Chapter 35
brUCE COLTON WAS waiting for me at the gate to the gallery. He was three inches shorter than me and came up close to stick a finger into my chest. His face was red with anger. He looked as if he’d been holding his breath the whole time he was waiting for me.
“What the fuck, Haller,” he said. “I don’t know which is worse, if you knew about her boyfriend and tried to cover it up or if you didn’t even fucking know.”
“Get out of my way, Bruce,” I said. “I have work to do.”
“Work? Are you kidding me? You talked us into giving up fifty million dollars. Fifty! And now you want to walk away from me? You better call those lawyers who just outsmarted your ass and get our fucking money.”
“I’m not doing that, Bruce. We still have a winnable case. Now, for the last time, get out of my way.”
He finally took a step back and laughed without a shred of joy. I noticed Cisco come up behind him in case I needed him.
“You know what’s going to happen?” Colton said. “You don’t win this case, I’m going to sue you for mal-fucking-practice. I’ll get my money one way or the other.”
“Good plan,” I said. “You do that, Bruce.”
I shouldered past him.
“Let’s go,” I said to Cisco.
We headed toward the courtroom door. I needed to get out of there to rethink and retool, to find some way of salvaging the case after the day’s disastrous ending.
I had told Lorna to take Naomi Kitchens down to the attorney conference room.
When I got out to the hallway, there were three reporters waiting for me. I pushed by them too.
“I’ve got no comment right now,” I said. “I need to talk to my witness.”
The conference room was crowded. Lorna sat at the table with Kitchens and her daughter. Lily was trying to console her mother, who had tears streaming down her face. McEvoy was standing, apparently to leave the fourth chair at the table for me.
“Okay, look, it’s too crowded in here,” I said abruptly. “Lorna, can you take Lily into the hall? Jack, you go with them. Cisco, you stay in case we need to work on something tonight.”
“I want to stay,” McEvoy said. “Fly on the wall, remember?”
“Okay, fine, whatever,” I said.
Lorna and Lily left the room without protest. I took the seat vacated by Lorna and sat directly across from Naomi. Cisco was to one side. McEvoy started pulling the remaining chair way back from the table, apparently taking the fly-on-the-wall metaphor literally.
“Jack, before you sit, can you go out and see if Lorna has any tissues?” I asked.
McEvoy left the room. I slid my chair in closer to the table that separated me from my witness.
“Okay, Naomi, we need to talk,” I began. “Let’s start with who is Patrick May?”
She didn’t answer at first. McEvoy reentered and handed her a small packet of tissues. She finally spoke as she started to take one out.
“He was my boyfriend,” she said. “I didn’t think anybody knew about us.”
“Was?” I asked. “You’re not together?”
“We broke up last year.”
“Who broke up with whom?”
“I broke it off.”
“Is he still with Tidalwaiv?”
“I think so. Last I knew.”
“Was he upset when you broke things off?”
“At the time, I didn’t think so. He knew it was coming. It was a slow breakup. He was staying with the project and I couldn’t handle that.”
I nodded and looked at Cisco. He nodded back.
“He ratted her out,” he said.
“You need to do a full workup on him,” I said. “If Mason doesn’t call him as a witness, we want to be ready to.”
Cisco asked Kitchens if she knew May’s birthdate. She provided that, an address for him up in San Mateo, and the cell phone number she had used for her last contact with him.
“On it,” Cisco said as he stood up.
He left the room and I refocused on Kitchens.
“Naomi, I have to decide whether to bring you back tomorrow for redirect. Can you think of anything that might help us rehabilitate your testimony?”
“I told the truth. You don’t have to rehabilitate it.”
“I know you told the truth, but it’s about credibility. It’s about trust. They’ve caught you in a lie and we need to—”
“What lie? I didn’t lie. I was never asked about any relationship. Plus, I thought maybe they knew about it because Patrick was the one who recommended me to the company as an ethicist for the project. I had no idea he had left out that we were dating.”
McEvoy cleared his throat and I looked over at him.
“What?” I asked.
“She’s sort of right,” he said. “Her employment application is in the materials she gave us, and I don’t remember any question about relationships with other employees of the company.”
“Look, we’re talking about semantics here,” I said, looking back at Naomi.
“It doesn’t matter if you didn’t lie on the application.
You had a relationship your employer should have been told about.
And the whole thing doubles down because you were supposed to be the conscience of ethical programming and behavior, and now it looks like you were hiding what many would say was an unethical relationship with a fellow employee below you in the corporate hierarchy.
So, think, Naomi. Is there anything we can go back into court with tomorrow that helps us? ”
Naomi wiped her cheeks and her nose with the tissue and looked at me.
“I told you not to do this,” she said. “I didn’t want to testify.”
“Well, maybe if you’d told me about Patrick May, I wouldn’t have asked you to,” I countered.
“That lawyer made it sound like I was his boss. I wasn’t. He may have been below me in the corporate hierarchy. But he was in the coding lab and I almost never even walked in there. He didn’t work for me directly and I never once told him what to do.”
“All right, that’s good. We can use that. Can you think of anybody else at work who knew about the relationship?”
“No, we never flaunted it. We never even took breaks together.”
“Well, that’s not good. It looks like you were trying to hide that you were together.”
“We weren’t. My office was in administration, he was in the lab. It was never the twain shall meet. Until after work.”
“Were you living together?”
“No. I had my daughter at home. This was before she went to USF.”
“Well, when the two of you were together and away from work, did you talk about work? Did he tell you about some of the training of Clair that was alarming you?”
“Well, yes. We did. How could we not talk about work? Is that good or bad?”
“It could be good. I don’t know yet. When was the last time you had contact with Patrick May?”
“Contact? You mean like physical contact?”
“When was the last time you met or communicated with him?”
“That would have been on his birthday, back in August. We were broken up by then but I texted him. He didn’t reply.”
“Any idea at all why he decided to tell the company about your relationship?”
“How do you know he did?”
“You said nobody knew about it. Was there somebody else?”
“No. No one.”
“Then it was him. Could they have had something on him that forced him to reveal the relationship?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, I’m going to need you to think about that tonight.”
“Am I testifying tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet. But I want to move you and Lily from the hotel you’re in to a new one. One of us will pick you up tomorrow morning to bring you to court.”
“This is really bad, isn’t it? For the case.”
I nodded.
“Yeah, it’s bad,” I said. “I thought we won yesterday. But today, I think they got the W. And that’s on me, Naomi. Not you. I should have known what they had, and I should’ve seen it coming.”