“Your Honor, I’m not here to indulge in comedy or groundless conspiracy speculation, even when they amount to the same thing. I’m here to argue a point of law. And although this isn’t the forum where absolute truth is to be decided, I think Your Honor will concede that I’ve made exactly what the law demands of me at this point in the proceedings: that is, I’ve established a reasonable argument for motive. It was enough for the Secret Service and the FBI to begin to monitor Mr. Swagger and it should be enough for the court.”
“Young man, it’s not necessary for you to tell me my job,” said Judge Hughes. “But let’s just say your observation isn’t without merit, even if it was delivered to this court in a fashion dangerously close to contempt.”
“I apologize, Your Honor.”
“Then you may proceed with the second part of your argument.”
“As Your Honor pleases,” said Kelso. He retreated briefly to his table.
“We’re not doing too well, are we?” whispered Sally.
“No, I’m afraid we’re not. I thought this old man would have something more than tit for tat stuff.”
“Nick, I’m scared.”
“Just hang on. My part is coming up next and—”
But Kelso had returned to the center of the floor.
“Your Honor,” he said, “I’d like to enter into evidence the sworn statement of a New Orleans police detective named Leon Timmons. Detective Timmons is not here because, tragically, he was slain in the line of duty last April. But it was Detective Timmons who heroically interceded as Bob Lee Swagger was—”
“Your Honor, I object,” said the old man, stirring himself to Biblical wrath. “This here evidence is hearsay, beyond the reach of cross-examination. Moreover this ‘heroic’ detective has been named in several internal affairs reports of the New Orleans Police Department of having suspected ties with organized crime in the greater—”
“Your Honor, Leon Timmons won three commendations for valor under fire in his eighteen years with—”
“And he drove one of them damned German convertible sports cars that cost more than sixty thousand dollars on a salary of twenty-two thousand five hundred per year—”
“Your Honor—”
“All right, all right, gentlemen, quit your squabbling,” Judge Hughes said with a groan. He paused.
“Mr. Kelso, don’t you have a live witness?”
“Shit,” said Nick to Sally.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s end this here. You put your sworn testimony into evidence and I’ll read it at my leisure and if the issue is still in doubt, rule then on its admissibility.”
“That’s fine, Your Honor. I feel my next witness will clear up any doubts anybody will have about the viability of the government’s case.”
Suddenly a bailiff was standing next to Nick.
“Mr. Memphis. From Mr. Utey.”
It was a note.
Nick unfolded it.
It said, Last chance. As you can see, Bob is lost. You can still turn this to your benefit and the Bureau’s advantage. Don’t throw your life and that poor girl’s away for nothing that can be helped anyway.
“What is it, Nick?” Sally whispered.
So here it was.
The whole thing come to this.
His life could be so fine.
Bob was gone anyhow; that was clear. Old Sam Vincent was a cracker-barrel windbag. The evidence was overwhelming. RamDyne had won. He looked behind the prosecution table and saw Hugh Meachum sitting there, his face serene, his blue eyes opaque.
“The prosecution calls Mr. Nicholas Memphis.”
Nick leaned to Sally.
“It’s a note from a ghost,” he said, crumpling it, and walked to the witness’s box without looking at Howard.
Nick took the oath without a lot of emotional investment and tried to find a comfortable position in the hardwood chair. He could see Bob, ramrod stiff, all Marine, staring not at him but into space; and sitting beside him, his slouch carrying with it a suggestion of collapsed feed bags heaped in the barn corner, old Sam Vincent, his jowls slightly rising and falling as he breathed heavily, his eyes enormous behind the thick glasses.
“Your current employment, Mr. Memphis?” asked Kelso.
“I’m currently unemployed. As of yesterday.”
“And until yesterday?”
Nick summed himself up quickly: twelve years, Federal Bureau of Investigation, special agent.
“And can you tell us your duties on the date of March first, of last year?”
“I was part of a multidepartmental task force assigned to a presidential security detail. I was—”
“Mr. Memphis, please just answer the question I ask without elaboration. You’ve done this before, no?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“But—”
“Mr. Memphis, what did these responsibilities entail?”
“I was parked in a car on St. Ann Street about five blocks from the speech site, Louis Armstrong Park, on North Rampart.”
“I see. What was your job?”
“Uh. Well, it was a Secret Service operation, basically. We were just on the farthest perimeter of the security envelope, pretty much as lookouts, that’s all.”
“I see. Now, please tell me what ensued at exactly twelve-nineteen P.M. that day. You are in your car and—”
“Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that. See, there’s context, it’s very important, what came before, what came after, what I learned, what was involved, and just to isolate—”
“Mr. Memphis, you were asked a direct question. You answer with an essay on an irrelevant topic. What ensued at exactly twelve-nineteen P.M. that—”
Nick felt it all draining away. He’d rehearsed a dozen times, reducing the story into the smallest understandable parts.
“Your Honor, I have to explain, because—”
“Your Honor, I should explain the witness is here as a hostile. He’s under subpoena and may soon be indicted under federal statutes for impersonating a federal officer.”
“I just need—”
“Mr. Memphis, you’ve testified before,” said the judge. “You know the rules. If you have a statement to make, I’ll allow you to file it in writing at the end of the proceedings.”
“Sir, I just feel—”
“Your Honor, he’s got to answer the question.”
I’m hurting him, Nick suddenly realized. I’m coming across like a crazy man, and in doing that, I absolutely hurt the man I meant to help. Kelso knew it. Kelso counted on it. Howard had prepped Kelso well on the weaknesses of Nicholas Memphis, formerly of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Mr. Memphis, I’ll have to hold you in contempt if you don’t answer. I don’t think you want three months in jail added to your current legal difficulties.”
“I just want justice, Your Honor. I—”
“Mr. Memphis, I have to warn you once more. Answer the question, or I’ll find you in contempt.”
“Yes, sir. But if you would just let me put it in con—”
“Nick.”
It was Bob.
“Nick, just tell the truth. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
His deep voice resonated in the courtroom like a mourning cry. It was followed by stillness.
“Mr. Swagger, if you make an interjection again, I’ll find you in contempt, and I’ll have you restrained and gagged,” said the judge.
Nick saw how brilliantly the prosecutor had choreographed it. Put Nick in distress; gull Bob into breaking his stoicism; we both look like fools, locked in complicity, terrified of the truth.
Howard was watching intently, shaking his head as if to claim at this point the victory was too easy to take.
“All right,” Nick finally said. He’d tried; he’d lost; they’d come so far; it was over; Bob the Nailer was nailed.
It was over quickly.
“I heard a shot. I got out of the car …” He told it
simply, in the end identifying Bob as the bleeding man who’d jumped from the window, hit the roof and staggered down the stairs.
“Thank you, Mr. Memphis,” said Kelso. “I’m finished, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Vincent, do you have any questions?”
At last. Nick knew his time had at last come. Now he could get it out. Now he could—
Vincent said, “No further questions, Your Honor.”
“You may step down, Mr. Memphis.”
Nick looked at the old man in utter disbelief. He felt like throwing up. That was it? It was over? It was—
“Oh, one thing, Mr. Memphis.” The old man seemed to be awakening from a dream.
“Uh, you say Detective Timmons was already inside the house out of which Mr. Swagger fled bleeding.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hmmm. Did you see him enter? As I recall, there’s only one entry to that courtyard.”
“No, sir. And I was on station at 1000 hours.”
“Damn, isn’t that strange? Yet in his log he says he saw something suspicious at Four-fifteen St. Ann Street up near the roofline and entered the courtyard and—”
“Your Honor, I object,” said the quick Kelso. “Detective Timmons isn’t on trial here and counsel himself objected when I tried to introduce the detective’s account—”
“Your Honor, I’m just an old country boy, but I’m wondering how this heroic detective turned himself invisible that day. That’s a hell of a trick.”
“Your Honor,” Kelso pushed ahead, “let me further point out that Mr. Memphis has been dismissed from his job in the Bureau out of gross negligence and dereliction of duty. His screwups on this case are notorious throughout the law enforcement community. To offer him as any kind of paragon of professionalism, as the defense is clearly trying, is ludicrous beyond words.”
Great. Now ritual humiliation in public added to everything else.
“He does have a point, Mr. Vincent. But I’ve marked your observation down for further study. All right, Mr. Kelso. Proceed.”
Nick lumbered back to his seat, feeling the weight of ages on his suddenly frail shoulders. Another nail in the coffin.
He fought his way back to the seat next to Sally, and she leaned over and put a hand on his.
“You tried,” she said.
“Catastrophe,” was all he could think to say.
He looked up to see the judge announce an hour recess for lunch.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
On the way out, two or three news types hounded him, but he just bulled on by; more of them were clustered around the star of the hour, the charismatic young prosecutor, who gobbled up sound-bite-sized nuggets for the six P.M. news. Sam Vincent was nowhere to be found.
“Sally,” he said, after they had sat in glum silence for a few minutes at a diner a few blocks away, the food claiming his last eleven dollars, “I think we have to talk.”
“All right.”
“I don’t think we’re going to win. In fact, I know we’re not going to win. Maybe Bob specializes in getting out of tight spots but this time … well, the point is, it’s not going to happen today. The noose is too tight. It’s over.”
“Nick, I—”
“And when he goes, I go, and when I go, you’ll go. But it doesn’t have to happen like that. I want you to call Kelso and volunteer to testify against me. Tell him I duped you, I seduced you, I used you. I won’t deny it. It’s me they really want. If you give them me on an espionage charge, something heavier than this stupid ‘impersonating a federal officer’ thing, they’ll go for it in an instant. It’s the smart move. Okay?”
“The smart move,” she said.
“Howard only wants me destroyed, because I wouldn’t give him his phony undercover thing. And there’s this mysterious old goat named Hugh Meachum that I think works for the CIA or did or something like that, he’s here to make sure it all stays contained. That’s the point of the drill. I know they won’t—”
“Nick, let me tell you something. Bob Lee Swagger may specialize in getting out of tight places, but you specialize in loyalty. You gave everything to the Bureau and everything to Myra all those years. I’ve watched you. I’ve been watching you for years, and how much you gave. And how I was never a honey to you; you were the only one who ever treated me like a human being, and you never came on to me, and believe me, A. B. Nick, you wouldn’t believe some of the champions of the family value system that came on to me. And that’s because at some point you are fundamentally the most decent man who ever lived. And now you’ve given your loyalty to Bob Lee Swagger. Well, Nick, I’ve loved you for half a decade and if all I get for it is today and tomorrow until we’re both indicted and held without bond, then that’s enough for me. I’ll give you the loyalty you’ve been giving everybody else all those years. It’s time for somebody to give you some loyalty.”
“Sally, I—”
“And I’ll bet you that old country boy Bob Lee Swagger has some sly left up his sleeve. I’ll tell you this, Nick, I’m from the South and I’ve known men like that my whole life. They’re not much damn good at anything except dying in wars and shooting helpless animals, Lord knows why, and outsmarting the law. They’re sly, that’s their talent. And I never met anybody who could outsly a sly old country boy and from what I’ve heard of Bob Lee Swagger, he’s the slyest of them all. There’s just no way a carpetbagging yankee like Howdy Duty or an old ghost like Hugh Meachum could bring it off. Nick, you’ve just got to believe in Bob Lee, do you hear me?”
He touched her arm. He wanted to kiss her. All that radiance in those bright eyes. Dammit, she believed, where he himself had lost all belief.
“Come on, son,” she said, “time to git back to the show. Got me a feeling there’s fireworks to come.”
The young man’s name was Walter Jacobs. He was extremely clean-cut, balding, mild of face and demeanor, his eyes narrowly intelligent and beaming with goodwill behind his wire frames, his suit blue and crisp, his shirt white and crisp, his tie black and crisp.
And he was death.
He was the one who’d do it, finally, push it that last little bit.
“Your employment, Mr. Jacobs?”
“I’m a senior firearms technician in the FBI Forensic Ballistics Laboratory in Washington, D.C.”
And so to means at last. Kelso, grunting to make it appear heavier and more lethal for the judge, bent to lift the means.
“And this is it?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jacobs.
“Your Honor, I’d like to enter this rifle as state exhibit four, please.”
“So mark it.”
“And this.”
It was a tiny, twisted piece of lead and copper—the base of a hollowtip bullet.
“Yes. Exhibit number five, Mr. Kelso.”
“And this—the final link—as state exhibit six.”
He held up a thin brass tube, 2.015 inches long, narrower at one end, rimmed at the other. It was an empty cartridge case.
“So marked,” said the judge.
“Would you identify this exhibit please, Mr. Jacobs.”
“Yes, sir. It’s a customized Remington Model 700V bolt action center-fire rifle in .308 caliber with a Leupold 10x Ultra Scope. It was recovered in the attic of Four-fifteen St. Ann Street, in this city, on the date March first, 1992.”
“All right. Can you tell us of the rifle’s background?”
Quickly, Jacobs sketched the rifle’s course from the Remington custom shop in Ilion, New York, to its special-order purchase through the Naval PX system by the commanding officer of the Marine Corps Marksmanship Unit at Camp Lejeune in 1975, where the paperwork said it was presented to Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, that unit, on the occasion of his disability retirement from the service.
“I see. Can you characterize the nature of the weapon?”
“Yes, sir. Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble and evinced a great deal of guncraft in making that rifle superbly accu
rate. The original custom rifle was very accurate, what we’d call a minute-of-angle rifle. But he has done things to refine it even more. For example, the original Remington barrel has been replaced by a custom-made Hart stainless steel barrel, with button-cut rifling. That work, incidentally, was performed by Hart Rifle Barrels of Lafayette, New York, according to company records, for Bob Lee Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, in June of 1982. The new fiberglass stock was manufactured by McMillan and Company, of Phoenix, Arizona; a stock of that model was sent to Bob Lee Swagger of Blue Eye, Arkansas. The firing pin has been replaced by a much lighter one of titanium from Brownells, of Montezuma, Iowa, to improve lock time thirty-five percent, that is, increase the speed between the trigger pull and the actual firing. The rifle has been bedded in Devcon aluminum and its screws have been ‘pillar bedded,’ meaning that they’ve been driven through a pillar of aluminum inserted in the stock. All of this, of course, makes the rifle more stable and therefore more accurate.”
“Thank you. And now, the last two items.”
Kelso held up the lead and copper scrap.
“That’s what remains of a 200-grain boattail hollowpoint Sierra MatchKing bullet,” said Jacobs. “It was recovered from the podium of the Louis Armstrong Park here in New Orleans, clotted with brain tissue and skull fragments.”
“Is there enough left to make a ballistic identification?”
“No, sir. We were unable to get a rifling signature from the bullet, since it was so mutilated.”
“I see. So what did you do?”
“Sir, we carefully sluiced the barrel of the rifle and took very careful samplings of copper and lead residue that remained in its rifling channels. We took copper and lead samplings from the bullet. Then, we made neutron activation analysis examinations of each metallic sample.”
“What did you learn?”
“That the bullet and the residue were atomically identical, sir.”
“Proving?”
“Proving that either that bullet, or one exactly like it, was the last bullet fired down that barrel. There were no other identifiable lead or copper tracings.”
“Are these bullets common?”
“They’re manufactured in small lots by Sierra Bullets of Sedalia, Missouri, primarily for thousand-yard shooting. The yearly production is less than five thousand. It’s not a common hunting round. We found several boxes, including one recently opened, in the suspect’s shop in Blue Eye, Arkansas.”