Little green men, p.26
Little Green Men, page 26
Banion decided he might as well tell Barrett about MJ-12 and all the rest of it.
Barrett listened attentively, nodding here, frowning there. When Banion finished, he kept nodding, as if lost in thought. "Well?" Banion said.
"You know. Jack." he said, "we really ought to consider the merits of a psychological defense."
TWENTY
One year later
If his life weren't hanging on the outcome of the trial. Banion would certainly long since have died of boredom.
He did his best to appear interested as his lawyer, the flamboyant, silver-maned westerner Jasper Jamm, methodically labored to besmirch the reputation of the forty-eighth aerospace engineer he had thus far called. (Only twenty-three to go.) At moments Banion wondered if a quick death in Ample Ampere's noiseless, smokeless, energy-efficient electric chair wouldn't be preferable to this water-drip torture.
The day before, he had drifted off during some mind-numbing testimony from a hydraulics engineer, occasioning a severe lecture from Jamm. "I need you to make love to this jury," he said gravely, "not to look like you don't give a possum's ass. Where do you think you are? Back in one of your Princeton eating clubs?"
Banion looked up at the stern face looming over him - Jamm stood six feet six in his cowboy boots.
"Don't you think they're bored too?" Jamm demanded.
"Is this your strategy?" Banion said. "Boring them into letting me off?"
Jamm was halfway into quoting another apothegm from Running Water when Banion wearily held up his hand to indicate that he was just not in the mood for another wise saying from Jamm's favorite nineteenth-century Shoshone philosopher-warrior, however fucking sagacious he was. Jamm made much of his partial Native American ancestry, despite his distinctly Caucasian looks. In place of the traditional necktie, there was a string bolo tie fastened with a silver-tipped bear claw. He wore a Stetson hat and Lucchese boots made from the skin of Gila monsters. He kept a pet cougar at his home in Idaho, and hunted elk in the Rocky Mountains with bow and arrow, using flint arrowheads made by his voluptuously attractive wife. Bliss. It was rumored - and never quite denied by him - that he had Custer's scalp in a secret compartment in his study. Before each trial, Jamm fasted and went naked into a sweat lodge in his backyard, there to prepare himself for the coming battle.
There was some feeling, within the criminal legal community, that all this colorful juju was for the benefit of the media, whom he assiduously courted. They of course gobbled it up. Given the choice between a lawyer who quotes Justice Brandeis and golfs, and one who claims to be related to Sitting Bull and slays large, antlered animals in his spare time, the press will usually go for the latter. Jamm's undeniable charisma and folksy sound bites eventually landed him his own television show, immodestly titled The Best Defense, but it had been canceled due to poor ratings, and he wanted it back. Fewer people had been stopping him for autographs in the street.
For all the grousing from other top criminal lawyers, Jamm was acknowledged to be among the best. Whether in a moment of weakness you had blown away your loved one or embezzled a few million dollars, betrayed your country, dumped toxic waste into the water supply, whatever, Jasper Jamm was the man to see. He had a way with juries. Who but Jamm could have convinced the Tracy Lee Boodro jurors - or at least enough of them - that his client was being controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency through the pacemaker in his chest at the time he dynamited the nuclear power plant in Jerome, Tennessee? When it came to imputing government conspiracies, Jamm was without peer. There was no telling what he might be able to do when handed a real one.
The trial was now in its eighteenth expensive week. Other than a theatrical opening statement - hysterically protested by the prosecution - in which Jamm hinted that the government itself had blown up Celeste in order to provide continued work for the military-industrial complex - Objection! - the trial had so far yielded little in the way of drama. (Banion wondered. Where did the courtroom drama genre ever originate?)
Jamm's strategy, apart from his customary "breaking" of the jury down into brain-dead zombies so that he could remake them to his will, was to (a) disagree with everything the prosecution said, including "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," (b) demolish the wrongful death charge, and (c) produce reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury that his client was guilty of the odious charge of treason. This last was the most troublesome of the numerous charges against him, fifty-eight in all, inasmuch as it carried the death penalty.
NASA had yet to determine what exactly had caused Celeste to explode. There weren't many pieces of the rocket left much larger than a thumbnail. The investigation was at this point focusing on the rocket's self-destruct mechanism, normally designed to go off in the event something went wrong and the craft began heading murderously into a populated area. It was not designed, so far as anyone knew, to detonate when the president of the United States pressed the ignition button.
The fallout from the Celeste explosion had been radioactive. The ex-president, who had lost his re-election, was now embroiled in a world of legal hurt of his own. stemming from the revelation that he had secretly ordered NASA to move up the launch date. Top NASA officials had been forced to resign in disgrace. Now it was Banion's turn to pick up his share of the tab.
Originally, the government had been able to indict him on only a plethora of charges ranging from demonstration permit violations to incitement to riot, reckless endangerment, et cetera, et cetera, and wrongful death. A Mr. Newbert Figg, aged seventy-two, a retired citrus farmer from nearby Onanola. Florida, had driven to Cape Canaveral just to "see what all the fuss was about," according to the testimony of the lachrymose widow Figg. When Celeste blew up, Mr. Figg, beholding the spectacular fireball, suffered his third and final heart attack. The United States - as in United States vs. John Oliver Banion - being avid to throw everything at him that it could, leapt to link Banion to this cardiac event. They charged that Banion. by convening his Millennial Man Militia, had created an "attractive nuisance" and was thus directly to blame for the demise of Mr. Figg.
Jamm was confident of convincing the jury that Banion had not conspired with half a million of his followers merely to bring about the death of a curious septuagenarian with a history of heart problems.
But then a larger difficulty presented itself, in the persons of Dr. Falopian and Colonel Murfletit. Banion's former brain trust, fleeing federal authorities for their role in this millennial ka-ka, had turned up in Moscow, where they were publicly embraced as heroes by the ever-belligerent Russian government and given state jobs advising the Kremlin on Inoplanetnye Dela.* Banion was left to look like the Third Man who had not managed to escape. (Scrubbs made the Fourth.) The government was thus handed the golden opportunity to divert some of the public heat from its own flaming hide. It promptly added treason -18 United States Code section 2381, providing aid and comfort to the enemy - to the groaning board of charges.
As their cases were so intricately intertwined, Scrubbs was to be tried separately. He had valiantly resisted the government's repeated
* Literally, "extraterrestrial affairs."
attempts to get him to incriminate Banion and cop to the much lesser charge of conspiracy to impede traffic. Fine, said the government -then he too would stand trial for treason.
Jamm promised it would get more interesting when they came to this portion of the trial. Meanwhile, there were another twenty-three aerospace engineers to discredit in an attempt to persuade the jury that far from being the cream of American aerospace technicians, they were nothing but imbeciles and incompetents who could not be trusted with fixing a leaky faucet, much less overseeing a $21 billion space station.
So Banion sat, a rictus of ersatz concentration frozen onto his face, forbidden by Jamm even the consolation of doodling on a legal pad. For a while he had sought mental relief by filling up pads with every list in his memory: names and dates of U.S. presidents, Jesus' genealogy going back to King David, the kings and queens of England, the handicaps of Supreme Court justices, and the names of the 711 survivors of the Titanic, which he had memorized on a bet as a child at Camp Ear Wig.
"Mr. Crummekar," Jamm said, leaning companionably on the edge of the witness box. "In nineteen seventy-four, while you were attending Oklahoma Tech as an undergraduate, you belonged to a fraternity, is that correct?"
"Objection."
"Sustained."
"I apologize, Your Honor. I will rephrase that. Mr. Crummekar, did you ever participate in a 'toga party' at Delta Kappa -"
"Objection."
"Sustained. Mr. Jamm, I have spoken to you about this before." "Your Honor, there is no margin for error in aerospace technology. I am merely trying to establish that -" "Get on with it, Counsel."
By the time Jamm had finished with the last aero-space engineer, in the twenty-seventh week of the trial, Banion was personally convinced, by the looks of hatred coming from jurors 6, 9, and 10, that they not only were itching to send him to the chair but would vote for putting him to death by the slowest means possible. Jamm, however, appeared quite satisfied, even exultant over having established that one of the technicians had filled a prescription for an antidepressant two weeks prior to the launch. That night he went on seven TV shows and declared, "One of the key members of the launch team was on drugs. It is the government that should be on trial, not Mr. Banion."
Weeks 22 through 27 were consumed with the less than riveting testimony from eighteen cardiologists as to whether Banion had the blood of Mr. Figg on his hands. Jamm was prepared. His investigators, a nasty pair of high-priced Washington ferrets, had established that Mr. Figg had a copy of Juggs* in his pickup truck at the time of the launch. Jamm had charts ready to go showing the heartbeat of a seventy-two-year-old male during arousal. Much as he felt innocent of the death of Mr. Figg, Banion privately expressed his earnest hope to Jamm that he would not have to play the Juggs card.
At a certain point in the proceedings, it occurred to Banion that he was seeing more of Jamm on the television set in his cell - he was allowed one - than he was in court. He began to drop hints that since he was paying $475 an hour, it might be nice actually to lay eyes on Jamm every now and then.
One morning Jamm showed up looking exhausted. Banion inquired if he had been up burning the midnight oil, poring over the law books. Not exactly. Jamm yawned. He had stayed up late in order to appear live on the British morning television program Wakey, Wakey.
* A glossy magazine devoted to large-breasted women, begun as a color insert in the Atlantic Monthly.
"Why," Banion said, "are you jeopardizing my defense in order to impress people eating bangers in Luton?"
Jamm replied that he was as alert as a falcon soaring above the forest and then proceeded to doze off during the prosecution's admittedly protracted exploration of the viability of Mr. Figg's myocardium.
The next day Jamm was not present in court, leaving the cross-examination of the current cardiologist to one of his assistant attorneys, an attractive redhead thought to inspire lubricious thoughts in male juror number 2, since he kept shifting in his seat whenever she was on display. Jamm was absent for the following three days. Where was he? Banion was unable to get a straightforward answer from the assistant attorneys, other than that he was "tracking down some important leads."
One morning, while waiting for the court to convene, Banion read in the paper that Jasper Jamm had just sold the rights to his story for "seven figures" to Big Pictures, the Hollywood movie studio. Banion wondered what exactly was meant by that "his." He reached Jamm by phone at the Beverly Hills Hotel and suggested that he take the next plane back.
He was not in a receptive mood when Jamm finally showed up the next morning, bleary-eyed and yawning from having caught the redeye. He blandly assured Banion that Ms. Plumm, his deputy, was perfectly competent to handle the cross-examination of the cardiologists and said that his presence in California had been a necessity because "Warren" wanted to meet him before closing the deal.
"Warren?"
"Beatty. He wants to play me in the film." 'Ah," Banion said. 'And who do they have in mind to play me?" "That's one of the things I want to discuss with you after today's session. I'm not at all satisfied with their casting suggestions so far." "Isn't this my story? Or am I missing something?"
"I absolutely think that you should sell your story. If you want, I'll pursue that when I go back out there tomorrow." "Tomorrow?"
"Nothing much is happening here, just more heart stuff. Warren is giving a dinner. Under the circumstances, I think I should probably be there. Don't you?"
So as the trial moved into its most critical phase, it did Banion good to know that his lawyer's attention was equally divided between keeping him off death row and negotiating with Minnie Driver to play his wife.
It was not going well. The prosecution had managed to make Banion's interview with Dr. Kokolev and Colonel Radik at the UFO convention sound like a meeting of the Committee to Overthrow the U.S. Government. In the general atmosphere of continued hostility between the two countries, trying to halt the launch of a rocket that was also carrying a military payload - what hay the prosecution made of that inconvenient fact - looked downright unpatriotic. One of the jurors was recused for high blood pressure. A week later a paperback entitled Juror Number Five: Why John Banion Must Fry appeared under his name; in it he announced his conviction that Banion had been working for the Russians - and aliens - all along. He was invited to share his insights on all the evening news and talk shows.
Morale on Team Banion was not running high. Crowds outside the courtroom held up signs for the cameras saying TRAITOR! For the First time, it dawned on Banion that the day might in fact dawn when the prison barber appeared in his cell to shave a contact spot onto the top of his head. He found himself musing on famous last lines of people who had been handed the traditional blindfold and cigarette, and even began rehearsing a few of his own.
When one night, musing on these pleasant thoughts, he looked up at the TV bolted to the wall and saw the debut of a new late-night legal affairs program called The Offense Never Rests - With Host Jasper Jamm, he wondered if it wasn't perhaps time for a change in legal representation.
"Mr. Banion," the judge said in chambers, "there is an axiom of the law that says -"
'"He who defends himself has a fool for a client.' Yes, Your Honor, I am aware of it. But there is another axiom." "What is that?"
'"He who pays himself four hundred seventy-five dollars an hour will soon be rich.'"
"Very well," the judge said.
On his first day as his own counsel, Banion called Roz as a witness. There was only one problem: Roz had vanished without trace. All he could do was put himself on the stand and describe the night she had betrayed him. After that, she became known in the tabloid press as the "Missing Macaroni Woman."
He called the ex-president. This took some doing, since the former president was in the midst of motions preparing for his own trial. But Banion's old nemesis seemed to be in an agreeable frame of mind when he arrived to be interrogated one last time by his old nemesis.
"Mr. President," Banion said, "thank you for being with us this morning."
"My pleasure."
"I know you're busy, so let me get right to it. Does the name MJ-Twelve. or Majestic Twelve, mean anything to you?"
"It's a lubricant, isn't it? You spray it on squeaky hinges."
"Now, Mr. President, you do recall that I came to you in the Oval Office and informed you that there was a secret agency within the government -"
"Oh, that." The ex-president smiled at the jury. "The one that launches UFO's and abducts people?"
"The same. The one that Mr. Scrubbs worked for -"
"Objection."
"Sustained."
"Your Honor."
"Proceed, Mr. Banion."
"And what did you do after I informed you of its existence?"
"Nothing."
"Well, isn't that a bit strange -"
"Objection."
"Sustained."
"Honestly. All right, I will rephrase that. Why didn't you do anything?"
"For two reasons. First, 1 assumed since 1 was president, I'd have heard of such an agency if it existed. And second, by that point I was personally convinced that you were working for the Russians, so -"
"Objection." Banion said.
"Overruled."
"Your Honor -"
"The witness may answer the question." "Your Honor, really."
"Mr. Banion, this is not your talk show. This is a court of law. If you persist in this unproductive way, I will appoint a lawyer for you. You may continue, Mr. President."
"Thank you. I thought you were working for the Russians. Under those circumstances, I wouldn't have divulged any national security information to you."
"And what made you think I was working for the Russians?"
The president smiled. "Because, Jack, you were trying to stop the launch of an American space vehicle carrying a military payload specifically designed to assist in the defense of our country, which was then, as it is now, facing a serious external threat from Russia. To be honest, I didn't believe you when you said you were doing it because aliens had instructed you to." He turned to the jury. "Not that I don't keep an open mind on these things."
"Well" - Banion sighed - "you're wrong -"
"Objection."
"Oh, shut up."
"Mr. Banion!"
"But I have to say, I see your point, Mr. President. I have no further questions."
"We're joined now by our chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin. Jeff, how does it look to you?"
"Peter, if 1 were Jack Banion, I would be seriously considering trying to negotiate an eleventh-hour plea bargain. But it may be too late for that. I think the prosecution's biggest challenge at this point is trying not to appear overconfident."
"Why wasn't Mr. Banion allowed to inform the jury that the former president is himself about to be tried for conspiracy to commit reckless endangerment in the Celeste case?"
