handled the diary cautiously, deferring to Crowley’s request—i.e., delay tactic—to keep it sealed and out of the defense’s hands until she’s permitted herself enough time to thoroughly analyze its contents.
Crowley believes she’ll allow certain passages to be admitted, which would seem to bolster their case. However, he’s justifiably worried that contradictions will arise when everybody starts to compare passages in the diary with deposition and live testimony.
Sitting there, his eye drifting down to a “Go Niners” carving in the table, Madden knows Crowley would like to have the most relevant and damaging passages read aloud in court.
“I wasn’t sure what I should be doing,” he envisages one of the young ADA’s, or maybe even Carrie, reading from the diary, speaking softly so that everybody in the courtroom has to lean forward in their seats to catch everything she’s saying. “So I said, ‘Fuck me. Fuck me like you mean it,’ because I’d once seen a woman do that in a movie.”
“What is it, Hank?”
He looks up and sees Crowley, a look of concern on his face, staring at him.
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing important.”
24/ LIKE LIKE HER
May 1, 2007—2:46 p.m.
“SO YOU’RE STANDING OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM ON THE THIRD floor,” the lawyer asks. “Let’s go back a minute.”
“OK,” Jim says.
“How long were you waiting for Kristen to come out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe five minutes. And then I started to get concerned.”
“And you knocked on the door?”
“Yeah, I knocked a few times. And like I said, I called to her.”
“Pretty loud, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Loud enough so that anybody would hear you?”
“Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t shouting. But it was loud.”
“So, why didn’t you just go in? It isn’t a hard door to open. It swings out. I tried it. Why didn’t you just go in?”
Jim shrugs, glances at the microcassette recorder sitting on the table between them, and says, “I don’t know. Like I told the detective, it just didn’t seem right, going into the occupied bathroom. And then this girl I knew—Gwen Dayton—was coming up the stairs and I just asked her whether she could check.”
The woman doesn’t respond. Instead, with her perfectly manicured fingers, she tears off a small piece of bread from her half-eaten sandwich and tosses the crumbs to a blackbird that’s looking up at her beseechingly from the ground, his head cocked to one side. For an older woman, she’s definitely hot, he thinks. When he first saw her, thin with dark hair and olive skin, a well put-together woman who was wearing a navy blue pantsuit, he thought she could be a TV lawyer. Usually, he’s nervous around good-looking women, but the idea of her being an actress puts him at ease, for it makes the interview seem less real. That, plus the four bong hits he’d done with his friend Dan Fleischman before he headed over to the meeting.
A brilliant, sunny day, they’re sitting in the plaza at the back of Tressider Student Union, which serves, among other functions, as the home for a cafeteria, café, convenience store, arcade, barber shop, and a row of Wells Fargo ATM machines. Just past two-thirty, many of the black, wire-mesh weather-resistant tables and chairs, once filled with students during the lunch hours, now sit empty. But that hasn’t deterred the scavengers—a couple dozen blackbirds and a handful of pigeons, which seem out of place among their suburban cousins—from making the rounds.
“At one point I left to find Carrie,” he volunteers. “She was dancing with some guy. And I pulled her off the dance floor and told her that Kristen had passed out in the bathroom upstairs and that we had to get her out of there.”
When they got up to the bathroom, he says, Kristen had been revived. Well, revived might be too strong a word. But she wasn’t totally passed out. Her eyes would flutter open for a moment and she would mumble something.
“Did you hear what she said?” the lawyer asks.
“I know she said ‘Leave me alone’ a couple of times. And I think she said, ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’”
“That’s it?”
“It was hard to understand her. I mean, she was slurring her words and then she would nod off and Gwen was slapping her in the face. Not hard or anything. But, you know, just trying to keep her awake.”
The woman breaks off another piece of bread and tosses it to the ground.
“Did you like Kristen, Jim?”
“How do you mean?”
“Did you like her?”
Another shrug. How come they always ask the same questions?
“Like like her?” His tone