“ Sure, a few.” It is a matter of some pride to be a lawyer’s lawyer.
“ What kind of cases?” Patterson asked.
“ The usual. Divorce, disbarment, money laundering.”
“ How were your clients to work with?”
That made me laugh. “You know lawyers. Always wanting to be in control. Terrible witnesses, either arrogant or condescending, and they always talk too much.”
“ All in all, tough clients?”
“ The worst, H.T. They confuse their roles. They’re sitting in the second chair, wishing it’s the first.”
“ I see.”
He studied me through a blur of snowflakes. A hardy jogger in shorts and a windbreaker chugged by us.
“ I get it, H.T. You want me to stay out of the way. Hey, don’t worry. I’ll be the perfect client. I won’t sneer at the prosecutor or wink at the stenographer. I won’t chew gum in court or toss paper airplanes at the jury. I’ll write you discreet little notes on my legal pad and sit quietly while the wheels of justice turn ever so slowly.”
A snowflake caught him in the eye and melted into a tear. “You pulling my chain, Jake?”
“ Hell no. You’re the boss. I’ll be the client I always wanted to have.”
The week before trial, the local paper was drumming up so much publicity you’d have thought they were selling tickets. “greed, lust drove lawyer to murder,” one headline read. Another story called Jo Jo the “linchpin of a love triangle that turned deadly.”
Kip read the story aloud to me, then wrinkled his freckled nose. “A triangle doesn’t have a linchpin,” he said. “It has a hypotenuse if it’s a right triangle. It can have an acute angle or an obtuse angle. It can be isosceles or equilateral, but it can’t have a linchpin.”
I decided to give Kip a lesson that had nothing to do with geometry. “Let me tell you something about the news media.”
“ I know, Uncle Jake. They lie through their teeth.”
Amazing, the process of generational osmosis. He’s lying through his teeth was one of Granny’s expressions. We influence our children in so many subtle ways. I made a mental note to never again drink directly from the milk carton, curse moronic drivers, or pee in the shower.
“ Not exactly,” I said, “but the news is often accurate without being truthful.”
“ Whadaya mean?”
“ Reporters rely on what people tell them. A woman claims she was the lover of a president. The story is accurate, because she said it, but where’s the truth? A spokesman for the tobacco industry claims there’s no proven link between smoking and lung cancer. Religious fanatics ignore all science and maintain that the Earth is only six thousand years old. So rule number one, the news is filled with accurate lies.”
“ How come the newspapers print what they know is false?”
“ Our system has faith in citizens’ ability to weigh conflicting evidence and reach the truth.”
“ Just like jurors are supposed to do.”
“ Right, and if newspapers print only what is indisputably true, there’d be nothing to read but yesterday’s box scores.”
“ But in the stories about you, only the prosecutor and the cops are talking.”
“ Prosecutors mouth off to the media to get the jury pool thinking their way before the trial begins. Usually, the defense keeps quiet because you can’t take a public position that may have to change with the ebb and flow of the trial. Most times, you don’t even know if your client will testify until you hear the state’s case.”
“ Are you going to testify?”
“ It’s up to H.T. But if I don’t, there’ll be no one to rebut Jo Jo’s perjury.”
“ There’s me, Uncle Jake.”
“ I’m keeping you out of it. Besides, you’re not exactly impartial, so the prosecutor would cross you on how much you’d like to help your uncle out of a jam and how you’d do anything for me. Besides, you weren’t even in the barn when the real action took place.”
“ I could lie.”
“ Forget it.”
“ Okay, what else?”
“ Rule number two about the news media. The more you know about a subject, the less truthful the story. Most stories are equal parts crude approximations, unfiltered information, rough summaries, and educated guesses, all strung together with random quotes chosen for maximum impact, not substance. If the story is about troop movements in Manchuria, you’re not going to know whether it’s even close. But if you’re a CPA and the story’s about the new tax code, you can pick apart every mistake.”
“ And if the story is about you and Jo Jo and that big cowboy, you know the truth.”
“ That’s a funny thing, Kip. We each see the truth through our own clouded lens. Our perceptions are always skewed. When we’re excited, when our adrenaline is pumping, even more so. Put four people in a room-”
“ Or a barn.”
“ Yeah, and each one will have a different version of what happened.”
“ Like Rashomon,” my nephew said.
The day before jury selection, it snowed two feet. A blizzard so hard and thick and gusty, it closed the ski lifts and the gondola for three hours. The morning of the trial, the redbrick courthouse looked like a Christmas decoration, puffed up with virgin snow, the spruce trees bent low under all that white.
I entered the old brick building from the Main Street side under a statue of Lady Justice. Inside, all spit and polished was an old steam engine that once ran a saw that cut timbers for the mines. I passed grainy hundred- year-old photos of cowboys, miners, and farmers at work and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The courtroom was a cathedral of dark wood, the jury box on a raised platform, the gallery a series of church pews. On the walls were photos of judges who had presided here, from the days of silver mining to high-tech skiing.
From a window, Main Street looked like the small town of a kid’s toy train set, all decorated with cotton-ball snow and miniature Christmas wreaths. To the south, Aspen Mountain was deep with fresh powder, and under a blinding blue sky, the Monday morning skiers were carving their signatures on the slopes. For some reason, I thought of the shafts and tunnels so far below the snow.
“ All rise!” the bailiff yelled. “The Ninth Judicial District Court, in and for Pitkin County, Colorado, the Honorable Judge Harold T. Witherspoon presiding, is now in session.”
The judge was gray-haired and lean, with cold blue eyes. He sternly read preliminary instructions to the jury pool, whose members sat stiff-backed in the gallery waiting to be called forward.
H. T. Patterson wore cowboy boots below a double-breasted black wool suit. His tight little smile reflected the expression of quiet confidence we use to mask opening-day jitters. I had a fresh haircut that clipped my shaggy hair from over my ears and trimmed it to a half-inch everywhere else. No longer sun-bleached from windsurfing, my hair was darker, and I was paler than I had been since my last winter as a student-athlete in the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
I wore a shapeless dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a striped tie. My shirt collar seemed unusually tight. I felt pasty, out of sorts, awkward. That morning, as I was staring at myself in the mirror, my nephew announced his ratings: two stars for my suit, half a star for my haircut, and two thumbs-down to the little white handkerchief I stuck in my suit coat pocket, trying to give off the aura of a small-town banker.
“ Uncle Jake, you look like a major dweeb,” Kip said.
“ It’s a ploy to make the jury think I’m lovable and innocent.”
“ With that haircut, you look worse than Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, though not as bad as Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent, when he was on trial for killing Greta Scacchi.”
I thanked him for his support and drove myself to court.
