The Runaway Jury Part 1

The Runaway Jury.

by John Grisham.

To the memory of Tim Hargrove (19531995)

Acknowledgments

ONCE AGAIN, I am indebted to my friend Will Denton, now of Biloxi, Mississippi, for providing much of the research and many of the stories upon which this one is based; and to his lovely wife Lucy, for the hospitalities extended to me while I was on the Coast.Thanks also to Glenn Hunt of Oxford, Mark Lee of Little Rock, Robert Warren of Bogue Chitto; and to Estelle, for finding more mistakes than I care to think about.

One.

The face of Nicholas Easter was slightly hidden by a display rack filled with slim cordless phones, and he was looking not directly at the hidden camera but somewhere off to the left, perhaps at a customer, or perhaps at a counter where a group of kids hovered over the latest electronic games from Asia. Though taken from a distance of forty yards by a man dodging rather heavy mall foot traffic, the photo was clear and revealed a nice face, clean-shaven with strong features and boyish good looks. Easter was twenty-seven, they knew that for a fact. No eyegla.s.ses. No nose ring or weird haircut. Nothing to indicate he was one of the usual computer nerds who worked in the store at five bucks an hour. His questionnaire said he'd been there for four months, said also that he was a part-time student, though no record of enrollment had been found at any college within three hundred miles. He was lying about this, they were certain.

He had to be lying. Their intelligence was too good. If the kid was a student, they'd know where, for how long, what field of study, how good were the grades, or how bad. They'd know. He was a clerk in a Computer Hut in a mall. Nothing more or less. Maybe he planned to enroll somewhere. Maybe he'd dropped out but still liked the notion of referring to himself as a part-time student. Maybe it made him feel better, gave him a sense of purpose, sounded good.

But he was not, at this moment nor at any time in the recent past, a student of any sort. So, could he be trusted? This had been thrashed about the room twice already, each time they came to Easter's name on the master list and his face hit the screen. It was a harmless lie, they'd almost decided.

He didn't smoke. The store had a strict nonsmoking rule, but he'd been seen (not photographed) eating a taco in the Food Garden with a co-worker who smoked two cigarettes with her lemonade. Easter didn't seem to mind the smoke. At least he wasn't an antismoking zealot.

The face in the photo was lean and tanned and smiling slightly with lips closed. The white s.h.i.+rt under the red store jacket had a b.u.t.tonless collar and a tasteful striped tie. He appeared neat, in shape, and the man who took the photo actually spoke with Nicholas as he pretended to shop for an obsolete gadget; said he was articulate, helpful, knowledgeable, a nice young man. His name badge labeled Easter as a Co-Manager, but two others with the same t.i.tle were spotted in the store at the same time.

The day after the photo was taken, an attractive young female in jeans entered the store, and while browsing near the software actually lit up a cigarette. Nicholas Easter just happened to be the nearest clerk, or Co-Manager, or whatever he was, and he politely approached the woman and asked her to stop smoking. She pretended to be frustrated by this, even insulted, and tried to provoke him. He maintained his tactful manner, explained to her that the store had a strict no-smoking policy. She was welcome to smoke elsewhere. "Does smoking bother you?" she had asked, taking a puff. "Not really," he had answered. "But it bothers the man who owns this store." He then asked her once again to stop. She really wanted to purchase a new digital radio, she explained, so would it be possible for him to fetch an ashtray. Nicholas pulled an empty soft drink can from under the counter, and actually took the cigarette from her and extinguished it. They talked about radios for twenty minutes as she struggled with the selection. She flirted shamelessly, and he warmed to the occasion. After paying for the radio, she left him her phone number. He promised to call.

The episode lasted twenty-four minutes and was captured by a small recorder hidden in her purse. The tape had been played both times while his face had been projected on the wall and studied by the lawyers and their experts. Her written report of the incident was in the file, six typed pages of her observations on everything from his shoes (old Nikes) to his breath (cinnamon gum) to his vocabulary (college level) to the way he handled the cigarette. In her opinion, and she was experienced in such matters, he had never smoked.

They listened to his pleasant tone and his professional sales pitch and his charming chatter, and they liked him. He was bright and he didn't hate tobacco. He didn't fit as their model juror, but he was certainly one to watch. The problem with Easter, potential juror number fifty-six, was that they knew so little about him. Evidently, he had landed on the Gulf Coast less than a year ago, and they had no idea where he came from. His past was a complete mystery. He rented a one-bedroom eight blocks from the Biloxi courthouse-they had photos of the apartment building-and at first worked as a waiter in a casino on the beach. He rose quickly to the rank of blackjack dealer, but quit after two months.

Shortly after Mississippi legalized gambling, a dozen casinos along the Coast sprang forth overnight, and a new wave of prosperity hit hard. Job seekers came from all directions, and so it was safe to a.s.sume Nicholas Easter arrived in Biloxi for the same reason as ten thousand others. The only odd thing about his move was that he had registered to vote so quickly.

He drove a 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, and a photo of it was flashed on the wall, taking the place of his face. Big deal. He was twenty-seven, single, an alleged part-time student-the perfect type to drive such a car. No b.u.mper stickers. Nothing to indicate political affiliation or social conscience or favorite team. No college parking sticker. Not even a faded dealer decal. The car meant nothing, as far as they were concerned. Nothing but near-poverty.

The man operating the projector and doing most of the talking was Carl Nussman, a lawyer from Chicago who no longer practiced law but instead ran his own jury consulting firm. For a small fortune, Carl Nussman and his firm could pick you the right jury. They gathered the data, took the photos, recorded the voices, sent the blondes in tight jeans into the right situations. Carl and his a.s.sociates flirted around the edges of laws and ethics, but it was impossible to catch them. After all, there's nothing illegal or unethical about photographing prospective jurors. They had conducted exhaustive telephone surveys in Harrison County six months ago, then again two months ago, then a month later to gauge community sentiment about tobacco issues and formulate models of the perfect jurors. They left no photo untaken, no dirt ungathered. They had a file on every prospective juror.

Carl pushed his b.u.t.ton and the VW was replaced with a meaningless shot of an apartment building with peeling paint; home, somewhere in there, of Nicholas Easter. Then a flick, and back to the face.

"And so we have only the three photos of number fifty-six," Carl said with a note of frustration as he turned and glared at the photographer, one of his countless private snoops, who had explained he just couldn't catch the kid without getting caught himself. The photographer sat in a chair against the back wall, facing the long table of lawyers and paralegals and jury experts. The photographer was quite bored and ready to bolt. It was seven o'clock on a Friday night. Number fifty-six was on the wall, leaving a hundred and forty still to come. The weekend would be awful. He needed a drink.

A half-dozen lawyers in rumpled s.h.i.+rts and rolled-up sleeves scribbled never-ending notes, and glanced occasionally at the face of Nicholas Easter up there behind Carl. Jury experts of almost every variety-psychiatrist, sociologist, handwriting a.n.a.lyst, law professor, and so on-shuffled papers and thumped the inch-thick computer printouts. They weren't sure what to do with Easter. He was a liar, and he was hiding his past, but still on paper and on the wall he looked okay.

Maybe he wasn't lying. Maybe he was a student last year in some low-rent junior college in eastern Arizona, and maybe they were simply missing this.

Give the kid a break, the photographer thought, but he kept it to himself. In this room of well-educated and well-paid suits, he was the last one whose opinion would be appreciated. Wasn't his job to say a word.

Carl cleared his throat while glancing once more at the photographer, then said, "Number fifty-seven." The sweaty face of a young mother flashed on the wall, and at least two people in the room managed a chuckle. "Traci Wilkes," Carl said, as if Traci was now an old friend. Papers moved slightly around the table.

"Age thirty-three, married, mother of two, doctor's wife, two country clubs, two health clubs, a whole list of social clubs." Carl clicked off these items from memory while twirling his projector b.u.t.ton. Traci's red face was replaced by a shot of her jogging along a sidewalk, splendidly awash in pink and black spandex and spotless Reeboks with a white sun visor sitting just above the latest in reflective sport sungla.s.ses, her long hair in a cute perfect ponytail. She was pus.h.i.+ng a jogging carriage with a small baby in it. Traci lived for sweat. She was tanned and fit, but not exactly as thin as might be expected. She had a few bad habits. Another shot of Traci in her black Mercedes wagon with kids and dogs looking from every window. Another of Traci loading bags of groceries into the same car, Traci with different sneakers and tight shorts and the precise appearance of one who aspired to look forever athletic. She'd been easy to follow because she was busy to the point of being frazzled, and she never stopped long enough to look around.

Carl ran through the photos of the Wilkeses' home, a ma.s.sive suburban trilevel with Doctor stamped all over it. He spent little time with these, saving the best for last. Then there was Traci, once again soaked with sweat, her designer bike nearby on the gra.s.s, sitting under a tree in a park, far away from everyone, half-hidden and-smoking a cigarette!

The same photographer grinned stupidly. It was his finest work, this hundred-yard shot of the doctor's wife sneaking a cigarette. He had had no idea she smoked, just happened to be nonchalantly smoking himself near a footbridge when she dashed by. He loitered about the park for half an hour until he saw her stop and reach into the pouch on her bike.

The mood around the room lightened for a fleeting moment as they looked at Traci by the tree. Then Carl said, "Safe to say that we'll take number fifty-seven." He made a notation on a sheet of paper, then took a sip of old coffee from a paper cup. Of course he'd take Traci Wilkes! Who wouldn't want a doctor's wife on the jury when the plaintiff's lawyers were asking for millions? Carl wanted nothing but doctors' wives, but he wouldn't get them. The fact that she enjoyed cigarettes was simply a small bonus.

Number fifty-eight was a s.h.i.+pyard worker at Ingalls in Pascagoula-fifty years old, white male, divorced, a union officer. Carl flashed a photo of the man's Ford pickup on the wall, and was about to summarize his life when the door opened and Mr. Rankin Fitch stepped into the room. Carl stopped. The lawyers bolted upright in their seats and instantly became enthralled by the Ford. They wrote furiously on their legal pads as if they might never again see such a vehicle. The jury consultants likewise snapped into action and all began taking notes in earnest, each careful not to look at the man.

Fitch was back. Fitch was in the room.

He slowly closed the door behind him, took a few steps toward the edge of the table, and glared at everyone sitting around it. It was more of a snarl than a glare. The puffy flesh around his dark eyes pinched inward. The deep wrinkles running the length of his forehead closed together. His thick chest rose and sank slowly, and for a second or two Fitch was the only person breathing. His lips parted to eat and drink, occasionally to talk, never to smile.

Fitch was angry, as usual, nothing new about that because the man even slept in a state of hostility. But would he curse and threaten, maybe throw things, or simply boil under the surface? They never knew with Fitch. He stopped at the edge of the table between two young lawyers who were junior partners and thus earning comfortable six-figure salaries, who were members of this firm and this was their room in their building. Fitch, on the other hand, was a stranger from Was.h.i.+ngton, an intruder who'd been growling and barking in their hallways for a month now. The two young lawyers dared not look at him.

"What number?" Fitch asked of Carl.

"Fifty-eight," Carl answered quickly, anxious to please.

"Go back to fifty-six," Fitch demanded, and Carl flicked rapidly until the face of Nicholas Easter was once again on the wall. Paperwork ruffled around the table.

"What do you know?" Fitch asked.

"The same," Carl said, looking away.

"That's just great. Out of a hundred and ninety-six, how many are still mysteries?"

"Eight."

Fitch snorted and shook his head slowly, and everyone waited for an eruption. Instead, he slowly stroked his meticulously trimmed black and gray goatee for a few seconds, looked at Carl, allowed the severity of the moment to filter in, then said, "You'll work until midnight, then return at seven in the morning. Same for Sunday." With that, he wheeled his pudgy body around and left the room.

The door slammed. The air lightened considerably, then, in unison, the lawyers and the jury consultants and Carl and everybody else glanced at their watches. They had just been ordered to spend thirty-nine out of the next fifty-three hours in this room, looking at enlarged photos of faces they'd already seen, memorizing names and birthdates and vital stats of almost two hundred people.

And there wasn't the slightest doubt anywhere in the room that they all would do exactly what they'd been told. Not the slightest.

FITCH TOOK THE STAIRS to the first floor of the building, and was met there by his driver, a large man named Jose. Jose wore a black suit with black western boots and black sungla.s.ses that were removed only when he showered and slept. Fitch opened a door without knocking, and interrupted a meeting which had been in progress for hours. Four lawyers and their a.s.sorted support staff were watching the videotaped depositions of the plaintiff's first witnesses. The tape stopped just seconds after Fitch burst in. He spoke briefly to one of the lawyers, then left the room. Jose followed him through a narrow library to another hallway, where he barged through another door and frightened another bunch of lawyers.

With eighty lawyers, the firm of Whitney & Cable & White was the largest on the Gulf Coast. The firm had been handpicked by Fitch himself, and it would earn millions in fees because of this selection. To earn the money, though, the firm had to endure the tyranny and ruthlessness of Rankin Fitch.

When satisfied that the entire building was aware of his presence and terrified of his movements, Fitch left. He stood on the sidewalk, in the warm October air, and waited for Jose. Three blocks away, in the top half of an old bank building, he could see an office suite filled with lights. The enemy was still working. The plaintiff's lawyers were up there, all huddled together in various rooms, meeting with experts and looking at grainy photos and doing pretty much the same things his people were doing. The trial started Monday with jury selection, and he knew they too were sweating over names and faces and wondering who the h.e.l.l was Nicholas Easter and where did he come from. And Ramon Caro and Lucas Miller and Andrew Lamb and Barbara Furrow and Delores DeBoe? Who were these people? Only in a backwater place like Mississippi would you find such outdated lists of prospective jurors. Fitch had directed the defense in eight cases before this one, in eight different states where computers were used and rolls were purged and where, when the clerks handed you your list of jurors, you didn't have to worry about who was dead and who wasn't.

He stared blankly at the distant lights and wondered how the greedy sharks would split the money, if they happened to win. How in the world could they ever agree to divide the b.l.o.o.d.y carca.s.s? The trial would be a gentle skirmish compared to the throat-cutting that would ensue if they got their verdict, and their spoils.

He hated them, and he spat on the sidewalk. He lit a cigarette, squeezing it tightly between his thick fingers.

Jose pulled to the curb in a s.h.i.+ny, rented Suburban with dark windows. Fitch took his customary place in the front seat. Jose too looked up at the enemy lawyers' office as they drove past, but he said nothing because his boss did not suffer small talk. They drove past the Biloxi courthouse, and past a semi-abandoned dime store where Fitch and a.s.sociates maintained a hidden suite of offices with fresh plywood dust on the floor and cheap rented furniture.

They turned west on Highway 90 at the beach and limped through heavy traffic. It was Friday night, and the casinos were packed with people gambling away grocery money with big plans to win it back tomorrow. They slowly made it out of Biloxi, through Gulfport, Long Beach, and Pa.s.s Christian. Then they left the coastline, and were soon pa.s.sing through a security checkpoint near a lagoon.

Two.

The beach house was modern and sprawling and built without the benefit of a beach. A whiteboard pier disappeared into the still and weedy waters of the bay, but the nearest sand was two miles away. A twenty-foot fis.h.i.+ng boat was moored at the pier. The house had been leased from an oil man in New Orleans-three months, cash, no questions. It was being temporarily used as a retreat, a hiding place, a sleep-over for some very important people.

On a deck high above the water, four gentlemen enjoyed drinks and managed small talk while waiting for a visitor. Though their businesses normally required them to be bitter enemies, they had played eighteen holes of golf this afternoon, then eaten shrimp and oysters off the grill. Now they drank and looked into the black waters below them. They loathed the fact that they were on the Gulf Coast, on Friday night, far away from their homes.

But business was at hand, crucial affairs that necessitated a truce and made the golf almost pleasant. Each of the four was the CEO of a large public corporation. Each corporation was in the Fortune 500, each was traded on the NYSE. The smallest had sales last year of six hundred million, the largest, four billion. Each had record profits, large dividends, happy stockholders, and CEO's who earned millions for their performances.

Each was a conglomerate of sorts with different divisions and a mult.i.tude of products, fat ad budgets, and insipid names such as Trellco and Smith Greer, names designed to deflect attention from the fact that at the core they were little more than tobacco companies. Each of the four, the Big Four as they were known in financial circles, could easily trace its roots to nineteenth-century tobacco brokers in the Carolinas and Virginia. They manufactured cigarettes-together, ninety-eight percent of all cigarettes sold in the United States and Canada. They also manufactured such things as crowbars and corn chips and hair dye, but dig just below the surface and you'd find that their profits came from cigarettes. There had been mergers and name changes and various efforts at preening for the public, but the Big Four had been thoroughly isolated and vilified by consumer groups, doctors, even politicians.

And now the lawyers were after them. The survivors of dead people out there were actually suing and asking for huge sums of money because cigarettes cause lung cancer, they claimed. Sixteen trials so far, and Big Tobacco had won them all, but the pressure was mounting. And the first time a jury handed out a few million to a widow, then all h.e.l.l would break loose. The trial lawyers would go berserk with their nonstop advertising, begging smokers and the survivors of smokers to sign up now and sue while the suing was good.

As a rule, the men talked of other matters when they were alone, but the liquor loosened their tongues. The bitterness began to ooze forth. They leaned on the railing of the deck, stared at the water, and began to curse lawyers and the American tort system. Each of their companies spent millions in Was.h.i.+ngton on various groups trying to reform tort laws so that responsible companies like themselves could be protected from litigation. They needed a s.h.i.+eld from such senseless attacks by alleged victims. But, it seemed, nothing was working. Here they were somewhere in the backwaters of Mississippi sweating out yet another trial.

In response to the growing a.s.sault from the courts, the Big Four had created a pool of money known simply as The Fund. It had no limits, left no trail. It did not exist. The Fund was used for hardball tactics in lawsuits; to hire the best and meanest defense lawyers, the smoothest experts, the most sophisticated jury consultants. No restrictions were placed on what The Fund could do. After sixteen victories, they sometimes asked, among themselves, if there was anything The Fund couldn't do. Each company siphoned off three million a year and routed the cash circuitously until it landed in The Fund. No bean counter, no auditor, no regulator had ever caught wind of the slush money.

The Fund was administered by Rankin Fitch, a man they collectively despised but nonetheless listened to and even obeyed when necessary. And they waited for him. They gathered when he said to gather. They dispersed and returned at his command. They tolerated being at his beck and call as long as he was winning. Fitch had directed eight trials without a loss. He'd also engineered two mistrials, but of course there was no proof of this.

An a.s.sistant stepped onto the deck with a tray of fresh drinks, each mixed to exact specifications. The drinks were being lifted from the tray when someone said, "Fitch is here." In unison the drinks shot upward then downward as the four knocked back a stiff belt.

They quickly stepped into the den while Fitch was parking Jose just outside the front door. An a.s.sistant handed him a mineral water, no ice. He never drank, though in an earlier life he'd consumed enough to float a barge. He didn't say thanks to the a.s.sistant, didn't acknowledge his presence, but moved to the faux fireplace and waited for the four to gather around him on the sofas. Another a.s.sistant ventured forth with a platter of leftover shrimp and oysters, but Fitch waved him off. There was a rumor that he sometimes ate, but he'd never been caught in the process. The evidence was there, the thick chest and ample waistline, the fleshy roll under his goatee, the general squattiness of his frame. But he wore dark suits and kept the jackets b.u.t.toned, and did a fine job of carrying his bulk with importance.

"A brief update," he said when he felt he'd waited long enough for the honchos to settle in. "At this moment, the entire defense team is working nonstop, and this will continue through the weekend. Jury research is on schedule. Trial counsel are ready. All witnesses are prepped, all experts are already in town. Nothing unusual has yet to be encountered."

There was a pause, just a little gap as they waited long enough to make sure Fitch had finished for a bit.

"What about those jurors?" asked D. Martin Jankle, the most nervous of the bunch. He ran U-Tab, as it was formerly known, an abbreviation for an old company which for years was called Union Tobacco but after a marketing cleansing was now traded as Pynex. The lawsuit at hand was Wood Wood v. v. Pynex Pynex, so the roulette wheel had placed Jankle on the hot seat. Pynex was number three in size with sales of almost two billion last year. It also happened to possess, as of the last quarter, the largest cash reserves of any of the four. The timing of this trial was lousy. With a bit of bad luck, the jury might soon be shown blowups of Pynex's financials, nice neat columns which would indicate in excess of eight hundred million in cash.

"We're working on them," Fitch said. "We have soft data on eight. Four of whom might either be dead or gone. The other four are alive and expected to be in court Monday."

"One rogue juror can be poison," Jankle said. He'd been a corporate lawyer in Louisville before joining U-Tab, and he always insisted on reminding Fitch that he knew more about the law than the other three.

"I'm well aware of that," Fitch snapped.

"We have to know these people."

"We're doing our best. We can't help it if the jury lists here are not as current as other states'."

Jankle took a long drink and stared at Fitch. Fitch, after all, was a well-paid security thug, nothing remotely near the level of CEO of a major company. Call him whatever you want-consultant, agent, contractor-fact was, he worked for them. Sure he had some clout right now, liked to swagger and bark because he was pus.h.i.+ng the b.u.t.tons, but dammit he was just a glorified thug. These thoughts Jankle kept to himself.

"Anything else?" Fitch demanded of Jankle, as if his initial inquiry were thoughtless, as though if he had nothing productive to say then maybe he should just keep his mouth shut.

"Do you trust these lawyers?" Jankle asked, not for the first time.

"We've covered this before," Fitch answered.

"We can certainly cover it again if I choose."

"Why are you worried about our lawyers?" Fitch asked.

"Because, well, because they're from around here."

"I see. And you think it'd be wise to bring in some New York lawyers to talk to our jury? Maybe some from Boston?"

"No, it's just that, well, they've never defended a tobacco case."

"There's never been a tobacco case on the Coast before. Are you complaining?"

"They just worry me, that's all."

"We've hired the best in this area," Fitch said.

"Why do they work so cheap?"

"Cheap. Last week you were worried about defense costs. Now our lawyers are not charging enough. Make up your mind."

"Last year we paid four hundred bucks an hour for Pittsburgh lawyers. These guys work for two hundred. That worries me."

Fitch frowned at Luther Vandemeer, CEO of Trellco. "Am I missing something here?" he asked. "Is he serious? We're at five million bucks for this case, and he's afraid I'm pinching pennies." Fitch waved in the direction of Jankle. Vandemeer smiled and took a drink.

"You spent six million in Oklahoma," Jankle said.

"And we won. I don't recall any complaints after the verdict came in."

"I'm not complaining now. I'm just voicing a concern."

"Great! I'll go back to the office, gather all the lawyers together, and tell them my clients are upset about the bills. I'll say, 'Look, fellas, I know you're getting rich off us, but that's not good enough. My clients want you to bill more, okay. Stick it to us. You guys are working too cheap.' That sound like a good idea?"

"Relax, Martin," Vandemeer said. "The trial hasn't started yet. I'm confident we'll be sick of our own lawyers before we leave here."

"Yeah, but this trial's different. We all know that." Jankle's words trailed off as he lifted his gla.s.s. He had a drinking problem, the only one of the four. His company had quietly dried him out six months ago, but the pressure of the lawsuit was too much. Fitch, a former drunk himself, knew Jankle was in trouble. He would be forced to testify in a few weeks.

As if Fitch didn't have enough to worry about, he was now saddled with the burden of keeping D. Martin Jankle sober until then. Fitch hated him for his weakness.