the crime scene on a bulletin board next to the witness stand. Moving through the sequence of photos, Ellie described the disorder in the apartment – the open cabinets and drawers, the relatively few possessions in the apartment tossed to the floor like confetti.
‘From the looks of it,’ Max said, ‘only the bathroom was spared?’
In the final picture on the board, a single cabinet door in the otherwise tidy master bathroom was flung open, a pile of towels splayed on the tile floor beneath the sink.
‘That’s about right,’ Ellie responded.
‘I guess extra rolls of toilet paper and back issues of Sports Illustrated aren’t the usual targets of a home invasion.’
Max’s comment wasn’t especially funny, but the bar for comedy in courtrooms was notoriously low, and the remark drew a chuckle from Judge Bandon.
The point of the testimony was simple: the violent home invasion on May 27 of a seventh-floor condo overlooking Lafayette Street had nothing to do with poor Robert Mancini until Robo got caught in the crossfire. The bodyguard’s relationship to the apartment was too inconsequential – too tangential – for the dead man to have been the premeditated target of the four bullets that eventually penetrated his naked torso that night.
No, the crime had nothing to do with Mancini. The real target was either a robbery or Sam Sparks himself, and robbery seemed unlikely. Despite the expensive furnishings – two flat-screen televisions, a top-of-the-line stereo system, the rug that doubled as art – nothing was missing from the apartment.
So now the police wanted to know more about Sam Sparks.
From the witness stand, Ellie eyed a silver picture frame behind the bench. In the photograph, a smiling Paul Bandon beamed alongside a perfect-looking wife and a teenage boy in a royal blue cap and gown. Outside this courtroom, underneath the robes, Bandon was a normal person with a real life and a family. She wondered, if she cut through the bull and laid it all out for him, whether Judge Bandon would understand how the series of events beginning on May 27 had led her to the middle of a battle between the district attorney’s office and one of the most powerful men in the city.
Maybe he would understand how she had felt when Sparks had sauntered into the crime scene, in his custom-cut tuxedo, somehow dry and picture-ready on that rain-soaked night, so put out by the disturbance at his pristine penthouse. Maybe he could imagine the disdainful looks Sparks had given the police officers sullying his spotless pied-a-terre, the very officers who protected the appearance of order that allowed Sparks to earn billions in Manhattan real estate. Maybe he would realize that she hadn’t even meant to arrest Sparks and had immediately kicked herself for doing it. All she’d wanted was to wipe that smug look off his face, just long enough for him to give more of a rat’s ass about a dead man in his bedroom than the area rug in his foyer.
If Ellie were telling the whole truth, she’d tell Judge Bandon that there was something about Sam Sparks that got under her skin. And she would try to explain that the only thing that bothered her more than that something was her own inability to maintain control in the face of it.
Sparks’s rigid refusal to cooperate with the police investigation – all because of their first ill-fated encounter, an encounter in which she had played no small part – had contributed to a four-month investigation that led nowhere.
‘So, in sum, Detective Hatcher, would access to the financial and business records we are requesting from Mr. Sparks assist you with your investigation?’ Donovan asked.
‘We believe so,’ she said, now looking directly at Judge Bandon. ‘Mr. Sparks is, as we all know, an extremely successful man. A break-in at one of his showcase personal properties would send a message to him. If he has financial or business enemies, we need to look into that.’
‘And to be clear, is Mr. Sparks himself a target of your investigation?’
‘Of course not,’ Ellie said.
If she were revealing the whole truth, she would have told Judge Bandon that at one point they of course had looked at Sparks as a suspect, but had quickly cleared him.
‘Is there anything you’d like to add to your testimony, Detective Hatcher?’
In polite courtroom discourse, ADA Max Donovan referred to her as Detective Hatcher. But this was not the whole truth, either. If courtrooms had anything to do with the whole truth, he would call her Ellie. And one of them might have to disclose the fact that, just that morning, the testifying detective had woken up naked in the assistant district attorney’s bed.
‘No, thank you, Mr. Donovan.’
11: 45 a.m.
Megan Gunther rolled her fingertips lightly over the keyboard of her laptop computer. It was a nervous habit. If her typing fingers were positioned at the ready, she had a tendency to keep them moving – tiny little wiggles against the smooth black keys.
She remembered begging her mother to teach her to type at the age of six. Her parents had just purchased a home computer, and Megan would eavesdrop as they sat side by side at her father’s desk, marveling at the wonders on the screen, all attributable to something called the Internet. But Megan had marveled at the speed of her mother’s fingers as they flew across the keyboard.
She glanced at the round white clock that hung above the blank blackboard behind Professor Ellen Stein. Eleven forty-five. Fifteen more minutes. Thirty-five minutes of class had passed, and the only words on her laptop screen were ‘Life and Death’, followed by the date, followed by a single question: ‘Are all lives equally good?’
Megan had enrolled in this seminar because the catalog description had piqued her curiosity: ‘Is life inherently worthwhile, or only if the life lived is a good life? Is death necessarily negative? Is a life not lived superior to a life lived in vain?’
Megan was no philosophy major – she would declare biology next year, and her curriculum was designed specifically for premed. But that course description had grabbed her attention. She figured that it could only serve the medical profession well if a future doctor took the time to contemplate the larger meaning of life and death in addition to learning the science that could extend one and forestall the other.
She should have foreseen, though, that a philosophy seminar with no prerequisites would devolve into a series of free-floating chat sessions during which unfocused undergrads – the ones who would eventually wind up behind a Starbucks counter, or perhaps in law school – attempted to show off their mastery of the most reductionist versions of the various branches of philosophy.
Today’s class, as was often the case, had held momentary promise when Dr. Stein posed the question that was still staring at Megan from the screen of her laptop: ‘Are all lives equally good?’
Unfortunately, the first student to respond immediately played the Hitler card. As in, ‘Of course not. I mean, who here mourns the death of Hitler?’ After just three weeks of a single philosophy course, Megan was convinced that the quality of the national civic dialogue would be noticeably improved by a voluntary prohibition against all analogies to Nazi Germany.
Poor Dr. Stein had done her best to steer the conversation on track, but then the girl who
