Dead Famous aka The Jury Must Die

by Carol O'Connell

  He pressed the button for the security lock. At the sound of the buzzer, a delivery boy entered the studio bearing a gift from a fan, Randy of SoHo. After the messenger had left the room, Zack continued his involuntary habit of checking the dark window of the producer's booth, looking for signs of movement within. Might Needleman be looking in on him tonight?

  Zachary considered the possibility that the producer was not shy, but brilliant, and playing a nervous game within the game. However, the more plausible theory was that his mysterious producer was a spy from the Federal Communications Commission. A federal court was still in the process of defining that fine line between entertainment and conspiracy to murder via public airways. The issue had been further complicated by all the newspapers and major television networks following the lead of Ian Zachary and his fans, reiterating every crackpot theory and juror sighting. The defense attorneys had argued that the Reaper had multiple sources for the same information, thus clouding the issue of cause and effect.

  Upon ripping open the envelope from the local fan, he discovered that last night's caller had indeed snapped the picture of a surviving juror. Zachary glanced at the clock, then flipped the switch to open a line to the sound booth. "Oh, Crazy Bitch?"

  She extended her middle finger to confirm that he was back on the air. "Well, people," he said to his listening audience, "we have an official winner in the photo contest. Randy from SoHo, I assume you're listening tonight. So, Crazy Bitch, will you tell our contestant what he's won?"

  Zack hit the time delay button to cut off a stream of obscenities from the sound booth. "That girl's really losing it. So, my friends, I propose a new contest. Pick the hour and the minute that she cracks. Something dramatic, maybe drool and speaking in tongues, pulling out patches of hair – mine or hers, your option. Five hundred dollars. Crazy Bitch will take the first ten callers. We won't have time for more players. I have a feeling that tonight's the night."

  Oh, shit. Couldn't you wait another hour?

  He overrode her own controls and cut to a commercial break five minutes ahead of schedule. The lights of her squirrel cage had gone out; and now he faced two black windows. She was taking a cue from Needleman and hiding in the dark. Not for long, babe.

  It was time to sweep out her idiot remains, the living body but not the mind – that was already lost. Fun's over.

  He raised the lights of his studio, for all the good that did. The lighting had been designed to suit his love of dark, cavelike environs. With the slight increase of illumination, he could barely make out her black silhouette in the booth. He walked toward his own lean ghost reflected in the darkened glass, enjoying this vision of himself, for he appeared to be strolling on thin air, neatly surpassing that tired old biblical trick of walking on the water.

  At the top of her volume dial, Crazy Bitch screamed, "Showtime!"

  He ripped the earphones off his head. The pain, Jesus. "Are you crazy?" he yelled at her – and how crazy was that? "Are you trying to break my eardrums?" Another silly question. Of course she wanted to hurt him. And his eyes were the next target. All the lights in her booth switched on at once. The desk lamp and track lights had been redirected at him, and he was blinded. The pain was passing off, but his vision was scorched with patches of hot white lights, and the earphones were still clutched in his hands when he heard the tinny distant sound of her voice at a normal decibel level, singing to him, "Oh, jerk-off?"

  He lifted the microphone element to his lips and whispered, "You incredible bitch."

  She parried by extending her middle finger close to the glass. Her tone was actually sweet when she said, "We have a first-time caller on line three. He claims he's one of the surviving jurors."

  "Good one," said Zack, all injury and hatred forgotten. What did it matter if this was a hoax? He had an audience of feebleminded, motivated believers. He ran to his panel and tapped the third light on his phone board. "Daddy loves you," he said to the caller, and he was sincere, for this one had drama potential. "Talk to me."

  A man's angry voice responded, "You're an idiot!"

  "The caller seems a bit confused," said Zack. "To recap for new listeners or anyone just tuning in, this man was on the jury of celebrity-blinded morons. He was so starstruck, he ignored all the evidence of guilt. We're talking blood and fingerprints, people. DNA and eyewitnesses. Out of three hundred million Americans, only the twelve jurors thought the defendant might be innocent. A verdict of sheer stupidity. No wonder the Reaper wants them all dead. Who doesn't? So, listeners, does our serial killer have a point? Is it time to clean out the gene pool?"

  "Stop I'll- "yelled the caller. "You can't – "

  "Or, as our hero the Reaper would say – is this juror too stupid to go on living? And now the most important question, the one that's worth hard cash. When will this one die?" Zack looked down at the photograph in his hand. It was a good likeness. "I didn't get your name. Who are you?"

  "It's MacPherson, and you know damn well who I am!"

  Yes, you fool.

  The rules his lawyers had carefully laid out were tricky, but now that the juror had identified himself on the air, the man was fair game.

  "McPherson? Still there?" Yes, he heard the sudden intake of breath. There was no more doubt. He had the genuine article on the line. "Any… last words?"

  "How can you do this to me?" Frustration made the caller's voice crack.

  Better and better.

  "You and your fans," said MacPherson, "you did everything but draw that maniac a map to my damn house? His voice was stronger, getting louder. "What the hell's wrong with you, man? I was one of the jurors who set you freel"

  "Yes," said Ian Zachary. "So what's your point?"

  Chapter 7

  Charles butler, an avid collector of antiques, entered the only visually chilly room on the premises of Butler and Company. The furnishings of his business partner's office were twenty-first-century cold steel. It was a place of hard edges, mechanical clicks and whirs, and long shelves lined with electronics and technical manuals surrounding three computers on workstations. The single charming aspect of eighteenth-century arched windows had been neatly killed off with stark white metal blinds. Only one wall provided him with relief from severity; it was covered with cork from baseboard to ceiling and served as a gigantic bulletin board. This morning it added a rare human aspect to Mallory's private domain. It appeared as though Riker had taken all the papers from Johanna Apollo's suitcase and hurled them at the wall, pages sticking there of their own accord, and pushpins later added as an afterthought. Each crookedly hung sheet would be an affront to Mallory's pathological neatness.

  And so Charles was unprepared for her response, and it gave him pause. She never smiled this way to convey any happiness. The young police detective paced the length of her cork wall, pausing sometimes to read a note or a newspaper article in its entirety. Her standard uniform of jeans, T-shirt and blazer only varied by color and material, smoky silk and cashmere today. Charles had long ago recognized this as the sign of a highly efficient brain with no spare time to waste upon wardrobe decisions. Her long black coat was slung over one arm. She had not yet committed to going or staying awhile. Please stay.

  They needed to talk about what she had done to Riker. While she scrutinized her wall, Charles was busy censoring his comments on this subject, culling the words outrageous, dangerously irresponsible and the like. But then he found himself altogether out of words. He stared at his shoes and said nothing. As her friend and foremost apologist, he would always excuse her most questionable behavior. By secondhand stories and deduction, he knew the darkest things about Mallory's childhood on the street, and he had paid dearly for that knowledge; on occasion, it still cost him sleep and peace of mind. She had lost everything that mattered to a little girl before she had even reached the age of reason, and yet a remarkable creature had emerged from devastating trauma. How prescient was the poet Yeats, for he had written his finest lines for Kathy Mallory long before she
was made: All changed; changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. "So now it begins," she said.

  How he hated the sound of that. Charles faced the paper storm on her cork wall. "Riker finished this about an hour ago. I don't think he'd been to bed yet."

  "Good," said Mallory. "I've got him hooked."

  On any other day, Charles would have done headstands for the pleasure of her smile. However, this morning, he could only wish that she would stop, drop it, and not relish this mad game so much. He walked up behind her in the role of conscience and softly said, "You know this isn't wise. A psychotic shot Riker, and now you throw him in the path of a serial killer, another lunatic."

  That's what makes it so perfect. Another jury of idiots." She stepped back to take in the entire sprawl of Riker's mess on the cork wall. "This case looks a lot like the horse that threw him."

  Indeed, there was a clear parallel of jury verdicts and violence. If a teenage killer had not been found innocent, despite a plethora of incriminating evidence, then Riker, the prosecution's star witness, would not have been ambushed in his own home. And now another jury had come to an equally insane verdict in the Zachary trial, but, this time, the result had been a mass slaughter.

  "However," said Charles, "this murderer is a bit more organized, more dangerous than the boy who shot Riker." He tapped the crime-scene photograph of a dead FBI agent, another parallel, for the Reaper also had a law-enforcement victim. In this case, it was an interesting departure from the juror killings. "What happens when this maniac recognizes Riker as a player? Given any thought to that?" Though he faced the wall, he was aware of Mallory's eyes on him, perhaps calculating that her only mistake was bringing him into the game.

  One hand went to her hip as a warning. "You have a better way to fix Riker?"

  "No." Sadly, he did not. Though one of his Ph.D.s was in psychology, he only applied it to assessing the stability of gifted clients, the better to find the right niches for them. He had never treated anyone as a patient, never even thought of opening that sort of practice. But Mallory, with no such background, was attempting shock therapy on a trauma victim in a very fragile state of mind. Charles made his own appraisal of the wall and pronounced it horrific. "You said you were going to feed him this case a piece at a time." A teaspoon of murder as medicine – that had been her stated intention. "This is too much."

  "I know that," said Mallory. "But I didn't know about Dr. Apollo's stash, not until we tossed her hotel room. So what's the damage? Is there anything in her papers that would give Riker the whole picture?"

  "Well, obviously he knows about the relationship with Agent Kidd. But there's nothing here to tell him precisely how Dr. Apollo fits into the game."

  "And I don't see that woman making any confessions." Mallory sat down at a workstation topped by a glowing monitor.

  He watched as she downloaded photographs from a camera to a computer. The array of images appeared on the screen. Sometimes he wondered why she made so many portraits of Johanna Apollo. In most of them, the woman's deformity was covered by long tresses of dark hair and only mildly apparent in the forward curve of her upper body. His favorite was a close-up of the doctor's face. A man could make friends with those warm brown eyes. The most recent picture was a full-body shot. The wind had ripped aside the sheltering curtain of hair to reveal the hump. Somehow he knew that this would be Mallory's last portrait of Dr. Apollo. She had finally achieved the full exposure of vulnerability. And Charles felt suddenly protective of this woman he had yet to meet.

  "You don't like her, do you, Mallory? Please tell me she's not a suspect." "The only players I don't suspect are the dead ones." "You never did tell me how you got caught up in this business. When did you first – "

  "The day I met Riker's hunchback," she said. "I ran a background check on her alias, and the documentation was just too perfect, too neat. That's always a good marker for the FBI's witness protection program." Mallory was looking past him now and suddenly distracted. She rose from her chair and stepped close to the cork wall, honing in on the only sample of Riker's messy handwriting. She read this margin note aloud. '"Jo's wine.' What's that about?" A more careful perusal of the board offered her no enlightenment. "Damn Riker. He's holding out on me."

  Johanna Apollo slung her duffel bag over one shoulder, and this was Mugs's cue to cry. There was a touch of betrayal about the cat's eyes, for she was obviously abandoning him. She would not be there to defend him when the maid arrived with the water pistol. Johanna was in no position to complain about the hotel staff defending themselves from a mauling, though she gave them hazardous-duty pay in the form of lavish tips. Also, Mugs preferred open warfare to being confined to his pet carrier. Nothing could drive him quite as crazy as being locked up in that box. She bent low to pat him where there were no memories of damaged nerves to make him scratch her. He pressed his head into the cup of her palm and cried again. In this moment, he managed to communicate a desperation, a message that he was already having a bad day, and he would be lost if she left him behind.

  Upon entering the bathroom, she opened a box from her store of pet tranquilizers. She disliked drugging Mugs, though sometimes it was a mercy. If the maid arrived and found him docile and drowsing, it would not be necessary for the woman to shoot him with the water pistol in self-defense. After breaking open a capsule, Johanna poured half of it into his water bowl.

  Next, lest Marvin Argus return with his own search warrant, she unlocked the armoire, retrieved a packet of letters and folded them into the pocket of her denim jacket. And last, she counted up her wine bottles, a neurotic ritual worthy of Timothy Kidd.

  Mallory tidied up Riker's careless pushpin style, moving sheets of paper to hang at exact right angles to the architecture. No, on second glance, Charles decided that she had actually improved upon that, for now he realized that the building had settled out of alignment over the past century. He put more trust in Mallory's internal plumb line that ran infallibly to the center of the earth.

  "So you spent some time with Riker," she said. "Notice any changes, anything odd?"

  "No, in most respects, he seems his old self. Quite relaxed I'd say, no tics or twitches that I was aware of. He does have a tendency to slam doors, a very un-Riker-like thing to do. But that's been going on ever since the – "

  "He's angry."

  "No," said Charles. "He was rather affable."

  "He's angry at me." And the slow shake of her head said that she had no idea why – only that this was true.

  He understood her rationale. Underlying anger could explain Riker's monkish behavior since his release from the hospital. "Perhaps it's not you – not something quite so personal." And here he had the good sense to stop, for she disliked being challenged. Her arms were folded against him, and her eyes narrowed, reminding him that – true or untrue – she was never wrong.

  "Why don't I refer him to a psychiatrist?" said Charles. "Therapy is what he needs."

  "A talking cure? I don't have time for that." She amended this pronouncement, adding, "Riker doesn't have time. His apartment is a pit. Mrs. Ortega says it should be condemned."

  "Well, that's because she never saw his old apartment in Brooklyn. I'm sure it can't be in worse shape." Ah, he had made another error, finding a logical explanation that disagreed with her own. He turned his eyes away from hers, hoping to avoid another ocular argument.

  "The mess is twice as bad," she said. "So you haven't been down there yet?"

  "No." He had not been invited. But now he gathered that Mallory had been visiting Riker's apartment, and not by invitation. She passed through locked doors too easily, so adept at breaking and entering – invading. He wondered how to broach the subject of Riker's need for privacy and security now more than ever. Empathy would be the wrong approach. She had none.

  "I don't see anything wrong with his reflexes," she said. "You agree?"

  "I didn't find any signs of physical disorder." He rattled off the items noted in every covert examination
of Riker. "Motor skills, eye movement, speech patterns, reasoning ability – everything spot on." He knew it was frustrating her that there were no technical manuals on the subject of rebuilding Riker.

  "Then it's the psych evaluation that has him freaked." "Well, that makes my case for getting him to a therapist. The sooner we get him into treatment – "

  "No time," she said, somewhat testy now, for she disliked repeating herself. "It's budget-cutting season, and Commissioner Beale is cleaning house. The little bastard has the soul of a cost accountant. He'd love to get rid of a senior detective with Riker's pay grade." She turned back to the board, back to the game. "Dr. Apollo was on two murder scenes. She had insider information from Agent Kidd."

  Charles could see where this was going. "It might be a mistake to develop her as a suspect. Think about it. You say Riker hired her three months ago. Well, that's when he started shaving again. Oh, and his first haircut since the shooting – same time frame. Granted, that's not much to work with, but suppose he genuinely cares for this woman?"

  Oh, Mallory, if a cat could smile. "What great satisfaction he saw in her eyes.

  "So he does have feelings for her. And you knew that." Oh, of course she did. What was he thinking? Dr. Apollo was Mallory's hostage. "So that's how you got Riker to play the game. Tell me, Mallory, how did you set him up? Did you whisper something scary in his ear? What did you say? No, let me guess. Oh, incidentally, Riker, this woman, this one bright spot in your otherwise miserable existence, she's in deep trouble. Maybe she'll die. Something like that?" Suddenly very tired, he leaned back against the cork wall. "I know you didn't tell him that Dr. Apollo was your favorite suspect. Then he'd have to choose up sides, wouldn't he? And it might not be your side."

  Annoyed, she turned her back on him, not liking his tone one bit.

  Well, tough.

  Disregarding two facts – that he loved his life and she carried a gun – he reached out, grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around. Well, that opened her eyes a bit wider.