Just Take My Heart - Mary Higgins Clark [26]
Why am I getting all these feelings of apprehension? she asked herself. It has to be the trial.
I've talked so much about Natalie that I feel as though I've be?come her.
Just Take My Heart
17
Since the trial began it had become a pattern for Gregg Aldrich to go directly to his lawyer's office from the courthouse and spend a couple of hours going over the testimony of the prosecutor's wit?nesses who had been on the stand that day. Then a car would drive him home. Katie, adamant in her need to be with him in the court?room, had agreed that she would go home when the court recessed around four p.m. and meet her tutor there.
She had also agreed, at her father's insistence, that at least some evenings would be spent with friends who attended school with her in Manhattan before she became a boarder at Choate in Connecticut.
The nights she was home they watched Courtside together. The inevitable result was that seeing the highlights of the trial and hear?ing the panel discussion brought Katie to a state of anger and tears.
“Daddy, why doesn't Michael ever stand up for you?” she would demand. “He was so nice when we used to go skiing with him, and he was always saying how much you helped Natalie's career. Why doesn't he say it now, when he could do you some good?”
“We'll show him,” was typical of Gregg's replies to his daughter. “We'll never go skiing with him again.” He would shake his fist at the television in mock indignation.
“Oh, Daddy!” Katie would laugh. “I mean it.”
“So do I,” Gregg would say, quietly now.
Gregg admitted to himself that the evenings Katie went out for a few hours with friends gave him a needed break. During the day, the love he felt emanating from her as she sat a few rows behind him in court was as welcome as a warm blanket would be to someone in the throes of hypothermia. But sometimes he simply needed to be alone.
This was one of the evenings Katie had gone out to dinner. Gregg had promised her that he would order room service from the club in the building, but after she left, he poured himself a double scotch over ice and settled down in the den, the remote television clicker in his hand. He intended to watch Courtside, but before then he needed to search his memory.
At their meeting a few hours earlier, Richard and Cole Moore had warned him that Jimmy Easton would be on the witness stand tomorrow and that the whole case hung on his credibility as a wit?ness. “Gregg, the crucial, absolutely crucial statement he'll make is when he talks about meeting with you in the apartment,” Richard had warned. “I'll ask you again. Is there any chance he was ever there?”
Gregg knew his response had been heated. “I never had a meet?ing with that liar in my apartment and don't ask me about it again.” But he was haunted by the question. How could Easton possibly claim he was here? Or am I going crazy?
Now, as he took a sip of the scotch, Gregg found himself bracing for his nightly viewing of Courtside, but when it came on, the sooth?ing effect that the fine single-malt scotch had offered vanished. Seventy-five percent of the viewers who had responded to the Court-side Web site poll thought he was guilty.
Seventy-five percent! Gregg thought incredulously. Seventy-five percent!
A clip from the trial showing Emily Wallace looking directly at him came onto the screen. The expression of disdain and contempt she conveyed made him cringe now as it had in the courtroom. Everyone watching this program was seeing it, too. “Innocent until proven guilty,” he thought bitterly. She's doing a mighty good job of proving I'm guilty.
Aside from the obvious, there was something about Emily Wal?lace that was unsettling him. One of the panelists on Courtside had called her performance “pure theatre.” He's right, Gregg thought, as he closed his eyes and lowered the volume of the television. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the folded sheet of paper that was like so many others