“I’ll ignore your language and just say so far, so good.”
“Verydamn good, if you ask me.”
“We can’t get crazy with this.”
“Shut up,” Norma Banks says, “and take the win.”
“That’s what my boyfriend says to me sometimes.”
She pats me on the shoulder.
“Of course he does,” she says. “One of the keys to success in this world is hanging around with people smarter than you.”
I smile into the mirror as I put the finishing touches on my face, then step back to admire my handiwork.
“So you’re saying that’s what I’m doing?”
“Fuckin’ ay,” she says.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
THE YOUNG WOMAN’S NAME is Brooke Milligan, and she is currently a freshman at Hofstra, and at Garden City High she was Morgan Carson’s closest friend.
She has been on Katherine Welsh’s witness list from the start, so I asked Jimmy to do a deep dive on her. On the condition that I never again use the expression “deep dive,” he agreed and he’d done good.
That’s how I know Ms. Milligan is here today and under oath trying to kill our client dead with her knowledge of Morgan’s relationship with him.
I can’t let that happen, even though I’m not looking forward, not even a little bit, to what’s about to happen between me and this young woman. I never have any doubts about how good I am at my job.
It’s just that there are days when I don’t like doing it.
This is about to be one of them.
Brooke Milligan is young, beautiful, clearly intelligent, dressed chastely in a white dress, clearly made up far better than I am this morning, and here to tell one story:
How Morgan Carson, only seventeen at the time, was madly in love with my client.
“I was the only one she confided in,” Brooke says. “Butonce she did, I got such a bad feeling that I tried every possible way I could think of to talk her out of it.”
She shakes her head. “She didn’t know anything about boys, much less men.”
I see Brooke Milligan pause now and take a sip of water from the glass next to her.
“This is all so awful …”
“Do you need a moment, Brooke?” Welsh says.
“I’m okay.” She smiles weakly. “Even though I’m not really okay.”
“You’re doing fine,” Welsh says. “Now, when you say you tried to talk her out of it, was it because you thought her relationship with the defendant was wrong, because of how much older he is and how young she was?”
“All of that, and more,” Brooke says. “But it didn’t matter what I thought. It was as if she had decided that after having been a good girl her whole life, she wanted to be a wild child.”
She puts air quotes around “good girl.”
“Could you please give this court a bit more context about what you mean by good girl?” Welsh asks.
She knows exactly what she means. So do I. And now the jury is about to know.
