Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

Sit down at a street-side café with an intimate friend to have a confidential conversation and your words along with pictures may show up on YouTube and the World Wide Web. If Harry had to guess, his candidate for wearer of the wire would be Walter Henoch, the newest man on the scene, the one Arnsberg didn’t know that well, the man who got him talking.

Upstairs, the walls of the main courthouse are decorated with pictures of the local worthies, mostly judges, some of them dating back to just this side of the California gold rush. Here the noise and commotion, the jostling of bodies, is different from in the lobby downstairs. Most of the lawyers, clerks, and courthouse staff seem to have some goal and direction, even if the cases they’re working do not.

There are two separate courthouses in this town, one civil and the other criminal, connected by a bridge that spans the street between them. And for all intents and purposes, it is the only thing that connects them.

It is just my view, but on the civil side it would require a peculiar wit to call it a justice system. Buried in mud over the axles twenty years ago, lawmakers threw up their hands and pushed everything on the civil side out of the courthouse door and into arbitration. This became the tollbooth you had to pass through to get back into the courthouse.

Once there, however, any claim, no matter how frivolous, often results in the defendant’s ponying up money rather than being bankrupted by years of litigation or facing the prospect of death by old age in a courtroom full of busy lawyers flinging pieces of paper around.

On any matter that even hints of the complex, it can take years to get through trial, followed by decades on appeal. On anything that is in fact complex, a lawyer can spend his entire career on that single case, and many have done so.

Businesses and corporations that make up the economic backbone of the state long ago opted out of the state’s civil court system, using instead mediation, binding arbitration, and in many cases private judges working for local firms to preside over the case and render a judgment-the businessman’s express toll highway to a quick and final decision. Just as with health care and medicine, no one can afford the high cost of government-administered justice any longer.

That is, except for the scions of the criminal courts. A private judge cannot send your client off to prison for a few lifetimes or direct others to stick a needle in his arm, transporting him out of this world. When they figure that one out, we’ll all be in trouble.

A female clerk sashays down the corridor past me, clicking heels on the hard floor, all to the accompaniment of the plastic badges she flashes on her chest. Living in the age of security as we do, badges are everywhere. Ubiquitous clip-ons for temporary visitors behind the scenes, a requirement if they wish to enter the inner sanctum of a judge’s chambers. There are more permanent hard laminated ones hanging from chains around the neck for seasoned staff. Some of these are worn two and three together or from multiple chains, emblems of status, an outward display of who can enter the sanctum sanctorum. If you can’t get a bump in salary, you can at least have another badge and, if you’re real good, a shiny new chain to go with it, something to dazzle friends and impress the public on cafeteria coffee breaks.

With plenty of time, I saunter down the hall past Departments 11 and 12. Off to the right, I see the sign over my destination’s door, DEPARTMENT 13, and wonder whether our assignment to this court portends something ominous.

The purpose of this morning’s gathering is an off-the-record meeting, under the guise of a pretrial conference, this so that the judge can lay down the law. Not the statutes printed in the codebooks or the case law handed down by the appellate courts, but the law from on high, the holy writ according to the Honorable Plato Quinn, whom we have drawn as trial judge in People v. Carl Arnsberg.

Of course, all of this is off calendar, away from the prying eyes of the press or notice to the public. If a trial is theater, you can consider these to be notes on stage direction: where you will stand and how you will comport yourself, how the judge’s word is final on everything, from what evidence will come before the jury to when you can empty your bladder and by how much.

The last two weeks, I have wheeled and dealed and burned a few bridges. In periodic gatherings with the presiding judge of the superior court and the county’s public defender, what gentlemen might call meetings to those of us present became a desperate game of financial chicken.

I have known from the beginning that Sam Arnsberg’s savings, plus what he earns selling insurance, would never come close to covering the fees, let alone the monstrous costs, in this case.

His son, Carl, qualifies as an indigent, public-defender bait. The problem was to convince the public defender that he didn’t want the case and that there were at least arguable legal grounds for him and his office to bug out. The bigger problem was to convince the court to go along with this, to officially declare Arnsberg an indigent and to appoint me to represent him at public expense.

The public defender already had enough cases stacked up against the walls in his office to make convincing him he didn’t need this particular circus twirling on top of his desk not all that hard.

It is a rule carved in granite that for reasons of conflict of interest, lawyers in the same law firm cannot represent more than one criminal defendant charged in the same case. The catch here was that there was only one defendant charged in this case, our client, Carl Arnsberg. But there was at least the glimmer of other miscreants looming just over the horizon, the other branded bozos that Carl ran with, the people he talked to, the state’s star witnesses. True, they weren’t charged, but they could be, they might be, and since nobody knew exactly what they might say at some point in the future if pressed, the case could end up in a conspiracy involving the entire Third Reich.

At first the judge wasn’t buying. As far as he was concerned, multiple defendants meant just that, real people actually charged. But as time went by, as the trial loomed closer, as the public defender and I slipped his head into a vise and turned the handle, he began to see the light. Gentle hints that if forced to the wall I might have to withdraw, along with estimates by the public defender that he would need at least two more full-time lawyers and six months to come up to speed on the case-these finally turned the tide.

This morning I called Sam Arnsberg and gave him the news. The county will be funding not only the prosecution but the defense, including our experts and investigators. What I didn’t tell him is that my fee will be a fraction of my usual hourly rate. No doubt my statement of hours along with Harry’s will be chiseled down further by the presiding judge, who will review, approving or modifying, our billings for each month, part of the deal. But it gets us over the hump.

I pull open one of the heavy wooden doors at Department 13, pass through the darkened airlock between the two sets of double doors and into the courtroom. The place is empty except for a lone figure sitting in the front row. I could have anticipated this. Bent and a little stooped, wearing a tweed suit with the look and cut of something from another decade, is a withered form. His hands are pocked by age marks, and his arthritic fingers claw a sharpened pencil in one hand, a reporter’s notepad in the other.

Harvey Smidt must be seventy if he’s a day, the oldest salt in the courthouse press corps. Harv shuns pack journalism. He works alone, often in silence like a Trappist monk, and rejects technology. He won’t use a computer. Smidt still knocks out daily copy on an old Underwood manual typewriter, not even electric. It is the perennial courthouse mystery where he acquires his store of typewriter ribbons. He has an assistant who keys his stories in for him online when he is done and sends them to the pressroom, which in Harvey’s case is up in Los Angeles. His paper tolerates this because Harv does his work the old-fashioned way. He uses shoe leather. Two years ago he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on the trial of the Santee Seven, a Mexican gang implicated in killings that ranged across four southwestern states and involved trafficking in enough drugs to swamp a Colombian cartel.