Just Take My Heart - Mary Higgins Clark [33]
Jimmy's account of his visit to the apartment was what worried Emily as being the weakest part of her case. The doorman had not seen him. The housekeeper had not seen him. It was his word against Gregg's that he had been there, that the money had been handed to him, and that he had backed out of the deal later.
There had been a number of magazine interviews with Natalie in the apartment when she lived there, and some of them had pic?tures of the living room. Emily was sure that Moore would make the most of those pictures to prove that the knowledge of the layout of the apartment and the way the living room was furnished was readily available.
That was exactly Moore's strategy. He presented to Easton one after another of the pages that showed the living room, then asked him to tell the jury what he was seeing.
Easton's answers were a word-for-word recital of what he claimed to remember from being in the room.
“You met Gregg Aldrich in a chance encounter at the bar. Moore snapped at him. ”You knew who his wife was. Then when she was murdered, you put together a story for the next time you were caught stealing and had it ready to trade?"
Scorn in his expression, derision in his voice, Moore continued. “Now read for the jury the underlined sentences in this article about Gregg Aldrich and Natalie Raines.” He handed a page from Vanity Fair to Jimmy.
Completely unshaken by Moore's accusations, Easton pulled reading glasses from his pocket. “The old peepers aren't what they used to be,” he explained. He cleared his throat before reading aloud. “Neither Gregg nor Natalie has ever wanted live-in help. Their housekeeper arrives at eight a.m. and leaves at three thirty. If they are not going out for the evening, they have dinner in the club in their building, or room service from it.”
He put down the page and looked at Moore. “So what?”
“Isn't it a fact that anyone reading that article would know that the housekeeper would be gone at four o'clock, the time you claim you were in the Aldrich apartment?”
“You think I read Vanity Fair?” Jimmy asked incredulously.
Once again the spectators laughed and once again they were ad?monished by the judge. This time he was obviously very angry and said that if it happened again, he would point out to a sheriff's officer the people who had been laughing and they would be escorted out of the courtroom.
The final blow to Moore's attempts to portray Jimmy as a liar came when he asked him to study the pictures of the living room again and tell him if there was one single thing in the room that he would not have known about if he had seen those pictures before he testified.
Jimmy started to shake his head, then said, “Oh, wait a minute. You see that little table by the couch?” He pointed to it. “That's where Aldrich kept the money he gave me. I don't know if it still creaks but it sure was noisy then when he opened it. I remember thinking he oughta oil it or somethin'.”
Emily glanced at Gregg Aldrich.
His complexion had gone so pale that she wondered if he was about to faint.
Just Take My Heart
21
B he had lied to Emily that his hours at work had been changed, Zach realized it was important she shouldn't see him or his car when she got home from the courthouse. And the problem was that now that the trial was under way, and court recessed at four p.m., she was getting home to her house early, between five thirty and six p.m. That meant he couldn't go home himself when he got off from work, but had to stay out until it was dark, then hope she didn't see him drive into his garage. It was one more reason to dislike her.
Soon after he handed Emily back her key, she had installed a bolt on the door of her back porch. He had discovered that when he tried to sneak into her house, about a week after he stopped minding Bess. He had called in sick to work because he missed handling Em?ily's things. He tried to slip in her house one morning after she left, and was stopped by the new bolt. What she was too dumb to realize