He leans back in his chair. He isn’t wearing his robe yet, just a white shirt and tie and cardigan sweater. Now Horton clasps his hands in front of him and says, “Ms. Welsh, I believe Mr. Harrington is second on your list for today. I am going to allow you to call him, as originally planned. But I am warning you here and now to choose your words carefully, and make it clear to your witness that he is to do the same thing. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly, Your Honor.”
Horton stands now, unbuttons his sweater, and removes his robe from where it’s hanging on a coatrack.
“Anything you’d like to add, Ms. Smith?”
I am already up and out of my chair.
“Just that I’ll see you both in court,” I say.
I am down the hall a few minutes later with Rob Jacobson and Thomas McGoey and Norma Banks, explaining to them that as hard as I just fought to keep Paul Harrington out of the courtroom, some good could come from him being in that chair, because it will give me a chance to bury him, when we hear a sharp rap on the door.
Katherine Welsh comes walking into the conference room then. I’m about to jokingly ask if she misses me already, before noticing how ashen-faced she is.
I haven’t seen Katherine Welsh rattled by much of anything so far in this trial, but she is clearly rattled now.
“You no longer have to concern yourself with Paul Harrington,” she says.
“He didn’t show up?”
“He killed himself,” she says.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
JUDGE HORTON CANCELS COURT for the day.
Danny Esposito tells me on the phone that he’s called ahead to Chief Carlos Quintero to tell him that Katherine Welsh and I are both on our way to Water Mill, and that the district attorney from Nassau County has requested that until we arrive Quintero not remove anything in Paul Harrington’s home.
Including Paul Harrington.
“Carlos told me it’s his crime scene,” Esposito tells me. “I told him that Judge Horton might not see it that way.”
“You really think Harrington killed himself?” I ask Esposito.
“He left a note,” Esposito says.
“Handwritten?”
“Short and sweet,” Esposito says. “Carlos says it’s the same scrawl as from a grocery list they found on the kitchen table where they found him.”
“He wrote out a grocery list before he shot himself in the head?” I ask.
Danny Esposito says, “Maybe he didn’t want to go on an empty stomach.”
Katherine Welsh and I, even traveling in our own cars, arrive only a few minutes apart in front of Harrington’s house, parking up the block from the emergency and policevehicles, one of them driven by the Nassau County Police Department detective Welsh dispatched to Water Mill to escort Harrington to the courthouse.
“You didn’t trust Harrington to drive himself?” I ask her as we walk toward the house together.
“I know you think he was hot to tell his story,” she says. “But the closer we got to him actually doing that, the more I started to worry about him. Even though he’s an ex-cop, he asked what would happen if he changed his mind and didn’t show. I told him we’d issue a warrant and arrest him all over again.”
“You really are a hard-ass,” I say.
“All that time in the gym,” she says.
Danny Esposito tells us he’s volunteered to pitch in and canvass the neighborhood. So he heads across the street as Welsh and I are handed gloves and blue crime-scene booties by one of Carlos Quintero’s guys stationed outside the house. I’m struck by the fact that the color of the booties seems to match Katherine Welsh’s dress almost perfectly, as if somehow the universe is accessorizing just for her.
Paul Harrington is slumped in a chair at his kitchen table. He’s wearing a robe and pajamas and slippers and what I recognize as an NYU T-shirt. There is a mass of dried blood on the right side of his face, caked around the bullet hole there. His eyes are closed. Blood has dripped down on his robe, and there are spots of it on the floor, near what I recognize instantly as a Glock 19, the service weapon I saw on Harrington at Jimmy’s bar.
