Raymond chewed a mouthful of turkey sandwich and tried to swallow it. It had been dry to begin with. Now it felt like swallowing a mouthful of cotton. And he hadn’t even gotten a beverage he could use to wash it down.
“What did you and Mrs. Gutermann talk about yesterday?” Raymond asked when he was able.
“Oh, a little bit of everything. She’s an amazing lady. Why?”
“I was just wondering how she managed to make a thing like this work. And I so . . . couldn’t.”
“Not your fault. It was my sister’s and my fault. We brought it up. We shouldn’t have. It was just hard to sit there all morning and listen to her testimony and wonder what the people who heard it were thinking about her. It’s hard not to want to tell people to please try to have a higher opinion of her. But we don’t get to talk to the jury, so . . .”
“Right. Doesn’t matter what I think.”
“I should go find my sister.”
He rose from the table and walked away, leaving half of his spaghetti lunch uneaten. Raymond leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. Squeezed his eyes closed.
I’ll have to ask her how she does a thing like that. Like yesterday’s lunch with the Hatfields. There must be a secret to it.
Then he decided the secret was probably ninety-two years of experience, and that it probably wouldn’t help to ask.
The prosecutor dug into the defendant again after lunch.
“I’d like to go a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of the shooting,” he said.
The Hatfield woman flopped against the back of her chair in obvious disgust. “I can’t imagine what there is to say about it that hasn’t been said a hundred times already.”
“Bear with me. Please. I want to ask about something Mr. Adler said yesterday. He said you couldn’t possibly have turned around and seen Mr. Velez holding your wallet and decided he stole it, because there was no time. There was no time for him to steal it. You had your purse clenched under your arm. He said you put it under there tightly after you got the gun out.”
“That’s right.”
“And Mr. Velez had just barely caught up to you enough to reach out.”
“Look, I know what you’re getting at. But I wasn’t lying. I turned around. I saw the wallet in his hand. I call it a purse, but I don’t want to be confusing. I concluded it was a robbery, and I acted accordingly.”
“I think you have the chronology wrong.”
“No,” she said. “I have it exactly right.”
“Turns out, though, there’s evidence to the contrary. Before you turned to face him you had already fired off a shot.”
The woman’s face went slack with surprise.
“That’s a perfectly ridiculous thing to say. How could I have fired a shot before I even turned around?”
“I don’t know,” the prosecutor said. “You tell me.” He walked to the table where his notes and files lay stacked. “Your Honor, I’d like to enter into evidence Exhibits D, E1, and E2.”
He handed two photos and some kind of document to the judge, who scanned them with his gaze, nodded, and handed them back.
He approached the witness with them, and she sat back, away from him and them, as though they might be poisonous.
“The newspaper report of the incident said you fired six bullets into Mr. Velez’s torso, emptying the gun. But that’s not quite right. I have a crime scene photo here of the body that clearly shows five entry wounds. And I also have the medical examiner’s report, which says the same.”
“Well, I don’t know where the other one went. I guess I just missed.”
“Yes. You did. You missed by nearly forty-five degrees. I also have a photo of the spot that took the first bullet. Or what police concluded was the first. It’s in the building that you were passing at the time of the shooting. The building that was on your right before you turned around.”
“So? So, I missed. Like I said. I was upset.”
“But you don’t stand and face a man at point-blank range and then fire a shot forty-five degrees off to your left.”
“So what are you saying happened, then?”
“I’m saying you fired off one shot while you were spinning around.”
“Okay. Fine. I was afraid. So what if I did?”
“If you hadn’t turned around, then you hadn’t seen the wallet in his hand.”
He waited, in case she wanted to say something. She did not. Her face seemed to be growing whiter.