But Gene Cassidy denies Butchie Frazier the advantage. In this courtroom he, too, is flesh and blood.
Schenker continues: “On that particular evening, what if anything do you recall…”
Cassidy grimaces slightly before answering. “I have no recollection of the incident… the shooting,” he says slowly. “The last thing I remember is being at my father-in-law’s house in Pennsylvania earlier that afternoon.”
“Can you recall going to work that day?”
“I know that I must have,” says Cassidy. “But I can’t remember anything after my father-in-law’s house. They tell me that’s pretty common with these kinds of injuries-”
“Officer Cassidy,” asks Bothe, interrupting. “I take it that’s your wife who escorted you to the stand.”
“Yes, your honor.”
“And by the look of things,” the judge says, unwilling to let the moment pass, “I would say that she’s expecting…”
“Yes. Due on the Fourth of July.”
The Fourth of July. The defense attorney shakes his head.
“Is this your first child?” asks the judge, glancing toward the jury box.
“Yes it is.”
“Thank you, Officer Cassidy. I was curious.”
The beleaguered defense counsel has nowhere to go. What do you do with the testimony of a blinded police officer whose pregnant wife waits on a nearby bench? What do you ask on cross examination? Where do you make your points? Where, in such a scene, do you find a place for your client to breathe?
“No questions, your honor.”
“The witness is excused. Thank you, Agent Cassidy.”
Out in the corridor, McLarney watches the double doors open at the recess. The jurors are already upstairs in the jury room, Bothe is already back in chambers. Patti walks out with Gene on her arm, followed by Schenker.
“Hey, Gene, how’d it go?” asks McLarney.
“Okay,” says Cassidy. “I think I was good. What’d you think, Patti?”
“You were great, Gene.”
“What did Butchie do? Did he look at me?”
“Yeah, Gene,” says a friend from the Western. “He was staring right at you.”
“Staring? Was he eyefucking me?”
“No,” says the officer. “He just looked real strange, you know.” Cassidy nods.
“You hurt him, Gene,” says a Western man. “You got him good.”
McLarney claps Cassidy on the back, then walks down the hall with Patti and Gene’s mother and brother, both down from New Jersey for the trial. As the family heads upstairs to the law library to wait out the defense case, McLarney puts a hand on Cassidy’s arm and asks a string of questions about the testimony.
“I wish I could have been in there, Gene,” McLarney tells him on the stairs.
“Yeah,” says Cassidy. “I think I did okay, though. What did you think, Patti?”
Patti Cassidy reassures her husband again, but McLarney is too nervous to be satisfied by one opinion. Minutes later, he’s again pacing the courthouse corridor, buttonholing every lawyer, spectator and sheriff ’s deputy who walks out of Bothe’s court.
“How’d Gene do? What was the jury’s reaction?”
McLarney frowns at every assurance. The cost of following the most important jury trial of your life from a corridor is that you’re never willing to believe what you hear. Cassidy endured months of speech therapy, McLarney reminds the others. Did he hear the questions? How was his speech?
“He did great, Terry,” says Schenker.
“What’d Butchie do?” asks McLarney.
“He just kept staring at him,” says a Western man. “He kept staring at the side of Gene’s face.”
The side of Gene’s face. The wound track. Butchie Frazier staring at his handiwork, wondering what the hell went wrong. That son of a bitch, thinks McLarney, frowning at the image.
The defense takes the rest of the afternoon, calling a couple of witnesses who insist that Butchie Frazier is the wrong man, that he wasn’t out there at Mosher and Appleton on that fall night. But Frazier himself does not take the stand; his criminal history makes such an act problematic.
“What happened to Officer Cassidy is a tragedy,” declares the defense attorney in his closing argument. “But it is a tragedy we can do nothing about. It would be adding to that tragedy to convict Clifton Frazier based on the evidence the state presented.”
For their own closing, Schenker and Gersh counter in tandem, with Schenker taking the high road and Gersh going low. The high road asks for an impartial examination of the evidence; the low road calls to a communal instinct that may or may not exist.
“Don’t convict Clifton Frazier because the victim in this case is a police officer,” Schenker tells the jurors. “Do so because the evidence demands it… Because Clifton Frazier did not want to go to jail, he shot Officer Cassidy.”
Yet ten minutes later, Gersh stands before the same jury, reminding them that “when a police officer is shot, a little bit of each of us is killed.”
The “thin blue line” speech, thinks McLarney, listening to the closing arguments from the back bench. Every time a cop is shot, the prosecutors wheel out the protect-and-serve imagery. Does the jury believe it? Does anyone believe it anymore? McLarney looks at the twelve faces. They’re listening, at least-all except number nine. She’s looking right through Gersh, McLarney thinks. She’s going to be trouble.
“We can send a message to the Butchie Fraziers of the world that they cannot go out on the street and shoot police officers…”
And then it’s over. Walking single file, the jurors move past the prosecutors, past the defense attorney, past Butchie Frazier, to climb the stairwell to the deliberation room.
Standing with Gersh and Schenker near the courtroom doors, McLarney suddenly encounters Frazier as the defendant, in handcuffs and leg irons, is under escort to the basement lockup. Frazier actually sneers as the two face each other at the edge of the hallway.
“Yeah. Right,” McLarney mutters, fighting hard for control. “Who the…”
Gersh pulls McLarney away. “I think we’ve got it,” the prosecutor tells him. “It’ll take a few hours, but I think we’ve got it. How’d you like our closing?”
McLarney ignores him, staring instead at the procession of Butchie Frazier and his two guards out the courtroom doors and down the second-floor stairs.
“C’mon,” says Gersh, with a light touch on McLarney’s shoulder. “Let’s go find Gene.”
Cassidy is already settled in for the wait, seated with his wife, his mother and his older brother in the back of the nearby jury assembly room. Western uniforms, fresh from their eight-to-four shift, hover around the family, issuing congratulations on the victory sure to come. Out in the hallway, Gersh and Schenker accept congratulations from spectators. As the evening sky fades outside the courtroom windows, two of the Western men organize a pizza run.
“Gene, what do you want on yours?”
“I don’t care, as long as it’s anchovy.”
“What’s the name of the place again?”
“Marco’s. On Exeter Street.”
“We better order now,” says one officer, smiling. “We’ll not be hanging around here long.”