4th of July

Chapter 18

THERE WERE ONLY TWELVE rows of seats in courtroom C in the San Francisco Civic Center Courthouse and no jury box. It would have been hard to find a courtroom more intimate than this one. I don’t think anyone breathed during Mickey’s walk to the witness stand.

He greeted Ms. D’Angelo, who looked relieved to be off the hot seat Mason Broyles had fired up for her.

“I only have a couple of questions,” he said. “It’s common practice to use ethyl alcohol swabs to clean the wounds, isn’t it? Couldn’t that alcohol have been confused with the blood alcohol?”

Betty D’Angelo looked as though she wanted to cry. “Well, we use Betadine to swab the wounds. We don’t use alcohol.”

Mickey brushed off the response and turned to the judge. He asked for a recess and it was granted. The reporters bolted for the doors, and in the relative privacy, I apologized with all my heart.

“I feel like a real schmuck,” he said, not unkindly. “I saw that medical report and I didn’t notice the ETOH.”

“I just completely forgot until now,” I said. “I must have blanked it out.”

I told Mickey that I had been off duty when Jacobi called me at Susie’s. I told him what I had had to drink and that if I wasn’t flat-out straight when I got into the car, the adrenaline rush of the chase had been completely sobering.

“You usually have a couple of drinks with dinner?” Mickey asked me.

“Yes. A few times a week.”

“Well, there you go. Drinks at dinner were an ordinary occurrence for you, and .067 is borderline, anyway. Then comes a major trauma. You were shot. You were in pain. You coulda died. You killed someone—and that’s what you’ve been obsessing about. Half of all shooting victims block out the incident entirely. You’ve done fine, considering what you’ve been through.”

I let out a sigh. “What now?”

“Well, at least we know what they have. Maybe they’ll put Sam Cabot on the stand, and if they give me a chance at that little bastard, we’ll come out on top.”

The courtroom filled once more, and Mickey went to work. A ballistics expert testified that the slugs taken from my body matched those fired from Sara Cabot’s gun, and we had Jacobi’s videotaped deposition from his hospital bed. He was my witness on the scene.

Although in obvious pain from his gut wound, Jacobi testified about the night of May 10. First, he described the car crash.

“I was calling for an ambulance when I heard the shots,” he said. “I turned and saw Lieutenant Boxer go down. Sara Cabot shot her twice, and Boxer didn’t have a gun in her hand. Then the boy shot me with a revolver.” Jacobi’s hand gingerly spanned his taped torso.

“That’s the last I remember before the lights went out.”

Jacobi’s account was good, but it wouldn’t be enough to overturn the margaritas.

Only one person could help me now. I was wearing her clothes, sitting in her chair. I was queasy and my wounds throbbed. I honestly didn’t know if I could save myself or if I would make everything worse.

My lawyer turned his warm brown eyes on me.

Steady, Lindsay.

I wobbled to my feet as I heard my name echo through the courtroom.

Mickey Sherman had called me to the stand.