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“Objection,” I hear from behind me.
“Sustained,” Judge Jackson Prentice says.
“Your Honor, I don’t mean to sound as if I’m objecting to Mr. Ahearn’s objection, but there’s a point to this line of questioning, if you’ll allow it.”
“I’ll allow it, Ms. Smith. But pleasegetto it.”
“Would you like me to repeat the question?” I say to Hennessy.
“No,” he says, “and I’ll be happy to answer it. We’ve been lucky enough, as everybody’s come out of the pandemic, to be doing quite well. There’s bigger shops than mine out here. But not many.”
“And you’d have to admit,” I say, “that you’ve been helped, at least partially, by the fact that Mr. Jacobson’s real estate business has suffered over this same amount of time, him being in jail and having been charged with murder.”
“Rob’s company is still active.”
“But the name attached to it is a name now attached to a monstrous triple homicide. So whilehisshop remains open, I can give you the numbers to show how business has suffered, if you’d care to hear them. Yours and his.”
“Objection,” Ahearn says. More of a shout this time. “Really, Your Honor? This is opposing counsel’s idea of getting to it?”
“Overruled,” Prentice says. “But I’m running out of patience, Ms. Smith.”
“Almost there, Your Honor. I promise.”
I turn back to Hennessy.
“So to put a bow on this subject, and just as a practical matter, what’s bad for my client has been good for you.”
“Not just me,” Gus Hennessy says.
I smile again. “Of course not!”
I walk back toward my table, pivot when I get there. In all ways.
“Other than what you say you heard on the beach that night, did you ever hear your pal Rob Jacobson threaten anybody?”
I am covering old ground. You have to sometimes. The jury doesn’t remember everything. And sometimes you can get a quisling like Gus Hennessy to contradict himself.
“I mean, I guess not,” he says.
“Youguessnot?” I say. “With a memory like yours, especially for dialogue, I have to believe you’d remember something like that.”
“Objection,” Ahearn says. “Even being sarcastic, she’s clearly badgering the witness.”
“Sustained.”
“Let me rephrase, Mr. Hennessy. In all the years that you have known my client, socialized with him, golfed with him, been the kind of friend to him you maintain you are, have you ever seen him come close to another threat, or any manner of physical altercation?”
“I frankly don’t see how that has anything to do with what I saw and heard on the beach that night.”
At this point, I am no longer smiling at him.
“Here’s how this works, Mr. Hennessy. I ask the questions and you answer them.”
Ahearn doesn’t object. Prentice lets me go.
“No,” he says.
His face has reddened, just slightly. Suddenly he’s acting much less like a real estate biggie on the go.
