Chapter 21

Roger Schwartz grabbed his briefcase and hurried for the entrance/exit of the new suite of offices the prosecutor's staff was lucky to have just moved into. Lucille, his secretary, called out a cheery "Good luck!" as he sailed by her desk.

"Don't need luck!" he yelled back, flashing her a grin.

In fact, he believed that. He was one of the up and coming lawyers of a generation that believed skill would make "luck" an archaic term. If that seems a bit rash, perhaps it could be said that he believed you made your own luck, rather than hoping it would stumble into your life.

The case he was on the way to the courtroom to prosecute might have been considered an argument that he was wrong. Anyone else would have said he was lucky indeed that the defendant in this case had the kind of ironic moral fiber she appeared to have. After all, she'd confessed to a murder and then turned down an offer of eight years and a hundred thousand dollars in restitution. He'd thought the plea deal he offered her was quite reasonable. The explosion she'd intentionally ignited had not only killed a man, but had probably caused well over three hundred thousand dollars worth of collateral damages.

Even the fact that the official investigation had labeled the explosion an accident didn't bother him. He had her confession on tape, and it was ironclad. There was no way in the world that confession would be thrown out. Her lawyer had been there while she made it, and had objected to every word she'd said. She was on tape a dozen times telling him to shut up, because she'd done it.

And the investigation after the fact had come up with lots of evidence to prove she was telling the truth. That evidence, added to the photographs taken when the incident occurred, left him eager to see the look on the jurors' faces as they were handed the Fetterman woman's head on a silver platter.

Yes, this one was a slam dunk. At most, it should take two days, and then he'd have another notch carved in the grip of his metaphorical six shooter. His mind wandered as, for perhaps the hundredth time, he thought quite seriously about getting himself an old time revolver and actually filing a notch into the handle of it for each successful prosecution he tried. Of course, it would have to be a nonfunctional replica weapon, since handguns were banned in the city.

But still, it would look good on his wall.

He breezed through the tall double doors of the courtroom. There were already a few people in the gallery, and he saw Matthew McDill poring over papers in a file on the defendant's table.

"Poor sap," he said under his breath as he walked down the aisle. He nodded to the bailiff as he pushed the gate open.

"Morning, Matt," he said, giving the obligatory greeting to his foe. Then he put his briefcase on the prosecution table and asked the bailiff to remove the extra chair. He'd be trying this case alone, and he wanted everyone to know it. He was about to enter into a complicated dance that had as many psychological elements to it as it did physical ones. Much of "the law" was an illusion, carefully crafted and presented in such a way as to convince people to believe what you wanted them to believe. In many ways it was like playing a role in a play or movie.

If you played the role well, people believed what they saw in the court room was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

That it wasn't necessarily so, didn't bother Roger Schwartz at all.

On the other side of the room, Matthew McDill, counselor for the defense, looked over his notes and sighed. Lacey was bound and determined to be punished for her acts. This was all a kind of penance for her, in her own mind, an attempt at catharsis that he was sure would end very badly for her.

He already thought of her as a prisoner, dressed in an orange jump suit and locked up in some horrible place where she'd look haunted after only a few days. Her spirit would be assailed with such force that she'd exit it as only a shell of her former self. And that was too bad, because he was convinced she was a nice woman and a good human being, all things considered.

At least he'd convinced her to have a jury trial, instead of just letting the judge sentence her. The only way to do that was to plead not guilty, which she'd argued about. Her psychiatrist had helped convince her that what she seemed to need to find peace, needed to be meted out by people like her, which meant she had to go through a trial.

His notes stared up at him. His plan was a radical departure from the way he normally defended a client. Of course this whole case was a radical departure from the kind of thing he usually dealt with.

He knew the truth, for one thing. That was pretty rare, actually. Most clients held things back—hid things—and guilt of the crime committed was only one of the things they usually tried to hide. They pretended to be innocent, and it often handicapped him, because most people don't lie well and juries are suspicious to begin with.

But this time he knew every intimate detail of his client's life. He knew what had led to her actions. She was an open book and her credibility was undoubted in a way that made her different from any client he'd had to date. Even the way she blushed when she gave certain details screamed that she was telling him everything, and that everything she was telling him was the stark truth.

That was the basis for his defense, as odd as it might have seemed.

She would confess to a jury of her peers. She had demanded that. He'd argued with her until he was blue in the face, but she was unbending in her desire to testify and throw herself to the dogs.

She thought she was going to sit in the witness chair and tell the jury she'd killed a man, and then be punished for it. She thought that would allow her to live with what she'd done.

What he hoped, as he reviewed the questions she didn't know he was going to ask her, was that the members of the jury would react to her story like he had.

He hoped they'd feel sorry for her.

His logical mind accepted there'd be a finding of guilt. There was no way around that. But the human being in him was going to try like hell to get a hung jury. If there was a mistrial, and the press got wind of it, even a change of venue was likely to end up in a mistrial the second time.

Matthew McDill's intent was to try to wear down the prosecution and buy himself enough time that Lacey would stop participating in her own crucifixion.

Lacking that, he wanted the judge to give her the first opportunity at parole, which was ten years, instead of the last, which was twenty-five.

In another room, down a short non-public hallway from Courtroom B, twelve people sat, or milled around, contemplating how their lives had been interrupted. Perhaps co-opted was the better term, because their lives went on. Just not in the way they preferred that it happen.

There was a coffee pot, and a plate of danish, most of which was untouched, because it was sticky on the outside and dry on the inside—the cheap kind that looks great, but is only good for one bite before interest is lost. People looked at each other, but tried to do it in a nonintrusive kind of way. The jurors didn't try to make eye contact with each other. They were strangers and each, in his or her own way, was convinced they'd always be strangers. The mystical jury selection process had been gone through and most of them had ended up drawing the short straw, somehow. This was a temporary speed bump in their lives, a civic duty that they had to perform, before they could steer their attention back onto the usual roadway of their different patterns of existence.

Maggie Thompson was fifty-eight, a widow, and the mother of two grown children. She was the epitome of the term "WASP" and, in her own mind, had lived a thoroughly uninteresting life thus far. She'd had two years of college, but hadn't gotten a degree. She'd married Walter, raised her children, buried Walter when he'd had a heart attack, and then worked at various unskilled jobs over the years that followed. She got by, because Walter's insurance had paid off the house and her needs were few.

When she was called to jury duty, she'd tried to get out of it by pretending to believe that anyone who had been arrested must be guilty. She'd seen something on TV one time about that, and something called a peremptory challenge. She'd thought that if she presented the appearance of someone who was like that that she'd be dismissed.

She hadn't been, though, and here she was. She tried to see the positive side of things. At least this was something new and interesting in her otherwise humdrum life that seemed vaguely unfulfilled.

Waldo Cunningham straightened his tie, unconsciously and stood, more or less in the center of the room, next to the long table they'd sit around while they deliberated. At forty-five, Waldo felt like he was in the prime of his life. He was an accountant, by trade, an active member of his church and the rotary club, and now was going to be part of a jury in a murder trial. This fact simply added to the impression in his mind that he was a pillar of the community. Marge, his wife, had wanted him to try to get out of it, but he'd ignored her. This was something good ... something important. Crime was rampant in the streets, and he firmly believed in the old saw that for evil to triumph it required only that good men do nothing.

He'd taken the time to do some research, to ensure that he would be chosen as a juror. He'd learned all the right things to say, and was proud that he'd been successful in being chosen to be a purveyor of justice.

He looked around at the others. He didn't interact with the public much. Not at work, anyway. And when he was at church, or club meetings, the people he was around were above reproach and didn't need to be analyzed. He couldn't tell much about these people so far.

But he knew they'd need a leader, and he was sure he was the man for the job.

Reginald Bower felt alone and isolated in the room. That was something he was used to, though, and it didn't bother him all that much. Reggie was a black man, thirty-seven years old and born during a time in America when race relations were a firestorm. The kiln of integration, as he went through his formative years, had fired him into a vessel that, like a clay pot, becomes hard and unchanging. He was jaded, without knowing it, and his routine beliefs about the world in which he lived were set. He didn't think much about why he believed the things he believed. He just believed them.

One of those things was that racism was alive and well, and that partial proof of that could be found in the statistics of prison populations. Everybody knew that there were more blacks in prison than any other race. And that meant that black men and women were still being put down.

He stood alone, at one end of the table in the room. That was more proof that racism was still in the world. All the others in the room were white. He knew he was the token black on this jury, and the others were keeping their distance from the black man. They were profiling him, just like the cops did, assuming he was a problem of some kind.

He was used to that, too. He got suspicious looks when he went into stores, or even just walked down the street. He'd learned to armor himself against that kind of thing. There were a few chinks in his armor, though he wasn't aware of them on a conscious level. His wife's death, for instance, was a chink in his armor. She'd taken a stray bullet in a drive by shooting. One second she was yelling at him for not asking for a raise at the shipping company where he drove a forklift, so they could get a decent car. The next second she was lying on the floor, her eyes wide open, staring lifelessly at a water stain on the ceiling. It had been a black man who had pulled the trigger on the Tech 9 that had killed her. His subconscious mind knew that, and that it was gang violence that had killed her, but his conscious mind insisted that if the white man would give jobs to young black men, they wouldn't join gangs. Still, it bothered him sometimes that a man of his own race had killed his wife.

It didn't matter. He was here, and the defendant was white. He'd been given a chance to alter those statistics, even if only a little. That was the black man's burden ... to be restricted to taking baby steps ... toward a day when, finally, black men and women would be truly equal to those around them.

He was here to take a few baby steps.

At the other end of the minority spectrum was Helen Zwinkowski. That she was a white woman put her in the minority, along with Reggie. That she was a single mother, working two jobs put her in another minority. That she was a knockout might be thought of as yet another minority group she belonged to, as could the fact that she had been in the upper ten percent of her graduating class in high school.

Helen had had it all, back then. She had been beautiful, sharp as a tack, and had a four year full ride scholarship to Columbia University. But even a near genius, a minority she missed being in by virtue of three points on the IQ test, can make a mistake in judgment.

Her mistake had been celebrating too much at a graduation party, where she'd accepted too many drinks, one of which had something in it that left her conscious, but unable to convince her boyfriend that she was still in the same mindset as all those times she'd already said "No!" He wanted to believe she'd just been waiting to graduate. He didn't use a condom, and she was then among that un-envious minority of women who get pregnant the very first time they have sex.

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