Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

innocent.”
    No doubt the defendants in Liz’s other cases had been guilty. But I was only momentarily cheered. No matter how much I believed my client innocent, I knew Liz had the better case.
    I ended up hiring an investigator, after all. He went up to Turlock and ascertained that Les’s mom wasn’t lying—Les wasn’t there and nobody’d seen him in what Chris would call a month of pigballs. He combed the Tenderloin for Les and Miranda, drinking in sleazy bars and even offering bribes, for all I knew. And he got nothing. Dad and I asked for continuance after continuance, but finally there was no longer any point to it. After ten months, the case came to trial.
    I should explain something. Lou was on trial for two murders only—that of Jack Sanchez, the gay man on the cross, and of Brewster Baskett, the old man who’d died of poisoning at Full Fathom Five. The police had no physical evidence in the cable car case, and none except the explosives manual to connect him with the elevator crash—since there was no note in either incident, they didn’t feel they could sell either one to a jury.
    But they had something very good indeed in the Sanchez murder—the gun that had killed him, found in my client’s room. It was probably enough to tie the two fairly circumstantial cases together. And Liz had another ace up her sleeve, one she timed for maximum flustering effect. During the break right after jury selection, a D.A.’s investigator handed me a subpoena ordering me to take the stand against my own client.
    If Lou hadn’t been my client, I might have expected to be a witness, but under the circumstances, I couldn’t possibly testify. It was a blatant conflict of interest. Surely no judge would permit it (except one, I worried, emotionally overcome by the horror of a serial killing). We had a judge with a far-flung reputation for being hard on defendants. But I felt confident he would see reason. Right was on my side.
    “Requiring me to testify,” I argued, “stands in complete contradiction of the ethical rules promulgated by the State Bar of California. When I became a lawyer, I took an oath to zealously represent my client to the best of my ability, and testifying for the prosecution would be in unthinkable violation of that oath.” I lowered my voice here: “Futhermore, Judge, more important than all that legal gobbledegook, think about it.
How would it look to the jury?
” I put all the passion I had into the last seven words.
    Liz was ready, of course. She argued that I hadn’t yet met my client at the time I discovered the body, and that therefore there was no actual conflict of interest; that I was only there to testify to the crime scene, that it would be different if my client had been seen running from that scene, and also that, if I felt the way I did, knowing I might be called, I should never have taken the case in the first place.
    “Because the crime is so serious and the city of San Francisco has been so terrorized,” began the judge, and I knew he was going to deny my motion to quash. I didn’t listen. I ignored Liz’s smug expression. I was already engaging in my favorite morale builder for such moments—drowning my sorrows in appellate remedies. Surely, I thought, if there were anything resembling justice in the world, a conviction would be overturned. It felt momentarily better to think that, but it wasn’t currently the point—the point was to
avoid
a conviction.
    In her opening statement, Liz said she would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lou Zimbardo had killed Sanchez, a drunk and helpless tourist from Gallup, New Mexico, and had wantonly brought deadly quarantined mussels to Full Fathom Five, killing Brewster Baskett and causing ten other innocent people to fall ill. She said she would produce the gun with which Sanchez was killed, and a (now frozen) plastic bag of eastern mussels, which he had stolen when he substituted poisoned ones, arrogantly leaving them in the restaurant’s bathroom.
    In my own statement, I said I hoped the jury understood the burden of proof was on the prosecution and if any member of that jury had the slightest doubt that Lou Zimbardo was guilty, he would burn in hell if he voted to convict. (I didn’t say “burn in hell,” but I tried to imply it.) I noted that Lou didn’t have to take the stand to answer the charges against him, and that he didn’t have to put on a defense at all. Indeed, I remarked, if the case against my