Page 102 of Goodbye Girl
“He said he—” she started to say, then stopped. “Can my room at least be in the same hotel as yours. I’m really scared.”
“Okay, fine. Tell me what he said.”
She lowered her eyes. And her voice. “He said he’s sorry he let me go.”
“Gigi, I know he was not your boyfriend. So don’t try to tell me he called to say he regrets dumping you.”
“No, I meant literallylet me go.Like, turn me loose.”
Theo had thought he’d imagined the worst, but maybe his imagination had fallen short. “Are you afraid he’s going to come back?”
She nodded.
“To make you work for him again?” asked Theo.
She shook her head.
“What are you afraid he’s going to do?”
She shrugged.
“What did he say?” asked Theo.
She touched Theo’s wrist. Her hand was shaking. “He said, ‘Goodbye Girl should have kept her mouth shut. Now I need to shut it for her.’”
He was angry at Judge and afraid for her at the same time. “Kept her mouth shut about what?”
She didn’t answer. The alone time in his hotel room had given Theo a chance to catch up on the most recent media coverage of Imani’s trial, as well as the links to “related stories.” He’d read about Shannon Dwyer in Boston Harbor.
“Gigi? Do you know something about the name this guy gave you? Goodbye Girl?”
She seemed flustered. “Should we really be sitting out in the open like this, a couple of sitting ducks?”
It was a valid point, but Theo also knew it was a diversion. He rose and took Gigi by the hand. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“You’re coming with me,” he said, starting toward the Tube station. “And this conversation is not over.”
Chapter 41
By Friday morning, Jack was able to match the faces of certain spectators to specific seats in the public gallery. These were celebrity worshipers, the hardcore observers who arrived before dawn and waited for hours outside the courthouse to be first in line, even ahead of Imani’s biggest supporters. Once inside the courtroom, they could take any available seat, but they grabbed the same one, day after day, as if they owned it. Their biggest fear was that they would miss the “big day”—that critical moment when a witness broke down on the stand, the judge lost his shit, or the lawyers nearly came to blows.
“Courtroom rubberneckers,” Jack called them, driven as they were by the same morbid curiosity that stopped traffic around a car accident.
Thursday afternoon had surely disappointed the rubberneckers. Cross-examination of the investment banker from Saxton Silvers had been about as riveting as that guy at the cocktail party who thinks the world can’t get enough of his nearly verbatim recount of the latest CNBC podcast. Ears had pricked up when the prosecutor called retired MDPD homicide detective Gustavo Cruz to the stand. But that, too, had fizzled. Wisely, the prosecutor had addressed the detective’s every vulnerability through direct examination before Jack could land a punch on cross. “Stealing the defense lawyer’s thunder,” it was called. Cruz forthrightly admitted to the jury that there was not a shred of physical evidence connecting either defendant to the crime. No fingerprints. No DNA. No hair, fibers, or bodily fluid of the victim found at the Nicholses’ house. No rope found in the garage that matched the rope around the victim’s neck. No chains that matched the chains on the piling. It was all perfectly explainable. The police didn’t find those things because they never searchedthe Nicholses’ house. “And,” the detective had told the jury, “we didn’t search because they weren’t suspects until twelve years after the murder.”
The prosecutor’s clever move had left Jack with essentially one point to make on cross-examination:
“What you’re saying, Detective, is that it wasn’tevidencethat made my client a suspect. It was a tip from a former bodyguard twelve years later—a tip from a convicted felon.”
One point for the defense. A nice point on which to end the day. The prosecutor seemed intent upon erasing that point from the scoreboard come Friday morning.
“Your Honor, the state of Florida would like to re-call Mr. Paxton to the witness stand.”
The judge did a double take. “To quote the late, great Yogi Berra, this feels ‘like déjà vu all over again.’”
Calling a prosecution witness to the stand a second time, except to rebut the defense’s case, was highly unorthodox. Jack objected, but the prosecutor had an answer.