Staying Cool

by Catherine Todd

  Rescue, in the form of a whopping scholarship from the State of California, brought me to UCLA. The government’s benevolence inspired my gratitude; it changed my life. At college there was a bit more celebration of ethnic diversity than there had been in high school, but most of the Chicano students I met there were on edge and angry, concerned with getting their rights. I didn’t blame them, but I didn’t identify with them, either. I was far too intoxicated with scholarly pursuits to become an activist. In a rush of blinkered optimism, I majored in art history. I fell in love. I got engaged. I graduated. I got married and changed my name. I had Andrea.

  So, the Anglo part wasn’t the Absolute Truth. (Absolute truth is a mirage anyway. It disappears as you try to get closer.) Neither was the affluence. My business—I’m an art consultant—takes me into some very expensive homes and businesses, and I have to look the part. There’s an art to that, too. The clients won’t hire you if you show up in a housecoat, but the women don’t feel comfortable if your clothes look as if they cost more than theirs. Panache—the hardest thing of all to achieve—can carry you through if you can carry it off. I try, and sometimes I succeed. But my bank balance is nothing to write home about.

  “Ellen?” Leo prompted me again. My history wouldn’t have interested him much. Getting things over with obviously did.

  “Are we just—” Hazel began, before I could open my mouth.

  “It’s Ellen’s turn,” Leo said succinctly, raising his eyebrows at Alvino.

  I turned to her. “Just what?” I asked with a smile. The only person less likely to command attention than a middle-aged widow was an elderly one who dithered. Shadows of the things to come.

  She twisted her hands worriedly. “I know I said I think he’s guilty. But shouldn’t we…don’t we have an obligation to review the evidence? I mean, we can’t just vote, can we?”

  There were several groans. “We can do anything we want to,” Leo told her. “The OJ jury came back in a couple of hours, and look how long his criminal trial took. I don’t think we have to discuss anything, unless the rest of you want to.”

  “I would feel better if we talked before we voted,” Marta said, with surprising firmness.

  “I agree,” I told her. I turned to Leo. “We don’t necessarily have to go over every bit of testimony and evidence, but before we vote to convict, it wouldn’t hurt to touch on the major points. After all, it’s a murder conviction, and the kid probably didn’t even mean to do it.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference in this case,” Eric, a bouncer at a local nightclub, corrected me eagerly. “If somebody dies because you committed a felony, they’ve got you for murder. They explained that to us.”

  “Not any felony,” Leo said. “Just certain ones.”

  “Like burglary,” Alvino said in a bored tone.

  “Did they tell us that?” asked Pat. Pat taught physical education to junior high schoolers. The occupation had done more to expand her biceps than her understanding. She reminded me of my P.E. teacher at that age, an Amazon with a passion for field hockey and a propensity to yell out “bully!” rather more often than the sport necessitated.

  Leo sighed. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to go over the evidence again,” he conceded.

  I can guess why the prosecutor wanted me to be on this jury. I’m just not sure why I agreed to be on it.

  The judge may give you a hard time, but you can always get out of it if you don’t cave in. Sure it’s a civic duty, but a murder trial—even a fairly perfunctory one—poses a significant hardship on the self-employed. The five-dollar per diem doesn’t quite make up for the fact that if you don’t work, you don’t make any money, and if you aren’t available, sometimes the clients call somebody else.

  Besides that, an awful lot of the process is tedious. You wait around while things you aren’t privy to are happening. And what you do get to hear isn’t a lot more interesting. If it wasn’t quite “cut and dried,” as Leo said, there weren’t a lot of surprises, either. It was far too easy, as the days flowed along, to forget that one person had died, and the other’s entire future was on the line.

  So why was I here?

  I notice that I’ve been planting a lot of excuses for why what happened, happened. But let me be as honest as I can. Usually, I preferred art to life—it was more satisfying in construction and generally more interesting. But recently I’d experienced one of those autumnal moments of revelation when I realized that most of life’s big experiences were going to pass me by. I’d already had my allotted share, and there weren’t going to be any more. My husband was gone, and my child was almost grown-up. My mother was senile. Replacement hormones were just around the corner. In fact, I’d reached the age when just about everything is measured by how much you have left of what you used to have, period. True, I had friends and a job that I liked (for the most part), but I’d already made my big life choices, and now all the consequences unrolled predictably before me into the future.

  Maybe a nice, messy murder trial would shake things up. Or maybe not. Who knows how the subconscious works? Still, here I was, although I had plenty of better things to do than rubber-stamp a guilty verdict, which is all that it seemed likely to come to anyway.

  “So who wants to start?” asked Leo.

  “Start what?” asked Pat.

  “Can we get a break?” asked Eric.

  “Christ, we just got in here,” muttered Alvino. “Let’s get the show on the road.”

  “I’ll start, then,” said Leo, as if Eric hadn’t spoken. “If everyone agrees.”

  Alvino sighed and sat back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. His leg twitched nervously. If he’d been a kid, they would have diagnosed him with Attention Deficit Disorder.

  “What we have,” said Leo solemnly, “is a defendant who had access to the victim’s offices, because he’d copied his mother’s keys. So he had the means. He knew she was well-off, again because of his mother. He went at an hour when you’d reasonably expect no one would be there—really early in the morning—to burglarize the place. The victim came in unexpectedly—her assistant testified that she sometimes came in very early to work, because she made telephone calls to Europe and the East Coast. The kid wouldn’t have known that. Anyway, she must’ve surprised her killer—let’s say it was Ramon—and he picked up the nearest heavy object and whacked her over the head from behind. So there’s motive. Maybe he meant to kill her; maybe not. It doesn’t matter, because, as we know, a death that results from a felony such as burglary—even if you were hit in an accident by the getaway car—is murder. Is everybody with me so far?”

  Everybody was.

  “Right. So let’s think about the evidence against him. In the first place, his fingerprints were on the murder weapon. In the second place, the police found some of the stuff from the dead woman’s office in his car. And—”

  “Someone called the police and reported a possible burglary on the premises shortly before they picked him up,” Alvino helped him out.

  “Or so they say,” said William, who was, if I remember correctly, an engineer at TRW.

  “Well, why would they lie about it?” asked Hazel.

  More groans. Most of us were such cynics. First the government, then the police. Expert witnesses. Credibility was a scarce commodity these days.

  “Well, even if you discount that, they had the goods on him. Motive, means, opportunity, and evidence!” concluded Alvino. I concluded that he, too, was a reader of crime fiction.

  Leo cleared his throat self-importantly to remind us Who Was In Charge. “Against that…against that, we have…what?” He raised his shoulders and eyebrows in an eloquent shrug.

  “He says he didn’t do it,” volunteered Marta.

  Alvino rolled his eyes.

  “Well, what do you expect?” Leo asked with irritation. “Of course he says that.”

  “But—”

  “They always say that,” he added with authority. “Don’t they?”
>
  “I guess so,” said Marta.

  “Besides, he told the cops she gave him all that stuff in his car. Because his mother used to work for her. That’s total bull—”

  “There is one thing, though,” I suggested.

  Leo glared at me. “What?”

  “Well, why didn’t he plea-bargain? After they caught him with stolen goods and found his fingerprints on the Erté—”

  “The what?” asked Pat.

  “The statue.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “His lawyer had to know it would look pretty bad for him after that. I’m sure the DA would have offered something less than first-degree murder. He was only seventeen at the time. So why wouldn’t he go for it?”

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to speculate on that,” Hazel said timidly. Leo had squashed most of the life out of her, and she wasn’t about to put up any more resistance. Besides, she had a point.

  “Well, okay. You’re probably right. But it still makes me wonder,” I told her.

  “You can wonder,” Alvino said grimly, “but you gotta use your head. Who else could have done it? They never found anybody else with a motive to kill her, much less anyone placed at the scene of the crime. Even if you don’t like it, we have to face the facts. The kid did it.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Does anybody want to talk about it any more?” Leo asked. He looked pointedly at Hazel, who shook her head.

  “Put it to a vote, man,” urged Alvino. “Please.”

  Leo drew himself up. “Hazel?” he asked.

  Bad choice. She could never feel comfortable being the first to state an opinion, no matter how strongly she held it. She looked away. “I’m not…I need…I’m not quite ready,” she pleaded.

  “A woman is dead,” Leo said sternly. “Do you want her murderer to get away with it?”

  Hazel gripped the table in panic.

  “Come back to her,” said Alvino. “I’ll start, okay? I vote guilty.”

  Leo turned his head ostentatiously away. “Eric?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Marta?”

  I could almost hear her swallow. “I agree. Guilty.”

  “Ellen?”

  This is what I remember: The fluorescent fixture hummed. The tabletop had lines of fake wood grain stretching unbroken the entire length. A chair scraped against the leg. The air-conditioning blew down my collar from the vent above. Everybody was looking at me expectantly. My mouth was very dry.

  But that’s it. No crisis of conscience, no inner voices, not even an accelerated heartbeat. Not a single clichéd emotion. No hesitation, or not much. No doubts, reasonable or otherwise.

  “Guilty,” I said.

  No excuses.

  2

  Alvino looked at his watch. “This is great! We might get out of here in time to get a decent dinner. I definitely want to celebrate the end of this trial.”

  “We haven’t finished voting yet,” Marta reminded him, a bit coolly.

  He looked embarrassed. “Oh, right. I’m sorry. I guess I was jumping the gun. I didn’t mean to sound…”

  “We know. It’s okay,” Marta told him.

  The votes tallied eleven-zero in favor of conviction. There was only one person left to poll.

  Leo turned majestically to Hazel, preparing himself for his Leading Role in the courtroom as foreman. “Well?” he asked her, imperfectly concealing his anxiety about the outcome under a bullying tone. “Have you decided?”

  Hazel shifted on her chair. She’d confided that her hip replacements bothered her after more than a few minutes on the hard seat. “Yes, I have,” she said.

  She paused dramatically. All eyes were on her. It was clear that she was enjoying her moment as the center of attention and had no desire to rush out of the spotlight. At length, she nodded. “I vote guilty.”

  There was a collective exhalation of withheld breath.

  “Thank God,” Alvino murmured.

  “I’ll call the bailiff,” said Leo, straightening his tie.

  It’s one thing to come to a verdict with reasonable confidence in the jury room; it’s something different when they announce it in open court. I couldn’t look at the defendant. I couldn’t look at his mother. I fixed my gaze on the burnished wood of the railing in front of me while the judge read out, “We, the jury, find…” et al. The rail was rich and glossy, like a coffin. I raised my eyes.

  Ramon took it like a tough guy. He stood perfectly still, holding himself erect while his attorney slipped an arm around him. His cheek muscle twitched, but that was all. His bravado made him seem younger and more vulnerable than at any other moment in the trial; it also made me feel a little bit sorry for him.

  But not as sorry as I was for his mother. She crumpled in her chair, devastated beyond tears. She kept shaking her head “no.” Another attorney came up beside her, offering his arm. She waved him away.

  I sneaked a look at Marta, who was sitting next to me. She had tears in her eyes. Even Leo looked distraught. When the judge thanked us for our service, for doing our duty, I felt numb.

  The prosecutors were engaged in a ritual of applause—warm handshakes all round. It was more tasteful than an orgy of backslapping, but the sentiment was the same. In another case, they would have been sharing quiet congratulations with the victim’s family and friends, but there was no one here to see justice done to Natasha’s killer. It was odd, now that I thought about it. How could someone who’d made matchmaking her life’s work have ended up completely alone?

  We were free to go. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, despite invitations from both the prosecutors and the defense. I felt squeezed out, like a used washcloth. Hazel pressed a piece of paper into my hand with her phone number written on it. She wrote mine down in a purse-sized address book with little flowers on the cover. She promised to call me about getting together.

  Despite our proximity for days and days, I did not entertain feelings of nostalgia about saying good-bye to the other jury members. I liked them well enough, and some more than that, but I was thoroughly tired of the whole experience and eager to put it behind me. I pined for a normal life. I wanted to be able to go the bank. I wanted to pick up the dry cleaning. I needed to work. Besides, I’d developed a definite distaste for Formica. I did not look forward to a “juror reunion” on the next anniversary of sending Ramon to jail.

  The others seemed to feel the same. We said goodbye quickly with perfunctory promises to keep in touch that faded with our smiles as we left. Alvino was already sprinting away on long legs, hurrying toward the parking lot.

  I just wanted out. If this was an adventure, I didn’t want any part of it. I never expected to see anyone connected with the trial again.

  My mistake.

  Home. I parked the car in the numbered space and walked over the little bridge and down the path to my townhouse. It was a pain to navigate such a distance with a sack full of groceries, but the grounds—complete with stream, flowers, and drought-tolerant landscaping—were exceptional for beachside property. Best of all, the other side of both floors of my townhouse gave onto a first-class view of the ocean. It wasn’t untrammeled Malibu—there was a pier and a lot of loud restaurants—but the beach was so close that you could smell the Bain de Soleil and hear the excited shrieks of little kids jumping the waves.

  I love the ocean, though I’m not so wild about the beach.

  The ocean has sea lions barking from the buoys at dawn, sand dabs, and whitecaps.

  The beach has blondes in abbreviated bathing costumes and thin thighs, who flip you the bird when you try to zigzag across the bike path on your way to the sand. The beach has a dedicated coterie who think volleyball is an academic major. The beach has No Parking, except at three A.M. when people with a predilection for boom boxes decide to take a walk. The beach also has its share of wackos with short fuses, though maybe not as many as you’d find, say, on an average city block in downtown L.A. or uptown Manhattan.

 
; If you have unlimited funds, you can have the ocean without the beach, although in that case the trade-off is a constant wrangle with the California Coastal Commission, which takes the quaint and increasingly anachronistic view that the shoreline belongs to the Public, who cannot be denied access no matter how much you paid for your property. Still, I have done art installations in Malibu beach houses, and I can vouch for the undeniable attractions of Keeping It All to Yourself. Since I’m unlikely to have the option, I’ll never know whether my egalitarian principles would stand up to the temptations of material success.

  I couldn’t complain, though. I put the sack down in the kitchen (so small it should probably be called “the galley”) and twisted the rod of the vertical blinds. It was nearly eight o’clock at night, and the sun was just going down into the water. A couple of late sailboats were out in the harbor, and the restaurants hadn’t cranked up the weekend volume yet. The daytime crowds had gone home. In short, a perfect evening.

  There was a small pile of peanuts, unshelled, on a stand I’d erected on one corner of the balcony. I’d put them out in the morning for the Mad Squirrel, but he apparently hadn’t come by. Squirrels were notoriously, well, squirrelly, but I still worried about him. He earned his moniker by sitting on the utility wires shrieking his lungs out for minutes on end, his tail held overhead to effect a daunting headdress—a big, bad, juvenile-delinquent squirrel. He had a wild stare, too, direct and intense, like a street person whose eye you’d never want to catch. The Mad Squirrel knew what he wanted, and he usually asked for it. Maybe tonight it wasn’t peanuts.

  I wanted to pour myself a glass of chardonnay and watch the rest of the sunset from my balcony, but if I did that I could never bring myself to listen to my messages. Even though the jury hadn’t been sequestered, “out of touch” didn’t begin to describe my regular life. Every day I came home to an onslaught of messages from increasingly irritated people who were apparently sure that the jury duty story was just a ruse to cover my holiday in Antigua. I spent an hour or so each night attempting to answer calls from clients, my mother, artists, and phone solicitors who snookered me into calling back by leaving official-sounding ambiguous requests. Mostly I ended up leaving messages on other people’s machines. At least, now that I was home, the appeasement process could begin in earnest.