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“By whom.Me.And my associate, Dr. Williams.”
On Monday, when court adjourns for the day, I have one last conference with my client, one that he has requested, in our usual room down the hall from the courtroom.
He told me beforehand that it’s important. But then he thinks everything related to him is.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he says when we’re seated across the table from each other. “I want to testify.”
“Yeah…no.”
“I think the jury needs to hear from me. Nobody can convince them of my innocence better than I can.”
“No.”
“I think I can put us over the top. With some things about me I haven’t even told you.”
“Tell me now.”
“Tomorrow,” he says. “You have to trust me. This will be a game changer.”
“On what planet?”
“You’ve said all along that we’d revisit the idea of me testifying before the trial was over.”
“I was hoping you’d forgotten, actually.”
“Well, we’re revisiting it now,” he says.
“Some defendants are able to help themselves on the stand. But you wouldn’t be one of them.”
He shakes his head, his smirk-face very much in place. “You really are a bitch.”
“It’s almost shocking how many people are telling me the same thing these days,” I say.
“Not shocking to anyone who’s taken the time to get to know you.”
“Good line, Rob. You’re still not testifying.”
“This is where I remind you one last time that you work for me.”
I’m tired. And my neck is starting to ache again, as it usually does now late in the day. I just want to get home and prepare my closing argument and get some rest so I’m as close as I can be to the top of my game tomorrow, when I will take my last best shot at getting an acquittal for the smug bastard sitting across from me.
One who may very well have killed those people.
“And is this where you expect me to tell you, one last time, to fire me?”
“Aren’t you going to?”
I stand now and turn my back to him, before turning back around as if addressing a jury of one.
“You’ve got it wrong, Rob, the way you have from the start.Youwork forme. You want the whole truth and nothing but? There it is. When we’re in that room down the hall, you work for me. Which means that one last time tomorrow, when we’re back in there together, I talk and you listen.”
He grins at me. “Then before we do make it down the hall, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen.”
He talks for quite a long time and has my complete attention.
When he finishes, I get up and leave without even saying good-bye. I take the back roads to Amagansett, and when I get home I feed Rip and take him to the beach, Indian Wells tonight, and search around until I find a good piece of driftwood to throw. Then this is one of the nights when he actually fetches it a few times before I’m the one doing the fetching and he’s staring at me from the sand as if to say,What areyoulooking at?
I go back home with my dog and panfry a burger and drink a beer as I eat it, and then begin a first draft of my closing argument, writing it in pencil, one of my trusty No. 2s.
