Baby, Would I Lie?

32

Monday, the trial got into high gear. Sara sat between Cal and Honey Franzen again, watching, remembering, wishing she could take notes but afraid it might just be the gesture to drive Jolie’s forbearance beyond endurance. And anyway, what was happening was memorable enough.

Over vociferous defense objections, the jury was shown photos of the dead Belle Hardwick, as well as of the scrubby lakeside land where the murder had taken place and the bloodstained interior of the red Acura SNX. The prosecution wanted to bus the jury over to the actual murder site — on a Ride the Ducks? — but even Judge Quigley realized that was going too far, both figuratively and literally, and ixnayed it.

Still, the prosecution made its approach clear from the opening salvo. Their two-pronged attack was first to demonstrate the absolute depravity of the crime and second to establish the absolute depravity of Ray Jones, thus linking him to the crime by making him the only person in the vicinity vile enough to have committed it. Since all they had in real terms was circumstantial evidence, and rather shaky circumstantial evidence at that, this was clearly their wisest approach. As the old legal dictum has it: If the facts are with you, pound the facts; if the facts are against you, pound the table. The prosecution pounded the table.

There was a lot of stuff they wanted to pound the table with, and the defense blocked them at every turn. They wanted to bring in the Ray Jones tax problem. They wanted to introduce supposedly cynical or unchristian lyrics from his songs. They wanted to talk about his marital life. They wanted to talk about a previous legal record that seemed to consist of the various things that can happen when you combine alcohol with automobiles. They even wanted to mention a decades-old song plagiarism suit against Ray that had been dismissed as frivolous and without merit the first time it had reached a court.

Every time one of these unacceptable side roads appeared on the horizon, Warren Thurbridge was at once on his feet, objecting loudly, eloquently and unceasingly, drowning out the offending matter, seeing to it by his volume and vocabulary that not one extraneous syllable tainted the jurors’ ears. And each time, Judge Quigley would pound her gavel and order the jury removed while she consulted with the attorneys at the bench, and the technician running the defense team’s video camera would switch it off, not to switch it back on until the jury returned.

The jury did a lot of marching back and forth Monday morning and the video technician did a lot of switching off and on. Sara, watching all this, thought there wasn’t going to be much tape for the shadow jury to look at later today, which made her realize she wanted desperately, hungrily, voraciously to watch the shadow jury in action.

At lunch, which she was permitted to take with the defense team in the conference room of Warren’s offices, presumably because all strategy had already been worked out and nothing of dangerous importance was likely to be said over the ham-and-American sandwiches and really sweet coleslaw, Sara began to wheedle Cal for permission to sit in on today’s shadow jury session, “even for just one minute, just to get the idea of it.”

At first, Cal didn’t even want to broach the subject with the lawyers in the room, not wanting his head bitten off, but then Sara said, “Ask Ray. If he says yes, they’ll have to go along with him. If he says no, I’ll give up.”

“Well, I’ll try it,” Cal agreed, and went away around the conference table to hunker down beside Ray and engage in muttered conversation for a while. Ray raised an eyebrow in her direction at one point (she smiled like a sunny schoolgirl back at him), then muttered with Cal some more, then turned to mutter at Jolie on his other side, and from the great lightning-flash thunderclouds that immediately formed all over Jolie’s head, Sara knew the answer was good news even before Cal came back and said, “It’s okay. Ray’ll fix it.”

“Thank you, Cal. And thank you, Ray.” She smiled and nodded in his direction, but he wasn’t looking at her.

“Only for a minute, though,” Cal warned.

“That’s all I want; that’s all I ask. Boy, I appreciate this, Cal.”

“Sure,” Cal said, looking dubious but relieved.

The afternoon session in court brought more meat but not less controversy. A skinny rat-faced young woman, Jayne Anne Klarg, identified as an ex-employee of the Ray Jones Country Theater, had allegedly been called by the prosecution to testify that she had seen Ray Jones in what appeared to be intimate conversation with Belle Hardwick on more than one occasion (not including the night of the murder, unfortunately, which was not emphasized), but it soon became clear that she was actually on the witness stand to suggest she’d left Ray Jones’s employment because he’d made unwelcome sexual advances and had frightened her when she had rejected him.

Warren was getting a lot of exercise today, popping to his feet at every other word, objecting all over the place, while Jayne Anne glared. Fred Heffner, the state prosecutor from Springfield handling the testimony, did his best to insert the information into the ears and brains of the jurors despite Judge Quigley’s reluctant agreement that he really shouldn’t do that.

Sara had expected Warren to chew Jayne Anne to bits when it came time for cross-examination, but he had a different tack in mind. Mildly, he said, “You quit your job at the Ray Jones Country Theater?”

“Because he was all the time—”

“I asked you,” Warren overrode her, “if you quit your job.”

“Of course, I did! Nobody likes to be treated—”

“You weren’t fired, is that right?”

She blinked. She looked wary. “I was quittin,” she insisted, which was an odd locution, all in all.

Warren returned to the defense desk, picked up a piece of paper — a business letter, it looked like — and returned to the witness. Holding it up in front of her, he said, “Is this a copy of a letter that was sent to you by the box-office manager at the Ray Jones Country Theater?”

She squinted. She didn’t like that. “I guess so.”

Fred Heffner was on his feet. “May I see that letter?”

“After Judge Quigley, I think,” Warren told him. He handed the letter to the judge, who read it, frowned with disapproval at the witness, and handed the letter to Fred Heffner, who read it, looked extremely expressionless, handed the letter back to Warren, and returned silently to his seat.

Warren: “You were dismissed, were you not?”

Jayne Anne: “I was quittin.”

Warren: “You were not dismissed for any reason having to do with Ray Jones or unwanted overtures, were you?”

Jayne Anne: “What?”

Warren: “You were dismissed for—”

Heffner (rising): “Your Honor, the reason for Miss Klarg’s dismissal is immaterial to the matter at hand. We do not dispute the defense contention that Miss Klarg did not resign, as she earlier suggested to us, but was dismissed.”

Warren: “Thank you, counselor.”

Quigley: “The reason for the dismissal need not concern us.

Warren: “Agreed, Your Honor.” To the witness (smiling): “But you did pay it back, didn’t you?”

Heffner (rising, wounded): “Your Honor!”

Warren: “Withdraw the question. I’ve finished with this witness. Your Honor.”

The next witness was the gate guard at Porte Regal, who for Fred Heffner was absolutely positive it had been Ray Jones’s red Acura SNX he’d waved through into the compound late that night, and who for Warren Thurbridge was equally absolutely positive he couldn’t be sure who’d been at the wheel, or indeed how many people had been in the car.

And there, astonishing everybody, the prosecution rested. It was barely three in the afternoon. Warren agreed with the suggestion from the bench that the defense didn’t feel like starting its presentation today and Judge Quigley gaveled the court closed until 9:30 the following morning.

A quick phone call was made to the motel in Branson where the shadow jury was being sequestered and then the defense team plus Sara crossed the street to Warren’s offices to await the jurors’ arrival.

The feeling in Warren’s offices was cheerful, even smug. What had the prosecution presented, after all? Their circumstantial evidence, boring, easily forgotten, all last Friday. This morning, the jury had essentially seen nothing but the judge agreeing with the defense and chastising the prosecution, and this afternoon the prosecution’s principal witness had exploded in their faces. The state had shot its bolt, it hadn’t laid a glove on Ray Jones, and now all the defense had to do was establish the principle of reasonable doubt and they’d be home free.

The self-congratulatory sense of well-being was infectious. Sara felt the lift of it herself, though it wasn’t her fight and, realistically speaking, the outcome didn’t matter to her one way or the other. She was an experienced reporter and an experienced magazine writer. Whatever the conclusion of the trial, Sara would find within it a larger meaning, a mirror in which America could gaze upon itself with perhaps a new understanding, blah blah blah. Nothing to it.

About twenty minutes later, the shadow jury’s bus — not a Ride the Ducks, but a charter from Interstate, for whom Ray used to do promos and, who knows, might again — arrived out front. Through the curtained former showroom window, Sara watched the people, who looked remarkably like the actual jurors she’d been observing in the courtroom across the street, climb down from the bus, squint in the sunlight — the bus windows were tinted — and cross the sidewalk toward the building.

“Oh my God!”

Sara jumped away from the window as though it had grown teeth and bitten her. The jurors were beginning to enter, to file past her toward the conference room. There was a secretary’s desk behind her; she dashed to it, sat down, swiveled the chair halfway around so her back was to the jurors, and became very interested in the contents of a bottom file drawer.

Immediately, Jolie was at her side, reaching down as though to slam that drawer, barking, “Get out of there! What do you think you’re doing?”

“Shut up!” Sara hissed, with such commanding urgency that Jolie stepped back, startled, and stared at her as though Sara were foaming at the mouth.

Sara risked a look over her shoulder. The last of the jurors was passing, was gone. Straightening, she said, “Jolie, get Warren out here. Now. Before anything else happens.”

“Have you lost your—”

“Don’t be a fool, Jolie. You can tell when I mean it.”

Jolie could. She gave Sara one last glare — this better be good, kid — then turned and bustled off to take Warren away from his jurors.

Which gave Sara a minute to look around and think, so that when Warren came back with Jolie, distracted and irritated, saying, “What’s this?” Sara merely rose, put her finger to her lips, and motioned for them to follow her outside. They didn’t want to — they wanted to believe she’d gone crazy — but they followed.

Hot humid sunlight beat down on the sidewalk. Sara turned, and as Warren and Jolie both started to demand something or other, she said, “One of your jurors is a ringer.”

That stopped them. They frowned. They stared at one another. Warren said, “What do you mean, a ringer?”

“I mean one of your jurors is not a bona fide Taney County voter. One of your jurors is actually a reporter for the Weekly Galaxy.”

Jolie nearly squeaked: “That rag?”

“You know it, eh?”

“The things they’ve said about Ray over the years—”

“Are nothing,” Sara interrupted, “to what they mean to say about him. And about all of you.”

Warren said, “What do you mean, all of us?”

“I’ve had a minute to think it out,” Sara said. “I know how those people think; I’ve had experience with Weekly Galaxy reporters before.” It seemed to her, all in all, better not to mention that she’d once been such a reporter. “And how did they get the information about the shadow jury?” she asked. “How did they get to know what you know fast enough to slip one of their own people in instead of the person you were going after?”

Jolie stared at the building with horror. “They bugged us!”

A man for whom light had suddenly dawned, Warren said, “The telephone repairers!”

“Sounds good,” Sara said.

Warren explained, “After everything was installed, these two came back and said there was a problem, and fixed it.”

“They sure did. Where did they work?”

“In my office,” Warren said, his usually robust voice gone hollow. His tan had faded, too.

“Everything you’ve said in that office,” Sara told him, “is now on a Weekly Galaxy tape.”

“My God.”

To Jolie, Sara said, “Aren’t you glad now you let me come along?”

Warren didn’t have time for good fellowship. He said, “Which one? We have to get rid of—”

“No no no, not that fast,” Sara said. “Jack Ingersoll, my boss at Trend, it happens he’s working on a Weekly Galaxy exposé right now. I want to call him, see how he wants to handle this.”

Outraged, Warren said, “How he wants to handle it?”

“You wouldn’t know a thing if it weren’t for me,” Sara pointed out.

“If what you say is true,” Jolie said. “If you aren’t just trying to scare us for some reason of your own.”

Sara looked at her. “You want me to walk away?”

Warren said, “Miss Joslyn, Sara, tell us who the ringer is.”

“Right after I find a pay phone and call Jack,” Sara told him. She turned away, then turned back. “And I suggest, if you don’t mind, that you find a pay phone and call a debugger.”