August 18, Tuesday
THE COURTROOM smelled faintly of burnt coffee this morning.
Someone had scorched a pot in the break room before proceedings began, and the bitter undertone lingered through the opening minutes.
I'd started knitting a new baby blanket the night before—a pale yellow this time, gender-neutral and butter soft.
A DEA agent named Foster took the stand, compact and sharp-eyed.
He testified about a series of raids on properties scattered across three counties—stash houses, he called them, though the photographs projected onto the courtroom screen showed nothing more sinister than unremarkable ranch homes with sagging gutters and dead lawns, the sort of houses in older neighborhoods you'd drive past without a second glance.
The prosecutor displayed a page from the ledger, rows of numbers and abbreviations that meant nothing to me and, apparently, everything to the analyst who followed Foster to the stand—a soft-spoken woman who spent the better part of an hour translating columns of digits into dollar amounts, dates, and product disguised as fruit. Apples. Oranges. Peaches.
I resumed knitting, my fingers finding the rhythm of the pattern without having to look. Purl two, knit two, the yellow yarn pooled in my lap.
Then came the confidential informant—it was a piece of theater to see how the witness stand had been altered to allow the person to be obscured behind a screen, and their voice disguised into something flat and mechanical.
It was impossible to tell if the witness was male or female.
The voice described meetings in the back rooms of a laundromat, coded phrases exchanged over prepaid phones, the particular vocabulary of a business that couldn't advertise itself.
Throughout the testimony, Robert Blackthorne was sitting forward and riveted on the screen. He was clearly trying to figure out who was testifying against him. I wondered if the person testifying was afraid…
Then I tried to see it from the defense side. What if the person was testifying for some kind of payback?
With only a disembodied voice, it was harder to get a bead on the sincerity of the witness… which made me realize how much I rely on a person's appearance and demeanor to determine if they're trustworthy.
Did that mean I was prejudiced?
The witness continued, "You didn't say 'drugs.' You said 'the shipment's running late' or 'tell him the invoice needs adjusting.' Everybody knew what it meant. Nobody said it plain."
It made me think of how we all talk in code.
I thought of the shorthand Warren and I had developed over seventeen years—fine meaning not fine, we'll talk later meaning we will absolutely not, I'm tired covering for things far heavier than fatigue.
Every marriage had its ledger, I supposed, its own private language for saying one thing while meaning another.
The informant's testimony wound through names that were already familiar—names who meant nothing to me mere days ago. The prosecutor asked whether Robert Blackthorne's name had ever come up in these coded exchanges.
"Not by name," the informant said. "Nobody said his name. You just said 'the man' or 'upstairs.' Like he was weather. Something that happened to you, not someone you talked about directly."
I glanced, involuntarily, toward the defense table. Blackthorne sat with his hands folded, watching the informant's silhouette with a murderous expression. In that moment, I believed he was capable of killing with his bare hands.