He saw us on the floor.
He stopped.
And then, because he is Spencer, he walked over.
“Laura. We need to talk about the card. Privately. Before this gets out of hand.”
Angela Brooks, who had come with me, stepped between us.
“Mr. Langford, you’re not to speak to my client outside a courtroom. You have a hearing Monday at nine. I’d save your voice.”
Monday at nine, the courtroom was full.
Not forty people.
A hundred and twenty.
Hotel managers who had read the news.
Two reporters.
Bernard Tate in the second row, in a bow tie.
Spencer’s attorneys, three of them now.
And Spencer, in the charcoal suit and the watch, looking at the door every time it opened as if someone were going to come through it and fix this.
Nobody did.
Judge Harwood did not ask Eli to speak.
She said, from the bench, that no child of eight would be asked to testify against a parent in her courtroom, and that she had, in any case, already heard from him, and then she had the clerk play the video again, in full, with the sound up.
