Steve Martini - The Jury

I wonder what he is doing downtown. He knows the trial has been dark for days. Even if it weren’t, he wouldn’t be allowed in. He’s on the witness list.

Then it hits me. He’s probably on his way to see Crone. Anger begins to set in, wondering how long this has been going on. I continue to watch them, Tash doing most of the listening. The other guy hands him a piece of paper, something from his pocket. Tash takes it, but doesn’t look at it. Instead he slips it into the briefcase under his arm, the same thin leather case he’s carried to the jail to meet with Crone each time we’ve gone.

Harry comes out of the bathroom, waltzes up behind me.

“You get the bill?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go,” he says.

“Hold on.”

“What are you looking at?”

“Over there, on the corner.”

Harry zones in, picks it up quickly. By now Tash has finished his conversation. He heads up the street in front of the courthouse.

“What’s he doing down here?”

“What I was wondering.” I expect him to keep going past the courthouse steps to the corner and down the street toward the entrance to the jail, but he doesn’t. Instead he turns and climbs the stairs, then disappears into the shadows under the courthouse door.

Harry looks at me, thinking the same thing. Tash is headed to the D.A.’s office.

“You think Tate is sweating him?” asks Harry.

“I don’t know.” Suddenly there is the smell of danger in the air.

“You missed the other half,” I tell him.

“What’s that?”

“The guy he was talking to at the corner. Tall, all bulked up, a long blond ponytail, his arms all inked up. The last time I saw him was in the bucket talking to Crone down in the dayroom.”

“You sure?”

I nod. It was the felon fodder joshing with Crone that morning, the first time we took Tash to the jail-the blond Viking.

Tate’s inner sanctum is a monument to longevity in office. The walls are covered with plaques of platitude: brass tablets and framed scrolls celebrating his high ethics, all presented by groups seeking to curry his favor.

There are framed pictures showing a man who only vaguely resembles Tate, darker hair and more of it, without the jowls that are now his most prominent feature.

Harry and I wander around the room, checking these trophies as Tate finishes a meeting down the hall in the library.

There are photos of the man shaking hands with baseball players, movie stars, other politicians: confirmation of his orbit in the celebtocracy in case he should forget. Some of these shots date him badly, figures in them have held horizontal residence at Forest Lawn for the better part of two decades. Time moving on, catching up.

Harry’s looking over my shoulder with an appraising eye at a shot of Marilyn Monroe showing some thigh, seated on the edge of a desk with Tate’s name placard on it. Tate is seated behind the desk looking very much younger, an eager and rising deputy.

“When he retires, they’re gonna have to take an oral history or lose touch with the ancient world,” says Harry.

“Who says he’s going to retire?”

The clutter of memorabilia is a flea market dream. What purports to be the first Padre baseball thrown out in one of the league play-offs sits on the second-base bag from that same game. A three-hundred-pound block of granite, a tombstone, with the engraving

DEATH PENALTY REPEAL

RIP

stands in a corner of the office, proof of Tate’s credentials in the cop community and the brotherhood of prosecutors. I am told he drapes this with a black lace handkerchief when closeted with deputies deciding whether to seek the death penalty in capital cases, and has scratched notches in the edges of the stone whenever the penalty was exacted in one of their cases. He is no squeamish liberal when it comes to retribution, and plays his politics the same way.

Before I can move to check the edges of the tombstone closer, the door behind me opens.

“Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting.” Tate sweeps into the office like an autumn wind. Being sucked along in the vacuum of his wake is Tannery.

“Did Charlotte offer you some coffee?”

I wave him off, but he ignores me, plops himself into the chair behind his desk and picks up the receiver on the phone hitting the com line.

“Charlotte, bring in some coffee, will ya? Four cups. You guys want cream and sugar?”

Before we can answer. “Sure, bring it all on a tray. And see if you got some of those little cookies. The ones with the mint.”

He sets the phone on its cradle and he’s back out of his chair before Harry and I can say a word, hanging his coat up on a hanger that dangles from the coat tree in the corner.

“You must be Madriani.” He reaches over on his way back to the desk, shakes my hand in an almost absent fashion as he passes by.

“Harry Hinds, my partner,” I tell him.

He has to backtrack to catch Harry’s hand. “Good to meet you. Have a seat. Sit down.” He directs us to the two client chairs. Tannery pulls up a ladder-back chair from the small conference table across the room and joins us.

“Heard good things about you both,” says Tate. This is very much his meeting, in control.

“Seems we have some mutual friends up in Capital City.” He mentions some names, fixtures in the local bar and on the bench.

“You represented Armando Acosta,” he says.

I nod.

“That was a big case. Got headlines all over. Not every day you get a state court judge charged with murder. Especially,” he says, “where there’s a little nookie involved.” He pulls on his right earlobe, smiles as if perhaps he can entice me to share some confidences from the past. Tate is referring to charges that the judge had been snared in an undercover vice sting by a pretty decoy sent out by the cops to nail him. She was later found dead, and Acosta was charged with her murder.

“Those charges were never proven,” I tell him.

“Of course not,” he says. “You won the case. Judge Acosta is eternally in your debt, from what I understand. Your biggest cheerleader. That was not always the case.”

“I haven’t been able to try a case before him since the trial. Judge Acosta is scrupulous in disqualifying himself in any matter in which I am involved.”

“Funny how that works. Do somebody a favor and it comes back to bite you in the ass.”

“The law is not politics,” I tell him. “That is, if it works right.”

He smiles. “Of course not. Which brings us to the reason for today’s meeting. Some pretty fortuitous events,” he says, “the death of a witness on the eve of testimony. I’ll bet that hasn’t happened in one of your cases before?”

“Not that I can recall,” I tell him.

“Obviously it’s thrown a glitch into the people’s case.”

“We noticed,” says Harry. Harry’s getting tired listening to the bullshit. He wants to cut to the chase. “Why did you call us in here?”

“We still think we have a solid case against your man. Don’t get me wrong,” says Tate.

“Is that why you called? To tell us you have a solid case?” I ask.

He looks at Tannery, smiles. “No. I called you here to discuss a possible resolution. As it stands, your client can’t be sure he’s gonna beat the wrap. Don’t misunderstand; the Epperson thing throws up some dust. It may not be quite as clear as it was before, but there’s still the question of the cable ties in his pocket, the tension tool in his garage, the fact that he and the victim were not on good terms. The medical evidence points to a skilled hand dismembering the body. There’s plenty there for a jury to chew on,” he says.

“And given this. . mountain that we have to climb, what are you prepared to offer?”