“The public doesn’t buy his plea.” He says this to my back as I head to the elevator.
“Then the public has a serious problem with our system of justice. Maybe you should go and talk to them about that.”
“Does your client know any of the people in Nazi uniforms across the street?”
I ignore them and keep walking.
“Does he have a Nazi uniform?”
If he does, I’m hoping that Harry got to it before the cops and had the foresight to burn it. So far we haven’t seen any pictures produced by the prosecution or otherwise showing Arnsberg in any uniform. But I don’t tell the reporters this. There’s always room for surprises. I keep moving toward the elevator, taking long, fast strides.
The cameraman, his lights blazing, trails me, capturing shots from behind. I can feel the heat of the lights on my back all the way to the elevator doors. See the defense lawyer running away. Details at eleven. I step inside and push the button-sanctuary. Upstairs is off-limits to cameras. The worst they can do now is sketch me.
Inside the courtroom the scene is enough to make the owner of the local cineplex green with envy. The center aisle is jammed, people trying to find empty seats. Uniformed deputies are everywhere, against the walls, mixed in with the mob.
One of the bailiffs is confiscating black baseball caps with white stitching above the bill reading END SLAVERY. These are being worn by a group of people who want to sit together. The First Amendment may still be in effect, but not in Plato Quinn’s courtroom. If you want to send a message to the jury, you’re going to have to use invisible ink.
A muscle of a deputy, beef on the hoof, is posted at the gate to the bar railing, making sure nobody gets up near the bench or back behind the scenes. Rudalgo Ruiz, Quinn’s clerk, keeps a nervous eye on the crowd as he shuffles papers at his table in front of the judge’s bench.
Tuchio is already here, seated at the counsel table to the right nearest the jury box, privilege of the prosecution. Next to him is one of the homicide detectives, Brant Detrick, the man who worked up the case against Arnsberg. Tall and blond, Detrick is a veteran of homicide. With almost twenty years on the force, he’s the kind of witness that defense lawyers hate. You could turn him upside down and shake him, and Detrick would show not the slightest bias or personal stake in the outcome of the trial. “Just doing my job,” while he quietly hangs your client. If anything, he has gotten more difficult over the years. Now that he’s getting closer to retirement, the touch of gray at the temple and the wrinkles where his glasses crimp the bridge of his nose give him a kind of professorial look. At the far end of Tuchio’s table is a woman I have not seen before, one of his assistants, a female prosecutor, African American. Only the blind would not be aware of the racial elements in this case. It’s more difficult for jurors to ignore this issue with a minority sitting at the counsel table.
At the far end of the defense table, I see the large, hulking form of Herman Diggs, his bald black head glowing like a beacon under the courtroom’s canister lights. Herman is our investigator. A human mountain originally from Detroit, Herman backed into his current vocation after a promising football career ended with a blown knee. We found each other in Mexico, on a case that grew ugly with violence. Herman and I came up realizing that we were the only two in sight who could trust each other. With Herman at my table, Tuchio would no doubt accuse me of playing the same card.
Herman is busy checking the boxes, seven of them stacked against the wall near his end of the defense table. These transfer cases with lids on them contain the materials delivered early this morning, documents and other evidence we may need during trial.
I lay my briefcase on the table. Herman lifts his head out of one of the boxes and turns to look.
“You come in through that mess outside?” he asks.
I nod.
“People got nothin’ better to do,” Herman mumbles to himself, his head going back halfway into one of the boxes. “You see all that crap back at the office? Damn truckload. That stuff have to come over here, too?”
“I won’t know until Harry goes through it all.”
“Yeah, Harry’s up to his ass,” he says.
Harry is back at the office pawing through boxes of printed data from Scarborough’s computers. Tuchio dumped all of it on us this morning at eight o’clock, when a small van backed up to the sidewalk out in front of our office and unloaded boxes of documents. How long the D.A. has had these is uncertain, but Tuchio can prove that it was all printed within the last forty-eight hours. Of that he made sure.
It’s all part of the game of modern litigation. Try your case while your opponent pushes a mountain of paper over on top of you.
“Excuse me, Counselor.”
I turn. Tuchio is behind me, smiling, his radiance. He approaches from across the divide, the space that separates the two counsel tables. This morning he is decked out in his best power suit, blue pinstripes and a club tie, starched cuffs with gold links. Marching behind him as if in lockstep is his female deputy and the detective Brant Detrick.
Detrick I know. Tuchio makes a short introduction, and we shake hands. Herman comes over. I introduce him.
Then Tuchio presents his assistant. “I’d like you to meet Deputy District Attorney Janice Harmen.”
“District attorney?” I say. “Have I missed something? We aren’t on appeal yet, are we?”
Tuchio laughs just a little. “Ms. Harmen is on loan. She’ll be with my office for the duration.”
She shakes my hand with a firm grip, no limp fingertips. Brown eyes, smooth coffee-colored complexion, her hair long to the shoulders with a slight wave. As she lets go of my hand, she looks me dead in the eye. The message is clear: woman on the rise. She intends to make her bones on my client.
“So how are you doing?” Tuchio stays and talks. His assistants return to their table. There’s something almost longing in the way Tuchio approaches you, as if he were actually earnest about making a new friend.
“Frankly, I’d be doing a lot better if my partner wasn’t back at the office picking through piles of paper we should have had two weeks ago,” I tell him.
“Oh, that. Yes, I know. I do apologize for the lateness. But there was nothing I could do. I got the stuff myself only late yesterday afternoon.”
“Is that right?”
“Absolutely,” he says. He looks almost hurt that I should question this, then glances over his shoulder. “Janice.” In the hum of the courtroom, a reporter is leaning over the railing talking to the deputy DA. “Janice.” This time he says it louder. He gets her attention. “Can you get me a copy of that certificate? You know, the one from IT.”
She nods and breaks away from the reporter, turns around and goes fishing in one of the sample cases under their table. These cases are commonly used by lawyers to carry heavy legal volumes and books.
“We got the materials to you as soon as we could,” says Tuchio. “Our IT guys tell me there was hell to pay lifting the documents from Scarborough’s hard disks. To begin with, there was a ton of material. I suppose you could figure that, the man being a writer. But some of it was old, archived on his computers but using software that’s been off the market for ages. I’m no computer buff, but-”
Before he can finish, Janice is at his shoulder with a piece of paper. He takes it, looks at it briefly, then hands it to me.
It is an affidavit prepared by the police department’s forensics lab and signed by one of their techs, showing the date they started working on Scarborough’s computer hard drives. According to the affidavit, they started more than a month ago, only to run into endless problems.
Tuchio tells me that Scarborough used three different word-processing programs over the years. Something called WordStar, Word-Perfect, and finally Word.
“That made it hard enough,” says Tuchio. “Some of the older versions of these programs aren’t supported any longer. Nobody sells them. I assume nobody uses them anymore either.” He leans over and looks at the affidavit with me. “See, right here.” He points to the paragraph where his technicians verify this.
“I assume your people have heard of ASCII?” I ask him. That’s the thing about trying cases-you tend to learn a little bit about a lot of things, sometimes just enough to get you in trouble. ASCII is a common machine language usually readable from PC computers. Most documents, if they’re the product of an obsolete program, can still be converted into ASCII and from this printed into text.
“I don’t know what that is,” says Tuchio. “You obviously know more about this than I do. But whatever it is,
