The only boyfriend they’d found was a computer geek who said he had respected her too much to hassle her for sex, so they dated, but their relationship was platonic. Lamb’s best friend, Mimi Buckmaster, was a cello-playing vegan whose worst vice appeared to be baking eggless muffins no one liked. Other close female friends included a Sunday-school teacher, a social worker, a bank clerk, and a woman who designed Hallmark greeting cards. All in all, they had zip.
No one at Sagelblum could believe it. Rhianna Lamb did not wear tight jeans, chew gum, smoke, or drink beer. She attended church, listened to blues, and friends said her favorite movies were
Forrest Gump
and
Titanic
. She was, in fact, so boring and decent, at the age of twenty-eight, that she was universally described as “nice.”
Jules could not imagine a more condemning epithet. Personally, she was thankful no one would ever say that about her, but professionally, she was bothered. In her experience no one was so “nice,” so consistently, that they had nothing to hide. The investigators had to be missing a piece of the puzzle.
Irritated, she tuned in to the client once more. Werner Brigham was still waxing lyrical.
“She runs, so she has that athletic build but,” he pronounced in an approving tone, “she’s still feminine and graceful. She probably had ballet lessons as a girl. You can see that in the way she holds herself.”
Ballet lessons. This was the first time she had ever heard a sex offender speculate on his alleged victim’s background in dance. And Brigham was an offender; Jules felt dead certain about that. He had freely admitted to stalking Rhianna Lamb and to an incomplete sex act he insistently described as “a consummation.” In his version of events, these actions were the culmination of a courtship and a preliminary to marriage. Brigham was a man who believed his own fiction.
“She has similar refined tastes in clothing to my mother,” he shared in a reflective tone. “I think the two of them will be good friends. That’s an important consideration.”
And a sentiment best left unshared with members of the jury. Brigham was apparently a stranger to the norms of dating. Was he also a stranger to reason? Several of the senior trial attorneys on the team thought so. Their private notes, for her eyes only, were circumspect but ominous.
Mr. Brigham displays a marked inability to perceive his actions as they may be interpreted by others…
…if the client was not a well-connected man of wealth and education, he would be at risk of certification…
…the manner in which the client professes his devotion to the plaintiff must be adjusted and controlled by counsel if he is to take the stand.
Finally, there was Sid Lyle’s assessment. Never one to mince words, he’d passed her a scrawled note during her first pre-trial conference. It read,
This guy is a fucking fruitcake.
In a half-decent world, they would plead him out and he would serve time, or at least end up in a state mental hospital. But Salazar, Hagel & Goldblum had a reputation to keep up and high-end real estate to pay for. They took cases to trial.
Jules had no problem with such pragmatism. She hadn’t worked her ass off for the shingle on her corner-suite door to start sweating about shades of guilt and innocence. If she didn’t like defending well-heeled clients who had made errors in judgment, or were innocent and targeted for the wrong reasons, she could always trade in her Mercedes, sell her costly hideaway on Lake Tahoe, and cross the street to the DA’s office. None of which were options she planned to explore anytime soon.
Werner Brigham had retained the best legal team money could buy, and she was the lead trial attorney who would walk down the courthouse steps with him when he was acquitted. Jules could sleep okay with that. She was paid handsomely to do a job, and she made a point of doing it better than most of her rivals.
“I understand you intended to propose marriage to Ms. Lamb the night of the incident,” she said.
“I had the ring custom-made for her. She wouldn’t even try it on.” Brigham looked aggrieved.
“That must have been upsetting.”
The client extracted a narrow gold case from inside his jacket; at first glance it could have passed for a lipstick. He flipped it open, extracted a slender silver toothpick, and set about working it between his front teeth. Between oral forays, he said, “That ring cost me fifty thousand dollars, not that money is an object. I knew from overhearing a conversation between Rhianna and her best friend, Mimi, that blue diamonds are her favorite. So I chose one with a blue diamond in the center and white princess diamonds on the sides. Princess…to express my vision of her.”
Jules ran through the argument.
Does a man purchase a fifty-thousand-dollar diamond engagement ring for a woman who has not encouraged him? Does he risk embarrassment by informing family and friends that he is planning to marry in the near future if he has no hope of such a union?
Werner Brigham is accused of a heinous crime. But his only “crime” was to mistake the mixed messages of a respectable, inexperienced single woman for natural shyness. You see, ladies and gentlemen, my client, in this day and age, is an old-fashioned man. A man from a prominent Denver family. A man brought up to respect women, but also to believe that men must take the lead in matters of romance and courtship…
Jury selection would be critical. They needed older women, preferably seven or eight of them, women who devoured Harlequin romances and still did their sons’ laundry. And they needed young, poorly educated men who would find nothing remarkable in the idea that one of their sex could be confused by a woman and innocently do the wrong thing. With good management, they would be able to identify the closet Neanderthals who thought “no” meant a woman was playing hard to get and male sexual aggression was “normal.” The world was full of them.
“Why do you think Ms. Lamb turned you down?” Jules was unable to take her eyes off the glinting toothpick. There could be nothing left to dislodge, but Brigham was probing almost viciously around his gums.
“She was overwhelmed,” he replied. “It’s been like that throughout our relationship. When you consider our different positions in life, that’s hardly surprising. Women have always chased me for my money.”
“Did Rhianna chase you?”
“No, quite the opposite,” he said with disdain. “That’s my point.”
“You’re saying Rhianna was not impressed by your wealth?”
“Exactly.” He nodded.
“Do you have any idea why not?” Jules invited, wanting to see how Brigham would approach the topic without coaching.
“She’s sensitive and unassuming. Obviously she is anxious about the social gulf between us and does not want me to see her as the grasping type. That’s why my flowers embarrassed her.” When Jules raised an eyebrow in query, he explained, “Each week, I sent her a large bouquet. She asked me to stop.”
“And did you?”
“Of course not. I knew she was only worried about the extravagance.” He flicked a dismissive hand through the air as he laughed this off. “She genuinely didn’t realize that a two-hundred-dollar bouquet is nothing to me, yet it could fill that second-rate abode of hers with beauty. That’s all I ever wanted for her…to surround her with beauty. Isn’t that what all truly feminine women want?”
He studied Jules with faint derision, leaving no doubt that she had failed the true-femininity test herself and was now being invited to speculate on the motives of her more acceptable sisters. Jules wondered what he saw in her that he disapproved of. At work, she kept her hair loose and shoulder length to send the right signal to clients and juries. She always wore a suit and a few carefully chosen items of jewelry—a simple gold initial pin her grandmother had given her when she graduated, a signet ring, small, thick gold cuff earrings. Today she was in Armani, a dark charcoal jacket and pants teamed with a patterned claret silk blouse.
She would have worn a skirt and classic Chanel or Ferragamo pumps if she had to appear before a judge. For a trial, she also changed her color scheme. A shell in ivory, pale pink, or soft olive green, and a less austere suit with a feminine cut. Juries appreciated eye candy, and she made sure to offer just enough, wearing her jackets a little shorter and her skirts slightly tight around the hips, so male jurors got to see a firm ass as she strolled back and forth. At the same time, for the benefit of the women she needed to win over, her skirts were long enough that she wasn’t flaunting legs better than theirs, and she kept her jackets buttoned to disguise breast perkiness and nipples that made themselves obvious when her adrenaline surged.
“It sounds like you consider Ms. Lamb the ideal woman,” Jules said. “Could you tell me why?”
The toothpick hung in the air an inch from his mouth, firmly clamped between thumb and forefinger. He wore a pinky ring on the hand in question, a smooth bloodstone cabochon set in pink gold. The ring drew attention to the affected angle of his pinky finger, which pointed straight up at the ceiling. That would have to change.
“Well, for a start, she’s completely natural. Most women with her hair color get it from a bottle, but I happen to know she sees her hairdresser for only a cut. I personally checked that.” He eyed Jules’s jet black hair suspiciously, then continued his musings with the confidence of a man who knew his topic well. “I suppose people would call her a blonde, but I like to call her hair ‘moonbeam’ in color, a personal vanity.” With a self-effacing chuckle, he explained, “Poetry was my major at Columbia. You could say Rhianna is my muse.”
Jules winced. Oh, yes, the jury would have plenty to talk about over their hot lunches. “You have some works published, don’t you?” She recalled an entry amidst her voluminous file notes.
“In the
Columbia Poetry Review
and, most recently, in
Pleiades.
”
He paused, as if to allow this information to sink in.
When she did not react, he said with faint condescension, “Obviously, you are not acquainted with the
belles lettres
or you would recognize the prestige of those publications. I also won the Maxine DeKamp award for best undergraduate poet in my year.”
Or, in jury-speak, Brigham is a Mommy’s boy who writes poems instead of holding down a man’s job.
Jules had already reworked that angle in her mind.
Mr. Brigham is a published, award-winning poet. While this is strictly a personal passion rather than an occupation, his hobby provides evidence of his romantic side. Ask yourselves this question: What is a sensitive man with a fifty-thousand-dollar diamond ring in his pocket planning when he takes a limousine to the home of the woman he is in love with? That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, he is planning a romantic dinner and a marriage proposal.
Mr. Brigham had reservations at the elite Palace Arms Restaurant for that evening and, as you have heard, the restaurant manager knew in advance that the dinner was an engagement celebration. My client placed a prepaid order for two bottles of high-priced champagne and a red-rose bouquet from the city’s leading florist. Who does this without a reason?
The man you see before you made an error in judgment. He’s only human. For his trouble, he has had his heart broken and his reputation destroyed by a malicious media. He has resigned from his job, lost friends, and seen his hopes of marriage and children go up in smoke. Hasn’t he been punished enough?
“So you see, calling her a blonde gives the wrong impression.” Brigham was still glued to his theme. “I don’t know about you, but I always picture a tramp when people talk about a blonde. And that’s not my Rhianna at all. She’s morally impeccable, or I would not have decided to marry her.”
“How can you be certain about her morality?” Jules inquired blandly.
“I used to watch her house in the evenings. No male visitors. And I took pains to be present at the social events she attended to make sure she was unmolested by men.” He paused, seeming to bask in his own certainty. “Sometimes she has female friends visit, but never a man.”
“You watched her house.” As soon as Brigham stepped into the courtroom, the jury would smell Eau de Creep.
Fortunately, he seemed to grasp that he was entering hazardous terrain. With earnest indignation, he explained, “I wasn’t watching her house to
spy
on her. I
care
for her. These days genuinely virtuous women are rare and their innocence makes them vulnerable. I was only trying to protect her from afar, before I have a husband’s right to do so.”