The Juror Page 11

  He reaches past her for the glove compartment. The little door swings open and he withdraws a fifth of Jim Beam.

  He says, “I don’t like to drink on the job but I’m not sure this is the job anymore. You want some?”

  She sort of nods. He unscrews the cap and passes it, and she takes a snort. It surprises him, how deeply she draws on the thing. As she passes the bottle back she murmurs, “Slavko, if this is hard for you to talk about—”

  “No, the hard part was going through it. The talking? That’s neither here nor there.” He takes a swallow to match hers. “She wanted something else. I don’t even know why she went out with me in the first place. Maybe she thought I was kind of funny.”

  “You are funny, Slavko. And you’re also kind of cute.”

  “Oh yeah, right.”

  “No, you are.”

  “I’m not even remotely cute. But that’s not why she dumped me. She just… she wanted a poet or something. You know Derek Walcott?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have either except she made me read him. He’s black. He’s Caribbean, he’s got a dancing soul, he’s pure sexiness, he writes all this poetry I can’t even read, he’s just the kind of guy she wants, he’s a poet so OK, that’s fine, so why didn’t she just leave me alone?”

  “Well she did, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah. When it was too late. When she’d cracked my heart in a lot of little pieces like she did to everybody else.”

  He shrugs. He starts telling Sari about this heartbreak and he takes a sip of the liquor and she takes a sip, and the next time he glances at the clock on the dash it’s already eleven o’clock and two hours have blown past.

  And Sari is telling him about the moment she first noticed a certain remoteness in her Eben’s demeanor.

  She says, “But it was so subtle I thought I was just paranoid, you know?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Oh, Christ, I know about that. You hope you’re being paranoid, but really you know something’s wrong. You know you’re losing.”

  She says, “It’s like everything’s sunny and perfect but you feel this, it’s like a little tiny breath of cold wind on your face—”

  “Exactly,” says Slavko.

  “And you know this big cold storm is coming and everything’s going to change and everything’s going to be lost.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Is there any more?” she asks him.

  “Well no, after you feel that chill I think you’re doomed—”

  She puts her hand on his arm. “No, I mean is there any more Jim Beam?”

  “Oh. There’s a swallow.”

  “You take it then.”

  “No, I’m, I don’t need any more.”

  She drains the bottle and wipes her mouth and she says, “But you’re right, there is nothing you can do. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing. You know? Everything’s sunny, everything is wonderful. And then that, that coldness.”

  When next he looks at the clock it’s one in the morning and both of them are hunched low in their seats and her knee is touching his knee.

  And just from the presence of her, just from her breath filling this car, and her voice, which is sort of brave and cheerful, and from the pressure of her knee against his, he finds he’s nursing a hard-on. Not a painful one, though, because the alcohol and the easyness of the talk combine to keep the edge off it.

  She’s telling him about this guy she was dating three years ago, this guy who was playing drums in a garage band and how long it took for her to realize he wasn’t affecting a vacant expression, he truly was vacant.

  Then abruptly she says: “You know I have to tell you something. Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I think I’m going to live through this.”

  She laughs. “I mean I wasn’t so sure I was going to. But the truth is, I’m OK. You know? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I’m with you, and you’re nice to talk to.”

  “So are you, Sari.”

  “Why do you think you’re weak?”

  “What?”

  “I said, Why do you think you’re weak?”

  “Did I say I was weak?”

  “The other night when I said I didn’t like weak men you got strange.”

  “I did?”

  “I get the feeling you think you’re a failure.”

  “Oh yeah? Really? I thought I exuded self-confidence.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t you think I should, being a detective?”

  “You should, yes. I’m thirsty.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m such a lousy detective.”

  She checks the bottle again. “All gone. You’re not a lousy detective.”

  “I don’t make much of a living.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, Slavko, maybe you should try something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Isn’t there anything else you want to do?”

  “I want to be Derek Walcott.”

  She laughs.

  “I did use to be a cop,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, but I screwed that up.”

  “How?”

  “I better not get started but there was a woman involved.”

  “Of course.”

  “Also some drinking.”

  “Shit,” she says. “I don’t know, Slavko. You want to be a poet why don’t you try it?”

  “I have tried. All I can write is how I feel like a pinball.”

  She enjoys that, she laughs.

  He says, “Like they dropped me down on this bizarre planet and I’m getting knocked all over the place and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, sometimes I think I can make sense out of this place but most of the time I’m just lost. With my jaw hanging open. You know? I can’t write for shit about sunsets and the soul of me, you know, and Greek gods and all that shit ’cause I’m getting bounced around like a dunce with my jaw hanging open. No wonder Juliet broke up with me.”

  “That was her name? Your doctor? Juliet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Romantic name.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I gotta go, Romeo.”

  “You can’t go.”

  “I got to go.”

  “You can’t drive, Sari. You had too much to drink.”

  “Less than you.”

  “Yeah but me, I’m staying right here. I’m not done with this stakeout.”

  She scowls. “Oh, what, you’re still worried about that son of a bitch, that Eben? Forget that son of a bitch. Don’t even bother. I’m through with him.”

  “That’s what you think. Wait till you get my bill.”

  “Kiss me,” she says, and he moves toward her clumsily. He holds the saddle of her back. He rasps his lips against hers and breathes in her breath and he wants for a moment to call her Juliet. But he catches himself.

  “Sari,” he murmurs.

  They’re holding each other so hard they’re crushing the wind out of each other. He tries to gear his brain up to print the message that this is an infatuation, this is a quick grope of a lonely client, it’s part of the job and I better forget it in the morning. But he’s drunk and what he knows to be true is this: He’s in love again. He’s in trouble. Still in love with Juliet but additionally with this one. The shit just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

  She breaks away.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  Then she opens the car door and says, “Yeah, I’m going to be OK. This is going to be easier than I thought. OK. Soon, Slavko.”

  And he can’t think of anything to say to hold her and so before he knows it she’s gone.

  ANNIE writes:

  Dear Turtle,

  It’s the middle of the night and he wants to see me again tomorrow and I wish I could talk to you. I keep waiting for you to call again or write me, I go to the mailbox every day and pray I
’ll find a letter but I know you’re too proud and I’ve hurt you once before, but still I keep thinking I’m going to turn around and you’ll be right here. And if you were here? I know I’d break down and tell you. I have to tell somebody. Turtle. I HAVE TO TELL SOMEBODY. But I can’t go to the police so don’t even ask me don’t, I can’t. Okay you would. I know you would. You’d think he was bluffing. You’d think that once I tell the cops, why should he bother to come chasing after me and Oliver—what good would it do him then? But he made that book that scrapbook of those people he’s gone after, and he knew that even if I didn’t believe it still it would scare me so much I couldn’t do anything.

  You’d want me to take a chance. Wouldn’t you Turtle? But why? I don’t care about that world out there anyway, why should I sacrifice my child to that world? Tonight when I was looking in the paper for something about the trial instead I found an article about a judge in Colombia. Three of his kids have been killed by druglords but he still shows up for work. He’s a hero Turtle but I don’t understand him at all—what does he believe in so much he believes in it more than his children? You have to explain this to me Turtle, you have to come here and take us away and explain all this to me. I love you and miss you.

  Annie

  She carefully tears the page out of the notebook and folds it. She rises and goes downstairs. Down in the kitchen she rifles all the drawers looking for a match, but she can’t find any. Then she forgets what she’s doing and stands there a while. Then she remembers. She roots around some more. She decides she’s going nuts here. Her hands are rummaging too quickly, they feel loaded up with static electricity. She quits looking. She turns up the burner on the electric stove and when the coils are bright she holds the letter to them. It smokes, and she blows at it fiercely. Finally it flashes into flame, and she carries it over to the sink. When the flame starts scorching at her fingertips she drops the page. When it’s all ash she douses it with water.

  5

  O you sick Brain of Mine, O you desperate Glutton for Misery…

  SLAVKO opens his eyes as far as he can, a hairline crack, wondering what in the world is that thing? Wing? Silver saucer? Or maybe it’s not in the world. Maybe it’s from some other world. Shimmery, and alien, and skimming along in the darkness—

  It takes him half a minute to realize this is his own rearview mirror he’s peering at.

  Oh shit. Did I fall asleep on a stakeout?

  He tries to sit up. His brain ripples like the northern lights.

  I got drunk on a stakeout? I’m on the skids again?

  He gets a grip on the steering wheel and pulls himself up. He tries to muster some notion of where he is. Still dark. He checks his watch: 5:30 A.M. Light drizzle on the windshield. One streetlight, a row of dark townhouses that look vaguely familiar.

  And then he catches a faint lingering of that woman’s fragrance… and the whole night comes spiraling back to him.

  Sari.

  Sweet beautiful Sari.

  Immediately thereafter comes a painful thought of Juliet. But he silently hisses at it: Ha! You weren’t the first thing to come into my thoughts, were you, Juliet? Not this morning. You’re not queen of my thoughts this morning.

  Headlights flash in the mirror.

  Slavko instinctively sinks down in his seat.

  A car, two men inside, slowly passes him and comes to a stop. Slavko’s eyes are just high enough to see above the dash, and he watches as the passenger-side door of the car swings open. The dome-light comes on. The passenger gets out and flicks his hand at the driver, a quick dismissive wave. He’s got strong cheekbones, and an air of prepossession, and Slavko’s pretty sure that this is Sari’s boy-friend Eben.

  The car moves off. Dull sedan. Late-80s Camry?—something like that. Slavko has always been weak on makes and models, and it’s too dark to read plates. So he lets the car go, and he keeps his eyes on Eben Rackland as the man strides up to his townhouse door, uses his key and steps in.

  Slavko gets out his little black logbook.

  He jots down the time, the location, his impressions of E.R. It’s his impression that E.R. is fresh and alert and has had a good night’s sleep. It’s also Slavko’s impression—though he doesn’t trouble to write it—that E.R. has been sleeping somewhere else lately but would just as soon the world thought he was sleeping here. Slavko’s foremost impression is that if he doesn’t get his own brain coated with coffee soon, it will throb itself into a gray gruel.

  But he stays where he is.

  He hunches down in his seat and nails his gaze to the townhouse door. He waits.

  The leaves of the trees along the sidewalk turn from black to russet, russet to rose.

  He belches. He gets a taste of roast beef, Jim Beam, bile and mayonnaise.

  Lights come on in the other townhouses. A woman comes out trailing her dogs. Someone else heads to work. Presently E.R. emerges from the townhouse wearing a suit and bearing a briefcase. He gets into his red Lotus. Slavko hears a snatch of baroque violins before the car slips away.

  Meanwhile Slavko’s own Buzzard is wheezing, not starting, bitching about the cold and the damp and the hour.

  Finally the engine catches.

  Running a one-man tail, it’s one thing that Slavko thinks he does pretty well. You’ve got to know—got to feel in your gut because it can’t be taught—when to drop back and when to muscle in. Today it helps that he’s familiar with this part of Westchester. And it helps that the quarry seems to have no anxiety about any glue on his ass.

  The Lotus cruises through Yorktown Heights and pulls onto the interstate, and Slavko stays on it. Heading south. Toward the city.

  But the farther south they go, the less enthusiasm he feels for this pursuit. He’s cold. The wind whistles through that rusted-out hole in the floor beside his left foot. He wants his bed. And after all, he already knows where this guy’s headed. Wall Street. His work. And no way is Slavko going to sit parked across from some Manhattan garage, chewing Alka-Seltzers and feeding quarters into a smirking parking meter and grinding his knuckles into his eyes and reading the want ads in the Post and just hanging around in the car all day like a pair of fuzzy dice.

  And speaking of hanging around wasting time, why is he still hanging on to this case?

  After all, he thinks, Sari told me to forget the whole thing. So who’s my client? What am I doing here? Who am I working for?

  Look in the mirror.

  Right. Exactly. And how much is the moron in the mirror paying you?

  The usual.

  He decides to pull off at the next exit, go right home, and get some sleep.

  But at the next exit E.R. eases off the interstate ahead of him. He’s not looking for gas either: there are no gas stations around here. He takes a right on Route 22, and Slavko keeps after him.

  They snake north for a few miles. Horse pastures, Slavko’s deadly nausea, a white church. Slavko cedes E.R. the curves and the hills, but watches for that red flash on the straightaways.

  At a forest crossroads the Lotus hangs a right. So does the Buzzard. There’s a dam and a pumphouse and then the road winds alongside a slate-gray reservoir. Slavko follows blindly. This is one of those times, he’s thinking, when you have to trust to sheer faith that you haven’t lost your man.

  The road takes a sharp turn, and abruptly starts across the reservoir on a long straight causeway.

  The Lotus isn’t on this causeway. The Lotus isn’t anywhere to be seen. Sheer faith has failed him. The Lotus is gone.

  Could E.R. have gotten so far ahead so quickly? Slavko doesn’t think so. But then where is he?

  Could he have turned off somewhere?

  Slavko thinks back. Since his last glimpse of the red car, since the crossroads, it’s all been woods and reservoir. No driveways, no houses.

  Although… there was that pumphouse….

  He steps on it. Pours it on so he can get to the end of this causeway, so he can turn the hell around….

 
ANNIE waits where Johnny told her to wait, on the reservoir’s rocky shore. She hears footsteps, and she glances back. Zach Lyde has arrived. He sits on a rock close to her.

  He gives her a look of tender concern.

  “How are you holding up, Annie?”

  “Fine.”

  Struggling to keep her anger bottled. But even in the one word it spills out.

  “And Oliver? Is he all right?”

  She says, “I was wondering what you thought about Oliver. Since you listen to everything we say, maybe you have a better idea—”

  “I don’t enjoy invading your privacy.”

  “You don’t enjoy it? You sound like an undertaker, you know that?”

  He lets that go. “You’re new at this,” he tells her. “It’s simple prudence for me to listen in. Do you think we can afford even the slightest error?”

  She looks off across the water. A car is crossing the causeway over there. Coming this way and it seems to be in a great hurry.

  Zach Lyde says, “Look, I know this won’t be welcome, but I’m going to say it. You’re being too hard on your child.”

  By now her anger has short-circuited half her brain, so that even if she could think of anything to snap back with, she wouldn’t have the presence of mind to utter it.

  He says, “I’m not trying to tell you how to raise him. But if you kept treating him so strangely, so harshly—suppose he guesses what’s going on? Suppose he talks to a friend?”

  She says, “He won’t guess. He’s just a kid.”

  “He’s quick, though. Show caution, treat him gently. The same with your friends. I understand that you want to keep them at arm’s distance. That’s wise. But if you drive them off precipitously they’ll start to worry. They’ll come around with questions. This Turtle, who is he? A boyfriend?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Where does he live, Annie?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “He lives somewhere in California. Do you want to kill him? I don’t remember exactly where. Some small town. I haven’t talked to him in years—”

  “You mentioned to him that you two had talked last spring.”