Page 54

NORMA BANKS AND I make a bet as to how long Katherine Welsh will go with her own opening statement. Welsh, of course, is going first, the way prosecutors always do, since it is the state’s burden to prove that my guy did the deed of which he’s been charged.

I’ve established thirty minutes as our over-under number, like this is one of the dumb, prop bets popular in Jimmy’s bar, where people guess the total number of combined points they think will be scored in a pro football game, among other things.

Norma bets the under.

“Wait and see, she won’t even come close to half an hour,” Norma whispers to me as Katherine Welsh confers one final time with her own team on the other side of the aisle. “She’s already kicked our ass just by showing up.”

I have Norma with me at my table. I would never mention this to her, but I see it as a way of making me look younger.

She’s to my left. McGoey is to my right and Rob Jacobson is to his right. They’ve both just asked why they aren’t in on the bet.

“Because men don’t have equal rights at this table,” I explain. “That’s why.”

Katherine Welsh is wearing a black pantsuit that on her looks like formal attire.

I know it’s a Cucinelli because I passed on buying the same suit at the Cucinelli store in East Hampton, having decided it was too pricey, at least for me.

In comparison the charcoal blazer and matching skirt I’m wearing, purchased a couple of weeks ago at Rag + Bone, looks downmarket.

This is only Day One, and I’m probably the only one keeping score on this, but she’s already taken a big early lead in the runway competition.

As she walks to the middle of the room, Norma Banks is whispering to me again.

“She looks like Lawyer Barbie,” she says.

I can’t help myself. I laugh, and as soon as I do all eyes in the courtroom, including Judge Horton’s, are suddenly on me.

“Care to let us in on the joke, Ms. Smith?” Horton says.

I may be amused. He’s clearly not.

Before I can respond, Norma Banks says, “Blame me, Michael. I made an inappropriate comment.”

“What’s inappropriate, Ms. Banks, is referring to me as anything other than Your Honor in this courtroom,” he says. “Is that clear?”

I see her fighting a smile.

“Yes, Mich—yes, Your Honor, ” she says.

Then Judge Michael Horton addresses Norma and me as if addressing two misbehaving girls in the back of the classroom.

“Don’t make me separate the two of you,” he says. “Now please proceed, Ms. Welsh, with the court’s apologies.”

“No apology necessary,” she says. “Opposing counsel is probably only laughing now to keep from crying later after the State has presented its case.”

Over the next twenty-five minutes—I occasionally check my watch—Katherine Welsh proceeds to kill it, laying out her case like a surgeon carefully laying out instruments in an OR.

She speaks at length about DNA evidence which, as she happily points out, only ended up in the system once the defendant was being tried in the murder of the Gates family.

This DNA evidence, she says, was sprinkled “like pixie dust” around the Carson home in Garden City.

“The defendant didn’t know it when he murdered these three innocent people, having always considered himself to be above the law,” she says, “but it was as if he were leaving a trail of crumbs that would take him all the way to this courtroom, and this trial.” She pauses before adding, “And this reckoning.”

She talks about the witnesses the State will call, all the people who will testify to having seen Rob Jacobson in the company of his old high school friend, Lily Carson, and her daughter, whom Welsh describes “as the kind of underaged young girl the defendant has sexually abused in a serial way.”

Welsh pauses again at this point.

“Another mother, another daughter,” she says, and now turns to face Rob Jacobson. “What are the odds?”

Then she turns back and is once again speaking directly to the jury.

“Fool us once, and by ‘us’ I mean the state, shame on him,” she says. “You know the rest of it, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. If this particular defendant is allowed to fool us again, the everlasting shame will be on us all.”

Another theatrical pause.

Woman knows how to work the room—I have to give her that.

“A shame that will last the rest of our lives,” she says. “Or until he kills again.”

As she heads back to her table, she only slows long enough to give me a look that’s like the stare-down I used to get in college hockey after being run into the boards.

Right before she sits back down, she says, “Oh, and one more thing.”

Wait for it.

Katherine Welsh then walks right back out there and tells the jury about the gun.

Maybe we would be friends if we’d ever met outside this room and this case , I think. Because I would have played it just the way she just played it, saving the murder weapon until the very end.

Now that Welsh is back in her seat, Judge Horton says, “Ms. Smith.”

Norma Banks gives my hand a quick squeeze. I take a last sip of water, take in some air, get to my feet.

Showtime for real.

I’m the one walking to center stage now.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I say.

Then I’m the one speaking directly to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

“Well, of course he did it,” is the way I begin.