“Whatever. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
I saw that the area around the elevators was clear. Lorna and I could go down now and not encounter any prospective jurors. I took Lorna by the arm and started leading her that way. I pushed past the reporter.
“So we’re okay?” McEvoy said. “You’ll hold off?”
“Hold off on what?”
“Talking to anyone else. On giving away the exclusive.”
“Whatever.”
I left him hanging and headed toward the elevators. When we got out of the building, we walked a block over to City Hall and I had Patrick pick us up there. I didn’t want any prospective jurors who might be hanging around the courthouse to see me getting into the back of a chauffeured Lincoln. It might not sit well with them. Among my pretrial instructions to Elliot had been a directive for him to eschew the studio limo and drive himself to court every day. You never know who might see what outside the courtroom and what the effect might be.
I told Patrick to take us over to the French Garden on Seventh Street. I then called Harry Bosch’s cell phone and he answered right away.
“I just talked to the reporter,” I said.
“And?”
“And it’s finally running Sunday 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 progressed. I knew that Golantz had made a tactical error. He had eliminated the sanitation worker with one challenge and had ended up with a juror seemingly even more detrimental to his cause. He would now have to live with the mistake or use his final challenge to remove the artist and run the same risk all over again.
When the judge finished his general inquiries, it was the lawyers’ turn. Golantz went first and asked a series of questions he hoped would draw out a bias so that the artist could be removed for cause instead of through the use of his last preemptory. But the woman held her own, appearing very honest and open-minded.
Four questions into the prosecutor’s effort, I felt a vibration in my pocket and reached in for my cell. I held it down below the defense table between my legs and at an angle where it could not be seen by the judge. Julie Favreau had been texting me all day.
Favreau: She’s a keeper.
I sent her one back immediately.
Haller: I know. What about 7, 8 and 10? Which one next?
Favreau, my secret jury consultant, had been in the fourth row of the gallery during both the morning and afternoon sessions. I had also met her for lunch while Walter Elliot had once again gone back to the studio to check on things, and I had allowed her to study my chart so that she could make up her own. She was a quick study and knew exactly where I was with my codes and challenges.
I got a response to my text message almost immediately. That was one thing I liked about Favreau. She didn’t overthink things. She made quick, instinctive decisions based solely on visual tells in relation to verbal answers.
Favreau: Don’t like 8. Haven’t heard enough from 10. Kick 7 if you have to.
Juror eight was the tree trimmer. I had him in blue because of some of the answers he gave when questioned about the police. I also thought he was too eager to be on the jury. This was always a flag in a murder case. It signaled to me that the potential juror had strong feelings about law and order and wasn’t hesitant about the idea of sitting in judgment of another person. The truth was, I was suspicious of anybody who liked to sit in judgment of another. Anybody who relished the idea of being a juror was blue ink all the way.
Judge Stanton was allowing us a lot of leeway. When it came time to question a prospective juror, the attorneys were allowed to trade their time to question anyone else on the panel. He was also allowing the liberal use of back strikes, meaning it was acceptable to use a preemptory challenge to strike out anybody on the panel, even if they had already been questioned and accepted.