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She’s right. I don’t. At least not yet.
She suddenly pushes back her chair and makes her way between the other tables, on her way to where she’s parked her car in the back lot.
Good talk.
Forty-Five
JIMMY RIDES TO COURTwith me the next morning, Judge Prentice having officially been informed that juror number 10 had not, in fact, been staring into the abyss. He is a diabetic. Low blood sugar had gotten him. He spent a couple of hours at the hospital, got released, and informed the court that he would be back in his seat today.
Jimmy and I talk a little more about the fire, and the work being done at the bar, and how the Sag Harbor cops don’t have a single lead.
“The only goddamn lead,” Jimmy tells me, “is sitting next to you.”
By now Jimmy has hired a local company that does bug sweeps, trying to find out if our guy got into Jimmy’s house as easily as he did mine and planted something that would help him hear Jimmy’s phone conversations. They came up with nothing. Came up with nothing at my house, too. They checked Jimmy’s car. And mine. Nothing.
“Let’s talk about something else before I get the ass all over again,” Jimmy says.
So we talk about the trial. I ask him if he thinks I should bring back our forensics expert, Marge Florio, from John Jay College, as a way of recasting doubt on the physical evidence.
“My opinion?” Jimmy says.
“Why I’m asking.”
“You’ll just bore the jury with that shit and stop all the momentum you got going after the way you bounced that Hennessy around. And I think you already did knock down the evidence pretty good with the East Hampton cop, poor guy. It was like he wasn’t ready to be called up to the big leagues.”
I feel myself grinning at how tense he is. It’s because he’s in the passenger seat. He doesn’t likenotbeing behind the wheel. And likes my driving even less.
“We both know what our job is right now,” he says. “Job one, like they say. And not for nothing, Janie? The divider line isnota lane.”
“Front-seat driver.”
“I wish,” he says. “We should outfit this car like it’s from Driver’s Ed, and we both get a wheel.”
“You’re fine.”
“Am I?”
“Job one,” I say now. “Create doubt.”
He lets me sit in on his regular poker game sometimes, even though the other guys at the table are much better cardplayers than I am. But some of the principles of poker apply to court. Always have. You want the rest of the table to believe, just by the way you’re betting, that you have the cards.
Whether you do or not.
It’s all about plausible doubt, standing it up as best you can. Make the jury doubt the perfect evidence. Thetotalityof evidence. Make it plausible that Rob Jacobson is right, that he was set up. That someone other than him did it. Someone, anyone. Even when your client is a perfect ass—and I know I’ve got one of those—that doesn’t mean he did it. Make them look somewhere else.
Don’t look over here.
Look overthere.
From the Shiny Object School of Law.
I tell Jimmy that he’s right. Screw the forensics expert. I’m re-calling Otis Miller first today, instead of second, and I contact the clerk to inform him of that fact.
Jimmy says, “You think Miller could have done it for real?”
“Could have, sure. Actually did the deed? Nah.”
“You feel bad about making him your straw man?”
