VC04 - Jury Double

by Edward Stewart

  There were groans from the jury box.

  “So when you come to court tomorrow, bring a suitcase with everything you’ll need for the next week.”

  Anne hurried to the bank of pay phones in the corridor and dialed Kyra’s work number. An assistant said Kyra was on jury duty. She dialed the apartment and Juliana said Kyra was out of town.

  “How long will she be gone?”

  “Who can say? You know Kyra.”

  “Would you tell her the jury’s sequestered and there’s no way I can do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “She’ll understand.”

  As Anne broke the connection, another juror—a slender, African-American woman—came clattering down the corridor. She was wearing high spike heels that a pigeon would have had trouble squeezing into, and her hair hung in gleaming coils that looked hand-dipped in honey.

  “Hey, Kyra—I have your betting sheets.”

  “My betting sheets?” Anne wondered what on earth Kyra had been telling people.

  The woman thrust several leaflets into Anne’s hand. They had a line drawing of a charging running back, football cradled to his chest. Heavy print warned: This publication for reading matter only. Not to be used in violation of any law.

  “Fill them out and give them back to me before the weekend. Let me know if you need more.”

  “Thanks. I’ll look at them later.” Anne dropped a quarter into the phone slot and called her apartment, tapping in the code for the machine to replay messages.

  “Anne,” an urgent male voice said, “are you there? It’s Tim Alvarez.” She had a sudden premonition of trouble. Tim was her father’s male nurse and live-in companion. Her father had reached that age where any news tended to be bad. “Could you give me a ring as soon as possible?”

  She dropped another quarter into the slot and placed a collect call to Connecticut.

  “A problem has come up.” Tim Alvarez sounded tense and pressured. “It’s your dad. We’ve got to talk in person. Today.”

  “Couldn’t Kyra make it?” Kyra was their father’s favorite, and as a rule she handled his problems.

  “Your sister’s on jury duty.”

  SEVEN

  6:40 P.M.

  ANNE PULLED HER GREEN Toyota into the driveway and cut the motor. She delayed a moment, gazing out from behind the windshield at her father’s little corner of Connecticut.

  Across the lawn, the woods were beginning to dim with twilight. In the pond, a frog was already crooning a love song.

  The old house had aged well. The white wood siding had been recently repainted. The ivy was thick on the brick chimneys but neatly trimmed. The boxwood were clipped. Lights glowed in the downstairs windows.

  She wished she could love the old place.

  Her heels crunched across gravel. She lifted the brass knocker and thumped.

  Through bubble-glass panes she could see a shadow hurrying toward her. The door opened and Tim Alvarez stood smiling the practiced smile he always bestowed on visitors.

  “Sorry if I’m late. Traffic was awful.”

  “Tell me about it.” A tall, thin young man, Tim Alvarez wore oversize steel-rimmed spectacles and a moppish brown hairdo. “I wish this could have been one of your father’s good days.”

  She stepped into the front hall. The old half-forgotten silence rose up around her like a familiar smell.

  “Some days he’s actually very alert. In fact he’s been alert enough to do a little pro bono legal work.”

  “Really?” she said. “What cases?”

  “Invasion of privacy stuff—amicus curiae briefs.”

  She peeked into the library. Stacks of books and magazines and files wriggled up from the floor. Her mother would never have allowed it. An unwatched television set was quietly laughing to itself. “What’s so urgent?”

  “Let’s save that till we’re all here,” Tim suggested. “We’re waiting for your father’s old law partner.”

  The old Yankee floorboards groaned louder under his weight than hers. At the end of the corridor he stood aside. She stepped into the living room.

  Her father was stretched out in a leather recliner by the window, tilting in a wedge of dying daylight. He had a woolen afghan spread over his legs and he was wearing a canvas harness on his chest. He was hanging up the telephone.

  She raised her voice to a singsong. “Hello, Leon.”

  At the sound of his name he turned, his expression part curious, part hopeful. With his gray hair wisping in a crown around his head, he looked like a dandelion gone to seed.

  She crossed the Tibetan rug, stepping over worn figures of phoenixes and dragons.

  His pale gray eyes finally recognized her. He frowned. “I was expecting your sister—the prodigal career girl.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. Kyra’s on jury duty.” She leaned down to kiss his cheek. Her lips touched stubble. Tim hadn’t shaved him today. “What’s all this?” She touched the harness.

  “I dial the hospital in Stamford and put the receiver over my heart. The telephone relays my heartbeat. My pacemaker talks things over with the computer. If I’m beating too slow or too fast, the computer dispatches an ambulance.”

  He lifted the harness from his chest and hooked it over the back of the recliner. The elbow of his left arm was almost rigid, with barely ten degrees of flexibility.

  “I hope the computer says you’re doing okay today.”

  “It made the usual satisfied noises.” He pushed himself up from the recliner, got his legs steady under him, and moved toward the sofa.

  She remembered him as a tall man, but nowadays he wasn’t. It pained her to see the difficulty he had walking. His right leg dragged. She wondered if he’d had another ministroke.

  “Tim, the eternal girl-student looks tired and thirsty.” Years ago Leon had decided that Kyra was the achiever, the career girl, and Anne was the laggard, the bookworm. “I’d say she’s earned a drink, coming all this way.”

  “Scotch and water,” Anne said.

  “The computer says I can have the same,” Leon said.

  “Are you sure?” Tim Alvarez’s tone was doubtful.

  “Sure I’m sure.” The furniture had been arranged so that Leon always had the edge of a table or the back of a chair to grasp. He lowered himself carefully onto the sofa and spread a small quilt over his legs.

  She took the chair facing him.

  He handed her a small wrapped package from the coffee table. “This is for Toby. Would you see that he gets it?”

  It felt like a book. “I’ll be glad to.”

  A kind of formality descended. Leon looked up at her. “How’s your beau?”

  “I don’t have a beau.”

  “You got rid of your stockbroker friend?”

  “Larry and I divorced just before mother died.”

  Leon shook his head. “My daughters sure married lulus—Kyra hitched herself to a neurotic and you wound up with a bum. I don’t suppose your lawyer friend is still in the picture?”

  Anne bit back annoyance. She could never tell how much of her father’s tactlessness was old age and how much was intentional goading. “That was two years ago.”

  “You got rid of him too?”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “I liked him.”

  “I did too.” Anne didn’t like the way the discussion was headed. She saw a game of solitaire half completed on the coffee table. “Are you playing cards by yourself?”

  “I enjoy it if I win. In that regard it’s like arguing a case in court.” Leon turned over a ten of clubs from the pack and laid it on the jack of diamonds. “Speaking of which, which jury is Kyra on?”

  “Corey Lyle. The Briar murders.”

  “Conspiracy.” For a moment there was no sound except the clicking of Leon’s false teeth. “That’s a real life-or-death case for the government pork barrel.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “We haven’t got a Cold War, so they have to cut th
e fat out of the security budget—or show the public a real cavalcade of domestic conspiracies. Can’t say I’m impressed with the evidence so far. Are you?”

  “I haven’t heard any.”

  “Conspiracy to murder two politically antediluvian twits.” He shook his head, eyes sparkling like two Boy Scout flints. “Corey Lyle’s a social visionary. And he has the guts to stand up to government bureaucracy. And that’s why the government’s railroading him.”

  “Why do you say they’re railroading him?”

  “I’ve got an acquaintance pretty well placed in the court system. She says the way they put that jury pool together is just a rat’s whisker short of jury-fixing.”

  “They’ll have a hard time fixing any jury that Kyra’s on.”

  “Just wait till the government drags in that boo-hoo about children.”

  “Children?” She’d read about the case in the papers, heard it discussed on TV—but she didn’t recall any charges involving children.

  “Next thing you know, we’ll have preverbal infants giving testimony in capital cases—and after that, chicken entrails will be admissible.”

  Tim Alvarez moved the playing cards aside and set drinks and cheeses and crackers on the coffee table. He handed Anne a glass and sat on the sofa beside Leon.

  “This isn’t Scotch and water.” Leon held his glass up to the light. He made a face. “It’s water and food color.”

  Outside the window, automobile tires crunched gravel.

  Tim Alvarez hopped to his feet. “There’s our other guest.”

  Tim Alvarez came back into the living room escorting a tall, gray-haired man. “Anne, meet Bob MacLeod. Bob, this is Anne Bingham, Leon’s daughter.”

  “Well, well, little Annie.” MacLeod strode forward, hand extended. “You used to sit on my knee when I was your father’s partner—remember?”

  Anne tried to pull a match out of her memories. He had a strong jaw, piercing metallic eyes, and he looked ten or fifteen years younger than her father. She couldn’t remember him. “Are you sure that wasn’t my twin sister? Kyra used to love sitting on men’s laps.”

  “Kyra was always flirting,” Leon said. “She still flirts. You’d like her.”

  “That’s a pleasure for another day.” Bob MacLeod settled himself in the easy chair. “What I’m here about, Anne, is your father.”

  A silence passed. Bob MacLeod tapped his fingers together. Anne realized he was wearing a toupee.

  “Leon is one of the brightest lights in the history of American jurisprudence—and, of course, we’d like to keep it that way.”

  Anne shifted. The tone disturbed her. MacLeod was talking as though something had ended. He was also talking as though Leon wasn’t there in the room with them.

  “Over the past two years,” MacLeod said, “young female relatives of some of the most distinguished lawyers in America have been receiving anonymous obscene phone calls.” He paused, biting his lower lip. “The father of one of the recipients put a trace on the line … and the trace led here—to this address.”

  Anne’s first instinct was that her mind had tricked her; she had missed something in MacLeod’s explanation.

  “Tim phoned me to handle damage containment. I naturally contacted the other numbers Leon had phoned. I discovered four other recipients of similar calls.”

  “Who were they?” Anne said softly.

  “They were all daughters of lawyers with whom or against whom Leon has argued in United States Supreme Court.”

  She looked over at her father, cozy under his afghan. He nodded at her as though to say: Yes, it’s true. Your old dad has still got the stuff.

  “You’re sure these were obscene calls?” she said.

  “There’s no doubt about that.”

  “And you’re sure Leon made them?”

  MacLeod turned to Leon, giving him the floor.

  “The calls are protected speech.” A benign, wise, half-smile floated on Leon’s lips. “In fact they’re part of a test case I’m working on.”

  Has he gone crazy? Anne asked herself.

  Tim Alvarez laid a stack of bills on the coffee table.

  Anne’s hand hesitated and then she leaned forward in her chair and nudged the bills into the circle of lamplight.

  Four dozen statements, stretching back twenty-four months. The name and address computer-printed at the top were Leon’s. Half the bills covered calls made from the house phone and half covered calls from the cabin up in the woods, where Leon used to go for privacy. Toll charges to out-of-state numbers had been highlighted in a glowing nail-polish pink. They’d been placed to a variety of area codes. She recognized Connecticut and California. The other codes were unfamiliar.

  “The families are willing to forgo a trial,” MacLeod said. “Provided Leon signs a consent form, promising to make no more such calls. And makes a substantial financial contribution to a rape hotline.”

  Anne fanned the bills together, tapping them on the edge of her wrist. “Are you willing, Leon?”

  “I’m giving it some thought.”

  Crazy or not, she thought with exasperation, you’re still sly. Still exasperating. She rose and stalked into the kitchen.

  Tim and MacLeod followed, footsteps creaking swiftly behind her.

  “Just tell me one thing.” She placed both hands on the butcher-block table and faced Tim, barely managing to control her voice. “We pay you to keep an eye on Leon. How is it you didn’t know he was making these calls?”

  A tiny drop of sweat crawled down Tim’s cheek, glistening in the lamplight. “Leon made the calls from the phone in his cabin.”

  “And for your father to limp all the way up there, with that bad leg of his …” MacLeod glanced toward the hall and lowered his voice. “I’d say that shows a pretty clear conscience of wrongdoing.”

  Anne reexamined the bills. Without exception, the highlighted calls had been direct-dialed from the cabin phone. A second oddity leaped out at her: the calls had all been placed after one in the morning. “If Leon was limping all the way up to that cabin—two hours past the time you’re supposed to have him in bed—I don’t see how you could have not noticed.”

  “You know your dad. He got me to lower my guard.” Apology danced a hesitation waltz across Tim’s eyes. “I goofed.”

  Anne wondered why Leon had chosen this moment to out himself as a dirty old man. Her hands balled into fists. “I don’t believe any of this. I don’t believe that old phone up in the cabin even works.”

  It had begun to rain. Drops made slapping sounds on the rhododendron leaves. Half-groping in the dark, Anne made out the vine-tangled path that led up the hill into the woods.

  Lightning ripped a neon crack in the sky, showing her the weathered pine cabin.

  The door was unlocked. Thunder growled as she stepped inside. Her hand scrabbled along a plank wall and struck a switch.

  On the desk a lamp went on, throwing a circle of raw 100-watt light over strewn newspapers and books.

  She searched beneath the papers but couldn’t find the phone. Couldn’t even find the cord.

  She tilted the lampshade. Light tipped out over rickety porch chairs and tables. The cabin gave an impression of dust and clutter and emptiness, of time overflowing like an ashtray.

  The light caught a group of framed photos hanging on the wall above the camp bed. She crossed the room for a closer look. In all, there were thirteen glossy black-and-white portraits.

  One was a group portrait of Leon and Kyra and Toby, posed in her father’s rose garden. Toby couldn’t have been older than six. Toby’s father, who had taken the picture, was present only as a shadow falling along the flagstone path.

  Another was a family Christmas portrait, taken when she and Kyra had been six, and their mother had still been alive.

  Her eye traveled across the eleven others. They were lawyers who had argued with or against Leon before the Supreme Court of the United States. Several had posed with their families. All were signe
d, but only one—a photo of Earl Warren in full regalia—was dated.

  The other ten had been photographed with their families. The homes of five had received obscene phone calls.

  What was it about the five—these five? Why had they been chosen?

  She went to the desk and lifted the gray plastic cover from the little Rolodex. Her fingers riffled through the cards. The five were listed—business and home phones.

  The screen door squeaked. Bob MacLeod stood in the doorway, shaking off raindrops. “I know it’s hard to believe a thing like this about your father. Believe me, it’s hard to believe it about my ex-partner.”

  “Why would Leon do it?”

  “He’s old. He’s breaking down. Losing his inhibitions. Old people sometimes develop sexual manias.”

  “Could there be a different explanation? What if someone wanted to hurt Leon? Destroy his reputation? He has enemies.”

  “But he as much as admitted he made the calls.”

  “He doesn’t remember things. Tim showed him the bills, Leon assumed he made the calls.”

  “I frankly find that hard to believe.”

  She stood frowning. “There isn’t even a phone here.”

  “Well, there certainly used to be.”

  “And even if there was, anyone could have walked in and made those phone calls. That door’s not secure.”

  Bob MacLeod examined the door latch. He swung the door back and forth. The hinges meowed. “Hardly.”

  She lifted a corner of the army blanket from the bed. “And look at this. Someone’s been using the bed. Leon wouldn’t sleep here—he has a bed of his own. With a mattress and inner springs.”

  “Solving the mystery is step two,” Bob MacLeod said. “Step one is making sure there’s no publicity.” He nudged back the cuff of his suit jacket and scowled at his watch. “I have to be going.” He darted a kiss on her forehead. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The door slammed.

  She sat down on the edge of the camp bed. Her foot struck something. She looked down and saw a black plastic lump hiding under the bed. She crouched and pulled out the phone.