The Runaway Jury (Page 41)

"No. We’ve tried. They’re not coming until they talk to you."

His shoulders sagged and his mouth hung open. "This is getting ridiculous," Wendall Rohr offered to no one in particular. The lawyers watched the Judge, who looked absently at the pile of papers on his desk and collected his thoughts. Then he rubbed his hands together and gave them all a huge phony smile. "Let’s go see them."

KONRAD TOOK THE FIRST CALL at 8:02. She didn’t want to talk to Fitch, just wanted to give him the message that the jury was once again perturbed and not coming out until Harkin hauled himself over to the Siesta Inn and unruffled their feathers. Konrad ran to Fitch’s room and delivered the message.

At 8:09, she called again and gave Konrad the information that Easter would be wearing a dark denim shirt over a tan T-shirt, with red socks and the usual starched khakis. Red socks, she repeated.

At 8:12, she called for the third time and asked to speak to Fitch, who was pacing around his desk and pulling on his goatee. He clenched the receiver. "Hello."

"Good morning, Fitch," she said.

"Good morning, Marlee."

"You ever been to the St. Regis Hotel in New Orleans?"

"No."

"It’s on Canal Street in the French Quarter. There’s an open-air bar on the roof. It’s called the Terrace Grill. Get a table overlooking the Quarter. Be there at seven tonight. I’ll be there later. Are you with me?"

"Yes."

"And come by yourself, Fitch. I’ll watch you enter the hotel, and if you bring friends the meeting’s off. Okay?"

"Okay."

"And if you attempt to trail me, then I disappear."

"You have my word."

"Why am I not comforted by your word, Fitch?" She hung up.

CABLE, ROHR, AND JUDGE HARKIN were met at the front desk by Lou Dell, who was flustered and scared and rattling on about how this had never happened to her; she’d always kept her juries under control. She led them to the Party Room where thirteen of the fourteen jurors were holed up. Herman Grimes was the lone dissenter. He had argued with the group about their tactics, and had angered Jerry Fernandez to the point of getting himself insulted. Jerry had pointed out that Herman had his wife with him, that he had no use for either televisions or newspapers, didn’t drink anymore, and probably didn’t need a gym. Jerry apologized after Millie Dupree asked him to.

If His Honor had a chip on his shoulder, it didn’t last long. After a few uncertain hellos and good mornings, he said, starting badly, "I’m a little bit disturbed by this."

To which Nicholas Easter responded, "We’re not in the mood to take any abuse."

Rohr and Cable had been expressly forbidden from speaking, and they hung near the door and watched with great amusement. Both knew this was a scene unlikely to be repeated in their litigating careers.

Nicholas had written down their list of complaints. Judge Harkin removed his coat, took a seat, and was soon hammered from all directions. He was pitifully outnumbered and virtually defenseless.

Beer was no problem. Newspapers could be censored by the front desk. Unrestricted phone calls made perfect sense. Same for televisions, but only if they promised not to watch the local news. The gym might be a problem, but he’d look into it. Visits to church could be arranged.

In fact, everything was flexible.

"Can you explain why we’re here?" Lonnie Shaver demanded.

He tried. He cleared his throat and reluctantly attempted to justify his reasons for locking them away. He rambled for a bit about unauthorized contact, about what had happened so far with this jury, and he made some vague references to events that had occurred in other tobacco trials.

The misconduct was well documented, and both sides had been guilty in the past. Fitch had left a wide trail across the landscape of tobacco litigation. Operatives for some of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in other cases had done dirty deeds. But Judge Harkin couldn’t talk about them in front of his jury. He had to be careful and not prejudice either side.

The meeting lasted an hour. Harkin asked for a no-strike guarantee in the future, but Easter wouldn’t commit.

PYNEX OPENED DOWN two points on news of a second strike, which according to an analyst waiting in the courtroom was caused by an ill-defined negative reaction by the jurors to certain tactics employed the day before by the defense team. The tactics were also ill-defined. A second rumor by another analyst in Biloxi cleared things up a little by speculating that no one in the courtroom knew for certain exactly why the jury was on strike. The stock moved half a point lower before correcting itself and inching upward in the early morning trading.

THE TAR in cigarettes causes cancer, at least in laboratory rodents. Dr. James Ueuker from Palo Alto had worked with mice and rats for the past fifteen years. He’d conducted many studies himself and he’d studied extensively the work of researchers around the world. At least six major studies had, in his opinion, conclusively linked cigarette smoking with lung cancer. In great detail, he explained to the jury exactly how he and his team had taken tobacco smoke condensates, usually referred to simply as "tars," and rubbed them directly onto the skin of what looked like a million white mice. The pictures were large and in color. The lucky mice got just a touch of tar, the others got fairly painted. To no one’s surprise, the heavier the tar, the quicker skin cancer developed.

It’s a long way from surface tumors on rodents to lung cancer in humans, and Dr. Ueuker, with Rohr leading the way, couldn’t wait to link the two. Medical history is filled with studies in which laboratory findings have ultimately been proven to apply to humans. Exceptions have been rare. Though mice and humans live in vastly different environments, the results in some animal tests are fully consistent with the epidemiologic findings in humans.

Every available jury consultant was in the courtroom during Ueuker’s testimony. Disgusting little rodents were one thing, but rabbits and beagles could be cuddly pets. Ueuker’s next study involved a similar plastering of tar on rabbits, with virtually the same results. His last test involved thirty beagles which he taught to smoke through tubes in their tracheas. The heavy smokers worked their way up to nine cigarettes a day; the equivalent of about forty cigarettes for a 150-pound man. In these dogs, serious lung damage in the form of invasive tumors was detected after 875 consecutive days of smoking. Ueuker used dogs because they exhibit the same reaction to cigarette smoking as do humans.

He would not, however, get to tell this jury about his rabbits and his beagles. An untrained amateur could look at Millie Dupree’s face and tell she felt very sorry for the mice, and held a grudge against Ueuker for killing them. Sylvia Taylor-Tatum and Angel Weese also expressed overt signs of displeasure. Mrs. Gladys Card and Phillip Savelle emitted subtle evidence of disapproval. The other men were unmoved.

Rohr and company made the decision during lunch to forgo more testimony from James Ueuker.

Chapter Sixteen

Jumper, the courtroom deputy who took the note from Marlee thirteen days earlier and handed it to Fitch, was approached during lunch and offered five thousand dollars cash to call in sick with stomach cramps or diarrhea or some such affliction, and travel in plain clothes with Pang to New Orleans for a night of food, fun, perhaps a call girl if Jumper was so inclined. Pang needed only a few hours of light work from him. Jumper needed the money.

They left Biloxi around twelve-thirty in a rented van. By the time they arrived in New Orleans two hours later, Jumper had been convinced to temporarily retire his uniform and work for Arlington West Associates for a while. Pang offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for six months’ work, nine thousand more than he was presently earning for an entire year.