Page 41 of The Hamptons Lawyer

Time for me to get to the money question.

“Just knowing what you know about the case, do you think you’ll be able to give a fair hearing to the facts as they’re presented to you?”

She gives a quick shake of her head.

“Probably not,” she says evenly.

“Would you mind telling the court why?”

“Well, Ms. Smith, it’s probably because the summer before last, your client failed to get me into bed despite relentless efforts, and an even more relentless refusal to take no for an answer,” she says, still not changing the tone of her voice. Smiling now, rather wickedly, I think. “And then when he couldn’t fuck me, he tried to do the same with my eighteen-year-old daughter.”

“Okay then,” I say. “Excused.”

As I begin walking back to my table, I am well aware of the slow murmur running through the other potential jurors in the box.

But this one isn’t quite finished.

“Don’t turn your back on me,” she snaps.

I wheel back around.

“You’ve already been excused,” I say.

“Not until I get my money’s worth,” she says. “The good news, or maybe it’s bad news for you, Ms. Smith, is that my daughter and I are still alive, which perhaps cheated you out of the chance to defend the sonofabitch on a couple of more murder raps.”

Judge Horton is banging his gavel now.“Step down, please,”he says.

Finally, the woman does stand up from the witness chair, and begins walking across the courtroom, the sound of her clicking heels suddenly very loud. As she passes my table she slows only long enough to hiss, “Tell him that Missy Werner hopes he rots in hell after he rots in prison.”

I watch her as she keeps going,click-click-clicking her way toward the courtroom’s double doors before she is through them, and gone.

Norma Banks has followed her exit right along with me.

“Good talk,” Norma says.

THIRTY-SIX

WE STAY AT IT for another couple of hours, with no further dramatics.

I am tired enough as we approach the end of the afternoon that I allow McGoey to start interviewing candidates. But as concerned as I am that he will, at worst, embarrass me, and at the very least try to make the whole thing about him, he does a solid and professional job. He mostly asks the same questions I would have asked and generally does nothing that will make that second chair of his empty by tomorrow morning.

Norma Banks has a yellow legal pad in front of her, and different-colored Magic Markers. She has been taking notes all afternoon when she isn’t in my ear making snarky and occasionally profane comments about the ones upon which Katherine Welsh and I have agreed, and the ones we’ve both rejected.

Sometimes I would look over and see this, in red:

“FULL OF CRAP.”

Or this in green:

“Dumb ass.”

Or this one, in black:

“Shut up and get out asshole.”

That one makes it impossible for me to stifle a laugh, even as McGoey is questioning a retired insurance agent from New Hyde Park, male, who looks old enough to have gone to college with Norma Banks.

“Something you find amusing, Ms. Smith?” Judge Horton says.