The Neon Lawyer (13 page)

Twenty-seven

The next day, Brigham got to court early. Molly was in a mediation on a custody case all day, so she wasn’t sitting behind him. Scotty had his own things going on as well. The only people there were the reporters.

When the judge finally came out, he didn’t waste any time and just said, “First witness, Mr. Dale.”

The witnesses were two deputies and three bystanders. Two of them were convicted felons who were going into the courthouse on pending charges. But Brigham didn’t bring any of that up. It didn’t matter, as far as he was concerned.

He watched Amanda. She had a distant stare, like she wasn’t even in the courtroom. It made Brigham think of his father, who had fought in Vietnam before marrying his mother. He’d had that same look, as if he’d lost something that he knew he’d never get back.

The deputies testified first, followed by the three bystanders. Their testimony should have been quick, but Vince took his time, as though savoring the fact that the shooting was played out to the jury five times in a single day.

They took only a half hour for lunch, but Brigham couldn’t eat. He went down to the cafeteria of the courthouse and bought some apple juice. He sat alone at a table in the corner and watched people. He didn’t even notice when Vince Dale sat down across from him.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Vince said.

Brigham was silent a moment. “What is?”

“The people coming in here. Doctors, politicians, lawyers, priests . . . you’d never even suspect the things they did behind closed doors. And yet, here they are. Having to give their pound of flesh. You never know what people are capable of ’cause they don’t show you. They don’t show anyone.”

“I don’t see it that way. I think everyone makes mistakes because we’re human. There’s no handbook on life. We make blunders along the way.”

Vince laughed. “You’re an idealist, aren’t you?”

Brigham shook his head, staring out the window. “Right now, it’s Amanda Pierce sitting in front of a jury for one of her mistakes. But it could just as easily be you.”

Vince stopped laughing. “I’m still willing to give you the offer. Call off the jury right now and save your client’s life, Counselor. She’ll hate you for it now, but thank you later.”

“She doesn’t deserve to spend her life in prison.”

“
Deserve
doesn’t have anything to do with this,” he said, motioning to the courthouse around them.

“Do you even know what’s right anymore, Vince?”

“Up yours, you little shit. I’m trying to do your client a favor.”

“You’re scared you might lose. The jury was crying in opening and your own detective said he didn’t blame her for what she did. And you’re not going to execute the mother of a murder victim anyway, so don’t bullshit me. If we lose, you’ll have a press conference where you’ll graciously decline to pursue the death penalty against her, due to her service to the country or something. This is about PR to you . . . But this is her life, Vince. Her
life
.”

Vince adjusted his tie, as though he hadn’t heard him. He rose. “Have it your way. Helluva gamble to take, though. If you’re wrong, and I do pursue the death penalty, she’s going to die.”

Brigham watched him walk away. A woman was trying to push herself through the door with a baby on her hip and a stroller in front of her. Vince saw her, and continued down the hall without getting the door.

When they got back from lunch, everyone seemed lethargic. The jury was slouching in their seats and even the judge looked like he might pass out. Vince, though, seemed full of energy and smiles. A consummate professional.

Amanda looked worse. She wasn’t speaking, wasn’t asking questions. She didn’t even seem interested in what happened there. Brigham knew now what it looked like when someone gave up, totally and completely.

The fourth witness was a man who looked like he’d just come off a long drinking binge, with torn jeans and a T-shirt. He went through what he had seen, the same thing as all the others, and it took a half hour to get the same testimony. But at the very end, he said something no one else had said.

“She looked like she didn’t know where she was.”

Vince ignored it and continued with his questioning. When he was done, the judge looked to Brigham. He stood up and walked to the podium.

“What did you mean when you said that she looked like she didn’t know where she was?”

“After she shot him, I got a good look at her face. I wasn’t that far away. She looked confused, like she’d just woken up from a dream or something.”

“Would you say she looked like it had just dawned on her what she had done?”

“I guess so.”

“But before that, she didn’t appear to know what she was doing?”

“She looked . . . on autopilot, if that makes sense. Like she shot him, and then woke up. That’s the best I can explain it.”

“Nothing further. Thank you.”

The final witness went through the same testimony. When Vince was through with the direct examination, Brigham got up and said, “What did she look like after she had shot the man?”

“What’dya mean?”

“Did she seem happy, elated, sad, confused . . .”

“Confused. Definitely confused.”

“Like she’d just woken up from a dream?”

“I guess.”

“Thank you. Nothing further.”

After that witness, Vince called another detective who had been on the witness list. It was his sixth witness and Brigham guessed he only called him to throw Brigham off, since he’d told everyone he would only be calling five.

The detective was a portly man with a thick mustache who had transported Amanda to jail. He took the stand and went through his qualifications, then talked about what Amanda had looked like that day and how he’d felt about it. Apparently she had remained quiet the entire drive, and this was somehow suspicious.

Brigham watched the jury. One man was actually asleep. His eyes would close for a few seconds and then snap open, then close again. One woman was staring at the reporters. The trial was no longer the center of the jury’s attention. The witness was irrelevant—it was the first mistake Brigham had seen Vince make.

The day finished at the same grindingly slow pace. Before leaving the courtroom, Brigham asked Amanda how she was holding up. She looked detached, staring blankly at the table as she nodded and said, “Fine.”

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

She shook her head. The bailiff came and got her and took her into the back to change and be transported to the jail.

Brigham sat in the empty courtroom for a while. The space was still and lifeless. A replica of the Constitution hung in a glass case on the wall. It was dusty and appeared like it hadn’t been cleaned in a while.

Twenty-eight

As he left the courthouse, Brigham turned on his phone. He’d kept it off because as an intern, he’d once seen a judge take an attorney’s phone away when it rang during a trial. The attorney was required to come back the next day, pay a fine, and then retrieve his phone.

He had six missed calls and two messages. The first message was from Molly. When he heard it, he nearly dropped his phone. His knees felt weak and a gnawing sickness gripped his guts. He stood still a moment on the courthouse steps and stared out into the parking lot.

Then, he sprinted for his bike.

He got down to the office in a few minutes. Two fire trucks were there plus an ambulance and several police cruisers. Brigham left his bike on the curb and ran over. A uniformed officer wouldn’t let him through. He saw a body on a stretcher, covered with a white sheet.

Molly came up behind him. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

“What happened?”

“He was just walking out of the office. Two men in a black sedan shot him from the street.”

The stretcher was loaded onto the ambulance. The EMT hauling it in from the front lost his grip and it tumbled down about a foot. The sheet slipped off from the top, revealing Tommy’s bloated face.

Brigham heard one of the cops behind him say, “Fuck him.”

Brigham looked back, giving him a hard stare. He made as if to move over to the cop and Molly placed her hand on Brigham’s shoulder.

“Let’s go,” she said softly.

Cahoots Bar, near the courthouse, was a place for lawyers and staff to come and get drunk after work. Occasionally you’d see a judge, but that was rare. News in Salt Lake was intermittently slow and reporters would come there looking for tidbits of stories. The last thing the judges wanted was a reporter snapping a photo of them getting drunk in a seedy bar.

Molly sat across from Brigham at the table. She was nursing a beer and flicking some peanuts from a bowl. The bar encouraged you to throw the peanut shells on the floor.

“I don’t understand what happened,” Molly said. “Could it be a client?”

Brigham shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“What the hell are we gonna do? Am I going to have to be a drone at some firm?”

“We’ll figure something out.”

She rubbed her face with her hands and inhaled deeply. “He took me in when I needed somewhere else to go. I hope he’s found some peace.”

Brigham didn’t respond. Instead, he took a sip of beer, staring at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

Brigham was restless that night. He tried to watch television but couldn’t because the noise aggravated him. He’d gotten used to Molly’s nice condo, and being back at his own place was disheartening. But he had sensed that she wanted to be alone right then and had told her that he needed to prepare for the next day. Vince declared he had one more witness, making seven rather than the five he promised at the outset of the trial, and then the prosecution would rest.

Molly had tried to convince Brigham to give the case over to someone else on the public defender contract list, but he refused. This had always been his case. It didn’t matter whose letterhead it was on.

Brigham changed into sweats and then lay in his bed. The mattress was lumpy and dipped in spots. He tossed and turned for several hours before getting up and putting on his shoes. He left the apartment and walked through the neighborhood. The streetlights were spaced too far apart, so for long periods, he’d be in complete darkness and he’d look up at the moon.

He passed the cemetery. The stillness of it was disturbing. He looked at the row of houses across the street and wondered who would choose to live across the street from a cemetery.

By the time he got back to his place, it was two in the morning. He lay down and closed his eyes, but sleep just wouldn’t come.

In the morning, unfocused and unable to concentrate through sheer exhaustion, he dressed and rode his bike to the courthouse as though nothing in the world was wrong. But he felt out of place, weak, lost.

Vince was already in court, speaking softly with someone in a Crime Scene Unit uniform. The bailiff shouted, “All rise,” and the judge came in. He glanced to Brigham.

“I heard, Mr. Theodore. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Judge.”

“Well,” he said, with a deep breath, “any outstanding issues?”

“No, Your Honor,” Brigham said.

“Nothing, Your Honor.”

“Okay, let’s bring in the jury.”

The jury filed in and took their seats. They looked like they’d just stepped off a cross-country bus trip. Hair styling and makeup had fallen by the wayside. Vince rose and said, “The State calls Bradley Chan to the stand.”

Chan sat down and was sworn in. He was a technician with the Crime Scene Unit and had processed the Moore homicide. He went through the blood spatter, gunshot residue on Amanda’s hands, and the trajectory of the bullets.

His testimony took three hours. Brigham turned to Amanda. She didn’t look well.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered.

“Nothing.”

“When was the last time you ate?” He got no response. “Amanda, when was the last time you ate?”

“Three days ago.”

“Are they not feeding you?” he said, anger rising in his belly.

“No, they are. I’m just not hungry. I’m not anything anymore.”

Brigham turned back to Chan and pretended to be paying attention. He wasn’t sure what to say to her. He didn’t know what to do.

“Mr. Theodore,” the judge said, “your witness.”

Brigham stood up, asked a few quick questions about how the body had fallen, and then sat back down. Objective experts were not a good place to ask many questions.

“Your Honor, at this time the State rests.”

Brigham stared at Vince. He should have had one, maybe even two, state psychiatrists discuss Amanda’s state of mind. One of them had interviewed her at the jail. But Vince hadn’t called him. Without another psychiatrist to contradict her testimony, the only expert on the mental state of Amanda Pierce on the day of the shooting would be Chris Connors, the expert for the defense.

“Okay, well, Mr. Theodore, why don’t you call your first witness, unless you have any motions.”

“No motions. My witness said she could be here within half an hour of receiving a call, Your Honor.”

“Let’s break for an early lunch then, and when we get back we’ll start with the defense witnesses.”

As Amanda was crossing the courtroom, she toppled over. The jury had already left, but someone gasped. Possibly a clerk. Brigham ran to her and helped her up but the bailiff pushed him away. The other bailiff came over and they helped her out.

“She needs a doctor,” Brigham said.

The bailiffs looked at each other like they hadn’t thought of it. “We’ll call the jail nurse,” one of them said.

Brigham looked back to Vince, who shrugged and then headed out of the courtroom. The door to the holding cells slammed shut. Brigham wanted to go back there and smack those bailiffs across the face. The woman was starving, nearly dead, and they didn’t even pretend they cared.

He texted Dr. Connors and she said she would be there in thirty minutes.

Brigham left the courtroom and sat outside on a bench for a long time before he decided he wasn’t hungry. Instead, he lay down on the bench, and closed his eyes.