Baby, Would I Lie?

5

After a late lunch with some state legislators over in Branson, Warren Thurbridge drove back to the defense team’s offices in Forsyth, the county seat, and when he walked in, Jim Chancellor was standing there, a lot of computer printout in his hands. He had good news, and he had bad news. “We’ve got our first jury lists. We can go over them now,” he said. “The phone company’s at work in your office, so maybe we should use the conference room.”

“Phone company?” Warren didn’t like that; everything was supposed to be done and ready to go. “What for?”

“Beats me,” Jim said. He was a local attorney, under forty, amiable, chunky, with a good sport’s thick black mustache. “They just said there was a little glitch.”

Warren, frowning massively, strode to his office, stood in the doorway, and there they were, a man and woman, both in plaid shirts and jeans and work boots, both wearing white hard hats with the word CONTEL on the side, both lumbered with big heavy tool belts jangling and dangling with equipment. They had Warren’s desk shoved out of the way and were doing something to the spaghetti of phone wires at the baseboard along the back wall. While the man went on working with a small screwdriver, the woman, apparently sensing the weight of Warren’s glare on her back, turned, smiled brightly, and said, “Just a couple more minutes.”

Jim stood behind Warren, outside the room. “We can use the conference room, Warren,” he said. He was new at saying “Warren,” and it came out a trifle lumpy.

But Warren pointed to the papers in Jim’s hands and said, “That stuff’s our secret. We’ll wait.”

“You’re the boss,” Jim said.

That’s right. Warren Thurbridge was not Ray Jones’s criminal lawyer. He was much more than that; he was the chief attorney of Ray Jones’s defense team. As such, he was a cross between a battlefield commander and a movie producer, and he looked the part: distinguished, handsome, confident, heavyset, a very well preserved sixty-one, with silvery hair and piercing eyes and a booming laugh that could as readily turn into a roar of rage or a silken snakelike hiss of contempt.

What Warren Thurbridge was good at was deploying large forces to powerful effect. He wouldn’t be a damn bit of use one-on-one, walking into court as a lone counselor arguing the case of one small defendant. But that didn’t matter; no one would ever think to offer him such a job. Nor would he accept it. What he would accept, and happily, was the Ray Jones kind of case. Lots of publicity, lots of money, and maybe even a shot at getting the son of a bitch off. Perfect.

Headquarters of the Ray Jones defense team was a recently defunct furniture showroom, a broad one-story glass-fronted structure across the street from the courthouse. Inside, the building had been a hollow shell, with offices at the rear that had once held the shop’s owner and credit manager, two people with a penchant for making wrong decisions. Gray industrial carpeting had covered the main showroom floor, with indentations in it where the unsold furniture had once stood, and old phone lines had jutted like hairy moles from the walls.

Now the place was transformed. Beige draperies covered the front showroom windows. Office furniture and equipment and cubicle partitions made a bustling atmosphere within. Phone and fax lines were in place, plus copiers and a darkroom and a water cooler everyone was too busy to gossip around. Twelve car parking had been obtained at the rear of a nearby restaurant. Warren himself was installed in the former owner’s office, with furniture that looked too good to be rented but was, and the onetime credit manager’s office was now the conference room, with bulletin boards, TV, VCR, and a polygraph.

The staff in this building numbered seventeen, beginning with Warren himself, and Pat Kelly, his secretary of the last twenty-one years, plus five young attorneys and two legal secretaries from Warren’s home office in Dallas, plus Jim Chancellor, who had once himself been the Taney County prosecutor, plus his secretary, plus six various researchers and clerks, all of them very busy.

What they were mostly busy with at the moment was the list of potential jurors. What with one thing and another, fewer than 9,000 of Taney County’s 22,000 residents were eligible jurors, and Warren wanted to have at least the beginning of a handle on every one of them before Wednesday — day after tomorrow.

Normally, in a particularly gruesome murder like this one, well covered in the local press, it would be almost automatic to ask for a change of venue to some county beyond the reach of regional papers and TV, but Ray Jones was already a famous person, famous everywhere. The national press would definitely cover this trial, so there was no way to get out from under the glare of publicity.

Still, fame could cut both ways. In the four years since Ray Jones had built his theater and bought his house out at Porte Regal, he’d done a number of things to ingratiate himself with the community, lending his name to hospital fund drives, putting on a charity performance for the local Boy Scouts, things like that, things any sensible celeb would do when trying to establish roots in a community. Some portion of that pool of potential jurors would harbor warm feelings toward Ray Jones as a result of his good deeds in Branson, and it was part of the job of Warren Thurbridge and his team to find those people and get them on the jury. Swallow the bad publicity, hope the good publicity does some good. Stay at home in Taney County.

This is where Jim Chancellor came in. A local boy, former prosecutor, he could tell you something about half the people on the jury list — but not till the phone people left.

In the meantime, Warren busied himself at Pat Kelly’s desk, going through his message slips. Nothing important; he’d spent part of the drive from Branson on his car phone to the Dallas office, getting brought up to date on the firm’s other affairs. In fact, most of these messages were from the media; the usual press feeding frenzy was about to begin. Later on, Warren would be more than happy to wage his Ray Jones battle in public, a kind of warfare at which he excelled, but at the moment journalists were useless to him, and so he’d have nothing to do with them. “Have Julie take care of these,” he told Pat, Julie being the file clerk who would also double as media spokesperson.

“Right,” Pat said as the phone workers came out of his office, both grinning happily but apologetically, saying, “All fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“No trouble,” Warren assured them, now that the trouble was over, and he and Jim went at last into his office and shut the door, while the two phone workers left the building and walked down the block to the Contel repair truck they’d obtained the same way they’d gotten the IDs and the tools and the hard hats: bribery.

Stashing their hard hats and tool belts in the back of the truck, the ex-phone repairers drove sedately away, circling one extra block to go past a small RV park. Half a dozen RVs, big, ungainly traveling hotel rooms on wheels, faced the street in a row across the front of the park, and in the driver’s seat of one of these an old geezer sat reading the latest Modern Maturity. When the Contel truck went by, he looked up, grinned, and gave an everything’s fine O sign with thumb and first finger. The former phone people waved and drove on, and the geezer went back to reading about how retirees could avoid paying their fair share of the cost of society. Behind him, two technicians from the Weekly Galaxy hunkered over recording equipment, and the sound of Warren Thurbridge’s voice was heard, saying, “Now, Jim, don’t hold anything back. Say what you want about these people. Not a word of this will ever leave this office.”