But today Shenk really needed a good jury. Not just good—what he needed was the best of all possible juries. He needed the most liberal-minded, victim-loving, anticorporate SoCal jury that the trial gods could conjure. And why? Because now, today, as Shenk in his blue suit with the silver inlay pushed into the civil courthouse, as he nodded with forced good cheer to John Riggs, as Judge Andrew Cates at long last sat down solemnly to gavel in Keener v. Valley Village Hospital Corporation, Shenk knew in the heart of his litigious heart that a bullseye jury was his only remaining hope.
Nothing had changed in the last few months; nothing had improved. Not Shenk’s financial situation, now rapidly approaching dire, and certainly not his case. Shenk’s last desperate maneuver had been to commission a survey, hastily conducted by a pay-for-play medical research consultancy out of Bakersfield, of two hundred seventy-five subdural hematoma surgeries conducted in the last five years—a Hail Mary effort to discover a pattern of appropriate conduct that Catanzaro and his team had failed to observe. The preliminary results of the study had not been encouraging, and the final results Shenk would never see, because his second payment had been by check, and the check had not cleared.
His chances thus lay entirely on the slender shoulders of Dr. Theresa Pileggi, who would take the stand to talk in her robotic voice about Syndrome K, presuming he could scrounge the cash together to pay her invoices through the day of her testimony, early next week.
All of which meant, bottom line, he needed to pick himself a hell of a jury.
Shenk summoned his spirits. He smoothed his hair. He sashayed up to the thirty-six Angelenos who had been led in like cattle from the holding pen downstairs, and beamed a welcoming grin across the bow of the box. The prospective jurors were of all kinds, drawn from the astonishing vastness of LA County, as varied in their ethnicity and gender and age as the city itself: Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Latin, young and old. Thick-bellied workingmen and reedy office types, nurses in scrubs, Hollywood agents in suits that shined like new-minted currency.
“Good morning, Mr. Janes,” said Shenk, sidling toward the first of the candidates, a portly African American gentleman with a union T-shirt and a combative glower. “And how are you today?”
“I’ve been better,” said Mr. Janes, folding his arms over his belly, signaling furious restrained distaste for jury duty, for sitting around, for sacrificing a day’s wages on this shit.
“I gotcha, sir,” said Shenk. “I hear ya.”
They were all watching him, all these could-be jurors, taking his measure just as he was taking theirs, in their turn: their outfits and their eyes, their haircuts and their skin color, the relative slump of their shoulders. Each was broadcasting a particular attitude, knowingly or unknowingly: they were anxious or they were irritated or they were bored, or—in some rare cases—eager. Mr. Janes was not eager.
“Mr. Janes, have you ever served on a jury before?”
“Yes,” he said, gruffly alluding in one syllable to what an enormous pain in his ass that previous service had been.
Unfortunately for Mr. Janes, everything else about his answers Shenk liked very much. Working-class background, high school education, a slipped disc that no doctor had ever been able to heal.
“Oh dear,” said Shenk, “I am so sorry,” thinking what a gift he was going to give this man: a doctor he could punish.
“We’ll be happy to seat Mr. Janes,” said Shenk, turning back to his table so as not to see the man’s reaction, winking at Beth Keener, who sat in the front row, clutching the wooden railing so hard it might snap.
Mr. Riggs rose slowly, in his brown suit and bad haircut, like a large but unfrightening monster surfacing from the deep. No doubt saving his objections for the truly objectionable, he allowed for Mr. Janes, and the judge banged his gavel and asked Jackie Benson who was next.
Next was a Ms. Rodway, and after her a Mr. Bissell, and after him was someone else, and one by one Shenk the thermometer took everybody’s temperature. Shenk knew how to do it. Shenk knew all the rules. Young people were better than old, and women were better than men, and working people better than professional. He knew that racial minorities were in the aggregate more sympathetic, more likely to have been screwed by places like hospitals and people like insurance-company hacks.
But neither could you just go by the rules of thumb; each prospective juror had to be taken on his or her own merits. You might have thought Shenk would jump at the chance to seat Samuel Ricks, whose wife, Patty, had lately died in a hospital. But under further questioning he recalled, voice trembling, how Patty’s doctors had worked “tirelessly” to save her; Shenk patted him with kindness on the hand and sent him on his way.
Riggs, for his part, jettisoned Ms. Elisha Jackson, a phone-company worker so skeptical of corporate power that she let out an audible puff of air between her lips as Riggs approached her in his Company Man suit. But Shenk did get Nancy Koechner, a recent college graduate in social work (social work! God bless her bleeding heart!); and he got Darlene Stephens, not only a retired elementary-school teacher but an octogenarian at least; and he even, after Riggs wasted the last of his preemptory challenges, was blessed with Marvin Leighton, who was not only an African American male but twenty-seven years old and radiant with pursed-lipped antiauthoritarian distrust.
As Cates tapped his gavel, officially impaneling Mr. Leighton, Shenk fidgeted with the knot of his tie. He was doing well, actually—he thought he was doing pretty damn well here.
It was madness, when you thought about it, that this was how justice worked. No one who has tried a case before a jury can possibly imagine that justice is some permanent thing, fixed and stable over time. How can it be, when there are so many elusive factors introduced with the addition of each new human person—each with her own prejudices and inclinations, her own preconceptions and distractions. Somehow the cross-pollination of all these disparate influences is not only supposed to magically divine the correct verdict but also the dollar amount that correlates precisely to the injury that has been sustained? The very notion of it was preposterous.
Shenk’s most daring selection came toward the end of the day, when they considered one Celia Gonzalez, who though only forty-seven years old had retired two years earlier from the Los Angeles Police Department and now worked in private security.
Riggs eyed Shenk suspiciously as Shenk stood back from the box, hands clasped behind him, and said, “The plaintiffs will be glad to seat Officer Gonzalez.” It was dogma, of course, that cops were bad jurors for the plaintiffs. Cops were institutionalists; cops were wary of nuisance suits; cops were traditionally indisposed to blame professionals for acts taken in the course of professional duty. But Officer Celia Gonzalez had stolen Shenk’s heart.
She was a female officer, for one thing, and she was a young female officer, for a second, and lastly—oh, Celia!—she was blond-haired and blue-eyed despite bearing the surname Gonzalez; she was, in other words, a white woman who was married to a man named Gonzalez.
And then there were twelve, and Shenk loved them, every one.
Cates took one of his ruminative pauses, inspecting the Keener jury and humming “Goodnight, My Someone,” from The Music Man. Finally he asked Ms. Benson what time it was, and when she said 4:30 he pointed his chin upward, turned this fact over for a few moments, like Oliver Wendell Holmes weighing a tricky question of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and pronounced that they would begin with jury instructions tomorrow.
Cates brought the gavel down, and everybody got up, and Shenk felt a touch at his elbow.
“How do you think it’s going?”
“Good, good. It’s going just fine, Beth.”
“Are you sure?”
Beth Keener had her fingers sunk into his elbow, like an owl gripping at a branch.
“Very much so, Beth. And you don’t need to come every day. I will tell you when I need you here. OK?”
Beth looked wiped out, her eyes red at the rims, her fingers slig
htly trembling from the sheer effort of watching every instant of what was, really, just the beginning of this. Reacting to everything, weighing the meaning of everything. She won’t make it, Shenk thought with alarm—she’ll die.
She was in all black—dress and pocketbook and shoes—as if it was a funeral and not a trial.
“We are doing great,” Shenk told her, keeping his expression neutral, his voice low. Still in court; still on display. He shifted position slightly and angled Beth slightly away from himself, so his nice new jury had a clear sightline on the suffering mother. As long as she’s here, let them see her. Let them look upon her drawn, angry face, the need for justice that burns in her eyes. Let them see what these people have done to her.
Maybe this was it, he thought, rising on a fresh gust of optimism. Maybe this excellent jury, this good and kind and victim-loving SoCal jury, would be inclined to buy what Dr. Pileggi was selling them, and keep his ass out of the fire.
And indeed, he noticed one of the jurors, on the way from the box, lingering, her hand on the rail, eyes resting with obvious sympathy on Beth Keener.
It was Officer Gonzalez, and Shenk thought, I like you, Officer. You, I like.
Shenk whistled on the way out of Cates’s courtroom, even winked mischievously at poor dumb Riggs, and at home he made Ruben breakfast for dinner before getting started on prep for the morning.
And all the rest of it was coming, just over the line of the near horizon—a ghost ship, invisible, steaming closer.
February 5, 2019
Renzer’s Peak was not a peak at all. It was less of a mountain and more of a hill, and really less of a hill and more of a long rise, angling upward out of the landscape toward its hazy white top. The trailhead was at one end of an oblong patch, unmarked and muddy, just off the state road.
Ruben left Ed’s car and started up the narrow path. He switchbacked unevenly up the ascent. He walked until the car was out of view behind him, and then he kept on walking.
A quarter mile in, ducking under the overstretched branch of a spruce, he brushed against it with the top of his head and brought down a cascade of slush, filling the narrow space between his shirt collar and his coat.
“Fuck,” said Ruben, and then the sky opened up and it began to rain. “Fuck,” he said again.
It hadn’t been raining at all when he left the post office, and it had stayed dry while he was finding his way out of town, looking for the trailhead, but now it had started, a steady ugly drizzle. He ducked his head and said “fuck” a third time, and then it came hard, as if summoned.
Ruben kept on going. Set his feet down carefully, kept the hood of his slicker tight around his head.
The path was narrow. It cut back sharply, again and again, crossing and then recrossing the face of the hill. Ruben stumbled, righted himself, stumbled again. He gritted his teeth. He tugged tight the hood of the rain slicker, pulled it taut around his hair, his neck, so just his face was exposed to the bitter air.
The rain came straight down at times and slantwise other times. It didn’t bother him at first, and then it did—it was awful.
“This sucks,” the Rabbi grunted to the empty woods, but he kept on going.
A crop of blisters began to form on his toes. He adjusted his stride, taking big, long steps to try to lessen the pressure.
He walked a long time. His socks, supposedly high quality and weatherproof, grew damp and then soggy. After stopping three times to hike them up, he quit trying and marched on with the socks puddled around his ankles.
Still walking, one step at a time, eyes looking straight ahead, motion locked in. He felt a faraway ache in his right thigh, a distant memory of a wrestling injury that twinged sometimes when he ran.
A thick fallen tree lay diagonally, like a passed-out drunk across the path, so Ruben took a giant’s step onto it, then slid down the other side, splinters biting into his ass.
After he’d been walking for what? For an hour? When he was starting to tire, when he was thoroughly soaked, when he was maybe starting to think he’d made a mistake, maybe thinking about slowing down, he instead decided to run.
No. He didn’t decide. It burst up out of him, and he ran. He just started running.
He took his glasses off and slid them into the top pocket of the rain jacket, and made his hands into fists and rushed up the rutted path, through rough churns of mud. He put his head down and breathed like runners know how to breathe, evenly and deep, and felt the muscles tighten in his neck. His feet navigated the rocks and roots. His hamstrings began to burn and his lungs burned with each breath of cold air.
He went fast, then faster.
It was colder the higher he got, but the cold was good and right. The cold was electric on his skin. Faster.
The rain became sleet, stinging at him, biting at his cheeks and the exposed backs of his hands, and it felt good. Every drop was a knifepoint, slicing him at the corners, opening him up, peeling him away. He ran faster, up the incline, breathing something in, breathing something out. The hard weather stripped his skin and revealed what was underneath, exposing him to the air, raw and red, and the sleet kept biting him, burning him, and he still rose, bending into the wind, closer to whatever was waiting.
He crested the hill, and the ground evened out, and the path opened up slightly, a wide track with muddy ruts on either side. He ran beneath overhanging branches, fattened by snow and shrouded in fog. A little ways farther and the trail separated, a smaller path diverging from the main, and there was no way to know which was better. Neither route was right.
But the Rabbi was on it now—he was in it. By gut he picked a route and when it branched again he picked again, not thinking, just going, and whatever truer, stronger, smarter self had been exposed by the elements, it was telling him where to go.
Here.
Here.
Here.
The path ended all at once, splintered into a tangle of small paths, all of which petered out around the rim of a clearing. Ruben stopped running.
A building stood in the clearing. Four brick walls and a faded green door and a slanted slate roof.
Ruben’s body thrummed inside his skin, wanting to keep running. Pulse and breath and blood all roaring in protest.
A sturdy little chimney poked up like a snout from the corner of the roof of the building, giving off no smoke.
The Rabbi stood staring. He stood with his boots sunk in the mud and stared at the old bricks and the green door. He found his glasses in his pocket. He licked his chapped lips. Then he cupped his hands and called out.
“Hello?”
His voice echoed and then died, swallowed by hundreds of empty acres of Alaskan silence.
“Hello?”
He heard a small distant noise, the skritch of an animal moving through bushes or leaping through branches, and all of a sudden all the fear he’d been suppressing or ignoring came clamoring up in him. His stomach went to water. He felt like he might piss, or shit, or both.
Bad idea.
Go back.
Who do you think—
At least Theresa Pileggi had a reason to come. Maybe she was out of her fucking mind, maybe she had fallen into this crazy idea, slipped underneath it, slipped below its surface like drowning. Maybe she had entered into some sort of murderous conspiracy with these monsters, and had come up here to find them, but what about him?
What was Ruben doing here?
He had followed this bloody story like a red thread, pulling at it as if it were pulling at him, drawing him forward like a reverse unspooling. But now all of it—Rich, the lamp, the motel room—none of it had valence anymore. Not out here, under an endless gray. Looking up the slight remaining rise that separated him from this brick cabin in the woods, standing squat against the wideness of the sky.
We’re all always trying to remain just one thing, but sometimes you feel incohered. You can’t help it. You stand there looking at the object of your search, this ancient red-brick house, with peeli
ng paint and a cracked roof and the drainpipe hanging off of it, and you have this disintegrating feeling, like it’s not yourself looking at this house, because there is no such thing as yourself. There are molecules in shapes, there are ideas that contradict each other, there are memories and dreams and visions and emotions. You are a thing that is made of other, interlocking, intermingling, overlapping things.
Ruben could only hope that sometimes the reasons for things reveal themselves in the aftermath.
His phone shivered in his pocket and he jumped and then laughed at himself for jumping. He had service. Suddenly, somehow, three days into his Alaskan sojourn, the mysterious gods of cell service had smiled on him.
He pulled out the phone and laughed again, out loud this time. He’d gotten a notification: Postmates was gifting him fifteen dollars off his next delivery. Ruben, deep in the Alaskan forest, a stone’s throw from the slanting brick cabin where Theresa Pileggi had come, two weeks before she came to Los Angeles to die, said “Thanks, Postmates.” He started to put his phone back in his pocket.
Wait, though. He had service.
He called his dad, and his dad answered right away.
“Oh God, Rubie,” he said. “Rubie! I been calling.”
“Listen—”
“I thought you were dead.”
“No,” he said. He took a step toward the ranger station. “Listen.”
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. I’m in Alaska.”
“You’re—what?”
“I’m trying to figure it out, Dad. I’m following her trail.”
“Ruben, baby—”
“Pileggi came here, to Alaska, before she came to LA. And she came to LA to kill Rich. I was right. He shot her in self-defense.”
Another step closer. There were two windows on the wall of the ranger station, small and square and laced with frost. Something was in one of the windows—a smudge of black, a shadow, a—
“Can you prove it?”
The Quiet Boy Page 27