The Brass Verdict

or Monday. On the front page, he says, so be ready.”
    “Finally.”
    “Yeah. You going to be ready?”
    “Don’t worry about it. I’m ready.”
    “I have to worry. It’s my – Hello?”
    He was gone already. I closed the phone.
    “What was that?” Lorna asked.
    “Nothing.”
    I realized that I had to change the subject.
    “Listen, when you go back to the office today, I want you to call Julie Favreau and see if she can come to court tomorrow.”
    “I thought Elliot didn’t want a jury consultant.”
    “He doesn’t have to know we’re using her.”
    “Then, how will you pay her?”
    “Take it out of general operating. I don’t care. I’ll pay her out of my own pocket if I have to. But I’m going to need her and I don’t care what Elliot thinks. I already burned through two strikes and have a feeling that by tomorrow I’m going to have to make whatever I have left count. I’ll want her help on the final chart. Just tell her the bailiff will have her name and will make sure she gets a seat. Tell her to sit in the gallery and not to approach me when I’m with my client. Tell her she can text me on the cell when she has something important.”
    “Okay, I’ll call her. Are you doing all right, Mick?”
    I must’ve been talking too fast or sweating too much. Lorna had picked up on my agitation. I was feeling a little shaky and I didn’t know if it was because of the reporter’s bullshit or Bosch’s hanging up or the growing realization that what I had been working toward for a year would soon be upon me. Testimony and evidence.
    “I’m fine,” I said sharply. “I’m just hungry. You know how I get when I’m hungry.”
    “Sure,” she said. “I understand.”
    The truth was, I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t even feel like eating. I was feeling the weight on me. The burden of a man’s future.
    And it wasn’t my client’s future I was thinking of.

Thirty-five
    By three o’clock on the second day of jury selection, Golantz and I had traded preemptory and cause challenges for more than ten hours of court time. It had been a battle. We had quietly savaged each other, identifying each other’s must-have jurors and striking them without care or conscience. We had gone through almost the entire venire, and my jury seating chart was covered in some spots with as many as five layers of Post-its. I had two preemptory challenges left. Golantz, at first judicious with his challenges, had caught up and then passed me and was down to his final preemptory. It was zero hour. The jury box was about to be complete.
    In its current composition, the panel now included an attorney, a computer programmer, two new postal service employees and three new retirees, as well as a male nurse, a tree trimmer and an artist.
    From the original twelve seated the morning before, there were still two prospective jurors remaining. The engineer in seat seven and one of the retirees, in seat twelve, had somehow gone the distance. Both were white males and both, in my estimation, leaning toward the state. Neither was overtly on the prosecution’s side, but on my chart I had written notes about each in blue ink – my code for a juror who I perceived as being cold to the defense. But their leanings were so slight that I had still not used a precious challenge on either.
    I knew I could take them both out in my final flourish and use of preemptory strikes, but that was the risk of voir dire. You strike one juror because of blue ink and the replacement might end up being neon blue and a greater risk to your client than the original was. It was what made jury selection such an unpredictable proposition.
    The latest addition to the box was the artist who took the opening in seat number eleven after Golantz had used his nineteenth preemptory to remove a city sanitation worker who I’d had down as a red juror. Under the general questioning of Judge Stanton, the artist revealed that she lived in Malibu and worked in a studio off the Pacific Coast Highway. Her medium was acrylic paint and she had studied at the Art Institute of Philadelphia before coming to California for the light. She said she didn’t own a television and didn’t regularly read any newspapers. She said she knew nothing about the murders that had taken place six months earlier in the beach house not far from where she lived and worked.
    Almost from the start I had taken notes about her in red and grew happier and happier with her on my jury as the questions