The Concrete Blonde (hb-3)

went to the lectern for redirect.
    “Mr. Wieczorek, this tape you mentioned to Mr. Belk, do you still have it?”
    “Sure, brought it with me.”
    Chandler then moved to have the tape shown to the jury. Judge Keyes looked at Belk, who lumbered slowly to the lectern.
    “Your Honor,” Belk managed to say, “can defense have a ten-minute recess to research case law?”
    The judge glanced at the clock.
    “It’s a little early, isn’t it, Mr. Belk? We just started.”
    “Your Honor,” Chandler said. “The plaintiff has no objection. I’ll need time to set up the video equipment.”
    “Very well,” the judge said. “Ten minutes for counsel. The jury can take a fifteen-minute break and then report back to the assembly room.”
    While they stood for the jury, Belk was flipping pages in the heavy law book. And when it was time to sit down, Bosch pulled his chair close to his lawyer’s.
    “Not now,” Belk said. “I’ve got ten minutes.”
    “You fucked up.”
    “No, we fucked up. We are a team. Remember that.”
    Bosch left his teammate there while he went out to smoke a cigarette. When he got to the statue, Chandler was already there. He lit a smoke anyway and kept his distance. She looked at him and smirked. Bosch spoke.
    “You tricked him, didn’t you?”
    “Tricked him with the truth.”
    “Is it?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    She put a half-smoked cigarette in the sand of the ash can and said, “I better get back in there and get the equipment set up.”
    She smirked again. Bosch wondered if she was that good or it was Belk who was that bad.

    * * *

    Belk lost his half-hour argument to keep the tape from being introduced. He said that since it was not brought up during deposition, it was new evidence which the plaintiff could not submit at so late a date. Judge Keyes denied his claim, pointing out what everyone knew, that it had been Belk who had brought the tape to light.
    After the jury was brought back in, Chandler asked Wieczorek several questions about the tape and where it had been for the last four years. After Judge Keyes dismissed one more objection from Belk, she rolled a TV/VCR combination to a position in front of the jury box and put in the tape, which Wieczorek had retrieved from a friend sitting in the gallery. Bosch and Belk had to stand up and move into the gallery seats to get a view of the TV screen.
    As he made the move, Harry saw Bremmer from the
Times
sitting in one of the back rows. He gave a small nod to Bosch. Harry wondered if he was there to cover the trial or because he was subpoenaed.
    The tape was long and boring but was not continuous. It was stopped and started during the evening of the bachelor party but the digital readout in the lower right corner kept the time and date. If it was correct, it was true that Church had an alibi for the last killing attributed to him.
    It was dizzying for Bosch to watch. There was Church, no toupee, bald as a baby, drinking beer and laughing with his friends. The man Bosch had killed, toasting a friend’s marriage, looking like the All American nerd that Bosch knew he had not been.
    The tape lasted ninety minutes, climaxing with a visit from a telegram stripper who sang a song to the groom-to-be, dropping lingerie on his head as she removed each piece. In the video, Church seemed embarrassed to be seeing this, his eye more on the groom than on the woman.
    Bosch pulled his eyes from the screen to watch the jury and he could see the tape was devastating to his defense. He looked away.
    After the tape was finished, Chandler had a few more questions for Wieczorek. They were questions Belk would have asked but she was beating him to the punch.
    “How is the date and time set on the video frame?”
    “Well, when you buy it, you set it. Then the battery keeps it going. Never had to fiddle with it after I bought it.”
    “But if you wanted to, you could put in any date you wanted, anytime you wanted, correct?”
    “I s’pose.”
    “So, say you were going to take a video of a friend to be used later as an alibi, could you set the date back, say a year, and then take the video?”
    “Sure.”
    “Could you put a date on an already existing video?”
    “No. You can’t superimpose a date over an existing video. Doesn’t work that way.”
    “So, in this case, how could you do it? How could you make a phony alibi for Norman Church?”
    Belk stood up and objected on the grounds that Wieczorek’s answer would be speculation, but Judge Keyes