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“Are you?”
“The people behind you are trying to do their jobs. We should probably both let them.”
“I’m more interested inyourjob, Ms. Smith. What’s it like trying to exonerate a murderer?”
“Myjob,Mr. Miller, is to give my client the best possible defense. And then leave it to the jury to exonerate him or not.”
“By smearing people like me?” Otis Miller says. “What course in law school taught you how to do something as pathetic as that?”
I’m aware of the cameras. I’m aware this is all being recorded and will be going viral even faster than the speed of social media. But there’s no place to run, no place to hide.
“If you were my client,” I say to Miller, “I’d give you the best defense, too. But now I really have to get inside and continue to offer my current client my best effort.”
I pull up the sleeve of my sincerity suit as if checking my watch, before realizing that I’m not wearing one today.
Otis Miller, though, isn’t about to let me fade him.
He’s suddenly standing right in front of me, perhaps hoping the cameras will show me backing up. Backing away from him.
If that’s what he’s hoping for, he doesn’t know anything about me.
“What you’re doing is sick,” he says. “You’resick.”
I smile brightly. “Well, Mr. Miller, you’ve got me there.”
One Hundred Six
I BET JIMMY CUNNIFFthat Ahearn’s closing would go for at least two hours.
It nearly does.
But along the way I lose track of time, because Ahearn’s performance happens to be brilliant, and mesmerizing, as if he was just warming up the day before when he went at Rob Jacobson as relentlessly as he did.
It turns out he’s an even better showman today than he was yesterday. I want to hate him for the way he’s shooting one hole after another in my case. But what he’s doing, even watching it from the other side, even knowing I’m being hurt here, is why I wanted to be a criminal attorney in the first place. For this kind of theater, with stakes as high as they can be, my client about to go free or die in prison.
Ahearn is being completely dismissive of any possible killer other than Rob Jacobson, or even the possibility that somebody could have set him up, planted as much evidence as there is in this case, and done all of it quickly enough to stay ahead of the police.
“There aren’t even master criminals like this in the movies,” Ahearn says. He pauses and grins and says, “Even good movies.”
He covers a lot of the ground he covered the day before, acting as if the idea that depression and suicide have anything to do with these murders, this trial, is like some sort of fever dream on the part of Rob Jacobson.
And me.
I occasionally scribble some notes on the legal pad in front of me. But never for very long, because I can’t take my eyes off Ahearn as I breathe his air, feeling my own heart begin to race, as if I’m the one out there on the floor and beginning my rebuttal already.
With my own A game.
At the finish he comes right back to the question I’ve asked myself from the beginning, even when I was convinced that the evidence against my client was simply too perfect:
If Rob Jacobson didn’t do it, who did?
Who could have hated him enough to set him up in such a meticulous way, all the way to the blood from Mitch Gates found in Jacobson’s Mercedes?
“Who did it?” Ahearn says.
He turns and points at Jacobson and says, “Hedid.”
He walks over to our table, then turns to face the jury.
