looked at Noelle now, sitting in the defendant’s box, beautiful and serene. She wore a
simple black wool suit with a plain, high-necked white blouse, and she looked like a
Princess from a fairy tale.
Noelle turned and saw Chotas staring at her and gave him a warm smile. He smiled
back, but his mind was already turning to the difficult task that lay ahead of him. The clerk
was calling the Court to order.
The spectators rose as two judges in business suits entered and took their seats on the
bench. The third judge, the President of the Court, followed and took the center seat. He
intoned, “I synethriassis archetai.”
The trial had begun.
Peter Demonides, Special Prosecutor for the State, nervously rose to make his
opening address to the jury. Demonides was a skilled and able prosecutor, but he had been
up against Napoleon Chotas before—many times, in fact—and the results were invariably
the same. The old bastard was unbeatable. Almost all trial lawyers browbeat hostile
witnesses, but Chotas coddled them. He nurtured them and loved them and before he was
through, they were contradicting themselves all over the place, trying to be helpful to him.
He had a knack of turning hard evidence into speculation and speculation into fantasy.
Chotas had the most brilliant legal mind Demonides had ever encountered and the greatest
knowledge of jurisprudence, but that was not his strength. His strength was his knowledge
of people. A reporter had once asked Chotas how he had learned so much about human
nature.
“I don’t know a damned thing about human nature,” Chotas had answered. “I only
know about people,” and the remark had been widely quoted.
In addition to everything else this was the kind of trial that was tailor-made for
Chotas to take before a jury, filled as it was with glamour, passion and murder. Of one
thing Demonides was certain: Napoleon Chotas would let nothing stop him from winning
this case. But neither would Demonides. He knew that he had a strong evidential case
against the defendants, and while Chotas might be able to spellbind the jury into
overlooking the evidence, he would not be able to sway the three judges on the bench. So
it was with a feeling of determination mixed with apprehension that the Special Prosecutor
for the State began his opening address.
In skillful, broad strokes Demonides outlined the State’s case against the two
defendants. By law the foreman of the ten-man jury was an attorney, so Demonides
directed his legal points to him and his general points to the rest of the jury.
“Before this trial has ended,” Demonides said, “the State will prove that these two
people conspired together to cold-bloodedly murder Catherine Douglas because she stood
in the way of their plans. Her only crime was in loving her husband, and for this she was
killed. The two defendants have been placed at the scene of the murder. They are the only
ones who had the motive and the opportunity. We shall prove beyond a shadow of a
doubt…”