...And Never Let HerGo

a golf club to his new BMW. Maurer asked Louie if it was true that he had lied to his insurance company about how his car was damaged.
    “I wasn’t untruthful . . . I didn’t tell the insurance company anything.”
    “Did you later have a conversation with Kristi Pepper about that subject matter?”
    “Yes.”
    “Weren’t you, in fact, upset and angry with Kristi Pepper because Kristi Pepper had told Detective Donovan what you had told her about how the accident occurred?”
    “That’s correct . . . [but] I don’t recall exactly what I told Kristi Pepper—”
    “There was somebody there that wasn’t told the truth, right?”
    “That’s true.”
    “Either Kristi Pepper wasn’t told the truth . . . or the insurance company?”
    Louie was chafing just a bit under Maurer’s relentless questions, and the jurors looked confused. They had heard the name Kristi Pepper two dozen times and knew that she had been the paramour of the married witness, but no one could figure out what had happened to Louie’s BMW by listening to the obscure questions—or what they had to do with the case against Tom. Louie kept talking about a “different interpretation” of the cause of the accident.
    “Well,” Maurer said, “there were two ways the accident could have happened. Right, Louie? It happened because your then wife, Lauri Merton, grabbed the wheel of the car while you’re going over the St. George’s Bridge and the car rammed the guardrail?”
    “That is correct.”
    “Now, another story gets out there, doesn’t it—where your wife is involved in a one-car accident?”
    “It
was
a one-car accident.”
    “Without you in the car, though?”
    “I never heard the story that she was by herself.”
    The jurors looked even more confused. Louie explained that he and his wife were insured by the same policy, so that it made no difference. Neither he nor Maurer ever explained what had happened to his BMW, but several people in the gallery who thought they knew grinned. Louie’s prize BMW had looked as if it had been through a tornado. Louie was emphatic that he was still married to Lauri Merton despite his friendship with Kristi Pepper.
    Louie was on the stand most of the day. Maurer had perhaps succeeded in showing him as something less than a faithful husband or a straitlaced citizen (and even a liar), but Louie had been convincing when he described Tom’s attempts to cover his own tracks at the expense of Gerry—and of Louie himself.
    And yet, they were still brothers. During his testimony, Louie had searched his memory for some detail about a friend’s occupation and, as he had done his entire life, looked down at Tom for help. For a moment, it was as if nothing had changed between them, but Tom only stared back at him coldly as if looking at a complete stranger. Finally, Louie had shrugged his shoulders. For the first time in their lives, they weren’t on the same side.
    The Capano section of the gallery that Friday, the thirteenth, seemed to support Tom rather than Louie. There had never been much love lost between Louie and Lee Ramunno, Marian’s husband, who continued to champion Tom. During a break on the marble stairway outside the courtroom, Lee had encountered Louie, who put his hand on Lee’s shoulder and muttered, “You’re the world’s biggest asshole.” Lee walked by him without replying.
    Finished with his testimony now, Louie walked toward the family benches, but as he attempted to step into a row and take a seat, Lee put his leg up on the bench in front of him, blocking Louie. Marian turned around and whispered,
“Lee! Let him in!”
After the next break, Louie hurried in and deliberately took Lee’s seat.
    T OM continued to eat bagels at the defense table when he took his pills, and a courtroom artist drew cartoons of him—full of bagels and with a forked tail—much to the hilarity of the media. The heat in the courtroom rose higher and higher; many of the Capanos were barely speaking to one another; and Tom’s own attorneys looked with more and more distaste at the barrage of suggestions he passed down the table to them. Judge Lee watched his courtroom warily, alert for any smoldering embers that could erupt suddenly into flames.
    Thanksgiving was less than two weeks away and there promised to be a decimated group around Marguerite’s table. But although Anne Marie was gone, her brothers and sister were closer than ever. “That was the gift that Anne Marie left us,”