had to say, “Off the record. Paul, you have to give her time to answer.”
“I thought we all wanted to speed it up,” he answered. “Isn’t that what you said, Sarah?”
“Asking only relevant questions would be a big help,” she said, “yes.”
“You do your job,” Chapman said, “I’ll do mine. Back on,” he told Marcela, then continued reciting questions from his notes.
Sarah resisted exchanging any kind of look with Burke, even if this one was justified by their work. Instead she resorted to writing the word ASS on her legal pad and then decorating the letters with dramatic shading and smoke rising out of the A and long tails growing from the Ss. She looped the tails into swirls and circles that then became sinister-looking eyeballs and grinning demons. Yes, she was really going to miss Chapman when he went.
“Hi, Ms. Harowitz,” she said when it was her turn. She read somewhere that people in the service industry were familiar with the “post-asshole” customer experience. If someone has witnessed a store clerk or a barista being abused by the customer ahead, by the time the next person steps up, he or she bends over backward to be nice. “Sure! No problem. Whatever you can do.”
Sarah felt a little of that impulse now. Joe’s client had been very tolerant of what was truly a bad example of lawyering.
“Thank you for coming in today,” Sarah said. “I know you had to take time off of work, and we all really appreciate it.”
Chapman grunted.
“We won’t keep you much longer,” Sarah said. “I’m interested in just a few things. You said you received the hair iron for Christmas. How soon after that did you use it?”
“The next day, I think,” Joe’s client said. She still seemed tense from Chapman’s questioning, but Sarah hoped to see her relax soon. Being courteous and professional with a witness often seemed to have that effect. Sarah wondered if Chapman had ever tried it.
“How often do you have to straighten your hair?” She asked. “I do mine about every three days—more often if I’ve just worked out or I’ve gotten it wet.”
“Oh, this is relevant,” Chapman sneered. “Thanks for showing me how it’s done.”
Sarah ignored him. “So how often would you say you straighten yours?”
Now that it was simply a conversation—and about a topic both women had in common—Joe’s client opened up. Sarah wasn’t pretending: she genuinely wanted to know what steps Ms. Harowitz went through to wash, condition, dry, then iron her hair. It was just woman-to-woman for a while, both of them comparing stories about how difficult their hair had been all their lives, and what they’d gone through to try to tame it.
Chapman made no effort to hide his annoyance. He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, and kept shaking his head and smirking at Burke, as if the two of them agreed Sarah was wasting their time. Finally Chapman asked, “Are you two girls going over makeup tips next? Because Joe and I might as well grab a beer.”
He was too stupid to listen, Sarah thought. All the better for her and her case.
“You said the product caught on fire February thirteenth, right?” she asked.
Joe’s client nodded. “I wanted to do an extra good job on my hair that night. You know, for Valentine’s the next day.”
Sarah winced. “I’m so sorry.”
The woman seemed to appreciate a genuine human reaction, as opposed to Chapman’s robotic, “And then what happened . . . and then what happened . . . ”
Sarah consulted her notes. “So, assuming you first used the product on December twenty-sixth, and used it approximately every two days after that, it sounds like you used it about twenty-five times, total. Does that sound right?”
Ms. Harowitz shrugged and looked apologetic. “I never really counted it.”
Sarah accidentally glanced at Joe just then and saw him looking back at her with a curious expression. She had never gone this in-depth before, putting a specific number out there, on the record. So far she’d just been keeping that information in her notes.
“Thank you, Ms. Harowitz. That’s all I have. We appreciate your time and patience today.”
***
She had already sweated through two miles on the hotel treadmill that evening when her music cut out to alert her to a text:
The name of a different hotel. And a room number.
Sarah deleted it and kept on running.
This was the problem with reality, she thought. Once it started creeping back in, it tended to crowd out the fantasies altogether. And reality