The courtroom stilled to breathlessness as Jake Emspak stepped forward to deliver his own opening remarks. He moved, then paused, with a great dramatist's sense of timing. Ghosts of a thousand courtrooms and fifty years of practice moved and paused with him. Impeccably dressed, his long silver hair artfully disheveled, he folded his blue-veined hands over the gold head of his cane and swayed for a moment in silence, thoughtfully contemplating the jurors. When he spoke, his voice had a quality of remoteness that was peculiarly compelling:
"I would like," he began, "to quote from a Supreme Court Justice who died before some of you were born. It was Benjamin Cardoza who said—'Law in its deepest aspects is one with the humanities and with all the things by which humanity is uplifted and inspired. Law is not a cadaver, but a spirit; not a finality, but a process of becoming; not a clog in the fullness of life, but an outlet and a means thereto; not a game but a sacrament'...."
He waited fully a half-minute before continuing, and not a person in the courtroom stirred.
"The defense," Jake went on quietly, "will rest its case on two major points:
"First, we will prove that the law has not kept pace with the progress of science and the forward march of human thought.
"Second ..." here Jake paused again, while he looked slowly from the jurors, to the judge and finally to the District Attorney. "Second," he continued, with a ghost of a smile on his thin lips, "we will prove that Tony Corfino is not Tony Corfino!"
Jake stood for a moment in silence. Then, with a slight, almost curt nod of his head, he turned away and walked back to his seat beside Tony Corfino. Tony stared at him wordlessly, with a look in his eyes that Jake had not yet fathomed.
The courtroom exploded into bedlam. Judge Hayward gaveled peremptorily for silence, and motioned to the District Attorney to begin presentation of the People's case.
If the D.A. was puzzled by Jake's opening remarks, he gave no sign of it. His marshalling of the evidence was grimly efficient. There was a quality of the inexorable about the way he moved up his witnesses one by one. It was like the maneuvering of a skilled boxer who seeks to take his opponent out, not with one punch, but with a carefully executed combination of punches.
Tony Corfino was not Tony Corfino? The D.A. smiled sardonically as he pointed to the pale defendant and asked the witness to identify him.