Barney Quinn came over to stand beside me. After the first hubbub had subsided, he said, “Well, pretty quick we’ll know the worst. We’ll know what we’re up against from his opening statement.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “On the other hand, if he has a surprise, he may deal in verbal detours.”
“How am I doing?” Quinn asked.
“Better,” I said. “Remember this. A jury keeps looking at the lawyers. The little things you do betray how you feel. The jurors don’t pick it up from any one little thing you do but from the thousand little things you do. The way you tilt back in your chair. The way you look at the clock. The way you run your hand over your head. The way you get up when you address the court. The way you pick up a pencil. The speed with which you make notes. Everything registers.
“You can’t sell a jury until you’ve first sold yourself. This is your big case. This is your opportunity. Make the most of it.”
Quinn said gloomily, “This is Irvine’s big case. It’s also his big opportunity. This is where he launches his campaign for attorney general. He’s smiling, urbane, persuasive — and, damn it! Lam, he’s got eight women on the jury.”
“So what?” I said. “What does he do when he gets mad? Does he blow up?”
“I don’t know,” Quinn said.
“That’s a helluva way to practice criminal law,” I told him. “Find out what he does when he gets mad.”
Quinn gave me a wan smile. “I’m not usually this much of a washout, Lam, but this case has just taken the starch out of me. Tell me, did you find that gun?”
I looked him in the eyes. “No.”
“You didn’t?” he asked, his face lighting up.
“Hell, no!” I told him. “You’re the attorney for the defense. I’d tell you the truth, wouldn’t I? My God, man! We’re working for you.”
“You mean we’re not suppressing any evidence?”
“Not a bit!”
He seemed to grow inches taller. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“I was afraid to. I thought — Ansel was positive he’d thrown the gun into that hedge.”
I said, “I doubt if he ever had a gun. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think the poor fool thinks that Elizabeth Endicott shot her husband, and he’s halfway trying to take the rap for her.”
Quinn thought that over. “I’ll be a son-of-a-gun,” he said slowly.
I saw the door of the Judge’s chambers open. I gave Quinn a jab with my thumb. “Go on in there,” I said, “and make the district attorney mad.”
Judge Lawton called court to order. Mortimer Irvine started his opening statement in the well-modulated voice of a man who has taken a course in dramatics at college.
It was a statement of glittering generalities. He said he expected to prove that there had been an attachment between Elizabeth Endicott, the widow of Karl Carver Endicott, and the defendant John Dittmar Ansel. He expected to prove that, after Elizabeth Endicott consented to marry the decedent Karl Endicott, the defendant Ansel had not been content to be a good loser, but had continued to hope against hope that he would be able to break up the home, notwithstanding the fact that he was in the employ of Karl Endicott, notwithstanding the fact that Endicott had trusted him to go on his most confidential missions. Ansel, as a snake in the grass” had waited, biding his time—
Barney Quinn was on his feet interrupting. He said he didn’t want to interrupt but this was not the time for an argument. This was only an opening statement in which the district attorney was entitled to show what he expected to prove — not to engage in a lot of dramatics, not to try and impress his “soulful personality” on the jurors.
Judge Lawton got mad. Mortimer Irvine got mad. The judge rebuked Barney for the manner in which he had made his objection. The judge rebuked Irvine for abusing the privilege of the opening statement. Then the judge sustained the objection.
Irvine didn’t do so good when he got mad. He lost some of his suave assurance. He had a savage, sarcastic streak in his character. The way I sized him up from that moment on he wasn’t a fighter. When the going got tough he didn’t wade in and slug. He circled around the edges and sniped.
Irvine went on. He said he expected to show that Ansel had returned from an expedition which he had voluntarily undertaken and for which he had received a bonus of twenty thousand dollars. He expected to show that within minutes of his arrival at the airport, Ansel had placed a telephone call. The telephone call had been to the residence of Karl Carver Endicott, but it had been a person-to-person call and the records would show that he had specifically stated he wished to talk only with Mrs. Endicott, and with no one else if she was not present.
Irvine went on to state that he expected to show Ansel had gone to the house. To the defendant’s surprise the person who had answered the door had been Karl Carver Endicott. Endicott had invited the defendant to an upstairs room. Within a matter of minutes thereafter Karl Carver Endicott had been dead, and Elizabeth Endicott had been a widow. Thereafter, Ansel had resorted to flight. He had remained in hiding, moving in the shadows, keeping from the clutches of the law only by reason of the fact that he was supposed to be dead. During that long waiting period, he had surreptitiously continued to meet Elizabeth Endicott.
Finally, when police had an inkling of the true facts, they had baited a trap and into that trap had walked the guilty pair — Elizabeth Endicott, the widow, who had been consorting with her husband’s murderer even before the body of her husband was cold in death, and John Dittmar Ansel, the defendant in the case, who had repaid the opportunities for advancement Karl Carver Endicott had given him by a .38 bullet fired into the back of Endicott’s head.
Irvine sat down amidst a hushed courtroom. One or two of the younger feminine members of the jury looked at John Dittmar Ansel with revulsion stamped all over their faces.
Court took the noon recess.
“He’s your baby,” I told Barney Quinn. “He can’t stand the in-fighting. It musses up his good looks. Get in there and play rough. Don’t let him get away with that stuff about betraying the interests of his employer. Make an opening statement of your own right after court convenes. Tell the jurors that Endicott deliberately sent Ansel on a suicide trip, that he baited his trap with twenty thousand dollars, but was so ruthless he didn’t even pay the twenty thousand in advance. It was only to be paid when the men returned, after having completed the impossible mission.”
“But a defense lawyer shouldn’t make his opening statement until he is ready to start putting on his case,” Quinn said.
“Then you may not have any case to put on,” I warned. “Right now you don’t dare to put the defendant on the stand, and before you get done you probably won’t dare to put Elizabeth Endicott on the stand. Tell them what you expect to prove, and pull out all the stops. Irvine talked about the loyalty due an employer from an employee. Tell them about the other side of the picture. Tell them about the man who sits smugly in an office and deliberately sends another man to his death, so that he can marry the man’s sweetheart.”
“The Court will rebuke me,” Quinn said.
“The Court rebuked Irvine,” I told him, “so you’ll be even. Get started!”
Quinn did a pretty fair job at that. Irvine got mad. He was on his feet, waving his hands, interrupting.
As the story began to unfold from Quinn’s lips, some of the women began to look sympathetically at John Ansel. Several of them glanced at Elizabeth Endicott and studied her poker face.
I made a note to remind Quinn to tell the jury that here was a woman who had suffered so much that she had abandoned tears as a useless expedient for emotional relief. Here was a woman who had had no outlet for her emotions for years, a woman who had suffered to the point of exhaustion.