by Buffa, D. W.
A half hour later almost everyone had gone. I helped Horace move the dining room table back into place and then, our work done, we sat down and made a start at finishing off what remained to drink. While we were at it, Alma came in, a languid look in her eyes. "That was a wonderful party," she said, and stood next to Horace, her arms resting on his shoulders.
It was almost four in the morning when I got home, and I had had too much to drink to sleep. I got out of my clothes, took a long hot shower, threw on a robe, made a cup of coffee, and went into the library. Sitting at the desk, I thought about what Russell Gray had said, the offhand remark that nothing lasts forever, and the easy assumption that it was true. Right in front of me was the volume of Aristotle through which I had for months now been making a slow, sometimes tortuous progress, trying to follow as best I could words written more than two thousand years ago. Some things last longer than others.
Chapter Eleven
Among other things left in the library of Leopold Rifkin are the numerous volumes of Diodorus Siculus, a Roman citizen born in Sicily who spent thirty years in the century before Christ writing a universal history of the world. Somewhere near the beginning he remarks that only the ancient Egyptians knew how to protect the law from the scandalous conduct of lawyers. All criminal proceedings were conducted in silence, and everything was done in writing. At the end, when all the writings had been examined, the judge placed a carved image of Truth upon one of the two pleas, without ever once speaking a word. The Egyptians, according to Diodorus, were convinced "that if the advocates were allowed to speak they would greatly becloud the justice of a case; for they knew that the clever devices of orators, the cunning witchery of their delivery, and the tears of the accused would influence many to overlook the severity of the laws and the strictness of truth." In Egypt, perjury, like murder, was punishable by death.
Sitting at the counsel table in a small sixth-floor county courtroom on a bright summer day, I waited for the defense to finish with the first juror on voir dire, wondering what the Egyptians would have made of all this. Richard Lee Jones, who had almost certainly never heard of Diodorus Siculus, was doing everything he could to convince an elderly woman he had never met that he was the most friendly, trustworthy person she would ever know. I had spent twenty-five years of my life having this same conversation and could only hope that it had not seemed as false and contrived to others as it now did to me.
Jones had taken the seat at the end of the counsel table closest to the jury box, but even that was not close enough. He pulled his chair back from the table and, placing his elbows on his knees, bent his lanky frame as far forward as he could. Parted on the left, his shiny black hair fell over his forehead as usual.
"You understand that, because this is a criminal case, the defendant is presumed to be innocent of everything they've charged him with?"
According to her jury questionnaire, Mildred Willis was a seventy-four-year-old widow with three children and seven grandchildren. She had moved to Oregon as a child and later worked as a telephone operator. Since her marriage she had not held a job outside the home. Painfully thin, with white hair and kindly blue eyes, she was the only female juror wearing a dress. She took her time when she answered a question.
"Yes, I understand that."
"And you understand that this presumption of innocence follows the defendant"—Jones paused long enough to sit up and glance back at his client—"Marshall Goodwin, throughout the trial? Not just part of the trial but all of it. Right up to the time when you go into the jury room and start deliberations. You understand that, don't you?"
She thought about it. "Yes," she said, "I understand that too."
The jury box was directly across from the bench, where the quick-tempered Judge Irma Holloway was concentrating on every word. It was an unusual arrangement. In most courtrooms, the jury is seated to the side and the counsel table is in front of the bench. Here, it was almost impossible to keep an eye on the jury while you were debating an issue before the judge or examining a witness on the stand.
For the first time in my life, I was sitting at a counsel table during a trial alone. I had no one to worry about, nothing to be responsible for, nothing except a woman who had been dead for more than two years and a belief that evil should never go unpunished.
Jones went on and on, asking questions about her children and her grandchildren, what she watched on television and what books and magazines she liked to read. It was like watching in a concave mirror a distorted reflection of myself. Finally, I got to my feet.
"Mr. Antonelli?" Judge Holloway asked in her piercing voice. "Do you rise for the purpose of making an objection?"
I pretended surprise. "No, your Honor. I rise to get the circulation back in my legs."
While the spectators and reporters laughed and several jurors smiled, Richard Lee Jones wheeled out of his chair and objected vociferously.
"Your Honor, I didn't disrupt the prosecution while he interviewed this juror. I would think common courtesy—"
"Loses out to physical necessity," I said, under my breath.
With a brisk nod, Judge Holloway got to her feet.
"In chambers, gentlemen."
It was not as easy as it sounded. The judge had a private entrance through a doorway directly behind the tall black leather swivel chair at the bench. We had to make our way past eight rows of spectator benches to a doorway at the back corner of the courtroom, down the grey linoleum corridor to the clerk's office, and through the law library, to the door that finally opened onto the private chambers of Judge Robert M. Beloit.
A garrulous, backslapping fool, Beloit had rescued himself from a failing law practice by convincing the governor, a former fraternity brother, to appoint him to a circuit court vacancy. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, he was always on the lookout for something new to kill, and his office was decorated with just a few of what he had managed to find over the years. An elk, a bighorn sheep, and a cougar stared straight ahead, as if they had crashed through the wall and were only momentarily dazed. We were meeting in chambers to discuss a legal procedure in a murder trial, surrounded by the proud, soulful eyes of a dead menagerie.
Irma Holloway sat straight up on the edge of the chair. Behind her high, sharp cheekbones, large eyes, and pinched mouth, she was a bundle of nervous energy on the verge of erupting at any moment. She looked at us as we settled into the two wooden Windsor chairs in front of the desk. Then her gaze lifted to the dead-eyed animals that covered the two facing walls. She slid back in the chair, slowly shaking her head.
"Are you a hunter, Mr. Jones?" she asked, a thin, polite smile on her mouth.
"Yes, I am, your Honor. Most everybody out where I come from is."
She turned to me. "And you, Mr. Antonelli?"
"No," I replied. "It was never anything I wanted to do."
A smirk started across Jones's face, and Judge Holloway rounded on him.
"You don't approve, Mr. Jones?"
"It's not up to me, your Honor," he said, shrugging his shoulders. He pushed his boots out in front of him until his legs were straight and then crossed one ankle over the other. "I don't care if Antonelli doesn't want to hunt. Though I could have done without that condescending tone of his. Far as I'm concerned, Antonelli can do whatever he wants. It's a free country. Except," he added, a warning in his voice, "I don't think he really has any business getting in my way while I'm talking to someone during voir dire. All I've got to say," he went on, glaring at me through half-closed eyes, "is that it better not happen again."
"And all I've got to say, Mr. Jones," she said, fixing him with a lethal stare, "is that unless you want to wind up like one of these animals, your head mounted on the wall, you'd better never tell me what to do again!"
"I didn't—"
"You don't come in here—I don't care what lunatic normally sits in these chambers—and start telling me what the other lawyer in this case better do or not do. You get my meaning, M
r. Jones? I didn't call you in here to hear what you think. I called you in here so you'd both know," she added, shooting a glance at me, "that in my courtroom I make the rules and you follow them, and pity the fool who first forgets it! You understand?"
Jones stared back at her, a grudging smile his only response.
"You both understand?" she demanded, her eyes switching to me.
I nodded.
"Now, let's get this straight." Leaning forward, she began to shake her finger. "This is a courtroom. It is not Drama
One-oh-one. Leave the theatrics at home."
Jones settled back in the chair.
"I don't just mean Antonelli, here. That's the last time he gets to his feet and pulls that kind of stunt. But let me tell you," she went on, bending farther across the desk, "it's also the last time you turn the examination of a prospective juror into a miniseries on that person's life."
"I have a right to explore avenues of possible prejudice in a juror. This isn't some drunk-drive case, your Honor."
"You want to argue the point, Mr. Jones? Save it for the appellate courts. I'm putting a ten-minute limit on how long either one of you can ask questions of each prospective juror."
Jones was beside himself. "Ten minutes? That's an impossible limitation."
"If you can't do it in the time allowed, Mr. Jones, I'll do it for you. The court has the power to take voir dire out of the hands of the lawyers if they're not doing it properly."
With a shudder, she cast one last disgusted look at the heads mounted on the wall. "Somebody should shoot him," she muttered under her breath. Her eyes came back to us. "All right. Let's get back to work."
Jones stopped me in the hallway. Pulling himself up to his full height, he stood close to me, backing me against the wall. "I'm going to bury you, Antonelli. You never were as good as me."
I moved along the wall. When I was free of him, I stopped, reached out to him, and laid my hand on his shoulder. "Listen, if it'll make you feel any better, I'll tell you right now that I've never thought I was as good as you." I began to walk toward the courtroom door. "I mean, let's face it," I said, as I opened it and waited for him to pass. "If you were only half as good as you tell everyone, you'd still be a hell of a lot better than anyone else who has ever tried a case."
His face went crimson and he bit his lip. We were inside the courtroom and everyone was watching. We moved up the short aisle that ran between the spectator benches and the wall. Jones stayed a step ahead of me, and when he reached the gate in the wooden railing he held it open, nodding politely as if we were friendly adversaries.
With a few last inconsequential questions, the defense finished with the elderly Mildred Willis. It was now the prosecution's turn to begin the examination of the next juror called into the box.
Content and exhausted, Dolores Lightner, the mother of two small children, sat with her arms wrapped around her bulging belly, waiting patiently for her third. Whether from an instinct of kindness or a fear that anyone that close to birth would find it difficult to condemn someone to death, I made up my mind to get rid of her. "I see from the form you filled out that you have two children?"
Her smile had motherhood written all over it. "Yes," she replied. Though I had not asked, she added proudly, "A girl, three, and a boy, one and a half."
From my place at the far right end of the counsel table, I smiled back. "And you're expecting your next child how soon?" "Eight weeks," she replied shyly.
I rose from my chair. "Your Honor, in view of Mrs. Lightner's condition, perhaps she might be excused?"
Jones was on his feet. Before he could say anything, Holloway held up her hand.
"Mrs. Lightner," said the judge, in a quiet, compassionate tone, "do you think you would be able to serve? As I said before jury selection began, the defendant has been charged with murder. And I'm afraid that some of the evidence may be graphic and quite unpleasant. When I was pregnant," she added, "it's not something I would have wanted to do."
Emphatically shaking her head, the young pregnant mother of two insisted she was perfectly able to serve and wanted to do so.
"I don't want my children growing up in a world where someone gets away with murder," she insisted seriously. "I believe in an eye for an eye," she added.
"Did you have something you wanted to say, Mr. Jones?" Holloway asked without expression.
He made the best of it he could. "No, your Honor. I just wanted to make sure she had a chance to decide for herself whether or not she could serve."
"The court appreciates your concern," she remarked dryly. "Mr. Antonelli, you may continue your examination."
After Mrs. Lightner, we moved on to the other jurors, repeating ourselves over and over again. When we finished with the twelve jurors called into the box, we began to use our peremptory challenges, replacing one juror with another and taking the new one through the same questions we had asked before.
No one really picks a jury. You start with the twelve they give you, chosen at random from two dozen that are brought into the courtroom, and go from there. Every lawyer has a theory about what kind of jury to get and what kind to avoid, but you never really have the choice. It is like playing poker: when you throw away two cards, you do not get to ask the dealer for the two that would give you the hand you want. The defense got rid of Dolores Lightner, and in her place we got an overweight thirty-five-year-old motorcycle mechanic with a Harley Davidson tattoo on his arm.
We had been doing this for days, and I was bored with it. I waited until he had squeezed into the chair. "Would you like to be on this jury, Mr. Armstrong?"
"Sure." He shrugged. "Why not?"
"Do you think you can be a fair and impartial juror?"
"Yeah, I guess."
Sinking back into my chair, I waved my hand listlessly. "Pass this juror for cause, your Honor."
Finally we had a jury. The judge instructed the clerk to swear them in. As I watched the eight women and four men listening as the clerk read the oath, I found myself wondering if I had not underestimated Richard Lee Jones's ability to ingratiate himself. He worked a kind of magic with his voice. He had talked to them, every one of them, slowly, patiently, as if they were children who could only understand things put into the simplest of terms. I had thought it was patronizing, yet instead of resenting it they seemed almost grateful. I was not worried anymore about whether Marshall Goodwin was guilty. Now that the trial had started, the only fear I had left was the fear I might lose. It did not matter what side I was on; whenever I stepped into a courtroom all I could think about was winning.
The next morning, as I made my way through the crowd that had begun to assemble in the corridor outside the courtroom door, I heard a familiar voice. Dressed in a wrinkled summer-weight suit, Harper Bryce was at my elbow. "I've got a bet down that says no matter how long you go on opening, Jones goes longer."
"As long as you don't bet that he'll have more to say."
Television crews were setting up their equipment. A young woman with lacquered hair and a microphone dangling in her hand was pacing back and forth, rehearsing her twelve-second lead. Drinking coffee from plastic cups, several reporters lounged next to the wall, while they read in the morning papers the stories they had written last night.
"Any chance we could have another conversation?" inquired Bryce casually, as we reached the door.
"Whenever you like."
"How about after court today?"
"I'm not sure about today," I said vaguely, "but sometime soon. Same rules as before, right?"
Nodding, he reached in front of me and opened the door. "It's always a pleasure, Mr. Antonelli," he said.
I was twenty minutes early, but the courtroom was almost full. Everyone wanted to hear what was going to be said in the two opening statements, in which each side would lay out what they thought they could prove or were certain they could refute. Alone at the counsel table, I pulled out the yellow legal pad on which I had written my notes. Jones and his client ha
d come in and were sitting at the opposite end of the table. The court reporter was inserting new tape into the stenotype machine. I reached into my briefcase, removed a document from a file folder, and passed it across.
