Beach Wedding(19)

Knowing all this, I held my breath some more as my leg started bouncing up and down. I sat waiting for Ms. Mercado to now nail Hailey Sutton to the courtroom floorboards.

“When you arrived at the station house, Ms. Mercado, you were interviewed by Detective Heller. Is that right?” my dad said.

That’s when it happened.

“Wait!” Ms. Mercado suddenly blurted out. “I need to tell you about that now. I need to tell you all about that.”

“Tell us all about what?” my dad said, baffled.

“What I said at the police station.”

“We’re getting to that, Ms. Mercado.”

Jailene Mercado looked at my dad and then over at the jury, then down at the floor. She looked like she was about to cry.

“I need to tell you that I lied. I lied to the police. About the gun. I’m so sorry. There was no gun. I make the whole thing up.”

“Your Honor, pardon my French, but what in the green hell is this?” Byron Seager said as the courtroom exploded in an uproar.

“Quiet! Order! Order!” the judge yelled. “Ms. Mercado, your job is to answer questions. Nothing else.”

“But I talk to a priest. A priest,” Jailene Mercado said, bursting into tears. “I need to tell the truth, the whole truth, the real truth. Now.”



27

“Dad,” I said that night as he came into his office, “she’s a lying sack of—”

“That’s enough, son. Quite enough,” he said as he plopped down in his chair and closed his eyes.

“And how do you know?” he said, taking a sip of his PBR. “If I didn’t know better, I might think you were listening in by the door three nights ago when Marv was here.”

“Dad, how can she do this? How can she suddenly say that she didn’t see a very unusual gun in the house? A gun that she identified out of a book at the police station with Marvin. A gun whose very unusual bullets were found in Noah’s head. It’s completely frigging impossible!”

“She’s been paid to lie, son. That’s how. She saw the gun. Sure as I see this ice-cold beer I just poured to soothe my aching soul.”

“Dad, you have to prosecute her now. You need to throw her lying butt in jail. You just have to.”

“I’ll get right on that with the judge, Terry. I’ll say, ‘Judge, my seventeen-year-old son says I have to throw Ms. Mercado’s ample butt in the hoosegow.’”

“I’m eighteen now, Dad.”

“That’s right. My bad. Duly noted,” he said.

“Talking to a priest,” I said. “She should be excommunicated. It’s unbelievable!”

“Unbelievable is the word,” my dad said.

“How can you be so calm, Dad? They’ve got you cooked, don’t they?”

He took a sip of his drink and licked the suds off his upper lip.

“Nah, I’m not done yet, son. They don’t have me beat just yet.”

“But you’re out of options. First, they steal your evidence, and now this! This is the most screwed-up trial in the history of trials. It’s over, isn’t it?”

He shook his head with a funny private smile on his lips.

“You leave it to me, Terry, my boy,” he said. “Two outs, bottom of the ninth, two strikes, but I still got the bat, kid. No worries. It ain’t over till the old man sums up.”



28

At ten o’clock the next morning, the courtroom hushed as my father stood and approached the jury.

He stopped before them and closed his blue eyes and put his weather-beaten fisherman’s hands together as if he were about to lead the courtroom in prayer. He stayed like that for a moment.

From my place along the left-hand wall in the back, I nervously passed a hand through my hair as I watched him.

What was he waiting for? What was taking him so long?

The bright, hot courtroom was completely silent. The air stilled. When a woman in the last bench ahead of me coughed, a bunch of people shushed her. My dad in his dark blue suit looked very small against the judge’s blond wood bench behind him.

Then he opened his eyes and began his closing statement.

“I’ve been thinking about everything that’s been happening to all of us during this trial. The pressure we are all under. You, me, the judge, the defendant, of course.

“All of us have been under such a strain. Because everyone is watching us. Everyone in New York. Everyone in the country. Heck, I saw a BBC news van when I was coming in this morning. Maybe everyone in the world is now tuned in to see what we will do.”

I smiled. My dad really was a charming son of a gun when he wanted to be. A special person. You just liked him. Everybody did. His blue eyes and workingman’s face and easy smile. Plus he was so damn smart.

That’s what his little smile was about. His secret weapon. He would win this case with nothing but his simple and true Irish blarney charm.

Please, God, I prayed, crossing my fingers. Please.

“I was thinking about all that,” my dad continued, looking wistfully out at the packed court, “and about what happens after. To all of us. Whichever way this goes. And then it occurred to me. I was wrong.

“Because this case isn’t about you, and it isn’t about me. It isn’t about the judge or even the defendant. It’s not about the media, and it’s not even about the watching eyes of the entire world.