The Juror Read online

  She gets hold of him with her eyes and starts talking.

  She remembers she used to have some facility for this sport.

  She gets him to tell her about the jazz combo he plays with. Then about the kids he gives clarinet lessons to. Then about Benny Goodman, then Ives and Mozart. That leads to favorite movies, which takes them to the countryside of Ireland. Mostly Annie listens. Clarinet Will tells her how much he loves to kayak. He loves saltwater kayaking particularly, he loves to glide down the backsides of big waves. His eyes glitter when he talks about this, and Annie’s glitter back.

  She’s frazzled. The food sucks, the fluorescent lights are encouraging her headache, she’s aware that the other jurors are watching them. But she has set his eyes to glittering and now she’s got to keep them glittering. She smiles and lets him believe that his tales of sea kayaking have carried her away. He shares a beach house on the coast of Georgia, he says. Sometimes he kayaks at night and the paddle stirs up the phosphor in the water and he feels like he’s casting a net of shooting stars over the surface of the ocean.

  Her face gets all dreamy when he tells her this.

  When it comes time to leave she has scarcely eaten three bites.

  She pushes her tray to one side and leans close and tells him, “You know, that’s the thing, that’s what I like about you. You’re not afraid to take risks. That’s why I like arguing with you. I get the sense that you’re willing to try different ways of looking at things. I mean, you’re not rejecting Louie Boffano’s innocence out of hand, just because they are.”

  She rolls her eyes when she says they. They means the other jurors. That ugly stupid world outside of their own intense communion here.

  He says, “I am trying to understand. But I don’t know. I just—I don’t know.”

  He scratches his shaggy head.

  He says, “You know, if you ever want to try kayaking on the Hudson? I’d be glad to take you with me.”

  “I’d love to,” she says.

  She closes her eyes slowly. When she opens them she’s looking away from him. Just the way they teach you in the magazines.

  While she’s thinking, After you cave in to me, coward, after you vote to let a murderer walk free? I swear if you ever dare to call me up, I swear before you say three words you’ll be talking to a dial tone.

  CAREW tells his partner, “I don’t think one way or the other. I don’t think Jimmy the Face killed Czernyk. I don’t think Jimmy didn’t kill Czernyk. I don’t think anything, Harry.”

  They’re in the car on their way to visit the Caruso Hotel. Harry’s driving.

  “If Jimmy did do it, though,” Carew goes on, “we’re fucked, I tell you that. He’ll have one of his cast-iron alibis. ‘Saturday? Three A.M.? Oh yeah, I was on CNN, Larry King and the President were giving me the Congressional Medal of Honor. Why do you ask?’”

  They leave the Taconic and turn onto Eastgate Avenue. They drive past the sprawling leafy campus of a seminary.

  Says Carew, “Anyway, it’s fishy, innit?”

  Says Harry, “I mean what would Jimmy want with this boozehound PI?”

  “Exactly. You know? Always with Jimmy it’s Sicilians and Jamaicans. Always professional. Now suddenly he turns to this Polish drunk, or Czech or whatever he is, and he says, ‘Here, buddy, here’s a couple a keys of heroin. Now be sure to jot down the price and all—oh and be sure to put my name down too, in case you get killed and the cops want to know who did it. Yep.”

  Harry says, “So what’s up?”

  “I don’t know. Probably Jimmy did do it. You know?”

  Harry says, “Probably we’re being too damn smart for our own britches.”

  Carew says, “’Cause the only other explanation is that somebody broke into that office last night and took away all incriminating evidence and planted that note for us to find. Which is…”

  “What?”

  “A little much. You know? A little rich for my blood.”

  They pull into the lot of the Caruso Hotel. Says Carew, “You know what I would like to know?”

  “What?”

  “What I still want to know?”

  “What’s that?”

  Says Carew, “I’d like to know what those last words meant.”

  “You mean what he told the nurse? About the log?”

  “Oak log, holly log. What the hell does that mean?”

  “Maybe it’s where he kept the dope.”

  “Maybe. Maybe this is another fine case from the fudge tunnel of hell.”

  At the Caruso Hotel, they have an appointment with the night clerk, Mr. Jerome Lex. They meet him in the office behind the registration desk. He seems willing to tell all he knows, but he doesn’t know much.

  He gives them a vague description of Raymond Boyle, the guest in room 318 who had so interested Czernyk. He tells them that Boyle paid cash for his room, and that no one saw him leave.

  Says Carew, “And you say Czernyk never went up there? He just asked you about the guy and took off? He never went up to Boyle’s room?”

  Jerome Lex makes a thoughtful face. “Well, he might have gone up. He didn’t go past me, but there are other entrances.”

  “When he was looking through the registration file, did he seem agitated?”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “Scared?”

  “No. Excited.”

  “Maybe he was stoned?”

  “You mean booze? Oh, I think Slavko was always a little drunk.”

  “Did he ever deal heroin, Mr. Lex?”

  “Slavko?” Jerome laughs.

  “That’s a no?”

  “He couldn’t have. He wasn’t, he wasn’t that type of guy. He was kind of a blunderer? Kind of awkward? Kind of had self-esteem problems? Drank too much. Always a crush on some girl. Couldn’t get it together, you know? But he was all right. He annoyed me, but I liked him. He was, he was, I don’t how to say it. A romantic, I guess I’ll just say that. He was what you’d have to call a romantic.”

  THE TEACHER sits in his old schoolhouse, holding the iconic position called sattvasana, listening.

  The receiver is tuned to the deliberations.

  Annie isn’t saying anything just now. Earlier she was ferocious. Now she’s letting her acolytes do all the work.

  She’s keeping quiet and letting her new converts, the clarinet player and the tree surgeon, gang up on the housewife from Mt. Kisco.

  The Sage rules without making the people bend beneath his weight. When his work is accomplished, the people say, “We did it. We did it all by ourselves!”

  The tree surgeon is saying, “But Laura, the evidence tells us the Teacher ordered that killing. The evidence says Boffano’s innocent. It doesn’t matter what your emotions say—”

  The housewife snaps back at him, “Do you have children?”

  “No,” he says.

  “If you had children you’d understand!”

  This seems to irk the clarinet player. “What does that have to do with making the right decision here?”

  Finally Annie speaks up. “It has everything to do with it.”

  The others hush. They all want to hear her voice. The Teacher thinks that they’re all in love with her voice.

  Annie says, “I have a boy, Laura—nearly as old as the boy who was killed. And I’m terrified that something might happen to him someday. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’ve got to protect the children. There’s all this chaos, and it keeps getting worse and worse and there’s nowhere you can go to get away from it. There’s no way to hide from it.”

  She pauses. Eleven others in that room with her, but nobody breaks in. They wait on her. Finally she says, “But the law is… I don’t care how weak or uncaring the system is—can you see any other way? The law says that if they don’t prove that Boffano committed the crime he’s charged with, we have to set him free. We have to. And you just, I don’t know, you pray you get him next time.”

  The Teacher
doesn’t want to laugh out loud.

  “But if you try to twist the law,” says Annie, “even just a little, for the best of reasons? Then the law loses whatever strength it has. And then my child’s in more danger than before. And yours, Laura….”

  The Teacher doesn’t want to exult.

  Triumph and failure, illusions alike.

  But every cell in his body is swaddled in a fat moist joyousness, it’s all he can do not to cry out, to crow his victory to the sky.

  She’s beautiful.

  She’s powerful. She’s a vessel of pure power.

  And the Tao has delivered her to him, a gift. Magnificent—not looked for, not sought after, but simply set before him. Set before him! And like all gifts of the Tao, this one is a gift to keep.

  CAREW riding, Harry driving, down a broad sleepy suburban avenue. They’re on their way to St. Ignatius Hospital. They’re going to see that nurse who was with Czernyk just before he was killed. She said she’d talk to them before she came on duty tonight.

  It’s nearly six o’clock. The sun’s going down behind this neighborhood of steep Victorian houses, and Harry’s hungry and cranky. Carew knows there’ll be no more useful ruminations out of him till they get to the hospital cafeteria. Still he can’t help but toss out his wild guesses.

  He says, “So why do you think Czernyk went to that hotel? You think that guy in 318, that Boyle guy—you think he invited him up?”

  “Nah.”

  “Right, because then why would he check the register? He must have been snooping out the guy’s room number. I bet he followed him there. But why?”

  Says Harry, “How about this? Czernyk was out cruising the Caruso Hotel, looking for a strong young sailor boy, and he saw Boyle drop his handkerchief from the balcony of 318, and—”

  “We’re losing it here, Harry.”

  “You wanna play with this one, Fred? Wait’ll I eat. Then I’ll play.”

  “Harry.”

  “What?”

  “Stop.”

  “What?”

  “Stop the car.”

  Harry does. “Why, what’s up? You all right?”

  “Back up,” says Carew.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The whine of reverse. On this wide avenue nobody’s coming either way, and there’s nothing to stop them from backing up as far as they want. But when they’ve gone a couple of hundred yards, they come to a corner, and Carew holds up his hand.

  Harry brakes. Dead stop. “What?”

  “The street sign there. Now just check that out, if you would.”

  Harry looks up. The street sign says OAK going one way. The other says HOLLY.

  “Oh yeah,” says Harry. “We are losing it.”

  Says Carew, “No, really. Czernyk might have gone this way, right? After the hotel?”

  “He might have.”

  “So Oak and Holly, maybe this is where it happened.”

  “Where what happened?”

  “Where he was shot.”

  “Yeah?” Still no spark, though. Harry only wants to eat.

  Carew keeps it up. “Or he could have tossed something out of his car here.”

  “The dope?”

  “It’s possible. Or the log.”

  Harry looks at Carew as he’d look at a madman. “He tossed a log out of the car?”

  “A notebook kind of log. The kind PIs keep when they’re on surveillance.”

  “Oh. Oh yeah. You think?” says Harry. His fingers drumming restlessly on the gearshift.

  Says Carew, “It won’t take long, right? We don’t meet the nurse till seven. So we got an hour to kill anyway.”

  “No, Fred, we got an hour to eat. The hour’s not for killing. It’s for eating.”

  “Ten minutes—a few doors. Or… maybe not, maybe you’re right. You need your vittles. We’ll come back some other time—”

  He says this because he knows he’s already won.

  Harry takes the left side of the street, Carew the right.

  Carew’s first house has a flagstone walk, then a porch with a bushel basket full of Indian corn. Two old women peer at Carew’s badge.

  Neither of them saw anything unusual on the street today.

  He walks around the boxwood hedge. Another flagstone path, another porch. This door has sidelights and a fanlight and a cutout of a black cat. Mother calls to her son, who comes clattering down many flights of stairs, arrives breathless.

  No. No notebook, no nothing.

  Another house. Lawyerly-looking gent. No.

  Another flagstone path.

  Nothing.

  Another. No.

  He spots Harry, looking plaintively at him from across the street. Harry whines like a hungry doggie.

  “OK, OK,” says Carew. “Forget it, let’s go.”

  They get back in the car, and Harry starts the engine.

  Then the little kid from the second house comes running up to the car.

  When Carew unrolls the window, the kid hands him a small black leather notebook. “I would’ve told you right away. But I thought you’d think I stole it but I didn’t, I found it in the gutter, right there, I mean I would’ve—”

  The kid goes on like this, while Carew reads. He reads and turns pages, and reads some more. Harry peers over his shoulder. Both of them hold their faces close to the page, trying to make out the god-awful handwriting in this dusky light.

  “Flip to the end,” says Harry.

  At some point the kid has shut up. At some point Harry has killed the engine so it’s quiet in the car, just the sound of evening crickets and TV laughter from the houses.

  Carew finds the last page. He sees the word juror. He sees the name BOFFANO and he sees the name Caruso Hotel and he makes a fist without knowing it. Lets it go, makes another.

  Juror.

  The court often takes rooms for jurors at the Caruso. He thinks, how could I have missed that—

  It starts to branch in his head. His eyes leap all over that page and suddenly this little no-account drug-dealer hit is getting bigger and bigger, and he raises his eyes and stares out his window at the kid. He doesn’t see the kid, he just stares while he cogitates, but the kid doesn’t know that. The kid sees this dangerous cop staring a death-stare at him, and he knows he should not have taken that notebook, and he knows he’ll be spending the best years of his life in a penitentiary somewhere in the Mojave Desert, and he’s trying to come to terms with this sudden plunge in his fortunes….

  EDDIE in back of the courtroom, watches the jurors file in. There she is. Dragging. Keeping her eyes down. She takes her seat and she shuts her eyes.

  Says the court clerk, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict in this matter?”

  Says the Forewoman, “We have.”

  “As to count one in the indictment, murder in the second degree, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?”

  “Not guilty.”

  Instantly two hundred sets of lungs suck all the air out of this courtroom.

  “And as to count two in this indictment, murder in the second degree, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?”

  “Not guilty.”

  Tallow demands that the jurors be polled, but it doesn’t do him any good. There’s a brisk farewell address from Wietzel, the defendant is released from custody, and that’s it.

  That’s this courtroom blown sky high.

  Louie Boffano jumps up like he’s ten years old and then turns around and swats everybody in sight. Big luscious open-hand swats bestowed on all his buddies and lawyers and wife and kid and cousins, and the courtroom is in an uproar. Jubilation, dismay. Wietzel pounds the gavel but the noise seems to comes from far off, like the sound of somebody pissing next to Niagara Falls, who cares?

  Eddie’s still watching her. She’s still got her eyes closed.

  Louie Boffano leaps into his lawyer’s arms. Little Bozeman trying to hold him up. Everybody laughing their asses off.


  She’ll be all right, Eddie thinks. It’s all over now, Annie Laird. You did it.

  Vincent and you together, you did this nasty piece of shitwork and now both of you, you can let it go? Annie, you can start scrubbing us out of your head now?

  Reporters push past Eddie to get to the aisle, to get out of here to a telephone. Old women push past to get down there where they can smother their hero Louie Boffano in kisses. Everybody pushes past Eddie. He sees only flickers of Annie through the crush.

  Right, Vincent? I’ll never see her again? You’re going to let her go now, right, Vincent?

  12

  a child at play, a sentimental fool…

  JULIET, in Annie’s kitchen, slices up the large pizza and doles it out. Henri is here, and Oliver’s friend Jesse with his new earring. Jesse eyes his slice warily. “What are these?”

  “What are what?” says Juliet.

  “These wormy things.”

  “Anchovies. What’s the matter?”

  Jesse gets a knotty chin. “What are anchovies?”

  “They’re fish,” says Juliet. “Annie, here.”

  She serves a slice to her friend, who smiles and then fades back into her thoughts.

  “Fish pizza?” says Jesse. “The concept here is fish pizza?”

  “If you don’t want them just pick them off,” says Juliet.

  “Oh, don’t be a wuss,” says Oliver.

  Jesse asks, “What do they taste like?”

  “They taste sort of like sardines,” says Juliet.

  Says Henri, “No. Precisely they taste like salt. But much saltier.”

  Oliver picks up a long anchovy and dangles it over his mouth. He drops it in. Then he puckers up his lips and shuts his eyes. “No, you know what they taste like precisely?” he says. “I mean really precisely?”

  He brings his lips close to Jesse’s ear. A splash of whispering.

  Says Juliet, “You telling him what I think you’re telling him?”

  “Yes.” Oliver opens his eyes wide and blinks innocently.

  “Gross insulting schoolboy stuff?” she says.