back around to the conference table. The message from Lucy was sitting there. I had managed to do my brain-partition thing during my Flynn questioning. I had kept Lucy out. But now, as much as I wanted to spend a few minutes basking in the glory of the moment, the message was calling out to me again.
Muse saw me looking down at the note.
"A friend from twenty years ago," Muse said. "That's when the Camp PLUS incident occurred."
I looked at her.
"It's connected, isn't it?"
"I don't know," I said. "But probably."
"What's her last name?"
"Silverstein. Lucy Silverstein."
"Right," Muse said, sitting back and crossing her arms. "That's what I figured." "How did you figure that?" "Come on, Cope. You know me." "That you're too nosy for your own good?" "Part of what makes me so attractive." "Nosiness and maybe your footwear. So when did you read up on me?"
"Soon as I heard you were taking over as county prosecutor."
I wasn't surprised.
"Oh, and I brushed up on the case before I told you I wanted in."
I looked at the message again.
"She was your girlfriend," Muse said.
"Summer romance," I said. "We were kids."
"When was the last time you heard from her?"
"Its been a long time."
We just sat there for a moment. I could hear the commotion outside the door. I ignored it. So did Muse. Neither one of us spoke. We just sat there with that message on the table.
Finally Muse stood. "I got some work to do."
"Go," I said.
"You'll be able to make it back to court without me?"
"I'll muddle through," I said.
When Muse reached the door, she turned back to me. "Are you going to call her?"
"Later."
"You want me to run her name? See what I come up with?"
I thought about it. "Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Because she used to mean something to me, Muse. I don't feel like having you poke around in her life."
Muse put her hands up. "Okay, okay, sheet, don't bite my head off. I wasn't talking about dragging her in here with cuffs. I was talking about running a routine background check."
"Don't, okay? At least, not yet."
"I'll get to work on your prison visit to Wayne Steubens then."
"Thank you."
"This Cal and Jim thing. You're not going to let it slip away, are you?"
"Not a chance."
My one worry was that the defense would claim that Chamique John son had watched the movie too and made up her story based on it or had deluded herself into thinking the movie was real. I was helped by several factors, however. One, it was easy to establish that the movie had not been playing on the fraternity's big-screen TV in the public room. Enough witnesses would back that up. Second, I had established via Jerry Flynn and photographs taken by the police that Marantz and Jenrette did not have a television set in their room, so she couldn't have seen it there.
Still, it was the only direction I could see them going in. A DVD could be played on a computer. Flimsy, true, but I really didn't want to leave much of an out. Jerry Flynn was what I refer to as a "bullfight" witness. In a bullfight, the bull comes out and a bunch of guys-not the matador-wave capes around. The bull charges until exhausted. Then picadors on horseback come out with long lances and jam them into a gland behind the bull's neck muscle, drawing blood and swelling the neck so that the bull cant turn his head much. Then some other guys run up and throw banderillas-gaily decorated daggers-into the bulls flanks, near his shoulders. More blood. The bull is half-dead already.
After all that, the matador-from the Spanish matar or "to kill"- comes in and finishes the job with a sword.
That was my job now. I had made my witness run into exhaustion and jammed a lance into his neck and stuck some colorful darts into him. So now it was time to bring out the sword.
Flair Hickory did everything in his considerable power to prevent this. He called for a recess, claiming that we had never produced this film before and that it was unfair and that it should have been given to them during discovery, blah, blah, blah. I fought back. The film had been in the possession of his clients, after all. We only found a copy our selves last night. The witness had confirmed that it had been watched in the fraternity house. If Mr. Hickory wants to claim his clients never saw it, he could put