by Joel Goldman
“Ethan told me he arranged for us to meet Jimmy in the Women’s Recreation Area, wherever that is,” Kate said.
We announced our presence to an intercom and a camera at the gate and waited for an unseen hand to push a button, gears groaning as the gate slid open. A guard met us inside the administrative building and searched Kate’s shoulder bag. A woman wearing a gray pantsuit, her blond hair, sparkling eyes, and perky smile contrasting with the dreary surroundings, introduced herself as Superintendent Annette Fibuch, confessed her love of corrections, told us that the guards were corrections officers, not guards, and escorted us to the Women’s Dormitory, telling us that’s where we’d find the Women’s Recreation Area.
Lucy and I had met with Jimmy Martin in the visitor’s area, talking to him through a phone, separated by a bulletproof glass barrier, a setting that nurtured evasion and invited denial. The Women’s Recreation Area could have passed for a community college rec room; it was the one space I’d seen at the Farm where inmates could feel at ease and Kate might learn something from Jimmy.
It was a long, rectangular room, its cinder block walls painted yellow with red trim on three sides, the pattern reversed on the exterior wall, the upper third of which was a bank of windows. Sunlight poured into a carpeted room furnished with a Ping-Pong table, a game table, a chalkboard, and a quartet of soft, black club chairs clustered together in a tight square.
“An officer will bring Jimmy here in a few minutes,” Superintendent Fibuch said. “He’ll wait outside the room if you need him. Jimmy isn’t thrilled with the company he’s keeping, but I don’t think he’ll cause any trouble. Feel free to stop by my office on your way out if you need anything else.”
“She seems more like a concierge than a jail superintendent,” I said, after she left.
“Ethan says she takes good care of him because he worked with her on getting the inmates decent mental health care. He says a lot of them used to live in state mental health facilities but those days are over, thanks to budget cutbacks. Now, this is their ticket to the help they need.”
“That Ethan is something else. One step removed from sainthood.”
“Do you have a good reason to dislike him, or are you just oozing resentment because he hired me instead of you?”
“I don’t like surprises and setups.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he should have told Lucy you were involved in this case.”
“Why? Because you and I used to be together?”
I felt the heat rise in my neck. “Yeah. That’s right.”
“So you naturally assumed that he knew about us.”
“I assumed you told him if he didn’t know already.”
“Why would I tell him, and why would you think he would know if I didn’t tell him? You and I didn’t make the society page, and I didn’t put my relationship status on Facebook. Honestly, Jack, no one cares what happened between us.”
“I care.”
The words tripped out as unexpected and involuntary as the stutter that accompanied them, a guilt-laden tremor rippling through my torso for punctuation. Joy was dying, and I was playing wounded Romeo.
Kate caught her breath, her face coloring as her mouth hardened.
“So you do.”
The door opened, the officer, a towering black man, led Jimmy Martin into the room, cupping Jimmy’s elbow in his massive hand. He had a good six inches and fifty pounds on Jimmy, his gray uniform and dark skin a sharp contrast to Jimmy’s orange jumpsuit and pasty complexion.
Jimmy was nondescript, the way so many people are, his features even and bland. Comb his brown hair back, dress him in a blue suit and he could have been a bank vice president though he looked just as at home wearing the latest in jailhouse fashion. His clothes outlined him, but he filled in the empty spaces when he opened his mouth.
“You be nice to these people, Jimmy,” the officer said.
Jimmy shook off the officer’s touch, his flat expression in place. “I don’t need you to tell me shit, nigger.”
The officer cuffed him on the back of the head. “Mind your manners, Jimmy. You don’t want these people getting the wrong idea about you. And, don’t forget, you and me got a long walk back to the men’s dorm. Lot of places along the way a man can slip and fall, especially the sorry shape this place is in.” The officer looked at us, smiling. “Don’t worry about me and Jimmy. We got an understanding. I’ll be right outside if you folks need anything.”
Kate waited for the officer to leave before walking toward Jimmy, her hand extended, Jimmy’s red, puffy eyes darting from her to me and back to her, his arms at his side, clenching his fists. She waited, her hand outstretched, Jimmy studying it like it was a hot poker before giving in and slowly raising his. Kate took hold, not letting go.
“Jimmy, I’m Kate Scranton. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me. Let’s sit down and figure out how I can help you.”
Chapter Twenty-three
She set up a miniature video camera mounted on an eight-inch tripod, aiming the lens at Jimmy.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“So I don’t have to take notes,” Kate answered.
That wasn’t the only reason. I knew Kate would study the video later, breaking it down frame by frame, deciphering Jimmy’s involuntary expressions, deciding whether to believe him.
We sat in a semicircle around a gray hard-plastic coffee table, Kate and I flanking Jimmy. He fidgeted, trying to find a safe place for his hands, locking them in his armpits. The chairs looked sturdier than they were, each of us sinking into the sagging cushions. Kate leaned back, legs extended, shoulders soft, her hands in her lap. His posture said he was tense, uncertain, while hers was open, reassuring, telling him she wouldn’t bite. I followed her lead, my legs crossed at the ankles, hands resting on the arms of my chair.
“Looks like you could use a good night’s sleep,” she said.
Jimmy licked his lower lip like he was searching for a cigarette and didn’t answer.
“I hear the beds are made of cold steel and you can floss your teeth with the mattresses.”
A closed, hard smile creased his mouth. “It’s jail. It ain’t the Ritz.”
“I don’t know how you stand the smell, living with all those people on top of you, especially with that officer putting his hands on you and treating you like a child.”
He narrowed his eyes, his back stiffening. “I can do the time.”
“I’m sure you can, but why do it if you don’t have to?”
He stared at her, taking short breaths before answering. “I told my lawyer and I told your friend there and I’m telling you. I’ll do the time. I got nothing to say about my kids.”
Kate leaned forward, her hands clamped on her knees. “And I’m not going to ask what happened to your children.”
He straightened and dropped his hands onto the armrests. “Then what do you want?”
“You’re going to trial on the theft charge. My job is to make sure the jury that decides whether you go free or go to prison is on your side.”
He rolled his eyes. “Now how you gonna do that? Who the hell is gonna be on my side?”
Kate smiled. “The economy is in a shambles. Millions of people have lost jobs they are never going to get back, and the money they put away for retirement, they would have been better off burying it in a tin can in their backyard. They’re angry and scared, but they don’t have the nerve to do more about it than stick their heads out the window and scream that they can’t take it anymore. You’d be surprised how many of them wish they had the balls to do what you did to support their family.”
He smirked. “They caught me with some copper. Don’t mean I stole it.”
“When the police arrested you, you were driving a truck loaded with five thousand dollars worth of copper tubing and wire they traced to a construction site. You claim you paid cash for the copper to someone who gave you a phony name and address and, so far, the police can’t find him.
That’s like the drug dealer who claims someone planted crack in a condom and stuck it up his ass. You want to ride that horse to the finish line, that’s your choice. But, if you want a fighting chance, you’ll work with me.”
“So what can you do about it?”
“My job is to figure out which jurors will hurt you and which ones will help you. Ethan Bonner can keep a lot of the bad ones off the jury, maybe not all of them but maybe enough to give you a shot at acquittal or a hung jury.”
“My lawyer said the jury was supposed to be fair and impartial.”
“The more people want to serve on a jury, the more they think they can do that, but half the time, they don’t even know they’re prejudiced against short people, fat people, or people who part their hair on the right instead of the left. They decide guilt or innocence without being aware of all the subtle things that go into their decision. You need an edge, and I’m your edge, that is, if you let me.”
He nodded, turning to me. “What about him? He works for my wife. What’s he doing here?”
“He’s my edge. He’ll find out what we need to know about the people in the jury pool, all the stuff that isn’t on the questionnaire the court makes them fill out.”
He squinted at me, and I nodded in reply, backing Kate up, wondering where she was going.
“Why would my wife let him help us?”
When he referred to the two of them as us, I knew that Kate had him. She sat back, knowing it too.
“Now why do you think your future former wife would want to keep you out of jail?”
Jimmy thought for a moment, his eyes widening when he figured out the answer. He shook his head, offering his first real smile. “Alimony.”
“Bingo,” Kate said.
“I’m not paying her one goddamn cent!”
“If you’re making twelve cents an hour scrubbing the penitentiary bathroom floor, you’re right. At least if you’re out on the street making a decent wage, you’ll have something worth fighting over.”
He smiled again. His uneven teeth were stained with tobacco and coffee, his grin crooked and dirty. I was wrong to think that a blue suit was all he needed to pass for a banker. Everything you needed to know about Jimmy Martin was right in front of you each time he opened his mouth. He rubbed his hands together.
“Okay, then. Where do we start?”
“It all starts with you, Jimmy,” Kate said. “If Ethan is going to sell you to the jury, I need to know everything there is to know about you. When were you born?”
She got him started, and it was hard to get him to stop. He told her about growing up in Northeast, how his father had smacked him and his brother around; how he’d stumbled through high school, barely graduating; enlisting in the Marines, doing two tours in the first Gulf War, getting in enough trouble that they offered him an honorable discharge in return for his promise not to re-enlist; and finally pulled himself together working construction, mostly residential, drywall and carpentry, some electrical and plumbing, whatever needed doing. He bragged about all the women he’d known, marveling how Peggy had somehow worn him down until he gave in and married her.
“And the next thing you knew, you had two kids and the party was over,” she said.
The air went out of him. “Yeah.”
“And with the recession, work dried up and money got tight, which wasn’t your fault, and you and Peggy started fighting and you’d come home at night and she’d say she was going out with her girlfriends, only it wasn’t always her girlfriends.”
His eyes flickered, his lips trembling even as his jaw tightened. “How’d you know about that?”
Kate reached into her shoulder bag, pulling out a sheaf of papers, setting them on the coffee table. “Ethan showed me what your divorce lawyer filed in response to Peggy’s divorce petition, and I read the rest of it between the lines. That had to be tough to take.”
He looked away, staring out the windows, coming back to her, his jaw set. “Who gives a shit? Somebody wants her, they can have her. I’m through with the bitch.”
Kate reached into her bag again, pulling out a manila folder and setting it on the coffee table. “But she was only half of the problem. Even if you were through with her, you still had the kids.”
She opened the folder, not taking her eyes off of him, spreading eight-by-ten color photographs of Evan and Cara out on the table, Evan posing in his Cub Scouts uniform, Cara wearing the one from her basketball team. Jimmy scanned the photos, locking in his flat expression.
She pulled out another folder, laying a color photograph of two dead children, their bodies bloody and sightless, on top of the pictures of Evan and Cara. Jimmy’s head spun clockwise like he’d taken a right cross, his jaw slack, his eyebrows arching over full-moon eyes.
He shook his head, bringing his glare back to Kate, not looking at the photographs, grabbing his thighs, fighting to stay in his chair and losing the fight. I beat him to his feet, chest bumping him and pinning his arms to his sides.
“Those aren’t my kids’ bodies! What the hell are you trying to pull on me?”
“Easy, Jimmy,” I said.
“Take your fucking hands off of me!”
The officer opened the door, making me wonder how private our conversation had been.
“Like the man told you,” the officer said, “go easy, Jimmy.”
Jimmy sucked in a deep breath, and I felt the tension drain out of him. I released his arms, and he raised his hands in mock surrender, walked past the officer and out into the hall without saying another word. The officer winked at us before following him.
Chapter Twenty-four
I waited until we were back in Kate’s car, the barbed-wire gate screening our view of the Farm.
“What was that about?”
She shook her hair. “What was what about?”
“The con you just tried to run on Jimmy Martin. You convinced him you could fix the jury so he could skate on a felony theft charge even though he’s guilty, all so you could try to blindside him into admitting he killed his kids. If there’s a code of ethics for jury consultants, I’d say you violated all of them except for the one about sleeping with the judge, but I guess you have to save something for the trial.”
She put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the engine. “Is that all?”
“No, that’s just for openers. This is Jimmy’s first felony beef, so he’s not going to do enough time for styles to change even if he’s convicted, which is going to happen no matter how much fairy dust you sprinkle on the jury. Your Robin Hood defense doesn’t stand a chance, especially since Jimmy will have to testify how much he loves his wife and kids, which guarantees he’ll be convicted once the prosecutor tells the jury that Peggy is divorcing him and that he won’t tell anyone what happened to his kids. No lawyer would hire a jury consultant for this case, especially one as good as you. It’s a lost cause, and you’re too damned expensive. Jimmy doesn’t have two quarters to rub together, but he’s got you on his team because Ethan Bonner says you owe him. How does that happen?”
“Is that all?”
“That’s enough for now.”
“Good,” she said, firing the engine. “How do we get to Peggy Martin’s house?”
“We aren’t going anywhere until I get some answers.”
She sighed, pulled out Peggy’s divorce petition, found her address on the cover sheet, and entered it in the GPS built into the dash. A moment later, a mechanical female voice instructed her to proceed to the highlighted route, and she put the car in gear.
“Your deal with Ethan was clear. I interview the Martins and tell you and him what I think. That doesn’t entitle you to an explanation of my methods.”
The warm greeting she’d given me at breakfast had faded, replaced by a cold front, the tipping point coming when I blurted out that I cared about what had happened to us. It wasn’t hard to understand why my confession had stirred up a storm. When she asked me to follow her to San Diego, I had answered
by saying that I’d asked my ex-wife to move in with me and would she mind being patient while I saw how that worked out. I would have sworn it somehow had made sense to me at the time even though anyone else would have realized it was a one-sentence application for Moron of the Year.
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded, keeping her eyes on the road. “Good for you.”
“Not about today, about San Diego.”
She bit her lip. “I believe you are sorry, Jack, but I’m not sure what it is you’re sorry about. Whether it’s that Joy got sick and you decided you were the only person on earth who could take care of her or that you chose her over me or that you hurt me or that you realized you made the biggest mistake of your life. But whatever it is, don’t tell me you care about what happened to us because people who care don’t just walk away even if they think they have a good reason. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with all of that and doing it in the middle of this case isn’t my idea of fun. So let’s just stick to business.”
My head and neck whip lashed against the head-rest, my right shoulder dipping as my left twisted until it was perpendicular to my sternum, the spasm holding me for a five count.
“Fair enough,” I said when I could breathe again.
She turned toward me, her eyes wet, her mouth soft. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Don’t say that. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me.”
“It’s not that. When you shake, it takes the fun out of beating up on you, and I really feel like beating up on you.”
“Get in line. So, tell me. Did Jimmy Martin kill his kids?”
She gathered herself, squaring her shoulders to the road. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What happened to divining the truth hidden in facial expressions?”
She took another breath, suppressing her irritation. “There’s been a lot of new research. Turns out that liars don’t avert their eyes on average any more than people telling the truth do.”
