Chapter 23 The Actual Smoking Gun #2
“I really didn’t—until the next morning, that is, when Harry noticed the target was gone and said something to me about it. Then? Well, then I figured Miss Winston had taken matters into her own hands the day before. Harry and I knew how much she hated that target. It was nuts.”
Mr. Barker objected to the words nuts, and it was sustained.
I hadn’t meant anything by that Caddy Day remark but bravado, the sort of swagger I saw in the really good male golfers.
And I was hitting the ball well that afternoon.
Still, once more I knew the damage had been done, and I allowed myself to curtain my face with my hands, frustrated with Bolger and with myself.
Only when I felt Mr. Barker surreptitiously tapping my forearm did I put my hands down and compose myself.
And when I looked up and around, there I spied Ethan Pomerleau and my brother, Spencer, in the courtroom.
I had no idea when they’d arrived. Ethan was wearing a deer-colored corduroy blazer and blue jeans, what I interpreted as dressy for Vermont.
Spencer was in a gray pinstripe suit. They both smiled at me, and suddenly I had to fight back tears. The two of them were absolute knights.
“You said that Miss Winston was walking to the clubhouse and the bag room,” Mr. Lindley was saying when I turned back to the witness.
“Yeah.”
“Did she have her bag with her?”
“She did.”
“What did she do with it?”
“She brought it to the bag room, of course.”
“Did you join her? Did you check it in?”
“The bag? I didn’t have to. She was a regular. She knew the room and where to put her bag as well as I did.”
“So, she left her bag in its usual storage slot?”
“Yup.”
Lindley glanced at me. I always felt he had a deeper animus toward me than he did toward some defendants because I had had an affair with the husband of a friend of his.
I was, in his eyes, the tart who had broken up Eleanor Catton’s marriage.
Perhaps bolstered by Ethan’s and Spencer’s presence, for the only time during that trial, I didn’t turn away until the DA did.
“Anyone else have access to the bag room?” he asked Bolger.
Here was the tightrope the state was trying to walk: a member like me might, once in a while, retrieve or return a bag when neither Fallows nor Bolger was present.
But the bag room was not so easily accessed that just anyone could stroll into it.
Lindley wanted to preempt a defense that suggested some as yet undiscovered stranger had wandered in and planted the target in my golf bag.
But rarely does a trial meticulously follow the script: it’s not a play where everyone on the stage knows their lines.
“The caddies, sometimes,” replied Bolger. “Even, sometimes, a kid like Kenny Foster. I saw him going in and out of there Tuesday morning, which was fine, but he didn’t seem to have a loop, and—”
I grabbed my lawyer’s wrist, because I knew.
I knew with a certainty that was rare for Mira Land.
I didn’t know the details yet, but I saw clearly the basics.
Already, Lindley was getting his witness back on track, but I started scribbling on my yellow legal pad what I wanted the defense team to ask in our cross-examination.
Mr. Barker didn’t pace, and he didn’t hover near Bolger.
He understood that Bolger had revealed something no one had thought to explore during the season of depositions or during discovery, and he wanted to move quickly.
He simply stood at our defense table, his hands behind his back in a posture as unassuming and unintimidating as possible.
“You said you sometimes saw caddies going into the bag room, yes?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Bolger agreed. He was defensive, though he was unsure what demons he might have unleashed.
“And you saw Kenny Foster going into the bag room on Tuesday morning, August first. You didn’t stop him?”
“No. I gave him a little grief since he didn’t have a loop. But not much grief, because he was a good kid. A really good kid. I reminded him it was off-limits if you don’t have a loop, and even then it was kind of sketchy.”
“You thought he was going to use the bathroom?”
“Yeah. The bathroom is by the men’s locker room and much nicer than the one off the kitchen that the employees and caddies are supposed to use. But, still, rules are rules, right?”
Lindley was watching this cross intently. And it seemed to me that while he might have had a hunch where it was leading, he was, so far, powerless to stop it.
“Indeed,” said Cleon Barker, “rules are rules. When did you talk to him? On his way in or way out?”
“Way out. I, um, gave him his peace to do his business.” My lawyer was about to ask him another question, but Bolger then gave us an unexpected gift by continuing, “But when he tried to use that bathroom again on Wednesday morning, I stopped him before he got to the bag room. ‘Buddy, that’s not happening,’ I said.
And I directed him to the back entrance to the clubhouse kitchen.
If that bathroom was good enough for me, it was good enough for him. ”
“That would have been August second, correct?”
“Correct.”
“The day before he died?”