"Exhibit Fourteen." Pratt held it up, and let the room look at it: the reporter's face turned to the window, the juror's hand on the table in front of her. "October the fourth. The seventeenth day of trial. You walked over from the counter. You put something in front of her. She was weeping. What did you give her?"
"Another napkin."
"Why?"
Remy looked at him as though the question were very strange. "Because she was crying," he said, "and it was a napkin."
Someone in the gallery laughed, and stopped. Pratt turned a page in his file.
"And a few minutes later," Pratt said, "the waitress, Mrs. Hettie Calvo, who I see is with us today, brought the reporter a slice of pie. With a candle in it. Mrs. Calvo told the reporter the pie was from the kitchen. My investigator has spoken to the cook, Mr. Spiro Andreadis, Mr. Agostini, and Mr. Andreadis says he didn't know anybody's birthday, and doesn't care to, and that he was paid two dollars and a quarter for that pie by somebody else." Pratt let it hang. "Who paid for the pie?"
Mina, in the front row, stopped breathing.
Remy did not look at her. He looked at the judge.
"I did," he said.
"So you did communicate with the reporter. Through an intermediary. During trial."
"I communicated with a pie," said Remy. "I didn't put a note in it. I didn't put the case in it. I didn't even put my name in it. I told Hettie to say it was from the kitchen so she'd never know it was me. I'd have gone my whole life and she'd never have known, if you hadn't asked." He turned, then, finally, and looked at Mina in the front row, and his face was red to the ears and perfectly steady. "Her mother told me it was her birthday. On my car, the Saturday before, in front of thirty people from Ohio. I didn't ask her. I couldn't stop her. Nobody can stop that woman. And then on the Tuesday I saw her sitting there by herself, and nobody had remembered, and I thought, the judge said not a word and not a note and not a nod. She didn't say anything about pie." He turned back to the bench. "If that's wrong, Your Honor, it's on me. Not on her. And not on Mrs. Lucchesi. Mrs. Lucchesi didn't even know about the pie."