First thing, put Cruz on that locker room. I want a list of everyone with keys to the back hall, everyone let go in the last six months, and anyone at that diner who's come into money he can't account for. Whoever opened a good padlock and closed it again behind him wanted her to find that gun and go to pieces. I'd like to know what he expected her to do next — and I'd like to know it before I'm standing in Thorne's office at nine o'clock with nothing in my hands but the gun." "I'll leave it on his desk tonight." Irene crossed to switch off the lamp, then paused, some obscure instinct making her glance at the safe, still standing open behind its swung-back frame. It looked, she thought, oddly bare. But it was late, and she was tired, and she had been at the door with the client while he finished at the wall, and Sterling had never once been wrong about a thing he'd said in that flat, certain voice. She reached in and swung the heavy door shut, spun the dial, and let the ugly painting fall back over the steel. The lamp went off. In the sudden dark the window filled with the city — the smeared lights, the sleet coming down in long silver strokes past twenty-three floors of stone. Below, a yellow Nova came out of the Terminal garage with its wipers laboring, turned west toward Lakewood, and was gone into the weather inside of a block. Irene watched the place where it had been for a moment longer, and thought that it was a good plan, well made, and that the woman would sleep tonight. --- ## Chapter 1: The Detour *Straight there. Door locked. Nobody till morning.* Vivian had it down to those seven words by the time she came off the ramp onto the Shoreway, and she said them out loud at intervals, because saying them out loud was a job and the job kept her hands steady on the wheel. The Nova's wipers could not keep up. They dragged the sleet into gray arcs and cleared a strip of windshield about the size of a paperback, and she drove looking through that strip and nothing else. She felt better. That was the strange part. An hour ago she had been sitting in a parking lot unable to make herself go into her own building, and now a large man in a wet overcoat had told her where to sleep, and she felt better. The brake lights came up ahead of her in a long red smear. She slowed, then slowed more, and then she was stopped, third car back in a line that ran forward around the bend and out of sight. Nobody was moving. A man two cars up got out, stood in the weather looking ahead with his hand shielding his eyes, and got back in. Vivian rolled the window down two inches. Cold came in and with it a sound she couldn't place, a flat rhythmic hissing, and then she saw the flares. They were laid in a line across all three lanes, maybe two hundred yards up, and they were beautiful, which was an insane thing to think and she thought it anyway. Road flares burn a red that doesn't exist anywhere else. She had spent four hundred dollars of a theater's money once trying to get a gel to do what a road flare does for a dollar ten. Beyond them a freight truck lay over on its side across the eastbound lanes with its trailer split open, and the whole scene was lit from below and behind by a fire truck's headlights, so that every man working it threw a shadow forty feet long up the embankment. Then the shadows moved and she saw the police cars. There were four of them. They had the westbound lanes down to one, and a patrolman in a slicker was leaning into each car at the front of the line, one after another, waving some through and holding others, and the ones he held were pulling onto the berm. *Identification*, she thought. He's going to want to see something. She reached across to the passenger seat and pulled the tote bag into her lap and put her hand down into it for her wallet. Her fingers went past the makeup case, past the roll of drafting pencils in their rubber band, past the paperback she had been not-reading for three weeks. Then cloth. Then, inside the cloth, cold. She knew what it was before her hand closed on it — the drop you get from a stair that isn't there. *I brought the apron.* That was the first thought and it was almost mild, almost administrative, the sort of thing you think when you realize you've walked out of a restaurant with the pen. *I brought the apron home to wash. I've brought that apron home three hundred times. I reached for it and I brought it, and it was on his desk, and the gun was in it, and he never took the gun out of it, he only turned it over with a pencil, he never took it out, so the gun was in the apron on the desk and I picked up the apron and the gun came with the apron and it is in this bag, it is in this bag right now, in a line of cars, in front of four police cars, and there is a patrolman in a slicker coming down the line, and I am the girl who stole from the children's fund, and I am sitting here with a loaded gun that appeared in my locker three hours ago, and there is no sentence. There is no sentence I can say. I have gone over it and there isn't one. "A lawyer put it in his safe" — it isn't in his safe. "I didn't know it was there" — nobody has ever said that and been believed, not once, not in the history of anybody saying it. He will ask me to open the bag and I will open the bag because what else do you do, and then it will be exactly the same as the theater except this time it will be true. This time they will be right.* The line moved up one car length. She put the bag on the floor and pushed it under the passenger seat with her heel, which accomplished nothing, and she knew it accomplished nothing while she was doing it. The exit sign was maybe sixty feet ahead on the right, and the berm was open, and she took it. She did not decide to. She was aware, afterward, that there had been no moment of deciding. She was in the line and then she was on the ramp, and the ramp curved down and away to the right and put the flares behind her, and her heart went off like something dropped down a stairwell. --- Down here there were no lights. She had been on this road maybe twice in her life, both times in daylight, both times lost. It ran flat along the bottom of everything, between chain-link on the left and a black embankment on the right, and past the fence there were shapes she could only half-resolve: conical piles forty feet high that had to be salt or coal, a line of hopper cars sitting dead on a siding, and, further out toward the water, the ore unloaders — those things, the huge riveted iron ones on legs, with the long jointed arms hanging down over the slips. In daylight they looked like machinery. At night, in this, they looked like a row of animals bent over drinking, and she thought, with a small clear part of her mind that was apparently still working, *I would build that. I would build exactly that.* The road surface changed under the tires from asphalt to something looser. Gravel, then gravel and mud. She should turn around. She knew the Shoreway was up there and she knew the roadblock would clear in twenty minutes and she could sit somewhere and wait it out. Except sitting somewhere was sitting in a car with a gun in it, and the whole reason — Headlights came up behind her. They were a good distance back and they were not gaining, and she watched them in the mirror and made herself count to ten. Then they went out. Not dimmed. Out. The road behind her went black, and stayed black, and the shape that had been a pair of headlights was still coming, and now she could only tell it was there by the piece of the world it blocked. *Police don't do that.* That was the whole of the thought and it arrived complete. *Police put lights on. Police put every light they own on.* Which meant it wasn't police, and if it wasn't police at midnight on a road with no reason to be on it, then it was the other thing, the thing that had opened a good padlock in a back hallway and closed it again behind itself. He had been there when she came off shift. He had been in the lot when she sat in the lot. He had been outside the Terminal Tower for two hours in the rain and he had followed her onto the Shoreway and he had followed her down here, and he wanted the gun back, or he wanted her, and either way there was nobody on this road, nobody, not a light, not a watchman, not a — She put her foot down. The Nova was nine years old and it did what it could. The back end came loose on the gravel and she caught it, and the shapes past the fence started going by faster, and the thing behind her closed the distance like the distance was nothing. It came up on her left side. She saw it at the last as a wall of darker dark with a strip of chrome down it, a big car, a heavy one, and it did not pass. It came over. The sound was enormous and it went on far too long — metal dragging along metal, a shriek that ran the whole length of her door and then stopped and then started again as he came back into her a second time. The wheel tried to leave her hands. She got it back. The right front tire dropped off the edge of the gravel into the mud and she hauled it up out of the ruts and the fence came at her and went away again, and the big car was still there, still alongside, pushing, patient about it. She was going to go off the road. She understood it in a completely calm way, with the same flat certainty she'd have had about which direction a set piece was going to fall. The bag was on the floor by her right foot. She got it by a strap and hauled it up into her lap one-handed, and she got her hand into it, into the cloth, and the thing came out heavier than she expected and wrong-shaped in her fist. She had never held one. She had never even seen one this close before tonight. Her left hand cranked the window down — three turns, four, it took forever, it took a year — and the cold and the noise came in together, and she put her left arm out backward into the rain with the gun in it and turned her face away and pulled. Nothing happened. She pulled harder, with her whole hand. She had not known it would be like that inside a car. The noise wasn't a noise, it was a thing that hit her, and the flash took her night vision away completely, so that the windshield and the road and the fence were simply gone and there was a green-white blank where they had been. She heard, a beat later, a flat metallic bang from somewhere behind her, like a hammer coming down once on a car door. She pulled again. The second one she barely heard. The second one she felt in her teeth. And she did not hear it hit anything at all. Then she was driving blind, actually blind, with her arm still out the window and her foot still down, and she pulled her arm in and dropped the gun somewhere and got both hands on the wheel and drove into a green blank for what could not have been more than two seconds and felt like the rest of her life. Behind her, and to the left, there was a sound of a large object changing its mind. Tires losing gravel. A long scrape. Then nothing for a moment — an actual gap of silence, which was the worst part, because she had time inside it to understand that a gap of silence meant the ground had stopped being under something. Then the water. Not a splash. A single deep slap, and after it a sound of settling, a long swallowing. Her sight came back in patches. The road was there. The fence was there. In the mirror there was nothing at all — no lights, no shape, no dark thing where the world was blocked, just the road going back empty into the rain. She did not stop. --- The gas station was closed but the lot was lit and the payphone on the corner of the building worked. She had to try twice because the first time she couldn't make her hand let go of the receiver long enough to get the dime in. He answered on the second ring, which meant he was still at the office. Not as late, then, as it felt. "Sterling." "It's — this is Vivian Novak. Miss — from tonight. The apron. I'm sorry, I know you said the morning, I know you said, but I have to tell you now because if I don't tell you now I'm going to decide not to, and I can feel myself already deciding not to." A pause of about one second. "Where are you." Not a question, the shape a sentence makes when a man has already stood up. "A gas station. Clifton, I think, I'm close, I'm almost there, I can see the sign for it, the sailboat one — I have the gun. I took the gun. It was in the apron and I picked up the apron and it came, and I didn't know until the roadblock, and there was a roadblock and I got off the road and there was a car with no lights and it hit me, it hit me twice, it was pushing me off, and I—" She stopped. The sleet came down through the lot lights in long strings. "Miss Novak." "I fired it. Twice. Out the window. Behind me, I wasn't — I didn't aim it at anything, I just wanted him to stop, and he went off the road. Into the water. I think into the water. I didn't stop. Mr. Sterling, I didn't stop." She heard him breathe out. "Listen to me very carefully," he said, and the voice was doing the thing it had done in the office, the reserve, the further gear held back. "Are you injured." "No." "Is the weapon in your possession." "It's on the seat. It's on the floor. I dropped it. It's in the car." "Go to the motel. Do not stop anywhere else, do not speak to anyone, and do not touch that revolver again — leave it where it lies and leave the car locked. From this moment you say nothing about tonight to anybody, including the man at the desk, including me on this line. We're finished on this line. Do you understand what I'm telling you?" "Yes. Are you — are you coming?" "Not tonight." He said it without any softening at all. "There is a car in the water on a road nobody uses, and by six o'clock the police will have decided what happened on it. I intend to be standing there while they decide. Cruz will be at your door at first light and not before." "Oh," she said. "Say it back to me." "Motel. Don't stop. Don't touch it. Say nothing." "Go." --- The sign really was shaped like a sailboat. She had thought Irene was making a point about how tired everyone was. The man at the desk had opinions about nothing, exactly as advertised. He took her money and gave her a key on a diamond of orange plastic and went back to a small television, and she carried the tote bag up the outside stairs with both arms around it. Room fourteen smelled like cigarettes and radiator. She locked the door and put the chain on and stood with her back against it. She had brought the gun in. She could not remember deciding to do that either. It had been in the car and he had said leave it in the car and she had come up the stairs with the bag and the bag had the apron in it and the apron had the gun in it, and here it was, in a motel room in Lakewood, three feet from the bed. She got it out with two fingers and set it down on the coverlet because she could not make herself put it anywhere that would require holding it longer. It sat there. It looked exactly as ordinary as it had looked on the desk. Then she sat on the edge of the mattress with her coat still on and her hands between her knees and waited for it to be morning, because a man she had met two hours ago had told her to wait for morning, and she had spent the last twelve hours discovering that she had no better ideas than anyone else's. --- ## Chapter 2: What the River Gave Back The winch had been screaming for seven minutes and the car had come up about four feet. Cruz stood at the edge of the light with his collar up and watched the cable. It was a two-part line off a boom truck that had no business on a pier this old, and the operator was running it too fast for the angle he had, and every so often the whole rig would shudder and take a half inch of bite out of the timber it was parked on. Cruz had spent years watching men lift heavy things out of cold water and he could have told the man three things that would have gotten the car up in half the time. He kept his mouth shut. Nobody out here wanted anything from him. The Lincoln came out nose-down and streaming, black under the mud, water pouring off the rocker panels in sheets and then in strings and then not at all. "There it is," Sterling said beside him. "There it is." They had made it from downtown in nineteen minutes, which Cruz knew because he had looked at the clock when the phone rang and looked at it again when they parked, and because nineteen minutes at that hour in that weather told him Sterling had not driven like a man who had a choice about coming. The phone call had been short. *A client of mine fired two shots on an unlit road off the Shoreway tonight and a car went into the water. She was somewhere between the roadblock and Clifton and there is exactly one stretch of road in that gap. Bring your camera and your tape and do not say one word to anybody.* Cruz had asked one question. *We defending or investigating?* *Ask me in an hour.* Now there were four cruisers and a coroner's wagon and a photographer working under portable floods on tripods, and the whole muddy apron of the pier was lit up like a movie set and going white in the sleet. Past the lights, out toward the lake, Cruz could make out the shape of the old Coast Guard station on its point, dark, sagging, still standing. He had walked out of that building at six in the morning more times than he could count. Thorne saw them at about the same moment Cruz saw Thorne. He came over unhurried, in a hat that had stopped being waterproof sometime during the Truman administration, and he stopped about six feet away and looked at the two of them for a while before he said anything. "Counselor." "Captain." "It's twenty past one in the morning." "It is." "There's a car in my river and a wrecker on my pier and I've had this scene for thirty-five minutes." Thorne's voice never went up. That was the thing about him. "How long have you had it?" "Forty," Cruz said. Sterling did not look at him. Thorne did, for a second, and there was something in it that wasn't quite hostility. "You want to tell me how that happens?" "I want to tell you a number of things," Sterling said. "Later today, in your office, at whatever hour you name, and there will be a great deal of it. Tonight I want to stand here and watch, and I want my investigator to take photographs from public ground, and I want you to understand that I am not going to lie to you at any point in this and that I am also not going to answer that question at one twenty in the morning." Thorne thought about it. Sleet came down between them. "Public ground's back of that fence," he said, and walked away. "That went well," Cruz said. "That went as well as it could have. He didn't tell us to leave." "He didn't tell us anything." "No," Sterling said. "He told us he's got thirty-five minutes and a body, and he told us he'd rather have us where he can see us. Go work." --- Cruz worked. He did it out of habit more than plan, because at one in the morning with no theory of the case you don't know what matters, so you take everything and you sort it later. He had learned that on hulls. You measure the whole compartment because the crack is never where the man tells you the crack is. So: the pier. Timber crib construction, filled with slag, faced with steel plate that had rusted through in a dozen places. No bull rail on the last thirty feet — it had been pulled or it had rotted off. It fronted a dead slip, not the channel: an old ore berth silted up and closed off years back, the kind of shallow forgotten corner a working dock keeps a dozen of. The deck sat maybe two and a half feet above the water, which was low and going lower, and the water at the pier edge ran four feet at the outside over a bottom of soft mud that had taken the Lincoln nose-first and meant to keep it. He put his tape down it twice in different spots and wrote both numbers. The car had gone off nose-first at an angle to the pier face, not square. He could see the gouge. It ran about twelve feet, cut down through wet gravel into the mud beneath, deepest at the outboard end where the left front tire had dug in and thrown a berm of gravel up onto the timber. A car that had been braked hard and turned hard, in that order, and had lost the back end doing it. He photographed the gouge from four positions with a scale in the frame, because a gouge is gone the first time somebody drives on it and this one had a wrecker parked ten feet from it. Across the access road from the pier the ground fell away toward a second slip, older and dead, and a row of creosote mooring piles stood up out of the cattails where nobody had tied a boat since before he was on the lake. Cruz walked the near edge of it with the lantern because he walked everything, and wrote *old ore slip — pilings — far side of road* and thought no more about it. Then the cars. He got the Lincoln's height off the roofline with the tape, standing on the running board of the wrecker to do it, and a detective told him to get down, and he got down and wrote the number. Fifty-four and a half inches, near enough, and that was a car sitting on flat tires with a bellyful of river. Dry and on its springs it was five foot even. A Continental was a lot of automobile. He did not have a Nova to measure. He wrote down that he needed one. He also wrote down: *why does that matter?* — and underlined it, and did not have an answer, and kept measuring. The paint was the last thing he got, and he only got it because the photographer wanted it too and Cruz stood behind the man's shoulder while he shot it. Down the Lincoln's left flank, from the front fender through both doors and dying out at the quarter panel, there was a long ragged scar in the black, and standing up out of it in ridges and smears was a color that even under a portable flood in the rain was obviously, stupidly yellow. Two contacts. Cruz could see the break in the middle where the cars had separated and met again. Whoever had been driving the black car had gone over, backed off, and gone over a second time. The second one was harder. He wrote that down too. --- The watchman was sixty-some and had a thermos and a company jacket two sizes too big, and he had been telling his story to policemen for an hour and had reached the stage of telling it well. "Two," he said. "Two shots. I'll say it as many times as you want." "I believe you," Cruz said. "How long between them?" The man considered that. He appreciated being asked something new. "Not long. Not — bang bang, not like that. But close. Time to say a word." "Then what?" "Then the engine, real loud, and the tires going, and then the other thing." He rolled the cap of the thermos in his hand. "You don't hear a car go in the water and think it's a car. It's not a splash. It's a — it's like a door slamming underneath you." "Yeah," Cruz said. "It is." "You been around it?" "Some." "Then you know." The old man drank. "Two shots. That's what I told him and that's what I'm telling you and it don't change." Cruz wrote *2* and circled it and did not know why, except that a man who has been asked the same question a dozen times and gives you the same answer every time is either honest or a professional, and this one was not a professional. --- They brought Arthur Davis out at twenty past one. It took four of them and it was ugly, and Cruz watched because that was the job, and because he had found that not watching cost more later. The body came out of the driver's side, which the detectives said out loud twice, and it came out heavy and slack and wrong-jointed, and it had been in cold water long enough to stop being a man in anybody's imagination. They put him on the tarp and the coroner's man crouched over him with a flashlight, and Thorne crouched on the other side, and for a while nobody said anything. Then Thorne said, loud enough to carry, which Cruz was fairly sure was deliberate: "That's a gunshot wound." The photographer came in over them. The flash went off twice, three times, and in the white of it Cruz saw the side of the dead man's head very clearly, one frame at a time, like slides. "Right temple," the coroner's man said. "In and not out, feels like. He's got a — hold the light. He's got an angle on him." "Say it." "It's going down. Front to back a little, and down. Not much, but it's down." "From where?" "Captain, I'm going to tell you that at nine o'clock tomorrow morning with him on a table and not standing in the rain." "Say it anyway." The man was quiet a second. "Above him. Somebody was above him." Cruz stopped writing. He looked at the Lincoln, sitting there on its flat tires with the river still running out of it. A wound in the right temple, going down, from above — not from a small yellow car running out ahead in the dark, but from a man's own right side, close, with somebody standing over him. And Arthur Davis had come out from behind the wheel, which the detectives had said out loud twice. A man shot from his passenger side, found driving. Cruz did not know what to do with any of it. He thought: *above him.* He did not have a case yet. He did not have a theory. He had a number in a notebook and a bad feeling with no shape to it. But he stood in the sleet on that pier at two in the morning and thought, quite distinctly: *whatever they think happened here did not happen here.* --- The yard man showed up around then and made a nuisance of himself about the wrecker. He was a big one — bigger than Cruz, thick through the chest and neck, in a dry canvas coat with a yard patch on the shoulder, and he wanted somebody to know that the pier was condemned and the truck was over its rating and that if the deck went, that was the company's problem and not his. One of the detectives took him twenty feet away and let him talk. Cruz half-listened. He was mostly thinking about the doors. But he had been reading men for a living for a while, and something registered and got filed without ever quite arriving: the coat was dry, and the cap was dry, and the hair under the cap was soaked flat to the man's skull. Which meant nothing. It was the fourth hour of freezing rain. Every human being on that pier was soaked to the skull, and half of them had found a dry coat somewhere. Cruz went back to reading the flank of the car. He wanted the doors. He wanted the whole car, actually — an hour with a lamp and a scraper and nobody talking to him — because a car that has been hit twice in the side and put in a river is a document, and he could read it, and nobody else out here was going to. But the Lincoln was six inches deep in Cuyahoga mud from the beltline down, and the police photographer was shooting it wet, and the whole back half of it was a smooth brown nothing. He walked over anyway. "Captain," he said. "Ten minutes with a light." "No." "I'll stand where you tell me to stand." "No." "It's going to sit in a lot for six weeks and rust while somebody types." "Probably." Thorne didn't turn around. "It's my car, Cruz. It's the state's car. It's not your car, and it's a long way from being your lawyer's car, and if it ever becomes his car it'll be because a judge said so in writing and not because you were charming at two in the morning." He turned around then. "You want it, come get it the right way." "That's what I figured you'd say." "Then why'd you ask?" "So you'd have to say it out loud in front of a witness," Cruz said, and Thorne almost — almost — laughed. --- The radio call came at twenty past two. Cruz was close enough to a cruiser to catch about half of it, and he got the rest from watching Thorne's back, which stiffened by degrees — a man taking delivery of the thing he'd been waiting for and finding it worse than he'd ordered. Yellow. Fresh damage on the driver's side, front to rear. Black transfer in the paint. And an address. Thorne stood there a second longer with the mike in his hand. Then he came across the mud to where Sterling was standing at the fence line with his hat in the weather and his hands in his overcoat pockets, and he stopped in front of him and said it without any preamble at all, watching his face while he did it. "Bay Vista Motel. Out on Clifton." Cruz was ten feet away. He saw the whole thing. Sterling did not react. That was what Cruz would remember about it afterward — that there was no flinch, no breath, no shift of the eyes, that the big face simply stayed exactly as it had been and went on being a face in the rain. Cruz had worked for him a long time and had never seen him drop anything, and he did not drop this. But something behind it stopped. That was the only word Cruz had for it. Everything in there was still there and none of it was running. Thorne saw it too. Thorne had been watching for it. "That's what I thought," Thorne said quietly, and went to get his car. --- ## Chapter 3: The Bay Vista Cruz drove. Sterling sat with his hat on his knees and did not say anything for four miles, and Cruz, who had known him a long time, did not ask him to. What Sterling was doing was building the state's case. He always did this first, before he built his own, because a defense assembled in ignorance of the prosecution is a house framed without knowing where the load comes down. So: what does a competent man have by noon tomorrow, working only from what is already lying on that pier? He has a dead union official with a bullet in his temple. He has a heavy sedan in the river with two separate impacts down the driver's side in yellow. He has a night watchman who heard shots and a crash within seconds of each other. He has, by now, a damaged yellow car in a motel lot ten minutes from the scene. He will have, within the hour, a woman who cannot account for the last ninety minutes without describing a shooting. And he will have — Sterling made himself finish the sentence — a revolver. Because she had told him on the telephone that it was in the car, and she had said *on the seat* and then *on the floor* and then *I dropped it*, and a woman who has said three different things about where an object is has not been thinking about the object at all. He tried to find the argument that made the revolver go away. He went at it from the outside in, as he went at everything, and there was nothing there. The car was in a public lot. The damage was in plain view from six feet. The APB was lawful and the match was good. Whatever happened when Thorne knocked on that door was going to be legal, and Sterling had spent thirty years learning the difference between an outrage and a catastrophe, and this was the second thing. "You want to tell me any of it?" Cruz said. "Not yet." "That bad." "I don't know yet. That's not evasion. I genuinely don't know yet." Cruz let it go. Out on the Shoreway the roadblock had cleared; there was nothing left of it but flare stubs guttering on the pavement and a wrecker still working the freight truck, and they went past it at fifty-five without either of them remarking on the fact that it was the whole reason for everything. --- The Bay Vista had half a dozen cars in the lot and one of them was hers. It sat under a light on the near end, nose out, and the driver's side was turned away from the building, which meant that anyone walking the lot with a flashlight would see it in the first thirty seconds. The scar ran from the front fender back through both doors, deep enough to have taken the trim off, and in the yellow paint, standing proud along the ridges, there was black. Sterling looked at it for a while. He had sent her here. He had named the motel and he had named the street and he had done it because it was quiet and clean and the man at the desk did not gossip, and every one of those virtues had turned out to be beside the point, because none of them addressed the only fact that mattered, which was that she would arrive in a car that had just been in a collision, and park it under a light, and go to sleep behind it. He had not asked her about the car. He had not thought of the car. There were three cruisers in the lot too, arranged with a certain economy, and the coroner's photographer had come along — Thorne was expecting to find something worth photographing. "Stay out here," he said to Cruz. "Photograph her car. All four sides, and get the trim line, and get a shot with the motel sign in the frame so nobody can say later it was taken somewhere else." "They'll tow it." "Then photograph it faster." --- The clerk had the room number out of his mouth before Thorne finished the sentence. It was why the man had been recommended: he had no opinions and therefore no reason to keep anything to himself. Fourteen. Second floor, outside stair, at the end. Thorne went up first with two detectives behind him. Sterling came up last and stopped four feet short of the door, at the rail, where he could see and be seen and could not be described afterward as having interfered. The knock was not loud. That was Thorne all over — thirty years and he still knocked on a murder suspect's door like a man delivering a telegram. "Miss Novak. Cleveland Police." Nothing for a moment. Then the chain, then the lock, and the door opened about a foot and there she was in the gap with her coat still on. She had not slept and she had not taken off her coat and she had been sitting in that room for two hours in it. She saw the uniforms. Then she saw Sterling behind them at the rail, and her whole face went to him, and he watched her decide that he had brought them, that he had come after all, that this was the plan. "Mr. Sterling—" "Say nothing." He put it out flat and hard, in the courtroom register, over the top of everyone. "Not one word. Not your name. Do you understand me? Nothing." She stopped with her mouth open. Thorne did not turn around. He was looking past her into the room, and Sterling, from four feet away and eighteen inches to the left, was looking where Thorne was looking, and they both saw it at the same time. The bed had an orange chenille cover on it, and in the middle of the bed, sitting by itself, was the revolver. Nobody said anything for a second or two. Sterling had a sensation he had not had in a courtroom in twenty years, of standing at the rail of a boat and watching something go over the side, entirely unable to reach it. "Ma'am, step back please," Thorne said. She stepped back. Thorne went in and the detectives went in and Sterling came as far as the doorway and no further, because the doorway was the line and he intended there to be a photograph of him standing on the correct side of it. Thorne did not touch it right away. He got down with his hands on his knees and put his face about ten inches from it and stayed there, and then he took out a pencil. He picked it up by the trigger guard. He brought the muzzle up under his nose and breathed in, and the heavy face took it in and closed over it. "Recent," he said. Then he swung the cylinder out. Sterling could not see it from the doorway. He did not need to. He watched Thorne's eyes go left to right across the face of the cylinder and stop, and count, and he saw the man's shoulders come down half an inch. "Two fired," Thorne said. "Three live." He said it to the room, in the voice of a man reading a number off a meter, and one of the detectives wrote it in a notebook, and it was, Sterling understood, the single most expensive sentence anyone had spoken that night. He could see already how it would look in a courtroom in four months: a five-shot revolver, two chambers spent, and a man in a river with one bullet in his head. A jury could hold that in one hand. You did not need an expert to explain it. You did not need anything. "Miss Novak," Thorne said, "I'm placing you under arrest for the murder of Arthur Davis. Turn around, please." He said the rest of it too, the card he could have recited in his sleep — the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, the warning that anything she said could be used — and he said it evenly and completely, because Thorne did not cut corners even on a night he'd rather have back. It was, Sterling thought, the one piece of advice in that room she was going to be given twice, and from opposite sides, and mean the same thing. --- She was very good, for about ten seconds. She turned around. She put her hands back. She did not cry and she did not argue, and Sterling, watching, allowed himself to think that she had heard him, that the *say nothing* had gone in and taken hold, and that they might get out of this room without the state acquiring anything else for free. Then, with the cuffs going on, she looked over her shoulder at him. "Mr. Sterling, tell them." Her voice cracked in the middle of it and came back. "Tell them, please. You saw it. Tonight, in your office — you *saw* it, you had it on the desk, you looked at it and you said it hadn't been fired, you *said* that, you said it was clean and it hadn't been—" "Miss Novak—" "—so they can't say I had it out there, they can't, because you *saw* it and it was—" "*Vivian.*" It came out of him in the full voice, the whole of it, the thing he kept in reserve, and it stopped her like a hand laid flat on the chest. It also stopped both detectives, and the photographer on the stairs, and the desk clerk who had come halfway up to watch. The room was very quiet. Nobody moved for a moment. Then Thorne straightened up slowly from the bed with the revolver hanging off his pencil, and turned around, and looked at Vance Sterling for a long, long time. He did not look surprised. That was the worst part of it. He looked like a man who had just had something explained that had been bothering him for an hour — like the answer to *how long have you had it, counselor* — and who did not enjoy the explanation at all. "Well," Thorne said. "Captain—" "No." Thorne raised one hand, the pencil and the gun still hanging from it. "No, don't. Not here, not in a doorway, not at three in the morning with four witnesses and a boy from the desk on the stairs." He let the hand drop. "You're going to come see me, and you're going to bring whatever it is you were going to bring, and it's going to be a considerably longer morning than either of us planned." They took her out past him. She did not look at him again. She kept her chin up and her eyes on the rail and went down the outside stairs into the sleet between two men, and Sterling stood in the door of room fourteen and let her go, because there was nothing in the entire body of American law that he could do for her in the next four minutes and it was better to do nothing well than something badly. Then everyone was gone and he was alone in the room with the smell of cigarettes and radiator and the print of her on the edge of the mattress where she had sat all night with her coat on. He stood there and worked it through, because he was constitutionally unable not to. She had said it in front of four police officers. It was true, it was helpful, and it was the end of him. *You saw it. You had it on the desk. You said it hadn't been fired.* There was now exactly one person alive who could testify that the murder weapon was clean and loaded at eleven o'clock on the night Arthur Davis died — one person who had held it under a lamp, turned the cylinder into the light, and formed a professional opinion about it. And that person was going to be sitting at the defense table. Which he would not be, of course. Which he could not be. Pryor would not even need to be clever about it; she would file the motion, and she would be right, and any judge in Cuyahoga County would grant it before lunch. He had told a frightened woman to leave a gun on his desk and go to a motel he had chosen, and she had taken the gun with her and driven into the only road in Cleveland where it could ruin her, and now the one fact in the world that could save her was a fact only he could prove, and proving it meant leaving her. Cruz's footsteps came up the outside stair. "Got the car," he said from the doorway. "Sixteen frames, all four sides, and I got the sign in three of them." He waited. "You want to tell me now?" Sterling looked at the empty bed. "In the morning," he said. "Bring the camera. We're going to see Captain Thorne, and then we are going to have a rather difficult conversation about who is going to try this case." --- ## Chapter 4: The Morning After By ten to seven Irene had moved four appointments, canceled a deposition, told the answering service to route everything to her directly, and typed a one-page memorandum of the previous evening's consultation while it was still accurate. She did that first. Before the coffee, before the coat came off. Memory is a depreciating asset and she had twelve hours on this one already. *11:05 p.m. Client presented apron containing revolver. VS examined without contact using pencil. Stated: loaded, not recently fired, barrel clean. Present: VS, IM, client. Instruction given: weapon to remain in office safe overnight, VS to deliver same to Capt. M. Thorne, CPD Homicide, a.m. of 11/9.* She read it over twice and initialed it and put the carbon in the file and the original in her desk, and only then did she sit back and look at the desk across the room. The lamp was off. The blotter was where it always was. There was a rectangle in the dust. --- She had been looking at it for a while when Sterling came in. He had not slept and had not shaved and was wearing yesterday's shirt under a different suit, which meant he had gone home for twenty minutes. "Thorne?" "Eight o'clock." He hung the coat himself, which he never did. "He gave me two hours to be somewhere else first. That's as close to a favor as he's capable of and I don't intend to waste it." "Coffee's on." "Yes." He came around the desk and stopped where she was standing, and the two of them looked down at the blotter together, at the clean rectangle about the size of a folded apron with a night's worth of ordinary dust laid in around it. Irene had already run it. She had run it four times between three and six in the morning, in order, forward and then backward, because that was what she did with a thing that had gone wrong — she took it apart into steps and found the step. Step one: he draws the apron off the client's knees onto the desk. Step two: he noses the revolver over with the pencil eraser, reads the frame, brings the cylinder into the light, sets the pencil down. *He does not take the gun out of the apron.* There is no reason he should. It is going into the safe in the apron. Step three: he crosses to the wall and opens the safe. Step four: he turns back and delivers the second instruction, which runs one hundred and forty words and takes the better part of a minute, and during which he is facing the room and the safe is standing open behind him with nothing in it. Step five: Irene goes to the coat tree. Step six — "I closed it," she said. "I know." "I didn't look in it. I put my hand on the door and I swung it and I spun the dial and I put the picture back over it. It was open the whole time you were talking to her and I never once looked in it." "Irene." "It's not remorse, it's the sequence. I want the sequence right because somebody is going to ask me about it under oath and I would rather have it now than invent it later." She heard how her own voice sounded and did not particularly care. "Also I told her to call the police." "You did." "Twice. For forty minutes." "You were right," Sterling said. "I want you to hear me say it in an empty office, because I am shortly going to spend a great deal of money and about four months arguing that I was also right, and both of those things can be true, and only one of them is going to matter to her." Irene picked up the blotter by two corners, carried it to the credenza, and set it down flat. "Nobody touches that," she said. "I'll have it photographed." "Why?" "Because in about four months somebody is going to want to argue about what was on this desk and what wasn't, and in what condition, and I would like a photograph of that dust, taken this morning, before either of us had a theory to serve." Sterling looked at her for a second. "You're worth every dollar I don't pay you," he said. "I've mentioned that." --- He would not have the state's story. That was the first thing he said when he sat down with the coffee, and he said it in the flat way he said things he had already decided. "It doesn't work, Irene. Take it entirely on their terms. She's driving. It's raining, it's dark, there are no lights on that road, and she is by every account in a condition close to hysteria. There is a heavy car alongside her that has already hit her twice. She has never fired a weapon in her life — I watched her be afraid to touch one across a desk at eleven o'clock. And out of that, they want a single round into a man's right temple, front to back, angled *down*." "They'll say it was luck." "They'll say it was luck," he agreed. "And that's the trouble, because luck is unfalsifiable, and a jury will take luck if nobody hands them anything better. So I need something better." He turned the cup around on the desk without drinking out of it. "Consider the wound for a moment and tell me what's wrong with it." "It's going the wrong way." "It is. A clean hole into the temple, angled down, and close — the coroner's man on the pier said somebody stood over him. That is a man held still and shot at leisure. She is moving, in the dark, in a panic, firing backward and blind out of a window she can barely reach across. I don't yet know how to draw the picture that makes those two things one event." He set the cup aside. "But I know they aren't. A frightened woman throwing shots behind her doesn't sign her work with a surgeon's stroke." "They swabbed her hands at the county," Irene said. "For residue." "Let them. She fired a gun twice into the dark and has said so to me, to you, and to four policemen. Barium and antimony on Vivian Novak's hands prove the one thing nobody in this case is contesting — it is the only test the State can run that can't cost us a thing, because the answer is already in the arrest report, in her own words." Irene wrote *the wound — the angle — Cruz's numbers* on her pad and underlined it twice. "Cruz has numbers," she said. "He was measuring things all night. He came in at four and left a roll of film and a page of figures and a note that says, and I'm reading it exactly, *ask him why I care about a roofline.*" "Tell him I don't know yet and to keep measuring." --- The assignments took four minutes because they always did. Cruz to the Whiskey Island yard — the union hall, the dock foremen, anyone who would talk to a man who had worked the lake. And Cruz to the Ambassador, on the locker: who had keys, who had been let go, who had come into money. Irene to the county. Arthur Davis's whole life on paper: property, corporations, liens, judgments, the union's filings, and whatever the recorder's office would give up about the warehouses on that yard. "And the retainer," she said. "What about it?" "There isn't one. She has three hundred and forty dollars in a passbook account and a car that is currently evidence." "Then there isn't one." "I'm not arguing," Irene said. "I'm telling you so that when you ask me in March why the operating account is what it is, you'll remember this conversation and not make me have it twice." "Noted." She closed the book. Then she opened it again. "There's the other thing." Sterling did not pretend not to know what she meant. That was one of his better qualities and she had always thought it was underrated. "There is the other thing," he said. "She said it in front of four policemen." "And a photographer, and the boy from the desk, and it will be in the arrest report by noon, phrased worse than she phrased it." He rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands, which she had seen him do perhaps five times. "Pryor will move to disqualify me inside a week. She won't enjoy it and she won't hesitate for a second, and she'll be right on the law, and any judge in that building grants it." "Unless the witness is somebody else." Irene made a note. It said: *me.* "I was in the room," she said. "I saw it on the desk, I heard you say it was clean, and I typed a memorandum about it at six forty this morning, contemporaneous, initialed, with a carbon." She capped the pen. "You'd better start getting used to sitting at that table without me." "I know what it costs." "You don't, actually," Irene said. "But you will by about the third day." --- The Justice Center was two years old and already smelled like every county building she had ever been in, which she had long since concluded was not a matter of ventilation but of the people. She got them through intake in twenty minutes flat, a personal record that involved reminding a sergeant of a favor from 1974. Vivian Novak had been in a cell for six hours. She came into the attorney room in county blue with her own coat over her arm because nobody had figured out where to put it, and she sat down and put her hands flat on the table like she had been told to, and she looked at Sterling and then at Irene, and the look she gave Irene was the worst thing Irene had seen in some years. "I should have called them," Vivian said. "Like you said. That first hour." "Probably," Irene said. Sterling let that stand for exactly as long as it needed to and then took it away from both of them. "Miss Novak. I'm going to ask you a series of questions and some of them are going to feel like accusations. They are not. What I need this morning is every fact that can hurt you, in your own words, before Mrs. Pryor gets it in somebody else's." He set his hands on the table. "Because she will get all of it. She always does. The only thing I control is whether I hear it first." "All right." "You knew who Arthur Davis was." The pause was not long, but Irene, who had spent years watching people answer questions in that office, could have driven a truck through it. "Yes." "How." "He worked the docks." Vivian's hands did not move off the table. "He was — there was a thing with my father. A long time ago. Years." "Tell it." "My father was a checker at the ore docks. Twenty-six years. A checker counts what comes off the boats and signs that the count is right." It came out smooth and worn, a thing told at a dinner table her whole life. "And in — sixty-eight, sixty-nine — the counts stopped being right. Not by much. By enough. And Mr. Davis came to my father and explained to him that the discrepancy was in his handwriting, which it was, because he'd signed for it, because that was his job. And that it would stay a private matter between them." "For how long?" "Two years." Her voice had gone very flat and stayed there. "Sixty dollars a month, then eighty. My father drank up the rest of the difference and my mother went to work at Halle's and I found out about it when I was nineteen, and then it stopped, because Davis went into the union office and got something better than my father." "Is your father living?" "Yes." A beat. "He's in the house on Fifty-first. He gets around all right some days." Sterling nodded slowly. "Miss Novak, I want you to understand what you have just given me, because you're going to read it in a newspaper and I would rather you heard it from me first." He said it without cushioning any of it, and Irene, watching Vivian's face, thought that this was the thing people got wrong about him — that they took the size and the voice for theater and missed that he had simply never once seen the point of lying to a client. "As of this moment the state has motive. A good one. A jury understands a daughter and a father and two years of sixty dollars a month better than it will ever understand a bullet's angle. Mrs. Pryor will put your father's name in front of twelve people and she will be entitled to." Vivian did not say anything. "Which is survivable," he said. "It is survivable on the ninth of November. It would not have been on the fifth of March, with Mrs. Pryor standing up to say it and me hearing it for the first time along with the jury. Now. The locker." Irene turned to a clean page and started writing. Somewhere around the third question she found she had written, in the margin, without any recollection of doing it: *sixty dollars a month × 24 = 1,440.* She looked at it for a moment. Then she drew a line through it, because it was not evidence of anything, and went back to taking down what the girl said. --- ## Chapter 5: Shoe Leather The trick with dock people is that you do not ask them anything on the first visit. Cruz got to the yard gate at ten past six with two boxes of doughnuts and a thermos of coffee that was better than what they had in the shack, and he sat in the gatehouse for forty minutes talking about the Browns, the weather, the price of a furnace, and a man they had both known in 1971 who had gone to Florida and died there. He asked nothing. He got nothing. That was fine. That was the deposit. By eight he was standing on the C&P dock in a hard hat that did not belong to him, watching a Hulett drop its bucket into a hold and come up with seventeen tons of taconite, and Ray Dudek was standing next to him with his hands in his coat and his opinions about everything. "You're here about the car," Dudek said. "I'm here about the car." "Cops were here at four." "I know. I was here at one." Dudek laughed, one syllable, and spat. He had been a rigger for twenty years before his back went and they made him a foreman, and Cruz had once spent two weeks proving that a fire in a warehouse Dudek was responsible for had started in the wiring and not in Dudek's cigarette. Dudek had never said thank you. He had also never once not taken Cruz's call. "Arthur Davis," Cruz said. "Yeah." "Tell me about him." "He's dead." "Ray." Dudek watched the Hulett swing. "He was a rep. You know what a rep is down here? A rep is a guy who decides which of two men gets the four-to-twelve. That's the whole job. Everything else is speeches." He worked something around in his mouth. "He'd been a rep a long time." "He make money at it?" "He drove a Continental." "On a rep's book?" "You said it," Dudek said. "I didn't." --- It took him until half past ten and three more conversations to get the shape of it, and the shape came out of a crane operator named Fitz who would not talk to him at all until Cruz mentioned that he had once surveyed a hull for Fitz's brother-in-law and undervalued it in the brother-in-law's favor, at which point Fitz became a fountain. Steel coils. Not ore — anybody can steal ore and nobody bothers, because it's dirt and it weighs a ton and it's worth six dollars. Coils. Cold-rolled, wide, drawing quality, coming in on the boats out of Burns Harbor bound for the auto plants, and worth real money to anybody with a flatbed and a buyer. You do not steal them off the dock. You cannot; they weigh twelve tons apiece and they go on a rail car in front of forty men. You steal them off the *paper*. "Scale ticket," Fitz said. "That's all it ever is. Boat comes in with four hundred and six. Ticket says three hundred and ninety-eight. Eight coils that were never here. Never here, never counted, never insured, never missed. Sits in a warehouse ninety days and then a truck comes." "Who writes the ticket?" Fitz looked at him. "Now you're asking me something." "I am." "Then I'm done," Fitz said, and went back up his ladder. --- The name came out of the union hall at half past one, from a business agent named Hoolihan who had eaten two of Cruz's doughnuts at six in the morning and who therefore felt something like an obligation. "Ask about Leo Briggs," Hoolihan said, not looking up from his desk. "Who's Leo Briggs?" "Night foreman. Yard side, not dock side." He shuffled paper that did not need shuffling. "Him and Davis were thick for about three years and then they weren't." "When did they stop being thick?" "Recent." "Hoolihan." "There was a thing behind No. 4 on Monday night. That's all I know and it's more than I know." He looked up finally. "Two guys yelling behind a warehouse at midnight. Half the yard heard it and every single one of them will tell you they were somewhere else. You understand what I'm telling you?" "I understand what you're telling me." "They're not scared of Briggs," Hoolihan said. "Which is what I'd be thinking if I were you. They're scared of the company. It's a different thing and it lasts longer." Cruz stood up to go, and then didn't. "Last thing. You ever hear of Briggs with a new gun?" Hoolihan's pen stopped. "Everybody down here's got a gun." "A new one. A clean one." "...He was in the hall a couple weeks back telling anybody who'd hold still that he'd bought himself a piece with no book on it. Little Smith. Proud of it, the way a man is about a thing he shouldn't have." Hoolihan looked up. "That mean something?" "Probably not," Cruz said, and wrote it down, and did not believe it, because he had learned a long time ago that the second gift in a day is the one with the hook in it. --- Cruz was in his car with the door open and one foot on the gravel, writing *BRIGGS, LEO — night foreman — yard side*, when it came to him. Big man. Thick through the chest and neck. Dry canvas coat with a yard patch on the shoulder, dry cap, complaining to a detective about the tonnage rating on a pier that everybody already knew was condemned. And under the dry cap, hair soaked flat to the skull. Cruz sat there with the pen not moving. It had meant nothing. It had meant absolutely nothing at two o'clock in the morning in the fourth hour of freezing rain, when every man on that pier was wet through and half of them had gone and found a dry coat from somewhere. He had looked directly at it and filed it as weather. *He came from the water.* No. He came from *somewhere*, and got dry clothes from *somewhere*, and there were a hundred ways for a man to get his hair wet on a night like that, starting with walking forty feet from a truck. Cruz wrote it down anyway, and put a box around it, and underneath the box he wrote: *nothing. probably nothing. check the gate.* --- The gate log was a bound ledger in the gatehouse and the day man let him look at it for reasons that had a great deal to do with doughnuts and nothing to do with the law. *BRIGGS L. — ON 2140.* Signed on at twenty to ten. Which meant Briggs was on shift, in the yard, with a hundred and forty acres of chain-link between him and the rest of Cleveland, for the entire relevant portion of the night. Cruz looked at it for a while. Then he went and found four men who had been on that shift, and he did not ask them where Briggs was, because that is how you teach a man to lie to you. He asked them about the tow rig. He asked them who called the fire department, and who had the keys to the west gate, and whether the floods on the pier had come off the yard's generator or the city's. He asked about the crash, which everybody wanted to talk about, and he let them walk him back through their own night to get there. And what came out of it, without anybody noticing they had said it, was this: Briggs had been at the ten o'clock. Briggs had not been at midnight, when a hopper jumped a switch on the east siding and four men spent an hour with pry bars and nobody could find the foreman and they had gone ahead without him, which had annoyed two of them enough that they still mentioned it a day later. And Briggs had been on the pier at half past one, in a dry coat, telling a detective about tonnage ratings. Three and a half hours in the middle of a signed shift, on a yard he was supposed to be running, and not one man could put him inside the fence for any of it. Cruz closed the notebook. *Now I care about the roofline*, he thought, and he was not entirely sure why, and it did not matter, because he was going to keep measuring either way. --- The Ambassador was between shifts at three o'clock and smelled like a griddle that had been going since five in the morning. The kitchen kid was seventeen and named Peter Lasko and he lasted about ninety seconds. He lasted ninety seconds because Cruz did not accuse him of anything. Cruz bought him a Coke and asked him about the lockers, and about the padlocks, and whether people ever left them open, and about the door to the back hall, and whether it locked by itself or you had to pull it — and the kid answered all of it perfectly comfortably right up until Cruz said, in exactly the same tone he had used for all of it: "How much did he give you?" The Coke stopped halfway. "Twenty," Lasko said, and then his face did something complicated. "Twenty dollars. He said he — I didn't — he said he was a health inspector." "He wasn't." "I *know* he wasn't." The kid's ears had gone scarlet. "I knew then. Twenty dollars, mister. To go out back for a smoke and leave the hall door on the hook for ten minutes. That's all it was. I didn't touch anybody's stuff, I didn't go in there, I went outside and I stood there and I smoked and I came back in and everything was exactly the same as when I left." "When?" "Last night. Around six, before the rush." "Describe him." "Big." Lasko turned the bottle around. "Bigger than you. Not fat. He had a — his hands were all beat up. Like dock hands. My uncle's got hands like that." He swallowed. "Am I in trouble?" "Yes," Cruz said. "But not with me, and not the kind you're thinking about, and you're going to be a lot less in it if you say all of that again tomorrow to a lawyer with a stenographer in the room." "Is that the girl? Vivian?" The kid looked genuinely sick now. "Is that — they said on the radio—" "Yeah." "She used to cover my side when I got behind," Lasko said, and put his head down on his arms on the counter, and Cruz let him stay like that. --- The house on East Fifty-first had a porch that had been rebuilt at least once by somebody who was not a carpenter, and Emil Novak took a long time getting to the door. He was seventy or close to it and he had been a big man once; you could see where the frame had been. He looked at Cruz's card for longer than it took to read it. "You work for the lawyer." "I do." "She has a lawyer." He said it as if confirming a rumor. "That's good. That's — all right. Come in, it's cold." The front room had a television on with no sound and a chair with a hollow in it and about four hundred *Plain Dealers* stacked against the wall in a way that suggested a system. They talked about the docks first, because Cruz knew better than to start anywhere else, and for about twenty minutes Emil Novak was a checker again — the counts, the tally boards, the trick of reading a hold, the winter of sixty-three when the ice came early and nothing moved for two months. His hands moved while he talked. His voice came up out of wherever it had been. Then Cruz said, "Tell me how a man walks eight coils off a scale ticket," and the hands stopped. "Why." "Because that's what Arthur Davis was doing, and I think it's why he's dead, and I don't know how it works." The old man sat back. The chair took him in the shape it had. "You need the checker," he said. "I figured." "Everything else is — the boat doesn't lie. The scale doesn't lie. The crane man counts because he has to, he's got a number in his head all shift. But there's one place where a number stops being a thing and starts being a *writing*, and that's the ticket, and one man signs it." He held up a hand and turned it over. "That's a checker. That's the whole of what a checker is. He is the place where the world turns into paper." "And in sixty-nine that was you." "In sixty-nine that was me." The television flickered. Neither of them looked at it. "He didn't ask me to write a false ticket," Emil said. "I want you to have that right. He never asked me to steal anything, not one time, and if he had I'd have — " He let it go unfinished. "He came to me with three tickets I *had* signed. Three. Over four months. And every one of them was eight or nine short against the boat, and every one of them had my name on it in my own hand." "Were they yours?" "They were my signature." "That's not what I asked." "No," Emil said. "It isn't." He was quiet a moment. "I don't know. That's the truth and it took me nine years to be able to say it. I signed four thousand tickets. Some days you're counting into a hold in the rain at four in the morning and the tally board's wet and the crane man's yelling and you sign what you're handed. I don't know if I miscounted three times in four months. I know what the odds are on that. I know what it looks like." "So you paid him." "So I paid him," Emil said. "Sixty a month. Then eighty. Twenty-four months. And then he got the union office and he didn't need a checker on the hook anymore, and he never spoke to me again, not once, not on the dock, not in a bar, nowhere. Nine years." He looked at Cruz. "You want to know the worst part? I still don't know if I was being blackmailed or if I was being let off easy." Cruz did not say anything for a bit. "Mr. Novak," he said, "if you'd gone to the company in sixty-nine—" "I've had nine years to run that one," Emil said. "Don't." "All right." "They'd have fired me and believed him. He was a rep." He worked his hands together, slowly, like a man warming them. "Does Vivian know you're here?" "No." "Don't tell her." He said it fast, and then heard himself, and the ruined face pulled tight. "No. Tell her. Tell her — " He stopped and started again. "Tell her I said the tickets weren't hers to carry. She'll know what I mean. She's carried them since she was nineteen years old and they were never hers." Cruz put his notebook away. "I'll tell her," he said. He was at the door with his hat in his hand when Emil Novak said, from the chair, without turning around: "Is it going to help her? Any of this?" And Cruz, who had put in nineteen years learning not to answer that question, stood in a cold front hall on East Fifty-first and could not find a single honest thing to say. --- ## Chapter 6: Paper The thing nobody understood about county records was that they were not a filing system. They were four filing systems that had been laid on top of each other by different administrations and were now married for tax purposes. Irene understood it. That was most of her value and she had never seen a reason to be modest about it. She had been at the machine since eight-forty with a roll of dimes, a legal pad, and Alma Weeks, who had run the microfilm room at the recorder's office since Eisenhower and who had four grandchildren, an unreliable hip, and a settled opinion of every attorney in Cuyahoga County. "You're not going to find it in deeds," Alma said. "I know." "People always want deeds." "I don't want deeds. Nobody buys a warehouse to hide eight coils of steel in it, they rent one." Irene wound the reel forward. "I want leases, and leases aren't recorded unless somebody's nervous, and I want to know who was nervous." Alma made a small pleased sound and went to get a different drawer. --- There was only one way to do it, and no machine that would answer a question for you. You do not start with the company. You start with the *building*, because a building cannot move and cannot be renamed and has been sitting on the same parcel since somebody surveyed it. Cruz had given her three warehouse numbers off the Whiskey Island yard — 2, 4, and 7 — and a note that said *4 is the one, but check them all so nobody can say we went looking for 4.* From the parcel you get the owner — in this case the shipping concern itself, and useless. From the owner you get nothing. So you go sideways: you go to the fire inspections. They are public, and they list the *occupant*, because the fire department does not care who holds title and cares very much who is storing what. Warehouse 4, occupant of record, since March of 1976: **Fleetwing Storage Company.** From the occupant you go looking for the person, because a company is a name on a door and a name cannot sign its own name. Fleetwing Storage was not a corporation — no officers, no statutory agent down in Columbus, no annual report to anybody. It was a *name*, twelve dollars' worth, wrapped around a bank account. But a warehouse that takes goods in has to answer to the city for them — occupancy, sprinklers, the fire load — and every one of those papers wants a human being at the bottom of it, in ink. And one of them gave her what a name never will: a signature and an address. *L. Briggs, 3411 Denison Ave.* Irene sat back and looked at it on the screen for a good while. Then she threaded up the next reel, because a thing you find in fifteen minutes is a thing anybody can find in fifteen minutes, and she had been doing this long enough to know that the first name is never the last name. --- By half past one she had it, and it had taken four drawers, two trips to a different floor, and a favor from a man in the treasurer's office involving a Christmas ham. Fleetwing had a lease. The lease was on file because Fleetwing was nobody — no assets, no history, twelve dollars' worth of name — and the shipping concern's lawyers had done exactly what any competent lawyer does with a tenant like that. They had required a guarantor. **Bessemer Holding Company, an Ohio corporation**, had guaranteed the rent on Warehouse 4 in March of 1976. And Bessemer, being an actual corporation, had actual filings, and the filings had actual officers, and the officers had names, and one of the names was **R. T. Merrick**, and Irene knew that name before she finished reading the line, because she read the *Plain Dealer* every morning with the attention other people gave a racing form. Merrick was a vice-president of the shipping concern. The same shipping concern that owned the yard, that owned Warehouse 4, that leased Warehouse 4 to a company with no assets, whose rent was guaranteed by a holding company that Merrick sat on the board of. The company was renting its own warehouse to itself through two layers of paper, and a night foreman's name was on the bottom layer. Irene wrote it all out on the legal pad in a column and looked at it. Then she took a fresh page and wrote: *What does this prove?* And under that, after a minute: *Nothing.* --- That was the part she disliked, and she made herself sit with it for the length of a cigarette she did not smoke. It proved a structure. It did not prove a crime. Bessemer had a dozen legitimate reasons to guarantee a tenant's rent and its lawyers would produce all twelve in a written response inside a week. Merrick had a dozen concerns and nine directorships and had almost certainly never heard of Leo Briggs in his life, and the honest truth — Irene made herself write this down too, because she distrusted any conclusion that flattered her — was that he probably hadn't. That was how it worked. That was how it always worked. Nobody at the top ordered anything. Somebody at the top built a structure in which a thing could happen, and then did not ask, and the not-asking was the whole of the transaction and there was no statute against it. She went down to the second floor anyway and spent forty minutes with the campaign filings. They were public and badly kept, and she read them three times because the totals had been entered by somebody who could not add. R. T. Merrick, personally, and four entities she could tie back to Bessemer inside twenty minutes, had put money into the committee that had spent the summer trying to throw the mayor out of office — the business revolt against the man who was at war with the banks, the recall that had failed in August by the width of a few hundred votes. Not a fortune. Enough. Enough that a prosecutor who wanted to walk Merrick's name into a grand jury on a theft nobody had reported — in a city a month from default, over money that had every legal right to go where it went — would need considerably more than a lease and a fire inspection. Irene closed the book. She was not naive and she was not shocked and she did not, at any point that afternoon, feel anything she would have described as outrage. What she felt was the specific irritation of a competent person who has found the true shape of a thing and knows she will not be permitted to use it. "Any luck?" Alma said, on the way out. "Enormous amounts." "Doesn't sound like it." "It's the useful kind and the useless kind at the same time," Irene said. "The building's dirty. The man who owns the building is going to be at a fundraiser in March." Alma considered that. "You want the drawers held?" "Two weeks. And Alma — if anybody else asks for that Fleetwing filing between now and then, I'd take it as a personal kindness to know about it." "You'd be the second one this month," Alma said. Irene stopped with her coat half on. "Who was the first?" "Couldn't tell you. Man. Big fella, dock hands on him. Three, four weeks back." Alma shrugged. "He didn't know what he was doing. Wanted deeds." --- She got back to the office at four and built the binder, which took until nine. People thought that part was clerical. It was not clerical. An exhibit binder is an argument that has not been made out loud yet: everything in it is a thing somebody will have to authenticate, and the order it goes in is the order a jury will be walked through it, and if the fire inspection comes before the fictitious-name filing then the whole structure lands upside down and has to be explained twice. She used tabs. She used a typed index with the custodian of records for every document listed in the right-hand column, because a document nobody can authenticate is a piece of paper, and she had watched three otherwise excellent cases lose a day and a half over exactly that. Sterling came in at half past six, dropped his hat, read the index standing up, and did not sit down until page two. "Merrick," he said. "You can't get to him." "No." "Neither could a United States Attorney with four years and a wire," Sterling said, and pulled the chair out. "Fine. He isn't the case. Briggs is the case, and the value of Merrick is that he tells a jury what the warehouse was *worth* — which is the only question that matters when somebody asks why a man would kill over eight pieces of metal." He turned a tab. "How solid is Briggs on the fictitious-name filing?" "It's his signature and it's notarized." "That's very good." "It's better than very good. The notary is still alive and she works at a savings and loan on Lorain." Irene sat down opposite him. "Now the other thing." Sterling put the binder down. "Pryor filed at ten-forty this morning," he said. "Motion to disqualify. It's short. She didn't need length." "Grounds?" "That I'm a necessary witness on a contested material fact — the condition of the weapon at eleven o'clock — and that no other competent witness exists." He said it evenly. "She's wrong about the last part and she knows she's wrong about the last part, and she filed it that way anyway, because she wants me to have to put you up to prove it." Irene thought about that. "That's not spite," she said. "That's arithmetic. If I'm the witness I'm not at the table, and if I'm not at the table you spend four months looking for things I'd have handed you." "Yes." "It's a good motion." "It's an excellent motion," Sterling said. "It would be a better one if she liked doing it." --- She drove down to the Justice Center at a quarter to ten with two documents that genuinely required a signature and one that did not, which was how she had gotten in at that hour. Vivian came in with her hair pushed back and four days on her. She signed both, and then the third, and did not read any of them, which Irene made a note to speak to her about at some point when it would not be cruel. "Mr. Cruz saw your father," Irene said. The pen stopped. "He's all right," Irene said. "He's the same. He wanted me to tell you something and I'm going to tell it to you exactly as it came to me, because I don't want to improve it." She took her glasses off. "He said: *tell her the tickets weren't hers to carry. She'll know what I mean.*" Vivian sat with that. "He knows I know," she said finally. "Apparently." "We've never — " She stopped, and turned the pen over on the table, and did not finish it. "Nine years. Not once. Thanksgiving, Christmas, his birthday. Not once." "That's fairly common." "Is it?" "In my experience it's nearly universal," Irene said, "and it is nobody's finest quality, and I'd rather you had eight years of it than nine." She gathered the papers and squared them against the table, twice, which she did not need to do. "Get some sleep," she said. "The motion's Tuesday. You won't be there and you're not required to be, and I'd tell you not to think about it, except that I've never once found that instruction useful when somebody's given it to me." She was at the door when Vivian said, "Miss Miller." "Yes." "Thank you for the — " She gestured at the table, at the papers, at nothing. "You didn't have to drive down here at ten o'clock for a signature you didn't need." Irene put her glasses back on. "No," she said. "Well." And she went out and drove home, and stopped for gas on Carnegie, and got to bed at midnight, and was at her desk the next morning at seven. --- ## Chapter 7: The Motion to Disqualify Evelyn Pryor argued it in eight minutes and never once raised her voice, and Sterling, who had been on the other side of a great many motions, thought it was as clean a piece of work as he had seen that year. "Disciplinary Rule 5-102," she said. "It is not discretionary and it is not a close question. A lawyer who learns he ought to be called as a witness on behalf of his client withdraws. Mr. Sterling examined the murder weapon little more than an hour before the homicide. He formed an opinion about whether it had been fired. That opinion is exculpatory, it is contested, and it exists nowhere in this world except in his head." "Counsel says there's another witness," Judge Wexler said, without looking up. "Counsel says a great many things and most of them are true, Your Honor, and this one is true in a way that doesn't help him." Pryor turned a page she did not need to turn. "Miss Miller was present. I don't dispute it. Miss Miller has also been Mr. Sterling's employee for a decade, draws her salary from him, and would be offering testimony that acquits her employer's client of murder. I could cross-examine that in four questions and every one of them would begin with the word *who*." She let it sit for exactly one beat. "The Rule doesn't ask whether *a* witness exists. It asks whether this lawyer ought to be called. He ought. He is the best evidence his client has, and she is entitled to him, and she cannot have him and have him at counsel table both." Pryor closed the folder. "The State takes no pleasure in this. Miss Novak is going to trial for her life and she is losing the finest defense lawyer in this county because of a rule that exists to protect her. I'd rather it were otherwise. It isn't." Sterling stood up. "That was very good," he said. "It was accurate." "It was both. I've been doing this thirty years and it's rarely both." He came around the table. "Your Honor, I'll take the Rule head on, because I don't think it says what my colleague needs it to say." --- He laid it out in four pieces, because four was what it took. "First. I never handled that revolver. I moved it with the eraser of a pencil and I put the pencil down, and there is a police laboratory report — the State's report, tendered to me on Thursday — that finds no latent prints of value on that weapon at all — not mine and not anyone's. I mention it because Mrs. Pryor's motion says I *examined* it, which is true, and invites the Court to hear *handled*, which is not." "Second. There is no statement. I took no statement from Miss Novak that night that I would offer or could offer, and the State has not suggested one. The only fact at issue is a physical observation of an object in a lighted room, and it was observed by two people, not one." "Third." He put his hand flat on the table. "The Court should know what I intended to do with that weapon, because the State's papers are silent about it and the silence is doing a great deal of work. I told Miss Novak, in front of Miss Miller, at approximately eleven-fifteen on the night of the eighth, that the revolver would remain in my office safe overnight and that I would carry it personally to Captain Thorne's office in the morning. I said it because I meant it. I was not sitting on evidence. I was declining to surrender the only physical object in the case before I could tell the police anything useful about where it came from — which is a distinction I would defend to this Court or to any bar committee that cares to convene." "And fourth. Mrs. Pryor says Miss Miller is impeachable for bias. She is. Every witness is impeachable for something and that is what cross-examination is for. It is not a ground for taking a lawyer off a homicide." Wexler took off his glasses. "Mr. Sterling, if I let you stay, who puts that fact in front of the jury?" "Miss Miller." "And if the jury doesn't believe her?" "Then my client is convicted," Sterling said, "and it will be because twelve people didn't believe a witness, which is how it is supposed to work, and not because the State was permitted to disqualify the only lawyer who was in the room." --- They put Irene on for the limited purpose and she was on the stand for nineteen minutes. Sterling took her through it in six. Where she was, what she saw, the lamp, the desk, the apron on the blotter, the pencil, the words he had spoken. She answered in complete sentences and did not embellish a single one and did not look at him once. Then he handed up the memorandum. "Miss Miller, what is Defense Exhibit A to this motion?" "A memorandum of the consultation." "Who prepared it?" "I did." "When?" "I began typing it at six-forty in the morning on the ninth of November and I initialed it at six fifty-two." "Why then?" "Because Miss Novak had been arrested at approximately three, I had been awake since the previous morning, and memory is a depreciating asset." A very small pause. "I have watched a great many people try to recall a conversation four months after it happened. I did not intend to be one of them." Pryor rose for cross and Sterling watched her do the arithmetic standing up. She had four questions and all of them began with *who*, and every one of them would land, and every one of them would land on a woman who had documented the conversation before the sun came up on the morning after, in a form that predated any theory of any defense, and who would answer each question flatly and without a flicker. Pryor stood there for perhaps three seconds. "No questions, Your Honor." It was, Sterling thought, the single most impressive thing she did all week. --- Wexler ruled from the bench, which he did not often do. "Motion is denied in part and granted in part." He wrote while he talked. "Mr. Sterling is not disqualified. I find the observation is available through Miss Miller, that her contemporaneous memorandum substantially answers the bias concern, and that Rule 5-102 does not require me to strip a defendant of chosen counsel where competent alternate testimony exists." Sterling was relieved for perhaps four seconds. "That said." Wexler put down the pen. "Miss Miller is a witness in this case as of this moment. She's subject to the separation order like every other witness. She does not sit at counsel table, she is not in the courtroom for testimony, and she does not receive daily transcripts. Mr. Sterling, if I hear that she has been read a transcript I will revisit this ruling and I will not be pleasant about it." "Understood, Your Honor." "Further: you will not argue her credibility to the jury from personal knowledge, and you will not, in any form, at any point, say the words *I saw*. If you do it once I'll declare a mistrial and tax it to you personally." Wexler looked over the glasses. "You understand what I've just done to you." "I do." "Then we're adjourned." --- Irene was standing in the corridor with her coat over her arm and her handbag in front of her with both hands, which was how she stood when she was furious. "Four months," she said. "Yes." "You'll walk into that room with three boxes and no one who knows what's in them." "Yes." "Cruz can't sit there either, he's a witness on the reconstruction. So it's you and a girl who's never seen a courtroom." Irene looked down the corridor at nothing. "Who carries the exhibits?" "I'll hire a boy." "You'll hire a boy," she repeated, in a tone that would have peeled paint off a bench. "Irene." "I'm not upset about the chair," she said. "I want to be clear about that, because you're going to think I'm upset about the chair." "I know what you're upset about." "Do you." "You've built the entire structure of this case on paper and now you have to hand it to me and go sit in a hallway," Sterling said, "and you don't think I'll get the order right." Irene did not say anything. "You're probably correct," he said. "Type me an index." --- Pryor was waiting by the elevators, alone, with her file under her arm. "Congratulations," she said. "Thank you." "I mean it. That was better than my motion." She pressed the button again. It did not help; people do it anyway. "You were right about the fourth point, incidentally. The intention to turn it over. That was the piece I couldn't get around, and it's why I wrote *no other competent witness exists* instead of arguing it, which was overreach, and Wexler saw it." "He did." "I'd have taken the same shot." "You would have taken a better one," Sterling said. "You'd have moved to exclude the observation entirely as hearsay of the declarant and made me fight for the memorandum." Pryor turned her head and looked at him for a moment. "Yes," she said. "I would have. Don't tell me things like that, we're four months out." The elevator came, and neither of them got on it, and it went away again. "Manslaughter," she said. "No." "You haven't heard it." "I've heard the number in my head and it's between four and seven, and you'll go to four, and she'd be out in under three." Sterling put his hands in his pockets. "No." "Vance." It was the first time she had used it. "I have read this file a dozen times. I have a woman with a documented grudge against the deceased going back nine years and two years of her father's money in his pocket. I have her on an unlit road at midnight in a car with his paint on it and his car with hers. I have a five-shot revolver in her motel room with two chambers fired. And I have a bullet in the man's head that came out of a .38 with the same rifling as hers." She shifted the file. "I did not build that. It arrived. I've spent three days trying to find the place where it's soft and there isn't one, and I don't enjoy taking three years from a set designer, and I'm offering you four because I think a jury gives me twenty and I think that's more than the truth is worth." "That's a decent speech." "It's not a speech. It's a file." She stopped and started again, more quietly. "You know what worries me about it? It's *too* clean. Everything fits and nothing is left over, and in a dozen years I've never once had a case where nothing was left over." A shrug that was barely a shrug. "And then I go back and read it again and it still fits. So I stop worrying." Sterling said nothing. "Here's what I actually came down here to ask you." Pryor's eyes came up. "What's your theory?" "I'm not going to answer that." "You're not refusing. You're stalling, which is different, and I've watched you do both." She let that sit. "You don't have one. You've got a client you believe, which is not the same thing, and you've got Cruz measuring rooflines on my crash scene — I know about that — and you've got no idea yet what any of it means." "Is that a question?" "It's a professional courtesy," Pryor said. "You've just spent a motion proving you're entitled to try this case. You should probably find out whether you can." She got on the next elevator. She did not say anything else, and the doors closed, and Sterling stood in the corridor of the Justice Center with three boxes of exhibits, an assistant he was not permitted to sit next to, a client who had handed the State its motive in her own words, and no theory of the case whatsoever. She was right. That was the thing about her. She was almost always right, and she had just done him the courtesy of saying it to his face instead of finding out at trial. He went down and found Cruz's car in the lot on Ontario and got in and shut the door. "Where to?" Cruz said. "Tell me about the roofline." --- ## Chapter 8: Discovery Cruz had built it on the conference table out of two shoeboxes, a cigar box, and about forty feet of string, and it was, Sterling thought, the ugliest thing he had ever been genuinely excited by. "That's the Nova." Cruz tapped the cigar box. "That's the Lincoln. And here's the part nobody's going to enjoy: they're the same car. Near enough. I measured both. A Continental is longer than a Nova and heavier than a Nova and a foot wider than a Nova, but it is not taller — they both sit about four and a half feet at the roof, give or take an inch." He laid a matchbook flat across each box, level with each other. "So if the State's hoping to say she was down in a little car shooting up at a man in a big one, that's gone. She wasn't down. Nobody was up." "Then where does this live?" "Her hand." Cruz set the pencil point against the side of the cigar box, low. "She's in the driver's seat, left arm out her own window, firing behind her at something she can't see. Her gun hand is never higher than the sill of that window — call it forty-four inches off the road, and lower every time she flinches, which is every time. A man sitting up behind a wheel keeps his head around fifty." He moved the pencil up four inches and held it there. "So whatever else happened out there, she was firing from below a seated man's head, backward, one-handed, in the dark." Sterling looked at the string. "So she cannot make that wound." "Not that one. Not a hole that goes *down* into a temple, fired from under a man's jaw." Cruz sat down on the edge of the table. "I've been saying it four days in different ways and nobody's told me what to do with it." "I'll tell you what Mrs. Pryor does with it," Sterling said. "She stands up and says: *the deceased was leaning.* She says he was reaching for something on the seat. She says he ducked. She says the Lincoln pitched over a rut — and there are ruts, you photographed a dozen of them. She says any one of those things and she doesn't have to prove it, because it's my burden that's imaginary, and all she needs is for one juror to think *well, he could have been leaning.*" Cruz was quiet for a second. "So the geometry's no good." "The geometry is excellent and it is not sufficient." Sterling put his finger on the cigar box and left it there. "It proves the shot was unlikely. I need a shot that was *impossible*, and there is only one kind of impossible a jury can hold in its hands." "Which is." "Arithmetic." He looked up. "She fired twice. The cylinder says twice. The watchman says twice — that man is the best witness in this case and neither side has noticed it. The State's whole theory is that one round missed and one round killed Arthur Davis." He tapped the box once. "Where did the miss go?" Cruz did not move. "Nobody asked," he said. "Nobody asked. Why would they? They had a hit. A miss is a thing that goes into the dark and is never seen again, and no honest investigator in this county spends two days looking for it." Sterling sat back. "But if I find it — and then find the other one — then Arthur Davis was killed by a third bullet out of a five-shot revolver with two chambers fired, and Mrs. Pryor can put the deceased in any posture she likes." "Both of them." "Both of them. One is a curiosity. Two is an acquittal." Cruz was already reaching for his coat. "The near one's in that car," he said. "Has to be. She's firing backward at something that's alongside and dropping back off her left quarter. If she hit anything at all she hit the front right of that Lincoln." "Which is in a police impound lot on Twenty-fifth Street under six inches of Cuyahoga mud." "So get me in." "No," Sterling said. "That's precisely what I'm not going to do." He came around the table and stood over the shoeboxes for a moment. "There's a second thing I'm keeping in my pocket, and I want you to know it's there so you don't knock it out. I am not going to say the word *locker* in that courtroom. Not in an opening, not in a cross, not once." Cruz waited. "The State thinks she carried that gun — her gun, her grudge, her road, and that is the whole of it. They do not know it was put in her locker, because the only people alive who know that are in this office and the man who left it there. She said nothing when they took her; I saw to that. It isn't in a report and it never reached a newspaper. As far as the record will ever run, that revolver came off a motel bedspread and had no life before it." He set two fingers on the cigar box. "So that is where I intend to leave it. I'll try the case the State built, straight, right up until Cruz can put the second gun in front of the man who bought the pair — and then I'll hand that man enough rope to say *locker* out loud, in front of twelve people, about a thing nobody in that room ever told him." "And if he keeps his mouth shut." "Then I put your diner boy on the stand and we prove the plant the slow, ugly way, and it is worth a great deal less." Sterling straightened. "Keep Lasko warm. Subpoena him and sit on him. He's the floor under this, not the roof over it." --- He filed two motions on the Monday and he wrote them in deliberately different registers, because a judge reads four hundred motions a month and the ones that work are the ones that ask for a small thing for a plain reason. The first asked for the autopsy photographs. The second asked for permission to have the impounded vehicle examined for bullet strikes — *by the State's own laboratory, at the State's own convenience, with defense counsel and its investigator present as observers only and prohibited from contact.* Irene read the second one twice. "You're giving it away," she said. "You've handed them the finding before you have it." "Yes." "If there's a round in that car, their technician takes it out, their technician logs it, and Mrs. Pryor knows what we know at the same moment we know it." "Yes." "Why." "Because I am not going to stand up in March," Sterling said, "and offer a jury a bullet that Dan Cruz dug out of a car in a lot at night. She would cross-examine him for two hours and she would be entitled to every minute of it, and the jury would go out remembering a private detective with a screwdriver." He signed the second motion and blotted it. "If that round exists, I want it found by a man in a State laboratory coat, entered in a State evidence log, in a car that has been in State custody since the ninth of November. I want a chain of custody I could not have interfered with if I'd wanted to. Then it isn't my bullet. It's theirs. And they have to explain it." Irene set the motion down. "This takes you to March." "It does." "The grand jury handed up a murder indictment inside a week, and Wexler set a bond she'd need a house to make and she hasn't got a house. So she's in a cell, and the clock runs triple against the State, and you could have her tried by February whether you like the odds or not." She did not make it a question. "You're waiving time." "It's filed." Sterling capped his pen. "It buys Cruz his weeks. It costs her three months in county for a thing she didn't do, and I made that trade without asking her, because if I ask her she tells me to try it now and take the chance — and the chance is twenty years." He looked at the motion. "When she walks, she'll have spent a season inside for my patience. Put that on the ledger too, under the retainer we don't have." Irene looked at the motion for a moment. "Type you an index," she said. --- Pryor opposed both, and won one. "The photographs are gratuitous," she told Wexler. "Mr. Sterling has the protocol, he has the diagrams, he has the measurements and the path description and the caliber. What he wants is nine glossy photographs of a dead man's head, and the only conceivable use for the ninth is that a jury looks at it. If there is a specific technical question he cannot answer from the protocol, let him name it and I'll produce the photograph that answers it." Wexler looked at Sterling. "Can you name it?" He could not. That was the trouble. He had a strong professional itch about a wound described as *no visible soot* on a body that had spent an hour in a river, and an itch is not a technical question. "Not today, Your Honor." "Then it's denied without prejudice, and Mr. Sterling, when you can name it, I expect you'll be back." "I expect I will." The Lincoln was different, and Pryor knew it before she stood up; Sterling watched her decide how hard to fight. "The State's position is that the vehicle has been processed." "Processed for what?" Wexler said. "For — " A fractional pause, which from her was an admission. "For blood, for the deceased's effects, for the paint transfer, and photographed throughout." "Was it examined for bullet strikes?" "It was not, Your Honor. There was no occasion to. Two rounds were fired and one is accounted for." "And Mr. Sterling would like to know about the other one." "Mr. Sterling would like to spend three weeks and a great deal of the Court's patience proving that a bullet went into the dark on a dark road," Pryor said. "Which is where bullets go." "Probably. Motion granted." Wexler was already writing. "Your laboratory, your people, your log, defense observes and does not touch. Mrs. Pryor, if your technician finds nothing this costs the State a morning. If he finds something you'd rather have found it yourself." --- It took the State's man five hours and forty minutes, and Sterling stood on a concrete floor in an unheated bay on East Twenty-fifth Street for every one of them with his overcoat on and his hands where everyone could see them. The technician's name was Boyle and he was perhaps thirty and he was thorough in the specific unhurried manner of a man who has decided he does not care who wins. He washed the right side of the car down in sections with a hose and a soft brush, and he did it from the front backward, and for the first two hours he found nothing at all but a decade of stone chips and the long black-on-yellow scar that everybody already knew about. At two-forty he stopped. He had the right front door about half clean. He put his face six inches from the sheet metal below the belt line, forward of the handle, and he stayed there long enough that one of Pryor's investigators came over. "Got a hole," Boyle said. Nobody said anything. "It's a hole," he said again, more carefully. "It is not a stone chip and it is not corrosion and I'm not going to call it anything else until I've got the panel off." He straightened up and looked around for his camera. "Little under an inch above the crease. Round. Edges rolled in." Sterling did not move from where he was standing — fourteen feet away against the far wall of the bay, where he had been since ten o'clock. They photographed it. They measured it — twenty-two and a quarter inches off the ground, with the car on flat tires; Boyle wrote down that he would need it re-measured on jacks. They photographed it again with a scale. Then Boyle took the interior door panel off, which took another fifty minutes because the screws had been in river water, and put a light inside the cavity. "It's in here," he said. "In the door?" "In the door. It's caught low against the inner panel, back and down from where it went in." He was writing while he talked. "I want that in the log the way I said it. Back *and down*. It came in travelling down." Cruz, standing beside Sterling with his hands jammed in his pockets and saying absolutely nothing for five hours and forty minutes, made a small sound. Boyle took it out with a wooden probe and a gloved hand and it went into a tin, and the tin went into an envelope, and the envelope got a number, and three people signed for it before it left the bay — Boyle, a sergeant, and Pryor's investigator. Sterling signed nothing. He had not touched anything all day, and there were nine people in that bay who could say so. "Can you tell me what it is?" he asked, from fourteen feet away. "I can tell you it's a bullet and it's a thirty-eight and it's in one piece," Boyle said, "and I can tell you the rest on Thursday, and I'd appreciate it if nobody quoted me on any of that." "One more, and it costs you nothing. The inside of this car — somebody went over it for blood." "Back in November. It's in the file." "What did it show?" "That there was blood in it." Boyle peeled off the gloves. "Man was shot in it, counselor. There's blood. Where it sits, how it's thrown — I logged that and I diagrammed it, and nobody's asked me a word about it since, because everybody already knows how it got there." He dropped the gloves in a can. "Or thinks they do." Sterling did not answer that. He filed it behind the arithmetic and the locker, a third quiet thing, and let it alone. --- They got out to Ontario at half past five and neither of them said anything until they were in the car. Then Cruz put both hands on the wheel and laughed once, with no humor in it at all. "Back and down," he said. "Back and down." "He said it into a log. Their guy. Into their log, in their bay, in a car they've had since the ninth." Cruz shook his head. "That is the coldest thing I have ever watched a man do." "Mm." "So that's one." "That's one," Sterling said. "And one is a curiosity. Mrs. Pryor stands up in March and says the girl fired two shots, one hit the door of the car chasing her, and the other one went through the open window and into Arthur Davis's head, and every word of that is consistent with the bullet we just watched a State employee put in a tin." Cruz stopped laughing. "So I need the other one." "You need the other one, and you need it out of something that will hold striations, and you need it before Mrs. Pryor works out why she should have fought harder this morning." Sterling looked out at the traffic on Ontario. "How long have you got on the freighter?" "Sails Saturday. Maybe Sunday if the weather holds them." "Then you have three days to search a hundred and forty acres of gravel for a piece of lead the size of a thumbnail," Sterling said, "and a ship." --- ## Chapter 9: Ballast By the sixth hour Cruz had stopped being able to feel the last two fingers of his left hand, and he had searched a hundred and ten feet of creosote piling, and he had found a dozen dents, four spikes, a horseshoe, and no bullet. He was not looking randomly. That was the only thing keeping him out there. Randomly was a hundred and forty acres. What he had instead was a cone. The gouge in the gravel gave him where the Lincoln went off — that was fixed, photographed, measured four ways on the night. The paint scar gave him where the two cars had been alongside each other. Boyle's hole in the right front door gave him the first shot: twenty-two and a quarter inches off the ground on flat tires, twenty-five and a half on jacks, entering forward of the handle and running back and down. A descending line. Her gun hand had been higher than the hole and dropping, up around the sill of her own window, which was exactly where a hand firing backward out of a driver's window would be. That was the shot he could draw. The other one he could not, and neither could anyone else. A woman who has never fired a gun, firing a snub-nosed .38 double-action, one-handed, backward, out of a moving car, does not group her shots. There is no rule for where the second one goes, because there is no aim in it at all — only a light revolver kicking her wrist wherever it pleases. The honest answer to where the round went was *anywhere*, and anywhere was a hundred and forty acres. But the first shot had gone low, into the door. If the second went the other way — and a revolver that has just thrown a hand down tends to throw the next one up — then it went high, over the Lincoln's roof and away, into whatever was standing on the far side of the road. What was standing on the far side of the road was a row of mooring pilings from an ore slip that had not been used since 1961. Cruz had staked a line, tied string at ten feet and at fourteen, and worked the pilings one at a time from the middle of the cone outward, with a lantern and a scraper and a magnifying loupe he had bought for reading load lines. At six hours and forty minutes he found it. It was in the eleventh piling from the road end, four feet nine inches up, and it did not look like anything. Creosote pilings are gray and split and full of holes and every hole looks like every other hole. This one was round, and the splinters at the lip were pushed *in*, and when he got the loupe on it there was a gray smear on the wood at the bottom edge of the entry that was not creosote and was not weather. Cruz looked at it for a long time. Then he sat back on his heels in the freezing mud and did not touch it, and started laughing, and the laughing turned into coughing, which he had earned. --- He went and found a payphone. "Homicide." "Captain Thorne." "Captain Thorne went home at seven o'clock like a person." "Then wake him up," Cruz said, "and tell him it's Cruz, and tell him it's on Whiskey Island, and tell him it's the second bullet." --- Thorne got there at ten past one in a hat and a topcoat over what was plainly pajamas, and he stood in the mud looking at a piling by lantern light with his hands in his pockets for a full minute before he said anything at all. "You didn't touch it." "I didn't touch it." "Why not." "Because your man Boyle put the first one in a tin in front of nine witnesses and it's going to be worth something in March," Cruz said, "and if I dig this one out with a pocketknife at one in the morning it's worth exactly nothing, and your Mrs. Pryor gets to spend an afternoon asking me what else I've been carrying around in my coat." Thorne breathed out through his nose. "That's Sterling talking." "Course it's Sterling talking. He's the one who thinks in March." "And what do you think in?" "Feet and inches," Cruz said. "Captain, it's four foot nine off the ground on the far side of the road, and it's got a smear of lead on the lip, and it is *up* — it is up and it is past where that Lincoln was. If that's a thirty-eight and it comes out of her gun then both of her shots went somewhere that isn't a man's head, and you have got a third bullet in Arthur Davis and nobody to hang it on." Thorne did not say anything for a while. He was sixty-one years old and standing in freezing mud in his pajamas at one in the morning, looking at a piece of wood, and Cruz watched him do the entire calculation — the file that was closed, the woman in county, the prosecutor who had already offered a plea, the three detectives who had worked it clean and fast and had not, because nobody would have, spent two days looking for a miss. "Ah, hell," Thorne said. He turned around and walked back toward his car, and about halfway there he said, without raising his voice and without turning his head: "I want it photographed in place before anybody puts a chisel near it, and I want the lab out here at first light, and I want the whole run from the road end shot on a scale so no defense lawyer in this county can tell me later it was the ninth piling and not the eleventh." "Captain—" "Don't," Thorne said. "Don't thank me. If she didn't do it I've had the wrong woman in a cell for three weeks and I'd rather find that out from a piece of wood than from you." --- The freighter was the harder half and Cruz had three days. The reasoning was not complicated. Where does a yard foreman put a gun? Not the river — it is four feet deep at that pier and it had police divers in it on the tenth for exactly forty minutes, which is not thorough but is enough to make a man nervous. Not the yard. A hundred and forty acres sounds enormous until you are the night foreman and you know that every square foot of it gets walked, swept, forked, or driven over by somebody who does not work for you. Not his house. Not his car. Not the union hall. Something *leaving*. There had been three boats at the ore dock on the night of the eighth. Two had sailed on the tenth and were somewhere off Whitefish Bay by now and might as well have been on the moon. The third was the *Marquette Bay*, a five-hundred-and-eighty-foot bulk carrier that had come in light, taken on a partial load, and been sitting at the wall since the eighth of November waiting on a gearbox. She came in light. Cruz kept coming back to that. A boat that comes in light comes in on ballast, and a boat that is going to load ore pumps that ballast out, and while she is at the wall waiting on a gearbox with her tanks pumped down, a ballast tank is a dry steel room the size of a garage with one hatch on deck, and there is precisely one category of person on that dock who can walk up a ladder at three in the morning and open a deck plate without a single soul asking him why. The yard foreman. --- Getting aboard was the easiest thing Cruz did all week, because he did not have to lie about anything. He put on the coveralls, he took the clipboard and the sounding tape and the eight-year-old surveyor's card that said COAST GUARD MARINE INSPECTION OFFICE on it in a way that did not technically claim anything, and he told the mate he wanted to look at the number three port ballast tank. The mate said, "Be my guest, it's dry, watch the ladder, the third rung's a liar." Nobody on a working boat has ever once been surprised by a man who wants to look at a tank. It is the single most ordinary request in the marine trades. It is *boring*. That is why it works. --- Inside was cold in a way that outside was not. A ballast tank is not a room. It is the gap between the inner and outer hull, divided by floors and frames and stringers into a series of low steel cells connected by lightening holes you go through on your hands and belly, and every surface of it is wet, and the wet is rust-colored, and your lamp only ever shows you about ten feet of it at once. Cruz had spent a substantial portion of his twenties in spaces like that and had never once enjoyed one. He worked it the same as the pilings — from the access hatch outward, cell by cell, port to starboard, low first because things that get dropped go low and stay there. He found: two feet of orange sludge, a wrench, a work glove with no hand in it, a beer can from a brand that had not existed since 1969, and about four hundred pounds of scale. In the fourth cell aft, wedged under the flange of a longitudinal about eight feet in from the hatch, in the sludge, where it had gone when somebody dropped it down through the opening and it had bounced twice and skidded, there was a snub-nosed revolver. Cruz put the lamp on it and lay there on the wet steel and looked at it for a while. It was gray with rust and it was the same gun. Not the same weapon — the same *gun*, the same model, same barrel length, same worn checkering, the mate to the one that had come out of an apron pocket in a lawyer's office on the eighth of November. He did not touch it. He photographed it where it lay, four exposures, with the flash washing the cell out white each time and then dropping him back into the dark. He wrote down the distance from the hatch coaming, the frame number, the cell, and the time, and then he backed out through two lightening holes on his belly and came up the ladder into the daylight and stood on the deck of the *Marquette Bay* breathing cold air with his hands shaking, and not from the cold. Then he went and found the mate. "That tank," he said. "When does she flood?" "When we finish loading. Thursday, Friday." "Nobody goes in there before then. Nobody opens that plate, nobody runs a hose in it, and if anybody from the yard asks you about it you tell them the Coast Guard has a hold on it." The mate looked at him. "Does the Coast Guard have a hold on it?" "The Coast Guard is going to have a hold on it," Cruz said, "in about forty minutes." --- Thorne answered on the first ring this time. He had been expecting it, which Cruz decided not to think about too hard. "What." "Number three port ballast tank aboard the *Marquette Bay*, ore dock, fourth cell aft, eight feet in from the hatch under the flange of a longitudinal." Cruz read it off his own handwriting. "Snub-nose thirty-eight. In the sludge, rusted, one chamber fired." The pause went on long enough that Cruz checked the receiver. "Say the last part again," Thorne said. "One chamber fired. Four live, one spent. I put a lamp on the back of the cylinder and I did not touch it, Captain, and I want that in whatever you write down — I did not touch it, and there are four photographs, and the mate can tell you what time I came up that ladder." "Whose boat." "Nobody's. She's been at the wall since the eighth on a gearbox." Cruz let a beat go. "The tank's dry because she came in light. Only reason a man could get down there at all. And there's exactly one fella on that dock who can open a deck plate at three in the morning and have nobody ask him a thing about it." Thorne said, very quietly, "Don't say his name to me on a telephone." "Wasn't going to." --- The seller took two more days and four hundred dollars of Sterling's money, which Irene entered in the ledger as *investigative expenses, miscellaneous*. Cruz found him the way you find anyone in that trade: he asked three men on the docks who a foreman with cash and a grudge would go to for a pistol with no book on it, and two of the three gave him the same name. The name kept a garage on Train Avenue, sold mostly car parts, and had never in his life spoken to anybody who could hurt him. He remembered the sale because of the pair. "Nobody buys two," he said. "That's — you buy one. What's a man want with two the same? I said that to him. I said, what do you want with two the same, and he says, one's for my brother." "You believe him?" "Mister, I don't believe anybody. I sold him two." He shrugged with his whole body. "Little Smiths, five-shot, blue, both used, both about the same wear. Month back. Cash." "Would you know him again?" The fat man's face closed like a till drawer. "That," he said, "is a different conversation." --- Cruz got back to Terminal Tower at eight on the Thursday evening with four rolls of film, eight pages of notes, a lab receipt, and a set of photographs of a ballast tank, and Irene took all of it off him at the door and put it on the conference table and stood looking down at it with her arms folded. "You've got a second gun," she said. "I've got a second gun." "And a second bullet." "State's got the second bullet. Pulled it at eight on the Saturday morning with Boyle standing in the mud and Thorne standing behind Boyle." Cruz sat down without being asked and put his head back against the chair. "Irene, I have been in a ballast tank." "I can smell that." "There's a dead man's whole plan lying on that table," Cruz said, "and I've got to hand it to him and go home, and you've got to hand it to him and go sit in a hallway." Irene did not answer that for a moment. Then she picked up the top photograph, looked at it, and set it down square with the edge of the table. "Then we'd better make the index very good," she said. --- ## Chapter 10: The Arithmetic The boy's name was Nagy and he was a second-year at Cleveland-Marshall and he was worth every dollar of the thirty-five a day Sterling paid him, provided nobody asked him a question. He had the boxes in order. He had the tabs where Irene's index said the tabs went. He handed up what he was asked for without being told twice, and on the fourth morning of trial he had begun, unprompted, to have the next exhibit half out of the box before Sterling turned around, which was the single most useful thing anyone had done for him in four months. He was not Irene. Sterling had caught himself twice on the first day starting to say something sideways, as you do with somebody who already knows, and both times the sentence had died in the air over an empty chair. Irene was in a witness room on the fourth floor with a paperback and a thermos, where she had been since Monday. --- Evelyn Pryor put on her case without a wasted motion, which was how she did everything. Thorne, forty minutes, flat and careful. The night watchman, twelve minutes, and she got what she wanted out of him and sat down before Sterling could get anything more. A criminalist on the paint transfer, black on yellow and yellow on black, two separate contacts down the driver's side. She did not hurry and she did not oversell and she never once used the word *execution*, which Sterling noticed and did not like, because it meant she had decided to let twelve people arrive at it by themselves. By Thursday afternoon she came to the gun. --- The State's firearms examiner was named Vosburgh, he had been doing it since 1961, and he was good. Pryor took him through it in twenty-five minutes. The revolver recovered from room fourteen: a five-shot .38 Special, two chambers fired, three live rounds. The bullet recovered from the head of Arthur Davis: a .38-caliber lead projectile, badly deformed. Five lands and grooves, right-hand twist. The defendant's revolver: five lands and grooves, right-hand twist. "Can you tell this jury whether the fatal bullet was fired from that revolver?" "I cannot say that it was," Vosburgh said. "The damage is too extensive to permit an individual identification. What I can say is that it is consistent with having been fired from that weapon." "Is it consistent with the defendant's revolver?" "It is." "Thank you. Nothing further." Wexler looked at the clock, and then at Sterling, and Sterling stood up without hurrying, because he had been waiting four months and there was no reason to look like it. --- "Mr. Vosburgh. You've been examining firearms for the county since 1961." "Eighteen years." "In eighteen years, how many times have you told a jury that a bullet is *consistent with* a weapon?" "I couldn't count them." "More than a hundred?" "Certainly." "Would it be fair to say that a .38 lead bullet with five lands and grooves and a right-hand twist is consistent with a very large number of revolvers manufactured in this country?" "That's fair." "Hundreds of thousands?" "Millions, over the years." "So when you tell this jury that the fatal bullet is *consistent with* Miss Novak's revolver, you are also telling them, in the same breath, that it is consistent with a great many revolvers that Miss Novak has never touched." "That's the meaning of the term, yes." "Thank you. Now — a revolver does not eject its cartridge cases, does it." "No. They stay in the cylinder." "So at that scene on the ninth of November, on the gravel by that pier, there was no brass to be found. Nothing ejected, nothing to photograph, nothing to measure." "That's correct." "Which means the State has no independent ballistic evidence from the scene at all. Not one thing. It has a bullet from a man's head that you cannot identify, and it has a weapon." "That is — yes. That's the state of it." Sterling let two seconds go by. Nagy, beside him, had his hand on the tab. "Mr. Vosburgh, I'm going to hand you three envelopes." --- He did it in the order Irene's index said — not the order he would have chosen himself, and correct. "Defense Exhibit fourteen. Will you read the label." Vosburgh turned it over. "Cuyahoga County Criminalistics, evidence number 78-4471. Recovered by C. Boyle, examiner, from the interior of the right front door, nineteen seventy-four Lincoln Continental, Ohio registration on file. Recovery date the twenty-ninth of November." "Whose custody has that envelope been in since the twenty-ninth of November?" "The county's." "Not mine." "No, sir." "Not my investigator's." "No." "Was I present when it was recovered?" "The report says defense counsel observed." "Observed," Sterling said. "Does the report say anything about where defense counsel was standing?" For the first time Vosburgh looked up from the envelope. He had a small dry mouth-corner thing that was almost a smile and did not get anywhere near his eyes. "It says fourteen feet." "Have you examined the projectile in that envelope?" "I have." "Is it deformed?" "No. It's in excellent condition. It went through one thickness of sheet metal and came to rest against a second, and the door cavity is about the friendliest place in the world for a bullet to end up." "Meaning it retains its markings." "It retains everything. Lands, grooves, and the individual striae." "Were you able to compare it against Miss Novak's revolver?" "I was." "With what result?" "It was fired from that weapon," Vosburgh said. "That's an identification, not a consistency. I'd testify to it anywhere." Sterling did not turn around to look at the jury. It was one of the hardest things he had ever made himself not do. --- "Defense Exhibit fifteen. Same question." "Evidence number 78-4488. Recovered by county criminalistics from a creosote mooring piling, Whiskey Island access road, on the instruction of Captain M. Thorne. Recovery date the second of December." "Condition?" "Very good. Soft wood takes a bullet gently." "Fired from?" "The same weapon. Miss Novak's revolver." "You're certain of both." "I'm certain of both. There's no argument about either one and I don't expect Mrs. Pryor to make one." "And Defense Exhibit sixteen is a photograph of that piling in situ, with a scale, taken before recovery. How far off the ground is that entry?" "Four feet nine inches." "Which is higher than the roofline of a Chevrolet Nova." "I wouldn't know about the car." "You wouldn't. Thank you." --- Then he went and got the gun. He carried it up himself, in its box, and set it on the rail of the witness stand, and he did not open it, because he wanted Vosburgh to do that in front of everybody. "Would you open the cylinder, please." Vosburgh did. "How many chambers does that weapon have?" "Five." "How many contain fired cases?" "Two." "How many contain live rounds?" "Three." "Two and three is five." "Yes." "So on the night of the ninth of November, whatever else happened out there, that revolver was fired exactly twice." "That's what the cylinder says." "Not once. Not three times. Twice." "Twice." "Mr. Vosburgh, the State's night watchman told this jury on Tuesday that he heard two shots. He was quite firm about it — I believe his words were that he'd say it as many times as we wanted." Sterling put one hand on the rail. "Does that accord with the physical evidence in front of you?" "It does." "So we have two shots heard, two chambers fired, and — " he turned, and he took his time about it — "two bullets. Exhibit fourteen, from the door of Arthur Davis's Lincoln. Exhibit fifteen, from a piling on the far side of the road. Both identified to Miss Novak's revolver. Both by you. This week." "That's correct." The courtroom had gone very quiet. Sterling had been listening for it and it had come about four questions earlier than he expected. "Then I want to ask you about the third one." "Sir?" "The bullet in Arthur Davis's head." Sterling let it sit. "If both of the rounds that came out of that revolver are sitting in envelopes on your lap — where did the one in Mr. Davis come from?" Pryor was already standing. "Objection. Calls for speculation." "Sustained." "I'll rephrase." Sterling did not look away from the witness. "Mr. Vosburgh. As a matter of arithmetic and not opinion: a five-shot revolver with two fired chambers can account for how many bullets?" "Two." "And you have identified both of them." "I have." "To a location that is not Arthur Davis." "...Yes." "Nothing further." --- Pryor came up for redirect and Sterling knew inside of ten seconds that she had found the place to stand. "Mr. Vosburgh. Exhibit fifteen — the piling. You said soft wood takes a bullet gently." "It does." "How long will a bullet stay in a creosote piling?" "Indefinitely. It's not going anywhere." "Years?" "Years." "Decades?" "I've taken them out of railroad ties older than I am." "So a bullet found in that piling on the second of December might have been fired on the ninth of November." A pause of exactly the right length. "Or in 1971." "That's — the wood won't tell you." "The wood won't tell you." She let the jury have it. "Mr. Vosburgh, is there anything at all in your examination of Exhibit fifteen that fixes *when* it was fired?" "No. Nothing does that." "Anything that fixes when it was fired *relative* to Exhibit fourteen?" "No." "And that access road — is it a public right of way?" "I don't know, ma'am." "It is. Now: Miss Novak has owned that revolver — " "Objection," Sterling said. "Miss Novak has never owned that revolver and there is no evidence in this record that she has." "Sustained. Rephrase, Mrs. Pryor." She inclined her head half an inch, which from her was an apology and a concession and a thing filed away, all at once. "Mr. Vosburgh — nothing in your science tells this jury that Exhibit fifteen was fired on the ninth of November at all. Correct?" "Correct." "Thank you." --- He got the door bullet back on recross in two questions, because that one she could not touch and both of them knew it. "Mr. Vosburgh. Exhibit fourteen was recovered from inside a car that had been in the custody of the Cleveland Police Department continuously since the ninth of November." "Yes." "Is there any question in your mind about when *that* bullet entered that door?" "None. It was in a car nobody could get to." "Thank you." But he had lost the piling, or he had lost enough of it, and standing there in front of twelve people who had been perfectly still four minutes ago and were now shifting in their seats, Sterling did the honest accounting. The arithmetic was not finished. It was three-quarters finished, and three-quarters was the worst possible place to be, because a juror who half believes you goes into a room and gets talked out of it by somebody who doesn't. He needed the second bullet nailed to that night, and no science on earth was going to do it. Or he needed to stop trying to prove where her bullets went and prove instead that *neither* of them ever got inside that car — which meant a downward line through a temple from three inches away, and a photograph of it, and a technical question he had spent nine days learning how to ask. --- Wexler recessed at four-ten. Pryor stopped at the defense table on her way out, which she had not done all week, and she stood there for a moment with her file against her hip and looked at the two envelopes still sitting in front of Nagy. "That was the best cross I've ever had done to a witness of mine," she said. "Thank you." "I've got the coroner's man in the morning." "I know." "You're going to want the photographs." "I am." "I'm going to fight you on it," Pryor said, "and I'm going to lose, and I want you to understand that I know I'm going to lose and I'm doing it anyway, because if I hand them over without a fight it looks like I don't believe my own case." Sterling looked up at her. "Do you?" he said. She did not answer that. She picked her file up off her hip and went out through the gate and up the aisle, and it was only afterward, packing the boxes with a second-year law student who had not said a word in four days, that Sterling realized she had walked the whole length of that courtroom without once looking at the jury box. --- ## Chapter 11: Geometry Pryor fought the photographs for six minutes on Friday morning and lost, exactly as she had said she would. Sterling won it with one sentence, which was the sentence he had not been able to construct in November. "Your Honor, the question is whether immersion in river water removes surface soot from a gunshot wound while leaving subdermal powder tattooing intact. The protocol does not address it. The photographs do. That is the technical question the Court asked me to name in November, and it took me until the ninth of December to learn enough to ask it." Wexler looked at him over the glasses for a moment. "Nine photographs to the defense," he said. "Two of them go to the jury and I'll pick which two." --- Dr. Renner had been a deputy coroner for six years and had the flat, slightly bored delivery of a man who has explained the same dozen facts to a great many juries and has learned that enthusiasm gets misread. Pryor's direct was fifteen minutes. Cause of death: a single gunshot wound to the right temple. Track front to back, right to left, and downward. The bullet had lodged behind the left ear. The lungs were nearly dry, which Renner offered as consistent with a man already dead when the car went into the water and declined, twice, to call proof of it. Sterling stood. "Doctor, I want to read you a line from your own protocol. Page four, under *Entrance Wound.* 'Margins abraded. No visible soot.' Did you write that?" "I did." "What is soot, in this context?" "Combustion products from the propellant. Carbon, principally. It deposits on the skin and on clothing when the muzzle is close." "How close?" "For a short-barreled revolver? You'll see soot inside about a foot. Sometimes eighteen inches." "And you saw none." "None visible." "None *visible*," Sterling said. "Doctor, what happens to soot deposited on the skin of a man who then spends approximately one hour submerged in the Cuyahoga River?" Renner did not answer immediately. Sterling had been told by three separate people that he would not, and he waited. "It washes off," Renner said. "Entirely?" "Largely. It's surface deposition. It's not bound to anything." "So the absence of visible soot on a body recovered from a river tells this jury — what, exactly, about the distance from which he was shot?" "By itself," Renner said, "nothing." "Nothing." Sterling let it stand for a beat. "Is there anything produced by a close-range discharge that does *not* wash off?" "Yes." Renner shifted, and for the first time in fifteen minutes he stopped sounding bored. "Powder tattooing. Stippling. Unburned and partially burned particles leave the muzzle at velocity and strike the skin hard enough to abrade it or embed in it. Those are injuries to the dermis. They're not deposits. Water doesn't touch them." "Would you look at what's been marked Defense Exhibit twenty-two." Nagy already had it half out of the box. Renner took the photograph. He held it at arm's length and then close, and then he took a pair of glasses out of his breast pocket and put them on, which he had not needed for anything else all morning, and looked at it for a long time. "Doctor?" "There's a zone of punctate abrasion around the entrance. Anterior and superior to it. Perhaps three centimeters across." "Is that stippling?" "That's stippling." "Was it in your protocol?" "No." "Why not?" Renner set the photograph down on the rail. To his considerable credit he did not look at Pryor, and he did not hedge. "Because I examined him at nine o'clock the following morning under fluorescent light with a wound that had been in cold water for an hour and cleaned before autopsy, and I was looking for soot and I recorded that there wasn't any," he said. "The photographs were taken under oblique light before the body was washed. That's a better record than my eyes were. It's in the picture and it wasn't in my notes, and I'm not going to stand up here and pretend otherwise." "Doctor, at what range does stippling occur?" "Close. Inside a foot or two, always." "Can you be more precise, for a pattern that tight?" "With a two-inch barrel and three centimeters of it? That's close work. Under six inches. I'd not be surprised at three, and at three you would look for searing at the margin — which the water may well have taken, along with the soot." "There's a second thing the water leaves behind, Doctor, and I'd like to come to it. A shot fired that close into a man's head — does it throw anything *back*, toward the gun?" "Back-spatter," Renner said. "A fine mist. The skin opens and a little of what's under it comes out the way the bullet went in. High velocity, almost no mass." "How far does it carry?" "A foot. Two at the most. It's mist — it falls out of the air at once, and it lands on whatever is close on the muzzle side. Including, as a rule, the hand that held the gun." "So a shot this close lays a fine spray of Arthur Davis's own blood on whatever stood within a foot or two of the muzzle." "It does." Sterling turned, and Nagy passed the report up without being asked. "Defense Exhibit twenty-three — the State's serology report on the interior of that Lincoln, dated the fourteenth of November. The third paragraph, Doctor, if you would." Renner took his glasses back out. "'Fine high-velocity spatter, typed to the deceased, on the passenger side of the windshield, the header rail above it, and the crown of the front seat back.'" He set it down. "Diagrammed and photographed. It's careful work." "Where is the header rail?" "Inside the car. Along the top of the windshield." "The crown of the seat back?" "Inside the car." "Doctor, you've told this jury that mist travels a foot or two and no further. The State's own report puts it on the inside of that automobile. What does that tell you about where the muzzle was when Arthur Davis was shot?" Renner was not bored now, and he did not hurry. "That it was inside the car with him," he said. "Within a foot or two of his head. Not in another one." --- Sterling let the courtroom sit with it for three full seconds, which is a very long time. "Doctor, I want to put a proposition to you. The State's theory is that this wound was inflicted by a person firing from the driver's window of a Chevrolet Nova at a Lincoln Continental that was behind and beside it, both cars moving, on a gravel road, at night." "I've heard that theory." "Is that consistent with a muzzle three inches from Arthur Davis's temple?" "No." "Is it consistent with a muzzle six inches away?" "No." "A foot?" "Counsel, at a foot those two cars are all but touching, and the man is inside one of them." There was a sound in the gallery — not laughter, something shorter than that — and Wexler let it go by without the gavel, which told Sterling everything about how the morning was running. "One more, Doctor, and it's the important one." Sterling put both hands on the rail. "Suppose Arthur Davis was leaning. Suppose he was turned in his seat, or ducking, or the car went over a rut. Does any posture that a man can adopt inside an automobile change the distance from the muzzle to his head?" Renner looked at him with something close to gratitude — a man who had been sitting on a question nobody thought to ask. "No," he said. "Posture changes the angle. It cannot change the range. Those are independent." "Thank you, Doctor." --- Pryor took him on redirect and Sterling gave her credit for going straight at it instead of nibbling. "Doctor, could the defendant have reached out of one vehicle toward another?" "She'd have to have an arm about nine feet long." "Could the vehicles have been in contact at the moment of the shot?" "Then the shot's still through a door and a window at an angle nobody's described, and I'd expect an intermediate target, and there isn't one on him." "That spatter on the inside of the car, Doctor — the vehicle was in the river the better part of an hour. Wouldn't the water have carried it off?" "Some of it, off the glass. Not off the cloth. Blood driven into a seat at that speed stays in the seat. And the header rail and the crown of the seat rode high — the car went in nose-down, and the water never reached them." "Doctor, you did not record this stippling at autopsy." "I did not." "You are testifying to it now, from a photograph, after being handed that photograph by defense counsel." "I am." "Thank you." It was the right question and she asked it well, and it was worth about four minutes of the jury's doubt, and everybody in that room including Evelyn Pryor knew that it was worth about four minutes. --- The State called Leo Briggs after the lunch recess. Pryor called him for one narrow purpose, and it was a legitimate one: she needed somebody to put Arthur Davis on that yard, to establish who he was and what he did and why a union representative might be driving a Continental down an access road at midnight. Briggs was the night foreman. He had known the man for three years. He was, on paper, the correct witness. Sterling watched him come up the aisle and take the oath. Big through the chest and the neck. A suit that had been bought for a funeral some years ago. He sat down and put his hands on his knees and left them there, and he answered Pryor's questions in short flat sentences for twenty minutes, and he was, Sterling thought, doing quite well. He had also been sequestered since Monday, under the same order that had a court reporter's transcript locked away from a woman on the fourth floor. He had not heard one word of the trial. Sterling stood up with a single sheet of paper. --- "Mr. Briggs. You signed on shift at twenty-one forty on the night of the eighth of November." "If that's what the book says." "It is the book. Defense Exhibit nine — the gate log, in your hand, *BRIGGS L., ON twenty-one forty.*" He set it down. "Were you inside the fence at midnight?" "I was on shift." "That isn't what I asked. At midnight a hopper jumped a switch on the east siding and four men worked it with pry bars for an hour. Were you there?" "I'd have to look at — there's a lot of yard." "Were you on the pier at half past one?" "Yeah. After the crash. Everybody was." "So we can place you at twenty-one forty and we can place you at half past one." Sterling did not move. "Can you tell this jury where you were in between?" "Working." "Where?" "On the yard." "Which part?" "All over. That's the job." "Mr. Briggs, my investigator spoke to four men from that shift. Not one of them can put you inside that fence between ten o'clock and half past one. Is there a man on this earth who can?" Pryor: "Objection. Argumentative." "Sustained." "I'll withdraw it." Sterling turned a page he did not need to turn. "Warehouse 4 on that yard is occupied by Fleetwing Storage Company. Do you know the name?" A pause. Half a second, no more. "I've heard it." "Defense Exhibit twelve is the occupancy permit for Warehouse 4, pulled for Fleetwing Storage in March of 1976, signed *L. Briggs*, address 3411 Denison Avenue. Is that your signature?" "...Yes." "Is that your address?" "It was." "So Fleetwing Storage is you." "It's a name. It never did any business." "Mr. Briggs, on the twenty-second of November — a week and a half after Arthur Davis died — a man matching your description asked the county recorder's office for the Fleetwing filing. He asked for deeds. He didn't know where to look. Was that you?" Briggs's hands came off his knees for the first time. "I don't remember." "Then let me try one you will. On the evening of the eighth of November, a man paid a boy at the Ambassador diner twenty dollars to step out back for a cigarette and leave the door to the staff hall standing open behind him. Ten minutes. The boy remembers a big man with dock hands who said he was a health inspector." Sterling let it sit. "Were you at the Ambassador on the eighth of November?" "I don't eat there." "That wasn't the question." "No," Briggs said. "I wasn't at the Ambassador." "Thank you." --- Sterling changed direction, and did it without a pause, which was the point. "Have you ever purchased a firearm from a dealer on Train Avenue?" "No." "Have you ever purchased two?" "No." "Defense Exhibit nineteen is a photograph of a snub-nosed .38 revolver recovered on the twelfth of December from the number three port ballast tank of the freighter *Marquette Bay*, at the ore dock on your yard, by officers of the Cleveland Police Department. One chamber fired, four live." He held it up without looking at it. "Have you ever seen that weapon?" "No." "That tank was dry because the vessel came in light. She'd been at the wall since November on a gearbox. To get into it, a man has to walk up a ladder at night and open a deck plate." Sterling set the photograph down. "Mr. Briggs, who on that dock can do that without a single person asking him why?" "Lot of people." "Name one." Silence. "Mr. Briggs, I want to be very careful here, because this matters and I don't intend to overstate it." Sterling came out from behind the podium, and his voice came down rather than up. "That weapon cannot be matched to the bullet in Arthur Davis's head. The bullet is too damaged. No expert in this country could do it and I'm not going to suggest to this jury that one could. I want that on the record and I want you to hear me say it." Briggs looked at him. He had been braced for something. Sterling had watched him brace for it for ten minutes — the accusation, the raised voice, the thing he could deny in front of twelve people with his hands flat and his jaw set. He had come up that aisle ready for it. And it had not come, and now the defense attorney was standing in the middle of the floor conceding a point in his favor, and there was nothing at all to push against. "So I'll ask you the only question the evidence supports," Sterling said. "Two revolvers of the same model, the same barrel length, the same wear, were sold to one buyer in one transaction on Train Avenue in the first week of November. One of them was found in the ballast tank of a ship on your dock. The other one was found in a waitress's apron." He stopped there. "That's not a question," Wexler said. "No, Your Honor. Withdrawn." Sterling turned back toward the table. "I have nothing further for this witness." And into the four feet of silence between the podium and the defense table, Leo Briggs said: "I never went near that girl's locker." --- Sterling stopped walking. He did not turn around straight away. He stood with his back to the witness stand and looked at Nagy, who was looking up at him with his hand still on a tab and no idea in the world what had just happened, and then he turned around slowly. "Mr. Briggs," he said. "In five days of testimony in this courtroom, nobody has said the word *locker*." Briggs's mouth opened. "You have been sequestered since Monday under the Court's order. You have not heard one witness. You have not read a transcript." Sterling's voice was very quiet now and it carried to the back wall. "Nobody has told you where that revolver was found. Not the State, not the Court, not me." "I heard it somewhere—" "Where?" "On the — the radio, the papers—" "The location of that weapon has never been published. Mrs. Pryor's office does not release it and I have never once said it outside this building." He took a step. "How do you know it was in a locker?" Briggs looked at Pryor. It was the worst thing he could have done and he did it without thinking, as a man looks for his lawyer, and Evelyn Pryor sat perfectly still at the State's table with a pen in her hand and looked back at him with an expression that Sterling would remember for a long time, because there was nothing in it at all. Not anger. Not surprise. She had put this man on the stand herself, three hours ago, to prove a timeline. The pen went down on the table very carefully, because setting it down hard might have broken something. "Your Honor," Pryor said, "may we approach." --- They were at the bench for four minutes. Sterling said almost nothing; there was nothing left that needed saying by him, and there is a moment in a trial when the most persuasive thing a lawyer can do is stand quietly and let the other side do the arithmetic in front of everybody. Wexler recessed until Monday and excused the jury and did not excuse Leo Briggs, and told him, in the same tone he used for scheduling, that he was to remain in the courtroom and that the Court was appointing him counsel before another word was said. Then he told the bailiff to close the doors. --- Cruz was waiting in the corridor with his hat in his hands because they had let him in at last, the reconstruction never having been needed. "Well?" "He knew about the locker," Sterling said. Cruz worked that through, and Sterling watched him get there, and watched the whole four months arrive at once — the pier, the measurements, the piling, the ballast tank, the fat man on Train Avenue. "He *told* you." "He told a courtroom. There's a difference and it's all in our favor." Sterling put his coat over his arm. "Go and get Irene off the fourth floor. She's had nothing but a paperback since Monday and I would like her to hear it from one of us and not from a bailiff." "What do I tell her?" Sterling thought about it. "Tell her the index was very good," he said. --- ## Epilogue: The Wind-Down Nobody put the boxes away. They came back up to the twenty-third floor on the Friday with the cartons of a case that had stopped existing at ten past ten on the Monday morning, and they set them along the wall under the window in the order they came out of the car, which was not any order at all, and then all three of them stood looking at them for a while and went and got a drink instead. Irene had spent four months on those boxes. She would spend two days putting them away and she knew it, and she found she did not mind, because there is a specific pleasure in filing something that is over. Evelyn Pryor had moved to dismiss herself. She had not been made to. She had stood up in front of Wexler on Monday morning with her file closed and said that in light of evidence developed at trial the State could no longer sustain its burden, and entered a nolle prosequi, and asked leave of the court to do it — and because the jury had been sworn, that was the end of it for good, and Wexler said so in under a minute. Sterling had said afterward that it was the single most professional thing he had ever watched a prosecutor do. Irene had thought — and did not say, then or later — that a dismissal is not an acquittal, and that the *Press* would run it as *charges dropped*, and that there is a difference between those two phrases that only ever matters to the person the phrases are about. --- Cruz got the bourbon out of the credenza and poured three, and did not make a speech about it, and handed them around. "All right," he said, sitting down on the arm of the client's chair with his glass. "When." "When what?" "When did you know. Not when could you prove it. When did *you* know." Sterling turned his glass a quarter turn on the blotter and did not answer straight away, and Irene, watching him, understood that he was deciding whether to be honest about it. "The second of December," he said. Cruz sat up. "The *piling*? That's three months before trial." "It is." "You had the geometry in November. You had the string and the shoeboxes on that table in November." Cruz was genuinely put out, which Irene enjoyed considerably. "You stood in that impound bay and watched Boyle pull a bullet out of a door and you're telling me you didn't know?" "I believed her in November," Sterling said. "That's a different organ entirely and it has never once won a case. What I had in November was one bullet in a door, which is perfectly consistent with a frightened woman firing twice and hitting a man with the second one. It's a curiosity. It isn't an answer." He drank. "The night you found the second one I stopped having a client I believed and started having an arithmetic problem with only one solution. That's when I knew. Three weeks, and I'd have taken three days." "Huh," Cruz said, and sat back, mollified in the specific way of a man who has been told his own work mattered. --- "Then explain the locker," Irene said. "Ah." Sterling set the glass down. "The locker is the thing I got wrong for four months, and I got it wrong because I asked the wrong question about it on the first night. In this room, with the woman sitting right there." "You asked why somebody put a gun in it." "I asked why somebody *armed* her. Which assumed the gun was meant to be used, and it never was." He put two fingers on the blotter. "Briggs did not want Vivian Novak to shoot anybody. He had no interest in what she did with it. What he wanted was for the police to find, in the possession of a woman with nine years of documented grievance against Arthur Davis, a revolver she could not explain." "That's all?" "That is the entire design. He kills Davis with a clean gun bought the same week from the same man — leans in from the passenger side while the man sits behind his own wheel and puts it against the right temple, close and angled down, so that anyone who ever looks at it reads an execution, which is what it was. He puts the mate in her locker at six o'clock that evening for twenty dollars. Then he waits a day or a week, and telephones a detective bureau anonymously, and says *ask the waitress at the Ambassador about Arthur Davis*, and lets the county do the rest." Sterling shrugged with one shoulder. "It would have worked. It very nearly worked *as it was*, and as it was, it was improvised in about ninety seconds on a dark road by a man who could not believe his luck." Irene had her glasses off and was turning them by one arm. "The freight truck," she said. "No one arranged it and no one could have," Sterling said. "She hits a roadblock on the Shoreway, discovers the gun in her bag, panics, and turns off into the only industrial peninsula in Cuyahoga County where Leo Briggs is the man who signs the shift book." He looked at the boxes along the wall. "He was behind her from Euclid Avenue. He was outside this building for two hours with Arthur Davis dead in the seat beside him, and he was waiting for her to go home so he could go home. And instead the entire county handed him a woman with his gun in her bag on an unlit road with no witnesses." "So he ran her off." "He ran her *at*. He didn't want her in a ditch, he wanted her frightened and shooting, and he got two shots out of her inside of a second and a half and put the Lincoln off the end of a dead slip he has walked past every night for six years." Sterling picked the glass back up. "Then he went into the water after it and put Davis back behind the wheel, so the man shot sitting still would be found dressed as the man who'd been driving. Waded to the bank in the dark and walked to his own gate, and was a wet foreman in a dry coat by the time the first cruiser came over the bridge. And in all of it he did the one careless thing, which is that he never once wondered where those two shots went. Why would he? A miss goes into the dark. Everybody knows that. The State knew it so thoroughly that nobody looked for four months." Cruz turned his glass on the blotter. "The body came out the driver's door. I watched them take him." "He'd have moved him twice, then. Once to drive him, once to leave him." "Twice, in the cold, with her tail-lights going away up the road and the watchman already dialing." Cruz shook his head slowly. "He was good." "He was good enough that if those two shots had gone into the river instead of into a door and a piece of wood," Sterling said, "we would be driving up to Marysville once a month to tell a set designer we're still working on it." Cruz said, "Six hours and forty minutes." "Six hours and forty minutes," Sterling agreed, "and an eleventh piling." --- The check was in Irene's second drawer and she had been waiting all evening for a reasonable moment to produce it, and there wasn't going to be one, so she took it out and slid it across the desk face down. Sterling turned it over. He looked at it for slightly longer than a man looks at a number he was expecting. "Irene." "The shipper's insurers recovered forty-one coils out of a warehouse on Denison that they had written off in 1977 and had stopped thinking about," she said. "There is a standing recovery schedule. I read it. It is twelve percent and they tried to tell me it was seven, and then a man in Pittsburgh read the schedule himself and stopped saying seven." "And the union?" "The union has a defense fund for officers under indictment which, as of the eleventh of this month, has no officers under indictment to defend, and a new executive board that would like very much to be seen doing something about Arthur Davis." Irene folded the glasses and set them on the desk. "I suggested a contribution to the costs of the party who did what their own trustees did not. They agreed inside of a day, which tells you what they think is coming." Cruz whistled at the ceiling. "Three hundred and forty dollars in a passbook," he said. "Three hundred and forty dollars in a passbook," Irene said, "and I would like it noted that I said in November that this case would pay for itself and that nobody in this room believed me." --- What she did not put on the desk, because there was nothing to put, was Merrick. She had the whole structure. Fleetwing at the bottom, Bessemer above it, R. T. Merrick above that with nine directorships and a seat on the committee that had tried to unseat the mayor, and a warehouse a company had rented to itself through two layers of paper so that eight coils a boat could disappear off a scale ticket and turn up ninety days later on a flatbed. Briggs would go down for Arthur Davis. He would probably go down for the steel as well. Merrick had already sent a letter. It was two paragraphs, it was on very good stock, it expressed the company's shock and its full cooperation, and it had been signed by somebody else on his behalf. Nobody in the room said anything about it. Sterling had read the letter that morning and put it in the box with the others, and Irene had watched him do it, and that had been the entire conversation. --- Cruz left at half past ten. Sterling left twenty minutes after that, and stopped at the door with his coat on and said, "Two days on the boxes?" "Three. The exhibits go back to the county and they'll want a receipt for every one of them." "Take four." Then he was gone, and the outer door shut, and Irene was alone on the twenty-third floor with the cartons and two inches of bourbon nobody had finished. --- She had one more thing to do and she had been aware of it all evening, in the low steady manner of a chore. Vivian Novak had been out of county since Monday. She was not coming up here; she had said so on the telephone, very politely, in the voice of somebody who intends never to enter a building again. She had gone back to the Ambassador on the Wednesday. They had held her station. Irene had asked, because it was her job to ask, whether the theater work had come back. There had been a pause on the line of about the right length for a woman to decide how honest to be with a stranger who had driven downtown at ten o'clock with a signature she did not need. *Nobody's called,* Vivian had said. *It's only been four days. It's the middle of a season, nobody hires in March.* And then, before Irene could say any of the four useless things available: *Miss Miller, last spring it was three weeks and a paragraph on page eleven and I still lost the season. This time it was four months and my picture in the paper twice.* A breath. *They print that the charges were dropped. They don't print that I didn't do it. Those aren't the same sentence and everybody who reads a paper knows it.* Irene had not argued, because the woman was correct, and because Irene had spent a career watching people be handled and had decided a long time ago not to do it herself. *I'll call you in the spring,* she had said instead. *Not about this. There's a man who builds sets at the Hanna who owes me a considerable favor and has no idea I intend to collect it.* --- She turned off the lamp and stood a moment in the dark with her coat over her arm. Then she crossed to the far wall and swung the ugly painting of the Superior Viaduct back on its hinge, and worked the dial, and opened the safe. There was nothing in it, and there had been nothing in it since the eighth of November. She had typed a memorandum about that before dawn on the ninth and sworn to it in December, to a judge and an empty jury box, and for her trouble the judge had made her a witness and sent her up to the fourth floor for a week — so that the one thing in the whole affair she could prove past doubt was the one thing the twelve people never heard her say. She looked inside it anyway, with her hand on the door, for a while. Then she closed it, and spun the dial, and let the painting fall back over the steel, and went home. ---