Antonio's song

 I must be old now.  I have a case with an opposing lawyer I last faced seventeen years ago.  Strangely, I remembered his phone number.  

 Last time he was the lead attorney for Antonio Nascimento, a Brazilian man who was living on Cape Cod when his pickup truck, with its tragically bald tires, spun into and up onto a guardrail on Route 6, then flipped over twice, ejecting him out the passenger side window and through the air into a tree, at the base of which he was found a paraplegic.  His attorneys and their whore of an expert witness tried to convince Ford Motor Company and then a jury that an allegedly defective door latch failed and he was ejected out the door, instead of out the perfectly non-defective window as all the physical evidence suggested.  They pocketed 1.2 million from two other defendants before the case went to trial against us.

 When the evidence was in, I sat or strolled calmly around the courtroom through the long morning as the jury deliberated, and on through the lunch hour.  Up to the moment, not long after lunch, when the clerk poked his head in through the door at the back of the courtroom, flashing a quick "V" with his fingers.  "Verdict, counsellors.  The jury has a verdict."  The calm mood is shattered as quickly and thoroughly as if a brick had come crashing through a window.

 The jury marches in one last time, avoiding any eye contact with me.  A bad sign.  The clerk hands the verdict slip to the judge, who takes just a second to read it.  A good sign.  He hands the slip back to the clerk.  The clerk turns on his ministerial voice and reads the verdict.  "Question one.  Has the plaintiff proved by a preponderance of the evidence that the passenger door of his 1986 Ranger opened during the accident.  Answer, 'No.'"

 And just like that, a victory, in the biggest role of my professional life to that point.  Sweet, warm, bubbling victory.  

 I was glad we won.  And glad Antonio had gotten some money, a lot of money, from others.  At his deposition we had learned what happened with his girlfriend.  He learned that she had left him on the day that he was discharged from the hospital, when she never came to pick him up.