“Sir, do you really think you’re up to coming here every day, maybe for weeks, possibly months, to listen to detailed testimony, from doctors, police officers, witnesses …”

As Nelson speaks Kauffman’s eyes begin to sparkle, a refreshed interest lights his face. Nelson’s describing more excitement than this man has seen in a decade.

“Sure,” he says. “I can do that.”

“It’s serious work, Mr. Kauffman. Hard work.” Nelson is stern, trying to quell this little rebellion of enthusiasm.

“I can do it,” he says. “I know I can.” There’s life in his voice, like with this kind of amusement to fill his days he could make it through the next century.

“You know,” says Nelson, folksy charm dripping through, “they used to excuse good senior citizens like yourself from jury service. The law figured that people over seventy worked hard, contributed their share to society, and now it was the turn of others to work. That these good people,” he gestures toward Kauffman, “deserved a rest, to relax in their later years.”

Kauffman’s look is the expressive equivalent of spit. He’s not buying Nelson’s geriatric populism.

“They used to feed Christians to the lions,” he says. “That don’t make it right.”

There’s laughter in the courtroom, a little applause from three older women in the back row. This is not going well. Nelson retreats to his table, conferring with Meeks. If they get him for cause, they have to consider at what cost, the alienation of other jurors on the panel.

“That’s all, Your Honor.” Nelson takes his seat.

Acosta looks at me.

“Mr. Madriani, for cause?”

“This juror is acceptable to me, Your Honor.” I look at Kauffman and smile. I would wave, but other jurors might think it improper. It’s a calculated risk, the assumption Nelson can’t live with Kauffman.

“Mr. Nelson?”

“Your Honor, we would move that Mr. Kauffman be excused for cause.”

“Not that I’ve heard,” says Acosta.

“Your Honor, it’s obvious that this trial is likely to go on for weeks. It’s going to be extremely rigorous.”

“And I hope you’re up to it, Mr. Nelson.”

There’s more laughter from the audience.

“Fine, Your Honor.” Nelson’s not interested in being the butt of political pandering. He takes his seat.

The judge looks at me again. “Peremptories?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Nelson.”

Nelson’s in conference with Meeks. It seems they do not agree. Finally he tears himself away.

“Your Honor, the people would like to thank Mr. Kauffman and excuse him.”

“Mr. Kauffman, you’re excused.”

The panel is staring at Nelson like some tyrannical first mate who has just tossed the oldest and most infirm from the lifeboat.

Kauffman’s looking around like he’s not sure what this means. Another juror whispers in his good ear.

“Do I have to leave, judge?”

“Yes, Mr. Kauffman, I think so. Maybe you could help him out.” Acosta’s prodding his bailiff for a little help. The marshal and two men on the panel get him around the railing and point him toward the door.

Kauffman’s seat is quickly filled, a tall man, well proportioned, in a buff cardigan and tan slacks.

Kauffman’s still moving, shuffling like flotsam and jetsam toward the door, while other jurors talk to him from aisle seats in the audience, patting him on the arm, a folk hero.

I’m on my feet at the jury railing, starting on the cardigan sweater.

“Sir,” I say, “you’ll have to excuse me, but I don’t have the jury list. Could you give me your name?”

“Robert Rath,” he says.

He is bald as a cue ball, with a slender, intelligent face and delicate wrinkles of thought across the forehead.

“Can you tell us a little about yourself? What type of work you do?”

“Retired,” he says.

I’m wandering near the jury box. Harry has the list and the juror questionnaires, so I’m blind as to Rath’s background.

“What kind of work did you do?”

“Military,” he says. “I’m retired from the Air Force.”

I get bad feelings in my bones. This kind face, I think, is deceptive.

Rath’s not volunteering anything. Nelson’s pulled the questionnaire from Meeks and is looking at it. He drops the paper and lifts his gaze to the judge, round-eyed, like there’s some concern here.

“Tell us about the kind of work you did in the military, before you retired.”

“JAG,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“I was part of the judge advocate general’s office, a military lawyer,” he says.

I turn and look at him. There’s a kind of confident, cocky expression on his face, like he knows he has coldcocked me.

“What type of legal work did you do in the military?”

“When you’re there for twenty-seven years, you do a little bit of everything,” he says. “But the last ten years I represented airmen under the uniform code of military justice. Your counterpart to the public defender,” he says. “Area defense counsel.”

He smiles at me, broad, benign, a brother in the cloth.

I glance at Nelson. He’s putting a face on it, composed, disinterested, unwilling to poison the other jurors with a burst of venom. But I know that in his gut he is churning, like the screws on the Love Boat.

I try to match his composure. But there are little yippees, jumping, erupting, crawling all over inside of me. A defense lawyer on the panel and the people out of peremptories.

Nelson’s not exactly screaming, but it’s the closest imitation I’ve seen by a lawyer at a judge in my recent memory. Acosta’s taking this in chambers, with the door closed. This time the court reporter is with us.

“You can’t allow him to sit.” This sounds like an order from Nelson. He’s pacing in front of the judge’s desk, his hands flailing the air.

“If it doesn’t violate the letter of the law, it certainly violates the spirit. The policy’s clear,” says Nelson. “The courts would never condone a lawyer exercising that kind of influence, dictating results to a jury of lay people behind closed doors. I can’t believe that you would want that.”

“It’s not what I want or what the courts want, Mr. Nelson. It’s what the law demands.”

For decades the statutes of this state had disqualified any lawyer from jury duty. Conventional wisdom held they would poison the fair-minded justice dispensed by average citizens, dominate other jurors. The organized bar went along with this, more interested in standing in front of the jury railing and being paid than sitting behind it. For forty years everyone was happy with this arrangement. Then a few years ago a lawyer-baiting legislator looking for headlines noticed these exemptions buried in the codes and cried foul. Reasoning that lawyers owed a civic duty to jury service, just like everybody else, he cowed the bar into silence, managed to suppress all rational thought on the subject, hustled his bill through the legislature, and promptly died. It was, it is said, his sole act of note in an otherwise undistinguished and brief legislative career. Lawyers on both sides of the railing have been taking his name in vain since.

I wade into the argument, trying to take some of the heat off Acosta.

“I wonder if the people would be here complaining, Your Honor, if Mr. Rath was a former prosecutor,” I say.

“No,” says Nelson, “we wouldn’t have to, you’d have already scotched him with a peremptory.”

It’s the hardest thing a lawyer has to do, argue with fundamental truth.

The prosecution has leveled an assault on the juror Rath that would shame a Roman legion, all in an effort to excuse him for cause. He has dodged each of these with the guile of a magician. Here, I think, is a retired man, younger but like Kauffman, with much time on his hands, a man whose heart pines for a return to the courtroom.

Nelson turns on Acosta and makes an impassioned plea for more peremptory challenges. Now he’s going for the soft underbelly. If the court can’t change the law to exclude Mr. Rath, it can exercise its discretion to grant the extra peremptories, he says. The ones the court talked about earlier.