Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (31 page)

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.

***

Mark McBain, the
prosecutor, started
voir
dire
, asking perfunctory questions about
family backgrounds, run-ins with law enforcement, and whether any
of the prospective jurors knew any of the principals. No one knew
me, but three were excused because they knew Cimarron, another two
because they had formed opinions of my guilt based on newspaper
accounts and swore they couldn’t shake those opinions. A few others
were sent home for various personal reasons, including sick
relatives, sick cattle, or just plain sick of lawyers.

I watched the jurors file in and out of the
box for most of the day, and for no rational reason, I started
hating them. Who were these people to judge me? They didn’t know
me. They weren’t there. They can’t know what happened. How would we
ever tell them so that they would know?

I felt out of place. Distant. At times, I
listened to the jurors’ answers but never heard a word. I felt I
was drifting over the courtroom, looking down at the proceedings.
Other times, I wasn’t there at all.

Once in a while, H.T. would ask for my
opinion of one of the panel, but I just waved him off. Let him
decide who to challenge and to seat. I was in no condition to
help.

Just after four o’clock, H. T. Patterson
nudged me. We had a jury of shopkeepers, ranchers, homemakers, a
bartender, a waitress, a woman schoolteacher, a mechanic, and a
student. They sat in a raised box of varnished walnut, seven men,
five women, ten Anglos, two of Mexican descent. Just before they
took their oath, I studied their faces, and they studied mine.

Who was this man, they seemed to ask, and
what has he done?

And for a moment, looking back, I didn’t
know the answer to either question.

***

Mark McBain was a nuts-and-bolts prosecutor.
Gray suit, gray eyes with, dark pouches underneath, and a little
soft through the middle. He had no desire to be governor, senator,
or Santa Claus. He had attained all his goals by dogged persistence
and hard work. Unlike Abe Socolow, who bled out his guts to win
each case and left a piece of himself on the courtroom floor, with
McBain, it was all in a day’s work. No flash, no dash. Paint the
jury a picture by the numbers. Nothing unnecessary put into
evidence, nothing important left out. No pomp, no pageantry, and no
nonsense. No ghastly blunders either, just the plain,
unembellished, unsentimental facts. A D.A. from the old school.

A prosecutor is a stolid carpenter who
patiently hammers his wood into place as he builds a house, one
board at a time. A defense lawyer is a nihilistic vandal who finds
the support beam and pulls down the house before it’s complete. Or
if you want to get high falutin’ about it, imagine prosecutors and
defense lawyers as great painters. The former would be Winslow
Homer realists, the latter Man Ray cubists.

At the moment, Mark McBain was leaning on
the balustraded railing of the jury box, beginning his opening
statement by methodically telling what he expected to prove.
“Imagine a trial as a book and opening statement as the table of
contents.”

He droned on in a monotone, unfolding his
case, witness by witness, using the time-honored phrase, “The
evidence will show...”

He talked about my past with Ms. Baroso, my
decade-long involvement with her brother, the convicted felon, my
position in her brother’s company which I systematically looted of
funds advanced by Mr. Cimarron, the decedent. He told the jurors
that they would hear from the medical examiner, the investigating
detective, an expert on power tools, and from Ms. Baroso herself,
the sole eyewitness to the murder. “Ms. Baroso is the only one who
can tell us exactly what happened that night. She has no ax to
grind. She is a professional woman of impeccable background and
credibility, a woman embarrassed by her brother and ...”

He turned toward me, all twelve jurors
following his gaze.

“
...embarrassed by her past
involvement with this criminal lawyer from Miami.”

He made “criminal lawyer” sound redundant,
and the way he said “Miami” left the impression of
Sodom-by-the-Sea.

“
I am not going to steal
these witnesses’ thunder,” McBain continued. “You will hear the
testimony from each of them, and when you do, I am convinced that
you will determine that the state has met its burden of proving
beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt that the
defendant is guilty of murder in the second degree.”

***

H. T. Patterson smiled, rocked back and
forth in his cowboy boots, and told the jurors that it was an honor
to stand before them, the people who can put an end to a grave
injustice that has befallen his client. He reminded them of their
promise this very morning that they would wait until all the
evidence was in before reaching any conclusions. He told them that
the state’s burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt was the
highest standard of proof known to our system of jurisprudence.
Without his nose growing a millimeter, he told the jury that my
character was unblemished, and a string of witnesses from Florida,
including football coaches, judges, and lawyers would attest to
that.

Moving close to the rail, Patterson raised
his voice a notch. “Ms. Baroso’s testimony is subject to
cross-examination, and it is on cross-examination that you will
judge whether the evidence meets this burden of proof. It is not
true that she is the only eyewitness. No, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr.
Lassiter was an eyewitness, also, and you shall hear from him. I
submit that you will find Ms. Baroso’s story to be ambiguous and
improbable, dubious and doubtful, and when you do, the state’s case
will fall. It will fall like a house of cards. It will collapse
like—”

“
Objection, Your Honor.”
McBain slowly got to his feet. It was the quietest objection I’d
ever heard.

“
Sustained,” the judge
said. “I don’t know how they do it in Mia-muh, but up here, we save
closing argument till the evidence is in.”

Patterson thanked the judge with a gracious
smile as if he had imparted the wisdom of the Holy Grail. Patterson
summed up with the usual platitudes about our by-golly best system
of justice in the world. He thanked the jurors in advance for their
rapt attention, though two were already looking out the window, and
another was catnapping. Then he sat down, and Judge Witherspoon
gave the jurors a little speech about not reading the newspapers or
discussing the case among themselves.