followed it; the Saturday. He was not asked his occupation beyond what the indictment required,
and the jury learned he worked for the government in Richmond from the defense's crossexamination, not from the Commonwealth's case. Lasky took him there at once: the office, the
section, the word federal spoken at last into the record like a card turned over. "You are an Assistant
United States Attorney." "I am." "In the public-corruption section." "I am." "And you would agree,
Mr. Rowan, that a felony prosecution, in a county court, of the president of your homeowners
association, three weeks after you moved — " "I would not agree to the arithmetic," Caleb said. "I
moved in March." A sound went through the courtroom that the judge's gavel absorbed without
comment. "Let me ask it plainly," Lasky said. "Did you, at any time, use your office, your
relationships, or your knowledge of the law to procure this prosecution?" "No. I wrote a letter of
appeal to my homeowners association on the fifteenth of April, by certified mail, and I said nothing
in public, on counsel's advice, for five weeks. When the crime occurred I was in my kitchen
making pancakes that I did not get to make. Since that morning I have signed a recusal
memorandum at my own office, referred every inquiry to my attorney, declined to attend the
neighbors' meetings about their own association, and declined, in June, to stand for its board. The
Commonwealth's Attorney can tell you whether I have ever telephoned her. She cannot, because I
haven't." "And the sheriff is your father-in-law." "He is my children's grandfather," Caleb said. "He
is also the man who told the defendant to stop talking, on that driveway, as a kindness. Both of
those are in the file. I checked with him once — about fishing. The file does not mention fishing,
Mr. Lasky, because it didn't happen in it." The service manager, Okonkwo, closed the
Commonwealth's case with the number itself: the quotation of April, given to June Rowan for an
insurance rider when the mirror was whole; the photographs taken that day, entered and shown, in
which the driver-side mirror of a sapphire Bentley reflected a dealership forecourt without a crack
in it anywhere; the replacement assembly, its price, the labor, the total — seven thousand, eight
hundred and forty dollars — and, on cross, one answer that Lasky did not ask twice: that in his
nineteen years with the marque he had seen cracked housings, stone strikes, and vandalism, and
that he could distinguish them, and had, in his report of May the nineteenth, in writing: two
impacts, both from a narrow steel edge, neither consistent with any pre-existing fracture he was
shown or could find. The Commonwealth rested on Thursday at noon.
The defense called Trent Halvorsen, who testified that vehicles with compromised mirrors had
been noted on the Ridge before, as hazards; and who, under Nolan's cross, agreed that he had never
known the defendant to draw attention to a defect with a steel edger, that he had not seen any crack
in the Rowan mirror that morning because he had remained at the cart, twenty feet away, writing,
and that his firm's common-area contract had been renewed, annually, without bids. Dale Fenwick
testified that a vehicle with an obstructed mirror was, in his professional view, unsafe to drive; and
agreed, on cross, that his firm had nonetheless been instructed to prepare to tow that very vehicle
on the Tuesday following; that the contract had never been bid; that his invoices were approved
monthly by the defendant, his brother-in-law; and that he had confirmed the hazard view to the
defendant by telephone on the night of the seventeenth, after the event, at the defendant's request.
Two character witnesses spoke to thirty years of rectitude, and Nolan asked each a single question:
whether they had ever seen the defendant strike another man's property with a tool; and each,
honestly, said no.
Then Gordon Pruitt took the stand, against the written advice of his counsel, which Lasky placed
on the record, at the bench, in the jury's absence, in the tone he kept for the load-bearing sentences,
and which the defendant overruled in one sentence of his own: "I have been explained by other
people since May. I will be explained by myself." He told it, on direct, as the folder had told it since
the first night: the standards, administered openly for years; the car, a hazard in open view; the
crack he had observed on the drive, on the Saturday drives of April and May, a hairline at the
housing's edge; the compliance drive of the seventeenth, in the course of which he had taken the
edger — his account of why the edger came out of the tube varied, across the telling, between
demonstrating the obstruction and clearing growth at the driveway's lip, and Lasky, at the table,
closed his eyes once, briefly, the way a man does at a sound only he can hear — and the contact,
unfortunate, glancing, which had shattered a housing already compromised. He had struck, he
conceded, a second time: to test — the word arrived, in the courtroom, like a coin on a counter —
whether the glass was secure in its frame, for the children's safety; the glass, being insecure, had
fallen. He was sorry for the damage. He had governed, throughout, for the Ridge. On crossexamination Patricia Nolan did not raise her voice at any point in the two hours it took. She walked