“Absolutely,” Sara said, sitting up straight in the seat across the desk.
“What we have here,” Jolie explained, “is every potential juror in the county, recorded into the computer, a demographic rundown on sex, age, occupation, race, political affiliation if known, organizations belonged to if known, religion if known, all those things that bundle together to make each and every one of us a unique individual, in a group that can be targeted.”
“Like advertising.”
“Exactly. As each juror is picked over there, Warren’s assistants over here go into the computer to find every other voter who closely fits that juror’s demographics. Then we send people out to hire one of those voters as a consultant.”
“For all twelve jurors?”
“Fourteen. We do the alternates, too. Then, for the length of the trial, those fourteen people see and hear everything the jury sees and hears, and nothing else. If the jury isn’t told something, our people aren’t told it.”
“They imitate the jury.”
“We sure hope so,” Jolie said. “At the end of every day’s session, we get together with the shadow jury in the conference room there and see what they think of what happened in court that day. We debrief them. And after that, we try different tactics on them for the next day, see how they react. If they don’t want to see certain pictures, for instance, then the next day we don’t show those pictures to the jury. But if they do want to see them, and if those pictures make them feel better about Ray Jones, then we bring them to court and flash them around.”
“This is an expensive technique,” Sara suggested.
Jolie smiled; not a pretty sight. “Our aim,” she said, “is the finest justice money can buy.”
“But does it work?”
“Ask me after the trial. In the past, it’s usually seemed to work.”
“You mean, it’s common in trials for the defense to have shadow juries?”
“Only among millionaires,” Jolie said.
So money could do a lot, but it couldn’t necessarily do everything. No matter how much Ray Jones and his team might spend on putting together a shadow jury, the state of Missouri had the resources and the power to put together the real jury. For every lawyer, investigator, specialist, and clerk the Warren Thurbridge team could deploy, the state could deploy a hundred. No matter how much money Ray Jones could spend at his most lavish or most desperate, the state would outspend him as a matter of course. And if he were a guy without money, in this situation, the state would still spend just as much and fight just as hard.
At lunchtime, it had been gently suggested that Sara take a walk, which she did, finding a lunch counter out on the main street, half a block from the courthouse. (It must be good; look at all the pickups angle-parked out front.) Back in the office, she knew, they would all be trying to figure out what to do about this brand-new murder charge against Ray Jones, and while she’d love to be there for that discussion, she could understand why they’d be happier—if they could be happy at all under the circumstances—without her.
After lunch, she’d headed for court, and there was the crowd from the bus at last in the spectator seats, a particularly scruffy bunch among all the lawyers and other official types, like a medieval troupe of errant minstrels wandering into Versailles. (Sara wrote that down, then crossed it out.)
The afternoon had been, in a word (which Sara didn’t bother to write down), tedious. Lawyers in the process of questioning potential jurors operate from such bizarre mind-sets and follow such complex and arcane private agendas that there’s nothing for an observer to hold on to, no story being told, no melody playing out. Every time Sara looked around, the faces of all the musicians had the same inward living-dead look as they quietly beat time with a finger or foot, playing songs in their heads, living in some recording studio or on some blue-and-red-lit stage, light-years from here.
But at last, the day in court came to an end. Riding back to Branson, drained by doubt and monotony and confusion, the gang in the bus sat silent, glumly brooding about life or fate or whatever it is unhappy, frustrated people brood about, and Sara kept her own good cheer—she was the fly on the wall! she was the fly on the wall!—absolutely to herself until after they’d dropped her at Jjeepers!, outside the guard shack entrance to Porte Regal, where she’d left the rental. She stood on the parking-lot asphalt in the late-afternoon sun and waved at the bus, and Cal and Jolie and a few others waved dispiritedly back, and she maintained her solemn face as the bus drove on through the gate.
It wasn’t until she was in the car and driving away up 165 toward the Lodge of the Ozarks that she permitted herself to release the broad grin that had been struggling to emerge all afternoon. Driving along in her packet of silence and air conditioning, she chuckled, she chortled, and she imagined the conversation to come with Jack, his astonishment and admiration at her brilliant good luck. She couldn’t help it; she burst into song: “Baby!” she sang, belting it out at the top of her voice. “Baby!” pounding the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. “Baby, would I lie?”
21
Jury selection took all of Wednesday and most of Thursday. Warren Thurbridge and his defense team played the voir dire like a Wurlitzer, prying out the prejudices and the eccentricities of the potential jurors, looking for strengths and weaknesses, potential sympathy, potential hostility. At the end of the process, midafternoon Thursday, they were reasonably well pleased with their performance. Nine of the jurors they were not unhappy to have on the panel, three more they could live with, one could probably be neutralized by the interaction of the jury room, and as for the fourteenth, all they could hope was for that God-fearing harridan to be chosen one of the two alternates when that cull was made at the end of the trial. In any event, Warren and his team felt they had done reasonably well in this opening round and were slightly ahead of the other side.
The other side, of course, was the people of the state of Missouri, though not all of them were in court. Legally speaking, Taney is a third-class county, which means the Taney County prosecuting attorney is a part-timer, with a private practice of his own to think about in addition to the county’s business. The current holder of the office, Buford Delray, had requested the assistance of a criminal-trial specialist from the state attorney general’s office, and his request had been granted in the form of a Lincolnesque gentleman named Fred Heffner, whose record, so far as the Thurbridge team could discover, seemed to be limited almost completely to the prosecution of drug couriers picked up by the state police in the course of traffic stops along Route 65, a known drug transportation lane north out of Arkansas, or on Interstate 44, a similar through route crossing Missouri east-west from Springfield to St. Louis.
This meant the Thurbridge team did not look upon the arrival of Fred Heffner as a threat likely to cause sleepless nights among the partisans of Ray Jones. Of course, Buford Delray did also have at his command the assistance of the Missouri Highway Patrol, the Taney County Sheriff’s Department, and, since the body had been found in water and with water inside it, the Missouri Water Patrol—a fairly formidable array, all in all.
What that array might be doing with itself on Thursday afternoon, after the close of court, Warren neither knew nor much cared, but what he was doing was getting to know the shadow jury.
As each actual juror had been agreed upon by prosecution and defense and accepted by Judge Quigley, the word had flashed from the courtroom to Warren’s offices, where the staff had at once pored through its computer files, finding the half dozen or so other Taney County voters who most closely matched the demographic profile of the just-empaneled juror. Staff members then hopped into cars and went in search of these people, with a simple question to ask: How would you like to take a vacation for the next week or two, live all expenses paid in a nice motel, have your meals provided, and be guaranteed an exciting, if unpublicized, part in the famous Ray Jones murder trial? Some restrictions apply: You won’t be allowed to read a paper or wa
tch TV or communicate with family and friends until the trial is over. But you’ll be paid well—better than the state pays its real jurors, who have no choice—and you’ll actually get to meet Ray Jones his own self!
Child’s play. There were very few turndowns among the potential shadows, partly because everybody likes to have a role in an ongoing drama, but mainly because most people aren’t doing much of anything, anyway. Take a couple of weeks off from this life? You betcha!
Court adjourned on Thursday at 2:25 P.M., and at 6:30 Warren, bringing Ray Jones his own self along, walked into the conference room in the former furniture store to greet the fourteen people sitting around with grins on their faces as though Ed McMahon had just called them personally to say, “No shit, now, this time you are a winner!”
“You all know Ray Jones,” Warren said unnecessarily.
“Hi,” Ray said generally, waving a casual hand and grinning a casual grin.
“Hi, hello, hi, Ray,” they all said back.
Warren said, “I’m Ray’s defense attorney in the trial just getting under way here, my name is Warren Thurbridge, and I want to tell you right now, for both Ray and myself, how pleased I am, and how grateful, that you folks have consented to take time from your busy schedules to come in here for the duration of the trial and help us see that justice is done.”
They all looked solemn at that, prepared to do their duty come hell or high water. The fact was, however, that even though there’s nothing illegal or underhanded about the use of a shadow jury in a felony trial, the jurors all had the sneaky feeling there ought to be, and the idea that they were part of the process of pulling a fast one made them feel giggly all over.
Warren went on to explain the concept of a shadow jury, and one woman raised her hand to ask, “Does this mean we’re going to be in court every day?”
“No, I’m sorry,” he told her. “I wish we could do it like that, but we just can’t. What we’ll do is, we’ll videotape the proceedings every day and then we’ll all gather in this room and you’ll watch the tape; you’ll see and hear everything the jury saw and heard that day. And then we’ll discuss it.”
A laconic fellow with a big nose and some kind of English or Irish accent said, “You mean, we won’t be here in the daytime at all?”
“You’re going to have your days free,” Warren assured him, “at the motel. There’s a nice pool there, a well-equipped game room, and we’ll get you any movie at all you want to watch on the VCR. I’m sorry you won’t be able to hang out with the other guests or anybody at all except your own group and our staff, but those are the same conditions the regular jury faces, and that’s what we’re trying for here, to get you people as close to the actual jury as we possibly can.”
There were a few more questions of a housekeeping nature, and one woman briefly seemed ready to quit, not having understood the concept of sequestering until about the eleventh time it was explained to her, but a couple of the other shadows assured her the whole thing would be fun and a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so she settled down, and that was that.
Then Ray Jones spoke to the group, while Warren stood to one side and looked them over, pleased. “After this is all over,” Ray told them, “we can get to know one another better, but for right now Mr. Thurbridge here tells me I have to keep my distance from you nice folks, for fear you’ll like me more than the other jury over there does.” Grinning, shrugging, he said, “Or maybe like me less—that could happen, too. So all I want to say now is, I’m real thankful for your help in my time of trouble and I just hope we can all have a victory celebration together out to my place when this is all over. Thank you.”
The woman who hadn’t understood sequester raised a timid hand. Ray grinned and pointed to her and she said, “Ray, would you sing us a song?”
This was a surprise. Ray and Warren looked at one another, both stuck for a second, and then Warren smiled at the woman and shook his head and said, “Mrs. Carlyle, Ray isn’t singing for the regular jury. We’re trying to make these groups as parallel as possible.”
One of the other jurors, a scrawny little retired postal worker named Juggs, said, “The trial won’t start till tomorrow. I bet Ray Jones could sing us a song today.”
Warren, not liking loss of control like this, was about to turn down the request a second time, but Ray stepped in, saying, “Well, I think I could. I didn’t bring my guitar with me, but let’s see if I can carry a tune without help.” He smiled at each and every one of the shadows. “You know,” he said, “most of my songs are a little comical or irreverent or whatever, but I have my serious side, as well. You may know this song from one of my albums. I don’t sing it all the time, just at special occasions, and I guess this is one. If you know the song and feel like joining in, you’re welcome.”
Warren stepped back, the smile frozen on his face. What the hell was Ray going to do now?
A cappella, Ray sang:
Everything we have, we have from Jesus.
Everything we are we are through Him.
Everything we do, you know He sees us.
He sees me when I’m sending out this hymn.
He is known to many different people.
Buddha, Mazda, Mithra, all are Him.
From tepee, temple, tower, and from steeple,
Everybody sings this mighty hymn.
Are you born in the blood of the Lamb?
I am, oh, I am.
Are you saved in the bosom of Him?
I am, oh, I am.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the conference room.
22
Thursday afternoon, it was Sara’s job to play good cop with the Weekly Galaxy people, Jack having so spectacularly played bad cop with them the day before by photographing their home base in a drive-by shooting. She couldn’t do it before then because she had to wait for FedEx to deliver the peace offering from New York. But when it arrived at the Lodge of the Ozarks, about three that afternoon, Sara immediately put it in her shoulder bag and headed for room 222, Palace Inn.
Where Binx took one look at her and in a flash made a crucifix out of crossed index fingers and glared at her wide-eyed through it. Advancing, shaking this fleshy cross in front of her face, he cried, “Out! Out!”
“Oh, come on, Binx,” she said. “You’re the vampire; everybody knows that.”
“Not this time.” Waggling those fingers more aggressively than ever, Binx chirruped, “We don’t want your kind around here, Missy.”
“Binx, Binx,” Sara said with a girlish laugh and an airy wave of her hand, “don’t you know when Jack’s goofing on you?”
Binx lowered his cross, but not his guard, and stood glowering at Sara, while the few people in the nearby crowd who’d noticed his odd actions and paused to see what would happen next decided nothing would happen next and lost interest. Binx frowned and thought and at last shook his head. “Jack Ingersoll does not goof around,” he decided. “Jack Ingersoll has no downtime. There isn’t a civilian bone in his body.”
This was true, but Sara was hardly likely to admit it, at least not right this minute. Taking one cautious step closer to Binx so she wouldn’t have to shout over the crowd noise—the Galaxy’s hospitality suite was as packed as ever, the attendees drunker and louder than they’d been on Monday—Sara said, “Jack’s sorry, Binx. He did it as a stunt, honest, just a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“Trend’s tried to get us before,” Binx said, and shivered all over at the memory. “But to do it to me, Sara, to do it on my watch.”
“Jack was afraid you’d think that,” Sara told him, taking from her bag the small black plastic film canister with the gray top. “It takes a lot to embarrass Jack, as you know,” she went on, showing the canister on the palm of her open hand.
“Hah,” Binx said, but he couldn’t keep himself from looking at the canister. He couldn’t keep himself, as Jack had known he wouldn’t be able to keep himself, from hope. “What’s that supposed to be?” he demanded, trying to sound t
ough and skeptical.
“It’s supposed to be the roll of film Jack took over at your place,” she said, although of course it wasn’t. This was what had occasioned the delay; first the original film had to be shipped to New York and developed. Then another roll of film had to be shot, taking pictures of the pictures. Then the second roll had to be FedExed posthaste to Branson and Sara. And here she and it were. “Take it,” she said. “Go on.”
“That isn’t the film,” Binx said, though it was clear that every atom of his body, every drop of dew in his every pore, wanted it to be the film, wanted to be able to believe it was the film.
“Of course it is,” Sara assured him. “Jack knows what you’re going through over here; he used to go through it himself. He doesn’t want you to get all bent out of shape just because he decided to play a joke for once.”
“It isn’t the film,” he said. Staring at the canister, Binx looked like a drunk in a silent movie, beholding with desire and repulsion the first drink of the day.
“It hasn’t been developed, Binx,” Sara said, permitting herself to sound just a trifle schoolmarmish and impatient. “Take it; develop it yourself; see what it is.”
“It isn’t the film.”
This time, Sara didn’t answer at all, but let the roar of the crowd enter their cone of space as she stood with her palm out, the canister on it, like someone offering a poisoned sugar cube to a skittish horse.
This was necessary, unfortunately, because Sara still had to maintain her access to the Galaxy and its people. She didn’t want a persona non grata put out against her, not with the entire Ray Jones trial still out ahead, certain to be speckled with Weekly Galaxy chicanery. Binx and the other Galaxians would never permit Jack anywhere near them again, joke or no joke, but that was all right—this wasn’t Jack’s story. This was Sara’s story, and she was going to get it. “Go on,” she murmured, creating a little silence for just the two of them in the midst of the madding crowd. She moved her hand slightly, the canister rolling on her palm. “Take it,” she murmured. “It won’t bite.”
Baby, Would I Lie? Page 11