I was in a daze.
I tried to focus on the trial but felt like I was swimming through Jell-O.
My concentration was off. My nerves were shot. I consumed too much Grolsch, and when that left me without a buzz, I switched to Finlandia straight out of the freezer. Kippis, as they say in Helsinki, which made me think of Eva-Lisa Haavikko, a good woman who died needlessly, but that, too, is another story.
Occasionally, I came up with slightly inebriated ideas for my defense, and I shared them all with H.T. Patterson. Sometimes, just after Jay Leno didn’t put me to sleep, I called Patterson with strategy for impeaching Jo Jo’s testimony. With the two-hour time difference, it was two-thirty a.m. or so in Miami, and I would awaken H.T. from a sound sleep, but he never complained.
“ You interrupted a dream,” he mumbled groggily one early morning.
“ That some day all men will be brothers?” I inquired.
“ No, that Gwendolyn was taking me to her bosom.”
“ Gwendolyn, from Jamaica? Judge Ferguson’s secretary?”
“ One and the same, a woman of charm and grace, intelligence and beauty, righteousness and rectitude.”
“ So what’s she doing with you, Henry Thackery?”
“ She’s not, my felonious friend. It was, after all, a dream.”
Lawyers hate for clients to call them at home. There is always an emergency that, in the client’s mind, cannot wait until morning. By the harsh light of day, the crisis will be shown to have existed solely in the client’s mind. But H. T. Patterson tolerated my late-night calls because he was a friend. And he understood. No, check that. He nearly understood. Until you are asked to rise in the courtroom and identify yourself as the defendant, you cannot understand. Send in the cliches, which are cliches, after all, because they are true: A lawyer is a mouthpiece, a hired gun; have briefcase, will travel; have mouth, will argue; another day, another dollar.
But if you’re the defendant, it is different. It is real, and it is forever. Win, lose, or draw, the lawyer will walk out of the courthouse and enjoy supper with family and friends. The day may end for the defendant with the echo of a steel door clanking shut with absolute finality.
A chill bit through the air. It rained and became colder, and the trees lost their leaves. Snow began to fall. H. T. Patterson had flown up for a pretrial conference with the judge, and Granny asked him to stay for Thanksgiving dinner. Granny cooked a turkey with chestnut stuffing, wild rice with bacon and brandy, and corn pudding. She baked a pumpkin pie and an apple pie, there being a scarcity of mangoes and Key limes in the Rocky Mountains. She prowled through the kitchen of her double-wide, more cantankerous than usual, grumbling about the altitude as she tried to bake honey wheat bread.
“ Yeast rises quicker here than a skeeter draws blood. Ye gods, I’ll never get used to this. Water boils at a lower temperature, so you got to boil longer, increase heat for baking, use more liquids but decrease the baking powder and sweeteners. What a damn fool place.”
The bread turned out to be soggy, and Granny said to hell with it, we could have eggnog with bourbon if we wanted. I told her to skip the first half of the recipe.
After the last slice of pumpkin pie, served hot with vanilla ice cream, and ample quantities of liquid refreshment, my lawyer and I took a walk. Snow flurries whipped around our bare heads as we trudged along a muddy trail that would soon be used for cross-country skiing. In the distance, the snow-covered peak of Mount Sopris rose high above the valley.
“ Jake, you ever represent any lawyers?”
“ 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.”