The Deep Blue Alibi

Thirty-nine

Richard Waddle propped an elbow on the rail of the jury box. "This is a story about greed and corruption, bribery and murder."

A strong start, Victoria thought, sitting with perfect posture at the defense table, taking notes. Using the rule of primacy. Jurors remember best what they've heard first.

"Greed and corruption. Bribery and murder."

The four horsemen of a murder trial. Waddle would drill the jury with the phrase every chance he got. Some lawyers believed in the rule of recency. What you hear last stays with you longest. Steve taught Victoria to use both theories because the best lawyers opened strong and finished strong.

"What I'm about to tell you is not evidence," Richard Waddle said. "It's a preview of what the evidence will be. It's a shorthand version of the story you are about to hear."

Opening statement. What lawyers like to call the "curtain raiser." They had their twelve jurors plus two alternates, all of whom had just raised their hands and promised to follow the law and the evidence and render a verdict just and true.

"And what's that story about?" Waddle asked rhetorically.

Victoria thought she knew the answer.

"Greed and corruption, bribery and murder," he answered himself.

Yep. Thought so.

"It's a story about a wealthy man with no links to the Keys and no respect for our beautiful string of islands, this emerald necklace reaching into the sea. You folks who live here know we've got to protect the beaches and the mangroves, the turquoise waters and the fragile life beneath the sea. But this defendant came here for another purpose. He's a big man with big plans and he doesn't let anything get in his way. Environmental laws? He'll find a way around them. Bribery laws? He'll violate them with impunity. It's the way he's always done business."

Victoria had never heard an opening statement quite like it. Waddle hadn't even gotten to the alleged murder and he'd already crossed way over the line into character assassination. She could object, but Steve's advice rang in her ears.

"You piss off the jurors when you object in opening. They want to hear each side's story. Sit quietly. Smile sweetly. You'll get your chance."

Waddle approached the defense table and pointed at her client. "That's him, Harold Griffin, sitting with his Miami lawyer." Mia-muh loy-yuh.

Ordering up some home cooking from a dozen local chefs.

"The defendant roared into town like a wave of napalm hitting a row of shotgun shacks. Shock and awe.

That's Harold Griffin. He blasted into the Keys with his private planes and his fancy boats and all that money and he says, 'The rules don't apply to me. I'm Harold Griffin. I do what I want. I bribe public employees, seduce them with greenbacks, and when they don't do exactly what I want, I kill them!' "

The jurors were transfixed. Next to her, Griffin squirmed in his chair. Victoria placed a calming hand on his arm.

Waddle walked to the clerk's table, picked up the speargun with one hand and the spear with the other. Gesturing with both weapon and projectile, he looked dangerous. That was the idea, Victoria supposed.

"With this deadly weapon, Harold Griffin impaled a living human being. Under our laws, you're not even allowed to spear a lobster. But Harold Griffin used this to puncture another man's vital organs. A man named Benjamin Stubbs, a loyal civil servant who was first corrupted and then callously dispatched by the defendant for refusing to do his dirty work."

Waddle droned on, painting a portrait of the deceased man, humanizing him. He was trying to create sympathy, Victoria knew, as soon as he said: "I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm looking for justice."

While Waddle prattled on, Victoria scanned the courtroom. Sheriff Rask was in his usual position in the front row. Junior had taken the day off. He needed to practice free dives in the Tortugas, saying he'd been letting himself get out of shape. The Queen played hooky, too. She needed a shopping fix, but with no Nieman-Marcus for 150 miles, Victoria knew she'd be back at the hotel spa by noon.

"Now, the defense is going to say that Mr. Stubbs might have accidentally shot himself with that speargun. They're going to bring in an expert witness with charts and diagrams to tell you about the angle of entry and velocity and a lot of other mumbo-jumbo they'll say creates reasonable doubt."

"Objection!" Maybe Steve would let it go, but she'd had enough. "Your Honor, I'd prefer to be the one to discuss our evidence. I probably know a little more about it than Mr. Waddle does."

A polite way of saying, "Mind your own briefcase."

"Overruled. Mr. Waddle's entitled to speculate, and the jury's entitled to hold it against him if he's wrong."

Damn.

"You know what an expert witness is?" Waddle smiled at the jurors. "A hired gun. Now, maybe you can't buy an expert witness, but you can sure as heck rent one. According to papers filed with the court, the defense has rented a 'professor of human factors. .' "

Making it sound like "charlatan with rank and tenure."

". . from Columbia University in New York City. I don't know why they had to go all the way to New York City, unless they couldn't find anyone in Florida to do their bidding."

Oh, shit.

Victoria knew she should object. She should pound the table and act outraged. But she was gun-shy after losing the first objection.

"In case you don't know it, a human factors expert is somebody who'll tell you that a curb is too high or a guardrail too low. I'm not sure what this professor from New York City knows about spearguns, so I'll have a few questions for him when he gets down here for his little paid vacation."

Waddle went on, speculating that the professor probably didn't know Manhattan Island from Green Turtle Key. Griffin drummed his fingers on the defense table and scowled. His look, Victoria thought, combined with his bull neck and broad chest, made Griffin appear belligerent. Victoria scribbled the word "smile" on her legal pad and slid it in front of her client.

The State Attorney was better on his feet than she had expected. And yes, Steve had warned her about that, too.

"Don't let Dickwad fool you with that aw-shucks routine. He's smarter and meaner than he looks."

Buried in the middle of Waddle's opening was the admission that no usable fingerprints were found on the speargun. Smart, Victoria thought, hanging a lantern on what might be perceived as a weakness in his case. The proliferation of forensics shows on TV has created what lawyers call the "CSI factor," jurors expecting fiber and hair and blood spatter evidence in every case, all accompanied by techno-hip computer graphics.

"There are no fingerprints," Waddle explained generously, "because the ridged polymer pistol grip on the speargun is not susceptible to prints."

As Waddle wound down, one of his assistants walked into the courtroom carrying a dummy, which he placed in an empty chair at the prosecution table. Unlike Tami the Love Doll, this sack of sawdust lacked name and gender. It resembled one of those crash-test dummies that gets knocked ass-over-elbows when broadsided by a weighted sled.

"Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you're going to hear a bunch about this speargun. It's an old pneumatic model, powered by a blast of air from a carbon dioxide cartridge. You load it like this." Keeping the barrel pointed at the ceiling, Waddle leaned over and jammed this spear into the barrel until it locked. "Not hard to do. As you can see, it'd be darn near impossible to accidentally shoot yourself. But shooting someone else- well, that's as easy as. ."

Waddle wheeled toward the prosecution table and fired. The spear whooshed across the courtroom and plugged the dummy in the chest with a sickening thwomp! The dummy's arms spasmed and its head whiplashed. The jurors gasped.

"Imagine the shattering of bones and the bursting of vessels. Imagine the pain and the horror. Imagine Ben Stubbs watching himself bleed nearly to death before he lost consciousness."

Victoria was furious. She could object. But the damage had already been done. Now, for the remainder of the trial, whenever the speargun was mentioned, the jurors would not be listening. Their minds would be focused on one horrific sight and sound. The spear thwomping into Ben Stubbs' chest.

"Now, I'm going to sit down," Waddle declared, the spear still vibrating. "And I want you to pay as close attention to Ms. Lord as you did to me. All the state wants is for justice to be done. A fair trial for all."

"All the state wants is a fair trial," Pinky Luber said. "Fair for the defendant, but fair for the people of Florida, too."

Steve hit the pause button and the picture froze. The videotape from WLRN-TV was twenty years old, but Pinky didn't look much different. Bald, pudgy, pink-faced. Like all the good trial lawyers, he was comfortable in front of the jury box. It was his turf, and before he surrendered an inch of it to the public defender, he was going to get his licks in. Even in voir dire.

Steve put his feet up on his cocktail table, poured himself a tall glass of Jack Daniel's-it was going to be a long night-and hit the play button.

"Mr. Willie Mays is accused of a horrific crime," Luber continued. "A vicious double homicide, the murder of an innocent woman and her baby. Now, I've got some questions to ask each of you to help us seat a jury that will be fair to both sides."

On the screen, Luber stood within arm's length of the jury box, close enough for eye contact but without invading anyone's space. "Juror One. Mr. Connor, let's start with you."

The video cut to a shot of the bench and Judge Herbert T. Solomon. Unlike Pinky, he had changed considerably. On the screen, he was a handsome man in his forties with an expensive haircut and aviator eyeglasses. His jawline had not yet gone soft, his hair was not yet gray, but there was something else different, too. An expression Steve could barely remember. As Herbert looked toward the jury box, the judge wore a relaxed and confident smile. He seemed happy. This was his courtroom; he was doing a job he loved. What must it be like to lose all that? How deep were his wounds?

Reginald Jones sat at the horseshoe-shaped desk below the bench, a supplicant before his king. Jones' tools were neatly arranged in front of him. Notepads, evidence stickers, a stamping device, and the court file itself: State of Florida versus Willie Mays.

Steve sipped his sour mash whiskey and watched Juror One explain that he had no moral or religious objections to capital punishment. "The Bible says an eye for an eye."

Bobby, barefoot as usual, padded into the living room, toting a legal pad and a guava smoothie. "I've broken down all the stats, Uncle Steve, but I don't know if they help you."

"Let's see what you've got."

While Luber asked his questions on the videotape, Bobby explained how he put together the demographics of the jurors in seventeen murder trials. Sometimes, the questions themselves would reveal the person's race. "As an African-American living in Liberty City, were you ever mistreated by Anglo police officers?" Sometimes, the answers were the key. "What those cops did to poor Mr. McDuffie was a crime, but I didn't take to the streets and riot like some of those fools." And other things, like membership in the African Methodist Church, civic organizations, and a residential address could help.

"Of the two hundred and four jurors seated in all the trials, twenty-three were African-Americans," Bobby said. "That's about eleven percent, which is less than the population but not, like, really outrageous."

"Not low enough to show systematic exclusion."

"That's what I mean, Uncle Steve. Every trial had at least one black juror and some had two."

"But never more than two?"

"Nope. Unless you count alternates."

"Anything else?"

"The African-Americans were almost never tossed off. Whatever ones got into the box were accepted by both sides."

"Just like the Mays case. Only five on the panel, and three got seated, one as an alternate. Unbelievable odds."

"Maybe it's because the African-Americans were such solid dudes."

"Meaning?"

"The black jurors all seemed to have good jobs."

Bobby handed Steve his notes. Next to the name and address, his nephew had listed the black jurors' occupations. Postal worker. Dentist. Accountant. Homemaker. Paramedic. Dentist. Probation officer.

Probation officer?

"This isn't a jury pool!" Steve thundered. "It's a Rotary meeting. A Republican convention. These guys drive Buicks. Where are the people on work release? On food stamps?"

"Did you watch the beginning of the tape, Uncle Steve?"

"Nothing to watch but an empty courtroom. I fast-forwarded to voir dire."

"You've gotta let it play a while. Mr. Jones came in and was doing something, but I don't know what it was."

Steve rewound the tape to the beginning. Just as before, the camera was on, but the courtroom was empty. Minutes passed.

"Who says trials are boring?" Steve asked.

"Let it play."

A few seconds later, a uniformed bailiff led several dozen people into the courtroom. They wore plastic name tags identifying them as jurors. At the moment, though, they were only potential jurors. Veniremen. More minutes passed. The civilians sat on the hard benches, some reading newspapers, most looking bored.

Reginald Jones walked in, pushing what looked like a grocery cart filled with files. He took his seat below the bench, smiled toward the gallery, and began speaking. No audio here, so Steve couldn't tell exactly what he said. But soon, a line formed in front of Jones' desk, and Steve knew what was going on.

"Jones is asking who wants out of jury service on hardship grounds," he told Bobby.

In a few moments, half the panel queued up in front of the deputy clerk's desk. Apparently a lot of people were caring for dying aunts. It only took another few moments for a pattern to begin emerging.

"He's letting the black jurors go home," Bobby said, just as a young man with dreadlocks hurried out of the courtroom.

"Not all of them. He's keeping the older African-Americans and the better-dressed ones, along with most of the whites."

"But there's a white juror getting excused." Bobby pointed to the next man in line. "He's so big, maybe Mr. Jones was afraid of him."

True, the guy was a load, his shoulders nearly filling the screen. Jones smiled broadly, energetically pumped the man's hand, then handed him a slip of paper. The man nodded and headed for the door. Jurors in the gallery applauded, and the man waved at them, stopping when someone offered a pen and a piece of paper. An autograph hound. Then Steve recognized him.

"Ed Newman," Steve said. "All-Pro guard for the Dolphins in the eighties."

"Maybe he had a Monday night game and couldn't sit on the jury."

"Keep watching. It's getting interesting."

The next person in line, who appeared Hispanic, wore a blue mechanic's jumpsuit, and Steve could make out the logo of the late and lamented Eastern Air Lines. Sorry, no excusal. Behind him, a well-dressed middle-aged white woman. Sorry, ma'am. You gotta stay, too. Then a white middle-aged man in a suit. Another smile from Reggie Jones. He stamped a slip of paper; the man bowed in gratitude and headed out. The camera picked up the black yarmulke on the man's head.

"The guy's a rabbi or something," Bobby said.

"So's Ed Newman. Jewish, I mean."

Newman, one of those brainy football players of a generation ago, went on to law school and had become a fine judge himself. But that's not what Steve was thinking about. The pattern was taking on another dimension, Steve thought.

"A Jewish football player?" Bobby said. "Cool."

"The Dolpins have had a few landsmen. Steve Shull was a linebacker at the same time Newman played. And you remember Jay Fiedler?"

"The quarterback?" Bobby said. "He stunk."

"So did A. J. Feely, and he's not a member of the tribe."

"So what's with Mr. Jones, anyway? Why's he letting off Jews and blacks?"

The blacks and the Jews.

Something came back to Steve, something from the day he'd deposed Pinky Luber. The slippery bastard was complaining about the jury in the first Willie Mays trial, the last case he lost.

"They must have come straight from an ACLU meeting. All shvartzers from Liberty City and Yids from Aventura."

It didn't mean anything then, but it did now. Something else Luber said that day, too.

"You can't trust juries."

Now Steve knew exactly what Luber and Jones were doing. "Bobby, what's the most important part of trial?"

"Jury selection. You always say so."

"Reggie Jones is helping Pinky Luber stack the jury. Knocking off blacks and Jews, the most defense-oriented jurors. The blacks he leaves on are all establishment guys. The defense lawyer has no choice but to accept them. Otherwise, he'll have an all-white panel, and God knows what'll go on in the jury room."

Jones' conduct was illegal, of course, a deprivation of the defendant's constitutional rights. But why was he doing it? No way the young deputy clerk came up with this scheme on his own. This had Pinky's sweaty palms all over it. But so far, it didn't seem to involve Steve's father.

There had to be something more. Something Dad was doing. Otherwise, what's he afraid of?

Steve fast-forwarded the tape to the beginning of voir dire. He'd seen it once, but this time he wouldn't take his eyes off his father. He'd study his old man, watch every gesture, listen to every word. Part of him hoped that his father had been unaware of the conspiracy taking place right under his gavel. But another part, coming from a dark place of repressed anger and alienation, yearned for something altogether different. Part of Steve wanted proof that he was right and his father wrong. Proof that the Honorable Herbert T. Solomon was considerably less than he held himself out to be and his son was considerably more.