screen, shards of glass piercing her eyes. From inside the broken screen, an electronic pop and fizzle and a puff of flame.
'Great balls of fire!' sang a voice she never heard.
CHAPTER 1
If Marvin the Maven tells me not to yell in closing argument, I don't yell. Marvin knows. He's never tried a case, but he's seen more trials than most lawyers. Drifting from courtroom to courtroom in search of the best action, he glimpses eight or nine cases a day, five days a week for the last seventeen years since he closed up his shoe store in Brooklyn and headed south.
Some lawyers don't listen to Marvin and his friends-Saul the Tailor and Max (Just Plain) Seltzer-and they pay the price. Me, I listen. The courthouse regulars can't read the fine print on the early-bird menus, but they can spot perjury from the third row of the gallery.
Marvin, Saul, and Max already told me I botched jury selection. Not that lawyers pick jurors anyway. We exclude those we fear, at least until we run out of challenges.
'You're meshuga, you leave number four on,' Marvin told me on the first day of trial.
'He's a hardworking butcher,' I said defensively. 'Knows the value of a dollar. Won't give the store away.'
Marvin ran a liver-spotted hand over his toupee, fingering the part. 'Lookit his eyes, boychik. Like pissholes in the snow. Plus, I betcha he lays his fat belly on the scale with the lamb chops. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit.'
I told myself Marvin was wrong and that he hadn't intended to shower me with spittle to make his point.
Some lawyers hire psychologists to help with jury selection. They'll tell you that people who wear bright colors crave attention and feel for the underdog. Plaintiff's jurors. Dark colors are worn by introverts who don't care about people. Defendant's jurors. Hoop earrings and costume jewelry are good for the plaintiff, Rolex watches and three-karat diamonds for the defense. To me, that's a lot of malarkey. I pick jurors who smile when I smile and don't fold their bodies into tight balls when I stand close.
No second-guessing now. Closing argument. A time to sing the praises of freedom of the press, of the great newspaper that fulfills the constitutional function of blah-blah-blah. And Marvin said don't yell. No emotion. The jury don't care about the Foist Amendment. Besides, Nick Fox is a great schmoozer, Marvin told me. The jurors love him. Number five, a Cuban receptionist, keeps batting her three-inch eyelashes at him.
And I thought she had trouble with her contacts.
The four men on the jury are your real problem, Marvin said. One black, two Cubans, one Anglo, all men's men. Nick's kind of guys.
So what am I, chopped liver?
He gave me that knowing look. Ey, Lassiter, it ain't your jury; it ain't your day. And with that, the gang took off, a kidnapping trial down the hall drawing them away.
Nick Fox's lawyer, H. T. Patterson, yelled in closing argument. Hell, he sang, chanted, ranted, rocked, and roiled. A spellbinder and a stemwinder, H.T. worked the jurors like a Holy Roller. Which he was at the Liberty City Colored Baptist Church while attending law school at night in the days before Martin Luther King.
'They subjected Nick Fox, a dedicated public servant, to scorn and ridicule, to calumny, and obloquy,' Patterson now crooned in a seductive singsong. 'They lied and distorted. They defamed and defiled. They took his honorable name and soiled it. Besmirched, tainted, and tarnished it! Debased, degraded, and disparaged it! And what should a man do when they stain, sully, and smear his good name?'
Change it, I thought.
'What should a man of honor do when those with pens sharp as daggers poison his reputation, not in whispers but in howls, five hundred three thousand, six hundred seventy-nine times?'
Five hundred three thousand, six hundred seventy-nine being the Sunday circulation of the Miami Journal, and Sunday being the day of choice for fifty-megaton, rock-'em-sock-'em, take-no-prisoners journalism. Which is what the Journal is noted for, though I thought the offending story-state attorney violated campaign laws-lacked characteristic punch. Not sharing my opinion was Nicholas G. Fox, bona fide local high-school football star, decorated Vietnam war hero, former policeman, and currently state attorney for the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in and for Dade County, Florida. The article accused Fox of various technical violations of the campaign contributions law plus one unfortunate reference to accepting money from a reputed drug dealer.
'The man should seek redress in a court of law,' Patterson solemnly declared, answering his own question, as lawyers are inclined to do. 'He should come before a jury of his peers, citizens of the community. So, my friends and neighbors, ladies and gentlemen of this jury, it is time to pay the piper…'
I didn't think the metaphor held up to scrutiny, but the jury didn't seem to notice. The men all nodded, and number five stopped fluttering her eyelashes and now stared mournfully at poor, defamed Nick Fox.
'It is time to assess damages; it is judgment day, it is time to levy the penalty for these knowing, reckless lies. And I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, is it too much to ask that the Miami Journal, that behemoth on the bay, that monster of malediction, pay ten dollars for each time it lied, yes, ten dollars for each time it sent its message of malice into our midst?'
I never did better than Cs in math, but I know when a lawyer is asking for five million bucks from a jury. Meaning H. T. Patterson hoped for two million, and I was beginning to wonder if taking this case to trial was so damn smart after all.
'A letter of apology, a front-page retraction, and fifty grand might do it,' I told the publisher six months earlier in his bayfront office.
Symington Foote bristled. 'We don't pay extortion. A public official is fair game, and we had a bona fide tip that Fox was taking dirty money.'
'From a tipster who refuses to come forward and a reporter who won't even reveal his source,' I reminded the publisher, trying to knock him off the soapbox.
'But we don't need to prove the story was true, do we, counselor?'
He had me there. As a public official, Nick Fox could win his libel suit only if he proved that the newspaper knew the story was false or had recklessly disregarded the truth. A nice concept for judges. For jurors, it's the same as in most lawsuits. If they like the plaintiff's attitude and appearance more than the defendant's, the plaintiff wins. Simple as that.
The case had been cleanly tried. A few histrionics from Patterson, but his tricks were mostly subtle. When I stood to make an objection, he would move close, letting me tower above him. He was a bantam rooster in a white linen three-piece suit, and alongside was a bruiser representing the unrestrained power of a billion-dollar company.
So here I was about to deliver my closing argument in the big barn of a courtroom on the sixth floor of the Dade County Courthouse, an aging tower of gray limestone where buzzards of the winged variety soar overhead and the seersuckered birds beat their wings inside. Heavy drapes matted with dust covered the grimy windows. The walnut paneling had darkened over the decades, and an obsolete air-conditioning system rumbled noisily overhead.
Several years ago the electorate was asked to approve many millions of dollars in bonds for capital projects around the county. The voters said yea to a new zoo and nay to a new courthouse, expressing greater regard for the animals of the jungle than for the animals of Flagler Street. And who could blame them?
Now I stood and approached the jury box, all six-two, two-hundred-something pounds of me. I tried not to get too close, avoiding the jurors' horizontal space. I shot a glance at the familiar sign on the wall above the judge's bench: we who labor here seek only the truth. There ought to be a footnote: subject to the truth being misstated by perjurious witnesses, obfuscated by sleazy lawyers, excluded by inept judges, and overlooked by lazy jurors.
