Martin filled his mouth with popcorn so as not to say anything to spoil the mood.
“It’s a good thing you’re a patent attorney,” he said when he had chewed and swallowed. “Dahlia Spears, hanging judge.”
She laughed. She didn’t understand the seriousness of his commitment to justice, despite everything, despite the sad state of the world, despite even his own incompetence. He hardly understood himself. He could not express it clearly with words. It was a quiet feeling of rightness, that was like light hitting water, that was like those summer afternoons spent with his great-aunt Hatch on the porch of her old place at Oxford on the Eastern Shore when he was a kid, and a strange bird — Aunt Hatch always said it was a parrot, blown by storms somehow from the jungles of South America — squawking in the quiet gloom of the box hedge.
Selecting a jury for the Alexei Smerdnakov trial, Martin was more careful than he’d been with any other case in his ten-year career with the Public Defender’s Service. The voir dire continued eight hours a day for three solid days, with many bench conferences and hasty lunches, broke for the weekend, and resumed again on Monday.
There is a science to composing the most sympathetic jury, many competing theories, experts, demographics, prejudices. Martin had only one criterion in mind, and it was this: neither the juror nor members of that juror’s immediate family could have been the victim of a violent crime, ever. In the District of Columbia, a city with the nation’s second-highest murder rate per capita (exceeded only by New Orleans), this criterion proved impossible to meet. The potential jurors, mostly black and poor, reported one after another that they had experienced shootings, stabbings, violent assaults, sometimes more than once, that they had been witness to fratricide, parricide, rape. Day after day Martin was confronted with the absurd and numbing toll of violence in urban America.
Finally, on Friday, the fourth day of jury selection, Martin accepted twelve jurors and two alternates, only five of whom had managed to escape the urban holocaust. These were the core, these were the ones on which he’d concentrate: three aging black church ladies, a twenty-one-year-old white college girl, and a Pakistani man who managed a service garage for taxicabs in Mount Pleasant. One of the church ladies, a recently retired missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, had been stationed in Ghana for the last twenty-five years: the other two lived alone and were unmarried. Since statistically most violent crime occurs at home, perpetrated by one family member against another, these ladies had managed to avoid any life-threatening incidents by remaining single. The college girl was a Mormon from Scipio, Utah, a little town in the middle of that distant state where children played barefoot in the dirt streets on Saturday night and no one locked his door. The Pakistani, a naturalized citizen, barely spoke English. It was possible that he hadn’t entirely understood Martin’s questions during the examination period.
The other seven jurors — two unemployed black males; a Hispanic female who ran a housecleaning service; two senior citizens, both ex-career civil servants, both white; a Korean-American waitress; a young white male, marginally employed in office temporary work who described himself as “Writer” on his questionnaire — all had been brutalized at some time or another in the past, but not seriously and not in the last five years. This was the best Martin could do.
At the end of the day Martin felt drained. He had that dry taste at the back of his throat that can only be remedied by a cold beer. He took the elevator up to the fourth floor of the Moultrie Center and convinced Jacobs and Burn to join him for happy hour at the D.C. Bar. Because of the high-profile nature of the Smerdnakov case, Marlin’s status had improved somewhat around the office. His face had not yet appeared on the evening news or in the papers, but there was a feeling that it would. Even if he lost — the certain outcome, it was generally agreed — the case would probably help his career. Also, Martin was known to be working hard on this one, pursuing every angle to prove his client’s innocence.
“Wex is wasting his time if you ask me,” Burn said to Jacobs when Wexler left them together at the bar to use the bathroom. It was just after six-thirty, and the place was crowded with attorneys and paralegals from Judiciary Square. “I feel sorry for the bastard. The spotlight’s right on him now, and he’s going to melt like an ice cube.”
Jacobs grunted. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” he said.
“You’re shitting me,” Burn said. “Think what happened to Genevieve. Wex is going to be defending a monster, a public menace. If he weren’t such a fuckup, Tayloe wouldn’t have given the case to him in the first place. He’s going to lose big, and that’s just going to confirm his status as a legal idiot. Good for the community, I suppose. Bad for old Wex.”
“You could be right about that.”Jacobs nodded.
Always a quick urinator, Martin got back in time to catch the last part of these comments.
“Thanks for the confidence, guys,” he said as he stepped up to the bar.
Jacobs stared down into his mug of Bud Lite, embarrassed. Burn didn’t say anything.
“Sorry, Wex,” Burn said at last. “But you’re the first to admit what a crappy attorney you are.”
Wex straddled his stool again. He was silent for a moment, then he cleared his throat.
“Yes,” he said. “I was a crappy attorney, but not anymore. There’s something about this case. I feel I’m doing the best work of my life. What the hell can you say about a dognapper caught with a poodle in his knapsack or a prostitute caught fucking an underage kid in the back of a van in the school parking lot? That’s the usual fare for me. This is totally different.”
Jacobs looked up. “How so?”
Martin smiled. “You heard it here first. My client’s innocent.”
Jacobs and Burn exchanged uneasy glances.
“You don’t mean you really believe that?”Jacobs said.
“I do,” Martin said. “Or I’d withdraw from the case.”
“Like I was saying to Jake here,” Burn said, “the pressure’s driven you crazy. Go to Tayloe before it’s too late! Get on your knees and beg for your old cases back!” This was meant as a joke, but it came out wrong.
Martin put down a ten-dollar bill, more than enough to pay for his Budweiser, made his excuses, and left them sitting at the bar. Outside, the light was fading in the sky over the old Pension Building. The terra-cotta army, frozen in rank, changeless, resolute, marched lockstep along the pediment into the shadow of coming night.
A swollen red gash taped together with three paper stitches zigzagged up Smerdnakov’s forehead, making him look a little like Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. A deep purple bruise extended across his left cheek. Martin’s first thought when he came into the consultation room was: That’s not going to look good in court, then he fell ashamed of himself.
“How did it happen?” he said as he sat down at the table.
“Got a cigarette, asshole?” Smerdnakov said, ignoring the question. It was his standard greeting.
Martin shook his head, “Not till this trial’s over,” he said. “When you get out of here, I’ll buy you a whole carton of Marlboros.”
“Prick,” the Russian said. “Fucking asshole! One day I’m going to rip your head off.”
“Great,” Martin said, unimpressed. “Better wait till after the trial. Why don’t you tell me about those?” He gestured toward the Russian’s battered face.
Smerdnakov shrugged. “Some niggers tried to fuck me up the ass,” he said. “In the shower. It’s not about love, you know; it’s about power.” He began to cackle like a madman.