Adair paused to finish his beer and continued. “I’m told it was a kind of half-whispered, half-shouted demagoguery. Lawyers flew in from all over, a few for the entire trial, but most just to hear Combine’s summation. And it must’ve sounded like implacable, irresistible logic-unless you studied it closely, as I eventually did, and found it not much more than visceral rhetoric, but brilliantly organized and beautifully told. Kelly was there. He can tell you.”
The two half sisters and the Iranian looked at Kelly Vines. But it was B. D. Huckins who asked the question all three were thinking. “What were you doing there?”
“Representing a client-the same Short Mex and Big Mick outfit Jack mentioned earlier. They’d sent me down because they thought they might be able to nibble around the edges, or at least catch a few crumbs that might fall from the table, if the verdict went the way they had hoped.”
“And did it?” Huckins asked.
“No.”
She looked at Adair. “Well?”
“After the prosecutor was all done, and after Combine had finally closed his mouth, and after the judge’s dubious instructions, the jury went out and stayed out for an hour and fifteen minutes, just long enough to make it look halfway decent, then came back in and found both Jack and Jill Jimson guilty of first-degree murder.”
Chapter 19
Dessert was a sin-rich flan and after Merriman Dorr himself served it to everyone except Kelly Vines, who said he didn’t care for any, Dorr asked whether the two of them could speak privately.
Vines rose from the table and followed him out into the hall, where Dorr looked left, right and left again, the way he might look if he had come to a stop sign.
“Enjoy your lunch?” he asked Vines.
“The trout was good.”
“Think the salad had a smidgeon too much tarragon?”
“The salad was fine, too. How much?”
“One thousand cash,” Dorr said. “No checks. No plastic.”
“The trout wasn’t all that good.”
“You’re paying for what it costs to bring the help in on a Saturday. Then there’s the liquor and the room. But what really jacks up the price is the privacy and that’s sort of hard to cost out because there’s none better anywhere.”
“Cash only must simplify your bookkeeping,” Vines said, took a none-too-plump roll of one-hundred-dollar bills from his pants pocket, peeled off ten of the hundreds slowly enough for Dorr to keep up with the count and handed them over. Dorr counted them again, even more slowly, and said, “I don’t know what you and B. D.’ve got going, but-”
“Let’s keep it like that.”
Dorr ignored the interruption. “But whatever it is, if she or maybe even you ever need to go some place quick, I know where I can get me a Cessna.”
“What do you charge-two hundred dollars per mile?”
“You might practice up on your listening,” Dorr said, shoving the now folded $1,000 into a hip pocket. “I’m offering you a service through her. I mean, if she tells me you’ve got to go someplace in a hurry, that’s fine, I’ll fly you there although it’s got to have her okay because I don’t know you or your partner, if that’s what he is. But if there’s anything at all I can do for B. D., I’ll do it for free gratis because to me she’s the case ace.”
“Why?” Vines said.
“Why what?”
“Why’s everyone so willing to jump off tall buildings for her?”
“Because if you offer to jump today, you might not get pushed off tomorrow.”
When Kelly Vines returned to his seat at the round table, Jack Adair was already well launched into his account of the million-dollar bribe: “…so when the state court of appeals upheld their convictions, it also revoked their bail. The boy was sent to the state penitentiary at Goldstone and the girl to the Female Correctional Institution, which is what they’d named the state prison for women when they built it back in nineteen eleven.”
“And the sentence?” Parvis Mansur asked. “You never said.”
“Death by lethal injection.”
“Really. Both of them?”
“Both.”
“Who would administer it-a doctor?”
“A medical technician.”
Suspecting that her brother-in-law had a long list of other questions to ask about the mechanics of the execution, B. D. Huckins broke in with: “Let’s get to the bribe.”
With an agreeable nod, Adair said, “The attorney general himself appeared before us for the state. He isn’t much of a lawyer but he is a damned fine politician, which is why he’s now governor. Then came Combine Wilson and that’s when all of us on the court sat up and took notice because this was Combine the legal scholar, not Combine the crowd pleaser. And if some of us hadn’t been careful, we’d’ve found ourselves nodding along with him and maybe even amening now and again as he told us what the law really was and not what some semiliterate county judge down in Little Dixie thought it ought to be.”
“Little Dixie?” Dixie Mansur asked.
“That’s what they call the section of my state where the Jimson kids were first tried.”
“Is it meant to be a compliment or a slam?”
“It started out one way but ended up the other.”
“That’s what I figured,” she said.
Adair looked at each member of his audience. “Any other questions?” When no one had any, Adair continued. “But despite Combine’s brilliance, I could sense that at least four of the brethren weren’t buying his argument. It could’ve been because three of them were up for reelection and figured that voting to put two rich kids to death wouldn’t do them any harm with the voters in my state, who, on the whole, are rather partial to executions. The fourth vote belonged to the lone weirdo on the court, who got and, I guess, still gets a kind of kinky pleasure from upholding death sentences. At least he’s never yet voted to overturn one. But then I have to admit I got plenty of satisfaction-of a different kind, I hope-from voting just the opposite.”
“You’re opposed to the death penalty then?” Mansur asked.
“Yes, sir, I am. Unalterably.”
“How peculiar.”
“Ever see one carried out, Mr. Mansur?”
Before Mansur could reply, which he obviously wanted to do, B. D. Huckins again interrupted with an impatient, “Let’s get on with it.”
Adair smiled at her. “With my account rather than my philosophy, I take it?” Not waiting for an answer, he said, “After I did my vote-counting, I came up with what appeared to be a four-to-four tie with old Justice Fuller holding the swing vote.”
Parvis Mansur couldn’t resist another interruption. “When you say old, is that a colloquialism or a statement of fact?”
“Justice Fuller was then eighty-one, which made him not only old but aged. His full name was Mark Tyson Fuller and he’d served on the court for thirty-six years and liked to call himself its institutional memory, although for a quarter of a century the clerks had been calling him The Weathervane because of his voting with the majority eighty-nine percent of the time.”
“Was he competent?” Mansur asked.