A fresh laurel wreath nestled in his clipped gray hair and if the lights had been flickering torches instead of fluorescent energy saver bulbs it would have been very imposing. He wore shining leather calceuses on his feet, secured with four thongs that glistened like fresh black licorice. They would have appeared even more elegant if he had not been standing on a stained linoleum floor.
“Who’re you?” Judge Gold demanded.
“I am Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, and I am representing Satan, Prince of Darkness, in the trial of Babbit vs. the Devil.”
“Is that your lawyer?” a disbelieving Judge Gold asked Satan.
“Yes, your honor,” Satan said. “Yes, it is.”
“You need to show up on time, counselor,” Judge Gold said as Nero walked up the aisle and sat down next to Satan. He had two large, rolling litigation cases with him and he opened them to reveal an impressive number of files, legal pads and pencils, which he began distributing around the defendant’s table. Satan instantly felt much better.
“Yes, your honor. My apologies, your honor. It won’t happen again, your honor.”
“Thank you,” Satan whispered to Nero. Nero nodded regally.
“All right, then. Let’s get this show on the road,” Judge Gold said. “What’s first? Oh, boy. Jury selection. Well that promises to be a bore. We got a jury pool?”
“Yes, your honor,” the bailiff said.
“Then get ‘em in here,” Judge Gold said. “We’ll shuffle through and find the least retarded and then let’s see some action. They aren’t paying us to sit around and drink Gatorade, fellas! They’re paying us to see JUSTICE!”
Jury selection was gruesome. Nero had watched enough Law & Order: Criminal Intent while secretly preparing for the trial to know that they were now in the midst of voir dire, the time when he could eliminate potential members of the jury who seemed grossly unfit to serve. The problem was that they all seemed grossly unfit to serve as far as Nero was concerned, and he would have rejected every single one of them based on their extremely ugly clothes alone. To him, they all looked like someone had stapled stonewashed denim scraps and performance fleece to them at random as they ran out of the door that morning.
Frita Babbit’s team had hired Lefty Ricketts, the greatest jury whisperer in the continental United States, to coach them through voir dire. Lefty had already studied the jury pool for three weeks. He had read their files, analyzed their credit reports, sent his field agents to follow them to Wal-Marts and strike up conversations with them in bars, and now he was conveying last minute decisions to Horton using subtle hand gestures.
One elderly jury member was wearing a Med Alert bracelet. A slight stroking of his moustache and she was rejected. If she was going to die soon she might try to feather her afterlife by going soft on Satan. A young, female jurist was eliminated when Lefty tweaked his right earlobe: she’d recently had an abortion. She’d be less inclined to judge someone in a tough spot. The prosecution needed a jury who were moral prigs, people who were up on their high horses, jurists who wanted everything to be a capital offense.
Nero faced a different problem. He couldn’t find a single unprejudiced jury member.
“He the fella responsible for killing my Jeremy in that fifteen-car pile-up out on Route one-oh-five back in ‘91?” an angry nurse’s aide asked.
“Yes,” Nero said.
“Well, I hate his guts,” she said, and then spat on Satan.
Nero rejected her.
“Before I answer your question, Mr. Defense Lawyer,” a flinty old man said. “I want to know one thing. My gramma used to drink to excess and she never got baptized. Is she burning in Hell right now, being tortured eternally by that son of a bitch?”
There was a whispered consultation between Satan and Nero. And then Nero turned to face him again.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then I hope he fries in the electric chair.”
“This isn’t a capital case,” Nero said.
“Don’t matter none. I’ll pull the switch myself.”
And so it went. Is he tormenting my wife who killed herself? Yes. Then I hope he dies. Is my daddy burning in that sumbitch’s eternal flames? Yes? Then I’ll beat his butt right here and now. And that’s how it went right up until the end of the day.
“This is ridiculous,” Judge Gold said.“Not a single jurist has been impaneled and to be honest I’ve got a European tour coming up that cannot be delayed.”