“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.”

Chapter 6

THE CUMBERSOME IRON SHACKLES around Gracie Johnson’s ankles clanked noisily as I helped her to her feet at the defense table.

“Thank you, Mr. Corbett,” she whispered.

Judge Warren gazed down on her as if he were God. “Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict in this case?” he asked.

“Yes, we have, Your Honor.”

Like every lawyer since the Romans invented the Code of Justinian, I had tried to learn something from the jurors’ faces as they filed into the courtroom-the haberdasher, the retired schoolteacher, the pale young man who was engaged to Congressman Chapman’s daughter and had cracked a tentative smile during my summation.