“ 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.