There was a surprised, proud-father laugh. Dad was the one who’d taught me that the most effective response to any argument is the question How do you know? Shift the burden of proof to your opponent and force them to back up their position with mountains of evidence.
“All right,” he obliged. “You’re an Ivy League law student who graduated summa cum laude. Your senior year, you led your sorority chapter to complete more service hours than any other Panhellenic organization in the South. And remind me of The House’s cumulative GPA again?”
“High enough to drive the opposing counsel to murder,” I replied with acid in my veins.
“Mmmm,” Dad said in a teasing, adversarial way. “And yet, how do you know?”
I snorted. “That he’s an idiot or that he’s a killer?”
“Both.”
“The DA unearthed his academic transcripts. His grades were in the bottom fifth percentile at Tacoma Narrows, and he only got in to the University of Utah because his application was embellished and falsified.”
“And?” Dad said over the creak of his office chair. I imagined him stretching and taking in the Hudson at the window. No less brown than the East River, but if you looked north, the cherry trees in Central Park were telling you it was spring. “How do you know he’s the one who killed Robbie and Denise?”
“Because I saw him with my own two eyes.”
* * *
Henry Pearl met me in the parking lot at the Leon County Jail. He was younger than I’d pictured over the phone, with a blond mustache and a peaches-and-cream complexion that was splotchy in the Florida humidity. He thanked me loudly for being on time, almost as if he wanted someone else to hear. A quick survey of my surroundings revealed a young woman smoking on the curb wearing heavy tortoiseshell sunglasses that would leave purplish indents on either side of her nose for the next few hours. She had black, ironed-straight hair and a tiny hourglass figure buttoned up snugly in a plaid suit. This was Veronica Ramira, thirty-two, the sole strategic female on The Defendant’s defense team. I despised her and wanted her to like me on the spot.
“Hello, Henry,” she said, pronouncing his name Enri. Later, in her closing remarks, Veronica would tell the twelve jurors that she arrived in Miami as part of the first wave of Cubans after the revolution, a twelve-year-old girl who barely spoke English, with parents who no longer had a cent to their name. When she spoke about the pain of being persecuted for something for which you bore no responsibility, her hand lightly resting on The Defendant’s shoulder, her voice carried considerable weight.
We walked past her into the jail and ended up waiting nearly an hour to be called back into the interrogation room. The Defendant did not like to be told what to do and when to do it and once jammed his jail cell keyhole with toilet paper so the guards couldn’t get in when they arrived to escort him to his arraignment. For this he was called cunning and clever, though I had a dog who also tore up toilet paper when he didn’t get enough attention.
The Defendant came into the dreary cement-walled interrogation room shuffling papers and sighing and apologizing, as though he’d had to rush across town from another important meeting to make this one. Quite the performance from a man who had taken a supervised shower that morning.
He sat down and avoided eye contact until the guard removed the shackles from around his wrists. Only then did he flash me an empathetic, mischievous smile, a smile that said neither of us belonged here, and wasn’t this just a monumental drag on the pair of us? Two fine upstanding citizens with nice looks and respectable backgrounds. Then he was touching temples with Veronica Ramira, murmuring and indicating an underlined passage in one of his documents. “I recall,” she said to him. There were greetings on either side of the table that were far too pleasant for my taste. The bailiff brought in the Bible, and the court reporter swore to the certification of the proceedings.
“Do you understand what it is we’re doing today?” The Defendant asked me slowly, chivalrously, as though he was happy to spell things out for the sorority bimbo across from him. He was wearing the oatmeal-colored suit from my premonition, and I was overcome with a powerful sense of reassurance. I’d seen him coming.
“I’ve sat in on a few depositions for one of my classes at Columbia,” I answered with a lofty lift of my chin.
The Defendant’s face fractured terrifyingly with smile lines. “Then you should know it’s best to answer with a simple yes or no.”
“At Columbia, they teach you to frame the answers in favorable terms.” I shrugged, unperturbed. Must be an Ivy League thing. “But yes, I understand the nature of today’s proceedings.”
“Thank you,” he said. Absentmindedly, he rolled his notes into a tube and, while we spoke, choked it with small hands, eyes drifting to my throat.
“Please state your address for me.” His arousal, that the power of the state gave him the authority to ask this of me, was unmissable—he adjusted himself in his seat, rubbed his lips together wetly.
“One-one-two-four Amsterdam Avenue. New York, New York.”
“What is your occupation?”
“I’m a student at Columbia Law School.”
“But it’s only your first year, correct?” The Defendant was quick to clarify. Veronica Ramira scribbled something, shielded it with her hand, and pushed it toward her client. I knew what she’d written without needing to read it. Name. The Defendant was so eager to find out where I lived, to minimize my qualifications, that he’d forgotten to ask my name, which is how you’re taught to begin proceedings at any law school worth its salt.
“I am a first-year student at Columbia Law,” I said. Columbia, Columbia, Columbia. Ask me again about my occupation, you verifiable loser. This was all I could batter him with; this was my oak club.
“Please state your name for the record.”
“Pamela Schumacher.”
“All right,” The Defendant said, unrolling the papers standing in for my elitist-bitch neck, “I’m going to ask you some general questions about the timeline of that morning. After you saw an intruder at the front door, what did you do?”
It was the obvious place to start. “I went upstairs to talk to Denise Andora.” I steeled myself for the follow-up question—why her, of all people? Which would force me to acknowledge my initial, mazed logic. That it was Roger I’d seen ducking out after Denise had smuggled him upstairs.
“Did you encounter someone else before you got to her bedroom?”
“Oh, uh,” I stumbled. Were we really going to gloss over the weakest part of my testimony? “Yes. I did.”
“Who was that?”
“Jill Hoffman.”
“And what was Jill Hoffman doing?”
“She was coming out of her room and heading for the bathroom.”
“Did she have her back to you, or was she coming toward you?”
“She had her back toward me,” I said, more confused than ever. What did that matter?
“Did you call out to her?”
“Yes.”
“What happened then?”
“She turned around, and I could see that there was some blood on her face and hands.”
“Some blood?”
I looked to Mr. Pearl, aghast.
“Please clarify that question for my client,” Mr. Pearl instructed.
“In your statement to the police”—The Defendant shuffled his notes like a deck of cards—“you described it as ‘more blood than I’d ever seen in my life.’?” But the page in his hand was upside down. Inwardly, I recoiled. The barnyard animal sitting much too close to me had memorized that part.
“For someone like me,” I replied priggishly, “who spends most of her time in the library, yes, it was certainly more blood than I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Please answer the question.”
Blithely, “Was there one?”
“Was it a lot of blood or only some blood?”