Jury of One

35

Dinner was late tonight, close to nine P.M., at a Chinese restaurant that Shelly had never patronized, but where they knew Paul Riley by name. Shelly had to concede, she enjoyed walking into a swanky restaurant where the owner ran out to say hello, gave them a nice window table. And she had to admit that she was enjoying Paul’s attention.

“Try to look at the internal investigation,” Paul said to her. He gestured with his fork, which held a piece of kung pao chicken. “If Internal Affairs has worked Sanchez over, there should be some documentation.”

Shelly had a vegetable stir-fry, and scooped healthy portions of the hot sauce into the bowl.

“Wish I could do that.” Paul pointed to his stomach.

“Ulcer?” she asked.

“Something like that. Certain things I have to avoid. I’m pushing it with the kung pao.” He smiled. “I guess I’m not helping my cause too much, am I? I sound older than fifty-one.”

She gave him a generous smile. Something about this guy. She turns him down romantically, he doesn’t run or even brood. He maintains an appropriate demeanor, professional and friendly, and makes no secret of the fact that he’s still making his play. This promise of his, to give Shelly tips throughout the process, had worked nicely for him, giving him the excuse to wine-and-dine her.

“You have to try this, Shelly.”

“No, thanks.”

“Oh.” He wiped his mouth. “Let me guess. Vegetarian.”

“We public-interest lawyers have to be either lesbians or vegetarians. There’s a test.”

He opened his hands. “Forgive me. I’m a Neanderthal. It’s a stereotype, I bought into it.”

“I’m a single thirty-three-year-old,” she said. “I don’t think you’re the first one to think I’m gay.”

“Actually.” He waved a finger, his mouth full of chicken. He thought better of it, shook his head.

“C’mon, Riley. I’m asking.”

“Well”-he wiped his mouth-“I thought you were pretty hard on the teacher. At our trial.”

“The teacher who was screwing her fifteen-year-old student?”

Paul dropped his napkin. “Yeah. You beat her up.”

“And that made me a lesbian?”

Paul laughed. “You seemed hostile to her. That’s all I’m saying.”

Sure, she thought. A man who is hostile is doing his job. A woman who does it is “icy,” or has some other character trait that must explain this very unfeminine trait-maybe she’s a lesbian!

“I was hostile to her,” Shelly said. “She had taken advantage of the boy. She wasn’t exactly sympathetic, Paul.”

“Sure she was. Sure she was.” Paul’s hands gripped the air. “She was thirty-seven, going through a divorce. She was troubled. And she was cute. She was petite.”

“She gets a pass because she was cute?”

“That’s not the point. Listen. Forget about the lesbian thing. But let’s talk about this. I think this might be helpful. If you don’t mind.”

“Trial advice? No, go ahead.”

“Okay, good. A good trial lawyer always listens to other people’s impressions. That’s what the whole thing is about, right? Impressions.”

Shelly nodded.

Paul was animated. “This woman was sympathetic, potentially. Everyone is potentially sympathetic, and everyone is potentially unsympathetic. It’s how you handle them.”

“Fair enough.”

“You had this woman passing these bizarre love letters. Unzipping the kid’s pants on school grounds. Ridiculous stuff. She was leading this boy by the hand. Calling all the shots. I think she would have hanged herself in front of the jury. But you tried to do it to her. You were hostile, Shelly. You came on very strong.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“You had already settled with her. You were after the school. So why brutalize her?”

“Because I wanted the jury mad about what happened. I wanted them to see what had been done to this boy.”

Paul nodded. “Do you think it worked?”

Shelly deflated. “Apparently not.”

“I think the jury felt sorry for her, after you crossed her. And maybe not so pleased with you.” He pointed his finger. “Third guy from the left, back row. Remember him?”

“No.”

“The banker. Most educated guy on the jury. Personable guy.”

“Okay, yeah. I remember him.”

“He raised his eyebrows three or four times during your cross of the teacher. He thought you were going overboard. You lost him. And I think he was the leader of that jury.”

“Hmm. Okay. So he bought into your laid-back, folksy charm.”

“He agreed with my attitude. Do you know what my attitude was, Shelly?”

“Just what I said.”

“No. No.” He shook his head. He stirred the air with his fork. “Put it into a sentence. Put my demeanor into a sentence that summarizes my theme. The entire theme of my case.”

“I-your theme.” She opened her hands. “Your theory was that the school couldn’t have known what this teacher was doing.”

“That was my legal argument, sure. But what was my theme? What was I saying with my attitude?”

“I feel like I’m back in law school,” she said.

“It was no big deal.” He sat back in his chair. “We had eight men and four women. We were upstate, where people are more conservative.”

“More conservative,” Shelly agreed. “As in, less likely to stand for what happened.”

Paul grimaced. “Maybe if the roles were reversed. A male teacher seducing a fifteen-year-old girl? Sure. You would have won that case. But a petite, troubled woman seducing a strapping, athletic, confident fifteen-year-old middle linebacker on the football team? He had a girlfriend he was having sex with, right?”

“Right.”

“So add sexually experienced. If he were a girl, you’d be picturing a lovestruck adolescent, under the spell of a predatory man. With your client, you’re picturing him telling his football teammates and high-fiving.” He shrugged. “It was no big deal.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Maybe so. I wasn’t trying to win an award. I was trying to appeal to the jury in the primitive sense. I never actually said those things, did I?” He took another bite of his food. “People aren’t as progressive as you think. And juries do what they want to do. Have you ever seen a jury deliberate?”

“No. How could you?”

“In a mock setting,” he answered, wiping his mouth again. He wiped his mouth after every bite. A gentleman and a scholar. “Before trial, you do a mock run-through. You try your case to a cross section of ordinary citizens, and then watch them deliberate. And interview them afterward. It’s incredibly enlightening.”

“Tell me.”

“Half the time, they’ve had so many facts thrown at them, they don’t remember them all. Or worse, they remember them wrong. We, the lawyers, know the case inside out, but we have to remember that these people are hearing it for the first time. So what are you left with?”

“Their guts.”

“Exactly. With our case upstate, their gut was that there was no harm, no foul. And that, Ms. Trotter”-he poked his fork at her again-“is why I won.”

Shelly shook her head.

“There are cases with a lot of factual disputes,” Paul continued, “and cases where the hard facts are basically agreed upon, and you argue inferences. With our case, you didn’t have any direct evidence that the school knew about the affair. You had to argue that they should have known. With cases like that, juries go with their guts.”

Shelly considered her case, Alex’s murder trial. She felt like she could not pin down even the most basic of factual points at this moment. But his point was valid nonetheless.

“My case sucks, Riley.” She pushed away her food. “I have a client whom I don’t trust. He might have been the dead cop’s confidential informant, like Sanchez says, or he might have been forced to deal drugs for the dead cop, like my client says.”

“Or both.”

“Yes, or both. And I’m pleading self-defense, and I don’t even know if my client is the one who shot the cop. He says he is but I don’t know.”

“Personally, I thought that was a good move,” he said. “The self-defense plea. You’re not wedded to it.”

“I wish I could take credit. The F.B.I. gave me the idea.”

“But it was your idea to use it as misdirection.”

She groaned and ran her hand over her face. That was one of the reasons. The other was to keep Alex, and herself, safe from unscrupulous members of the city’s law enforcement. God, how tangled this case had become.

She peeked through her fingers and saw that Paul was watching her. His look was free of any social restraint or subtlety, something faintly primitive and longing. He was checking her out. Men stared so much and always seemed to think that they were doing so covertly. Most of them had the subtlety of a chainsaw. Paul, in fairness, at least had thought he had a free shot.

“Get men on the jury,” he said. “They’ll fall all over themselves trying to please you.”

She looked at him differently than before, a slight narrowing of her eyes, an adjusted set to her mouth. If she could hold up a mirror, she might use the word flirtatious.

Paul, unable to hold the stare, chopped his hand on the table. “Alex is caught in the middle. He’s got the federal government pulling him one way, a dirty cop pulling him the other. He’s an-” he looked up at Shelly and froze. This respected trial lawyer, who had stared down ruthless killers and cross-examined mobsters who could have someone killed with a wink and a nod, could not continue with Shelly looking at him so intently.

“-an innocent victim,” he continued. “I think that would-You could-you could sell that, I think.”

She nodded slowly. She appreciated his assistance and the stroking of her ego. Paul returned to eating his entree and Shelly watched him. He was a tad abrasive, but he had real substance, and he took pride in his work. He wasn’t looking for gratitude or praise. He genuinely enjoyed talking trial strategy, imparting some wisdom. Maybe she had completely underestimated him. Yes, that’s what she had done. Paul had stereotyped her, but she had done the same thing to him. Maybe, in varying degrees, she had stereotyped every man, found or assumed the existence of a flaw and highlighted it to the exclusion of all else.

Her heartbeat was racing. But for once, it was not born of confusion or anxiety. The word was clarity.

“This kung pao is good,” he said, without looking at her.

“I think we’re ready for the check,” she said.

Paul looked up, with a quarter of his plate still covered, a mouthful of rice. “You want to go home?”

“I want to go to your home,” she said.

Shelly had seen many feats of athleticism in her time. Karate teachers with lightning-quick reflexes. Athletes who could jump higher or run faster than anyone on the planet. Men who could throw a football sixty yards in the air and hit a receiver in stride. But in her three-plus decades on this earth, she was relatively sure that she had never seen a human being move so quickly as Paul Riley raised his hand and called for the check.