Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor

CHAPTER 1

A Matter of Honor

If Marvin the Maven tells me not to yell in closing argument, I don’t yell. Marvin knows. He’s never tried a case, but he’s seen more trials than most lawyers. Drifting from courtroom to courtroom in search of the best action, he glimpses eight or nine cases a day. Five days a week for the last seventeen years since he closed up his shoe store in Brooklyn and headed south.

Some lawyers don’t listen to Marvin and his friends-Saul the Tailor and Max (Just Plain) Seltzer-and they pay the price. Me, I listen. The courthouse regulars can’t read the fine print on the early-bird menus, but they can spot perjury from the third row of the gallery.

Marvin, Saul, and Max already told me I botched jury selection. Not that lawyers pick jurors anyway. We exclude those we fear, at least until we run out of challenges.

“You’re meshuga, you leave number four on,” Marvin told me on the first day of trial.

“He’s a hardworking butcher,” I said defensively. “Knows the value of a dollar. Won’t give the store away.”

Marvin ran a liver-spotted hand over his toupee, fingering the part. “Lookit his eyes, boychik. Like pissholes in the snow. Plus, I betcha he lays his fat belly on the scale with the lamb chops. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit.”

I told myself Marvin was wrong and that he hadn’t intended to shower me with spittle to make his point.

Some lawyers hire psychologists to help with jury selection. They’ll tell you that people who wear bright colors crave attention and feel for the underdog. Plaintiffs jurors. Dark colors are worn by introverts who don’t care about people. Defendant’s jurors. Hoop earrings and costume jewelry are good for the plaintiff, Rolex watches and three-karat diamonds for the defense. To me, that’s a lot of malarkey. I pick jurors who smile when I smile and don’t fold their bodies into tight balls when I stand close.

No second-guessing now. Closing argument. A time to sing the praises of freedom of the press, of the great newspaper that fulfills the constitutional function of blah-blah-blah. And Marvin said don’t yell. No emotion. The jury don’t care about the Foist Amendment. Besides, Nick Wolf is a great schmoozer, Marvin told me. The jurors love him. Number five, a Cuban receptionist, keeps batting her three-inch eyelashes at him.

And I thought she had trouble with her contacts.

The four men on the jury are your real problem, Marvin said. One black, two Cubans, one Anglo, all men’s men. Nick’s kind of guys.

So what am I, chopped liver?

He gave me that knowing look. Ey, Lassiter, it ain’t your jury; it ain’t your day. And with that, the gang took off, a kidnapping trial down the hall drawing them away.

Nick Wolf’s lawyer, H. T. Patterson, yelled in closing argument. Hell, he sang, chanted, ranted, rocked, and roiled. A spellbinder and a stemwinder, H.T. worked the jurors like a Holy Roller. Which he was at the Liberty City Colored Baptist Church while attending law school at night in the days before Martin Luther King.

“They subjected Nick Wolf, a dedicated public servant, to scorn and ridicule, to calumny, and obloquy,” Patterson now crooned in a seductive singsong. “They lied and distorted. They defamed and defiled. They took his honorable name and soiled it. Besmirched, tainted, and tarnished it! Debased, degraded, and disparaged it! And what should a man do when they stain, sully, and smear his good name?”

Change it, I thought.

“What should a man of honor do when those with pens sharp as daggers poison his reputation, not in whispers but in howls, five hundred three thousand, six hundred seventy-nine times?”

Five hundred three thousand, six hundred seventy-nine being the Sunday circulation of the Miami Journal, and Sunday being the day of choice for fifty-megaton, rock-’em-sock-’em, take-no-prisoners journalism. Which is what the Journal is noted for, though I thought the offending story-STATE ATTORNEY VIOLATED CAMPAIGN LAWS-lacked characteristic punch. Not sharing my opinion was Nicholas G. Wolf, bona fide local high-school football star, decorated Vietnam war hero, former policeman, and currently state attorney for the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in and for Dade County, Florida. The article accused Wolf of various technical violations of the campaign contributions law plus one unfortunate reference to accepting money from a reputed drug dealer.

“The man should seek redress in a court of law,” Patterson solemnly declared, answering his own question, as lawyers are inclined to do. “He should come before a jury of his peers, citizens of the community. So, my friends and neighbors, ladies and gentlemen of this jury, it is time to pay the piper…”

I didn’t think the metaphor held up to scrutiny, but the jury didn’t seem to notice. The men all nodded, and number five stopped fluttering her eyelashes and now stared mournfully at poor, defamed Nick Wolf.

“It is time to assess damages; it is judgment day, it is time to levy the penalty for these knowing, reckless lies. And I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, is it too much to ask that the Miami Journal, that behemoth on the bay, that monster of malediction, pay ten dollars for each time it lied, yes, ten dollars for each time it sent its message of malice into our midst?”

I never did better than Cs in math, but I know when a lawyer is asking for five million bucks from a jury. Meaning H. T. Patterson hoped for two million, and I was beginning to wonder if taking this case to trial was so damn smart after all.

“A letter of apology, a front-page retraction, and fifty grand might do it,” I told the publisher six months earlier in his bayfront office.

Symington Foote bristled. “We don’t pay extortion. A public official is fair game, and we had a bona fide tip that Wolf was taking dirty money.”

“From a tipster who refuses to come forward and a reporter who won’t even reveal his source,” I reminded the publisher, trying to knock him off the soapbox.

“But we don’t need to prove the story was true, do we, counselor?”

He had me there. As a public official, Nick Wolf could win his libel suit only if he proved that the newspaper knew the story was false or had recklessly disregarded the truth. A nice concept for judges. For jurors, it’s the same as in most lawsuits. If they like the plaintiff’s attitude and appearance more than the defendant’s, the plaintiff wins. Simple as that.

The case had been cleanly tried. A few histrionics from Patterson, but his tricks were mostly subtle. When I stood to make an objection, he would move close, letting me tower above him. He was a bantam rooster in a white linen three-piece suit, and alongside was a bruiser representing the unrestrained power of a billion-dollar company.

So here I was about to deliver my closing argument in the big barn of a courtroom on the sixth floor of the Dade County Courthouse, an aging tower of gray limestone where buzzards of the winged variety soar overhead and the seersuckered birds beat their wings inside. Heavy drapes matted with dust covered the grimy windows. The walnut paneling had darkened over the decades, and an obsolete air-conditioning system rumbled noisily overhead.

Several years ago the electorate was asked to approve many millions of dollars in bonds for capital projects around the county. The voters said yea to a new zoo and nay to a new courthouse, expressing greater regard for the animals of the jungle than for the animals of Flagler Street. And who could blame them?

Now I stood and approached the jury box, all six-two, two-hundred-something pounds of me. I tried not to get too close, avoiding the jurors’ horizontal space. I shot a glance at the familiar sign on the wall above the judge’s bench: WE WHO LABOR HERE ONLY SEEK THE TRUTH. There ought to be a footnote: subject to the truth being misstated by perjurious witnesses, obfuscated by sleazy lawyers, excluded by inept judges, and overlooked by lazy jurors.

Planting myself like an oak in front of the jury, I surveyed the courtroom. Symington Foote sat at the defense table next to the chair I had just abandoned. The publisher fingered his gold cuff links and eyed me skeptically. Behind him in the row of imitation leather chairs just in front of the bar were two representatives of the newspaper’s libel insurance company. Both men wore charcoal-gray three-piece suits. They flew in from Kansas City for the trial and had that corn-fed, pale-faced, short-haired, tight-assed look of insurance adjusters everywhere. I wouldn’t have a drink with either one of them if stroking the client’s pocketbook wasn’t part of my job. In the front row of the gallery sat three senior partners of Harman and Fox, awaiting my performance with anxiety that approached hysteria. They were more nervous than I was, and I’m prone to both nausea and diarrhea just before closing argument. Neither Mr. Harman nor Mr. Fox was there, the former having died of a stroke in a Havana brothel in 1952, the latter living out his golden years in a Palm Beach estate-Chateau Renard-with his sixth wife, a twenty-three-year-old beautician from Barbados. We were an old-line law firm by Miami standards, our forebears having represented the railroads, phosphate manufacturers, citrus growers, and assorted other robber barons and swindlers from Florida’s checkered past. These days we carried the banner of the First Amendment, a load lightened considerably by our enormous retainer and hefty hourly rates.

Much like a railroad, a newspaper is a glorious client because of the destruction it can inflict. Newspaper trucks crush pedestrians in the early-morning darkness; obsolete presses mangle workmen’s limbs; and the news accounts themselves-the paper’s very raison d’etre, as H. T. Patterson had just put it in a lyrical moment-can poison as surely as the deadliest drug. All of it, fodder for the law firm. So the gallery was also filled with an impressive collection of downtown hired guns squirming in their seats with the fond hope that the jury would tack seven digits onto the verdict form and leave The Miami Journal looking for new counsel. When I analyzed it, my only true friend inside the hall of alleged justice was Marvin the Maven, and he couldn’t help me now.

I began the usual way, thanking the jurors, stopping just short of slobbering my gratitude for their rapt attention. I didn’t point out that number two had slept through the second day and that number six was more interested in what he dug out of his nose than the exhibits marked into evidence. Then after the brief commercial for the flag, the judge, and our gosh-darned best-in-the-world legal system, I paused to let them know that the important stuff was coming right up. Summoning the deep voice calculated to keep them still, I began explaining constitutional niceties as six men and women stared back at me with suspicion and enmity.

“Yes, it is true that the Journal did not offer testimony by the main source of its story. And it is true that there can be many explanations for the receipt of cash contributions and many reasons why State Attorney Wolf chose to drop charges against three men considered major drug dealers by the DEA. But Judge Witherspoon will instruct you on the law of libel and the burden of the plaintiff in such a case. And he will tell you that the law gives the Journal the right to be wrong…”

I caught a glimpse of Nick Wolf, giving me that tough-guy smile. He was a smart enough lawyer in his own right to know I had no ammunition and was floundering.

“And as for damages,” I told the jury, “you have just heard some outrageous sums thrown about by Mr. Patterson. In this very courtroom, at that very plaintiff’s table, there have sat persons horribly maimed and disfigured, there have sat others defrauded of huge sums of money, but look at the plaintiff here…”

They did, and he looked back with his politician’s grin. Nick Wolf filled his chair and then some. All chest and shoulders. One of those guys who worked slinging bags of cement or chopping trees as a kid, and with the good genes, the bulk stayed hard and his rahma-bull neck would strain against shirt collars for the rest of his life. On television, with the camera focused on a head shot, all you remembered was that neck.

“Has he been physically injured? No. Has he lost a dime because of this story? No. Has he even lost a moment’s sleep? No. So even if you find the Journal liable…”

H. T. Patterson still had rebuttal, and I wondered if he would use the line from Ecclesiastes about a man’s good name being more valuable than precious ointment or the one from Othello about reputation as the immortal part of self.

He used them both.

Then threw in one from Richard II I’d never heard.

“You could have advised us to settle,” Symington Foote said, standing on the courthouse steps, squinting into the low, vicious late-afternoon sun.

Funny, I thought I had.

“Three hundred twenty-two thousand,” I said. “Could have been worse.”

“Where the hell did that number come from? Where do these jurors get their-”

“Probably a quotient verdict. Someone wanted to give him a million, someone else only a hundred thousand. They put the numbers on slips of paper, add ’em up, and divide by six. They’re not supposed to do it, but it happens.”

Foote sniffed the air, didn’t like what he smelled, and snorted. “Maybe it’s time for a hard look at the jury system. I’ll talk to the editorial writers in the morning.”

He stomped off without telling me how much he looked forward to using my services in the future.