Page 8 of The Hamptons Lawyer

“Try not to kill them,” Jimmy says.

They’re just through the Midtown Tunnel when there’s an incoming call on Jimmy’s phone. He sees on his dashboard screen that it’s from Jane.

But when he answers he hears a woman’s voice saying, “This is Norma Banks.”

“You’re the jury consultant,” Jimmy says. “But why are you calling me on Jane’s phone?”

“She told me to call you,” she says. “We just got to the hospital.”

SIX

“YOUR GIRL WAS PISSED at me for calling 911,” Norma says to Jimmy, “once she came to, that is.”

Jimmy and Norma and Rip the dog and I are in my living room, all of us having finished the burgers and fries Jimmy had picked up for us at Rowdy Hall.

Jimmy and Norma had cold beers with theirs. I drank one of the many bottles of water I’ve consumed since Norma and I left the hospital.

The emergency room doctor at the NYU Langone Hospital in Mineola ran a battery of tests and concluded that what had happened was almost entirely due to dehydration, something about which I still occasionally get careless, and released me.

“That’s bullshit that it was just hydration,” Norma says to Jimmy. “It was stress, too.”

She has eventually stopped pouting that I won’t let her smoke in the house.

“Add some fatigue in there, too,” Jimmy says, “from having to keep looking over her shoulder all the time.”

“Look who’s talking,” I say.

On his way to my house, Jimmy dropped Rob Jacobson at his rental with a warning: until the trial starts, if he travels farther than the end of the driveway, Jimmy will call his parole officer himself.

“You’d actually do that?” Rob asked him.

“While wearing a party hat,” Jimmy said.

Even though I’ve already killed two bad guys since taking on Rob Jacobson’s defense, Jimmy and I both know there are still too many out there, and very much unaccounted for, and that if I start listing them now, starting with Rob’s own son, Eric, it would sound as if I were calling the roll on a dirtbag parade.

I give a shake to my head now and tell myself to stop thinking about them, or the world might once again start spinning on me the way it did at the courthouse.

For the next hour or so, we do manage to talk about the trial and not fainting spells. Well, Norma does most of the talking, turning over an unlit Marlboro in her right hand, while Jimmy and I listen. She’s started out by detailing her jury wish list.

“Since none of us has Human Resources to worry about,” she says, “let me tell you two that we don’t want any blue-collar workers and the whiter the jury the better. And I mean whiter than Wonder Bread.”

“Is that even still a thing?” Jimmy asks.

She glares at him and continues. “We want white people in that box, and we want people with money in their pockets. Clarence Darrow once said that most jury trials come down to rich versus poor.”

I see Jimmy grinning. Maybe he just wants her to know she doesn’t scare him. “I heard you dated him,” he says.

He is seated next to her. Norma Banks turns and pinches his bare upper arm enough to turn it red.

“Hey, that hurt,” he says.

“No worries, kid,” she says. “It just means I like you.”

I lean back in my chair, afraid that if I close my eyes, I might fall asleep. It’s been a long day, and they’re only going to get longer once the trial starts. Jimmy says he’ll take Rip out for his last walk of the day. Norma is going to stay thenight in my guest room, so we can get up and do work together in the morning.

“One more question about the kind of jury we want,” Jimmy says. “Do we want more men or more women deciding about our guy Rob?”

“Women,” she says, without any hesitation.