The 13th Juror

by John Lescroart

  It sounds strange, but during all this time we were trying to live normal lives. I mean, I was working with Harlan, I was his receptionist, thinking someday to be a hygienist—oh, you didn’t know that? Yes, that’s how that started. I didn’t plan it, to be unfaithful. That wasn’t who I thought I was. But everything with Ned was falling apart and Harlan was very nice to me. Gentle. So it was easy to keep the relationship hidden. It wasn’t like I had to sneak out at night. I mean, we’d just close the doors at lunch.

  And then, after we were together, he saw the . . . he saw what Ned had done and said I should report it, call the cops, do something. I kept telling him Ned hadn’t done it. They were accidents, that’s all.

  Well, you saw Harlan. He thinks you do everything you’re supposed to do and things somehow will work out. So finally, I think I’m in love with him—Harlan. I know he’s fat now, but in those days he was just big. I’ve always had this weakness for big men.

  Now I decide to wait until Ned isn’t drunk or stoned and try to talk to him, tell him I’m unhappy and can’t take him beating me anymore and I’m going to leave. I don’t mention Harlan, of course. Thank God. I tell him there’s no other man, nobody else. It’s not that. It’s just between him and me that we’re not working out.

  I kept thinking that if I don’t run away, if I’m reasonable, his reaction is going to be different.

  Which it was. He sits there in his chair for about an hour and then—real calm again, which should have been a warning—he says he’s going to go out for a while and think about things.

  By midnight he’s not home and I finally fall asleep.

  I wake up screaming, but there’s a sock or something in my mouth and I can’t breathe or make any noise and there’s this awful awful pain down . . . down in me . . . and Ned’s on top of me, holding me down.

  The next day I can’t move. My insides feel broken, ripped up. I still can’t breathe. There’s blood on the sheets and my hands are tied to the bed. I see that my closet is open and half the clothes are pulled out, cut into shreds, thrown around the room. On the floor I see the knife—it’s a butter knife—he’s used the dull end, poking it in me.

  I wake up again and he’s there, untying me, he’s straight again. Helps me get in the bath. I’m scared every second now. He’s being calm and says he can make things disappear without a trace. I’ll find out it’s true, he says.

  So I take a sick day—I couldn’t have gone in anyway—and then it’s the weekend and one of the nights Ned has scored some coke and he wants me to get high with him. We’ll have fun, he says. It’ll be like old times. What old times? I never used drugs.

  Well, I can’t do it. I’m so scared, I’m still hurting bad. Ned starts to get upset with me again—I’ve got to stop that. I can’t take any more, not right then, so I try to be nice, do what he wants, and he wants to have sex.

  Can you believe this? I’m pleading with him, saying I hurt real bad, but he says so what, I’m his wife, get on your back. And I do. And I’m sure at the moment I’m going to die.

  But I don’t. That was the worst, not dying. You know how many times I wished I had just died then? How many other times? I mean, truly die, not wake up, just be gone from all this? And believe me, once you feel that—like you really want to die—it’s not too far to want someone else to be dead. Why does it have to be me?

  I wake up sometime early and Ned is lying next to me, not moving. For a long time I watch him, thinking, hoping he might be dead. I pinch him in the leg and there’s no reaction. Then he snores or snorts or something. But the idea stays, the germ of it.

  A couple of days go by and I’m starting to heal and things look different, the way they do. No one really wants to believe there’s no hope, do they? Even though, really, there isn’t.

  I’m back at work, I’m putting Harlan off with some excuse and suddenly I realize I haven’t seen Boots—Boots was my cat—I haven’t seen her in days. Sitting at the front desk at Harlan’s, then, all of a sudden, I know. And then I know, I just know, the only way out, what I have to do.

  Don’t kid yourself, there wasn’t any escape. Ned can make things disappear without a trace. He was proving it. I was next.

  I arrange it so he thinks we’re going to get high. I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult, I’ll be a fun person the way I used to be . . .

  This time it’s easy. I give him the shot, take a long hot shower, drive out to the beach and bury the stuff, go to my parents’ house for breakfast—just visiting, which I still did back then. When I get back home I call the police, tell them my husband’s had an accident.

  The tiny airless interview room smelled of sweat and wet wool.

  Freeman sat, legs crossed, in the chair that he had pushed back against the wall in the corner away from the door.

  Hardy’s mouth was dry, his back stiff. He had not moved a muscle in fifteen minutes. He found that he believed every word she had said, and was struggling to keep his perspective. “You could probably have pled that as a Murder Two,” he said, “which would take it out of capital.”

  Freeman said, “We got a dismissal. That takes it out of capital, too.”

  “I don’t care what the law says.” Jennifer brushed her hair away from her face. “I knew him. There was no other way.”

  “You should have tried calling the police. They could have done something.” Hardy, arguing against himself now, realized how lame it sounded.

  Jennifer allowed a one-note laugh. “No they couldn’t. Don’t you understand? This had been going on for two years and they couldn’t have done a damn thing even if they wanted to, even if they believed me.”

  “Why wouldn’t they believe you?”

  “Because that’s not how it really works. You should know better. You think the law’s here to protect potential victims? Wrong. What the law does is punish people who’ve already broken the law. Until somebody’s already hurt or killed, they’ve got no business—”

  “But you were hurt. And Ned did break the law, he would have been punished—”

  “Jesus, in your dreams.” Jennifer looked to Freeman. “Is this guy for real? Does he live in the real world?”

  “I live in the real world, Jennifer, and you can’t—”

  “Oh? Well, listen, here’s the real world. If I’m lucky, Ned gets no bail—impossible right there—and then gets a year, if that, for a first offense. Meanwhile I’ve got maybe a year to move, change my name and my life. Then, guess what—Ned gets out of jail and comes and gets me, wherever I am, and I disappear just like Boots. My cat. Do I have to explain this? Do I have to draw you a picture? I’m the one whose life is ruined, if I stay alive.”

  Hardy leaned back in the chair and tried to stretch the crick from his neck. In the guards’ room through the glass a woman had just come in for the night shift and was shaking out her raincoat, hanging it on a peg by the door, saying something to somebody outside of Hardy’s vision.

  “I don’t know. From my perspective, I’d say Matt’s life is pretty ruined. Even if Larry was beating you—”

  “I’ve told you, Larry wasn’t beating me,” she said, glaring at him.

  Hardy slammed the table with the flat of his palm. “Oh, cut the shit, Jennifer!” He was standing now. The chair tipped, crashed to the floor behind him. “I know for certain that Larry was beating you. I know the doctors you went to see and I know the lies you told them.”

  He picked up his briefcase and grabbed for the chair to set it upright. Freeman still hadn’t said a word.

  “I did not kill my son—”

  “Good for you.”

  “I didn’t kill Larry, either.”

  “Or if you did, I’m sure you had a good reason.”

  “I didn’t, goddamn it, I didn’t kill them. I have no idea who did.”

  Suddenly she was in his face, coming at him, arms flailing. He tried to back away but in the constrained space there was nowhere to go. The back of his knees hit the chair behind him and he lost his
balance, falling over.

  Somehow Freeman had gotten between them and maneuvered Jennifer back down into her seat, giving the high sign that everything was all right to the guards through the window. Hardy was pulling himself up, and Freeman, who was aware that he stood blocking the exit, said that in his experience every trial worth its salt produced at least one good display of honest emotion. “I think we can all get through this,” he said. “It’s to all our advantage.”

  It had been a tense five minutes, but they were all seated again, clustered around the table. Hardy had agreed to talk, to listen. Now he stared at his partner. “You don’t care what, in fact, happened, David. You’ve made that point a hundred times.”

  “No, that’s not strictly true. What I said was that, legally, it doesn’t matter what the facts are if they can’t be proven. Personally, though, I care. I care a great deal. It’s why I’m a lawyer. Which is telling you more than you deserve to know. I could ruin my reputation.”

  Hardy turned to Jennifer. “Here’s a quick-quiz question: Did Larry beat you or not?”

  “Yes.” Finally.

  “A lot?”

  She nodded. “But if I admitted that, especially with what happened with Ned, no jury would believe I didn’t kill Larry, too.”

  This was the issue. Jennifer had killed Ned because he beat her. Larry, too, had beaten her, and she was contending, insisting, that she had not killed him.

  “I had to lie,” she said. “Once it came out that they both hit me . . . ”

  “What’s to make me think you’re not lying now?”

  “I’m not lying now. I’m telling you.”

  “All you’re doing is telling me another version. Whatever flies this week.”

  “Diz.” Freeman put a hand on his sleeve. “Please. Look at it strategically. She’s free on Ned. We’re halfway there. She certainly didn’t kill her own boy. Accident or not. She wasn’t any part of that. I think you and I both believe that.”

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore, David.”

  Jennifer put her hand on his other arm. “I did what I did with Ned almost ten years ago.” She was talking quietly, almost whispering, not trying to look at him to persuade with her eyes, which he took as a good sign. “If I had a choice, as you say I did, well, then at least you should believe that I didn’t think I had a choice. I was scared for my life and I didn’t know what to do—I thought there was no other way out.

  “With Larry, it hadn’t gotten to that yet. Maybe it would have. I don’t know. I wanted to think not. It’s why I started seeing Ken Lightner, trying to make the family work. I’m screwed up, I admit, I bring things on myself. Even Ken tells me I’m too much a victim. I was trying to change . . . And then somebody . . . somebody kills Larry, and my son, and out of the blue I’m arrested for it. And suddenly I’m supposed to trust my whole life to two men I didn’t even know six months ago? No way. Men haven’t been so good to me, you might have noticed, so I made my own plan and stuck with it.”

  Hardy crossed his arms. “I did notice one other thing, though. You managed to tell David here the truth.”

  Freeman cut in. “I sandbagged her, Diz. That’s how I work. It came out.”

  “And you didn’t tell me.”

  “That was my decision, not hers. Okay, it was a mistake on my part, bad judgment. I should have included you, but I didn’t think you’d need to know until the penalty phase, if then.”

  “Need to know, huh?” It had become dark outside through the guardroom window. Friday night. The weekend lay ahead, with time to decide what he was going to do. Hardy let out a long breath. He turned to Jennifer. “If you have any other secrets, Jennifer, now would be a good time to talk about them.”

  But the veil had come down again, her passion spent. “Just find out who killed my baby, would you? Can you do that?”

  33

  He didn’t know what he was doing, driving in the morning rain out California to Miz Carter’s, then changing his mind, turning down through Golden Gate Park, avoiding the tree limbs that littered Kennedy Drive, knocked down by the force of the storm. He didn’t really know where he was going. Maybe his brain had shut down from lack of sleep.

  It all had come down to whether he believed her. This time. Even though he knew she had lied to him—about damn near everything—from the beginning. Could he still believe her?

  He thought he did. That was what had kept him awake, tossing next to Frannie until the clouds’ gray became visible out their bedroom window.

  He had told Freeman that Jennifer’s story was flawed, but the truth was that he found it credible. He’d been around and around on it, and every time it came up more logically sound.

  Jennifer had to kill Ned. From her perspective, it was pure self-defense. She truly believed he was going to kill her, and why wouldn’t she?

  She’d tried to run away and he’d tracked her down. Then she’d told him she was going to leave and he’d beaten her almost to death, violated her with the blunt end of a kitchen knife, killed her cat as an obvious, classic threat, and threatened her with her own death if she did anything to stop the rampage.

  He had read everything Lightner had given him, plus twenty or thirty other articles and briefs on the subject. Battered women did not feel like they could get away. They were forever trapped in a situation from which they could literally neither run nor hide, and which would someday, in all probability, kill them.

  Hardy believed Freeman could prove that Jennifer’s taking Ned’s life had been justifiable, a sometimes valid form of self-defense that the courts had begun to recognize. Even with Judge Villars, even with the legislature failing to pass a law codifying BWS as a defense, Hardy was fairly confident they could get Jennifer off. Certainly, as he had pointed out, no jury in the State of California would call for the death penalty.

  Jennifer was not stupid. She knew that if she agreed to assert the battered woman syndrome, then her life, at least, would be removed from the equation—it would no longer be a capital case.

  So the recurring question was: Why wouldn’t she plead to it? Her reason was that it implied a defense against guilt, and she said she had no reason for a defense against something she hadn’t done.

  And she could not very well plead to one murder and not the other. No one would believe her. Powell would laugh at it. A jury would be insulted. No judge would be sympathetic. Yet Hardy found himself believing it. Jennifer Witt did not kill her son. She had not been there when he had been killed. She had known nothing about it. Matt rang true, and if he bought that—which was not at all the same as believing a jury would buy it—then, working backward, all the other apparent duplicity made a perverse kind of sense.

  She could not admit to any similarities, especially insofar as battery, between her lives with Ned and with Larry, especially once they’d gotten as far as trial.

  There was no evidence that she had been beaten, and if they admitted at trial that she had been, in the jury’s mind that would only make it more likely that she had killed both of her husbands. So her position had to be that no one had ever abused her. It was the only story that worked . . . And of course, truthful or not, David Freeman the lawyer gobbled it up and made it his own.

  There was a pause in the downpour. Hardy was wearing tennis shoes, jeans and a green waterproof jacket. He got out of his car, and from where he stood, near the top of Olympia up the block from Jennifer’s house, he could see a band of blue widening at the horizon. Even this early in the morning, and it was before seven, the air was strangely humid and heavy, laden with the smell of eucalyptus.

  He didn’t know why he had driven out here, or what, if anything, he expected to find or accomplish. Lightheaded, he walked from his car up past the Witt house to the edge of the grove surrounding Twin Peaks, leading up to Sutro Tower, the source of the eucalyptus scent. A mother deer and her two fawns were rooting through the foliage there, fifty or sixty feet back into the trees.

  The deer bolted, startled, di
sappearing into the woods. In the deep shade, Hardy blinked his stinging eyes, trying to clear his vision, stunned to see Jennifer Witt in a bright blue jogging outfit break from the cover of the trees and run toward him on the trail, then past him—no, close up it wasn’t, of course, her—out to the street, where whoever it was turned down Olympia.

  As he stood there, drizzle began to fall again and he ran, following her footsteps, around the corner and down the long block to his car. The woman, jogging faster than Hardy could sprint, had turned downhill on Clarendon.

  The car spun on the wet pavement, then straightened. Hardy took the corner at Olympia and hydroplaned again, his wheels this time bouncing off the concrete center-divider before he got the car under control again.

  He was alongside the woman, slowing down and honking his horn, motioning for her to pull over. She flipped him off, stole a glance at her watch and kept going.

  Hardy slowed, rolled down his passenger window and gunned it up to her again, honking. “I need help,” he called out to her. Driving ahead another hundred yards, he pulled to the curb, throwing open his door and getting out. He held his hands wide, spread out at shoulder height, offering no threat. The woman slowed abruptly, stopping fifty feet up the street. The rain started coming in sheets.

  “What?” she gasped. “Can’t you see I’m trying to run?” Hardy took a step toward her and she put her hand to her hip. “I’ve got Mace here on my belt and I’ll use it.”

  “I need to ask you a question.”

  A car passed going the other direction, slowed to look, then sped up the street.

  “A question?” She shook her head in disbelief. “Christ, this city.”

  “It might save a woman’s life.”

  “Sure it will.” She checked her wristwatch again. “Who the hell are you? Leave me alone.”