The Runaway Jury (23 page)

Loreen swallowed her eggs and said, “What I don’t understand is, why can’t we be trusted with a telephone? My kids might need to call me. It’s not like some goon’s gonna call my room and threaten me.”

“I’d just like a cold beer, or two,” Jerry said. “And maybe a few more conjugal visits,” he added, again looking at Mrs. Gladys Card.

The grumbling gathered speed around the table, and within ten minutes of Easter’s arrival, the jurors were on the verge of revolt. The random irritations were now a full-fledged list of abuses. Even Herrera, the Retired Colonel who’d camped in jungles, was not pleased with the selection of beverages offered in the Party Room. Millie Dupree objected to the absence of newspapers. Lonnie Shaver had pressing business, and deeply resented the notion of sequestration in the first place. “I can think for myself,” he said. “No one can influence me.” At the least, he needed an unrestricted telephone. Phillip Savelle did yoga in the woods each morning at dawn, alone, just himself communing with nature, and there wasn’t a tree within two hundred yards of the motel. And what about church? Mrs. Card was a devout Baptist who never missed prayer meeting on Wednesday nights and visitation on Tuesdays and WMU on Fridays and of course the Sabbath was crammed full of meetings.

“We’d better get things straight now,” Nicholas said solemnly. “We’re gonna be here for two weeks, maybe three. I say we get Judge Harkin’s attention.”

Judge Harkin had nine lawyers packed into his chambers haggling over the daily issues to be kept away from the jury. He required the lawyers to appear each morning at eight for the warm-up bouts, and he often made them stay an hour or two after the jury left. A heavy knock interrupted a heated debate between Rohr and Cable. Gloria Lane pushed the door open until it hit a chair occupied by Oliver McAdoo.

“We have a problem with the jury,” she said gravely.

Harkin jumped to his feet. “What!”

“They want to talk to you. That’s all I know.”

Harkin looked at his watch. “Where are they?”

“At the motel.”

“Can’t we get them over here?”

“No. We’ve tried. They’re not coming until they talk to you.”

His shoulders sagged and his mouth hung open. “This is getting ridiculous,” Wendall Rohr offered to no one in particular. The lawyers watched the Judge, who looked absently at the pile of papers on his desk and collected his thoughts. Then he rubbed his hands together and gave them all a huge phony smile. “Let’s go see them.”

KONRAD TOOK THE FIRST CALL at 8:02. She didn’t want to talk to Fitch, just wanted to give him the message that the jury was once again perturbed and not coming out until Harkin hauled himself over to the Siesta Inn and unruffled their feathers.
Konrad ran to Fitch’s room and delivered the message.

At 8:09, she called again and gave Konrad the information that Easter would be wearing a dark denim shirt over a tan T-shirt, with red socks and the usual starched khakis. Red socks, she repeated.

At 8:12, she called for the third time and asked to speak to Fitch, who was pacing around his desk and pulling on his goatee. He clenched the receiver. “Hello.”

“Good morning, Fitch,” she said.

“Good morning, Marlee.”

“You ever been to the St. Regis Hotel in New Orleans?”

“No.”

“It’s on Canal Street in the French Quarter. There’s an open-air bar on the roof. It’s called the Terrace Grill. Get a table overlooking the Quarter. Be there at seven tonight. I’ll be there later. Are you with me?”

“Yes.”

“And come by yourself, Fitch. I’ll watch you enter the hotel, and if you bring friends the meeting’s off. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And if you attempt to trail me, then I disappear.”

“You have my word.”

“Why am I not comforted by your word, Fitch?” She hung up.

CABLE, ROHR, AND JUDGE HARKIN were met at the front desk by Lou Dell, who was flustered and scared and rattling on about how this had never happened to her; she’d always kept her juries under control. She led them to the Party Room where thirteen
of the fourteen jurors were holed up. Herman Grimes was the lone dissenter. He had argued with the group about their tactics, and had angered Jerry Fernandez to the point of getting himself insulted. Jerry had pointed out that Herman had his wife with him, that he had no use for either televisions or newspapers, didn’t drink anymore, and probably didn’t need a gym. Jerry apologized after Millie Dupree asked him to.

If His Honor had a chip on his shoulder, it didn’t last long. After a few uncertain hellos and good mornings, he said, starting badly, “I’m a little bit disturbed by this.”

To which Nicholas Easter responded, “We’re not in the mood to take any abuse.”

Rohr and Cable had been expressly forbidden from speaking, and they hung near the door and watched with great amusement. Both knew this was a scene unlikely to be repeated in their litigating careers.

Nicholas had written down their list of complaints. Judge Harkin removed his coat, took a seat, and was soon hammered from all directions. He was pitifully outnumbered and virtually defenseless.

Beer was no problem. Newspapers could be censored by the front desk. Unrestricted phone calls made perfect sense. Same for televisions, but only if they promised not to watch the local news. The gym might be a problem, but he’d look into it. Visits to church could be arranged.

In fact, everything was flexible.

“Can you explain why we’re here?” Lonnie Shaver demanded.

He tried. He cleared his throat and reluctantly attempted to justify his reasons for locking them
away. He rambled for a bit about unauthorized contact, about what had happened so far with this jury, and he made some vague references to events that had occurred in other tobacco trials.

The misconduct was well documented, and both sides had been guilty in the past. Fitch had left a wide trail across the landscape of tobacco litigation. Operatives for some of the plaintiff’s’ lawyers in other cases had done dirty deeds. But Judge Harkin couldn’t talk about them in front of his jury. He had to be careful and not prejudice either side.

The meeting lasted an hour. Harkin asked for a no-strike guarantee in the future, but Easter wouldn’t commit.

PYNEX OPENED DOWN two points on news of a second strike, which according to an analyst waiting in the courtroom was caused by an ill-defined negative reaction by the jurors to certain tactics employed the day before by the defense team. The tactics were also ill-defined. A second rumor by another analyst in Biloxi cleared things up a little by speculating that no one in the courtroom knew for certain exactly why the jury was on strike. The stock moved half a point lower before correcting itself and inching upward in the early morning trading.

THE TAR in cigarettes causes cancer, at least in laboratory rodents. Dr. James Ueuker from Palo Alto had worked with mice and rats for the past fifteen years. He’d conducted many studies himself and he’d studied extensively the work of researchers around the world. At least six major studies had, in his opinion, conclusively linked cigarette smoking with lung cancer. In great detail, he explained to the
jury exactly how he and his team had taken tobacco smoke condensates, usually referred to simply as “tars,” and rubbed them directly onto the skin of what looked like a million white mice. The pictures were large and in color. The lucky mice got just a touch of tar, the others got fairly painted. To no one’s surprise, the heavier the tar, the quicker skin cancer developed.

It’s a long way from surface tumors on rodents to lung cancer in humans, and Dr. Ueuker, with Rohr leading the way, couldn’t wait to link the two. Medical history is filled with studies in which laboratory findings have ultimately been proven to apply to humans. Exceptions have been rare. Though mice and humans live in vastly different environments, the results in some animal tests are fully consistent with the epidemiologic findings in humans.

Every available jury consultant was in the courtroom during Ueuker’s testimony. Disgusting little rodents were one thing, but rabbits and beagles could be cuddly pets. Ueuker’s next study involved a similar plastering of tar on rabbits, with virtually the same results. His last test involved thirty beagles which he taught to smoke through tubes in their tracheas. The heavy smokers worked their way up to nine cigarettes a day; the equivalent of about forty cigarettes for a 150-pound man. In these dogs, serious lung damage in the form of invasive tumors was detected after 875 consecutive days of smoking. Ueuker used dogs because they exhibit the same reaction to cigarette smoking as do humans.

He would not, however, get to tell this jury about his rabbits and his beagles. An untrained amateur could look at Millie Dupree’s face and tell she felt very sorry for the mice, and held a grudge against
Ueuker for killing them. Sylvia Taylor-Tatum and Angel Weese also expressed overt signs of displeasure. Mrs. Gladys Card and Phillip Savelle emitted subtle evidence of disapproval. The other men were unmoved.

Rohr and company made the decision during lunch to forgo more testimony from James Ueuker.

Sixteen

J
umper, the courtroom deputy who took the note from Marlee thirteen days earlier and handed it to Fitch, was approached during lunch and offered five thousand dollars cash to call in sick with stomach cramps or diarrhea or some such affliction, and travel in plain clothes with Pang to New Orleans for a night of food, fun, perhaps a call girl if Jumper was so inclined. Pang needed only a few hours of light work from him. Jumper needed the money.

They left Biloxi around twelve-thirty in a rented van. By the time they arrived in New Orleans two hours later, Jumper had been convinced to temporarily retire his uniform and work for Arlington West Associates for a while. Pang offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for six months’ work, nine thousand more than he was presently earning for an entire year.

They checked into their rooms at the St. Regis, two single rooms on each side of Fitch, who’d been able to extort only four from the hotel. Holly’s room
was down the hall. Dubaz, Joe Boy, and Dante were four blocks away in the Royal Sonesta. Jumper was first parked on a bar stool in the lounge, where he had a view of the front entrance of the hotel.

The waiting began. There was no sign of her as the afternoon dragged toward dark, and no one was surprised. Jumper was moved four times, and swiftly tired of shadow work.

Fitch left his room a few minutes before seven and rode the elevator to the roof. His table was in a corner with a nice view of the Quarter. Holly and Dubaz were at a table ten feet away, both well dressed and seemingly oblivious to everyone. Dante and a hired escort in a black mini-skirt had another table. Joe Boy would take the pictures.

At seven-thirty, she appeared from nowhere. Neither Jumper nor Pang reported seeing her anywhere near the front lobby. She simply emerged through the open French doors on the roof and was at Fitch’s table in an instant. He later speculated that she did what they had done—got a room at the hotel under another name and used the stairs. She was dressed in slacks and jacket, and very pretty—dark short hair, brown eyes, strong chin and cheeks, very little makeup but then little was needed. He guessed her age to be between twenty-eight and thirty-two. She sat quickly, so fast in fact that Fitch didn’t get the chance to offer her a chair. She sat directly across from him with her back to the other tables.

“A pleasure to meet you,” he said softly, glancing around at the other tables to see if anyone was listening.

“Yes, a real pleasure,” she replied, leaning on her elbows.

The waiter appeared with rapid efficiency and
asked if she wanted something to drink. No, she did not. The waiter had been bribed with hard cash to carefully remove anything she touched with her fingers—glasses, plates, silver, ashtrays, anything. He would not get the chance.

“Are you hungry?” Fitch asked, sipping a mineral water.

“No. I’m in a hurry.”

“Why?”

“Because the longer I sit here the more photos your goons can take.”

“I came alone.”

“Of course you did. How’d you like the red socks?” A jazz band began across the roof, but she ignored it. Her eyes never left Fitch’s.

Fitch rolled his head back and offered a snort. It was still difficult to believe he was chatting with the lover of one of his jurors. He’d had indirect contact with jurors before, several times in different forms, but never this close.

And she came to him!

“Where’s he from?” Fitch asked.

“What difference does it make? He’s here.”

“Is he your husband?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“You present a lot of questions, young lady. And you expect me to ask them.”

“He’s an acquaintance.”

“When did he assume the name Nicholas Easter?”

“What difference does it make? That’s his legal name. He’s a legal resident of Mississippi, a registered voter. He can change his name once a month if he wants.”

She kept her hands tucked together under her chin. He knew she would not make the mistake of leaving prints. “What about you?” Fitch asked.

“Me?”

“Yeah, you’re not registered to vote in Mississippi.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we checked. Assuming, of course, your real name is Marlee, and that it’s spelled properly.”

“You’re assuming too much.”

“It’s my job. Are you from the Coast?”

“No.”

Joe Boy leaned down low between two plastic boxwoods just long enough to take six shots of the side of her face. A decent view would require a tightrope act on top of the brick banister, eighteen floors above Canal. He’d stay in the greenery and hope for something better when she left.

Fitch rattled the ice in his glass. “So why are we here?” he asked.

“One meeting leads to another.”

“And where do all the meetings lead us?”

“To the verdict.”

“For a fee, I’m sure.”

“Fee has an awfully small ring to it. Are you recording this?” She knew perfectly well Fitch was recording every sound.