"Ten thousand."
"What?"
"Ten. Five now, five when the trial is over."
Cleve grunted as if slightly disgusted. If only Derrick knew the stakes. "Okay. Ten."
"When can I get it?"
"Tomorrow." They ordered sandwiches and talked for another hour about the trial, and the verdict, and how best to persuade Angel.
THE CHORE of keeping D. Martin Jankle away from his cherished vodka fell to Durwood Cable. Fitch and Jankle had fought bitterly over the question of whether or not Jankle could drink Tuesday night, the night before he testified. Fitch, the former drunk, accused Jankle of having a problem. Jankle cursed Fitch viciously for trying to tell him, the CEO of Pynex, a Fortune 500 company, if and when and how much he could drink.
Cable was dragged into the brawl by Fitch. Cable insisted that Jankle hang around his office throughout the night to prepare for his testimony. A mock direct exam was followed by a lengthy cross, and Jankle performed adequately. Nothing spectacular. Cable made him watch the video of it with a panel of jury experts.
When he was finally taken to his hotel room after ten, he found that Fitch had removed all liquor from the mini-bar and replaced it with soft drinks and fruit juices.
Jankle cursed and went to his overnight bag, where he kept a flask hidden in a leather pouch. But there was no flask. Fitch had removed it too.
AT 1 A.M., Nicholas silently opened his door and looked up and down the hall. The guard was gone, no doubt asleep in his room.
Marlee was waiting in a room on the second floor. They embraced and kissed but never got around to anything else. She had hinted on the phone that there was trouble, and she hurriedly spilled the story, beginning with her early morning chat with Rebecca in Lawrence. Nicholas took it well.
Other than the natural passion of two young lovers, their relationship rarely saw emotion. And when it surfaced, it was almost always from Nicholas, who had a slight temper, which, regardless of how slight, was certainly more than she possessed. He might raise his voice when angry, but that almost never occurred. Marlee wasn't cold, just calculating. He'd never seen her cry, the one exception being at the end of a movie he'd hated. They had never been through a difficult fight, and the usual squabbles were snuffed out quickly because Marlee had taught him to bite his tongue. She didn't tolerate wasted sentiment, didn't pout or carry petty grudges, and didn't put up with him when he tried to.
She replayed her conversation with Rebecca, and she tried to recall every word from her meeting with Fitch.
The realization that they'd been partially discovered hit hard. They were sure it was Fitch, and they wondered how much he knew. They were convinced, and always had been, that Jeff Kerr would have to be discovered in order to find Claire Clement. Jeff's background was harmless. Claire's had to be protected or they might as well flee now.
There was little to do but wait.
DERRICK ENTERED Angel's room by wedging himself through the fold-out window. He hadn't seen her since Sunday, a gap of almost forty-eight hours, and he simply couldn't wait until tomorrow night because he loved her madly and missed her and had to hold her. She immediately noticed he had been drinking. They fell into bed, where they quietly consummated an unauthorized personal visit.
Derrick rolled over and fell fast asleep.
They awoke at dawn, and Angel panicked because she had a man in her room and this was, of course, against the Judge's orders. Derrick was unconcerned. He said he'd simply wait until they left for court, then sneak out of the room. This did little to calm her nerves. Angel took a long shower.
Derrick had taken Cleve's plan and improved on it immensely. After leaving the tavern, he bought a six-pack and drove along the Gulf for hours. Slowly, up and down Highway 90, past the hotels and casinos and boat docks, from Pass Christian to Pascagoula he had driven, sipping beer and expanding the scheme. Cleve, after a few drinks, had let it slip that the lawyers for the plaintiff were seeking millions. It took only nine of the twelve for a verdict, so Derrick figured Angel's vote was worth a helluva lot more than ten thousand dollars.
Ten thousand sounded great at the tavern, but if they would pay that much, and agree to do it so quickly, then they would pay more with pressure. The more he drove, the more her vote was worth. It was now at fifty, and rising almost by the hour.
Derrick was intrigued by the notion of percentages. What if the verdict was ten million, for example? One percent, one lousy little percent, would be a hundred thousand dollars. A twenty-million-dollar verdict? Two hundred thousand dollars. What if Derrick proposed to Cleve a deal whereby they paid him cash up front and a percentage of the verdict? That would motivate Derrick, and of course his girlfriend, to press hard during deliberations for a large verdict. They'd become players. It was a chance they'd never see again.
Angel returned in her bathrobe and lit a cigarette.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Pynex's defense of its good corporate name got off to a miserable start Wednesday morning, through no fault of its own. An analyst named Walter Barker, writing in Mogul, a popular weekly financial, laid two-to-one odds that the jury down in Biloxi would find against Pynex, and return a large verdict. Barker was no lightweight. Trained as a lawyer, he had developed a formidable reputation on Wall Street as the man to watch when litigation affected commerce. His specialty was monitoring trials and appeals and settlements, and predicting their outcomes before they were final. He was usually right, and had made a fortune with his research. He was widely read, and the fact that he was betting against Pynex shocked Wall Street. The stock opened at seventy-six, dropped to seventy-three, and by mid-morning was at seventy-one and a half.
The courtroom crowd was larger Wednesday. The Wall Street boys were back in force, each reading a copy of Mogul and all suddenly agreeing with Barker, though over breakfast an hour earlier the consensus had been that Pynex had weathered the plaintiff's witnesses and should close strongly. Now they read with worried faces and revised their reports to their offices. Barker had actually been in the courtroom last week. He'd sat alone on the back row. What had he seen that they'd missed?
The jurors filed in promptly at nine, with Lou Dell proudly holding the door as if she'd collected her brood after they'd scattered yesterday and was now delivering them back to where they belonged. Harkin welcomed them as if they'd been gone for a month, made some flat crack about fishing, then raced through his standard "Have you been molested?" questions. He promised the jurors a speedy end to the trial.
Jankle was called as a witness, and the defense began. Free of the effects of alcohol, Jankle was primed and sharp. He smiled easily and seemed to welcome the chance to defend his tobacco company. Cable waltzed him through the preliminaries without a hitch.
Seated on the second row was D. Y. Taunton, the black lawyer from the Wall Street firm who'd met with Lonnie in Charlotte. He listened to Jankle while cutting his eyes at Lonnie, and it didn't take long to connect. Lonnie glanced once, couldn't help it as he glanced again, and on the third look managed to nod and smile because it seemed like the proper thing to do. The message was clear-Taunton was an important person who'd traveled all the way down to Biloxi because this was an important day. The defense was now speaking, and it was critical for Lonnie to understand that he should listen and believe every word now being said from the witness stand. No problem with Lonnie.
Jankle's first defensive thrust was on the issue of choice. He conceded that a lot of people think cigarettes are addictive, but only because he and Cable realized he would sound foolish otherwise. But, then, maybe they're not addictive. No one really knows, and the folks in research are just as confused as anyone. One study leans this way, the next one leans another, but he'd never seen positive proof that smoking was addictive. Personally, he just did not believe it. Jankle had smoked for twenty years, but only because he enjoyed it. He smoked twenty cigarettes a day, by choice, and he'd chosen a lower-tar brand. No, he most certainly was not addicted. He could quit whenever he wanted. He smoked because he liked to. He played tennis four times a week and his annual physical revealed nothing to worry about.