“And how many cases do you prosecute in any given year?”
“Anywhere from twelve to twenty. That’s in front of a jury. The majority of cases are disposed of through bench trials or plea negotiations.” She laughed. “It gets very hectic at this time of year. There’s usually a race to see which judge can dispose of the most number of cases before Christmas.”
The pizza arrived, steaming and hot, its four different cheeses spilling over the sides of the aluminum pan, a variety of vegetables and sausages spread across its face. “Looks fabulous,” Adam remarked, cutting a piece for each of them and smiling as Jess immediately lifted her piece into her hands and stuffed the end into her mouth.
Adam laughed. “You look just like a little kid.”
“I’m sorry. I should have warned you. I’m a total slob when I eat. I have no shame.”
“It’s a pleasure to watch you.”
“I could never understand how people can eat pizza with a knife and fork,” she continued, then stopped short, a long string of cheese dangling between her mouth and
plate. “Now you’re going to tell me that you always use a knife and fork, right?”
“I wouldn’t dare.” Adam lifted his piece of pizza into his large hands and carried it to his mouth.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful,” he agreed, his eyes never leaving hers. “So, tell me more about Jess Koster, assistant state’s attorney.”
“I think I’ve probably said more than enough. Don’t all the books advise women to let men do the talking? You know, find out what his interests are? Fake interest in same?” She paused, the pizza in her hand suspended in midair. “Or is that what you’re doing with me?”
“You don’t think you’re interesting?”
“Just because l find the law fascinating doesn’t mean everybody else will.”
“What is it about the law that fascinates you?”
Jess lowered her pizza to her plate, giving serious thought to his question, choosing her words carefully. “I guess that it’s so complicated. I mean, most people like to think of the criminal justice system as a fight between right and wrong, good and evil, the whole truth and nothing but. But it isn’t like that at all. It’s not black and white. It’s varying shades of gray. Both sides subvert the truth, try to use it to their own advantage. A good attorney will always put a ‘spin’ on a bad act so that it doesn’t come out sounding so bad.”
“Lawyers as spin doctors?”
Jess nodded. “The sad truth is that truth is almost irrelevant in a court of law.” She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s easy for lawyers to lose sight of basic moral and ethical considerations.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Morality is internal,” Jess said simply. “Ethics are defined by a professional code of responsibility. Did that sound as hopelessly pompous as I think it did?”
“It sounded charming.”
“Charming? I sounded charming?” Jess laughed.
“That surprises you?”
“Charming is rarely a word I hear used to describe me,” she answered honestly.
“What words do you hear?”
“Oh … intense, serious, intense, dedicated, intense. I hear a lot of intense.”
“Which is probably what makes you such a good prosecutor.”
“Who said I was any good?”
“Asked she who stood fourth in her graduating class.”
Jess smiled self-consciously. “I’m not sure one thing has anything to do with the other. I mean, you can memorize precedents and procedures, you can study the law books backward and forward, but you really have to have a
feeling
for what the law is. It’s a little like love, I guess.” She looked away. “A matter of ghosts and shadows.”
“Interesting analogy,” Adam commented. “I take it you’re divorced.”
Jess reached for her wineglass, lifted it to her mouth, then lowered it without taking a drink. “Interesting assumption.”
“Two interesting people,” Adam told her, once again clicking his glass against hers. “How long were you married?”
“Four years.”
“And how long have you been divorced?”
“Four years.”
“Nice symmetry.”
“And you?”
“Married six years, divorced three.”
“Any children?”
He finished his wine, poured the rest of the bottle into his glass, and shook his head.
“Are you sure?” Jess asked, and laughed. “That was a very pregnant pause.”
“No children,” he repeated. “And you?”
“No.”
“Too busy?”
“Too much of a child myself, I guess.”
“I doubt that,” he told her. “You look as if you have a very old soul.”
Jess disguised her sudden discomfort with nervous laughter. “I guess I need more sleep.”
“You don’t need a thing. You’re very beautiful,” he said, suddenly focusing all his attention on his pizza.
Jess did the same. For several awkward seconds, nobody spoke.
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” he said, still concentrating on his plate.
“I’m not embarrassed,” Jess said, not sure what she was.
“So, did your being a prosecutor have anything to do with your divorce?” Adam asked, suddenly shifting gears.
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, being a trial lawyer is a little like being a racehorse, I suspect. You’re trained to be a thoroughbred. You hear the bell, you come out running. You’ve got a big ego, which you need because it’s always on the line. And the worst thing is losing. When you’re in the middle of a trial, I would
think it’s very hard to just turn all that off. Basically you’re married to the trial for its duration. Am I wrong?”
Jess shook her head. “You’re not wrong.”
“What did your husband do?” Adam cut them each another slice of pizza.
Jess smiled. “He’s a lawyer.”
“I rest my case.”
Jess laughed. “What about your ex-wife?”
“She’s an interior decorator. Last I heard she’d remarried.” Adam took a deep breath, lifted his hands into the air, as if to indicate he’d exhausted himself on the subject. “Anyway, enough about past lives. Time to move on.”
“That was quick.”
“Nothing much to tell.”
“You don’t like talking about yourself much, do you?”
“No more than you do.”
Jess was incredulous. “What do you mean? I’ve been talking about myself since I got here.”
“You’ve been talking about the law. Whenever the questions get more personal, you clam up as tightly as if you were a hostile witness on the stand.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Jess said, surprised to find herself so transparent. “I won’t tell you my secrets if you don’t tell me yours.”
Adam smiled, his brown eyes impenetrable. “Tell me no secrets; I’ll tell you no lies.”
There was a long pause.
“Sounds good,” Jess said.
“For me too.”
They resumed eating, finishing off the rest of the pizza in silence.
“Why did you call me tonight?” Jess asked, pushing away her empty plate.
“I wanted to see you,” he answered. “Why did you accept?”
“I guess I wanted to see you too.”
They smiled at each other across the table.
“So, what’s an ambitious lawyer like you doing out with a simple shoe salesman like me?” He signaled for the check.
“I get the feeling there’s nothing simple about you.”
“That’s because you’re a lawyer. You’re always looking for things that aren’t there.”
Jess laughed. “And I hear it’s going to snow tomorrow. I could use a new pair of winter boots.”
“I have just the thing in the backseat of my car. Can I offer you a ride home?”
Jess hesitated, wondered what was she afraid of?
Carla approached with the bill. “So, how was everything? You like the pizza?” she inquired of Adam.
“Without doubt, the best pizza in the De Paul area.”
Jess watched Adam take a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, thought of offering to split the cost of the dinner, then thought better of the idea. Next time, she decided, dinner would be on her.
If there was a next time.
Jess was sleeping, the kind of deep, dreamless, luxurious sleep that had eluded her for weeks. Suddenly, she was awake, her body upright, her hands shooting forward, as if she were falling through the air. All around bells were ringing, alarms were going off.
It was the phone, she realized, reaching across the bed and lifting the receiver cautiously to her ear. The illuminated
dial of her digital clock announced it was three a.m. No good news ever came at three o’clock in the morning, she knew. Only death and despair thought nothing of waking people up in the middle of the night.
“Hello,” she said, her voice alert and in control, as if she’d been waiting for the phone to ring.
She expected to hear the police on the other end, or possibly the office of the medical examiner. But there was only silence.
“Hello?” she repeated. “Hello? Hello?”
No answer. Not even the courtesy of some token heavy breathing.
She hung up, her head falling back onto her pillow with a gentle thud. Just a stupid nuisance call, she thought, refusing to consider other possibilities. “Go back to sleep,” she muttered. But sleep had deserted her, and she lay awake, watching as snow silently cascaded outside her bedroom window, until it was time to get up.
“S
o, all in all, how would you say it went today?” Jess looked across her desk at Neil Strayhorn and Barbara Cohen, both of whom were fighting off various stages of cold and flu bugs. Neil’s cold had been dragging on for so long now the Kleenex that moved continually between his hand and his long, aquiline nose seemed a permanent fixture. Barbara’s red-rimmed eyes were the consistency of runny eggs, threatening to spill over onto her flushed cheeks. Jess swiveled her chair toward the window, concentrating on the mixture of snow and rain that cut diagonally through the dark sky.
“I thought it went pretty well,” Neil said, his voice wandering helplessly through congested nasal passages. “We made some important points.”
“Such as?” Jess nodded toward Barbara Cohen.
“Ellie Lupino testified that she’d heard Terry Wales threaten to kill his wife if she ever tried to leave him.”
Barbara coughed, had to clear her throat in order to continue. “She swore that Nina Wales wasn’t having an affair.”
“She swore that,
to the best of her knowledge
, Nina Wales wasn’t having an affair,” Jess clarified.
“She was Nina’s best friend for almost ten years. Nina told her everything,” Neil offered. “Surely that will carry a lot of weight with the jury.”
“Ellie Lupino also admitted that she heard Nina Wales publicly disparage her husband’s performance in bed on more than one occasion, that she threatened to take him for everything he had,” Jess reminded them.
“So?” Barbara asked, the word triggering a minor coughing spasm.
“So, that goes to the heart of the defense’s case. If they can convince the jury that Nina Wales provoked her husband into an uncontrollable fury. …”
“… then she was responsible for her own murder!” Barbara sneezed in indignation.
“Then at best we’re looking at murder two.”
“So what if Nina Wales taunted her husband with the fact he was lousy in bed? So what if she threatened to leave him? He beat her with his
fists
. Words were the only weapon that she had!” Barbara Cohen clutched at her chest, stubbornly swallowing another coughing fit, which made her sound as if she was choking.
“We have motive, we have malice aforethought, we have cold, calculated premeditation,” Neil rhymed off, punctuating his sentence with a loud blowing of his nose.
“The whole question is one of provocation,” Jess reiterated over the growing cacophony of bronchial histrionics. “There was a recent case in Michigan where a jury found
the husband of a judge guilty only of manslaughter when he killed his estranged wife in her own courtroom. The jury found that the breakup provoked him to kill her. In another case in New York City, a Chinese American was put on probation,
on probation
, after he bludgeoned his wife to death, with a hammer. The wife had been unfaithful, and the judge ruled that because of the husband’s cultural background, the infidelity constituted provocation.” She took a deep breath, trying not to inhale the germs lingering almost visibly in the air. “The only question those jurors are going to be asking themselves is whether, under similar circumstances, they might be capable of the same thing.”
“So what are you saying?” Barbara asked, a lone tear escaping her watery eyes.
“I’m saying that it all boils down to how well Terry Wales performs on the witness stand,” Jess told them. “I’m saying that we better know everything Terry Wales is going to say to that jury before he does, and not only be ready to call him on it, but to tear him to shreds. I’m saying that it’s not going to be easy to win this case. I’m saying that you guys better get out of here and get into bed.”
Neil sneezed three times in rapid succession.
“Bless you,” Jess said automatically.
“You don’t have to say bless you when someone has a cold,” Barbara informed her. “That’s what my mother always says,” she explained sheepishly, heading for the door.
“I thought Judge Harris was looking a little rough around the edges today,” Neil said, right behind her.
“Probably too much Thanksgiving turkey,” Jess said, closing the door after them, collapsing into the nearest chair, feeling a nervous tickle at the back of her throat.
“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t you get sick now. You do not have time to get sick. Tickle, be gone,” she ordered, returning to her own seat behind her desk, peering over the notes she’d made in court that afternoon, glancing menacingly at the phone.
So what if a week had passed and Adam hadn’t called? Had she really expected him to? Their evening together had ended on a very businesslike note—he’d handed over the boots, she’d handed over the check. He’d deposited her in front of her brownstone without so much as a peck on the cheek. She hadn’t invited him in; he hadn’t asked. They’d said good-bye. No “Can I see you again?,” no “I’ll call you.” Nothing. So, why had she been expecting more?
Had she really thought he might call, suggest they spend Thanksgiving together? Two virtual strangers sharing turkey and cranberry sauce? The assistant state’s attorney from Cook County and the shoe salesman from Springfield! What bothered her more? The fact he was a shoe salesman or the fact he hadn’t called?