Baby, Would I Lie?

20

What a day! There was a sense of exhaustion and gloom within everybody else on the team bus rolling back to Branson after a full day of jury selection — not yet completed; only nine good persons and true were now settling into their sequestered quarters at one of the new motels on the hills just north of Branson — but for Sara, the day had been terrific. The others on the bus, driving through the late-afternoon traffic directly into the late-afternoon summer sun, were all too worn out, physically and emotionally, to sing or even to speak, but Sara was dancing inside.

What a scoop! And all her own! If only she still worked for the Galaxy—

No, strike that thought. She was happier with Trend, more productive, less embarrassed about the very fact of her existence. And what she’d gained today would be extremely useful when it came time to do her Ray Jones piece, whatever Jack might think about the irrelevancy of the underclass.

In the first place, it wasn’t all underclass. Ray Jones might make his living off the great unwashed — just as Sara, and Jack himself, used to do, at a much lower economic level, at the Galaxy — but he didn’t surround himself with those folk, not up close. The people around Ray Jones were smart, talented, sharp, and fun to be with. The musicians weren’t very talkative, but they were bright and they appreciated a nice nuance in somebody else’s dialogue.

As for Jolie Grubbe, she was great. If I ever have to go to court, Sara told herself, I want Jolie beside me. Once the fat woman had gotten over her natural distaste for the press, it turned out she and Sara had certain things in common beyond gender — attitudes, interests, histories, even some specifics, including a very strange link indeed.

It worked like this. Sara’s first journalism job after college had been with a small local paper in New Hampshire. Shortly after she’d been hired, the paper had been sold to a conglomerate, who merged it with some other little papers and fired the redundant staff, principally Sara. Jolie Grubbe, it turned out, had gone to college, prior to attending law school at Columbia, in the area serviced by that newspaper, though years before Sara had worked there. Still, Jolie herself while an undergraduate had written some items for the paper and had maintained her subscription to it after she’d moved away, keeping the connection alive out of some sort of buried sentimentality (any sentimentality Jolie Grubbe might have would be very definitely buried) until the paper became merged, stapled, mutilated, and folded. So she must have read Sara, in Sara’s earliest incarnation, though neither of them could pinpoint at this late date any specific item Sara might have written that Jolie might have read.

Still, the link was there, and Sara worked it for all it was worth. It was nice she had Cal Denny on her side, and also nice that Ray Jones permitted her to hang around with the entourage, but it was maybe more important to be pals with Jolie Grubbe, a smart insider who could be very helpful if she chose.

At least for today, Jolie chose. With nothing else to do but wait, she took Sara around the Warren Thurbridge offices, showed her the conference room being set up for the shadow jury, and explained what a shadow jury was. She made this explanation in Warren’s private office, seated at Warren’s desk, since Warren was across the street in court and Jolie didn’t want anybody else to hear this. Sara should consider the conversation private and the information she was hearing privileged — until after the trial, privileged.

“Absolutely,” Sara said, sitting up straight in the seat across the desk.

“What we have here,” Jolie explained, “is every potential juror in the county, recorded into the computer, a demographic rundown on sex, age, occupation, race, political affiliation if known, organizations belonged to if known, religion if known, all those things that bundle together to make each and every one of us a unique individual, in a group that can be targeted.”

“Like advertising.”

“Exactly. As each juror is picked over there, Warren’s assistants over here go into the computer to find every other voter who closely fits that juror’s demographics. Then we send people out to hire one of those voters as a consultant.”

“For all twelve jurors?”

“Fourteen. We do the alternates, too. Then, for the length of the trial, those fourteen people see and hear everything the jury sees and hears, and nothing else. If the jury isn’t told something, our people aren’t told it.”

“They imitate the jury.”

“We sure hope so,” Jolie said. “At the end of every day’s session, we get together with the shadow jury in the conference room there and see what they think of what happened in court that day. We debrief them. And after that, we try different tactics on them for the next day, see how they react. If they don’t want to see certain pictures, for instance, then the next day we don’t show those pictures to the jury. But if they do want to see them, and if those pictures make them feel better about Ray Jones, then we bring them to court and flash them around.”

“This is an expensive technique,” Sara suggested.

Jolie smiled; not a pretty sight. “Our aim,” she said, “is the finest justice money can buy.”

“But does it work?”

“Ask me after the trial. In the past, it’s usually seemed to work.”

“You mean, it’s common in trials for the defense to have shadow juries?”

“Only among millionaires,” Jolie said.

So money could do a lot, but it couldn’t necessarily do everything. No matter how much Ray Jones and his team might spend on putting together a shadow jury, the state of Missouri had the resources and the power to put together the real jury. For every lawyer, investigator, specialist, and clerk the Warren Thurbridge team could deploy, the state could deploy a hundred. No matter how much money Ray Jones could spend at his most lavish or most desperate, the state would outspend him as a matter of course. And if he were a guy without money, in this situation, the state would still spend just as much and fight just as hard.

At lunchtime, it had been gently suggested that Sara take a walk, which she did, finding a lunch counter out on the main street, half a block from the courthouse. (It must be good; look at all the pickups angle-parked out front.) Back in the office, she knew, they would all be trying to figure out what to do about this brand-new murder charge against Ray Jones, and while she’d love to be there for that discussion, she could understand why they’d be happier — if they could be happy at all under the circumstances — without her.

After lunch, she’d headed for court, and there was the crowd from the bus at last in the spectator seats, a particularly scruffy bunch among all the lawyers and other official types, like a medieval troupe of errant minstrels wandering into Versailles. (Sara wrote that down, then crossed it out.)

The afternoon had been, in a word (which Sara didn’t bother to write down), tedious. Lawyers in the process of questioning potential jurors operate from such bizarre mind-sets and follow such complex and arcane private agendas that there’s nothing for an observer to hold on to, no story being told, no melody playing out. Every time Sara looked around, the faces of all the musicians had the same inward living-dead look as they quietly beat time with a finger or foot, playing songs in their heads, living in some recording studio or on some blue-and-red-lit stage, light-years from here.

But at last, the day in court came to an end. Riding back to Branson, drained by doubt and monotony and confusion, the gang in the bus sat silent, glumly brooding about life or fate or whatever it is unhappy, frustrated people brood about, and Sara kept her own good cheer — she was the fly on the wall! she was the fly on the wall! — absolutely to herself until after they’d dropped her at Jjeepers! outside the guard shack entrance to Porte Regal, where she’d left the rental. She stood on the parking-lot asphalt in the late-afternoon sun and waved at the bus, and Cal and Jolie and a few others waved dispiritedly back, and she maintained her solemn face as the bus drove on through the gate.

It wasn’t until she was in the car and driving away up 165 toward the Lodge of the Ozarks that she permitted herself to release the broad grin that had been struggling to emerge all afternoon. Driving along in her packet of silence and air conditioning, she chuckled, she chortled, and she imagined the conversation to come with Jack, his astonishment and admiration at her brilliant good luck. She couldn’t help it, she burst into song: “Baby!” she sang, belting it out at the top of her voice. “Baby!” pounding the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. “Baby, would I lie?”