Shadow of Power

28

When Harry and I arrived at the courthouse just after eight in the morning, groups were already starting to form outside. The carnival atmosphere was gone, driven off by tension in the air, like an approaching army, a sense of siege, a feeling that the moment had arrived.

Even with the secrecy imposed by the judge’s guillotine, Plato Quinn’s gag order looming over all our heads, the press has now punctured the seal. Fragments of information concerning the infamous letter are beginning to surface, stories running on cable news and the networks.

By the time we get to the courtroom, Ruiz, the clerk, is busy waving all the lawyers down the hall toward the judge’s chambers. When we get there, Quinn is standing in the middle of the room leaning against the front edge of his desk, watching the television. He puts a finger to his lips to keep us quiet as we file in.

“…news that a copy of the letter was found, what undisclosed sources are now referring to as the ‘Jefferson Letter.’ It is being described by unnamed sources as a document of ‘immense historic importance.’”

It is one of the cable channels. The reporter holding the microphone is staring intently into the camera as he stands in front of the Capitol building in Washington.

“The trial of Carl Arnsberg, a reputed neo-Nazi, for the murder of author Terry Scarborough has been ongoing now for nearly five months. The trial has been hotly covered by the media both here and abroad. Scarborough’s best-selling book Perpetual Slaves, based on the historic language of slavery in the Constitution and dealing with modern race relations, has been an international bestseller for nearly a year. The book sparked racial violence in at least five cities during the forty-seven days that Scarborough was on tour, before he was murdered.

“It was reported last week, and confirmed by court testimony yesterday, that an item of evidence missing from the scene of Scarborough’s murder, and presumably taken by the killer, has surfaced and had somehow been delivered to the law offices of Madriani and Hinds in Southern California. Madriani and Hinds are the lawyers representing the defendant, Carl Arnsberg.

“However, the information disclosed late last night that the item of evidence in question may be the reputed Jefferson Letter places a whole new dimension on the trial.

“Members of Congress are now weighing in. With reports that the letter may contain damaging information regarding African slavery at the time of the American Revolution, information never previously revealed, there are deep concerns in Congress and in the White House that disclosure of this information could spark renewed and broader racial violence.

“This is Howard Chamrow reporting from Washington.”

They cut back to the studio.

“Tom, do we have anything more on this?”

“This story seems to be growing by the minute. According to wire-service stories, the Congressional Black Caucus is now demanding immediate federal action to investigate whether or not the reports are accurate and, if in fact there is a Jefferson Letter, that it be secured by the FBI to make sure that it doesn’t get lost or destroyed.

“And there were also reports, though these are older, that there may be some connection, though it’s very vague, between some kind of a letter, though it’s not clear that it’s the Jefferson Letter, and a member of the United States Supreme Court, Arthur Ginnis. But as I say, those reports were filed last week. They’re very sketchy, and we haven’t heard anything more about this since, so it may have just been rumor. I’m hearing, according to one source, that Justice Ginnis, who is off the Court on sick leave right now, is a history buff and is considered something of a scholar on Jefferson’s papers, so it may be that someone simply contacted him at some point to check this out and that may be his only connection. We’re just not sure.”

With this last little bit, Quinn looks over at me, a mass of wrinkled eyebrows.

I’m having the same thought, wondering if perhaps the video of Scarborough and Ginnis over the table and Teddy Nons’s transcript of their conversation are all just part of a bad dream.

They switch to another story, and Quinn turns off the set.

“Close the door,” he says.

Five of us are in the room. Tuchio and Harmen, his assistant. Harry, myself, and Quinn.

“First question,” says Quinn, “is who leaked the information? Unless somebody raises a hand in the next second or so, I am going to assume that it was nobody in this room.” He waits for a few beats, looks at each of us and says, “At least that’s good news.

“Next order of business, I want to secure the letter, have it locked up in a safe place. Since it’s already been examined by forensics, is there any objection to working with a copy off the evidence cart from now on?”

I look at Harry. He shrugs. We all agree.

“Good. Then I’m gonna lock it up. I’ll have the county treasurer put it in their vault in a locked box.”

“As long as the evidence is preserved,” I tell him. “In the event of an appeal or retrial.”

“I’ll make sure of that,” says the judge. “Next,” he says. “How many of you have copies of the letter?”

I raise my hand. Tuchio raises his.

“You each have one?”

“As far as I know,” says Tuchio. “Nobody else in my office has one. I don’t know about the crime lab.”

“Find out,” says the judge. “You, Mr. Madriani. Do your forensics people have one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out,” he says.

“I want every copy that was made of that letter secured by you, Mr. Tuchio, and you, Mr. Madriani. I want them locked up in a safe. I don’t want your staff reading it, and if they already have read it, I don’t want them talking to anyone about it. Find out,” he says. “Do I make myself clear?”

Nothing but nodding heads in the room.

“When you leave here, call your offices immediately. Have them locate every copy that was made. Then I want to know, by three o’clock this afternoon, how many there are. And make sure you get them all.

“And I’m holding you responsible. If the crime lab has copies, if your forensics experts have copies, get ’ em back. I don’t want to see anything more regarding the contents of that letter on television, and I don’t want to read about it in the newspapers, not until I decide whether what’s written on those pages is gonna come into evidence or whether it’s not.” He looks at his watch.

“Is there some question about that?” I ask.

“About what?” he says.

“About the contents of the letter coming into evidence?” I say.

“It’s something we’re going to have to talk about,” says Quinn. “I think it’s pretty clear to all of us at this point that we don’t have much time. Pretty soon I have a feeling that I’m going to be up to my hips in federal agents, U.S. Attorneys, and federal court orders, so the sooner we can wrap this trial the better.

“Are you ready with your witnesses?” He looks at me.

I nod.

“Good, then let’s get movin’,” he says.

Tuchio and Harmen are out of their chairs, moving toward the door. Quinn is wrestling with his robe, struggling to get it on, running over me, as I try to get in his way.

“Your Honor, before we leave, I have to know whether I’m going to be allowed to introduce the contents of that letter into evidence and, if not, what your legal basis is for denying admission.”

He looks at his watch as he’s trying to move around me. “Not now,” he says. “This afternoon we’ll talk about it.”

“You got that, Mr. Tuchio?”

“Got it, Your Honor.”

“I’ll be prepared by then to entertain all arguments. If we need time for points and authorities”-he’s already heading down the hall toward the bench-“it can be arranged. Otherwise I’ll be prepared to enter a ruling on the restaurant video and the contents of the letter at that time. Now, let’s go.”

By ten o’clock, before the midmorning break, you can hear the drumbeat, the resonant pounding like that of Zulu warriors striking spears against their shields on the street outside. Periodically there is the electronic bleep and blare of an emergency vehicle.

Through all this we work with our witness. Fortunately, he is solid.

Robert Stepro is our resident forensics expert, the man who accompanied the envelope and its contents to the crime lab and watched as they processed and examined the bloodied side of the letter and the samples of hair.

This morning Stepro is equipped with enlarged photographs, taken with a macro lens and mounted on poster board, so that minute specks of blood appear the size of a nickel.

I sense that Tuchio has the feeling of a big-league baseball manager, ahead on the scoreboard but with the game about to be called on account of rain.

With the commotion growing outside and the risk that we may have to evacuate the courthouse, Tuchio tells the judge that he’s prepared to stipulate that the bloodied surface of the letter matches the shadow on the leather portfolio and that the letter is in fact the item taken from Scarborough’s hotel room that morning.

I insist on presenting at least the principal evidence, a prima facie case, so that there is no doubt in the minds of jurors when they go in to deliberate.

It’s clear that Tuchio does not intend to contest either this or the hair evidence contained in the envelope. His forensics experts have told him that any dispute over these items is a nonstarter.

It’s also clear that Tuchio has already settled on a changed theory: two killers working in tandem, Carl and a blond compatriot who slipped the envelope under our office door in the middle of the night. He will no doubt embellish this with hints of complicity by our office in order to tip the scales enough that jurors will excuse the inconsistencies in his own case.

In a period of less than two hours, Stepro, using his poster-board photographs on an easel in front of the jury, nails down the comparison evidence of the shadowed leather portfolio and the bloodied letter. The pattern of blood on the back of the letter at the edges where paper meets leather matches perfectly with spots of blood on the portfolio.

You would not have to be a scientist to see that, magnified many times, traces of blood-numerous, minute, oblong ringlets-had been severed by the covering edge of the paper. When the letter was placed back in the shadowed rectangle on the portfolio, these detached ovals were once again complete.

When asked for his opinion, Stepro states, “Better than any fingerprint, the complexity of the pattern and the countless intersecting matches between paper and leather put the issue beyond any possible doubt. The four folded pieces of paper were without question the object that created the shadow on leather.”

Stepro also testifies that examination of the paper reveals that the documents, the four pages, were stapled only one time. Further microscopic inspection of the staple at the folds in the metal where it was bent and closed to bind the pages indicates that it was probably driven in by an electric stapling machine and that, because of the tight closure, it is his opinion that no pages were removed or appear to be missing.

Finally I ask him about fingerprints on the pages and whether any were found.

“We found several fingerprints. I believe there were at least thirty-two full or partial prints on the four pages.”

“Were you able to lift these, and were you able to identify whom they belonged to?”

“We lifted all of them, and they all belonged to the same person, the victim, Terrance Scarborough.”

Ginnis knew exactly what he was doing in the video when he refused to touch the letter over the dinner table in the restaurant. When he finally reached out to dispose of the letter, to get it off the table, he did it with the butter knife, flipping the pages back to Scarborough.

According to Stepro, and included in the police crime lab’s report, is the finding that four small bloody spots on the folded surface of the letter, the spattered side, as well as a single blood spot on the reverse side, show traces of fiber transfer, similar to the spots found on and inside Scarborough’s attaché case, evidence of the blood-soaked cotton gloves of the killer.

When I finish with the witness, Tuchio gets up and asks a single question: whether the witness, during the course of his examination of the four pages, examined the writing or read the contents of the communication written on them.

The judge nearly swallows his tongue.

Before I can even object, the witness responds and says, “No. I was instructed by my client not to read the contents of the correspondence for the reason that it was confidential.”

“No further questions.” Tuchio takes his seat.

That he would pop this question in this way tells me two things. One is that Tuchio is as convinced as I am, despite what Quinn may be saying, that the contents of the Jefferson Letter will at some point be admitted into evidence and read to the jury. Second is that if it must come in, Tuchio would prefer that it come in now, before the defense has completed presenting its case. He’s hoping that this might dissipate its effect. Or at least remove it as far as possible from the point of deliberations so that its impact on the jury will be lessened, once they’re sedated a bit by the passage of time, closing arguments, and other evidence.

For the first time I can recall, ever in a trial, the judge has lunch brought in for the lawyers. With the pressure on, he’s not letting any of us out of the courthouse. He tells court staff to stay close, to eat in the cafeteria. The race to a restaurant is not worth the risk of the melee outside, and Quinn wants everybody back in court by one o’clock.

A little past noon, and the rhythmic pounding of demonstrators, the ceaseless chants and yelling, against the pitched wail of electronic sirens outside, has the constancy and power of roiling surf.

It seems to overwhelm, until I realize that there are at least six solid walls of reinforced concrete between those of us in the building and the hell that is happening out on the street. I cannot fathom what the bedlam must sound like there.

Every few minutes Quinn takes reports from one of the senior bailiffs, updating him on the situation on the street in the event that it becomes necessary to evacuate the building. So far there have been no shots fired and no fatalities, but eight officers have been hospitalized and an untold number of civilians have been caught up in the burgeoning battle and injured.

According to the bailiff, a delegation from the local chapter of the NAACP and the National Lawyers Guild have appealed for calm, while another group has appeared at the courthouse’s main entrance and demanded a copy of the Jefferson Letter. One of the deputies, a lieutenant, told them that he would relay their request to the judge, who would take it under advisement.

By one o’clock we’re back in the courtroom. Quinn is running a taut ship at this point, hustling to get the case to the jury before the folks outside can burn the building down. His biggest fear is more revelations regarding the letter. But sooner or later it has to come out.

Our last two witnesses are both educators, one more surprise for Tuchio and, if the letter comes in, what may prove to be a hideous shocker for the nation.

Kathy Lafair is a teacher who also holds a joint degree in clinical and educational psychology and has been tucked into our witness list for months. She has given us nothing in writing that we would have to turn over to the prosecution, though Harry and I know what she will say.

Lafair teaches classes in the evenings at a school in the eastern area of the county. It is part of an extension program for special education, serving adults who dropped out of school when they were kids due to learning disabilities and who now find themselves locked out of the system because they lack basic skills.

Under oath and on the stand, she tells the jury that with counseling, encouragement, and sometimes one-on-one tutoring, some of these adults can find their way back to the dreams they once had as children, to learn and to enjoy more productive lives.

Sadly, however, this was not the case for Carl Arnsberg.

Harry was the one who discovered the problem, and he felt bad about it. He’d made a wisecrack about Carl early in the case, just after the three of us had met for the first time at the jail.

Harry and I were talking, and the issue was whether Scarborough’s book might have set Carl off, especially if he were a nutcase. Harry brushed it aside with one of his glib comments.

The comment came back to haunt him two weeks later in a meeting with Carl to go over some items of evidence delivered to us by the D.A.’s office. By that time Harry had some suspicions, but he wasn’t sure. He handed Carl a slip of paper and told him to take a look at it. Harry was busy hunting for other documents in his briefcase.

Carl picked up the slip of paper, studied it for a few seconds, and then put it down.

Harry regarded Carl and said, “What do you think?”

“Oh, it’s fine. Looks good.”

The half slip of paper was a form with some printing on it and some boxes to be checked. Two of the boxes had X’s typed in them. It was the charging document for “special circumstances”-the legal justification, and the basis if he is convicted, for the State of California to execute Carl Everett Arnsberg.

Carl is illiterate. It’s not that he has difficulty reading. He can’t read a word. He never told us, didn’t say anything. Carl has been hiding this from people all his life. We didn’t know the full story until he gave us the name of Kathy Lafair.

This morning she sits on the stand and smiles at him.

Carl’s head is down. He glances up at her every once in a while, but he won’t look her in the eye. Kathy Lafair is just another reminder of failure in Carl’s life, one of many.

“Can you tell the jury how you came to know the defendant, Carl Arnsberg?” I ask her.

“He was one of my students,” she says. “For about six weeks. Three times a week at night, he would come to classes.”

“And what did you teach?”

“Basic reading comprehension.”

“Can you tell the jury what that is?”

“It’s what you call beginner’s reading. What you would normally teach to children in kindergarten and first grade.”

“Was Carl able to read at all?”

“No.” She looks over at him. “Carl, you shouldn’t be ashamed. It’s not your fault.”

“Your Honor, I’m going to object to this.” Tuchio is up out of his chair. “If she wants to testify, that’s fine. But to be having conversations with the defendant…”

“Mr. Tuchio, relax,” says the judge. “Sit down.” He looks at the witness. “Go ahead, Mr. Madriani.”

“When you say he couldn’t read, did he have the ability to comprehend any words typed or written on a page? For example, could he recognize his own name if it were printed or typed?”

“No.”

“And you know this for a fact?”

“I do.”

“Before we go any further, can you tell the court what degrees or special training you have?”

“I hold a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree in clinical and educational psychology from UCLA.”

“As a clinical and educational psychologist, can you tell the jury what you do?”

“I do a good deal of testing. I administer standardized tests and conduct evaluations.”

“To what purpose do you do this?”

“To determine whether students suffer from any recognized learning disabilities. It’s diagnostic. There’s a wide range of learning disabilities, from hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder to autism and dyslexia and more,” she says.

“And how long have you been doing this?”

“Twenty-two years.”

“Did you have occasion to conduct any tests on the defendant, Carl Arnsberg?”

“I did.”

“When?”

“Let’s see. That would have been about two years ago.”

“So the tests were not performed in connection with this case?”

“No. They were related to his schooling.”

This is important, to avoid a claim by the prosecution that we had tests conducted and failed to disclose the results in discovery.

“And as a result of these tests, were you able to determine whether Carl suffered from any known or recognized learning disability?”

“Yes. He suffers from dyslexia.”

“Can you tell the jury what that is?”

“Dyslexia manifests itself in an inability to process certain visual signals, usually symbols, letters, and written words. It can affect verbal abilities as well, but that’s not as common.”

“Is it curable? Can it be treated?”

“Not in the ordinary sense. You can’t prescribe medication for it. There’s no pill you can take. It can be overcome in some cases, but depending on the severity it can be very difficult, very frustrating, and in some cases it can take years. Basically what you’re doing is therapy, educational intervention, but it’s usually more effective in early childhood. The older the person is, the more difficult it may be to treat.”

“What about in Carl’s case?”

“Carl had a problem,” she says. “Because no one knew he suffered from dyslexia. He managed to hide it very well. His parents didn’t know. He didn’t know himself until he was tested and diagnosed in our office.”

“And how old was he then?”

“I think he was twenty or twenty-one years old.”

“So he went all the way through school with dyslexia, and he never knew it.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not uncommon, especially years ago. It went undiagnosed in many cases.”

“Can you explain to the jury what it’s like to suffer from dyslexia?”

“The best example I can give,” she says, “is a ciphering machine. It would be as if every written message that you received was enciphered in a code and everyone else in the world was given a decoding machine, except you. They would be getting and sending messages constantly. You would be getting messages, but you wouldn’t be able to understand any of them. And you wouldn’t be able to send any either, because you didn’t understand how to encode them.”

“So I imagine that would be very frustrating.”

“That’s the problem,” she says. “It’s the frustration and constant anxiety that generally overwhelms the person. But it’s a very slow, agonizing process.”

“How do you mean?”

She explains that it generally starts in childhood when the sufferer is just beginning to socialize with other children. As they all begin school, the other children progress, because the learning process is so heavily dependent upon reading skills. This leaves the person suffering from dyslexia looking at those around him and wondering why they’re progressing and he’s not. This results in a multitude of other problems-acting out in an effort to compensate for the inability to learn, aggression, feelings of inadequacy, depression, a whole range of psychological problems. “Depending on the child, many of these attendant problems become worse as the child gets older with major problems in adolescence, in the teenage years.”

“Can the frustration result in violence?”

“It can, and there are many documented cases of this. Studies show that a considerable number of inmates incarcerated in correctional facilities suffer from dyslexia. Of course, it’s not possible to know how their lives might have changed had this been diagnosed in early childhood and the disorder remedied.”

“Does dyslexia have anything to do with intelligence, how smart or how bright a person may be?”

“Albert Einstein suffered from dyslexia. Does that answer your question? There is absolutely no correlation at all between intelligence and dyslexia. Go online sometime and check the lists of names-celebrities, inventors, writers. Agatha Christie, if you can imagine. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison were both dyslexic.”

“How do you account for the fact that some people are able to cope with and overcome the disorder and others aren’t?”

“That’s impossible to say. In some cases it may have to do with the severity of the disorder. In others it may have more to do with the fact that they had someone around them in their early developmental years who was willing and able to spend the enormous amount of time that is required to overcome dyslexia.”

“With regard to Carl, based on your testing and evaluation, can you tell the jury how severe the dyslexia was in his case?”

“Severe. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most severe, I would rate Carl at nine.”

I walk to the evidence cart and collect Scarborough’s book, Perpetual Slaves. I show the witness the cover. I call her attention to the bold lettering, the title. In your opinion, if I were to show this to Carl, the title of this book, would he be able to read it?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t mean this in a bad way, Carl.” Then she looks back at me. “There isn’t a chance.”

“And if there was some correspondence-say, a letter, a handwritten letter-and I told Carl to go and find that letter, would he have the ability to distinguish that letter based on the writing from other letters and correspondence that might be at that location?”

“No.”

“Thank you. Your witness.”

Tuchio gets up, looks at the witness. “Ms. Lafair, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Would the defendant’s condition, dyslexia, interfere with his ability to watch television or process visual images such as video, news programs, things like that?”

“Generally, no. But if there was any writing on the screen, he wouldn’t be able to read it.”

“But he could understand the sounds coming from the television, the spoken words and the pictorial images?”

“Generally, yes.”

“Let me ask you about the hypothetical situation that Mr. Madriani raised, the handwritten letter in the room and the defendant’s ability to distinguish it from other correspondence. Let me give you a little variation on the theme. If there was a handwritten letter in that room and the letter in question was written in a unique color of ink, say, a tobacco color, brown as opposed to blue or black. If I told Carl to go and get the letter written in the brown ink and there was no other letter written in that color ink, would he be able to distinguish that letter from other letters?”

“Dyslexia generally doesn’t affect the ability to distinguish colors.”

“So he would be able to distinguish in that case?”

“In the circumstances that you outlined, yes.”

“I have no further questions, Your Honor.”

Tuchio has taken half of the loaf away from me. He will argue that it didn’t matter that Carl couldn’t read Scarborough’s book, because what fired him up and sent him over the edge were the television interviews with the victim. And as for the letter, if he knew the color of the ink, he would be able to find the Jefferson Letter. Of course, this begs the question: Why would someone suffering from severe dyslexia want a handwritten letter, especially if it had no intrinsic value because it was a copy, not the original?

The end of the day, and we do battle in chambers over Quinn’s desk. There are two issues, the restaurant videotape showing Ginnis and Scarborough quibbling over the letter spread out on the middle of the table and the Jefferson Letter itself.

To be honest, it’s a hard call. The video, if Quinn would let me have it, shows the victim with Ginnis across the table, as well as the letter in the middle between them. With a little maneuvering room, Teddy Nons’s transcript, and a few carefully timed winks and twitches as the jury watches the video, it wouldn’t be difficult to get them leaning in the right direction, into Ginnis’s lap over dinner.

The only problem is, I promised them a shocker in my opening statement, and moving pictures of Ginnis, even with a scowl, isn’t going to cut it. And there’s no group on earth less forgiving than twelve angry people sleeping in hotel rooms who have been promised a punch line that isn’t delivered.

Right out of the box, Quinn is worried that disclosure regarding the contents of the letter is the equivalent of tossing jet fuel on a fire.

“Can you guarantee that there won’t be violence if that letter is read?” Quinn is looking at me.

But Tuchio pipes up first. “Besides, there is no way to know whether the letter is authentic.”

“Let me suggest that we put the letter aside for the moment and take up the question of the video,” I tell them.

“Well, there’s no basis for that to come in at all,” says Tuchio. “It’s hearsay, and there’s still no foundation. Good luck,” he says.

I go back to my original argument that it’s all one big package; pictures of the letter in the video serve to verify that the two documents, the one in the video and the item taken from the murder scene, are the same thing. Since the video shows the interested players huddled over the item, why not let the jury in on the secret so that everybody knows?

There’s not the slightest chance in the world that Quinn is going to go for this, and before I can lean back in my chair, he says so. “The video’s off the table. It’s not coming in.”

Precisely, and since every judge wants to play Solomon, we’re down to the basic questions: What part of the baby is he willing to give me, and how do we sever it?

“We could stay here and argue all night,” I say. “But Mr. Tuchio made a point, and I think it’s a good one.”

“You agree with something Tuchio said?” Quinn stares at me.

“At this particular moment, I’m tired, Your Honor. Forgive me.”

“No, that’s all right. What were these words of wisdom?”

“The question of authenticity. We will stipulate to the fact that there’s no way we can prove that the letter is authentic, but that’s not really at issue here.”

“It sure is,” says Tuchio.

“No, the letter is physical evidence taken from the scene of a murder. The presumption, and it’s a reasonable one, is that the killer took it. The unanswered question is why. Now, if the pages on that paper were blank, there wouldn’t be an issue. We would have to tell the jury that the idiot took blank paper. Except they aren’t blank. There are words on them. But here’s the kicker. We’re not offering those words to prove the truth of what is stated in the letter, so there’s no issue of hearsay. The question goes to motive. Why did the killer take the letter in the first place, and that’s a question of fact for the jury.”

Quinn is following all this. “He’s right.”

“No,” says Tuchio. “He’s not. There’s still a question of authenticity. Is the letter real?”

“No,” I say. “In this setting, as a matter of law, it doesn’t matter whether it’s real. The killer took it because he had a reason to take it. That reason is an issue for the jury.”

“Well, why do you think he took it?” says Tuchio.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out. There is a question of authenticity, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the law,” I say. “Or this case. It has to do with public safety.”

And here comes the hook for Quinn. “There are probably a few thousand people out there who’d like to set fire to this building right now, and God knows how many other buildings around the county. And when they find out what’s in that letter, they’re going to want to redouble their efforts. Those are the people who should be concerned about the authenticity of the letter.

“So let me make a suggestion. Tomorrow you turn off the lights in the courtroom and we go dark. The eyes of the world are on this place right now. The federal government is threatening to come and take the letter away. The court sends out a press release tonight, to every media outlet it can find. In the press release, you tell the world that there is a letter. It purports to be in the hand of Jefferson, but the court cannot verify whether the letter is real or not. Furthermore we may never be able to answer the question of whether it’s real, because we don’t have the original; we don’t know where it is or whether it even exists. That should pour cold water on hot heads. When they realize that the party favor may not pop, that there’s no there there, we can hope their feet will get sore from standing around and they’ll go home. If we’re lucky.”

“Or,” says Tuchio, “the court could order that the letter not be read in court. Much simpler,” he says.

“But to draw the jury right to the edge of the railing,” I tell Quinn, “to produce evidence of blood-spattered paper and to argue in closing that this paper is the reason the victim was murdered without telling them what was written on it is to invite them to take out their disappointment on the defendant.”

“No, I like Mr. Madriani’s idea,” says Quinn. “Besides, his analysis on the law is right. There’s no legal basis to keep the letter out. If I let you convince me to do that, and you convict his client, it’s just going to get overturned on appeal. Waste of time and money. On top of that, whether the letter gets read here or someplace else, the problem is the same-fires all over. So as long as I still have the letter, why don’t we do something judicious with it?”

There’s a knock on the door. It opens, and the bailiff sticks his head in. “Your Honor, the governor’s on the phone.”

“The governor?”

“Yeah, they got a big problem up in South Central L.A. He wants to talk to you.”

“Man has a problem. And I have a solution. Good timing!” says Quinn. “Is my secretary out there?”

“No.” The bailiff is halfway down the hall. “She went home.”

He looks at me. “You any good at writing press releases? I have to take a phone call.”