Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

“These people are here to make sure that your time on jury duty is as pleasant and comfortable as we can make it.” Quinn makes it sound like a party, cookies and milk over photographs of Scarborough, his head all bloodied by the claws of a hammer.

Some of the jurors are looking around, taking their first gander out at the bleachers, where there is standing room only and a sea of serious faces, some of them still flushed by the threats from the judge. The jurors are probably realizing for the first time how important they are, the random hand of government having given them the power, like the emperor with his arm outstretched, closed fist with thumb protruding, suspended over the question of life and death.

Quinn does a few more introductions. He starts on us.

“You already know Mr. Tuchio, the district attorney.”

The Tush gives them a big smile and waves from his chair.

“And Ms. Harmen, who will be assisting him.”

She nods and favors them with the pearly whites.

“And of course counsel for the defense, Mr. Madriani.” The judge nods pleasantly toward me. “I see Mr. Hinds is not with us today.”

“He couldn’t make it, Your Honor.” I could tell him that Harry has become the recycling king, buried under a pile of last-minute paper by Tuchio, but why bother?

Quinn skips right over my client, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, the reason we’re all here, and instead finds himself looking at Herman, whom he doesn’t know.

I get up out of my chair, fingering the middle button on my suit coat, and give the jury my best college smile.

I introduce Herman, who stands and half bows toward the jury. “And last but not least my client, Carl Arnsberg. Carl.” I gesture for him to stand.

This catches Carl completely off guard. Nobody told him he was going to have to stand up and meet people. He becomes what he is, a kid stumbling over his feet trying to get up. When he finally makes it, he looks over at the jury and offers a kind of sheepish grin that slowly blossoms into a full smile. This becomes infectious when a few of the jurors begin to smile back.

Tuchio is halfway out of his chair, worried, I suspect, that Arnsberg might try to say something, like, Please don’t kill me. I didn’t do it. This is matched by Quinn’s stark expression up on the bench, judge in the headlights.

It is one of those moments when dumb luck plays a hand, surprise aided by awkward innocence and the ill-fitting suit that Herman picked off the rack giving Carl the image of a prairie schoolboy. All that’s missing is a stalk of hay dangling from his teeth.

It’s a good thing none of the jurors have X-ray vision, or they’d be looking at the edgy artwork, swastikas, and other social commentary tattooed on his arms and upper body.

Carl stands there grinning, casting an occasional shy downward glance. The judge finally pushes his heart back down into his chest and says, “Thank you, Mr. Madriani.”

Under the glare from the bench, I put a hand on Carl’s shoulder, and we both quietly sit.

Quinn is not happy having his dog and pony show with the jury hijacked. But on the scale of things at the moment it is not worth his wrath.

When you’re defending, the one thing you don’t want sitting in the chair next to you at a murder trial is the invisible man, a silent, emotionless cipher of a client charged with crimes so vile that normal people have trouble imagining them.

When I look over, Tuchio is hunched at his table, working over the notes for his opening statement, his pen whittling away. He has a kind of benign no-crime, no-foul grin on his face, though you can bet he is seething inside. If he wants to put Carl to death, he will have to burn out of their brains the image of the defendant standing in front of the jury, smiling at them with the homespun geniality of Will Rogers.

“I’m going to give the jury a brief break. Ten-minute recess,” says Quinn. “I will see counsel in chambers.”

en minutes turns into an hour, a good part of which is spent with Quinn giving me more than a small slice of his mind. “If you want me to introduce your client to the jury, I’ll be more than happy to do so,” he tells me. “But under proper guidelines and with clear instructions to the defendant that under no circumstances is he to make any statement or say anything.”

“He didn’t, Your Honor.”

“Damn lucky for you,” he says. “And what’s this business with your investigator? Where the hell is Hinds?” He reminds me that Harry is assigned the penalty phase of the trial in the event that Arnsberg is convicted and the jury has to decide whether he gets life or death. “He’s supposed to be here.”

“When the evidence comes in,” I tell him. “When the first witness is sworn, he’ll be here.”

“I asked you where he was.”

“You want to know where he is, ask Mr. Tuchio.”

Quinn looks over at the prosecutor, who is lounging on the judge’s couch against the wall in the corner. “I don’t know where he is, Your Honor.”

“He’s back at the office checking for roadside bombs tucked into the truckload of materials from the victim’s computers that your office delivered to us at eight o’clock this morning.”

“Oh, that,” says Tuchio.

At this, Quinn looks up from his desk, flustered. “Those were supposed to be delivered a week ago.”

Tuchio’s turn to wiggle.

“What about it?” says the judge.

The Tush fishes the affidavit from his IT people out of his briefcase. “We sent the court a copy as soon as we got it,” he says.

“What the hell is this?” Quinn gets his glasses on and starts reading. “Why wasn’t I told?”

“We didn’t know ourselves until the last minute,” says Tuchio.

The judge tries to throw the paper. It seems to add to his frustration when it lands with all the force of a fallen leaf on the blotter in the middle of his desk.

“Get Hinds over here,” he says.

“When do we get to look at the materials?” I ask. “I know it’s a small point, but they may be central to our case.”

“You think maybe Scarborough left a suicide note in his computer?” says Tuchio. “‘I’m angry with the world. I’m depressed. P.S.-I’m gonna beat my brains out with a hammer.’”

“I want it on record”-I ignore him-“that this stuff came late. That the cops didn’t even see it before they charged.”

“You can look at it over the weekend,” says Quinn.

The fact that the cops haven’t even had the time, let alone the inclination, to look at these leaves open the question whether there are e-mails with death threats strewn all over Scarborough’s hard drives. And God knows what else.

“It’s a safe bet, given the subject matter of his writings, that there were probably regional chapters of ‘Hate Scarborough’ committees,” I tell them.

“Yes, but did they all have their fingerprints on the hammer?” says Tuchio.

“For all you know, there could have been a line forming outside that hotel room door with people paying quarters to take a whack at the back of his head,” I tell him.

“Yes, and they all wiped their fingerprints off the hammer except your client.”

“Enough,” says the judge. “You.” He points at me. “Call your partner. Get him on the phone and tell him to get over here now.”

It takes Harry almost an hour in midmorning traffic to cross the bridge, drive downtown, park his car, and hoof it to the courthouse.

Quinn is angry at my antics with Carl in front of the jury, so he takes it out on Harry. He lets us cool our heels while he sits in chambers as the clock edges toward the lunch hour, then sends Ruiz out to announce that his lordship has released the jury and gone to lunch. Court will reconvene at one-thirty.