Hit List

accompanied by the two willowy young men, who began clearing away the leftovers. No one said a word.
    “I wonder if we could go back to the VCR,” Gloria said.
    “My cousin had one just like it,” somebody said, “and it was fine for playing movies from the video rental, but you could not get it to record a program.”
    “She couldn’t program it,” someone else said.
    “My cousin’s a man, thank you very much, and he programmed it just fine. It would start recording something, and then it would switch to another channel all by its own self. I swear that machine had a mind of its own.”
    That put it ahead of the jury, Keller decided, which at the very least didn’t know its own mind, if it had one at all. They kept going off on tangents.
    And now Gloria led them on a particularly oblique path. After the vagaries of VCRs in general had been explored at some length, she took up a thread the defense had pursued with some vigor. Nierstein had called several witnesses to trace the history of the VCR the prosecution had brought to the courtroom, from the moment when Clifford Mapes had allegedly purchased it from the defendant all the way to the present moment. The prosecution had taken pains to identify it as one of a shipment stolen from a Price Club warehouse on Long Island, and had produced a witness, one William Gubbins, who had acted as lookout for the thieves and had received the VCR as part of his share of the proceeds. Gubbins had testified that he sold the VCR to the defendant.
    Nierstein’s contention was that the chain of evidence had been corrupted, that the electronic marvel on the evidence table was not the same one that his client had allegedly bought from William Gubbins and allegedly sold to the undercover policeman.
    “Remember what he asked that property clerk? Asked him if he ever took home items entrusted to his own care?”
    “The man said no,” said one of the Asians, a Ms. Chin.
    “But Nierstein didn’t stop there,” Gloria reminded them. “He asked about a specific item, a video camcorder.”
    “Wanted to know if the guy didn’t borrow it to film his daughter’s birthday party.”
    “And he said no,” Ms. Chin countered.
    Keller remembered the exchange. The property clerk, who Gloria felt would cut a much more impressive figure if he lost ten pounds and shaved off his mustache, had admitted that his daughter had a birthday party on such-and-such a date, that he himself had attended, and that he had immortalized the event on tape. He had admitted as well that he had not owned a video camera at the time, and did not own one now, but he steadfastly denied that he had taken one home from work, maintaining that he’d borrowed one belonging to his brother-in-law. Sheehy had objected to the whole line of questioning, calling it irrelevant, and suggesting sarcastically that the defense might next call for the tape of the party to be played in court. That brought a reprimand from the judge, who’d evidently found the whole business absorbing enough to overrule her objections.
    “Well, I don’t know,” Gloria said.
    “We can only go by the testimony,” Mrs. Estévez said. “The lawyer asked the questions and the man answered them.”
    Keller hadn’t wanted to say anything, but he couldn’t help himself. “But how did he know to ask?” They looked at him, and he said, “How did he know about the birthday party, and that the guy taped it?”
    “Everybody tapes their kids’ parties,” somebody said.
    Did they? Was every childhood birthday party captured that way, the moment frozen on time through the magic of videotape? Did anybody ever look at the tapes?
    “But he knew the date,” Keller said. “He must have heard somewhere that the guy borrowed a camcorder. The clerk had to deny it, it’s a breach of regulations. Just because he denied it doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen.”
    “It doesn’t mean it did, either,” a woman pointed out.
    “Well, no,” Keller said. “It’s a question of who you’re going to believe.”
    “But what’s it matter? There’s no camcorder in the prosecution’s case. Just a VCR. Who cares if the guy borrowed a camcorder? Nobody was using it, and he brought it back in the same condition he borrowed it.”
    “It establishes a pattern,” Gloria said.
    “What pattern? If he borrowed a camcorder, he must have borrowed a VCR? And so what if he did? So what if he took the VCR home with him, which nobody says he did, by the