The thing is, I’m convinced there’s something hinky about David and Lacey’s relationship and that it was a proper area of cross-examination.
I blame Alicia and Cole. If I just had better associates helping me …
“You want to get a drink at La Fiesta’s? Celebrate the end of a long, notable trial?”
It’s Bauer, with Alicia and Cole in tow, standing in my doorway. What does he mean drink to the end of a long trial? Why not drink to a job well done? And why isn’t the district attorney joining us? She’s probably elsewhere, celebrating the demise of her political opponent, Jack Cranston. Well, I haven’t given up, even though everyone else has.
“Drinks are on me,” I say.
They all doth protest, but not too much.
I push myself up out of my desk chair and grab my coat, and it’s all I can do to put it on. Oh, adrenaline, where are you when I need you? Grungy. My coat is grungy. I didn’t have a chance to make it to the dry cleaners during the last two weeks of trial, and I don’t have fourteen suits to wear. More like four, which I recycled. After the incest debate, I didn’t want to ask my wife to take care of my laundry. I was an English major, you know. Still read Shakespeare when I get a chance. David Sullinger reminds me of a kind of wimpy Macbeth who turned on Lady Macbeth. Maybe some avant-garde producer will do an adaption like that someday. The Tragedy of Macbeth: The Battered Husband. Or is Sullinger more like Richard III? An ax, an ax, my kingdom for an ax.
“Congratulations on a job well done,” Bauer says.
“These two deserve most of the credit,” I say, patting Alicia, then Cole, on the shoulder. “They worked their asses off.”
JUROR NO. 52
THE EXPRESS MESSENGER / ACTOR
“So are you going to reach a verdict soon?”
“I can’t talk about it, Mom. How many times …? I’m watching the game. Wanna watch with me? Warriors verse Clippers.”
“Oh, come on. Your generation is so … When I was your age, we weren’t so afraid of authority. We marched in favor of civil rights in the South and protested the Vietnam War. And we invented feminism.”
“You’re not old enough for the civil rights movement. And, I’m not afraid. I’m just doing the right thing. Following the law, and stuff.”
“Who’s winning?”
“The Warriors, but the Clippers have—”
“No, who’s winning in the jury room.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“Don’t say ‘Jesus.’ You know I don’t—”
“Okay. Sorry. I’m watching the game.”
“Will the trial be over tomorrow?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“This week?”
“I just can’t.”
“I bet the Jody Arias jury talked to their mothers … or family.”
“Who’s—?”
“Don’t you watch the news? Well, I guess you were a kid. Well, not a kid, but three, four years younger. You’re still a kid. You should watch the news if you want to be an actor. And read the news. She was the girl who killed her boyfriend, stabbed him fifty times or so, shot him to make sure he was dead, and claimed self-defense because he made her do anal sex, but really she was just nuts. They convicted her. Life imprisonment, not the death penalty.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“Don’t say ‘Jesus,’ and don’t cover your ears when I talk to you.”
“If you’re going to talk about … I’m going to bed soon, so maybe you’ll let me get some sleep. I have to be in court first thing.”
“Okay, yeah, get some sleep. That Jody Arias reminds me of that David Sullinger. Stabbing. Or, in your case, axing, but same thing. Self-defense claim. No shooting with Sullinger, I’ll grant you, not that it makes a difference. Dead is dead.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“Kiss your mom good night.”
THE PARALEGAL
SAUL MEADE
A paradox: those who speak best for the downtrodden eventually become rich, famous, privileged, worshipped, all of the above—and, as a consequence, more adored by the downtrodden. The legendary rock singer with the private jet still sings about his hardscrabble Pittsburgh neighborhood. Electioneering from her luxurious brownstone on the Upper West Side, the still-beautiful, still-working, award-winning actress urges everyone to vote radical-progressive. The billionaire corporate mogul dabbles in politics and snake-charms the working class. Even Mother Teresa became something of a rock star. How else can you explain her expedited sainthood?
Just so with defense attorney Jenna Blaylock, though on a much smaller scale, because, after all, even the most prominent attorneys have a fame ceiling. Athletes, entertainers, and artists entertain and edify. Lawyers can’t do that. How many remember Clarence Darrow and Daniel Webster these days? And no, Abraham Lincoln doesn’t count. In any event, Jenna started as a socially conscious public defender in Chicago, won a high-profile trial for an accused cop killer, earned a gig on cable TV because she was smart, articulate, and a pretty blond, and soon went into private practice, taking on one of two types of clients: the rich and the notorious and, if she was lucky, both at once.
In Jenna’s seventeen-year career, she’s never lost a case. If you don’t believe it, just take a look at her website, which I designed. When she does lose, she claims that she had nothing to do with the case, that her cocounsel took the lead. Legal insiders know the truth, but the truth can’t trump a well-designed website and exposure on national television. Unblemished record or not, Jenna is a superb trial lawyer, and I should know—I’ve worked for her since the beginning.
Two hours after the Sullinger jury left for the evening, our defense team sits in the town’s best restaurant (mediocre food, excellent cocktails). Our group comprises a junior partner—who’s a partner in name only, because she doesn’t share in firm profits—a second-year associate, and me, her paralegal.
“To another victory,” Jenna says, raising her martini glass.
Everyone but me raises a glass in response. When Jenna sees this, she sets her glass back down, as do the others.
“What’s the problem now, Saul?” she says, her tone portending the approach of an arctic cold snap.
“You know exactly what the problem is,” I say. “The jury is still out, to coin a phrase.”
“We’re celebrating because we’ve got it won,” Jenna says, biting her martini olive with such hostility that the pimento falls onto the table. “The daughter won it for us—slam dunk. I have a fund-raiser in Boston day after tomorrow, and after the jury comes back, I want to get a reasonably early flight. You can’t expect me to take a red-eye back east just so I can have a dinner in this town.” She picks the pimento off the table and pops it into her mouth. “No more of your negativity, Saul. Buzzkill. You do this every time we have a trial, and I always win.”
“I just don’t want us to jinx it,” I say—a quarrelsome statement because, as Jenna learned long ago, I’m not superstitious.
“Trials are resolved based on the lawyer’s ability, not superstition,” she says. “And next trial, shine your shoes before you walk into court. They’re all scuffed. And you don’t wear brown shoes with a charcoal-gray suit.”
“I didn’t think trials were decided by fashion choices,” I say. “I thought they’re resolved based on truth and justice.”
“You forgot to add ‘the American way,’” Blaylock says. “And yes, fashion matters. Don’t you think the jury noticed Cranston’s ill-fitting suits?”
The nonpartner-partner and the associate chuckle.
She looks at the two lawyers at the table as if they were jurors. “No, trials don’t remotely involve the values of Superman. Sure, guilt and innocence matter, but only because some people are so guilty that you can’t spin the facts any other way. I don’t take those kinds of cases anymore. I had more than my fair share when I w
as a public defender—although, even on those tough cases, I worked magic.”
“How humble of you,” I say.
“Cases are won by spinning facts, appealing to prejudices—”
“Prejudices?” I say. “I’ve never heard you admit quite so blatantly—”
“Yes, prejudices. We’re all friends here. We are friends, aren’t we, Saul?”
I lift my wineglass, although I’m not feeling very friendly now. We’ve all had too much to drink.
“Yes, in advocacy, you appeal to prejudices, spin the facts when possible, quibble, deflect, distract. You challenge the credibility of the most credible witnesses, which is an easy thing to do. No one can know everything—which you use against them, and you also take what they know, and use that against them. You demonize the victim, because most victims can be demonized. God knows Amanda Sullinger could be demonized. She demonized herself. And then you use your God-given talents to charm the jury, to make your opponent look plodding and untrustworthy, whether he’s trustworthy or not. I have to admit it—Jack Cranston is a pretty straight shooter as prosecutors go, and he’s not a bad trial lawyer. I just made him look incompetent.” She sits back in the booth, takes a self-satisfied sip of her drink, and raises her glass again. “Here’s to winning.”
The others drink, but I just swirl my glass and stare into it, as if the answers to unanswerable questions could be discerned by reading the pattern of sediment at the bottom of a glass of pinot noir. Haven’t you learned, Jenna, that sometimes the star can get too big for the show, that the jurors might begin to attribute their initial belief in David’s innocence not to the truth but to a masterful Vegas-worthy magic trick, and if that happens, the cause is lost?
“What’s wrong now?” Jenna asks when she notices I didn’t participate in her toast.
“Why aren’t we drinking to David Sullinger’s freedom?” I say. “Or to justice?”
She shrugs. “Sure, why not? Here’s to justice for David Sullinger.” She touches the rim of the glass to her lips but doesn’t drink this time.
“We’ll continue this discussion later,” I say.
“No. We won’t.”
That ends the conversation. Once upon a time, she would have listened.
“Whatever you say, boss.”
The associate chortles, then clamps a hand to his mouth in mortification. Jenna ignores him, which is the worst possible reaction one can get from her. Better that she scream at him.
Jenna Blaylock and I fell in love three months after she hired me. She’d just left the Chicago public defender’s office and started her private practice, the Law Offices of Jenna M. Blaylock, Criminal Defense. A life-altering event and a huge risk for a young lawyer who’d never worked at a firm, never operated a business.
I, too, had made a recent life change. A year earlier, I’d given up on my seven-year attempt—I won’t dignify it by calling it a quest—to finish my doctoral dissertation, supposedly an analysis of postmodernist literary criticism and its relevance to the criminal justice system, but in fact a hodgepodge of arcane theories and suppositions that became so byzantine even I couldn’t understand them. Something about Jacques Derrida, Sir Edward Coke, and Antonin Scalia meet My Cousin Vinnie. Not that the inability to understand your own work disqualifies you from publication.
My parents had stopped helping me financially with grad school two years earlier, and since then I’d worked as a legal secretary and then a paralegal to help defray the costs of daily existence. I knew I was doing a good job when the law firm offered to pay my way through law school, with a promise of employment when I passed the bar. My parents urged me, and later begged me, to accept the offer and follow in my mother’s footsteps. (She’s a litigator who runs her own boutique employment-law firm.) Then, perhaps, if I wanted to return to academia, I’d follow in my father’s footsteps and become a law professor. I declined. I was not going to attend school for another three seconds, much less three years, and I wasn’t going to subject myself to the absurd pressure that BigLaw attorneys, and particularly BigLaw associates, must endure. I’d rather keep paying off the student loans.
There were no hard feelings on the part of the law firm, which just gave a corporate shrug, changed my job title from “paralegal” to “senior analyst,” and raised my billing rate a hundred and fifty dollars per hour. I functioned as a de facto associate. Indeed, my annual job reviewers said I was better than most associates, smarter than most partners. I didn’t want to feel better or smarter than anyone. I just wanted to leave the office at a decent hour, go home, read fantasy and horror novels, watch edgy internet-television programs, and play in my twice-a-week hockey league. I wanted to avoid any involvement in law firm politics, because as a graduate student, I’d nearly been devoured by university politics. Most of all, I didn’t want to be judged. A senior analyst at a law firm isn’t judged but, rather, is the object of a condescending admiration.
I was happy at the law firm, but that didn’t stop me from answering an internet notice announcing that a criminal defense attorney who had recently opened an office was looking to hire a paralegal—someone creative, hardworking, willing to take the initiative, good with people, and in possession of a social conscience. My decision to interview was the result of a kind of academic curiosity, an inquiry into what makes a celebrity lawyer tick. Jenna had appeared on cable news shows as a pundit on high-profile criminal cases, and I … To be honest, I wanted to find out whether she was as beautiful and caustic in person as she was on TV.
The answer was yes and no. Yes, she was beautiful, and still is. More so now, because she’s truly a woman and not partly a child. No, she wasn’t the tough chick of the small screen and the internet but, rather, a scared young lawyer who had heretofore relied on the security net of a government job and was now staking success in private practice on a growing reputation she didn’t fully believe she deserved. She’d ended up at the public defender’s office because she had washed out at a large law firm. She needed help with legal writing and theory, and my credentials impressed her mightily. Oh, she didn’t say that in so many words, but I perceived it.
“I’ll start in two weeks,” I said when she offered me the job. I was ensconced in her office suite in a week. What can I say? I found her intriguing.
As it turned out, it was the perfect symbiosis. I’m a writer and she’s a talker. I’m a thinker and she’s a doer. I’m an introvert and she can charm, manipulate, and persuade like no one I’ve ever met.
So many relationships develop out of necessity and the desire to avoid isolation. We fought our first legal battles virtually alone. We married the year after she hired me. There was something old-fashioned about her desire for a wedding, though marriage didn’t seem necessary. At first, we behaved as equal partners, handling ever more lucrative criminal cases, but also a fair share of cases for indigents and the wrongfully accused. The pro bono work stopped as Jenna became more successful and the firm grew from just the two of us to a dozen attorneys and a large support staff. She’s received numerous offers from prominent law firms desperate to acquire the incomparable Jenna Blaylock and has rejected each offer out of hand. She wants to be her own boss. She wants to be the star. Fine with me—I want to be neither a boss nor a star.
One day about a year ago, she asked me, “Why don’t you reconsider law school? You’re smarter than anyone I know, and you already function as a lawyer. You and I, we’re not BigLaw, so things are different than before.” It was phrased as a compliment, but it was a message: in his present incarnation, Saul Meade is no longer worthy of Jenna Blaylock.
Of course I didn’t go to law school, and of course she was disappointed in me.
Yet the marriage endures. We still work well together. This Sullinger trial is an example. But more and more, she treats me like an employee, and not only while we’re working.
I didn’t want her to take this Sullinger case.
We were too busy, the town is too remote, the law is too ambiguous, and the facts are too horrifying.
“That’s why I’m going to take it,” Jenna said. “If I get him off, they’ll write about this case for decades to come.”
Now, while the attorneys at the victory table dissect the trial and praise Jenna for her brilliance, I’m seized with remorse that I’ve spoiled her moment in the sun. So much remorse lately. I chug down my wine and, without waiting for the server, pour myself another glass. We’ve both had too much to drink. That’s become a habit lately, in the name of victory celebrations and wine connoisseurship.
She lifts her glass again. “You all did a terrific job on this trial. Here’s to my loyal staff.” The reference to “staff” is more offensive to the lawyers at the table than it is to me, but they’re just collateral damage.
I never told her the real reason I didn’t want her to represent David Sullinger: The case would involve dissecting the Sullingers’ horrific relationship, and I feared that picking through the doomed couple’s matrimonial carrion would not only subject us to the stench of their marriage but also expose something putrid about our own. I was right.
JUROR NO. 33
THE GRANDMOTHER
The Student helps me down the courthouse steps, and when I take out my cell phone to call a cab—I haven’t driven in
eighteen months, since the last fender bender—she uses her phone to call an Uber. Except that she doesn’t call; she touches an app.
“My daughter has been trying to get me to use Uber,” I say. “But I still have my flip phone, and that’s enough technology for me. I never thought I’d turn out to be an old fogy, but it happens to the best of us.”
“Hmm. I feel like your daughter’s right. There’s so much you can do with a smartphone, whichever brand you get. Not only calling for Ubers, but searching the web to get information …” She turns her head away for a moment. “Text, insta … wake up …”
We, the Jury Page 11
