Karp nudged Conlin, and whispered. “Jack, catch the defendant. This guy was an ice cube the last time I saw him. Now he looks like a basket case.”
Conlin glanced over. “It happens sometimes. Some guys, it takes a while for the penny to drop-that he’s really in a courtroom looking at Murder One.”
Braker cleared his throat. “Are the People ready, Mr. Conlin?”
“Ready, Your Honor.”
“Is the defendant ready?”
Sussman rose, removed his half-glasses, looked carefully at each member of the jury and then at the judge. He was not going to be tricked into a careless admission. “Ready, Your Honor.”
“Then please begin, Mister Conlin.”
Conlin rose gracefully, his suit jacket already neatly buttoned, and strode into the well of the court to face the jury. He met each of twelve pairs of eyes.
“Good morning,” he said. “May it please this Honorable Court, Mister Justice Braker, Mister Sussman, Mister Karp, Mister Foreman, and members of the jury.
“At this point in the trial, as the assistant district attorney in charge of presenting the evidence in this case on behalf of the People of the State of New York, the law imposes on me the duty of making an opening statement. Its purpose is to outline for you what the People expect to prove by way of the evidence in this case. Now, you should know that there is no corresponding duty for the defense.” He gestured casually toward Sussman’s table. “They may make an opening or they may not, as they see fit.”
Conlin paused and moved closer to the jury box, almost belly up to the rail. He resumed, in his rich baritone, a little more intensely. “You may consider this opening as a preview of what we plan to present as evidence, like the table of contents of a book, so that you can follow the testimony more easily.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the People will prove that this man,” (here he pivoted sharply, and pointed the classic accusing finger directly at Louis), “this man, the defendant, Mandeville Louis, during the night of March Twenty-sixth of this year, while committing an armed robbery of A amp;A Liquors, in Manhattan, at 423 Madison Avenue, brutally and callously snuffed out the life of the proprietor, Angelo Marchione, by shooting him in the head with a sawed-off shotgun.”
Karp watched in fascination, taking professional note of the way Conlin held himself, the way he modulated and pitched his voice. This was the reality, worth twenty years of law-school lectures. But as Conlin launched into a gripping description of how Randy Marchione had been done to death, Karp was distracted by a whining sound, a low “uh-heh, uh-heh, uh-heh” like a child getting set to throw a tantrum, from the direction of the defense table. He turned his head and observed Louis bouncing up and down in his seat. The defendant held his arms bent at the elbow, rigid, his hands like blades, moving them in a chopping motion in time with each bounce.
The jury was distracted from Conlin’s speech. Conlin himself stopped talking and turned around, fury and confusion on his face. All eyes were on Mandeville Louis. Sussman plucked at his sleeve; Louis yanked his arm away and rose to his feet, jerking like a puppet. His glasses hung askew from one earpiece, his mouth gaped wide and from it now came a dribble of saliva and a loud inarticulate wail.
The judge tapped his gavel. The wail grew louder, reached a crescendo and stopped. A confused babble from the spectators; more banging of the gavel. Louis pointed a finger at the judge. “You hurt my momma,” he shrieked, and with that he overturned the heavy defense table, climbed over it, and jumped the rail. The two court officers were stunned; in the seconds it took them to react, Louis had cleared the well of the court and thrown himself at the judge’s high presidium, which he attempted to scale like a commando on an obstacle course. A woman began screaming. A man yelled, “Stop him! Stop him!”
Judge Braker had seen many odd things during his forty years on the bench, but these barely prepared him for the sight of a foam-flecked, raving lunatic face heaving over the cliff-edge of his domain. “Ah get you, ah get you, you hurt mah momma,” said Louis, with accompanying groans and shrieks. The judge rolled his chair away as far as he could, and prepared to defend himself with his gavel, returning that symbolic instrument, for perhaps the first time in six hundred years, to its literal role as the defender of the physical security of the judiciary.
Fortunately, he did not have to defend himself against the defendant. To his relief, the grotesque face and clutching hands were yanked away. Two court officers and a police officer fell on Louis, cuffed his hands and his ankles, and carried him feet first through the door to the holding pen.
Judge Braker wiped his face with his handkerchief and waited for the unaccustomed, but not entirely unwelcome, flood of adrenaline to dissipate from his system. The murmurs in the courtroom died away. “Mister Conlin,” he said wryly, “it appears to me that your opening statement has upset the defendant.” Conlin said nothing. What could he say?
The judge turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to adjourn this court for a few moments. In the meantime, I ask that you not discuss what you have just witnessed among yourselves, and that you do not draw any conclusions from it.” To the lawyers he said, “I would like to see all counsel in my chambers-right now.”
In Braker’s chambers it was neat Chivas all around, except for Karp, who declined. Conlin was wary and silent, Sussman looked genuinely stunned, Braker looked exhausted as he knocked down his first belt in a single gulp, and poured himself another.
Sussman said, “Fred, I honestly had no idea … I mean, the man gave no indication …”
Braker smiled. “Relax, Lennie, nobody thinks you’re putting on an act. Everybody knows it’s not your style. But, we obviously …”
Sussman nodded vigorously. “Obviously, I will move to declare him unfit to stand trial.”
The judge choked on a swallow of his Scotch, recovered, gave Sussman a bleak look. “No shit, Lennie, no shit.” He turned to Conlin. “No objection from the People?” Conlin seemed about to say something, then shook his head. “Then I will have the orders drawn up and send him to Bellevue.” Braker sat back in his chair with a sigh. “See you in court, gentlemen.”
“Jack,” said Karp, “didn’t anything strike you as odd about that scene?” Conlin and Karp were walking in the corridor toward the bureau offices after the dismissal of the jury.
“Odd? Yeah, I guess it would strike me as odd when a defendant goes off his nut and attacks the judge. What the hell are you talking about, odd?”
“No, no, not what happened-I mean the details. Did you spot that Louis sort of stopped fighting when the court officers had him? I always thought that maniacs-I don’t know-fought like maniacs. None of the officers even had their hair mussed.”
Conlin snorted. “Hey, how should I know? Am I a shrink?”
“And another thing. His glasses. When he threw over the table they were hanging off his face. When the guards carried him out he had them in his hand. That’s what I mean by odd. Protecting eyeglasses is not something you expect a psychotic to do.”
“What are you getting at? You think he pulled a scam on us?”
“It’s a possibility.”
Conlin made a contemptuous noise. “Boy, have you got a lot to learn! Listen, forensic psychiatry is the biggest tar pit in this business. Go near it, and you get dirty.” He started to walk away.