Courting Trouble raa-9

by Lisa Scottoline

  “A Third Circuit virgin,” Ben says, with the superior snicker of someone who has never done it. I fail to see the humor. I know what it’s like to stand before a judge when the words you memorized don’t seem to come and the ones that do roll down backward through your gullet and tumble out your butt.

  “I guess my time is up,” the lawyer says, obviously relieved to see the Christmas light on the podium blink from yellow to red. He thinks the hard part’s over, but he’s dead wrong. The light turns green again. Go!

  “Who wants the first question?” Armen says, looking over his colleagues on the panel. He flicks a silky black forelock out of his eyes; he always needs a haircut, it’s part of his sex appeal. “Judge Galanter?”

  “Counsel,” Judge Galanter says quickly, “your appeal concerns the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, but I wonder if you understand why the statute at issue was enacted by Congress.”

  “It was passed because of organized crime, Your Honor.”

  “The statute was aimed at extortionists, murderers, and loan sharks. The typical organized criminals, correct?”

  The young lawyer looks puzzled. “Yes, Judge Galanter.”

  “It prohibits a pattern of racketeering activity, the so-called predicate acts, does it not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Armen shifts in his high-backed chair.

  “But your client isn’t suing mobsters under RICO, is he, counsel?” Galanter says.

  “With all due respect, Your Honor, I think this appeal presents a matter of national importance. It involves the manipulation of—”

  “Flower peddlers, isn’t that right, counsel? Not mobsters, not extortionists, not killers. Florists. The ad says, Nothing but the Best for Your Wedding or Bar Mitzvah.” He chuckles, as does the gallery. They have to, he’s an Article III Judge, as in Article III of the Constitution; if you don’t laugh, the FBI shows up at your door.

  “Yes, the defendants are floral vendors.”

  Galanter’s thin lips part in an approximation of a smile and he arches an eyebrow so blond it’s almost invisible. “Floral vendors? Is that a term of art, counsel?”

  The gallery laughs again.

  “Florists,” the lawyer concedes.

  “Thank you. Now, carnations are the bulk of your client’s business, is that correct?” Galanter flips through the appendix with assurance and reads aloud. “Pink ones, red ones, even the sprayed ones,’ according to your client’s affidavit. Although I see sweetheart roses did well in February.” He pauses to look significantly at Judge Townsend, but Townsend’s eyes are closed; God knows which way he’ll go on this case. He thinks people enter his dreams to have sex with him, so it’s impossible to tell right now if he’s pondering RICO law or watching lesbians frolic.

  “They’re a group of florists. A network of florists.”

  “Oh, I see, a ring of florists. Do you think Congress intended even a ring of florists to be covered by this racketeering statute?”

  Armen hunches over his microphone. “Counsel, does it really matter what they sell?”

  “Go get ’em, boss,” I say under my breath.

  “Sir?” says the lawyer. He grabs the side of the podium like a kid stowed away on a sinking ship.

  “It wouldn’t make sense to have a rule of law that turned on the occupation of the defendant, would it?”

  “No, sir,” says the lawyer, shaking his head.

  Armen leans forward, his eyes dark as Turkish coffee. “In fact, after what the Supreme Court said in Scheidler, even a group of abortion protestors can be subject to RICO, isn’t that right, Mr. Noble?”

  Galanter glances over at Armen like a jockey on a Thoroughbred. “But Chief Justice Rehnquist made clear in Scheidler that there was a pattern of extortion, of federal crimes. Where’s the federal crimes with the floral conspiracy? Florists wielding pruning shears? Gimme that money or I snip the orchid?” Galanter shudders comically and the gallery laughs on cue.

  “But they do threaten society,” the lawyer says, fumbling for the rigging. “Mr. Canavan signed a contract, and they didn’t send him any orders. They intended to drive Canavan Flowers into bankruptcy. It was part of a plan.”

  “Your client did file for Chapter Eleven protection, didn’t he?” Armen says.

  Suddenly Judge Townsend emits a noisy snort that sounds like an ancient steamboat chugging to life. Armen and Galanter look over as Judge Townsend’s heavy-lidded eyes creak open. “If I may, I have a question,” he says, smacking his dry lips.

  “Go right ahead,” Armen says. Galanter forces a well-bred smile.

  “Thank you, Chief Judge Gregorian,” Judge Townsend says. He nods graciously. “Now, counselor, why are you letting my colleagues badger you?”

  The smile on Galanter’s face freezes in place. The gallery laughs uncertainly.

  “Sir?” the lawyer says.

  Judge Townsend snorts again and lists gently to the starboard side. “As I see it, the question with this new statute is always the same.”

  Ben whispers, “New? RICO was passed in the seventies.”

  “The question is always, How is this case different from a case of garden variety fraud? How is it different from other injuries to one’s business, which we decide under the common law?” Judge Townsend waves his wrinkled hand in the air; it cuts a jagged swath. “In other words, have you got some precedent for us? A case to hang your hat on?”

  The lawyer reads his notes. “Wait a minute, Your Honor.”

  Judge Townsend blinks once, then again. Galanter smooths back the few hairs he has left. The lawyers in the gallery glance at one another. They’re all thinking the same thing: Nobody tells the Third Circuit to wait a minute. The answers are supposed to roll off your tongue. The case is supposed to be at your fingertips. Better you should pee on the counsel table.

  “Way to go, Einstein,” Ben says.

  “I know I have the case somewhere,” says the attorney, nervously riffling through his legal pad. He should be nervous; the circuit court is the last stop before the Supreme Court, which takes fewer appeals each year. It’s all those speaking engagements.

  “Armen’s upset,” Sarah whispers, and I follow her eyes. Armen is looking down, worried about the appeal. The only sound in the tense courtroom is a frantic rustling as the lawyer ransacks the podium. A yellow page sails to the rich navy carpet.

  The silence seems to intensify.

  Galanter glares at the lawyer’s bent head.

  A sound shatters the silence—ticktickticktickticktick—from the back of the courtroom.

  The back rows of the gallery turn around. The sound is loud, unmistakable.

  Ticktickticktickticktick.

  Row after row looks back in disbelief, then in alarm.

  Ticktickticktickticktick.

  “It’s a bomb!” one of the lawyers shouts.

  “A bomb!” yells an older lawyer. “No!”

  Ticktickticktickticktick.

  The crowded courtroom bursts into chaos. The gallery surges to its feet in confusion and fear. Lawyers grab their briefcases and files. People slam into each other in panic, trying to escape to the exit doors.

  “No!” someone shouts. “Stay calm!”

  I look wildly toward the back row where Artie was sitting. I can’t see him at all. The mob at the back is pushing and shouting.

  Tickticktickticktickticktick.

  Ben and other law clerks run for the judges’ exit next to the dais. My heart begins to thunder. Time is slowed, stretched out.

  “Artie’s back there!” I shout.

  Sarah grabs my arm. “Armen!”

  I look back at the dais. Armen stands at the center, shielding his eyes from the overhead lights, squinting into the back row. Judge Townsend is stalled at his chair.

  Galanter snatches Armen’s gavel and pounds it on the dais: boom boom boom! “Order! Order, I say!” he bellows, red-faced. He slams the chief judge’s gavel again and again. “Order!”

>   “Oh, my God,” Armen says, when he realizes what’s happening. “It can’t be.”

  Copyright © 1994 by Lisa Scottoline. All rights reserved.

  Running From the Law

  Whether it’s poker or trial law, wisecracking Rita Morrone plays to win, especially when she takes on the defense of the Honorable Fiske Hamilton, a prominent federal judge accused of sexual harassment. And it’s no coincidence that the judge is her live-in lover’s father.

  Then the action turns deadly, and Rita finds herself at the center of a murder case. She probes deep into the murder, uncovering a secret life and suspects in shocking places. When the killer viciously ups the ante, Rita decides to end this lethal game. She lays it all on the line for the highest stakes ever.

  USA Today: “Sharp, intelligent, funny, and hip . . .. [Scottoline] gives fans of legal thrillers a good, twisty plot.”

  Chapter One

  Any good poker player will tell you the secret to a winning bluff is believing it yourself. I know this, so by the time I cross-examined the last witness, I believed. I was in deep, albeit fraudulent, mourning. Now all I had to do was convince the jury.

  “Would you examine this document for me, sir?” I said, my voice hoarse with fake grief. I did the bereavement shuffle to the witness stand and handed an exhibit to Frankie Costello, a lump of a plant manager with a pencil-thin mustache.

  “You want I should read it?” Costello asked.

  No, I want you should make a paper airplane. “Yes, read it please.”

  Costello bent over the document, and I snuck a glance at the jury through my imaginary black veil. A few returned my gaze with mounting sympathy. The trial had been postponed last week because of the death of counsel’s mother, but the jury wasn’t told which lawyer’s mother had died. It was defense counsel’s mother who’d just passed on, not mine, but don’t split hairs, okay? You hand me an ace, I’m gonna use it.

  “I’m done,” Costello said, after the first page.

  “Please examine the attachments, sir.”

  “Attachments?” he asked, cranky as a student on the vocational track.

  “Yes, sir.” I leaned heavily on the burled edge of the witness stand and looked down with a mournful sigh. I was wearing black all over: black suit, black pumps, black hair pulled back with a black grosgrain ribbon. My eyes were raccoony, too, but from weeks of lost sleep over this trial, which had been slipping through my manicured fingers until somebody choked on her last chicken bone.

  “Give me a minute,” Costello said, tracing a graph with a stubby finger.

  “Take all the time you need, sir.”

  He labored over the chart as the courtroom fell silent. The only sound was the death rattle of an ancient air conditioner that proved no match for a Philadelphia summer. It strained to cool the large Victorian courtroom, one of the most ornate in City Hall. The courtroom was surrounded by rose marble wainscoting and its high ceiling was painted robin’s-egg blue with gold crown molding. A mahogany rail contained the jury, and I stole another glance at them. The old woman and the pregnant mother in the front row were with me all the way. But I couldn’t read the grim-faced engineer who’d been peering at me all morning. Was he sympathetic or suspicious?

  “I’m done,” Costello said, and thrust the exhibit at me in a Speedy Gonzales fit of pique. We don’t need no steenking badges.

  “Thank you,” I said, meaning it. It was a mistake not to keep the exhibit. You’ll see why. “Mr. Costello, have you had an adequate opportunity to read Joint Exhibit 121?”

  “Yeh.”

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve seen these documents, is it, sir?” My voice echoed in the empty courtroom. There were no spectators in the pews, not even the homeless. The Free Library was cooler, and this trial was boring even me until today.

  “Nah,” Costello said. “I seen it before.”

  “You prepared the memorandum yourself, didn’t you?”

  “Yeh.” Costello shifted in the direction of his lawyer, George W. Vandivoort IV, the stiff-necked fellow at the defense table. Vandivoort wore a pin-striped suit, horn-rimmed glasses, and a bright-eyed expression. He manifested none of the grief of a man who had buried his own mother only days ago, which was fine with me. I had rehearsed enough grief for both of us.

  “Mr. Costello, did you send Exhibit 121 to Bob Brown, director of operations at Northfolk Paper, with a copy to Mr. Saltzman?”

  Costello paused, at a loss without the memo in front of him. Who can remember what they just read? Nobody. Who would ask for the memo back? Everybody except an Italian male. “I think so,” he said slowly.

  “And you sent Mr. Rizzo a blind copy, isn’t that correct, sir?”

  He tried to remember. “Yeh.”

  “Just so I’m clear on this, a blind copy is when you send a memo or letter to someone, but the memo doesn’t show that you did, isn’t that right?” A point with no legal significance, but juries hate blind copies.

  “Yeh. It’s standard procedure to Mr. Rizzo, Mr. Dell’Orefice, and Mr. Facelli.”

  Even better, it sounded like the Mafia. I glanced at one of the black jurors, who was frowning deeply. He lived in Southeast Philly on the ragged fringe of the Italian neighborhood, and had undoubtedly taken his share of abuse. His frown meant I had collected six jurors so far. But what about the engineer? I tried to look sadder.

  Suddenly an authoritative cough issued from the direction of the judge’s paneled dais. “Ms. Morrone, I don’t appreciate what you’re doing,” snapped the Honorable Gordon H. Kroungold, a sharp Democrat who was elevated to the bench from an estates practice, where nobody would ever dream of exploiting someone’s death. At least not in open court. “I don’t appreciate what you’re doing at all.”

  “I’m proceeding as quickly as I can, Your Honor,” I said, looking innocently up at the dais. It towered above my head, having been built in a time when we thought judges belonged on pedestals.

  “That’s not what I meant, Ms. Morrone.” Judge Kroungold smoothed down a triangle of frizzy hair with an open hand. He wetted his hair down with water every morning, but after the second witness it would reattain its loft. “It’s your demeanor I’m having a problem with, counsel.”

  Stay calm. Your mother’s not even cold, poor baby. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Your Honor.”

  Judge Kroungold’s dark eyes glowered. “Approach the bench, Ms. Morrone. You, too, Mr. Vandivoort.”

  “Of course, Your Honor,” Vandivoort said, jumping up and hustling over. His mother’s death had put such a spring into his step that he almost beat me to the dais. An inheritance, no doubt.

  “Ms. Morrone, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Judge Kroungold asked, stretching down over his desk. “Is this some kind of stunt?”

  Gulp. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Your Honor?”

  “Please.” Judge Kroungold looked around for his court reporter and waved him over irritably. “Wesley, I want this on the record.”

  The court reporter, an older black man with oddly grayish skin, picked up the stenography machine by its steel tripod and huddled with us at the front of the dais. A sidebar conversation is out of the jury’s hearing, but not the appellate court’s. The word disbarment flitted across my mind, but I shooed it away.

  “Ms. Morrone,” Judge Kroungold said, “please tell me, on the record, that I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean, Your Honor. What is it you’re seeing?”

  “No, Ms. Morrone. No, no, no. Nuh-uh. You tell me exactly what you’re doing.” Judge Kroungold leaned so far over that I experienced a fine spray of judicial saliva. “You tell me. Right now.”

  “I’m conducting my cross-examination of this final witness, Your Honor.”

  The judge’s liver-colored lips set in a determined line. “So it would appear. But let me state for the rec
ord that you seem very tired today, Ms. Morrone. Very lethargic. One would even say that you seem depressed.”

  I didn’t know he cared. “Your Honor, I am tired. It’s been a long trial and I’ve worked this case myself. I don’t have the associates Mr. Vandivoort does, from Webster & Dunne,” I said, loud enough for the jury to hear.

  Judge Kroungold’s eyes slipped toward the jury, then bored down into me. “Lower your voice, counsel. Now.”

  Win some, lose some. “Yes, sir.”

  “I never would have expected to see something like this in my courtroom. For God’s sake, you’re even wearing a black suit!”

  “I noticed that, too,” Vandivoort added, as it began to dawn on him.

  “Your Honor,” I said, “I’ve worn this suit to court many times.”

  “Not in this trial you haven’t,” the judge spat back. Literally. “And no makeup. Last week you had on lipstick, but not today. What happened to that pink lipstick? Too bright?”

  Time to raise him. “Your Honor, why are we discussing my clothing and makeup in court? Do you make comments of this sort to the male attorneys who appear before you?”

  Judge Kroungold blinked, then his eyes narrowed. “You know damn well I wasn’t making . . .comments.”

  “With all due respect, Your Honor, I find your comments inappropriate. I object to them and to the tenor of this entire sidebar as an unfortunate example of gender bias.”

  His mouth fell so far open I could see his bridgework. “What? I’m not biased against you. In fact, I took great pains in my instruction not to tell the jury whose mother had died, in order to avoid undue sympathy for the defense. You, Ms. Morrone, are giving the jury the distinct and entirely false impression that it was your mother who died and not Mr. Vandivoort’s.”

  “What?” I said, sounding as shocked as possible. At the same nanosecond, a quart of adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream and a familiar rush surged into my nerves, setting them tingling, jangling, and twanging like the strings of an electric guitar. Believe. “Your Honor, I would never do such a thing! I couldn’t even begin to do such a thing. Who can divine what a jury is thinking, much less attempt to control it?”