The Runaway Jury

His field had been narrowed over the years, so that Dr. Fricke now spent ten hours a day studying the effects of tobacco smoke on the human body. He was the director of the Smoke Free Research Institute in Rochester, New York. The jury soon learned that he had been hired by Rohr before Jacob Wood died, and that he had been present during an autopsy performed on Mr. Wood four hours after his death. And that he had taken some photos of the autopsy.

Rohr emphasized the existence of the photos, leaving no doubt that the jurors would see them eventually. But Rohr was not ready yet. He needed to spend time with this extraordinary expert on the chemistry and pharmacology of smoking. Fricke proved quite the professor. He treaded cautiously through ponderous medical and scientific studies, weeding out the big words and giving the jurors what they could understand. He was relaxed and thoroughly confident.

When His Honor announced the lunch recess, Rohr informed the court that Dr. Fricke would be on the stand for the remainder of the day.

Lunch was waiting in the jury room, with Mr. O’Reilly himself in charge of its presentation and readily offering apologies for what had happened the day before.

"These are paper plates and plastic forks," Nicholas said as they took their seats around the table. He did not sit. Mr. O’Reilly looked at Lou Dell, who said, "So?"

"So, we specifically said we wanted to eat on real china with real forks. Didn’t we say that?" His voice was rising, and a few of the jurors looked away. They just wanted to eat.

"What’s wrong with paper plates?" Lou Dell asked nervously, her bangs shaking.

"They soak up grease, okay? They get spongy and leave stains on the table, you understand? That’s why I specifically asked for real plates. And real forks." He took a white plastic fork, snapped it in two, and threw it in a waste can. "And what really makes me mad, Lou Dell, is that right now the Judge and all the lawyers and their clients and the witnesses and the clerks and the spectators and everybody else involved with this trial are sitting down to a nice lunch in a nice restaurant with real plates and real glasses and forks that don’t snap in two. And they’re ordering good food from a thick menu. That’s what makes me mad. And we, the jurors, the most important people of the whole damned trial, we’re stuck here like first-graders waiting to be fed our cookies and lemonade."

"The food’s pretty good," Mr. O’Reilly said in self-defense.

"I think you’re overdoing it a bit," said Mrs. Gladys Card, a prim little lady with white hair and a sweet voice.

"Then eat your soggy sandwich and stay out of this," Nicholas snapped, much too harshly.

"Are you gonna show your ass every day at lunch?" asked Frank Herrera, a retired colonel from somewhere up North. Herrera was short and portly with tiny hands and an opinion, so far, on just about everything. He was the only one who was truly disappointed when he wasn’t elected foreman.

Jerry Fernandez had already nicknamed him Napoleon. Nap for short. The Retarded Colonel as an alternative.

"There were no complaints yesterday," Nicholas shot back.

"Let’s eat. I’m starving," Herrera said, unwrapping a sandwich. A few of the others did the same.

The aroma of baked chicken and french fries rose from the table. As Mr. O’Reilly finished unpacking a container of pasta salad, he said, "I’ll be happy to bring over some plates and forks on Monday. No problem."

Nicholas quietly said, "Thanks," and sat down.

THE DEAL was an easy one to make. The details were wrapped up between two old friends over a three-hour lunch at the ’21’ Club on Fifty-second. Luther Vandemeer, CEO of Trellco, and his former protege, Larry Zell, now CEO of Listing Foods, had discussed the basics on the phone, but needed to meet face-to-face over food and wine so no one could hear them. Vandemeer gave him the background of the latest serious threat down in Biloxi, and didn’t hide the truth that he was worried. Sure, Trellco was not a named defendant, but the entire industry was under fire and the Big Four was standing firm. Zell knew this. He’d worked for Trellco for seventeen years, and had learned to hate trial lawyers a long time ago.

There was a small regional grocery chain, Hadley Brothers, out of Pensacola, which just happened to own a few stores along the Mississippi Coast. One such store was in Biloxi, and its manager was a sharp young black man named Lonnie Shaver. Lonnie Shaver just happened to be on the jury down there. Vandemeer wanted SuperHouse, a much larger grocery chain in Georgia and the Carolinas, to purchase, at whatever premium necessary, Hadley Brothers. SuperHouse was one of twenty or so divisions of Listing Foods. It would be a small transaction-Vandemeer’s people had already done the numbers-and would cost Listing no more than six million. Hadley Brothers was privately owned, so the deal would create virtually no attention. Listing Foods had grossed two billion last year, so six million was no sweat. The company had eighty million in cash and little debt. And to sweeten the deal, Vandemeer promised that Trellco would quietly purchase Hadley Brothers in two years if Zell wished to unload it.

Nothing could go wrong. Listing and Trellco were totally independent of each other. Listing was already in the business of owning grocery chains. Trellco was not directly involved in the litigation down there. It was a simple handshake deal between two old friends.

Later, of course, there would need to be a personnel shakeup within Hadley Brothers, one of the usual realignments inherent in any buyout or merger or whatever it was to be called. Vandemeer would need to pass along some instructions for Zell to send down the line until the right amount of pressure could be placed on Lonnie Shaver.

And it needed to be done quickly. The trial was scheduled to last for four more weeks. Week one would end in just a few hours.

After a brief nap in his office in downtown Manhattan, Luther Vandemeer called the number in Biloxi and left a message for Rankin Fitch to call him in the Hamptons over the weekend.

FITCH’S OFFICE was in the back of an empty store, a five-and-dime that had closed years earlier. The rent was low, parking was plentiful, no one noticed the place, and it was just a short walk from the courthouse. There were five large rooms, all hastily built with unpainted plywood walls; the sawdust was still on the floor. The furniture was cheap, rented, and consisted primarily of folding tables and plastic chairs. The lighting was fluorescent and plentiful. The outer doors were heavily secured. Two men with guns guarded the suite at all times.

If pennies had been pinched throwing the place together, nothing had been spared in getting it plugged in. Computers and monitors were everywhere. Wires to faxes and copiers and phones ran over the floor in no apparent design. Fitch had the latest technology, and he had the people to operate it.

The walls of one room were covered with large photos of the fifteen jurors. Computer printouts were tacked to another wall. A huge seating chart was on another wall, and an employee was adding data to the block under Gladys Card’s name.

The room in the back was the smallest, and it was strictly off-limits for the regular employees, though they all knew what was happening in it. The door locked automatically from the inside, and Fitch had the only key. It was a viewing room, with no windows, a large screen on one wall, and half a dozen comfortable chairs. Friday afternoon, Fitch and two jury experts sat in the dark and stared at the screen. The experts preferred not to engage in small talk with Fitch, and Fitch wasn’t about to entertain them. Silence.

The camera was a Yumara XLT-2, a tiny unit capable of fitting almost anywhere. The lens was half an inch in diameter, and the camera itself weighed less than a pound. It had been meticulously installed by one of Fitch’s boys, and was now situated in a well-worn brown leather satchel sitting on the floor in the courtroom under the defense table, and being covertly guarded by Oliver McAdoo, a lawyer from Washington and the only foreigner selected by Fitch to sit alongside Cable and the rest. Mc-Adoo’s job was to think strategy, smile at the jurors, and feed documents to Cable. His real job, known only to Fitch and a few others, was to walk into the courtroom each day, heavily laden with the tools of warfare, including two large, identical brown briefcases, one of which held the camera, and to sit at approximately the same spot at the defense table. He was the first defense lawyer in the courtroom each morning. He would set the satchel upright, aim it at the jury box, then quickly call Fitch on a cellphone to get things adjusted.