Shoot the Lawyer Twice

by Michael Bowen

“The left-coasters decided it was fifty-fifty. Those are the same geniuses who picked the jury consultant, so I’ll stick with my prediction this morning.”

  “Speaking of that high-priced jury consulting firm,” Rep said, “did it ever come up with any explanation for going so far off the rails?”

  “Yeah: It was all the lawyers’ fault.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “They talked after the trial to every juror they could. And they interviewed three let’s-pretend jurors they’d hired to shadow the trial while it was going on. Their official conclusion was that our jury went into deliberations with at least three strong partisans for our side, but they got frustrated because they didn’t feel we’d given them enough ammunition to counter the arguments of the jurors who favored conviction.”

  “That seems a little…generic,” Rep said.

  “Well, if I’d just been paid humpty-thousand dollars for a wrong answer I’d tend to get a mite generic myself.”

  They stepped into the Wabash Steak House and gratefully left the biting wind behind them. They discovered that the restaurant had not only remembered their reservations but could actually honor them and provide a table immediately. They were passing around dinner rolls and menus when Melissa brought the jury consultant up again.

  “Your comment about shadow jurors intrigued me,” she said. “I assumed the main thing a jury consulting firm did was tell you what kind of jurors you want for your case. And that always puzzled me, because you shouldn’t have to pay someone to tell you that you wanted twelve libidinous frat boys in something like the sex-or-swim case.”

  “It involves more big words than that,” Rep said.

  “Jury consultants actually do three main things,” Kuchinski said. “First, they show a heavily condensed summary of the evidence to a cross-section of the community that matches the jury you’re likely to get, so you can see how that mock-jury reacts. Second, they put shadow jurors in the courtroom and tell you day by day how those people are reacting to what they’ve heard. And third, they dress it all up with jargon like ‘passive/alienated’ and ‘aggressive/reactive’ and chart data points on quadrants in a graph so that it looks scientific enough to justify a gigantic price-tag. That’s what Rep meant by more big words.”

  “But why do smart people pay high prices for flimflammery?”

  “Because the jury consultants are usually right,” Rep said.

  “Hmm,” Melissa said.

  “Try the bone-in ribeye,” Kuchinski said. “It’s delicious.”

  Chapter 19

  The third Friday in December

  “I don’t consider this smoking,” Melissa heard Bleifert say to a twenty-something male sharing a table with her at the Cairo Café, just off Downer Avenue. Melissa guessed, correctly, that the male was Grady Schoenfeld.

  Bleifert put a hookah’s plastic tube between her lips, drew dreamily on it, then blew a lazy stream of white smoke toward the ceiling.

  “Right. I don’t know why anyone would call that smoking.”

  “Try it.”

  Taking the tube from her with a good-sport shrug, he took a puff.

  “It’s milder and cooler,” he said. “But it’s still tobacco smoke, even if it’s peach flavored.”

  Melissa walked over to them. A week had gone by since Angstrom’s murder. She had wanted to let a decent interval pass after Angstrom’s memorial service at UWM on Tuesday before approaching Bleifert. She shook her head now, stunned by the resilience of youth. Bleifert had sobbed at the memorial service and hadn’t shown up for class or work on Wednesday. Two days later she still wasn’t exactly lighthearted, but she was teasing and flirting and cultivating bad habits—like a normal nineteen-year old.

  “Oh, hi, professor,” Bleifert said, glancing up at Melissa and then nodding toward the hookah. “Have you ever tried this?”

  “Yes, except not with tobacco.”

  “Pot?” Schoenfeld asked in an astonished voice.

  “Yes. College students sometimes smoked marijuana, even in the olden days.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Yeah, he did, actually,” Bleifert said, giving Schoenfeld a joshing little nudge. “Would you like to, you know, sit down or something?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Melissa said, ignoring Schoenfeld’ imperfectly suppressed sigh. “I ordered some tea at the counter and I was hoping to chat while I drank it.”

  “Do you want to try a hit?” Bleifert asked, proffering the tube.

  Melissa considered playing along just to seem companionable but decided against it. She figured she’d look like a phony, and she was afraid she’d cough like an eighth-grader trying her first Camel Light.

  “No, thanks.”

  Bad move. Bleifert’s mood swung like politician’s after a surprising poll.

  “So this isn’t a social encounter, huh?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Look, I’ll save you some time, okay? I got to Professor Angstrom’s office within half-an-hour after the Villa Terrace panel ended. I used a key he’d given me to go in and return the Power Point stuff. I only turned on one light, but it was enough to see the mess. I tried to call him, then ended up running all over the building looking for a guard so that I could report the break-in. I should have just gone straight to the security desk, but I thought I could find a guard making his rounds. By the time I finally gave up and did go to the desk, there was no guard there—apparently because he’d gone off with you. So I left my name and number at the desk and I took off, because I wanted to hook up with McHunk here. And yes, I was at Notre Dame for the same symposium Professor Angstrom attended, and no, I didn’t hide in his car and kill him after he’d driven to Chicago.”

  “My mother warned me that I looked severe in hunter green,” Melissa said, “but I didn’t expect you to take me for Torquemada.”

  “Grand inquisitor,” Bleifert said to Schoenfeld.

  “I know who Torquemada was,” Schoenfeld said, with a trace of affectionate exasperation.

  Schoenfeld struck Melissa as a little bland, maybe a bit too anxious to please. His hair was cut like a novice Rotarian’s, and his pale blue eyes behind wire-rims were half-hidden by heavy lids, as if he couldn’t be bothered to open them all the way. Not a bad looking kid, but no one’s idea of McHunk—unless you were gazing at him through infatuated eyes. Was he the first guy who’d ever been nice to Bleifert? The first one not scared off by her brains and her sharp tongue?

  Bleifert’s gaze snapped back to Melissa.

  “Don’t try to game me, okay? The whole point of the Cairo Café is hookahs, and you don’t smoke but you’re here at the same time I am. Don’t tell me it’s coincidence.”

  “Hardly. I checked with four or five people, made a list of half-a-dozen places near campus where I’d have a good shot of running into you, and Cairo Café was at the top.”

  “And you did that because Li asked you to have a discreet little chat with me to help him decide whether one of his coeds is a murderer so he can get to work on damage control, right?”

  A waitress in a modified chador set a steaming cup of green tea in front of Melissa, who took a tentative sip. Bleifert had a point about the hookahs. Melissa couldn’t imagine anyone coming to the Cairo Café for its tea.

  “I have an ulterior motive, but interrogation isn’t it. Being lured into a stairwell and trapped there like an airhead in a romance novel wasn’t exactly a highlight of the semester for me, but I’m not conducting my own private investigation into the incident.”

  Melissa choked down another throatful of tea while pink crept up the backs of Bleifert’s ears.

  “Then why did you go to so much trouble to track me down?”

  “For starters, I wanted to return something to you.” Fishing the holy card from her purse, Melissa tendered it to Bleifert.

  “Two!” Schoenfeld said, making a referee’s count-it signal with
his right hand as Bleifert accepted the card.

  “Yep,” Bleifert said gamely. “Burned my ass for sure.”

  “You dropped it at Villa Terrace. I thought you’d want it back.”

  “I do. Thanks. Sorry for the bitch act just now. Since Professor Angstrom’s murder I’ve been acting like Paris Hilton during a Midol shortage.”

  “Actually, I’m the one who should be thanking you.”

  “Why is that?

  “Seeing my name on that card reminded me of one of the only times I’ve cried since I grew up.”

  “Whoa,” Bleifert said.

  “I was home from college during spring break, and my mother asked me to go over to Saint Peters Church, near where we lived in Kansas City, to pick up my grandmother who was there for Lenten devotions. I walked in about three minutes after the service was over. And in the front pew I saw about twelve girls in parochial school uniforms praying in unison. All at once I realized that they were praying for me.”

  “Huh?” Schoenfeld demanded.

  Bleifert gave Schoenfeld a brisk rundown about Lenten prayers for lapsed Catholics.

  “Right,” Melissa confirmed. “These girls had never heard of me but they were giving up an hour on a Friday afternoon to pray for me and try to save my soul. Suddenly, before I realized what was happening, tears were streaming down my cheeks.”

  “And Terry’s card reminded you of that,” Schoenfeld said, nodding his head in contented understanding. “Cool.”

  “Not only your card but a couple of things you said when we talked about my agnosticism. I fell away from the Church in my teens—fell a long, long way from it. But the more I thought about what you’d said, the more I wondered if I hadn’t given the Church enough of a chance.”

  No actress alive could have faked the transformation that swept over Bleifert. Every ounce of chip-on-her-shoulder attitude evaporated from her features. Her eyes widened and lit up. Her lips split in a delighted smile. Her face seemed to glow as she eagerly leaned forward.

  ‘Gray lie’ hell, Melissa thought. I am scum under a rock.

  “That’s wonderful,” Bleifert said.

  “I’m not really sure where to take it from here. I was wondering if you know a priest at the Newman Center on campus who might be a good one for me to talk to about—I don’t know, about exploring my feelings further.”

  “That might be risky until you have tenure,” Bleifert said. “A lot of your colleagues would think you’d gone over to the dark side if they spotted you traipsing into the Newman Center.”

  “I hope you’re wrong about that,” Melissa said.

  “The priest I know best is a Franciscan at Saint Josephats, the basilica on the south side. If you like, I’d be happy to call him and try to get you in touch with him.”

  “That would be very thoughtful. I’d appreciate it.”

  “I could also get you some books. Oh, God, I’m coming off like a Jehovah’s Witness, aren’t I?”

  “Why don’t we start with one book?” Melissa suggested, smiling. “I wouldn’t want to over-commit on required reading.”

  “You’ll have it Monday morning.”

  “Thanks. I’ll leave you two to enjoy the rest of your evening together.”

  As Melissa was leaving, she heard Bleifert and Schoenfeld fall effortlessly into carefree banter.

  “Okay, explain that one, McSkeptic.”

  “I’m happy that you’re happy, my Polish princess, but one grace-filled moment doesn’t erase all the horrible things that have been done in the name of religion over the centuries.”

  “Hitler, Stalin, Mao.”

  “Come again?”

  “Two atheists and a pagan,” Bleifert said with a fierce and triumphant intensity. “And among them they managed in about forty years to kill more people by several orders of magnitude than all the Crusades and all the jihads and all the pograms and all the inquisitions and all the witch-hunts in history, even if you take it back to the annihilation of the Midianites by the Israelites in Numbers.”

  A pause of three or four seconds ensued, as if Schoenfeld were catching his breath after this verbal assault.

  “Well, yeah,” he conceded then. “But they had better technology.”

  PART THREE

  Scribbling On the Tabula Rasa

  “Behavioral researchers have attempted to understand what kinds of jurors reach what types of decisions and how attitudes affect the way in which jurors must be informed and persuaded toward a particular view in a trial. Jurors do not come into the courtroom with a blank slate or tabula rasa. They bring with them a large number of attitudes which are firmly entrenched in their minds.”

  —Donald Vinson, Jury Trials: The Psychology of Winning Strategy

  Chapter 20

  The third Saturday in December, 2007

  “You owe me big time, Mr. Pennyworth.”

  That’s what I get for turning my cell-phone on before eight o’clock in the morning on a weekend.

  “Owe you for what, Frank?” Rep asked, reluctantly laying his Milwaukee Journal Sentinel next to a bowl of corn flakes now doomed to soggy limpness well before he could taste them.

  “For going well above and beyond the call of duty.”

  “For an editor at a New York publishing house to be at his desk before nine A.M. on a weekday would qualify as heroic,” Rep said, adding an hour for eastern time. “On a weekend it’s transcendent. This is about my query a while back?”

  “Yes. And coming into my office isn’t the heroic part. I’m calling you from my squalid, thirty-two-hundred square foot garret in Tribeca.”

  “By all means get to the heroism. Did a pitch or a story like the one I described come in over the transom?”

  “No. I checked the junior readers and came up empty. But I didn’t stop there. I showed some initiative. I put the word out because the professor-in-Milwaukee part rang a very faint bell. It turns out we did get a ’script from a tweedy-type in Milwaukee named Harald Angstrom. But it didn’t come in over any transom.”

  “You mean he had an agent?”

  “Not just an agent, buddy. Amy Lee. It hit the desk of a senior editor maybe four months ago, and it hit with a very loud thud. The buzz isn’t supposed to start for another six months, but it’s a go.”

  “Even though Angstrom has passed away? ”

  “You kidding? That’s hype-fodder, not a buzz-killer—a fantastic hook. Getting murdered may be this egghead’s greatest career move.”

  “My word,” Rep said. “Religious/mystical thriller with an intrepid and omni-competent academic as the hero?”

  “Not even close. Courtroom drama revolving around complex machinations in jury selection. Don’t ask for more because I had to take a colleague to lunch at Nouvelle Justine just to get that much—and that place creeps me out.”

  “You’re right. I owe you.”

  “You bet you do. When the next John Grisham stumbles into your office wondering whether he needs permission to equip his query letter with a computer chip that will play the Perry Mason Theme when it’s opened, I want to hear about it first.”

  “You shall. ”

  Rep scribbled Frank Thompkins/Artemis Books in white space at the top of the Journal Sentinel’s front page. By happenstance, he wrote the words immediately above the headline announcing:

  ‘SEX OR SWIM’ DISMISSAL REVERSED

  CASE SENT BACK FOR RETRIAL

  ***

  “Thank you for calling back,” Melissa said less than forty minutes later as, baffled, she watched Rep bustling around the bedroom. “Could you hold on for just a minute?” Then, to Rep, “You’re not going into the office are you?”

  “Yep.”

  “A little after eight-thirty on a Saturday?”

  “I’d be there already except that Walt won’t be in until nine.”

  “Walt is coming in on a Saturday?”

  “Has to. Q Kasmaryck seems to have gotten
into a scrape of some kind early this morning.”

  Melissa put the phone back to her ear.

  “I’m sorry, Father Huebner. My husband was turning into a blur and I thought I’d better find out what was happening. It’s very thoughtful of you to call on a Saturday with Christmas only a week away.”

  “We’re as busy as H and R Block would be in April if it filled out tax forms for free,” her caller’s reedy, tenor voice said. “But this is important. If you can possibly get out to Mount Mary College about three o’clock this afternoon, I should have an hour between two commitments out there.”

  “I’ll be there. How will I know you?”

  “I’ll be the one in the papal tiara.”

  “Um, okay. ”

  “No, seriously,” Father Gregory Huebner, O.F.M. said. “Papal tiara.”

  ***

  “I’ll tell you one thing, if she was gonna throw an all-night party on a yacht during the Fourth of July fireworks, she should have made damn good and sure she knew everyone she let on that boat. That was just asking for it.”

  “We’re not supposed to consider that, though.”

  “I know, I’m just saying.”

  Rep had to work hard to keep his attention focused on the grainy figures, videotaped through one-way mirrors, who populated his computer screen. The first speaker looked like he was in his mid-sixties, with scattered white hair and liver-spotted hands. The second, a woman, had silver-streaked black hair pulled back and tied in what Rep guessed was supposed to be a pony tail. They were two of the seventeen people that Jurimetrics, Inc. had gathered last summer to help the Clevenger defense team figure out what would happen when they tried the sex-or-swim case.

  It looked like Jurimetrics had come pretty close to the cross-section the exercise required. Several retirees, a postal worker, someone described generically as a “civil servant,” a couple of homemakers, an office manager—that was the woman with the attempted pony tail—two pink-collar types, a bespectacled, poker-faced guy in his late twenties who said he was self-employed, three students with purple and green streaks in their hair, a machinist, a construction worker, two public school teachers—and Harald Angstrom. You didn’t get investment bankers or doctors to give up a Saturday for the stipend Jurimetrics paid, of course, but they weren’t too likely to show up on juries, either. Three African-Americans, two Hispanics, the rest white. Ten women and seven men.