The party goes on for a while as they debrief and unwind all the details of the morning and afternoon since Jennifer returned with the disk and they first punched it up. Twenty minutes later Jennifer is the last of our staff out the door, walking on air, headed for home.
Harry watches her from the open door as she disappears under the arch and out to the street, and then closes it. “You know, it’s only a guess, but I would bet she’ll never forget this day.”
“No. I doubt that she will.”
“Not to diminish what any of them did. Hell, this morning we weren’t even sure that the letter existed. Now we have a picture of it,” says Harry. “For all the good it will do us.”
“I know,” I say. “There’s no foundation to get any of it in, unless we can produce the person who made the video, and he’s dead.”
“Did you see the look on Ginnis’s face when Scarborough dropped that letter on the table?” says Harry. “That old man is up to his teeth in this thing. There’s a lot of fear in that video.”
“That wasn’t fear you saw. That was anger.”
Harry shoots me a questioning look.
“Ginnis’s face on that video brought back something that Trisha Scott told me months ago, when I met with her in Washington. She said Ginnis despised Scarborough and that he wouldn’t have anything to do with him. It was her way of trying to get me to leave Ginnis alone.”
“Yeah, and as I recall, she lied to you about other things, too,” says Harry.
“I’m not so sure.”
“Well, you just saw them sitting there on that video, or are my eyes deceiving me?” says Harry. “I grant you they may not have been all warm and fuzzy over each other. But apparently there’s enough commercial avarice between them to bridge any troubled waters.”
“I also read the book,” I tell him.
“What book?”
“The one Scarborough wrote about the Supreme Court, Case of the Century, about the presidential election and the razor’s-edge balloting decided by the Court.”
“How can anyone forget?” says Harry.
The election was nearly twelve years ago, the administration long gone.
“I ordered the book from Amazon. It’s been on my nightstand for four months.”
“Not a lot of leisure for nighttime reading, is what you’re telling me,” says Harry.
“I finally got around to it last weekend. It’s a real page-turner.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” he says.
“In it Scarborough does for the Court what Martin Luther did for the Catholic Church. He excoriated the nine of them. But he saved the bitterest bile for Ginnis, the swing vote in the big case. According to Scarborough, Ginnis handpicked his own president.”
“Lucky man! Still, somebody had to do it,” says Harry. “As I recall, after all the lawyers showed up, the two candidates were no longer willing to pitch pennies for the post.”
“Scarborough called Ginnis a party hack, and that was among the more gracious things he had to say.”
“Sour grapes,” says Harry.
“No, not sour. Poisonous,” I tell him.
Harry looks at me.
“The real cross Scarborough left Ginnis to carry was the charge that the justice had committed ethical violations. Scarborough claimed that Ginnis engaged in private, out-of-court communications, ex parte, during the case with some of the lofty lawyers representing the soon-to-be-anointed president. And Scarborough said there was a point to all this talking. Ginnis was lobbying for another judicial post, and he was doing it from a point of leverage.”
“Something higher than the Supreme Court?” says Harry.
“Chief justice!”
This draws a pair of arched eyebrows from Harry.
“According to Scarborough, Ginnis wanted to head up the Court.”
“I don’t remember that. I remember when the position came open, chief justice,” says Harry. “That was a few years ago. But I don’t remember Ginnis being mentioned as a candidate.”
“That’s the point. He wasn’t. Trisha Scott told me the charges were a lie. She may have been right. I don’t know. But it didn’t matter. When the position of chief justice fell vacant two years after the razor-sharp election, Ginnis didn’t even make the short list.”
“Maybe he was too old,” says Harry.
“No. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t in Scarborough’s book either, but it did make Newsweek, a tiny one-column article at the time. A source in the White House-unnamed, of course-said Ginnis was the president’s first pick for chief justice. The problem was, they couldn’t put him on the list because of Scarborough’s book and the charges he’d made. To nominate Ginnis would lend credence to the charges, and the administration, Ginnis’s handpicked president, didn’t want the heat. How’s that for having your career capped?”
“The top of the pyramid is always slippery,” says Harry.
“And I’ve been told that time heals all wounds. But you do have to wonder,” I say. “The two of them sitting there breaking bread.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Without the Jefferson Letter, the only evidence we have is that video. That means we don’t have a choice,” I tell him. “We’ve got to find Ginnis, track him down and serve him. Shackle and drag him if we have to, but get him here, and get him into court.”
20
Harry called Herman in Washington at the crack of dawn this morning and asked him if he had his passport with him. It seems Herman never leaves home without it. The man has been chasing leads on cases long enough to know he can never be sure where the next one will have him stepping off.
As I’m heading downtown, to Quinn’s ten o’clock court call, Herman is winging his way to Miami for a connecting flight south to Curaçao.
Tuchio spends the next couple of days combing his list for witnesses to fill in some of the cracks. He calls his psychiatric witness and lays out in more detail the elements and driving mental characteristics that can detonate rage in the commission of a homicide. Among the inventory of motives the psychiatrist cites is social and political animosity, particularly the kind grounded in racial hostility. Since we haven’t put Carl’s mental state in issue, via a plea of insanity or diminished capacity, the state’s witness was not able to interview, test, or examine Carl. This is no doubt a plus for our side. There has never been a realistic hope of mounting a defense on these grounds, so exposing him to examination by a state’s expert would most likely result in a finding that Carl meets all the criteria for the commission of this kind of crime. It’s the problem with putting Carl on the stand. Tuchio would eat him for lunch, pepper him with questions about Scarborough and his book. He would turn down the lights and show Carl videos of the author in provocative interviews, and when the lights came back up, there’s no telling what might be the first words out of Carl’s mouth.
On Wednesday morning I’m climbing the courthouse steps and see a small convention of bikers, lots of leather and denim across the street. People riding Harleys today could be a clan of executives from IBM, but not these guys. I count maybe twenty of the outriders from the fabled Aryan Posse, badasses all of them.
Associates and members are estimated at close to seventy-five on the street and roughly twice that number in prisons around the country. It’s not the size of the organization but its deep roots within the Aryan prison community, where the racial divide is deep, sharp, and violent, that have the attention of authorities.
The reason they’re here this morning is Tuchio’s main attraction, his witness of the day, Charles Gross. He is one of their own. I’m guessing that the state is bringing Gross on now in order to sandwich him between other witnesses so that the rough edges don’t look so bad.
As I clear security on the courthouse main floor, I can see fifteen, maybe more, uniformed officers moving quickly toward the stairs at the back of the building. Something is happening, but I can’t tell what.