Dead Famous aka The Jury Must Die

by Carol O'Connell

  She held up an envelope, and by its thickness, he guessed it was a twin to the one on his kitchen table at home. "This is the form to appeal your discharge. I've got Lieutenant Coffey's signature. Now I need yours." After pulling out the sheets and unfolding them, she pointed to a red X so large that he could find his signature line without the bifocals he never wore in public. Mallory had often pointed out to him that his refusal to wear eyeglasses was an absurd vanity in a man with a shabby wardrobe, scruffy shoes and a bad haircut. And she had also meant well on that occasion.

  She handed the heavy document across the desk. "Sign it," she said to him, ordered him. "Then I'll set up new dates for your exams."

  He could not even touch it. "I'll read the form tonight, okay?"

  No, that was obviously not okay, but she let the bundle of sheets fall from her hand to the desk, then leaned down to retrieve the crumpled ball he had tossed in the wastebasket. "Now, back to your hunchback, Johanna Apollo."

  So that was the lady's real name.

  Mallory tossed the wadded paper at him, and he caught it in one hand. Was she testing his reflexes – wondering if he could pass the police physical? Or had she guessed that he was most afraid of the psychiatric test?

  "Are you listening to me?"

  "Yeah, I hear you," he said.

  She rose from her chair, braced both hands on the edge of the desk and stared him down, settling for no less than his complete attention. "But you never listen to the radio, do you, Riker?"

  Chapter 2

  JOHANNA APOLLO'S EYES WERE DOWNCAST AS SHE crossed the avenue, moving toward the Italianate row houses along St. Luke's Place. She lacked a hunchback's gooseneck aspect, for she rarely raised her head to cope with the curious faces of strangers. Instead, she studied their feet, and, based solely upon the science of shoes, made personal judgments on her more upright fellowman. A cab stopped up ahead, and the trendy loafers of a soulless yuppie stepped out onto the pavement to cross paths with the dusty work boots of a blue-collar man who could not afford the rents in this Greenwich Village neighborhood. In her previous life, Johanna had often mused that she should have cultivated foot fetishists, for they would have had more to talk about.

  Behind her, she heard the hesitation steps of clicking high heels, some woman in a pedestrian dilemma of political correctness: how to get past the cripple on a sidewalk made narrower by lines of garbage cans? Impatience won out, and the shoes of an office girl walked abreast of her, hurrying to pass the leisurely hunchback. Without raising her head, Johanna knew the girl would be young. These were the dangerous spiked heels of an on-the-job man hunter, seeking fun or rescue in that other sex. The shoe design was flirty and flimsy, not made for the dead run at a moment's notice – like now. Two rats slithered out of a mound of trash bags torn open by sharp little teeth. The office girl's feet turned skittish, skipping to the side, followed by a sudden breathy surprise when she collided with a garbage pail and knocked it over.

  "Turn at the corner," said Johanna, raising her eyes to the younger woman's face. "The vermin aren't your worst problem." She pointed toward the ragged man standing in the center of the sidewalk on the next block.

  And now that the beggar had an audience, his arms raised slowly, then flapped up and down in the manner of demented pump handles. Bunny was what he called himself, but Johanna knew him by all his street names: Bum, Fool, and You Crazy Son of a Bitch. He was waiting for his tribute money, but first – a little fun, another fright night.

  The office girl obediently turned at the corner to take another route to the subway station. Johanna did not. As she closed the distance between herself and the homeless man, she raised her face once more and sighed, resigned to the trial ahead.

  Behind a fringe of matted hair was the pug nose of a boy and a grin that insisted on innocence. Bunny's face belied the adage that the homeless life aged people well beyond their years. Though he was in his thirties, she always saw him as a child. Closer now, Johanna stared at one blackened ankle. It was too late to save his foot. Soon the skin would slough away, and he would die from massive infection. Ah, but his shoes said more – the cold wind leaking in, life leaking out, tired leather parting with the sole and showing a peek at sockless, gangrenous toes. By the shoes alone, she knew that he had been defeated in two great themes of the ancient Greeks: man against nature, and man against himself. He stank of disease and soiled underwear.

  Bunny's hand struck out and batted the air an inch from her face. She had dodged the first shot and neatly evaded the second, yet she was falling, her feet slip-sliding on marbles that crashed to the sidewalk from Bunny's outstretched hand. She hit the ground and felt the searing pain of her elbow smashing into cement. The agitated man stood over her, waving his arms, though this was hardly frightening. His hands were arthritic claws after too many winters without the protection of gloves. He could barely make a fist, and any damage he might do unto others would hurt Bunny more. Nevertheless, she raised her hands in surrender. "I've got money," she said, and these ritual words appeased him, as they always did.

  She rose to her feet, careful to avoid the other marbles around her work boots. And now she must keep Bunny still, or he might fall and break a bone. Such an injury could mean death for a man in his shape and circumstance. She handed him the same ten-dollar toll she paid each time they met. "Well, Bunny, you learned a new trick tonight. The marbles. That was very smart."

  He had finally found a means to keep people from running away at the first sign of madness. But she knew this trick was well beyond his reasoning ability. It was also a bad joke, the cliche: of lost marbles, lost mind. And whose sick bit of humor was this? Had some neighborhood child taught him the new stunt? It hardly mattered. He would forget it in a few hours' time. Short-term memory also had a way of outrunning Bunny.

  "You're quick. That's what he says." Bunny tapped his head in a knowing way and made a sly face as he looked down at the fallen marbles. "He gave me those. Says I gotta play it smart to catch – Oh, oh, ooooh." He laughed and shifted his weight from foot to foot in a bob and a weave, so excited. "I got a message for you." His eyes closed and his teeth clenched in fierce concentration. And now he had it, and his eyes opened wide. "It's a message from Timothy Kidd. He says it's real cold in hell, and ain't that a surprise."

  Johanna's mouth rounded in a silent No!

  "Where did you hear that name?" Was there a siren of alarm in her voice? Yes, but it was well beyond the pitch of Bunny's impaired perception. He had no empathy with the fears of others. "Tell me – where did you hear that name?"

  Bunny kept tapping his skull. "In here. He lives with me."

  It was useless to pursue this little horror, impossible to distinguish between Bunny's real and imagined people, though she knew the messenger was a living human being, someone who had spent a great deal of time with the homeless man. Only constant repetition over days and days would have made that sentence remain in his mind; it was so crowded in Bunny's head, where so many people talked to him all the time.

  Johanna pulled a newspaper from one of the trash cans and used it to sweep the marbles off the sidewalk so he would not trip and hurt himself. Should she call the police? And tell them what? From NYPD's point of view, it was the rest of the citizenry who needed protection from Bunny. She shook her head, giving up on the idea of asking them to look after the homeless man. From now on, she would take a different route home from work, and perhaps that would keep Bunny from harm. As the last marble rolled off the curb, her injured elbow throbbed with pain, and this was only the first leg of her gauntlet. There was still the cat to deal with at the other end of her odyssey.

  At the West Fourth Street station, she boarded a subway car crammed with passengers who made space to accommodate her. Johanna was that rare straphanger who was offered a seat by men, women and, most humiliating – children. During the short ride home, she observed the egalitarian meeting of the city's shoes, real leather and faux, sneakers and oxfords.

 
Out of the subway, tired and sore, she made her way down Twenty-third Street, heading toward her hotel. The Chelsea was a bastard castle, Victorian and Gothic, striped with long rows of wrought-iron balconies and crowned on the twelfth floor with tall chimneys and dormer windows set into a pitched gray roof. All told, the redbrick giant had two hundred windows overlooking the street. It was not the tallest building in this neighborhood of lesser architecture, but certainly the grandest.

  Grandeur ended as Johanna passed through the front door.

  The lobby was rimmed with nineteen-sixties track lights surrounding the crystal chandelier of a more distant period, and the statue of a fat pink girl perched upon a swing was also suspended from the high ceiling. Abstract pieces of sculpture sat on the marble floor beside contemporary and antique furniture, and the walls were covered with the large canvases of an ever-changing art show. The eclecticism was so extreme that nothing – not a live elephant – nothing would seem out of place here. And then there were the tenants, permanent and transient: the Chelsea was a haven for certifiable creative types, artists and the like, and proudly advertised itself as haunted by a history of suicide and murder. In the past four months of residence, Johanna had encountered no earthbound spirits other than the ghosts she had checked in with, ten of them, including Timothy Kidd.

  She crossed the dark carpet, eyes fixed on a parade of luggage on wheels and the out-of-town shoes of visitors. Only one pair was familiar, spit-shine black and memorable for the broken laces and the knotty repairs. They were ten steps in front of her, when she raised her head to see the FBI agent, Marvin Argus, approach the front desk. Johanna waved at the clerk, begging him in dumb show not to give her away as she rounded the corner and pushed the elevator button. The door slid open, and she slipped inside.

  Moving through the Chelsea in any direction was like a trip through time and other places. She rode upward in a small box with midcentury gas station decor. Its doors opened onto the seventh-floor foyer and an ornate staircase from her exchange-student days in Paris. Turning left, she opened a fire door of wood and glass and passed into a silent corridor leading to her rear apartment and its tall windows with southern plantation shutters. The last skirmish of the day lay before her as she fitted a key into her lock. The moment she cracked the door open, a white furry paw appeared, claws extended and swatting air, so anxious to get at all comers and rake them till they bled.

  Johanna lived with New York City's only attack cat.

  She guessed that her apartment had been cleaned late in the day, for Mugs was still angry and up for a fight. The formidable hotel maid always came armed with a water pistol to keep the cat at bay. Johanna had no such defenses, only denim jeans to protect her legs from the needle-sharp claws. She edged past the animal. Mugs followed her down the short hallway to the spacious front room with an armchair in front of the fireplace – so inviting – but before she even removed her coat, she quickly entered the kitchen. The cat would be hungry, and food would buy her a small respite from his attentions. On the days when she was feeling fragile, Mugs was locked in a bathroom, but most of the time he roamed free, rubbing up against her legs, purring, then clawing her when he felt the agony of close association. A nerve along the cat's spine had been damaged long before she found him, and any physical contact caused him excruciating pain. Yet Mugs came looking for love each time she walked into a room.

  While he was distracted by his bowl of gourmet cat food, she inspected the doors to a maple armoire, one of the few pieces of custom-made furniture that she had brought with her from Chicago. The cat hair in the lock opening had not been disturbed in her absence. She inserted the key, and the paneled doors opened to rows of shelves, cubbyholes and a desktop littered with newspaper clippings on the men and women who had died in fear and violence and those who were still in the game. Her journal lay open to a blank page, and she penned a few lines about Bunny's message from the late Timothy Kidd. Then she tidied up the desktop, sorting papers for the jurors who had survived. Material on the dead was consigned to the drawers below the desktop, and Timothy had a drawer all to himself.

  She was so in tune with him tonight, almost paranoid enough. Johanna slowly revolved, taking in the entire room. Everything was in neat order, no objects added or taken away, no obvious signs of trespass. The only disturbance was a pile of mail knocked to the floor, and she credited this to the cat's revenge on the maid and her water pistol. All was as it should be, but she could never lose the sense of something tall and wobbly teetering on the verge of a crash. Even within the perfect silence of these thick walls, peace was a rare thing. She lived every day in a heightened state of readiness – waiting.

  Mugs padded away from his empty bowl and paused to stretch on the way to his basket, where he completed three turns on a red pillow, never fewer, never more, then curled up for a postprandial nap. His eyes closed on an expression of sweetness which lured strangers into the deception that he could be petted and stroked. Johanna lay back in a reclining chair, dry-mouthing pain pills and watching the evening news on television.

  All the major networks had developed the macabre murder spree into a miniseries format, replete with original theme music for the Reaper's segment. The serial killer, not trusting his name and fame to the vagaries of tabloid reporters, had christened himself with the crude sketch of a scythe drawn in blood on the walls of every crime scene. It was also his habit to write the score in blood, keeping the tally of murdered jurors current. His last message had figured nine down -

  " – and three to go," said the smiling broadcaster on the screen.

  His guest for the evening was a retired federal judge railing against the incompetence of the FBI to stop this assault on the American judicial system. "If we cannot guarantee the safety of every juror, then the law becomes impotent."

  The broadcaster listened with mock sympathy, then broke in on the judge's tirade to complain that "It's been nearly a month since the last murder – "

  And his story was getting stale. Tonight's program gave Johanna no new information. It was rather like a tired rerun, repeating old encounters with the bereaved friends and families of the dead. Some of these people had become inadvertent players, giving up clues to the whereabouts of runaway jurors, and others had taken money for this information. Several family members had settled for fame as payment, becoming media personalities over the past six months, always good for an interview on a slow news day.

  Johanna closed her tired eyes for a brief nap, one of the most underrated luxuries of life. Soon she would be delivered from angst and pain. Her concept of heaven was not a place of eternal peace, but a small window in time, a few tranquil moments between consciousness and sleep, blessed sleep.

  Mallory's present was tucked under one arm as Riker strolled past the old men's social club, a small gathering that convened in Ned's parking lot every night. Four old fellows with their folding chairs sat in a circle with a jug of wine to fortify them against the cold air. They nodded to him in passing, then turned up the volume of a portable radio and rocked their chair legs to a Spanish rhythm. Riker's feet weighed less and less, then nothing at all, walking him back to a warmer season.

  The summer of his seventeenth birthday, he had left his father's house and run two thousand miles. He had made it all the way to Mexico, past the tourist traps of the borderland and farther south along roads that had no names or signposts, only piles of sand to trap the rusty old Volkswagen van. He had bought the vehicle for next to nothing, a necessary expense: in those days, he would go nowhere without the giant amplifiers for his electric guitar. Every ten miles, he had climbed out of the van to dig his bald tires out of foreign sand, every ten miles all the way to Cholla Bay. He had found that place under a sky of a billion brilliant stars. Until that moment, he had not known that they were up there, for the stars of city skies had been stingy and few. By the close of that summer, the Brooklyn boy, barefoot and sun brown, had learned some new words and another kind of music that went into his b
lood, swimming backward to the heart, and lying there in wait for a day like today.

  He had spent the best part of his life trying to forget that place – or was it a time? – when he had been happy. Riker walked on in dreams of Mexico, knowing that he would never get back to Cholla Bay. Happiness had not been on his wish list when he had decided to become a cop.

  Could he ever make his way back to the police force?

  The Latin beat of the old men's social club was blocks behind him when he stopped to look up at the sky.

  No stars.

  He turned left instead of right, taking a different route home, one that would lead him by a bar where he could run a tab, drink all night and clear his head of music.

  It seemed that only seconds had passed before Johanna Apollo started awake. Mugs's front paws were kneading her chest as he licked her face with a sandpaper tongue. She looked past the cat to the clock on the mantelpiece. So much time had been lost, hours and hours. She rose from her chair to switch off the television set, and Mugs was dumped from her lap to the floor. Deeply offended and tail held high, he returned to his basket pillow.

  Johanna reached out to the radio by her chair and tuned in to the familiar voice of Ian Zachary. The game master was recapping the life-and-death plight of twelve human beings. The surviving jurors had fled from Chicago, where their verdict had been so unpopular that three of them had been put to death within the city limits. The rest had peeled away from their government bodyguards after a fourth juror had died while under the protection of the FBI. The fifth kill had occurred on an isolated farm in Kansas. Other jurors had gone to hide among family in small towns, and now only three of them remained alive and at large. One of the shock-jock's callers had sighted a live one hiding in San Francisco, but no contest prize had been awarded for lack of photographic evidence. The game had strict rules.

  "Who's next?" asked Ian Zachary, called Zack by his fans. The Englishman's voice was deep-throated, and the tenor was seductive. "Come on, all my idiot children, retard bastards every one of you, talk to me. Daddy loves you."