When court reconvened on Monday morning, the weekend's publicity showed its results. A bailiff whispered to Jake that people had been waiting for the doors to open since five A.M. Thousands had gone home disappointed. The fortunate who did get seats filled the courtroom with babble and shrillness as they waited impatiently for something to happen. A new note of excitement sounded when Tony Corfino walked in beside a Sheriff's Deputy. Jake had insisted that Tony be carefully groomed and dressed each morning before coming into court, and the women among the spectators buzzed with appreciation.
Promptly at ten, Judge Hayward stepped out of his chambers and looked, gimlet-eyed, over the courtroom. The hubub quieted, then faded to stillness. Jake was glad to have Judge Hayward on this case. At forty-seven, he was the youngest Superior Court judge and least wedded to precedent. He was impatient with legal sleight-of-hand, painstakingly insistent on a structure of evidence. "Any mule can kick a barn down; it takes a good carpenter to build one," he had once told Jake.
Selection of the jury proceeded at a creeping pace, which court reporters had come to expect with both the D.A. and Jake Emspak in the same courtroom. In their last clash, they had meticulously examined one hundred and fifty jurors before accepting twelve. But this time, the District Attorney was responsible for most of the delay. Not knowing why Jake had taken the case, the D.A. proceeded nervously and cautiously in questioning each juror: What is your feeling about capital punishment? Would you credit the testimony of an eye witness? Do you believe that a criminal must be punished as decreed by law?
Jake's questions were fewer, and less orthodox. Sometimes he asked: "What is your attitude toward science?" Or, again: "Are you a religious man?" But most frequently he came without preamble to what seemed to be the key to his case:
"What is a man?"
And while this went on in the courtroom, Jake continued his tireless preparations. Research, subpoenas, talking to witnesses, taking depositions, then more research and more subpoenas. Bound the case on the east, the north, the south and the west. Lincoln had said that. Jake's stomach rebelled, and he took to eating a bowl of baby cereal before going to bed in an effort to still its growling and grumbling. Those who knew how hard he worked continued to ask: Where's the money coming from? Why is this important anyway?
Whenever speculation started to sag, Jake shrewdly needled it by leaking a fact here, a rumor there. From Los Angeles, the ebullient old television commentator, George Putnam, still indefatigable in his late sixties, reported that a noted brain surgeon had been subpoenaed to testify at the Corfino trial. In New York, Ed Murrow asked the probing, provocative question: Why has Jake Emspak personally invited one of our great religious philosophers to appear as a defense witness?
"I suggest," hinted Murrow, "that you won't find the gold in this case by panning the mainstream. Or, as Plato said...."
The D.A. and his deputies sat up half the night studying an air-check of the Murrow broadcast.