Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

The day the trial began, the back spasm seemed to have shortened Mitch’s left leg by half an inch. He limped into court feeling more like a personal-injury plaintiff than a lawyer. He was tired of the classroom-smell of courtrooms, preferred even the bookish smell of their quiet law library in the office. But he had scheduled himself to remain next to Bernie for their week of triumph, in case he was needed.

Bernie, trim and solid, wore his poverty-lawyer suit, a blue double-breasted that he had bought sometime after Korea and seemed to keep better shined than his shoes. He was immaculately clean but as shabby as the law allowed. His iron-gray hair was carefully mussed, as if concern for his client had occupied his mind while he combed it. When he regarded the jury, his dark eyes pleaded with it to understand a night-school lawyer who had come up the hard way. Their client was absent, but you could feel the injustice of her own pain and suffering in every word he spoke.

Mitch felt a quiver of something like panic. A million and a half! They had gone too far. He discovered suddenly that he really didn’t want Bernie to succeed too well.

Bernie charged ahead, turning in his best performance yet. He asked their star witness, a doctor from Johns Hopkins who also held a law degree, for a summation: “Then, Doctor, what are the actual odds?”

“On what, Mr. Bertelli?” the doctor asked. He radiated sincerity: he and Bernie were a beautiful team. Mitch wondered when he had last actually treated a patient: he was a neurosurgeon, impressively trained, but more lawyer than medical man, and it had cost them five thousand dollars and expenses to get him on the stand for an hour.

“The odds,” Bernie repeated, “that her paralysis could have stemmed from some mysterious virus she brought to the operating table?”

“None. Not one in a million.”

The defense awakened. “Objection! Your Honor, that’s an opinion!”

“Of an expert,” Mitch broke in from the table, to get the heat off Bernie.

The young judge looked at him with some irritation. “An expert bookmaker?” he demanded. “Objection sustained,” he ruled. “I will caution counsel for plaintiff. And Doctor, you’re a member of the Maryland bar. You should know better.”