“You’re kind of a solitary hunter by nature, Harry,” Will said. “I’m more of a pack creature. We’re smart about different things, that’s all.”
I read a little more. “There’s a dress code, too?” I demanded.
Will covered up his mouth with his hand and coughed, but I could see that he was laughing at me.
“Well,” I said firmly, “I am not wearing a tie.”
Will lowered his hand, his expression carefully locked into sober agreement. “Viva la revolution.”
SO I WENT to court.
It meant a trek downtown to the Richard J. Daley Center courthouse, whose name did little to inspire confidence in me that justice might indeed be done. Ah well. I wasn’t here to create disorder. I was here to preserve disorder.
I went up to the seventeenth floor, turned in my card along with about a gazillion other people, none of whom seemed at all enthusiastic about being there. I got a cup of bad coffee and grimaced at it while waiting around for a while. Then a guy in a black muumuu showed up and recounted the plot of My Cousin Vinny.
Okay, it was a robe, and the guy was a judge, and he gave us a brief outline of the format of the trial system, but it’s not nearly as entertaining to say it that way.
Then they started calling names. They said they only needed about half of us, and when they had been going for a while, I thought I was about to get lucky and get sent home, but then some clerk called my name, and I had to shuffle forward to join a file of other jurors.
There were lines and questions and a lot of waiting around. Long story short: I wound up sitting in the box seats in a Cook County courtroom as the wheels of justice started to grind for a guy named Hamilton Luther.
THE CASE WAS being handled by one of the new ADAs. I used to keep track of those people pretty closely, but then I was mostly dead for a while, and then living in exile, and my priorities shifted. When you live in a city with a reputation for political corruption as pervasive as Chicago’s, and work in a business that sometimes treads close to the limit of the law (or twenty miles past it), it’s wise to keep an eye on the public servants. Most of them were decent enough, I guess, by which I mean they were your basic politicians—they had just enough integrity to keep up appearances and appease political sponsors, and at the end of the day they had an agenda to pursue.
Once in a while, though, you got one who was thoroughly in someone’s pocket. The outfit owned some of those types. The unions owned some others. The corporations had the rest.
The new kid was in his late twenties, clean-cut, thoroughly shaven, and looked a little distracted as he assembled notes and folders around him with the help of an attractive female assistant. His grey suit was tailored to him, maybe a little too well tailored for someone just out of law school, and his maroon tie was made of expensive silk that matched the kerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He had big ears and a large Adam’s apple, and his expression was painfully earnest.
On the other side of the aisle, at the defendant’s table, sat a study in contrast. He was a man in his fifties, and if he’d ever been in college it had been on a wrestling scholarship. He had shoulders like a bull moose, hunched with muscle, and his arms ended in fists the size of sledgehammer heads. The dark skin on his knuckles was white and lumpy with old scars, the kind you get in back-alley fistfights, not in a boxing ring. He had shaved his head. There was stubble around the edges but the top was shiny. He had a heavy brow, a nose that had been broken on a biannual basis, and his suit was cheap and ill-fitting. He had a couple of folders on the table with him, along with a pair of thick books. The man looked bleakly uneasy and kept flicking nervous glances across the aisle.
If that guy was a lawyer, I was an Ewok. But he sat alone.
So where was his public defender?
“All rise!” a large man in a uniform said in a voice pitched to carry. “Court is now in session, the Honorable Mavis Jefferson presiding.”
Everyone stood up. After a second, so did I.
I guess you could say I’m not really a joiner.
The judge came in and settled down at her bench, and the rest of us sat, too. She was a blocky woman in her early sixties, with skin the color of coffee grounds and bags under her eyes that made me think of Spike the bulldog in those old cartoons. If you didn’t look closely, you’d think she was bored out of her mind. She sat without moving much, her eyes half closed, scanning over a document on her own desk through a pair of reading glasses. There was something serpentine about her eyes, a suggestion of formidable, remorseless rationality. This was a woman who had seen a great deal, had been amused by very little of it, and who would not be easily made a fool. She finished scanning the document and glanced up at the defendant.
“Mr. Luther?” she said.
The bruiser in the bad suit rose. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I see that you have taken it upon yourself to serve as your own defender,” she said. Her tone was bored, entirely neutral. “While this is your right under the law, I strongly advise you to reconsider. Given the severity of the charges against you, I would think that a professional attorney would offer you a much more comprehensive and capable legal defense.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Luther said. “I thought that, too. But all the public defender wanted to do was plea bargain, ma’am. And I want to have my say.”
“That, too, is your right,” the judge said. For a second, I thought I saw a flicker of something like regret on her face, but it vanished into neutrality again almost instantly. Her tone took on the measured cadence of a cop reading formal Miranda rights. “If you go through with this, you will not be able to move for a mistrial based on the fact that you do not have adequate representation. This trial will proceed and its outcome will be binding. Do you understand this warning as I have stated it to you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Luther said. “Ain’t no take-backsies. I want to represent myself, ma’am.”
The judge nodded. “Then you may be seated.” Luther sat. The judge turned toward the prosecutor and nodded to him. “Counselor.” There was a pause about a second and a half long, and then she repeated, in a mildly annoyed tone, “Counselor?” Another impatient pause. “Counselor Tremont, am I interrupting you?”
The young ADA in the fine suit blinked, looked up from his notes, and hastily rose. “No, Your Honor, please excuse me. I’m ready to begin.”
“Thank goodness,” the judge said in a dry tone. “My granddaughter graduates from high school in three weeks. You may proceed.”
Tremont flushed. “Um, yes. Thank you, Your Honor.” The young man cleared his throat, adjusted his suit jacket, and walked over to face the jury box. He held up a glossy professional headshot of a handsome man in his thirties and showed it to us.
“Meet Curtis Black,” Tremont said. “He was a stockbroker. He liked to go rock climbing on the weekends. He volunteered in a soup kitchen three weekends a month, and he once won an all-expenses-paid vacation to Florida by making a half-court shot during halftime at a Bulls game. He was well liked by his professional associates and had an extensive family and was owned by an Abyssinian cat named Purrple.
“You have doubtless noted my use of the past tense. Was. Liked. Volunteered. But I have to use the past tense, because one year ago, Curtis Black was brutally murdered in an alley in Wrigleyville near the corner of Southport and Grace. Mr. Black was bludgeoned to death with a bowling pin. His skull was smashed flat in the back, and the autopsy showed that it had been shattered into a dozen pieces, like plate glass.”