Simon walked in at 7 A.M. and found the coffeepot. Raymond and Casey Noland arrived a few minutes later. Raymond said he was ready, said it was “showtime,” said if you weren’t nervous the first day of the trial, then something was wrong. He told a couple first-day stories that were hard to follow.
Simon listened as he kept an eye on the street in front of the courthouse. The television vans were arriving and being herded to the proper spots by a small army of city policemen. Barricades were in place to keep the sidewalks clear of reporters and onlookers. The jurors would enter through a side door, away from the press. Simon had his own strategy, one that Marshall Graff had put together with his paralegals.
At 8:30, Raymond and Casey loaded their thick briefcases and walked to the front entrance of the courthouse. They attracted plenty of attention, and a smiling Raymond enjoyed bantering with the reporters while saying nothing. They wanted to know where his client was hiding. Raymond said Simon was sleeping in that morning.
An associate of Marshall Graff’s drove Simon to a service entrance, where he jumped out by the dumpsters and entered, unseen. At 8:55, he strode into the courtroom with Raymond and Casey, took a seat at the defense table, and tried not to notice the crowd watching him.
Judge Shyam assumed the bench at precisely 9 A.M. and said good morning. She went through her usual spiel about the trial and her rules governing the decorum in her courtroom. She gave a general outline of how the trial would progress and predicted it would be completed by the end of the week, but there was no rush. She informed the crowd that the jury had already been selected and asked the bailiffs to bring the jurors. They entered, some rather tentatively, and assumed their numbered chairs in the jury box.
Judge Shyam nodded at Cora Cook, who rose and walked purposefully to the podium in front of the jurors. Not a single garment in her closet could be considered conservative, but she was still quite impressive in solid black. The heels were not quite as high and the skirt wasn’t quite as tight, but she kept a nice figure and knew how to display it. The jurors looked her over while she smiled and said hello. Then she began with an obsequious opening in which she thanked the jurors repeatedly for their service, and so on.
Simon scribbled on his legal pad, “as if they have a choice???”
Cora got to the heart of the matter soon enough. “This is a case of murder driven by greed.” Her words were delivered solemnly, with a nice dramatic flair. Simon could feel the jurors’ eyes boring down upon him. He did not look up.
“In March of last year, in the town of Braxton, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a lovely lady named Eleanor Barnett, a widow with no children, made an appointment to see a lawyer named Simon Latch, the defendant.” Cora paused for more drama and pointed at Simon. He nodded gravely at her finger as if to say, Yes, that’s me but you got the wrong person.
“Ms. Barnett was eighty-five years old and wanted to make a new will. The defendant had been a lawyer in Braxton for eighteen years, was well known, and had prepared many simple, inexpensive wills. The meeting took place as scheduled on March the tenth in his office on Main Street. At some point during the first meeting, the defendant realized that a simple will would not be sufficient for Ms. Barnett, at least not in his opinion. She was not an average client. Indeed, she said she had millions of dollars in assets, and no debts. She claimed to own stock in Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart and said she kept several million dollars in cash in a bank in Atlanta. Greed entered the picture and the defendant decided on a different course of action. For the previous twelve years, his secretary, Matilda Clark, had typed every will in the office. It’s fairly routine legal work. But for some reason, the defendant did not allow Ms. Clark to prepare the will, but rather typed it himself and said nothing to his secretary about it. From that moment on, the defendant had a scheme to ingratiate himself to Ms. Barnett and get as much of her money as possible.”
Simon scribbled, “So far, so good, pretty much on point, got her facts straight. Why am I sweating already?”
Raymond had warned him that most prosecutors try to dehumanize their targets by referring to them only as the defendant. Cora was following the playbook.
She said, “Unfortunately, the scheme ended in the poisoning and death of Ms. Barnett.” In another effort at high drama, she pointed at him again and said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Ms. Barnett died at the hands of her own lawyer, this defendant sitting right here.”
Cora then made a harmless mistake by talking about the will the defendant prepared and typed himself. She lost the jury for the moment when she tried to explain some of the trusts. Simon watched them and knew they were either confused or bored.
His mind wandered. To be called a murderer and put on trial would be a nightmarish ordeal even for a guilty person. The horror was the potential punishment: death by lethal injection, or decades in prison. But for an innocent man, the entire charade was overwhelming and surreal. Simon kept telling himself that it wasn’t really happening, that at some pivotal moment the judge would stop everything, dismiss the jury, admonish the prosecutor, and instruct the defendant to walk out of the courthouse, an innocent man. And, oh by the way, sorry for the trouble. But with each hour of each day, he was quietly growing accustomed to the role of the accused. The grinding machinery of American justice was often slow to start, but once the disparate elements finally came together at one time and in one place — the courtroom — there was no stopping the train wreck.
Cora returned to his scheming ways and the jury perked up. The defendant typed the will, then convinced an insurance agent and his wife next door to witness it, then tried his best to keep it quiet. Because of a quirk in our estate tax laws, it would be greatly advantageous to the heirs if Ms. Barnett died in calendar year 2015. Thus, the defendant had a deadline. He slowly befriended Ms. Barnett, spent more time with her, took her to many long lunches, all of which he paid for. During one outing, the couple discovered a Vietnamese restaurant in Braxton. Ms. Barnett especially liked the Saigon ginger cookies the place was known for.
On a large screen hung from the wall across from the jury, Cora flashed a color photo of one of the ginger cookies. Flat, about two inches in diameter. Then she added a photo of the Tan Lu’s box. For $6.25 you got a dozen cookies. The last photo was a small mound of white powder on a lab test tray. It resembled baking soda. She said it was a sample of thallium, a poison no longer produced in America but not illegal to possess. Until recently it was commonly used in rat poison. Most of it came from China and India. It was odorless, tasteless, invisible when mixed with other substances, and lethal.
In a movement that was quite dramatic, Cora walked to the exhibit table near the bench and from a cardboard box removed a standard, plastic hospital tray. Two of Tan Lu’s boxes were in the center of it. She held it in front of the jury and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the murder weapon. Eleven cookies. Nine in one box, two in the other, all laced with thallium. The thirteen that are missing were consumed by the victim. All were purchased by the defendant on two separate days last December, then taken by his secretary to the hospital room of Eleanor Barnett. After the cookies were consumed over a one-week period, Ms. Barnett died of acute toxic poisoning. Her death was slow, painful, and agonizing. The state medical examiner will describe the condition of her body.”
The courtroom was perfectly still. Everyone watched as Cora carefully placed the tray back in the cardboard box. She handled it as if the slightest jiggle might unleash the thallium and kill her, the court reporter, maybe the judge as well.