Perri O’Shaughnessy - Breach Of Promise

Genevieve stepped smoothly in front of Winston.

“Listen. You’re going to have to compromise on this,” she said to Nina. “He’s right. He’s at his peak. He knows what will sway that jury. He has a better chance to crack… the hard nuts, if there are any.”

“No,” said Nina. And this time, she didn’t say she was sorry. What would be the point?

“How about if he does half the argument, and you finish it off?”

“Finish it off is right!” said Winston.

“Milne won’t let us trade off in the final argument,” said Nina.

Winston turned and stalked around the car. He opened the door and sat staring straight ahead, furious.

“Let’s talk some more tonight. I’ll call you,” Genevieve said, putting her hand on Nina’s arm.

“I have to work on this my own way.”

“You act like you’ve lost all faith in us,” said Genevieve. “Have you?”

“Not at all. I’m sorry to make this change at such a late date. It’s nothing against Winston. It’s just… I’m the lead counsel. I can prepare better alone.” In her backyard, where she could address the trees without manipulating, sentimentalizing, influencing… the final argument would be hers.

“Nina, be careful about getting stuck with a decision you might regret. Shouldn’t you think this over?”

“Okay, say what’s on your mind, Genevieve,” Nina said. “Don’t you think I can do it? Is Winston smarter, or a better lawyer? Is that what you’re thinking?” She said it loud so Winston could hear. A few cars over, several people had angled their ears her way.

Genevieve studied her for a moment, then relented, apparently deciding this was one argument she could not win. “I know you won’t fuck up, Nina,” Genevieve said. “I just know you won’t. None of us can afford that.” Unintentionally leaving a sharp air of doubt behind to erode Nina’s confidence, she got into the car and Winston pulled out.

In the courtroom hush, Nina could almost pretend she was in her backyard where she had practiced her summation yesterday afternoon, face-to-face with the dark bark of a tree. All those moon faces out there were pinecones. Better to think of things that way than the other way, which was to admit the hundred judges to her performance. The only ones that counted were the faces of her jury, and those she smiled at before addressing.

She began at the beginning. She laid it out the way she saw it, and a couple of the jurors never started listening, but most of them made the valiant effort to follow. She felt intimate with them. She had wanted only one thing in the last weeks, and that was to connect to each one of them. They weren’t friends; they were closer than that now, and she believed some of them felt the same proprietary interest in her. She hoped so.

“And then Mike moved on.” Nina paced once across the front of the jury box, and then back to the other end, with her head lowered. She didn’t have the art to convey the devastation encapsulated in those words, all she could do was offer this silent prayerful moment to honor Lindy’s suffering.

“But Lindy had nothing to worry about, isn’t that so?” she continued, lifting her head to search the jurors, one by one. Mrs. Lim’s head was cocked her way.

“Right here in court, we all heard him, Mike said she had nothing to worry about. He would ’take care’ of Lindy for life.

“He said that. He felt some duty to take care of her, protect her, for the rest of her life. And how did he do that? You heard. He evicted her, fired her, and made sure his name was on every stick of property. Then he flung in her face a thirteen-year-old agreement that she’d signed when the business was worthless on the premise that he would marry her.”

She paused. “The judge will read you a legal instruction, because it may be applicable in this case. It sounds so simple. And it is simple. A promise, in this case, made in writing by Lindy to give it all away-in consideration of marriage-in this case, in return for Mike’s finally marrying her-is invalidated when there is no marriage.

“And that makes the so-called separate property agreement invalid!”

She looked directly at Cliff Wright. He yawned.

“Yes, it was in writing. But that piece of paper she signed without full knowledge of its contents was not notarized. No lawyer discussed or explained it to her at the time. That grotesque and unfair document did not come about through agreement. No reasonable person can think that under those circumstances she made an informed decision. It’s bogus, made in bad faith, and doesn’t meet reasonable requirements to be legally binding. You should disregard it.”

She went on to Lindy’s strong area, the implied contract argument, Lindy’s twenty years of working alongside Mike. She knew her summation so well that, in the pauses between sentences, she found time to reflect: on the faces of the jurors, intent, bored, tired, eager; on the long days of testimony that had brought them to this point; and on Lindy herself.

She was recounting Lindy’s life, trying to make the jury fully appreciate the loving dedication of this thin, wan woman on whom they must pass judgment. She spoke of the children Mike and Lindy never had, and said that the business, like a child, had belonged to both of them, but unlike a child could be split down the middle. And Lindy deserved half.

“It’s in your hands,” she said finally. “Thank you.”

Nina sat down, feeling drained. She had given Lindy her best.

Riesner, smiling and confident, matter-of-fact, kept his summation even more succinct, introducing Mike’s position with the plainest possible language to give the jury the impression that the decision they were faced with was easy.

“This is a simple situation,” he said, as he came to the finish. “Lindy and Mike break up. But Lindy’s now stuck with this agreement they made years ago. She’s got a real incentive to ’forget’ about it, or dispute its contents. There’s money there for the taking, she figures, and by golly, she wants some of it. She’s got to do something, so she hires a team of fancy lawyers to tell you it’s not a legitimate agreement.

“But it’s right here in writing, ladies and gentlemen. They agreed not to commingle assets. They agreed to keep separate accounts. The business, the properties, those stayed in Mike’s name because they belonged entirely to him. That was the expectation, the agreement. Just so that there would be no misunderstanding, they had a document drafted to make sure they agreed, which they both signed.

“That was the deal. The deal,” he repeated. “Plain and simple. Black and white. In writing. Read the exhibits. And don’t let greed win out this time.”

His last words sat there, gathering energy. Nina heard the shuffling and whispering start up behind her. Wanting to do something to soften the bite of these words, she touched Lindy’s wrist, even though she knew it wouldn’t help.

Only two things remained: to instruct the jury, and to set them loose.

The American jury system suffered from one indefensible flaw-the jury had to sit through the whole trial without knowing the legal framework on which the facts were supposed to hang. How they could, in the end, set aside whatever impromptu conceptual framework they had been using to adopt a new one, no one knew. Worse, the legal instructions were tedious, contradictory, and sometimes even mysterious.

To Nina, the instructions sounded laughably simplistic. Thousands of subtle distinctions, derived from thousands of cases over hundreds of years, flowed from each statement Milne made now, and the jury would hear only the one-syllable version.

The jury looked at Judge Milne, who adjusted his reading glasses. They seemed like a whole different group from the tentative individuals who had been sworn in at the beginning; a new collective had been born. They even dressed more homogeneously. Mrs. Lim’s stiff jackets had disappeared sometime during the trial, along with Kevin Dowd’s knit golf shirts and Maribel Grzegorek’s hair spray.