But neither of us can ignore the loud gasp when Dante, escorted by a pair of county sheriffs, enters the courtroom. He wears an inexpensive blue blazer and dress pants, both a size too small-he’s grown an inch in prison. He stares at the ground until he is seated between us.
“You guys good?” Dante asks in the quietest voice I can imagine coming out of his large body.
“Not just good,” I tell him. “We’re the best. And we’re ready.”
Dante’s slight smile, when it comes, is priceless.
Twenty minutes behind schedule, the sharp nasal voice of the bailiff finally rings through the courtroom. “Hear ye! Hear ye! All persons having business before the Suffolk County Supreme Court and Honorable Judge Richard Rothstein will now rise!”
Chapter 89. Tom
SUFFOLK COUNTY DA Dominic Ioli pushes his chair back from the prosecution table and then carefully folds his reading glasses into a leather case. Only after they’re safely tucked away in the jacket pocket of his new gray suit coat does he stand and face the two rows of jurors.
“Ladies and gentlemen, over the next several weeks you’re going to hear about the cold-blooded murder of four young men last summer. Before this trial is over, the state will have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the defendant seated on my left, Dante Halleyville, carefully and deliberately planned and carried out all four heinous crimes.
“We will prove that in the first three murders, Mr. Halleyville acted with Michael Walker, and that eleven days later, he turned that same weapon on his best friend and accomplice.”
Ioli has logged his share of court time, and you can hear it in his measured delivery. As Ioli refers to “a gun and a hat and a body of evidence that places the defendant at both crime scenes,” I glance back at the divided sea of faces staring from opposite sides of the courtroom. I scan the expressions of Jeff, Sean, Clarence, and Mack, and linger on Marie.
“Murder is too gentle a word,” bellows Ioli, bringing me back to his speech. “The more accurate word, the only word that captures the horror of these crimes, is execution.”
As Ioli winds down, I look around for one last piece of incentive, this time in the row of journalists and brand-name lawyers the networks have flown in as talking heads.
Sitting beside Alan Dershowitz, in a rumpled suit, and Gerry Spence, in a fringed suede jacket, is Ronnie Montgomery. For a second, we lock eyes.
The moment makes me think of Cecil Felderson, a fellow benchwarmer in my short time playing with the Timberwolves. According to Cecil, who hoarded his resentments like gold, “the worst thing of all, the thing that sticks in your craw more than anything, is having to listen to some guy say ‘I told you so.’”
With one haughty look at us and our tiny office, Montgomery wrote me off as an amateur and a loser, hopelessly out of my depth. Now I can either prove him right and hear about it, one way or another, for the rest of my life, or I can prove him wrong and shut him, and everybody else, the fuck up.
I rise from my seat.
Chapter 90. Kate
I DON’T KNOW who’s more nervous right now, Tom or me, but somehow I think it might be me. This is it, a bigger, more important trial than either of us has any right to be involved in probably ever in our careers, but certainly right now.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Tom, turning to face the jury, “I have only one request of each one of you this morning, and it’s harder than it sounds. I ask you to listen.
“For as long as it takes for justice to be delivered to the nineteen-year-old sitting behind me, I need you to listen with a sharp, open, and critical mind.”
Tom looked green on the drive over, and he hasn’t said a dozen words all morning, but suddenly his game face is screwed on tight. “Because if you do, if you just listen, the prosecution’s case will collapse like a house of cards.
“The district attorney of Suffolk County has just told you that this is an open-and-shut case and that he has a mountain of evidence against Dante Halleyville. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did Dante Halleyville have no motive to commit these murders, he had enormous incentive not to commit them.
“For the past half a dozen years Dante Halleyville has concentrated all his considerable energy, talent, and determination on becoming the top schoolboy basketball player in the country. Lofty as that goal was, he accomplished it. Dante Halleyville succeeded so well that pro scouts guaranteed him that whenever he chose to enter the NBA draft he would be among the very top selections, maybe even number one. Growing up under extremely difficult circumstances and surrounded by family members who made one disastrous choice after another, Dante never took his eye off his goal. Not once, until these false charges, has Dante been in any kind of trouble, either at Bridgehampton High School or in his neighborhood, with the law.
“So why now, when he is so close to achieving his dream, would he commit such self-destructive crimes? The answer-he wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that. He wouldn’t do it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, your selection as jurors was random, but the next few weeks could be the most important in your lives. The future of a fellow human being is in your hands. Not just the life of an innocent nineteen-year-old, but of a truly remarkable young man. And both Dante and you will have to live with your decision for the rest of your lives.
“Someone did kill those young men on Beach Road. And in that Brooklyn apartment. Murdered them in cold blood. Whoever committed these horrible crimes will eventually be apprehended and brought to justice, but that person was not and could not have been Dante Halleyville.
“So I ask you to listen carefully and dispassionately and critically to everything presented to you in this courtroom. Don’t let anyone but yourself decide how strong or weak the prosecution’s case is. I have faith that you can and will do that. Thanks.”
When Tom turns away from the jury, three hundred bodies readjust themselves in their seats. In addition to the rustling, you can almost feel the surprise, and it runs from Judge Rothstein in his pulpit to the last beer-bellied cop leaning against the far wall. This inexperienced lawyer, with mediocre credentials and crap grades, can handle himself in a courtroom.
Chapter 91. Kate
TOM SITS, AND Melvin Howard, Ioli’s assistant DA, stands. Howard is a tall, thin man in his early fifties with a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and antique wire-rimmed spectacles. He’s also African American, and none of these things is coincidental.
For the same transparently cynical reasons that my old firm chose me to help Randall Kane fend off sexual harassment charges brought by his female employees, the prosecution has selected a black man, with the mild-mannered appearance of a college professor, to prosecute Dante Halleyville. The selection is an attempt to tell the jury that this case is not about race, but about crime, a vicious murder that should outrage blacks as much as whites.
And just because this strategy is obvious and self-serving doesn’t mean it won’t work.
“In addition to listening,” Melvin Howard begins as he tapes a twelve-by-fourteen-inch color photograph to a large easel set up directly in front of the jury, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to look too.”
He slowly attaches three more photographs to the easel-and when he steps out of the way, the jurors push back in their chairs, trying to get as far away from the lurid images as possible.
“These are crime scene photographs of each of the four victims, and it’s your sworn duty not to look away.”