Dreams of Jeannie and Other Stories

by Catherine Dain

  Cat, the Jury

  A Faith Cassidy Mystery

  I received the invitation to write a story for an anthology about cats and courts not long after I had moved to Ventura. I couldn't resist dragging Faith Cassidy there, if only for the afternoon. Around the time I finished the story, I ran into Michael Collins at a party and asked for his professional opinion on titles—should I call it "Cat, the Jury" or "Reasonable Doubt"?

  " 'Cat, the Jury'—'I, the Jury' with a cat?" Michael gasped, then recovered. "Everybody has written a story called 'Reasonable Doubt.' Call it 'Cat, the Jury.' " So I did.

  "If there ever was an excuse to get out of jury duty, this is it. Show me the notice again."

  "Wait till we get to our table." Michael headed purpose­fully toward the one vacant table near the small lunch counter and grill.

  Two burly, bearded men wearing Harley Davidson vests above their swimming trunks glared as Michael cut them off. He pretended not to notice.

  "We shouldn't have come to the beach." Faith stopped, ready to retreat, but the two men moved away without com­ment.

  "Of course we should have come," Michael replied. "Although next time we're going to rent one of those tables with the yellow umbrellas."

  "Making reservations for the beach seems un-American. Still..." Faith let the sentence trail away. If the bikers had wanted to argue, they would be eating sand with their sand­wiches.

  The August heat had rendered West Hollywood unin­habitable. When Michael had called that morning asking Faith to cancel whatever appointments she had and join him in a trip to the beach, Faith had confessed that the two clients scheduled for the afternoon had already cancelled. She lived in an older building, with only a window unit to cool her combination office and living room, and one client had explained politely that suffocating heat was not condu­cive to productive psychotherapy. The other had left a mes­sage on her answering machine while she was in the shower.

  Michael had read about a European-style area of the Ventura beach where yellow umbrellas had been set up near a small espresso and sandwich bar, allowing spur of the mo­ment beach-going and instant picnics. Ventura sounded like a long drive for nothing to Faith, but since Michael was driving, she agreed to go.

  Once they had walked the length of the rickety old Ventura pier and back, stopping to watch the group of fishermen at the end, she was too tired and hungry to walk down the beach to the yellow umbrellas. The lunch counter on the pier was as far as she was willing to move. Besides, the area with yellow umbrellas was packed with escapees from the city. They hadn't thought to make reservations, so they would have had to wait.

  The topper was that she was almost cold. Not quite, but almost. The Los Angeles basin was well over a hundred de­grees when they left. The Ventura beach wasn't even eighty, and there was a stiff breeze from the ocean. With just a light terrycloth jacket over her bathing suit, Faith wanted shelter. The pier provided it, the beach didn't.

  Still, she had to admit that the Ventura beach had its charms, with its clear green water and slightly hazy blue sky. The ocean ended not at the horizon, but in an offshore mist that hid the Channel Islands from view. That was why the breeze was so cool—the marine layer.

  Faith set the plate with her grilled veggie burger on the small table next to Michael's teriyaki ahi sandwich. She took a long swallow of her iced tea.

  "Elizabeth is a cat," she said. "A cat can't be a juror. How did they get her name?"

  "From the voter registration rolls. I bet Bobby that the system was so lax that I could register Elizabeth and no one would check. I was right. And so Elizabeth—my cat—has been summoned to jury duty."

  Faith examined the summons. Municipal Court in Van Nuys. She took a bite of her veggie burger and thought about the heat. The pervasive heat, the heat that she had been wandering through malls and going to afternoon movies to get away from. The heat that they had come to the beach to escape. The heat that would be waiting for her when she returned to the city, returned to an apartment with only a fan in the bedroom and a window unit in the combination office/living room for an air conditioner.

  "I'll go," she said.

  "My God! Why?"

  The courthouse will be cooler than my apartment—anything would be—and all my clients are canceling until the end of the heat wave. I don't blame them, either. I might as well do something useful. They have an on-call system, so I don't have to go every morning. And it's for Municipal Court. That means even if I get a trial, it'll be somebody fighting a traffic violation, or petty theft, or a minor dope bust, something like that. It'll only take a few hours. I'll take a book with me and read in the jury room the rest of the time. Elizabeth will have done her civic duty and no one will know you diddled with the political system."

  "What will you use for identification? I didn't get her a driver's license, and you don't look like a six-year-old blue-point Himalayan anyway."

  "The last time I was a juror no one checked for identifi­cation. I showed up with a badge and they took my word for it. People try to get out. They don't try to get in. If you're worried, ask Bobby to make me a driver's license. He can get something out of his computer that I could flash in a pinch."

  "That's breaking the law," Michael pointed out.

  Faith rolled her eyes and took another sip of her iced tea.

  "I'll only have to lie about my name. The rest of it is close enough. Elizabeth is a television actress—television commercials are the art form of the new generation—and I used to be a television actress. Would you rather explain why Elizabeth can't be a juror?"

  "I'll get you something that will pass."

  Faith nodded. She picked up her veggie burger and pre­pared to enjoy the rest of the afternoon.

  When the alarm went off on Monday morning, Faith awoke with a jerk that scattered Amy and Mac, her two do­mestic longhairs, from the bed. It took a few startled, puz­zled seconds for her to remember why she had set it the night before.

  "Jury duty," she muttered.

  Mac stared at her, wild-eyed.

  "It's for Elizabeth," she explained. "Michael's cat. A long story."

  Amy headed for the kitchen, certain food would be forthcoming soon.

  And Faith headed for the shower, not certain that it was going to do much good. The day was going to be another scorcher.

  Even getting dressed and made-up required taking breaks in front of the wheezing window unit. She was damp before she left the building. With a book under her arm and a jacket over it, in case the courthouse was actually refriger­ated, she dashed for her car, the one place in the world where the temperature was under her control.

  Surely, jury duty would be better than another day in the heat.

  She took Coldwater Canyon over the hill, past Ventura Boulevard and on to Victory Boulevard, where she turned left toward the government complex that included two courthouses, one Municipal, one Superior. Following the directions on Elizabeth's summons, she found the jury parking lot. A young man glanced at the card and waved her through. He had waved at the car before, and he waved at the car after.

  The new jurors were all arriving at the same time—and the line of cars moving slowly into the structure meant that they would all be late.

  Faith parked between the two cars that had been with her coming in. She fell into step with the fiftyish man in a work shirt and jeans who emerged from one and the sixtyish woman in a cotton blouse and skirt who emerged from the other as all three walked briskly across the street and right, toward the building that housed the Municipal Court.

  There was another bottleneck just inside the door. Ev­eryone had to pass through the metal detector. Nobody set it off, and the guard seemed bored.

  The herd moved as one to the jury room. Faith sat and waited for her name—Elizabeth's name, that is—to be called. Whoever had summoned them all clearly had done this before and knew they would all be late. The public ad­dress system came to life about half an hour after she ar­rived.

&n
bsp; Faith sat and waited through the orientation, first lis­tening to a clerk explain the routine, then watching a video­taped judge explain the system. She sat and waited through a long silence. The room felt uncomfortably like a bus ter­minal, and she didn't really feel like reading the paperback novel she had brought. But at least it was cool. And not too cold.

  Shortly before noon, the speakers came to life again, and an amplified voice called out, "Municipal Court will not be seating a jury today. Superior Court, however, needs jurors. At one thirty, the following prospective ju­rors will report for duty at the Superior Court building on the other side of the walkway. If your name is not called, you are dismissed for the day. Walter Ivey, Jane Guerin, Elizabeth Haver..."

  Faith was picking up her things, getting ready to leave, when she realized unhappily that she was now Elizabeth Haver.

  The voice gave directions to the courtroom.

  As ordered, Faith reported to the Superior Court building after lunching in the crowded cafeteria. No one wanted to leave the area. It would have meant exposure to the heat.

  The man and woman she had met in the parking structure were among the group in the hall waiting for the court­room door to open.

  "Bad luck," the woman said brightly, nodding at Faith. The woman had short white hair and wore heavy bifocals that reflected the light from the windows.

  Faith nodded in return. She didn't really want to get caught in small talk. It would mean establishing her identity as Elizabeth Haver, and she wanted to keep the lies to a minimum.

  It was almost two when the bailiff opened the door and motioned them all inside.

  More waiting, more listening to instructions.

  And it dawned on Faith as the first twelve prospective jurors were questioned that if she were seated, and if she told them her name was Elizabeth Haver, she wouldn't simply be lying. She would be committing perjury—actually breaking the law. She thought about explaining to the bailiff that this was all a mistake, that she had to leave. She thought about suddenly becoming ill.

  She imagined the cold eyes of the judge penetrating her heart.

  There was no easy out, no way she could tell the truth without making things worse. Perjury it would have to be.

  She tried to figure out from the questions what kind of crime the defendant was charged with. It had to be violent, and serious, or the judge wouldn't care so much which of the prospective jurors had recently been victimized.

  The defendant was a woman, a grossly obese woman with a spiky halo of flaming red hair. She didn't look particularly violent, although she did look vaguely familiar. Faith had seen her face before. On television. She remembered the protruding blue eyes with the dark shadows beneath.

  The voir dire questions that weren't about crime all seemed to do with belief in extrasensory perception.

  The prosecutor was using his peremptory challenges to get rid of jurors who absolutely believed in psychic phe­nomena. The defense attorney was using hers to get rid of skeptics.

  The judge was excusing people who said they had seen so much media coverage of the case that their minds were made up.

  Faith remembered who the woman was. Molly Jupiter, billed as the World's Greatest Psychic. A few months earlier she had been arrested for the murder of Charles Bennis, op­erator of a psychic hotline that was advertised extensively on late-night television. Faith hadn't paid too much atten­tion to the media coverage because too much had been hap­pening in her own life at the time. All she remembered was the fat psychic, who had seemed even fatter on television, refusing to talk.

  If Faith wanted to avoid this jury, all she had to do was tell them her mind was closed, one way or the other. Closed on psychic phenomena, certain the woman was a mur­deress.

  Unfortunately, her mind was open on both. It was one thing to lie about her name, another to lie about her toler­ance and sense of fair play.

  At the end of the afternoon, Faith—now Elizabeth Haver—was one of twelve jurors sworn in to decide the case of Molly Jupiter.

  Opening arguments were scheduled for ten the following morning.

  Faith glumly trudged out of the courtroom.

  The white-haired woman, also on the jury, caught her at the escalator.

  "What do you think?" she asked. "By the way, my name is Jane."

  "I think we shouldn't discuss it," Faith said. "And my name is—Elizabeth."

  "Glad to meet you. You mentioned when the judge was asking questions that you're an actress. Might I have seen you in anything? You do look familiar." Jane seemed deter­mined to strike up a conversation.

  "Uh, no, I don't think so. I've been living on residuals, nothing recent."

  Faith was almost glad to hit the heat. Walking from the courthouse to the parking structure left both women short of breath, ending all talk.

  They waved goodbye as they reached their cars.

  Turning the air conditioner to maximum cool restored Faith's good humor. She considered driving until morning, until it was time to return to court.

  She went home because her cats were there. And she needed to confess her crime to Michael.

  "Faith, you knew it would be perjury," he said when she called.

  "I didn't think. Could I be prosecuted?"

  "I don't know. Probably not—or at least not unless you cause a mistrial. Are you sure you want to go ahead?"

  "Forward is easier than back."

  "And it's in a good cause."

  "I know. You read about all these lousy court decisions. Maybe I can do something right."

  "Don't flatter yourself. The cause is staying out of the heat, and you know it."

  Faith sniffed. "Partly true. Besides, I want to know what happened. This was a case that got some attention. I'll tell you about it just as soon as I can."

  "Of course. You don't want to add misconduct to per­jury."

  "That's enough. I'll call you tomorrow."

  The bottleneck at the door to the Superior Court building reached all the way down the stairs. Faith was per­spiring heavily by the time the guards passed her through the metal detector. And not in a good mood.

  "Elizabeth!"

  A hand tapped Faith's shoulder. Startled, she turned to see the juror named Jane, smiling at her.

  "I was thinking about you last night," the older woman said. "What good experience this will be, if you're ever cast in a crime series."

  Faith made a weak attempt to smile back.

  "I suspect it isn't the same," she said, moving purpose­fully toward the escalator.

  Jane scurried to catch up. "Well, we'll certainly find out, won't we?"

  The crowd had thinned in the hall, but the escalator re­newed the bottleneck.

  Faith realized that she would be doomed to chat with Jane for the duration of the trial. She turned, calling on all her reserves of charm, and found a smile that was almost sincere.

  "Yes, we surely will," she said.

  She smiled through the wait in the hallway, smiled as the bailiff called them in, smiled as Jane kept talking.

  Once seated in her spot as Juror Number Four, Faith began to study Molly Jupiter, who was having a whispered conversation with her attorney.

  The woman could have gone straight from the court­room to the Renaissance Fair. She was wearing several layers of dark blue cotton, including a blouse, a long ruffled skirt, and an equally long sleeveless vest. Her pudgy hands were clasped in front of her in a manner that seemed to Faith too relaxed for the circumstances. She searched for signs of tension.

  As if sensing Faith's attention, the woman glanced at her, focused the protruding eyes for a moment, eyes that seemed even a deeper blue this morning, nodded, and re­turned to her conversation. The attorney, whose beige tai­lored suit offered a striking contrast to her client's dress, didn't seem to notice the shift in attention.

  "All rise," the bailiff called.

  The judge, a dark-haired woman with a friendly face, en­tered and took her place. She greeted the jurors, cal
led for the opening arguments, and the trial was underway.

  The prosecutor was a young black man who looked barely out of law school.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," he began, looking each of them in the eyes, one at a time. "The defendant is charged with brutally murdering her former employer, a man who had built her professional career. Because of the nature of the crime, I will have to describe acts and show photographs that will offend some of you. Let me apologize in advance. But there is no other way."

  The prosecutor proceeded to tell them how Charles Bennis had advertised in several magazines catering to those with an interest in the occult, looking for someone who could be billed as the World's Greatest Psychic. He au­ditioned close to a hundred psychics before hiring Molly Ju­piter.

  Bennis set her up as star of her own psychic hotline, complete with infomercials on late night cable. The money poured in. Then Molly Jupiter decided she wanted to be in business for herself. Bennis threatened to sue. He was blud­geoned to death two days later.

  A piece of skin matching Molly Jupiter's DNA was found under Bennis's fingernails, the defendant had a scratch on her arm, and she had no alibi for the time of the murder.

  "Circumstantial evidence, yes," the prosecutor said. "But circumstantial evidence can be convincing. Think of the light inside your refrigerator. How do you know it goes out when you close the door? Can you see it? No. You know there is a light switch, and you believe that the door hits the light switch when it closes, and the light goes out. Circum­stantial evidence. But you have no doubt that the light goes out."

  Molly Jupiter sat quietly, looking at her hands, as the prosecutor dramatized the story. Faith wondered again if she were truly that calm, even as the prosecutor had the jury seeing the fat woman as a murderous refrigerator door.

  The defense attorney's statement was short.

  "Much of what you have heard is true," she said. "One thing is not. Molly Jupiter did not commit the murder. This is a case of mistaken identity. The police arrested the wrong psychic. The real perpetrator was not Molly Jupiter but her cousin, Melinda Parris, who was passed over originally for the title of World's Greatest Psychic, and then passed over a second time, when Molly left the hotline. Molly Jupiter was framed. What you will hear is circumstantial evidence. Nothing places Molly Jupiter at the crime because she wasn't there. Someone cut off the victim's light. But it wasn't Molly Jupiter."