Cheater's Game

by Paul Levine

“But surely the NFL knows that,” she said, still puzzled.

  “Exactly! They don’t care. They’d rather pay a few million for equipment than another billion-dollar settlement for C.T.E. This is their way of sidestepping additional liability.”

  Her eyes burned with anger. Tampering with scientific research in pursuit of profits was a deadly sin. “The N.I.H. won’t stand for this!”

  “Then you’d better tell them.”

  “You bet your jock strap I will!”

  Just then, Kip came flying into the kitchen, shorn of suit coat and tie, his trial uniform. “Melissa, you should have seen Uncle Jake today. He kicked government butt.”

  “It was just jury selection, kiddo,” Jake said, his eyes half-closed, as if he wanted to doze off, “and it was pretty much a draw.”

  “But a draw is a win for the defense because the government has the burden of proof. You taught me that.”

  Jake let out a long breath and said, “True.”

  Melissa thought he looked exhausted, with his face drawn. Last night, he had slept restlessly, kicking the sheets now and then and waking her up. She wasn’t going to press him to rehash his day in court. She also didn’t want to seem overly concerned about him. Jake was a man who soldiered on and played through pain. The stoic male, a throwback in many ways. She would say nothing to make him think he needed a duty nurse.

  Kip said, “The prosecutor is pretty tough, though, isn’t she, Uncle Jake?”

  He nodded. “No pushover.”

  For a man of many words, tonight he was practically mute. Too tired to talk. She had brought dinner home from Havana Harry’s on LeJeune. Vaca frita, shredded beef cooked until crispy with onions and garlic, fried plantains, and, for dessert, Jake’s favorite, tres leches, sponge cake with condensed milk, whole milk, and heavy cream. But he ate little of the beef and plantains and none of the dessert, which sat in front of him at the kitchen table. Kip had wolfed down his quinoa salad with avocado, sweet potatoes, and beets, but spent a moment inhaling the aroma of the crispy beef.

  “Do you want a drink, Jake?” Melissa asked.

  “Just coffee. Gotta prep.”

  Kip seemed unaware of his uncle’s condition and just kept prattling on. “I really liked the chef. Especially when he said he wanted to help other people. Before I hooked up with Max Ringle, I did free test counseling for kids from poor families, and now I have an idea to expand it. I’m gonna create SAT and ACT prep courses for underprivileged kids from Appalachia, inner cities, immigrants with problems in English. All pro bono.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Melissa said.

  “I can statistically identify general deficiencies found in those groups, then aim the courses at those weaknesses. What do you think, Uncle Jake?”

  “Great idea, Kip.”

  He said it without any inflection, though Kip didn’t seem to notice. He kept going a while, before carrying his own tres leches to his room.

  “Kip seems upbeat,” she said when he was gone.

  “Strange as it sounds,” Jake observed, “he’s not cognizant that he’ll probably be teaching his SAT courses to fellow inmates, not kids in Appalachia. He’s a little detached from reality.”

  “Which is part of your defense. Did you get any Star Trek fans on the jury?”

  “Three.” He used a fork to toy with the meringue on top the tres leches but didn’t eat any. “Three trekkies out of twelve.”

  “That’s good. Did you ask if any of them remember the reality distortion field episode?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to tip Margaret Bolden to that defense, far-fetched as it may be.”

  “It’s not really a defense, is it?”

  “It’s more like those rocket ship fins on a 1959 Cadillac,” he said. “Showy and distracting, but no real purpose.” He barked out a small laugh. “Kind of like my career.”

  He was worrying her, but she would approach the subject oh-so-gently. “Are you a little down tonight, Jake?”

  “Had the adrenaline rush in court. Seems to have sapped my energy. I’ve got my hands full with Margaret Bolden.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Poised. Confident. Unruffled. She’s petite, almost tiny, but she walks across the well of the courtroom as if she owns the real estate. She’ll be hard to fluster.”

  “Will you try?”

  He seemed to think about it before replying. “She’s too likeable, and I’d look like a big jerk.”

  “And the judge?”

  “Prosecution oriented. Hard-ass. I’m still feeling him out. Not sure how far I can push jury nullification without being held in contempt.”

  “He doesn’t scare you?”

  “Nah, but it scares me that he doesn’t scare me.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Ninety percent of the time, I can play the game of the obsequious lawyer, kissing the judge’s robes, thanking him for letting me breathe. But ten percent of the time, I’m like a hot boiler without a safety valve, nothing to relieve the pressure.”

  “And how does that manifest itself?”

  “Impulse control and a loss of focus. Just for a few seconds. Drifting off somewhere, not hearing the judge or the prosecutor or even my own thoughts. Then I say something seriously stupid.”

  She kept her demeanor calm, belying her feelings. By any objective standard, Jake’s condition was worsening. The symptoms he described were common in the early stages of dementia. She believed more than ever that defending Kip’s case was dangerous for him.

  “I’ve been held in contempt a bunch of times in state court,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Once, years ago, a judge yelled at me, ‘Mr. Lassiter, I’m gonna send you to a place you’ve never been.’”

  “I said, ‘Already been to jail, Your Honor.’”

  “And he said, ‘Not talking about jail. I’m sending you to law school.’”

  She didn’t smile and didn’t laugh. She just looked at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’ve told me that story before. You know that, right?”

  He smacked his forehead with his right hand. “Sure, I do.”

  She wasn’t convinced. They had a quiet moment before she inquired, “What else besides impulse control? What about headaches?”

  “They come and go, like armies marching in the night.”

  “Tinnitus?”

  “Same, but I’m so used to the sound, it’s just background noise. Like jet engines on an endless flight.”

  “Anything else?”

  He took a forkful of meringue into his mouth, then dipped the fork into the sodden cake, which dripped with milk and cream. She handed him a spoon, which was more useful.

  “I got a little dizzy in court today, but it passed quickly,” Jake said.

  Again, she controlled her reaction. Vertigo in patients with traumatic brain injuries usually worsens, especially in times of stress. “On Thursday, you’re due for an injection.”

  He spooned some sugary cake into his mouth. “Gonna skip it until the trial’s over.”

  “Not a good idea, Jake. Nobody quits cold turkey.”

  Unless they die.

  But she didn’t say that. Instead, he asked, “How about if we just reduce the dosage?”

  “I can’t deal with the side effects right now. I need to sleep. I need to focus. I need not to fall down in court.”

  She could have argued with him, could have said, “There’s no evidence the antibodies are causing those side effects.”

  But there was also scant evidence the antibodies were helping, and maybe stopping them would have a reverse placebo effect and he’d sleep better, focus better, and not become dizzy.

  “It’s your choice, Jake.”

  He smiled warmly at her, a puff of meringue in the corner of his mouth. “I love the way you give me unconditional love and support.”

  “Is there a ‘but’ coming?”

  “No way. The opposite. You
support me even when you think I’m wrong.”

  “But I tell you what I think, and then you have to decide. That’s the give-and-take of an adult relationship.”

  With an index finger, she scraped the meringue off his lip and ate it. He laughed and said, “You, Melissa Gold, are the one I never knew I always wanted.”

  She cocked her head and gave him a sly smile. “That’s beautiful, but didn’t that come from a movie, some rom-com we watched on Amazon?”

  “Of course it did. It was funny as hell, and a wonderful night with you.”

  She could tell he was just winging it, with no recollection whatsoever. “It surely was,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  “This is the story of a very intelligent young man,” Margaret Bolden began, “a young man who could have been a success at virtually any endeavor but chose to be a major player in a nationwide criminal conspiracy of deception and fraud. For him, a very lucrative criminal conspiracy. For others, a trail of destruction, criminal records, and shattered reputations.”

  Bolden turned away from the jury box, walked several paces to the defense table, and pointed at Kip, her pink fingernails a foot from his face. “This is that man. The defendant, Chester Lassiter, also known as Kip. The man who directed the criminal conspiracy and profited from it.”

  Bolden’s opening statement was pretty much what I expected from an experienced, savvy trial lawyer. She didn’t cling to the hackneyed structure that begins, “The evidence will show . . . blah, blah, blah.”

  She told her story, establishing the theme in the first two sentences. A damn interesting story, I’m sorry to say, that would make a decent movie. It had a hero, an FBI agent named Peter Wisniewski who, with a cast of hundreds, uncovered the villainy and put together the government’s air-tight case. It had a villain, the angelic-looking, yet evil Kip Lassiter, an avaricious, manipulative, deceptive young man who preyed on the insecurities of decent parents who only wanted the best for their saintly children.

  As in dramas dating back to Aristotle, the villain had an ally, the mastermind Max Ringle. Yes, Ringle was a scam artist, but he finally saw the beatific glow of justice, not unlike Saul on the road to Damascus being bathed in divine light.

  Victims? Oh, there were victims galore. The students themselves, some of whom supposedly did not know their parents had paid a ringer to bounce their test scores by thirty percent. I looked forward to cross-examining these entitled brats about their galactic ignorance. The universities, too, were victims, the prosecutor said. They were deprived of their “property,” those priceless admissions slots. We were going to hear from university administrators about the damage to dear old Ivy. And yes, I hungered to cross-examine the starch out of those administrators’ shirts.

  Two other A.U.S.A.’s sat at the government table, a man and a woman, both in their early thirties, each with a laptop. They were typing away, either taking notes or playing solitaire. Behind them, in the row of chairs in front of the railing that separates the gallery from the well of the courtroom—technically the “bar”—sat three more government types. Assistants or consultants or investigative personnel, who knows? They had their own laptops. At their feet were neatly arranged expansion files with color-coded folders.

  Oh, bring on your minions. I’m always outnumbered but never outgunned.

  Margaret Bolden told the jury that Agent Wisniewski would be the first witness and would give them a tour of the conspiracy. He would explain both the larger conspiracy involving Max Ringle and this particularly devious scheme involving Kip Lassiter. The “exam bribery tentacle,” she called it. Agent Wisniewski would play numerous recorded conversations for the jury, each of which would implicate the defendant.

  “You will hear the defendant discussing his nefarious actions,” she said. “You will see photos and video of him entering and exiting testing centers on the day of exams. You will hear from parents who paid him, and you will see bank records of the deposits of his ill-gotten gains. The proof will be overwhelming that this is an open-and-shut case of fraud, racketeering, and money laundering.”

  Well, I had to agree. It certainly sounded open-and-shut. But I intended to stick my size 14 cleats through that open door and kick it off the hinges before it slammed shut.

  “You will hear from Max Ringle in person,” the prosecutor went on. “He may have been the sorcerer, but Kip Lassiter was the sorcerer’s apprentice.”

  Ouch! A deadly turn of phrase. That’s what you get when a dozen A.U.S.A.’s and FBI agents hang out in a conference room for months, drinking coffee and eating croissants on the taxpayers’ dime.

  “Both men are equally guilty in the eyes of the law,” Bolden said. “The difference is that Mr. Ringle admits his guilt and expresses remorse. Mr. Lassiter has forced us to bring him to trial at great expense to the government and inconvenience to you . . .”

  “Objection! What the hell!” I was on my feet and just this side of crazy. I wasn’t sure what I’d just said or what I’d say next. “That violates the presumption of innocence. It violates Golden Rule by invoking the jurors. It condemns the defendant for pleading not guilty. It’s friggin’ improper, and Ray knows it!”

  The judge pointed a finger at me. “Pipe down, Mr. Lassiter. Your objection is sustained. The jury shall disregard the last statement by Ms. Bolden. Now, up here, both of you.”

  Next to me, Kip whispered, “You okay, Uncle Jake?”

  I ignored him and stumbled a step, making my way to the side of the bench away from the jury. Margaret Bolden followed.

  “First of all, Mr. Lassiter,” the judge whispered, “who’s Ray?”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose with my thumb and index finger. There seemed to be a pain somewhere deep in there. “Did I say ‘Ray?’”

  “You did, sir.”

  “I guess it’s Ray Pincher, the state attorney. I’ve tried a lot of cases against him, and he always does something to set me off.”

  The judge turned toward the prosecutor. “Margie, not like you to light a firecracker and toss it under the defense table.”

  “I apologize, Your Honor. I went too far.”

  The judge harrumphed and turned back to me. “Now, Mr. Lassiter, did I hear you use an expletive in making your objection?”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I lost it there for a second.”

  He eyed me a moment with a cautious look, as if wondering whether to pet a barking dog. “I Googled you, Mr. Lassiter. Your name came up in a story about that brain disease.”

  “Yes, sir. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.”

  “Is that a bicycle helmet I see on the defense table?”

  “It is, Your Honor.”

  “Is that your head gear in case you keel over? You gonna collapse in my courtroom?”

  “Won’t happen, Your Honor.”

  If he pressed me, I thought, I’d have to tell him why the bike helmet was there, costing me a bishop or a knight in the chess game of a trial.

  “I’ve had a lawyer stroke out in closing argument,” the judge said, forgetting all about the helmet. “Had a young fellow pee his pants when I struck his pleadings in a civil case. Fouls up my schedule, I can tell you that.”

  “I’m good to go, Your Honor. Strong bladder.”

  “Then, both of you, back to your places. Let’s wrap up opening statements and take some testimony.”

  The unflappable Margaret Bolden took her position in front of the jury box. Summing up, she shifted her tone to kind and empathetic, even lowering her voice to that of a trusted friend sharing personal advice. “This is a criminal case, but it is also a tragedy. A tragedy that a young man of such promise could have strayed so far off the path. Perhaps it is a good thing that he is so young so that he will have a chance to redeem himself at some later date . . .”

  Meaning when he gets out of prison.

  I didn’t know exactly where she was going with this. She walked to the defense table and stood
alongside Kip, and then spoke in her soft whispery voice. “As you look at the defendant and see this young man of promise, you might be tempted to feel sorry for him. But the court will instruct you that, and I quote, ‘The law does not permit you to be governed by sympathy.’”

  She returned to her position in front of the jury box. “Sympathy is a wonderful human emotion, but it has no place in the courtroom any more than vengeance does. All that matters is the law.”

  Ah, so that was it. Kip’s youthful, wholesome appearance worried Bolden. Kip would testify, and hopefully the new, improved, redemption-seeking Kip would appear on the stand, rather than the cocky, cashmere hoodie-wearing smartass.

  Of course, when I presented the defense case, I intended to shamelessly appeal to the jurors’ sympathy, no matter the jury instruction or the prosecutor’s objections. I would invoke Kip’s worthless mother, his unknown father, his beloved Granny, and the vicissitudes of his youth. When it comes to my conduct in trials, I have only two rules. I won’t lie to the court or let a witness do it. Other than that, batten the hatches, because I sail straight into storms.

  Bolden spent a few more minutes talking about the judge’s wise instructions and the jurors’ grave responsibilities, then thanked them all and sat down.

  I got to my feet, nodded to the judge, buttoned my suit coat, smiled warmly, and said my six favorite words in the English language. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury . . .”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” I looked at fourteen faces, a dozen jurors and two alternates. “I love saying that. The jury. The bulwark of our freedoms. Our line of defense against tyranny.

  “I represent the defendant, my nephew, Chester Lassiter. He prefers to be called ‘Kip.' Because he’s still a kid, I sometimes call him kiddo. Or even Kippers. You can call him whatever you want, except one thing. You can’t call him guilty because he is not.”

  I was working without a net, which is to say without notes. Even with my faulty memory, I felt I could do this. There was something purely instinctual about standing in front of a jury and telling a story, and I didn’t want to peer down at my notes on the podium, jurors studying the top of my head. I needed to look them in the eye, show them my sincerity