“Rob Jacobson wasn’t anywhere near the Carson home the night three people were tragically murdered,” I continue. “We’ll prove that, too, when we show why that photograph of him leaving that home on the night in question is as fake as the most fake thing you’ll find on social media today.” I grin. “Unless you still believe that Bitcoin is safer for you than real money.”
I turn back to my new buddy, Juror No. 7.
“Please tell me you don’t believe that,” I tell her.
She doesn’t just smile back at me, she shakes her head vigorously, no no no, and laughs.
“You know what hype really is, ladies and gentlemen?” I say. “It’s short for hyperbole. It’s an exaggeration whose intent is to persuade you, usually of something that’s not true. And what is not true today and won’t be true over all the days to follow inside this room and will never be true, is that Rob Jacobson is guilty.”
There is more I’ve planned to say. I know I haven’t gone as long as Katherine Welsh did. But I feel my legs starting to go, and it’s not as if I can call a time-out and wait to get them back.
I’m back in the middle of the room now, my back to Judge Horton, squarely facing the jury for the last time this morning, trying not to let them see that I’m running out of gas.
“I’m not about to tell you my client is a Boy Scout,” I say. “If he ever even read the Scout Oath, which I sincerely doubt, he likely skipped the last part about being morally straight. Because he’s not. Never has been, never will be, that’snotin his DNA. When it comes to women both young and old, he’s acted like a pig so many times in his life even he’s lost count.”
I give him a quick look over my shoulder and see himtrying to glare me all the way back to law school before I once again turn back to the jurors.
“He has been a sonofabitch with women for most of his life,” I tell them. “But what he doesn’t do to women is kill them, or a husband and father, even though someone has gone to great lengths to make it look as if that’s exactly what he’s done. You know what we’re really talking about here? A well-planned and brilliantly staged setup, including that gun Ms. Welsh talked about.” I pause. “Especiallythat gun, which so conveniently turned up at my client’s town house in a place where it’s amazing the housekeeper didn’t find it.”
One more pause.
Finish strong.
“When something’s too good to be true, ladies and gentlemen, it usually is,” I say. “Thatis the authentic truth of this case. And whether opposing counsel likes it or not, and whether all of you particularly like my client or not, the truth in the end is going to set my sonofabitch of a client free.”
I sit down then before I fall down.
FIFTY-SIX
I’M BACK IN THE conference room with Rob Jacobson and Norma Banks and McGoey after Judge Horton has announced that he’s decided to adjourn for today, and that Katherine Welsh can begin calling witnesses first thing tomorrow morning.
I want to run across the room and give him a big kiss.
“I don’t appreciate being called a pig by my own lawyer,” Rob Jacobson says to me now.
“Get over it,” I tell him.
“Don’t do it again,” he says.
“Rob,” I say wearily, just wanting to be out of this room and on my way to the car, “please stop talking now.”
“And let’s face it, kid,” Norma Banks says, “if it oinks like a pig.”
“I have to take shit from her, grandma,” he says, wheeling on her. “Not from you.”
She gives him her Mrs. Claus smile and says cheerily, “Wanna bet?”
“You might not be in any mood to hear this right now, Rob,” McGoey says. “But Jane was great out there.”
“I thought her job was to draw blood from that bitch DA,” Jacobson says, “not me.”
Norma says, “You didn’t see it, because you wouldn’t. But it was a way for Jane to get the jury on her side.”
I say to Jacobson, “What she said.”
Then I stand.
“We’re not done here,” Jacobson says.
