by F P Adriani
“It’s early yet,” I said then. “Go back to sleep.”
Grunting, he flipped over onto his stomach.
*
Later I was in the kitchen finishing off my breakfast of whole-grain toast and herb tea when Tan emerged—fully dressed now in his gray work-clothes.
“I want to come with you to court,” he said, standing before the refrigerator and pulling out a white pineapple-juice container.
But I shook my head at him. “No.”
“Come on, Pia—”
“You’ve got to work today! And I should do this alone.”
He sighed hard and plopped the container onto the counter, his eyes falling on me as he shook his head. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re the most stubborn person in the galaxy?”
“Yeah, you. All the time.”
He pointed at me. “You should listen to him. That man knows what he’s talking about.”
I laughed around the piece of toast in my mouth.
“I’m serious. I’m…worried about you. Let me come with you.”
“No, no. Really. I can handle this myself.”
“Must you always do that? You’ve got me—so use me!”
“I do use you; I use you for other things. I definitely used you last night.” I had tried to inject a sexy lighthearted tone into my voice now, but my voice had only come out tired-sounding.
He exhaled a loud breath as he poured himself some juice into a tall glass. “I don’t want to argue. Whatever you say. So…will you be going over to the office today?”
“Maybe later I’ll check it.” I felt heat in my face. I suspected he’d really meant to ask me if I would check the mail later, but he didn’t want to upset me by bringing it up if I hadn’t been thinking about it (which I had been).
…Or maybe I was imagining hidden meanings inside his words. It seemed I often did that in general.
*
Hours later, I finally parked my car in the parking lot across the street from the courthouse.
I eyed the big and rectangular courthouse building beyond my windshield; the building had been coated with diamond-sand-based stucco, and the pale walls glistened in the sunlight, like some beacon of truth and justice. But then I remembered that there were no such things as truth and justice, and I also remembered my personal predicament.
Quite a few people were standing around outside the courthouse, but the walkway to the front door was through an open area that would expose me.
I was sighing at my (hopefully) paranoid state as I grabbed my black purse and stepped out of my car.
I clicked the key-card button to re-arm the car’s new alarm, my nervous eyes shooting around, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary—anyone out of the ordinary focused on me. I did, nevertheless, feel quite naked as I quickly walked to the building: I had no weapon on me. I would have been arrested if I’d tried to bring a weapon in there….
Suddenly I wondered if I should have taken Tan up on his offer. Well, I probably should have, yeah. Stupid.
I was sighing again as my sweaty hand grabbed the bronze knob on the big wooden front door and pulled it open.
The inside of the cavernous building seemed more crowded with people than the outside had seemed. But I finally spotted the prosecutor for Ronin’s case, Ann Jennings, standing at the far end of the hallway.
I’d gone to her office the week before because she wanted to discuss some things about my testimony today. But I hadn’t been in the actual courtroom—or an actual courtroom in a long time—until I would be today.
I moved toward Jennings, but before I could get there, to the left I noticed a man and a woman sitting on one of the side benches; they were both crying. The heavy-set man pulled out a tissue from the pocket of his brown jacket and blew his nose loudly. The gray-haired woman seemed to be avoiding looking at anyone’s eyes, including the eyes of the crying man; she cried at the floor, into herself.
Ann Jennings walked up to me and said hello. But she must have noticed where I’d been staring. Her green eyes moved in that same direction now, and she spoke in a low voice: “That’s Sam Ardento’s parents.”
Sam Ardento was one of the dead Festival employees, a young janitor, a young janitor Ronin had blown up.
The whole thing suddenly became so goddamn depressing. I felt my insides being yanked down, and now I wished I hadn’t fucking come there. But what choice did I have? I probably would have been subpoenaed had I refused to testify.
“I need to use the bathroom,” I said fast now to Jennings. And then I walked away.
*
By the time I was done successfully repressing a sudden nervous nausea, it was almost time to go into the courtroom.
…Still, I lingered in the bathroom: I kept feeling a strong urge to just leave without testifying.
I hadn’t set eyes on Ronin since the Astrals escapade. And my nausea related to him had multiple causes, one of the most important being: I hadn’t led the life of a person who should visit courtrooms. They could pose a problem for me, with my past.
Since I’d first learned what Ronin had done, I’d had a lot of time to think. And I was now a bit…torn about the whole situation, which was a lose-lose situation for me. Though part of me wanted him to pay with his own life for taking the lives of people I loved, another part of me didn’t want him to get executed. And he probably wouldn’t be executed because he’d pled guilty.
But the thing was: it was always possible that someday…I could be on trial for murder.
A part of me knew this and felt like a fraud. And that had inserted a self-serving needle of doubt inside my brain over whether Ronin should get the death penalty….
Still, I wanted him in jail for a long, long time. He was not repentant; I was. That was the biggest difference between the two of us.
And that was what I told myself as I left the bathroom and made the difficult-for-me walk toward the courtroom.
*
The big room was quite packed, mostly with bystanders sitting in a church-like succession of slate-gray painted benches. I moved past there and over toward the left, where the wooden wall-stand of witness seats had been arranged perpendicular to the judge’s enormous red palella-wood bench.
The witnesses for the defense were sitting in the lower seats because they would testify first; then the witnesses for the prosecution (like me) would take the stand. All our seats faced the jury’s seats on the room’s opposite side, seats which were now filled with the faceless-and-nameless seeming The People.
I stepped up to the back level of witness seats, then sat down hard on the cushioned wood chair. I nodded at the person beside me, who was a witness I didn’t recognize.
Then I turned my head to the right, and then—there. There he was: the man who’d destroyed my life many years ago. Today, I’d finally get to face him in court.
He sat behind a long table in front of the bystander benches. Someone had cleaned him up, had covered the scar on his face with make-up, trimmed his blond hair, put him in a pale-blue shirt and a pale-blue tie; he looked…official. He looked like a new person. But I knew he could never be.
Beside him sat his attorney. And Ann Jennings and her assistant occupied the prosecutor’s table beyond.
Criminal trials on Diamond usually had two parts: the conviction part and the sentencing part. There had never been a jury-attended conviction part to this case because Ronin had pled guilty. But the sentencing part had been going on all morning; though the jury had been present during then, no witnesses had been, only the judge and the attorneys doing their lawyer-things to address and explain the specific laws on Diamond as they pertained to the case in question.
I looked at the judge’s long bench again, at the brown witness stand beside there. My turn to testify in that seat wouldn’t come till two other people had testified before me, two witnesses for the defense….
From a side door the judge now entered the courtroom in a flurry of fast-moving royal-blue robe clot
h. He sat behind his red bench; then he made a few statements about the rules of court during a sentencing trial, about how lying was a punishable offense, about how he would keep order, and then he asked the two attorneys to begin with their questions.
The defense attorney, a gray-suited man named Robert Barr, called his first witness to the stand: a woman who had supposedly been in the hall I had been in on the day of the Festival bombing, shortly before it happened.
Barr began questioning her, and she soon claimed that she saw no one in that hall that day.
I felt blood rise into my face because that no one would include me: her testimony could imply that I had either been mistaken about Ronin’s being there, or that I had been lying and would be mistaken or lying when I took the stand and gave an account of my experiences that day.
However, during the Festival I had been part of the security personnel there. All of this was a matter of official record. So at least I had the weight of some law behind me.
…Would that be enough? That was the question that burned inside my head as I listened to the woman’s bullshit—and it did sound like bullshit. I’d never seen her before, and I certainly hadn’t seen her in the hall that day. She could have been who she said: a worker from inside the Festival. But if she was, she was clearly also an idiot that she would testify for an obvious murderer.
Eventually she left the stand and the next witness took her place: a man who apparently was a bomb expert. The defense attorney questioned him about his area of knowledge, and the man spoke at some length about that and about his general opinion on the Festival bombing. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before in reports about that day.
But then Barr’s questions got more specific, and I listened carefully as the expert now testified that the location of “the” bomb couldn’t be pinpointed down to smaller than somewhere within a forty-foot radius of damage.
“Mister Kramer,” Barr said then in a very confident voice, “could the explosive element have come from the basement storage-room thirty-feet below the building’s first floor?”
“Yes. It could have,” said Kramer, nodding his shaggy-blond head.
A moment later the defense attorney sat down and Ann Jennings rose from her table.
She said hello to Kramer; then she picked up some papers from her table. “In my hand I have Page Ten from a report from the Crestview Bomb Squad responsible for the Festival explosives clean-up. Mister Kramer, from your testimony during the defense’s questions, I know you’ve read the report. But I want you to re-read Page Ten. I’ll give you a few minutes.” She handed him the report excerpt.
Then she handed another copy to the judge, who said, “The jury will receive a copy during sentencing deliberations. Please concern yourselves with testimonies only at this point.”
A few of the jurors nodded; the rest seemed content to reside in a juror stupor of bored faces.
Another few moments passed, during which I eyed Ronin’s face, which didn’t seem inclined to look my way. He mostly kept staring straight ahead toward the witness stand. But, soon, I would be there….
Kramer was still seated at it now, though, and he finally cleared his throat and sent the prosecutor a questioning look.
Quickly she moved back to the stand, saying, “The report excerpt I gave you cites evidence of the prior existence of two bombs in the wreckage. Now that you’ve re-read the report, do you dispute that finding?”
The man’s wide face seemed to twitch at her. “Uh—no. No, not really. I—”
“So then you agree that there were two bombs?”
“That seems true—yeah.”
“So even if one bomb had been placed in the basement, couldn’t the other have been placed farther above?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
“Thank you,” she said. And she walked back to her table.
Barr shot up like a laser bullet—a lightning-quick flash of gray-covered energetic limbs. “Mister Kramer, do you or that report have any evidence of the specific height of the supposed bombs?”
“The…height?”
“Specifically, is there any evidence that either of the supposed two bombs was higher than the basement storage room? If there were two and they were both in the storage room, could there be a way that one would only seem like it had come from higher up?”
“Well, uh, well…I suppose if there was a gas line right above one bomb, the explosion from below might have ignited the line and traveled in it, spreading the damage higher up; then the point of origin could seem higher too….”
“And can that point of origin be determined from the wreckage itself?”
“Not necessarily. When you have structural collapse and debris from various levels piled on top of each other, with re-ignition and re-explosion during collapse, you can’t always tell which level was ignited first. The result’s like a giant ball of exploded mass.”
Barr’s smug voice was back again. “That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you, Mister Kramer. You can step down.”
Barr now positioned himself to make a statement to the jury, which statement the judge first explained was customary from the defense at this point during a sentencing trial.
“Your Honor and honorable jury members,” Barr began, “my client had no intention of hurting anyone, and, according to Diamond law, intent is half of what should be considered when deciding on a sentence. Mister Gregorievina admits to damaging the basement only and having no other intentions.”
My heart was pumping as fast as a high-speed train now, not just because of my imminent testimony, but because I was experiencing a bad feeling: like I’d been broadsided by the bullshit I’d just witnessed on the stand and had now heard from the defense attorney. The basement, the upstairs—who the fuck cares? People died—what else matters!
I wanted to jump across the courtroom and add another scar to Ronin’s face. There was NO WAY he didn’t intend to kill people that day. Killing was exactly what he did and what he enjoyed doing. And how sick that I now had to witness reinventions of what had no doubt been his intentions.
I knew the breed of person Ronin was. I just hoped the judge and the jury could also tell the breed….
Barr went back to his table; the judge turned to the witness seats now, and, from her table, Ann Jennings called out my name.
I swallowed and stood, turning to step down from the upper seat-level—and that was when I spotted a familiar face: Tan’s face. He was sitting in the bystander crowd, and his dark eyes were on me.
My lips parted on a taut breath: I couldn’t believe that he’d come. And now I felt so goddamn grateful that he hadn’t listened to me.
He nodded at me slowly, a slight smile on his face, and that smile was just what I needed to help me move one foot in front of the other and walk onto the stand, then sit in the too-hard chair there.
Jennings came over to me and clasped her hands in front of her; I watched the long nails on one of her hands tap at the back of her other hand.
“Good day, Miss Senda,” she said in a pleasant voice. “You were working as a security guard during The Diamond Sand Festival in question today. And you were a witness to the defendant’s—” her long nails pointed to her left, to where Ronin sat “—presence at that Festival. Is that correct?”
I cleared my throat as I moved nearer to the microphone below and in front of me. “Yes. I was there and I saw him.”
I looked at him then, right in the eye, because he had been looking at me. And I suddenly remembered him then, remembered our encounters, and his utter disregard for anyone but himself. Though even that made me wonder: some people were so dead inside to outside stimuli that they didn’t much care if even they died. It was possible that Barr cared more about the degree of Ronin’s punishment than Ronin did….
Then again, I now saw what looked like a snide, I’ll-survive-at-all-costs disrespect burning behind Ronin’s bland face. He must have been coached to look as bland and unassuming as the jury looked. But Ronin couldn’t
totally pull it off to me. The jury hadn’t seen him up close; I had. And when he’d had murdering on his mind….
Jennings was talking to me again: “In a transcript to the Diamond Police, you said you saw the defendant tampering with the Festival building’s structure on the first floor?”
“Yes. He was standing at a shelf and attaching something to it, in an area where only employees should have been. But he had no Festival personnel badge.”
Jennings now turned away from me and said, “I want the honorable jury to note that the defendant wasn’t employed at the Festival.”
I heard some murmuring begin in the courtroom, coming from the bystanders. And when I looked out over it, I spotted Tan again. Unfortunately, I had no time to contemplate his face.
Jennings now asked me several more questions, and I did the best I could at relaying what I’d experienced that day, in as much detail as I could remember. Then Jennings thanked me and walked away to sit at her table.
Barr didn’t rise right away from his seat; he had been writing something down on a notepad. And for some reason that made me more nervous than if he’d jumped up ready to pounce at me with questions.
I could feel sweat slide down the back of my neck and even further down along my spine. My ass in my pants was painfully asleep on the rigid seat….
“Good afternoon, Miss Senda,” came Barr’s smooth voice as he finally moved closer to me. “In that same transcript to the Diamond Police, you mention separate occasions where you got into separate altercations with someone.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say separate….”
“Did you not say you were first in a hallway, then you were in a large common room, then on a transport?”
I flushed, felt more sliding sweat. “Yes—yes. But it was a continuous encounter—”
“You mean you were suddenly magically transported from indoors and onto a transport?”
I flushed harder, thought I heard a laugh coming from somewhere. “N—no. There was a chase. I chased him.” I glanced toward Ronin. “Through the building.”
