“Was there dancing in the VIP room?” He rested his hand comfortably on the railing. He appeared relaxed: he could have been in his own living room.
“There’s always dancing,” Daisy said.
“How many people were dancing, do you suppose?”
Daisy cocked her head, one earring bumping gently against the side of her throat. “About a hundred, I guess.”
“Did you observe the defendant dancing?” Martin’s voice took on a commanding pitch.
“Yes, I did,” Daisy said.
“And while he was dancing, was he wearing a necktie and suit jacket?”
Daisy shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Since there were a hundred people dancing that night,” Martin said, “how is it you can remember my client so clearly?”
“I remember because his shirt was hanging open down to his belly button,” Daisy said. “He looked like some seventies disco king. And his chest was really hairy. It was pretty gross.”
Somehow this was just the right detail. As Daisy stepped down, she flashed Martin a veiled look whose meaning was not readily apparent. But it didn’t matter now; he felt it in his bones. The case was over, and he had beaten one of the top prosecutors in the city. A single glance at his opponents confirmed everything: Rossiter and his assistants sat there, slumped in gloom, surrounded by the useless mess of their papers, defeated. The light out the stained glass window had grown dim with afternoon. Martin checked his watch; it was nearly five. Judge Deal rubbed her hands together as if she were trying to warm them.
“Given the lateness of the hour,” she said. “We will adjourn until tomorrow morning.” Then she flashed Martin an unexpected smile. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, counselor.”
Martin took her advice, went home, threw himself in bed following the evening news, and fell asleep within five minutes. That night he slept soundly, and if he dreamed at all, dreamed only of darkness and silence.
The summation for the prosecution was made first thing the next morning by the young pale-faced lawyer, who as yet had not uttered a single word during the course of the trial. Rossiter, it appeared, had washed his hands of the case. Now that everything was lost, the second string would get a chance to play. But the pale lawyer proved to be the best of the three. He spoke in a courtly central Virginia accent directly to the jury, and he did his best to simplify. He was not patronizing them; he was merely explaining things in the clearest way he knew how. This case was open and shut, he said. Anyone could see that. The defendant, Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov, was a man with a history of violence, a fact that the defense had not even bothered to refute.
“I am aware that they have provided several witnesses to testify Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov was not the man seen murdering Ms. Volovnaya.” He stood very still before the jury box, his skin shining like marble. “But I ask you to consider his behavior directly following the murder. Think, use your common sense, people! I don’t care what country you’re from, if your girlfriend is murdered while you’re in the bathroom, your response is not going to be to go upstairs and dance some more until the police show up to arrest you! That’s crazy! That is the action of a sociopath who knows the system all too well and knows for whatever reason that he has a good chance of getting away with his crime. Why ruin a perfectly good evening of drinking and dancing just on account of one little old murder?”
This young lawyer was smart, capable, and polite. He concluded his comments with a rousing call for a guilty verdict, then thanked the judge and the jury for their patience and retreated to his seat at the prosecution table with all the gracious dignity of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.
At last the defense was free to make its summation. Martin ostentatiously filled a glass of water, drank it down. He cracked his knuckles, jammed his hands in his pockets, and shambled over to the jury box. He fell like Henry Fonda playing the young Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln. In that film Abraham Lincoln, still a bumpkinly country lawyer, uses a detail gleaned from the Farmer’s Almanac to defend a man wrongfully accused of murder. Martin remembered this scene in some compartment of his mind as he began to speak.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “I’m sure you’re all worn out by the events of the last two weeks. No doubt you’d like to finish up with this case, get home, and not have to worry about any of this ever again.” He saw the church ladies nod their heads at this. “So I will try to wrap up my remarks as quickly as possible...”
Martin reiterated the highlights of the defense: the prosecution’s version of the truth was built on questionable circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a single, dubious eyewitness, an ex-prostitute who had admitted to being high on drugs and alcohol at the time of the murder. According to witnesses, the murder weapon was not on the defendant’s person minutes before the murder... etc. Halfway through his presentation, he interrupted himself suddenly, took a deep breath, and passed a hand across his brow. Then he made eye contact with each member of the jury in turn.
“We have been talking about cold facts here so far,” he said. “But I’m going to forget the facts now, and I’m going to talk about feelings.” His voice softened. He was no longer a lawyer arguing a complicated legal case but just an average guy, worried about simple justice. “My client is a man numbed by grief, a man suffering from emotional shock. A man who has lost the woman he loved in a terrible crime, only to see himself accused of that same crime. We are all decent, God-fearing people here. We are fair people, but we are not miracle workers. We cannot restore to my client the life of the woman he loved. But we can give him back his own life; we can ransom it back from a prosecution too eager to find a criminal for every crime, whether the person they find is guilty or not Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Smerdnakov is innocent! Give his life back to him, let him go free!”
Martin turned away abruptly and walked back to the defense table. When he sat down, he realized he felt a little giddy. He tried to focus on the doodles on his pad and found he was suffering from a sort of tunnel vision brought about by his own eloquence. The doodles now seemed larger than life to him, giant, childish renderings of locomotives, sports cars, puppies, clowns, balloons, and odd, exaggerated mazelike patterns and geometric shapes. He hardly heard a word of Judge Deal’s instructions to the jury, barely saw them leave their box and exit through the door to the deliberation room. His own thoughts were jumbled, disorganized. He wanted to grab the hulking Russian beside him by the shoulders and shout, “I think we beat them!” But instead, he remained in his seat unmoving, dumb as a stone, staring into the haze of colored light from the stained glass window. Presently he realized Judge Deal herself was gone, where, he couldn’t exactly say.
“We got to take him now, sir.”
Martin looked up, startled. It was the court clerk accompanied by a U.S. marshal whom Martin recognized immediately, Caesar Martinez.
“Caesar,” Martin said, “you on this detail?”
Caesar nodded. “Asked for it special,” he said. “Heard you were burning up the courtroom. Had to get down here to see for myself.”
The court clerk held a pair of leg irons; a pair of handcuffs hung clipped to his belt. He stepped up and indicated that Smerdnakov should stand out of his chair.
“Is that strictly necessary?” Martin said.
“We got to put them on him, Wex,” Caesar said. “It’s the rules, you know that.”
Martin moved aside as the court clerk affixed the leg irons to Smerdnakov’s ankles and snapped the handcuffs around his wrists.