Henry had just reached the hallway of his home when the phone summoned him with its strident demand to be answered. Loosening his tie with one hand, he picked up the instrument with the other, "Yes, hello, Tarbuck residence."
"Ah, good. You're home, Henry." This superb example of deductive reasoning delivered in the imperious manner of a self-appointed earth-god could only be The Pope.
"Yes, how are you, John?" Henry had pulled off his tie and was settling himself comfortably in the chair next to the phone. "Sorry I missed you when I returned to the office, but we decided to adjourn early so I did a few errands I've been putting off and then I came home."
"No problem, Henry. I just wanted to check with you to see how things are going. Mark said there was a bit of a dust up over the file material he sent the document examiners as standards?"
"Yes. Trenchant is making an issue of every little thing she can think of. Actually, I think she must have some outside help—someone is advising her. Perhaps even someone at Belmont."
"Giving you a lot of trouble, is she? Slap her down, Henry, slap her down. We've got her good on this one. Mark tells me the document examiner was one hundred percent sure that Trenchant wrote those things," The Pope boomed expansively.
"That's correct. The only thing is the three women on the panel don't place much confidence in the examiner's ability and right now they aren't accepting her testimony. Besides that, Trenchant has a student witness who claims that she, the witness, wrote one of those SmurFFs our analyst said was written by Trenchant."
"My God. That doesn't sound good at all. I thought Mark said handwriting analysis was as foolproof as fingerprints."
"Well, that's the legal argument lawyers use. Apparently, they aren't. Trenchant gave us two cases as examples of these so-called experts being fooled. One was concerning the Hitler Diaries and another she called the White Salamander Affair. She also listed several other sources for the panel to check on."
"What are you going to do? You've got to whip that panel in line and do it fast, Henry, we're in this thing too deep to back off now."