“Better?” Zack said.
“Yes,” I said. “You are always exactly what I need.”
“And you’re always exactly what I need.” Zack squeezed my shoulder. “Try not to let what Howard said get to you. He made an ass of himself tonight. He was probably just lashing out.”
“Maybe. But what he said had the ring of truth. At the end, Ian and I had a lot of flash points.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
Zack leaned towards me in his arms. “I love you very much.”
“I love you too,” I said.
“In my opinion, that means we should be together.”
“Unfair,” I said. “I’m tired and vulnerable.”
“I’m tired and vulnerable too,” he said. “But you don’t hear me whining.”
“That’s because you’re tough.”
“Says who?”
“Brette Sinclair.”
“The pretty girl with the silky hair that you were sitting next to in court.”
“We had lunch together too,” I said. “I’m learning a lot from her.”
“For example …?”
“For example, she predicted you’d do that LifeSaver trick with Sam – very clever.”
Zack laughed softly. “Just a variation on a theme,” he said. “If a female lawyer has a male client who’s accused of a violent crime, she touches his arm, gives him a little pat on the shoulder just to show that her client’s not all that scary.”
“Maybe I should give you a few more touches and pats in public – humanize you.”
“Bad idea,” Zack said. “It’s my job to be scary. As long as I don’t scare you …”
I didn’t respond.
Zack pulled away. “I don’t scare you, do I?”
I touched the furrow that ran down his cheek. “You did today,” I said. “You’ve always been so careful not to refer to Glenda as Sam’s son. I thought it was a matter of principle.”
“The first time was a slip,” Zack said. “But the moment it happened, I knew I’d connected with the jury. I’d hit the sweet spot – I could feel the ball fly off the bat and soar over the outfield fence. I was in the game, and I needed that.”
“For you or for Sam?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is it felt really good.” He ran his finger over my lips, then kissed me. “That wasn’t the answer you wanted, but I’m not a hero, Jo. I’m just a guy who needs to win. And when I win, my clients win. Can you live with that?”
“I guess I’m going to have to,” I said.
Shades of grey. Shades of grey.
CHAPTER
7
Every night during the trial, Rapti Lustig e-mailed me more background information. Early that first week she forwarded an article about criminal lawyer Eddie Greenspan in which the writer riffed on the idea that in a jury trial, everything but the basic script is choreography and improvisation.
During its first week, it seemed the Sam Parker trial was desperately in need of a script doctor. The job of the Crown was to establish the evidence, and for Linda Fritz that apparently meant taking police officers through every line of every note they had made on the case. Her dogged precision exasperated Zack, but since his job was to make sure the police and the Crown had done their jobs, she gave him a good base from which to work. And so we listened as the Crown called witness after witness to buttress its case and the defence picked away endlessly at the testimony of officers who were accustomed to testifying and were unlikely to risk their careers to falsify a detail like the angle of the sun on a late afternoon in May.
Throughout the period Brette Sinclair referred to as “the parade of the essential but boring as hell witnesses,” I found my attention drawn to the jurors. Like the members of any ensemble cast, they were beginning to declare themselves as individuals. The angry man with the aggressive combover turned out to have an odd mannerism. He responded to everything the lawyers or the witnesses said with a vigorous negative shake of the head. Until Zack figured out the shake was a tic not a comment, he was distinctly uneasy. The foreperson with the shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair had arranged her features in a mask of serenity that suggested she had withdrawn from the courtroom’s swirl of bad karma and negative thoughts. The young people made no attempt to disguise their boredom at the lacklustre performance they were forced to endure. Their faces were blank, as if they had detached themselves and were listening to invisible iPods. The Modigliani woman and the meaty man had become Zack’s partisans, smiling encouragement when he did well with a line of questioning and dropping their gaze when the judge (as he frequently did) chastised Zack for pushing too hard (as he frequently did). The notetaker grew more notetakey, barely glanced up at the proceedings, so intent was he on recording everything. The Lucille Ball wannabe seemed pathetically eager to lighten it up. On the trial’s third morning, an earnest young constable described in precise detail the size of a bullet hole; when he was through, she rewarded him with a rubbery grin. The men in the three-piece suits were clearly impatient, like senior managers forced to listen to the concerns of underlings. The ladies with the gentle perms drifted off from time to time as ladies with gentle perms will when the topic of conversation turns to the trajectory of a bullet.
The one real source of drama that week was Linda Fritz, who, it became increasingly clear, was suffering from the mother of all colds. On the first day it had attacked her voice, roughening it and reducing it to a painful croak. By
