Joel Goldman - No way out

“Looks like you could use a good night’s sleep,” she said.

Jimmy licked his lower lip like he was searching for a cigarette and didn’t answer.

“I hear the beds are made of cold steel and you can floss your teeth with the mattresses.”

A closed, hard smile creased his mouth. “It’s jail. It ain’t the Ritz.”

“I don’t know how you stand the smell, living with all those people on top of you, especially with that officer putting his hands on you and treating you like a child.”

He narrowed his eyes, his back stiffening. “I can do the time.”

“I’m sure you can, but why do it if you don’t have to?”

He stared at her, taking short breaths before answering. “I told my lawyer and I told your friend there and I’m telling you. I’ll do the time. I got nothing to say about my kids.”

Kate leaned forward, her hands clamped on her knees. “And I’m not going to ask what happened to your children.”

He straightened and dropped his hands onto the armrests. “Then what do you want?”

“You’re going to trial on the theft charge. My job is to make sure the jury that decides whether you go free or go to prison is on your side.”

He rolled his eyes. “Now how you gonna do that? Who the hell is gonna be on my side?”

Kate smiled. “The economy is in a shambles. Millions of people have lost jobs they are never going to get back, and the money they put away for retirement, they would have been better off burying it in a tin can in their backyard. They’re angry and scared, but they don’t have the nerve to do more about it than stick their heads out the window and scream that they can’t take it anymore. You’d be surprised how many of them wish they had the balls to do what you did to support their family.”

He smirked. “They caught me with some copper. Don’t mean I stole it.”

“When the police arrested you, you were driving a truck loaded with five thousand dollars worth of copper tubing and wire they traced to a construction site. You claim you paid cash for the copper to someone who gave you a phony name and address and, so far, the police can’t find him. That’s like the drug dealer who claims someone planted crack in a condom and stuck it up his ass. You want to ride that horse to the finish line, that’s your choice. But, if you want a fighting chance, you’ll work with me.”

“So what can you do about it?”

“My job is to figure out which jurors will hurt you and which ones will help you. Ethan Bonner can keep a lot of the bad ones off the jury, maybe not all of them but maybe enough to give you a shot at acquittal or a hung jury.”

“My lawyer said the jury was supposed to be fair and impartial.”

“The more people want to serve on a jury, the more they think they can do that, but half the time, they don’t even know they’re prejudiced against short people, fat people, or people who part their hair on the right instead of the left. They decide guilt or innocence without being aware of all the subtle things that go into their decision. You need an edge, and I’m your edge, that is, if you let me.”

He nodded, turning to me. “What about him? He works for my wife. What’s he doing here?”

“He’s my edge. He’ll find out what we need to know about the people in the jury pool, all the stuff that isn’t on the questionnaire the court makes them fill out.”

He squinted at me, and I nodded in reply, backing Kate up, wondering where she was going.

“Why would my wife let him help us?”

When he referred to the two of them as us, I knew that Kate had him. She sat back, knowing it too.

“Now why do you think your future former wife would want to keep you out of jail?”

Jimmy thought for a moment, his eyes widening when he figured out the answer. He shook his head, offering his first real smile. “Alimony.”

“Bingo,” Kate said.

“I’m not paying her one goddamn cent!”

“If you’re making twelve cents an hour scrubbing the penitentiary bathroom floor, you’re right. At least if you’re out on the street making a decent wage, you’ll have something worth fighting over.”

He smiled again. His uneven teeth were stained with tobacco and coffee, his grin crooked and dirty. I was wrong to think that a blue suit was all he needed to pass for a banker. Everything you needed to know about Jimmy Martin was right in front of you each time he opened his mouth. He rubbed his hands together.

“Okay, then. Where do we start?”

“It all starts with you, Jimmy,” Kate said. “If Ethan is going to sell you to the jury, I need to know everything there is to know about you. When were you born?”

She got him started, and it was hard to get him to stop. He told her about growing up in Northeast, how his father had smacked him and his brother around; how he’d stumbled through high school, barely graduating; enlisting in the Marines, doing two tours in the first Gulf War, getting in enough trouble that they offered him an honorable discharge in return for his promise not to re-enlist; and finally pulled himself together working construction, mostly residential, drywall and carpentry, some electrical and plumbing, whatever needed doing. He bragged about all the women he’d known, marveling how Peggy had somehow worn him down until he gave in and married her.

“And the next thing you knew, you had two kids and the party was over,” she said.

The air went out of him. “Yeah.”

“And with the recession, work dried up and money got tight, which wasn’t your fault, and you and Peggy started fighting and you’d come home at night and she’d say she was going out with her girlfriends, only it wasn’t always her girlfriends.”

His eyes flickered, his lips trembling even as his jaw tightened. “How’d you know about that?”

Kate reached into her shoulder bag, pulling out a sheaf of papers, setting them on the coffee table. “Ethan showed me what your divorce lawyer filed in response to Peggy’s divorce petition, and I read the rest of it between the lines. That had to be tough to take.”

He looked away, staring out the windows, coming back to her, his jaw set. “Who gives a shit? Somebody wants her, they can have her. I’m through with the bitch.”

Kate reached into her bag again, pulling out a manila folder and setting it on the coffee table. “But she was only half of the problem. Even if you were through with her, you still had the kids.”

She opened the folder, not taking her eyes off of him, spreading eight-by-ten color photographs of Evan and Cara out on the table, Evan posing in his Cub Scouts uniform, Cara wearing the one from her basketball team. Jimmy scanned the photos, locking in his flat expression.

She pulled out another folder, laying a color photograph of two dead children, their bodies bloody and sightless, on top of the pictures of Evan and Cara. Jimmy’s head spun clockwise like he’d taken a right cross, his jaw slack, his eyebrows arching over full-moon eyes.

He shook his head, bringing his glare back to Kate, not looking at the photographs, grabbing his thighs, fighting to stay in his chair and losing the fight. I beat him to his feet, chest bumping him and pinning his arms to his sides.

“Those aren’t my kids’ bodies! What the hell are you trying to pull on me?”

“Easy, Jimmy,” I said.

“Take your fucking hands off of me!”

The officer opened the door, making me wonder how private our conversation had been.

“Like the man told you,” the officer said, “go easy, Jimmy.”

Jimmy sucked in a deep breath, and I felt the tension drain out of him. I released his arms, and he raised his hands in mock surrender, walked past the officer and out into the hall without saying another word. The officer winked at us before following him.