A fat man jumping at chance? Not pretty. That’s just one reason I’ve not talked about these matters before now.

When I got back to Failey Thursday night, I went to the office and wrote it up. Two stories. The lead focused, of course, on Pratt’s testimony and Crandall’s blowup. The sidebar was a straight replay of Connie’s swill.

The next day and the day after, I held my breath while I waited to see whether anyone else among the clans would reach Crandall or Pratt before me and explain to our well-whetted audiences what really had happened. My colleagues’ experience, however, apparently was no better than my own.

I spent the better part of Friday trying to locate Pratt and Crandall.

I went to Crandall’s office and his house. He was nowhere to be found. I left messages with Crandall’s giggly secretary and at his home. He returned no calls. Like most cops and ex-cops, Pratt’s home number is unlisted, and only the machine picked up at his office.

Wood was not talking either. I reached other people who knew Crandall and Pratt, but none of them either knew what was going on or would discuss it if they did. I was about ready to get in my car and drive to the city to find Pratt, when Marley reminded me that I am forever indentured to the next day’s edition. I wasn’t going anywhere, he said, until I delivered something for Saturday.

Three hours, a noisy car, and a busted radio: the drive back from the Bluff had been agar in which certain, disquieting conclusions about where things now stood had bloomed and festered. All I need do was find someone besides me who would speak them aloud.

The Bluff lawyer who had initially asked if talking to me was a paying gig had found modest notoriety and its impact on his caseload to be adequately compensating. As a result, he was more than happy to explain to me that what we had seen during Pratt’s cross were old-school moves.

Old-school guys, he said, always hold in reserve a way to goad the opponent or the judge into doing something that could lead only to mistrial. If things start looking ugly for their clients, the old-school guys will run a trial off the rails and do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like it was their fault. If it looks like it’s their fault, they might have to call their malpractice carrier or talk to the Disciplinary Commission.

In the Bluff lawyer’s opinion—and mine—that’s what Pratt and Reardon had tried on Crandall. By using Crandall’s first name and suggesting that Crandall had previously tried to coerce Pratt into shortcutting procedure and arresting someone he did not believe to be guilty, Pratt had provoked Crandall into doing something that gave Reardon grounds to ask for a mistrial. During the meeting in Secrist’s chambers, the Bluff lawyer surmised—as did I—Secrist offered Reardon the mistrial. The fact that Reardon did not take it when he was offered the opportunity in court was itself significant.

“Most of us who’ve done this a while think it’s malpractice per se not to take a mistrial when things are going so badly you think you have to employ the moves that will derail a trial,” the lawyer said. “Listen. I don’t want to sound like I’m accusing someone of malpractice. Can we keep this off the record?”

I wouldn’t normally let a source off the record once we’d started, but I liked what he was saying so well I snapped that rule like a twig.

“How does ‘seasoned observer’ sound?” said I.

The fact that someone as experienced and old-school as Crandall let himself be goaded into blowing up made the lawyer wonder whether Crandall might have wanted the mistrial himself.

“I mean, come on. Maybe he realized the effect Pratt had on that jury. Maybe he saw he took a hit on the cross. Maybe he realized that kid is pretty unappealing. You think?”

I thought Crandall was under a lot of pressure and had, in my experience, never been very good about keeping a volcanic temper in check. I said, however, “I’m asking you.”

“Regardless, the fact that Reardon did not take the mistrial must surely mean that he thought Pratt’s testimony had been so effective he was willing to let the case go to the jury, instead of withdrawing and living on to fight another day,” the lawyer said. “That’s pretty ballsy.”

He paused.

“Is that a word I can use in a newspaper?”

“Not really, seasoned observer,” I said. “But then we’re off the record, aren’t we? What’re you betting? As it stands today.”

“Even money.”

“Which just another way of saying you don’t know how it’ll come out.”

“With a jury? In this case? Who does?”

The barbershop boys were of like mind.

“How many you got in there today?” I asked Carl, the older proprietor.

“Four. Plus Cal and me.”

“Take a poll. How many say guilty? How many not?”

He put the phone down. I could hear mumbling. To his surly son, I heard Carl say, “Come on, Cal. Get the cob out of your ass.” Must not have been children in there then.

“Split,” Carl said when he came back on the line. “Three-three.”

“Anybody want to tell me why?”

One of the loafers picked up the phone. He’d attended the trial, listened to the testimony, and reported back to the boys.

“That old cop,” the loafer said to me, “that Pratt, him, he said some smart things.”

It was a laconic man’s way of saying Pratt’s testimony had been jury magic, covering the spectrum of acts that defy explanation, starting with pure sorcery: charms and enchantments. Surely such a personable, intelligent, and upright man could not take money from someone whom he thought actually was guilty of the horrible things the Defendant was accused of.

Pratt had worked in a little alchemy for range. By throwing Bunny and police incompetence into the pot, Pratt gave the jury a seemingly rational and factual basis for delivering a not-guilty verdict and delivered to Reardon the means of turning into gold the lump of lead that was the defense.

Pratt had topped off the performance with legerdemain. What else explained how Pratt had made the jury’s faith in Crandall disappear and replaced it with the innate resistance to authority that good citizens work so hard to suppress?

For pathos and just to remind devoted readers what was at stake, I called Naomi. She was only too happy to say for the record that she was sick, just sick, with fear that Crandall and the police had blown any chance of that jury convicting her son’s killer.

Marley could not stand to hang around and watch while I made the calls and wrote the piece, so he went home to an undoubtedly ascetic supper and returned. From my side of his desk, I watched him to gauge his reaction. When he finished reading the story the first time, he sighed and let his hands fall from the keyboard into his lap.

It could not be the jury magic stuff that bothered Marley. I made those points, without attribution, but left out references to all things mystical. Only Dill would’ve let me get away with something that metaphoric and then only after a fight. Nor apparently was it Naomi’s negative assessment, which I merely quoted in full without redaction.

“You don’t believe he’s guilty,” Marley said.

His eyes were fixed on the screen. They did not move. He did not read.

On my side of his desk, I laid my notepad. I thumbed through it for the third time, hoping I might find something more positive I may have left out.

“Well?” said Marley.

He turned to face me. He put both arms on the desk, clasped his hands, and aimed double-barrel forefingers at me.

“You don’t, do you?”

“The theme of that story, in case you missed it, is that it’s too close to call.”

“Is it?”

His persistence and a certain sharp edge in his tone made me look up.

“Yes, reggae king, it is.”

“Your use of a name you know annoys me makes me think I’m being diverted. What’s going on?”

We knew each other well. I had never told him that Dill called using someone else to voice your opinions writing in the fourth person, but he knew the concept and its temptation as well as I did. His job, among others, was to spot it and ensure that if I used it I did so rarely and only when he thought it wise. So, to mollify him, I said, “Yes, I believe he’s guilty.”

“But,” I said, when Marley sank back in his chair, “what I think—as we both know—counts for shit.”

Conversations of this sort we previously had had any number of times. He did not sit up, and he did not look away. He merely folded his arms to shield himself against rationalization.

“I’ve checked his background,” I said. “I’ve talked to his father. I think I’ve talked to him on the phone. I believe in Jake. I’ve watched him at breaks and before and after court.”

I reached across the desk to a corner where Marley had parked the photo I took outside the courthouse, and I planted my index finger in the middle of it.

“I looked at his scary-ass face—close up—when I took that picture. The jury, on the other hand . . . .”

I withdrew my hand from the photo, sat back, and shrugged.

“The jury has done none of those things. Not one. They know or they are supposed to know nothing about anything other than what they have been told or shown in that courtroom. So if you’re asking me if I believe this is a sure thing, then the answer has to be: Hell no.”

I said it as one word.

“And if you’re asking me to write something more positive about the likely outcome, I got to say: At this point, I don’t see how.”

More than twenty-four hours had passed, and we had not published the photo. The general manager took one look at the print and shortstopped it. He said it was inappropriate since the Defendant had not yet been convicted, and even though we were located across the state, really, we couldn’t know what a jury would and would not see.

What the GM did not say was that the photo scared him as much as it did the rest of us. He was just in a better position than Marley and me to do something about it.

“It’ll make for a hell of story if they acquit him,” Marley said, rocking in his chair, his eyes unfocused. “Probably better copy, probably more copy than if he’s convicted.”

Marley looked at me, hope for argument manifest on his face. I could not argue, so I only nodded.

Marley looked from the screen to the photo and back.

He said, almost to himself, “Takes twelve to hang a Defendant.”

I knew the maxim, too. “And just one to hang the jury,” I said, finishing it for him.

Marley considered the photo again.

“Truth will out,” said he, a reader of Shakespeare. “Regardless of form.”

With a reaper’s sweep of his bony arm, he gathered the photo to him and made me his fourth person.