“What motive? I loved her and I didn’t even know about Rilz. I thought he was a faggot.”

I held my hands up in a slow-it-down gesture.

“Look, do yourself a favor, Walter, and don’t call him that. In court or anywhere else. If it is appropriate to reference his sexual orientation, you say you thought he was gay. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, the prosecution will simply say that you did know Johan Rilz was your wife’s lover, and they’ll trot out evidence and testimony that will indicate that a divorce forced by your wife’s infidelity would cost you in excess of a hundred million dollars and possibly dilute your control of the studio. They plant all of that in the jury’s minds and you start having a pretty good motivation for murder.”

“And it’s all bullshit.”

“And I’ll be able to potshot the hell out of it at trial. A lot of their positives can be turned into negatives. It will be a dance, Walter. We’ll trade punches. We’ll try to distort and destroy but ultimately they’ll land more punches than we can block and that’s why we’re the underdog and why it’s always good for the defense to float an alternate theory. We give the jury a plausible explanation for why these two people were killed. We throw suspicion away from you and at somebody else.”

“Like the one-armed man in The Fugitive?”

I shook my head.

“Not exactly.”

I remembered the movie and the television show before it. In both cases, there actually was a one-armed man. I was talking about a smoke screen, an alternate theory concocted by the defense because I wasn’t buying into Elliot’s “I-am-innocent rap” — at least not yet.

There was a buzzing sound and Elliot took a phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen.

“Walter, we have work here,” I said.

He didn’t take the call and reluctantly put the phone away. I continued.

“Okay, during the prosecution phase we are going to use cross-examination to make one thing crystal clear to the jury. That is, that once that GSR test came back positive on you, then—”

“False positive!”