Page 4

THE COURTHOUSE HAS OFFERED me the use of an empty conference room for a couple of hours. But I see Norma Banks waiting on a park bench, smoking away.

I cross the street to the small park where she’s sitting, looking trim and fit for someone her age, sucking on what my father used to call a heater.

“The little snots wouldn’t let me smoke inside the building,” she says as her form of greeting.

“The nerve.”

I sit, trying to position myself upwind of her on the small bench. She might be a couple of inches over five feet tall, soft white hair that looks as if it sprouted from a cotton tree, accentuated by a pink sweater and blue jeans and running shoes colored both pink and blue.

She knows about my illness—and about my ongoing hope of being a permanent survivor of it. But I have this feeling that if I ask her to stop puffing away, she’ll tell me it’s a little late for me to be clutching my pearls over secondhand smoke.

Norma Banks just smiles, mostly with eyes the color of the sky.

“Don’t tell me. You quit smoking a long time ago.”

“I was one of those na?ve people who didn’t write off the surgeon general as being an alarmist,” I say.

“Your loss.”

But I smile back at her.

“By the way,” I say. “Thanks for agreeing to work with me.”

“About time you called me,” Norma Banks says. “I was wondering when you were going to wake the fuck up.”

I instantly experience her well-known ability to read jurors even after they’ve been selected—not using technology, only those blue eyes and her fierce intelligence and her instincts.

Neither her age nor her granny looks, however, alter the fact that Norma Banks was—and is—one of the most prominent jury consultants in the country.

She’s worked with everybody from New York City mob lawyers to big-ticket show-business attorneys in Hollywood.

Every time there is a big trial, she hits the talk-show circuit, though after dropping a couple of f-bombs on Court TV, she’s learned to watch her language.

Having turned down the chance to work with O. J. Simpson’s Dream Team, she memorably commented on-air to CNN: “If the gloves don’t fit you must acquit my ass.”

Katherine Welsh has enough forensics to make them party favors. She has a murder weapon with Rob Jacobson’s prints everywhere except inside the gun barrel. And now—Jimmy Cunniff said this was piling on—she has the photograph of him leaving the house that night.

My client continues to say it was all a setup. As you can imagine, I get a lot of that in my line of work. But he’s not the reason I’m skeptical about the State’s case against Rob Jacobson. The reason I’m skeptical goes back to something my father told me one time.

“You want to know the only sure thing in this world?” he said. “That there are no sure things.”

“You know you got lucky with this guy the first time around,” Norma Banks tells me now.

She reaches into the ancient leather bag next to her, grabs a red-and-white Marlboro box. It was my father’s brand, too. He was another one who thought that warning on the side of the boxes was for suckers until he dropped dead of a heart attack on a barroom floor.

She lights another cigarette and inhales deeply and then sighs as if she might have briefly glimpsed God.

“With all due respect,” I say to her, “I like to think I make my own luck.”

“That’s a load of bull and you know it,” she says.

I am smiling again. I can’t help myself.

“Are you under the impression that all of my previous cases somehow won themselves?” I ask her.

“And are you under the impression that you’ve been involved in more murder cases than I have?”

She blows some smoke in my direction. I move my head to the side to avoid it the way you’d slip a punch. At least she’s blowing some kind of smoke at me.

“I know you think you’re one tough mother,” she says. “But it’s my job to read people. And what I’m reading with you is that you’re scared right out of your designer jeans.”

“They’re actually Levi’s,” I say. “But I see your larger point.”

In the still air, she leans her head back and blows a perfect smoke ring.

“So we’re clear?” Norma Banks says. “I think your client is guilty as balls.”

The twinkle in her eyes makes her look much younger than I know she is.

“Is that going to be a problem for you?”

“If it’s not for you, it’s not for me,” she says. “Now let’s both of us stop screwing around here and get to work.”

We’re walking across the street to the courthouse when Jimmy Cunniff calls and without preamble, because there rarely is an ex-cop like him, reports facts he thinks worthy of landmark status.

Rob Jacobson is at the family town house in Manhattan, the place where his father and teenage mistress were shot to death when Jacobson was in high school.

“That’s impossible,” I say. “He’s wearing a goddamn electronic monitoring device.”

“Wore it all the way back to daddy’s house, apparently.”

“What can we do about that, unless they’re already on their way to pick him up?”

“What I’m going to do is drive to the city and then drag him back out here,” Jimmy says. “And not by his ankle, in case you were wondering.”

I end the call, for the second time today feeling the urge to kill my own client.

“Don’t tell me,” Norma Banks says, as almost like a condemned woman, she finishes off one last Marlboro. “Your client did something stupid.”

“Guilty,” I say.