CARTER AMES PUSHED his silver flask of bourbon toward my face. “Have a swig, Ben. You deserve it, son. Well done.”
What a sight for the funny pages we must have made—Ames barely five feet tall, me at six-four—standing side by side in the marble hallway outside the courtroom.
“No, thanks, Carter. I’d rather be sober when the verdict comes in.”
“I wouldn’t, if I was you.” His voice was a curdled mixture of phlegm and whiskey. As he lifted the flask to his mouth, I was surprised to see half-moons of sweat under his arms. In the courtroom he’d looked cool as a block of pond ice.
“Your summation was damn good,” he observed. “I think you had ’em going for a while there. But then you went and threw in that colored stuff. Why’d you have to remind them? You think they didn’t notice she’s black as the ace of spades?”
“I thought I saw one or two who weren’t buying your motive,” I said. “Only takes one to hang ’em up.”
“And twelve to hang her, don’t I know it.”
He took another swig from his flask and eased himself down to a bench. “Sit down, Ben. I want to talk to you, not your rear end.”
I sat.
“Son, you’re a fine young lawyer, Harvard trained and all, gonna make a finer lawyer one of these days,” he said. “But you still need to learn that Washington is a southern town. We’re every bit as southern as wherever you’re from down in Podunk, Mississippi.”
I grimaced and shook my head. “I just do what I think is right, Carter.”
“I know you do. And that’s what makes everybody think you’re nothing but a goddamned bleeding-heart fool and nigger-lover.”
Before I could defend—well, just about everything I believe in—a police officer poked his head out of the courtroom. “Jury’s coming back.”