VC04 - Jury Double

by Edward Stewart

  “That’s my home. I wanted to make sure my son was safe.”

  “Are you totally ignorant of the law, or do you just think it doesn’t apply to you?”

  “I’m not completely ignorant. My father’s a lawyer. You may know him. Leon Brandsetter?”

  Judge Bernheim stiffened. “You’re his daughter?”

  “One of them.”

  “You were asked in voir dire if there were any lawyers in your family. Why in God’s name didn’t you say yes? You’d have been excused and we wouldn’t be going through all this.”

  Don’t tell me—Kyra missed a chance to get off the jury? “I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Evidently. What’s your phone number?”

  “My phone—?” For one whirlpooling moment Anne couldn’t remember Kyra’s number. And then it popped into her memory.

  The judge dialed and grimaced. “Busy.” She dialed zero, identified herself, and asked the operator to interrupt.

  “I see.” She lowered the receiver and glanced up. “That line’s out of order.”

  Anne’s mind ricocheted between terrifying possibilities. “I left Toby with my sister. They could be at her place.” She managed to remember her own number.

  The judge dialed. Anne sat forward on the chair, straining to overhear.

  After a moment the judge cleared her throat. “Yes. This is Judge Gina Bernheim.” She had the voice of someone who loathed speaking to answering machines. “I’m calling for …” She covered the receiver. “What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Kyra—” Anne bit her tongue.

  “Your sister, Mrs. Talbot.”

  “Anne Bingham.”

  “I’m calling for Anne Bingham. This is an emergency. Would you please get in touch with me as soon as possible?” The judge left her number.

  There was a knock on the door. A young man in blue jeans and a Brooks Brothers shirt handed the judge a printout. She scanned rapidly. Her gaze swung around to Anne. “According to the record, there’ve been no calls to your room since you were sequestered.”

  “The record is mistaken, Your Honor.”

  Judge Bernheim glanced at her assistant.

  “There’s a call block on sequestered jurors’ rooms,” he explained. “Caller I.D. automatically registers any incoming attempts. If anyone had placed a call to your room, it wouldn’t have gotten through, but there’d be a record of their number and the time they tried.”

  Anne gritted her teeth. “I understand how the system’s supposed to work—but it didn’t work tonight.”

  The judge’s eyes iced over. “When you monkey with justice, Mrs. Talbot, you’re monkeying with the DNA of civilization. You’re also monkeying with me. I have one word of free legal advice: don’t. We’d better have a talk with that lawyer of yours. What’s his number?”

  Twenty minutes later, Mark Wells burst into the room wearing squash shorts and a windbreaker. “I apologize for my clothes, Your Honor.” He was out of breath; sweat had plastered locks of brown hair to his forehead.

  “Sorry to interrupt your game,” Judge Bernheim said. “Have a seat, Mr. Wells.”

  Mark sat in the chair beside Anne and flashed her a smile.

  In a rapid monotone, Judge Bernheim summarized the situation. She handed Mark the telephone printout. “As you can see, there’s no record of any phone call.”

  “Yes, I see.” He darted Anne a pained look.

  “Once a jury is impaneled,” Judge Bernheim said, “any attempt to get off fraudulently is a felony.”

  “Your Honor, I doubt my client was fully aware of the legal implications of her action.”

  “My action?” Anne cried. “Their recording system goofed! There was a phone call!”

  “Kyra … please.” Mark’s hands made placating gestures. “Let me handle this?”

  “Why don’t you take Mrs. Talbot into the next room,” Judge Bernheim suggested. “Talk with her.”

  The door closed, and they were alone in the walnut-paneled anteroom. Anne handed Mark a dollar.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your retainer. We’re covered now by client-attorney privilege, right?”

  “We are.” Mark tucked the dollar into his billfold. “So you might as well tell me the truth. Is this another attempt to get off the jury, or did you really get a threatening call?”

  “I’m not lying. I didn’t recognize the voice. It could have been a man or a woman. It sounded … disguised. They said if I didn’t vote to acquit—I’d never see Toby alive again. Mark, help me.”

  “I’ll do everything I can.”

  “Get me off this jury. I’ve got to warn Kyra.”

  His brow furrowed. “Warn Kyra!”

  “And if it’s too late for that, I’ve got to find Toby.”

  “Wait a minute. You said ‘warn Kyra.’”

  She nodded. “Because I’m not Kyra. I’m Anne.”

  His eyes skittered disbelievingly across her face.

  “Last Tuesday I took my sister’s place on the jury.”

  His face turned ashen. “That’s crazy. That’s irresponsible. Not to mention illegal.”

  “She had an overloaded schedule and we thought you’d get her off—me off.”

  “My God—don’t you realize what you two have done? Not only have you caused a mistrial—you’ve probably aborted Gina Bernheim’s bid for a seat on the Supreme Court. There’s only one way you can get off this jury now. You have to tell her everything.”

  She stood by the window, staring down at the streetlights in Foley Square. “And if I tell her everything—what happens?”

  “There’ll be a mistrial. You’ll be guilty of felony and conspiracy to commit felony.”

  “Conspiring with Kyra?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Which makes her a felon too?”

  “Of course.”

  “And who gets custody of Toby if Kyra’s a felon?”

  “She’ll lose him. Catch will get custody.”

  Anne felt a tightening in her chest. “That would kill her,” She turned. “I can’t do it to her.”

  “You mean you’re not going to tell the judge?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll keep quiet and stay on the jury. You’ll have to warn Kyra.”

  “As your lawyer, Anne, it’s my duty to advise you that—”

  “As my lawyer, you can’t repeat anything I’ve told you.” She took his hand. “Come on.”

  Judge Bernheim’s eyes were expectant as Anne and Mark stepped through the door.

  “Your Honor,” Anne said, “I have to make an admission. There was no threatening phone call.”

  Gina Bernheim bristled with the indignation of a queen on her throne. “You’re admitting you lied?”

  “My client deeply regrets her action,” Mark said.

  The judge tapped a ballpoint pen on the edge of her desk. “Your client is in grave trouble, Mr. Wells.”

  “My client appeals to the understanding and compassion of the court.”

  The judge studied Anne skeptically. “Mrs. Talbot, it’s within my discretion to overlook your actions. But if I do so, I must have your assurance and your attorney’s that you’ll discuss tonight’s events with no one.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sunday, September 22

  7:10 A.M.

  FOOTSTEPS. SOMETHING FELL TO the floor with a clatter. Panic slid over Anne like a new layer of skin. She sneaked one eye open.

  Morning light slatted the walls of room 1818. Shoshana rose up from between the beds, slipping a cassette into a Walkman. The earphones had yellow Mickey Mouse ears. The yellow matched her sweatshirt top. It didn’t match her spinach-green spandex bottoms.

  “Halloween?” Anne mumbled. “Already?”

  “Lara and Abe and I and one of the guards are going for a jog. Why don’t you come? It’ll fine-tune your system.”

  There was something too bright and unpitying about Shoshana’s energy—it reminded Anne of the blade
s of a thresher, mowing down all laggards and late risers.

  “I’ll take a rain check.” She pulled the pillow over her head.

  “Kyra Talbot’s line is out of order.” Tommy Thomas showed the super his work order. “We have to get into the apartment.”

  The super mused over the computer-generated order. “Who reported this? Because there hasn’t been anyone in that apartment for two days.”

  “Our computer reported it.”

  The super’s swarthy face wrinkled and his eyes went to Cardozo. “And who are you?”

  Cardozo handed over the fake Nynex I.D. that Tommy had provided him.

  Tommy Thomas was Cardozo’s telephone connection. The phone company, unlike the police, didn’t need a court order to get into a private residence; all it needed was the wrong kind of busy signal. Cardozo had done Tommy a few favors over the years; Tommy owed him a few. This was one of them.

  The super pulled his fingers through his frizzy brown hair. “No one else in the building has complained.”

  “It’s not affecting other phones in the building.” Tommy Thomas’s sandy-brown hair was salon-cut and he wore a lightweight dark gray suit and carried a small leather tool case. He was an extremely trustworthy-looking guy. “It’s affecting phones in the neighborhood.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Mr. Marcowitz,” Tommy said, “this is an emergency.”

  The super reached up to the wall of his office, where tenants’ duplicate keys hung. “Come with me.”

  When no one answered the buzzer, the super unlocked the door. “Mrs. Talbot?” he shouted.

  No answer.

  “Let me know when you’re through,” he said.

  Cardozo stepped into the apartment. Despite the disorder, he had to marvel at the sheer abundance of the lifestyle: deep chairs and sofas; oriental rugs; tabletops loaded with silver and crystal; a forty-inch TV and state-of-the-art home electronics; shelves crammed with books and CDs.

  “No matter how you slice it,” Tommy Thomas said, “more is more.”

  Cardozo nodded.

  The kitchen was a warehouse of cooking and cutting and grinding and juicing appliances. The bedrooms had personal computers. The shelves in the master bathroom looked like a Madison Avenue cosmetics-and-bath shop.

  Cardozo examined a photo cube on the mirrored vanity. All the snapshots showed the same freckle-faced towheaded boy, running, jumping, throwing a Frisbee. He took a shot of the boy reading a comic book and slid it carefully into the credit-card pocket of his wallet.

  “Eureka.” Tommy Thomas had found a receiver underneath the canopied bed. The phone lay on the floor two feet away. “This got knocked off the table.”

  A marmalade cat scurried across the rug into the hallway.

  “And I think the perpetrator just got away.”

  At nine-fifteen, Mark Wells folded the Week in Review section of the New York Times, came in from the terrace to his living room, and once again dialed Kyra’s phone number. This time her machine picked up, chirpy and indomitable. “Hi. This is Kyra. There’s no one home. If you want to speak to me, or Toby, or Juliana, please leave a message at the beep and one of us will get back to you.”

  Mark frowned. It didn’t make sense to him. The line had been busy last night, and busy again at seven this morning—so someone must have been home and gone out again.

  Or was Kyra screening her calls, hiding behind her answering machine?

  “If anyone’s there, pick up. It’s Mark. Emergency.”

  No pickup.

  “Look, I’ve spoken with Anne. I know everything and naturally I’m concerned. What’s going on? Where are you? Phone me. Leave a message. Please.”

  They’re letting us see a movie this afternoon,” Anne told Shoshana. “Are you coming?”

  “I wasn’t planning to. It sounds like one of those shoot-’em-ups.”

  “Please come. I have to do something—and I need help.”

  On the giant screen, a white stretch limo rammed into a hearse. Brakes squealed. Machine guns rattled. A three-hundred-pound male comedian, dressed as a nun, crawled out from under a pushcart of stuffed O.J. dolls.

  Four rows from the rear of the darkened theater, Anne nudged Shoshana and whispered, “Let’s go.”

  Anne squeezed past the knees of other jurors. “Excuse me.” She waited a moment in the aisle.

  Shoshana caught up and they climbed the incline toward the red EXIT sign. A female jury guard stepped into their path.

  “We’re going to the ladies’ room;” Anne said.

  The guard nodded. “Downstairs to your left.”

  A red velvet corridor brought them to a small, deserted art deco lounge. A circus strong-man logo decorated one door; a lissome pinup girl the other. Anne pushed the pinup girl.

  The small black-and-white tiled washroom had two sinks and two stalls, both open. The air carried an eye-bashing sting of camphor.

  “Close one of the stall doors and wait by the sink,” Anne said. “If anyone tries to go into that stall, tell them I’m using it and you’re waiting for me.”

  Shoshana’s face was dubious. “And where are you going to be?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  In keeping with the nostalgia motif of the theater’s decor, the phone booth was an old-fashioned World War II design with a little fan that went on when Anne closed the folding door. She dropped a quarter into the slot and pushed the buttons for Kyra’s number.

  The line was busy.

  She hung up, waited forty-five seconds, and tried again.

  Still busy.

  See, she told herself, everything’s okay—Kyra wouldn’t be chatting on the phone if there was any kind of trouble.

  She waited thirty seconds and tried Kyra’s number again.

  Still busy. She pushed zero. “Operator—could you verify a number for me?” She gave Kyra’s number.

  “That line is busy,” the operator said.

  “There’s conversation on the line?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Anne consulted her watch. There was still eighty minutes till the movie broke.

  She decided to chance it.

  Spurred by the promise of a ten-dollar tip, the taxi driver avoided traffic jams and street fairs and slam-braked to a stop beside a little flower-bordered park in Greenwich Village. “Close enough?”

  Anne shoved fifteen dollars into the change gate. “Fine.” The light was against her, but there was a break in traffic. She ran.

  Outside the red-brick high-rise, the doorman leaned against a pillar, smoking a cigarette. The name Joey was lettered in gold script on his uniform lapel. “In a serious rush today, Kyra?”

  “You know it.” Anne opened her purse and made a show of searching through it. “Damn. I left my key in the apartment. Is Toby up there?”

  “Haven’t seen the Tobester since Friday night.”

  “Could you let me in?”

  “No problema.” Joey flicked his cigarette into the gutter. “You go on up and I’ll get the passkey.”

  Anne crossed the lobby.

  “Mrs. Talbot,” a gray-haired but young-faced woman called from the white leather sofa. “We haven’t been formally introduced, but I know your son, Toby? I’m Sadie Hooper, your neighbor in Nine-J?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Hooper?”

  “I noticed you had a stack of games piled in the corridor Friday night? If you’re throwing out any toys or games, we could use them at the community center.”

  “I’ll remember that, Mrs. Hooper.”

  “Sadie. Please.”

  Anne stepped into the elevator and pressed nine.

  Jumbled sections of Saturday’s and Sunday’s New York Times lay piled on Kyra’s doormat. Anne pressed the buzzer.

  No answer. Joey arrived with the key and opened the door.

  “Thanks, Joey.” She picked up all the pieces of the Times and laid them on the hall table.

  “Looks like you could use a cleanup crew in
here.”

  Was that a hint for moonlighting cash? “I’ll let you know, Joey. Thanks.” Smile nailed to her face, she closed the door behind him, firmly.

  She stood in the hallway. “Hello? Anyone home?”

  Whoever had been on the phone must have gone out again.

  She walked quickly to Toby’s room. The toys and games were gone. The closet was open. There were no clothes on the hangers, and the shelves were bare.

  She threw open the closet door in Juliana’s room. There was not a shoe, not a dress, not a single article of clothing.

  She went to Kyra’s room. The closets and drawers were full, but Kyra kept them overstuffed and it was hard to tell if any clothes were missing. The bathroom shelves and the top of the dressing table seemed as expensively cluttered as ever.

  She heard a scurrying sound beneath the bed. She knelt down and reached into the dark space. Something furry pounced on her hand. She drew her arm back. Toby’s kitten was hanging on to her wrist. She cradled him and petted him.

  “Hey, Max, where’d everyone go?”

  Her eye fell on the answering machine. She saw that two messages had come in. She pressed replay.

  “If anyone’s there, pick up. It’s Mark. …”

  She fast-forwarded to the second message. “Would you like an all-expenses paid vacation in sunny Saint Kitts? Of course you would.” She understood why the line had been busy. The sales pitch went on four minutes. She gritted her teeth and pressed reset.

  The cat, leaping and dashing across the bedspread, had discovered something wedged between the pillows and the quilted headboard.

  “What have you found, Max?” She lifted a pillow, and there was Kyra’s cellular phone.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  6:40 P.M.

  “COULD I ASK YOU a favor? Would you double-bag those?”

  The long line behind him snaked halfway down the baked goods and canned fruits aisle. Only two other checkouts were open, and they were equally crowded.

  The checkout girl gave him a sullenly minimal glance and began bagging the groceries into double plastic bags.

  “We forgot potato chips,” Toby said.