The Brass Verdict

instinctively knew I was holding the jury. Each one of them was riding with me.
    “I know that in our society we want our law enforcement officers to be professional and thorough and the best they can possibly be. We see crime on the news and in the streets and we know that these men and women are the thin line between order and disorder. I mean, I want that as much as you do. I’ve been the victim of a violent crime myself. I know what that is like. And we want our cops to step in and save the day. After all, that’s what they are there for.”
    I stopped and swept the whole jury box, holding every set of eyes for a brief moment before continuing.
    “But that’s not what happened here. The evidence – and I’m talking about the state’s own evidence and testimony – will show that from the start the investigators focused on one suspect, Walter Elliot. The evidence will show that once Walter became that focus, then all other bets were off. All other avenues of investigation were halted or never even pursued. They had a suspect and what they believed was a motive, and they never looked back. They never looked anywhere else either.”
    For the first time I moved from my position. I stepped forward to the railing in front of juror number one. I slowly walked along the front of the box, hand sliding along the railing.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, this case is about tunnel vision. The focus on one suspect and the complete lack of focus on anything else. And I will promise you that when you come out of the prosecution’s tunnel, you’re going to be looking at one another and squinting your eyes against the bright light. And you’re going to be wondering where the hell their case is. Thank you very much.”
    My hand trailed off the railing and I headed back to my seat. Before I sat down, the judge recessed court for lunch.

Thirty-seven
    Once more my client eschewed lunch with me so he could get back to the studio and make his business-as-usual appearance in the executive offices. I was beginning to think he viewed the trial as an annoying inconvenience in his schedule. He was either more confident than I was in the defense’s case, or the trial simply wasn’t a priority.
    Whatever the reason, that left me with my entourage from the first row. We went over to Traxx in Union Station because I felt it was far enough away from the courthouse to avoid our ending up in the same place as one of the jurors. Patrick drove and I had him valet the Lincoln and join us so that he would feel like part of the team.
    They gave us a table in a quiet enclosure next to a window that looked out on the train station’s huge and wonderful waiting room. Lorna had made the seating arrangements and I ended up next to Julie Favreau. Ever since Lorna had hooked up with Cisco, she had decided that I needed to be with someone and had endeavored to be something of a matchmaker. This effort coming from an ex-wife – an ex-wife I still cared for on many levels – was decidedly uncomfortable and it felt clumsy when Lorna overtly pointed me to the chair next to my jury consultant. I was in the middle of day one of a trial and the possibility of romance was the last thing I was thinking about. Besides that, I was incapable of a relationship. My addiction had left me with an emotional distance from people and things that I was only now beginning to close. As such, I had made it my priority to reconnect with my daughter. After that, I would worry about finding a woman to spend time with.
    Romance aside, Julie Favreau was wonderful to work with. She was an attractive, diminutive woman with delicate facial features and raven hair that fell around her face in curls. A spray of youthful freckles across her nose made her look younger than she was. I knew she was thirty-three years old. She had once told me her story. She’d come to Los Angeles by way of London to act in film and had studied with a teacher who believed that internal thoughts of character could be shown externally through facial tells, tics and body movements. It was her job as an actor to bring these giveaways to the surface without making them obvious. Her student exercises became observation, identification and interpretation of these tells in others. Her assignments took her anywhere from the poker rooms in the south county, where she learned to read the faces of people trying not to give anything away, to the courtrooms of the CCB, where there were always lots of faces and