The Juror Page 25
“Not really.”
“The same man you were talking to on the balcony.”
“Oh?”
“The man who called himself Roger Boyle.”
“Oh?”
“You recall?”
“Not really.”
“Not really? You weren’t there?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“But we know that you were. So now we’ve got this conflict, don’t we? How would you explain it?”
“Explain what?”
“This conflict.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Oh, give it a stab. What do you think?”
“Mushrooms?”
“What does that mean?”
“You, you investigators, maybe you take a lot of mushrooms and you see things that aren’t there.”
Now the other one, Investigator Beard, speaks up. “Ms. Laird.”
“What.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I used to process orders for a company called Devotional Services. But this trial went on a while, I suppose by now my boss has found somebody else.”
“Ms. Laird, your bank account took a real friendly little bounce this month—”
“Yes.”
“How come?”
“I sold some artwork.”
Says Carew, “You did? Good for you. But you know what? We don’t really care how you got it. Because we don’t think you did this for the money. We think these guys scared you. They’re still scaring you. But now it’s time to quit being scared. Let us get you out of this mess.”
“How would you do that?” she asks.
“If you open up to us, help us, testify for us, we’ll put you somewhere safe. You and your boy. Then we’ll put Mr. Boyle and his friends in jail. We’ll put them away for a long time.”
“And then what?”
“Then whatever you want. You could relocate for good if you liked. Or come back here—”
“You mean to Pharaoh?”
“If you want.”
“To my house? After I testify—”
“The mob’s not what it used to be, Ms. Laird. Their bark is worse than their bite. They don’t often kill civilians.”
“Often? Not often? You’re sweet. Now can I go?”
Investigator Carew glares at her. She glares back.
“Not yet,” he says.
“Well, make it quick then. I’ve got to get home before my kid gets out of school.”
Says Investigator Beard, “We could send someone over to pick your son up. Take him wherever—”
She erupts. “No! Stay away from my house! You put me in danger when you come around my house! Don’t you stupid bastards understand that?”
Carew looks over at Beard. Then he makes a steeple of his fingers in front of his face, and asks, “In danger, Ms. Laird? In danger from what?”
“From the Man in the Moon. Let me out of here.”
“I’m afraid we’re not finished.”
“I’m finished.”
“Ms. Laird, we’re trying to help you. But you have to cooperate.”
“Well, I can’t.”
She pushes her chair back. Ready to get up, but Carew shakes his head and says, “All right. Listen. Suppose the press got hold of some bad information. All sorts of crazy things happen—suppose there was a leak to the effect that you were cooperating. That’d make a great story, wouldn’t it? State to Bring Tampering Charges Against Boffano, Juror Will Testify—something like that. Your friend, your visitor at the hotel, he’d be glad to see himself in print, wouldn’t he?”
“You do that,” she says, “and they’ll…”
“What?”
She feels the skin tightening around her cheekbones. The hell with it, she thinks. They know anyway. So she says it. “They’ll kill my child.”
He’s ready for that. “No, they won’t. If you help us they won’t.”
“Oh fuck you! You don’t know them! You don’t—”
“Ms. Laird, I’ve spent the last twenty-five years of my life locking these punks away. They always threaten. Always. But they don’t do squat. They’re not going to hurt you. Or anyone close to you. They know we’d consider that an act of war, we’d use that to wipe them off the face of the earth. They’re dumb but they’re not that dumb.”
“But you can’t be certain—”
“I’m certain you’re in danger without us. If you play by their rules you’ll lose—I’m certain of that. Let us protect you. That’s what we’re here for. Who else will protect you?”
He looks at her for a little while, then he drops his eyes to his clipboard. When Investigator Beard starts to say something, Carew clears his throat and shakes his head slightly to silence him.
For two minutes Carew works methodically at a doodle of chained triangles.
Then Annie says, “Look, I’m not saying no, but I’ll need to think about it.”
“OK.”
“But not now. Now I’ve got to pick up my son from school. Give me time.”
“How much time?”
“Just, just a day or two. But keep your goons away from my house. You want to watch me, OK. But don’t let anyone know you’re watching. You hear?”
“A day or two?”
“Forty-eight hours. Just give me that long.”
JULIET in Ian Slate’s Stiletto. Skimming down the Hudson past Riverdale, past the mansions preening themselves in the last light.
Ian lets her take the helm. The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran and maniacally quick. She keeps the throttle open. They skate between a fishing trawler and a coal barge. They whip around a far slower speedboat. She imagines she flicks her tail at them as she passes. Let them eat wake.
“Am I going too fast?” She laughs.
“Yes,” he says. He puts his hand over hers and gives the throttle another nudge.
She finds to her surprise that his touch is welcome to her.
She’s been telling herself she doesn’t really like him. She’s been thinking he’s much too self-possessed and controlling for her. For example the way he has choreographed this evening to such a fare-thee-well. Picking her up in his Range Rover, with the music all dreamy Irish ballads (harp, strings, soprano). Taking her to the dock in Peekskill where he had a man waiting with two dry martinis and his boat. And an extra jacket for Juliet, to ward off the river-chill.
The delight he takes in all his glimmering, confident, liquid-green gauges.
The way he so crisply points out landmarks. That palisade way over there, under that blazing sunset, where Aaron Burr shot down Alexander Hamilton. This cave here on the Manhattan side where the crazy Caveman once lived. She’s been telling herself that such a self-assured helmsman simply isn’t her type—and then he touches her and his touch gives her that little jolt. She looks up at him, into his green eyes. Flicker of mischief there. Reminds her of that look he gave her in Nightbone’s Poetry Cafe. And now here comes his screwy smile.
It occurs to her that she’s having a blast with this guy.
She surrenders the tiller.
He takes them under the George Washington Bridge and down the long neck of Manhattan. When they come abreast of the old westside piers, he spots what he’s looking for. A yacht bobbing on the velvet water. He steers a graceful J, and as he approaches the yacht he cuts back the engine.
He flings his bowline to a man in a white tuxedo, some sort of steward or majordomo.
The man unfurls a ladder for them.
Juliet tosses the man her left shoe and then her right. Then she climbs aboard, and Ian follows.
Floating nightclub? Restaurant? She’s not sure, and she never asks. There are half a dozen other couples already in the dining room, and a guitarist. The repast is coquilles St. Jacques with sautéed asparagus. Ian’s eyes hold hers. They talk about ten thousand things. He tells her about the orchids of Easter Island. He tells her about a family of Basque shepherds he knew in Idaho. She spins one of her hospital war sto
ries, and then another, and another. He has a trick of listening that loosens her tongue, and she finds it easy to tell him all about the drudge-rounds and the sleeplessness and the fluorescent wound-up hell of St. Ignatius Hospital.
Always his gaze is steady, curious, cool.
He gives her the story of the Croat cellist who played for him all one scorching summer night in a Mostar garden, and then left the cello in Ian’s care while he went to join his brothers up in the Dinari foothills.
At some point she asks him what he does for a living.
He says, “Reporter, didn’t I mention-—”
“But this isn’t, all this seems a little extravagant for a reporter’s salary, doesn’t it? I mean the boat and the car and all?”
He simply laughs.
“Well of course the poetry brings in quite a bit,” he says, and laughs some more.
She leaves it alone.
The waiter brings them Stilton cheese and port wine, and then coffee. Finally, nothing so gauche as the presentation of a bill. Simply a warm handshake between Ian and the waiter—that suffices.
They step out onto the yacht’s stern. Gusts of the guitar music follow them. It’s a cool moist night, but it’s not as cold as it has been. The yacht has come around to the East River, to the lights of City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge. Ian and Juliet lean against the taffrail, lean into the breeze.
She tells him, “A man was shot to death at my hospital last week. Right outside the emergency room. You read about that?”
He nods. “I read something. Were you there?”
“No, but I knew him. I used to date him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Slavko Czernyk. I have an idea he was looking for me when they killed him.”
Ian Slate smiles at her. “I thought he was wounded and he was looking for a hospital.”
“Well. All right. Maybe just that then.”
“But your gut tells you he was looking for you?”
“Mm.”
“Why did he want you?”
“I don’t know.”
“That must have been hard for you, Juliet.”
She shakes her head. “What’s hard is that it was so easy. I came in late the next day and I heard about it and I went over to the hospital morgue. I wanted to see him. Freddie let me look at him. Big GWH. Gunshot wound to the head. We get them often, but this one was fascinating. I’d never seen one like that. The bone of the skull was blown away. The cortex was exposed. The gray matter? And the blood had drained from it perfectly, so you could see all the wrinkles—it looked like it’s supposed to look, like a head of cauliflower.”
“What did you feel?”
She shrugs. “Nothing really. Something like pity, I don’t know. But then something like contempt because this, this cadaver, this head of cauliflower? I’d made love to this guy, and now he was, he was just the object of my pity. And then, I mean I guess I felt guilty because, because I was thinking those things.”
“But you’d never loved him?”
“No. But still, we made love. That should count, shouldn’t it? So I shouldn’t have been looking at his brains with contempt, should I?”
At the pier, a car is waiting for them. A limo, but not stretched. Nothing ostentatious, nothing tawdry.
Ian tells the driver, “Coliseum Books.” He prepares two more dry martinis. This time the music is the Cowboy Junkies: The Black-eyed Man.
They lean back with their drinks. Tenth Avenue goes by in the mist.
He touches her hand. He says, “Juliet, every day you see all this suffering—so you have to switch your compassion off. Now you want to instantly switch it on again? You can’t do it. Don’t beat yourself up. The grief will come to you—”
“I mean it’s not that I’m not capable of tenderness.”
“I’m sure of that—”
“I mean there are people that I love,” she says, but the way she blurts it—she recognizes that she’s a little drunk.
“Who do you love?” he asks.
“I love my friend Henri. I have a friend Annie, I love her. I love her child—God do I love him. He’s twelve years old and Annie thinks he’s got a crush on me, but I think I’m the one with the crush.” She laughs. “But there’s all these annoying laws against statutory rape.”
He asks her, “So if it had been this Oliver who had been hurt? Instead of your old boyfriend?”
“Don’t—” She raises her hand. “Yes. If Oliver had—? That I would have felt.”
At Coliseum Books he asks her to wait for him and he steps in and a minute later comes back with a gift for her, some books.
He murmurs to the driver, “Take us to Belly Mortar?”
While he pours another martini she looks over the strange selection of books he’s brought her. A historical romance, Love’s Warrior, by Sarah Rebecca Nightsmith. A thriller called The Delta Triad, by Dean Locket. Sister Hearth, by Dannika Jackson, which the jacket describes as a reverie of a Deep South African American girlhood.
She laughs. “Why, why these?”
“You wanted to know how I earned my living.”
He smiles. Takes out his pen and writes on the flyleaf of Sister Hearth:
To Juliet, on this night…
He signs it Dannika Jackson.
Then he opens Love’s Warrior, and on the flyleaf he writes:
… of surprises… and intoxications…
And he signs it Sarah Rebecca Nightsmith.
In The Delta Triad he writes:
… and rare passion—Ian.
She’s gaping at him. He shrugs and laughs and tells her, “If I were just one writer, I’d get restless.”
The limo takes them to Belly Mortar.
Dark street in the meatpacking district. A crowd waiting on the cobblestones by a loading dock. Ian and Juliet push through. A phalanx of bouncers parts for them, they step onto a milk crate and then onto the loading platform, and then they click down a long bare-bulb passageway. The music starting to pulse. They spiral down two flights of water-smooth steps to the factory’s immense basement.
Hundreds are churning and raving.
A huge hip-hopper, nearly round, serene and still as an idol, chants the crowd into delirium.
Ian and Juliet are swept out into that surge. They dance for hours. But all the time he keeps his green eyes locked on to her green eyes. And every now and then he touches her—quick guiding ringers on her elbow, her shoulders—and when he touches her she shuts her eyes so the sensation will linger a little longer.
She’s letting this tide tumble her, letting that touch lead her.
She’s certain that what she’s feeling now she has never felt before in her life.
She tells herself, Oh yeah, it’s called getting drunk.
But if that’s it, then she damn sure has never been this drunk before.
Swirled out of her mind, out of her name and her character, floating now into this man’s arms and letting him rock her into a corner of the club where suddenly she pulls his head down to kiss him. To devour his mouth. Hitching up her skirt so he can boost her up against the cinderblock wall with his hands cupping her ass, with her legs wide open like a bird’s wings. He’s crushing her, smothering her against this wall. Feeding on her mouth, and she feels the heat of his cock throbbing against her panties. Her ankles lock behind his back. Witnesses everywhere if anyone cares, but the amp-blast and the boil and murk erases them all, and all she can feel is his lips, and that stone ridge of his cock grinding against her, and the pain where the rough cinderblock scrapes her shoulders. She arches her pelvis forward into that ridge and she pushes her shoulders back into that roughness. And she breathes into his ear: “OK.” As though he’d asked her, but really he hasn’t said a word.
She tells him, “It’s OK, if you’ve got a condom.”
She thinks she hears him laugh. She thinks she hears him say, “Well, it so happens…”
She reaches down and unzips his pants. She wonders if th
ey’ll be arrested. His cock in hand. That ropy vein under her thumb. Her eyelids flutter open, just long enough to see the flash of the condom packet between his teeth as he tears it open. She laughs and tries to kiss him again but the curled edge of the packet is still between his lips. He turns and sputters it away. Then kisses her harshly and she feels him unfurling the condom down his cock. She pulls her panties aside to make room for him.
It’s dark. They’re all stoned out there. Nobody’s watching. But even if they are watching I don’t care, I don’t care, I only, Oh my God. She’s got her arms flat against the cinderblock, her palms flat and he’s sliding into her. Too slowly. She’s hungry. She jams herself down on him, then jams down again. Again. Ugly damn squat and a brook of her juices pouring from her and can these ravers see this, see his cock? Oh Jesus, his cock slide into me? She’s never had an orgasm during intercourse and she’s not going to have one now, but yes, this thing, this is close. This is farther than orgasm, what is this thing? This is, this crushed-out lost-my-mind gone-to-hell, Jesus, this. This man. This man. Ian. Ian. No handhold. No purchase on anything. Riding him like a child. Arms wrapping now around his neck—anything to hold on to. Ian.
THE TEACHER, hours later in Juliet’s bed, holding close to her as she drifts off to sleep, murmurs her name. “Juliet?”
“Mm?”
“Sweet Juliet?”
“Mm?”
“Would you do a favor?”
He can feel her smile.
“For you?” she says. She arches her back, pushes her bottom into his groin. Yawns.
“No. For your friend, for Oliver.”
“For Oliver?”
“A huge favor.”
“I don’t understand, what?”
“Wait,” he says. “Let me show you.”
He rises. From his night-bag he withdraws three blister packs of 200 mg Tuinal, and a bottle of Ron Botran. He asks her, “Will you take these?”
She turns over sleepily to see what he’s talking about. “What.” She blinks. “What are they?”
“Secobarbital, amobarbital, and rum. If you take them now, take them quickly, you can save Oliver’s life.”
She rouses a bit. Sits up in bed. Stares. “What are you talking about?”