Baby, Would I Lie?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “That might be best,” the judge told him. “I’ll let you decide.”

  “Perform a little circus in front of the potential jurors and then go on as before. If I agree with that, Ray’s bail continues.”

  “Of course.”

  “If I refuse, you’ll lock him up until the trial.”

  “To assure his appearance, yes.”

  Warren said, “Your Honor, you don’t appear to be interested in even the appearance of evenhandedness here.”

  “Be careful, Mr. Thurbridge,” she warned him. “Whatever treatment you may be used to in other states, we in Missouri can be quite severe in the face of wild accusations. Take care.”

  Warren gave her a level look. “In a well-publicized and important case like this,” he said, “I think we’ll all be careful, don’t you?”

  She shrugged that off. “What’s your decision, Mr. Thurbridge?”

  Warren brooded. Judge Quigley looked stern and unmoving. Buford Delray looked like the cat that raped the canary. In the little silence preceding Warren’s capitulation, the Englishman, Fernit-Branca, said, “Fascinating, American justice, all in all.”

  18

  Afterward, Ray understood that the little interrogation they’d run him through was just bullshit, a stalling session while Warren was being nailed to the wall by the prosecutor and the judge, but at the time it was going on, he didn’t get it, and for a few minutes there he got truly rattled. The troopers arrested him in front of the bus, they put handcuffs on him for the brief walk into the courthouse, they took him upstairs and through a hall full of local citizens waiting to be called as jurors—all of whom gawked at the celebrity in handcuffs, a dream come true—they took him into a small underfurnished room, and there they removed the cuffs, read him his rights, took his fingerprints, sat him down at a little metal table, and clumsily questioned him for about half an hour. Clumsily, because in fact they told him a lot more than he told them. There were half a dozen of them, in uniforms and plainclothes, led by a craggy-faced chief interrogator, and from their questions, Ray put together the story: Bob Golker’s body had been found in a car at the bottom of Lake Taneycomo, blood full of alcohol and lungs full of water. He’d died no more than twenty-four hours after Belle. And what did Ray Jones have to say to all that?

  That was Ray’s first real moment of doubt. He almost broke down at that point and told the truth; but one look at those closed dumb official faces all around him and he realized the truth would be utterly wasted if used here. So, while they were stalling him, he stalled right back.

  Jury selection had been supposed to start at 9:30, so it had been just a little before that time when Ray and the bus had arrived, and it was just a little after ten when the chief interrogator was called out of the room for a minute. The others halfheartedly went on with their bullshit, but everybody looked relieved when the interrogator came back a few minutes later and said, “Okay, Ray, that’s all for now. The deputy will escort you to the courtroom.”

  “For what?” Ray asked.

  The interrogator looked surprised. “For what? You came here for jury selection, didn’t you?”

  “That’s goin ahead?”

  “The deputy will escort you.”

  The deputy, a blond gelding in tan, gestured with a hand that didn’t quite grasp Ray’s elbow. “Come along.”

  Ray looked at his fingers, still black with ink from the printing. “Got to wash my hands,” he said.

  “No time,” the deputy said.

  Ray looked at him, looked around at the rest of these assholes, and grinned. “I may be a country boy,” he said, “but I know better than to walk into that courtroom and those folks on the jury with ink on my fingers. You’ve had your fun jerkin me around, but it’s over.”

  The chief interrogator looked like a fella eating a bad clam.

  “The deputy will escort you to the washroom.”

  “That’s more like it,” Ray said, getting to his feet. “And tell him, while we’re in there, keep his hands to himself.”

  That shocked the dumbos into silence. Ray and the deputy went around the corner to the men’s room and Ray washed the black off his fingertips. Then the two of them walked together down the hall full of people waiting to be called for jury duty—Ray now grinning left and right, waving, demonstrating unfettered hands—and into the courtroom, crowded with press in the public seats and lawyers up front.

  The judge looked like the orphanage operator in Annie; not a good sign. She glowered at Ray for his whole walk between the rear door and the defendant’s table. Ray ignored her as best he could, took the empty chair beside Warren Thurbridge, and leaned over to half-whisper, “We havin fun yet?”

  Warren gave him a bleak smile. “When the going gets tough,” he said.

  Ray looked interested. “Yeah? What happens then?”

  “Wait and see.”

  So Ray waited and saw, for the next two hours until lunchtime, and there wasn’t much fun in it. Most of the time, he didn’t know what the hell was going on, and when he did know what was going on, he didn’t like it.

  One by one, the prospective jurors were put on the witness stand and asked questions. Sometimes the questions were asked by the judge; sometimes by the prosecutor, Buford Delray; sometimes by the state prosecutor, Fred Heffner; sometimes by Warren; and sometimes by Warren’s local legal beagle, Jim Chancellor. The questions had to do with what the people knew about the case and what they knew about Ray and what attitude they had toward capital punishment. (Those who didn’t like capital punishment were automatically excluded, which meant the very first cull was in favor of the bloody-minded. Great.)

  There were a lot of other reasons as well for excusing a possible juror: if they said they’d already formed an opinion about the case, for instance, or if they claimed to have somebody dependent at home that needed them every day, or if they thought a woman like Belle Hardwick probably deserved what she got no matter who it was did it to her—there were a bunch of those.

  Then every once in a while, there’d be a peremptory challenge, which would mean either Warren or one of the prosecutors just didn’t like that juror’s face and wanted him or her out of there. It seemed to Ray that every time a potential juror gave Ray even the slightest smile of encouragement or nod of recognition or even admitted to ever having bought one of his records or tapes or CDs, there would be old Buford Delray on his feet again, chanting the old mantra: “For cause!”

  What made it even worse, he didn’t have his backup group with him like he’d expected. Everybody from the bus was supposed to be here in court, in the seats just behind Ray and Warren, so at least from time to time at one of the more unbelievably boring or stupid parts he’d be able to turn around and make eye contact with a friend, but the mess out front when they’d arrived had thrown everybody off. According to Warren, some of the bunch were over at his offices now and the rest were just wandering around Forsyth, a one-horse town if ever there was one. Leaving Ray, except for his high-priced legal talent, all alone. And the talent was busy.

  Time crawled; and most jurors were excused for one reason or another, but nevertheless by lunchtime five people had been accepted and led away through the side door to become jurors. Ray hadn’t thought about food at all, and, in fact, wasn’t entirely certain he’d ever eat again, the way his stomach was all knotted up, so it was a surprise to him when the judge suddenly said they’d stand at recess for lunch until two o’clock, banged her gavel, and left.

  Everybody was suddenly up and moving. Ray said to Warren, “So what do you think?”

  “They don’t have you yet,” Warren said. “Let’s go eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved.”

  19

  While Sara was off having fun in Forsyth, fooling around with murder trials, Jack devoted himself to the real subject: the Weekly Galaxy. He was hampered by the fact that most of the Galaxians knew him from the old days and would have no reason to trust him, having no reason to trust anyone, si
nce every man’s hand would quite naturally be raised against them, along with the hands of most women and all the more perspicacious children. Still, there was work that could be done. And the first thing was to find their nest, the private home the Galaxy would have rented and turned into headquarters for this operation.

  To do that, Jack in his anonymous rental car hung around the parking lot of Jjeepers!—the family restaurant just outside the guarded entrance to Porte Regal, the golf course Ray Jones called home—and waited for a Galaxian to try to get in. Surely they’d be bugging the Jones manse and photographing its bedrooms, or at least trying to get onto the property for such purposes, so all Jack had to do was sit here, listen to a fishing program on the car radio, and wait for a Galaxian to go in.

  Except that the one he saw, about 10:30 in the morning, was coming out. Gloomy Don Grove it was whom Jack recognized, one of the reporters from his own team in the old days, now attached like a bad cold to Binx. Don was at this moment at the wheel of a diaper-service truck.

  Really? Jack had heard that cloth diapers and therefore diaper services were coming back, for ecological reasons, but at Porte Regal? It seemed unlikely, almost impossible.

  But then he looked more closely and saw the company name printed in flowing logo on its side was Empower Adult Diaper Service, and all became clear. And when Don Grove, at the wheel of the truck, and the guard in his guard shack gave one another surreptitious nods and waves, even more became clear. Suborning employees—the Galaxy’s prime business, really.

  Jack snapped a picture of the guard, to remember him later, and followed the diaper truck out onto the highway and to the right toward town. The truck stopped a quarter of a mile later, at a convenience store and gas station on the right, where Don pulled up beside the building and stopped. Himself halting a discreet distance away, Jack watched as Don climbed out. He was shucking out of his blue jacket with EMPOWER on the back when a worried-looking guy in a white shirt and blue trousers approached him. While Jack took many photos of the occurrence, the guy clearly asked Don if everything had gone well, and Don assured him that it had. Then Don gave the guy the jacket and the guy put it on, and it fit him just as badly as it had fit Don. Then Don took off his blue Empower cap and handed it to the guy, who put it on, pulling it low over his eyes. Then Don took money from his pocket and gave it to the guy, who looked all around with the most guilty expression you’ve ever seen and then, establishing his criminal intent, put the money in his pocket. All of which was memorialized in virtually continuous photos in Jack’s two cameras.

  At last, the guy got into his diaper truck and drove it away, and Don got into a rental as anonymous as Jack’s and headed down a secondary road that skirted the chaos of central Branson. Jack, making himself tiny in Don’s rearview mirror, followed.

  And jackpot. Don drove straight to a side street called Cherokee, in the old residential part of town, and parked in front of a low brown ranch house that had exactly the appearance of a place that later turns out to have been the terrorists’ bomb factory. It was the only house in the neighborhood, for instance, with butcher paper over the windows; and several cars parked in the driveway and on the lawn; and a lot of furniture partially under a tarp in the carport; and enough new phone lines going in for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This, Jack told himself, watching Don Grove trudge up from his rental to the front door and on in, must be the place.

  How to proceed. Frontally; why not? Having reloaded his smaller camera, Jack got out of the rental, took a few preliminary shots from a distance, then walked boldly across the lawn and directly to the front door, which he knew would be unlocked. (Too many people would be going in and out for everybody to have a key.) He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and went in with a big smile on his face. “Hi! How’s everybody doing? Pumping out those sidebars?”

  Startled faces turned his way. He kept moving forward into the nest, still talking, waving his right hand prominently at everybody and anybody, while his left hand held the camera low, snapping, snapping, snapping. To be able to take useful pictures at hip level, without direct visual aim, is a skill well worth the learning for any investigative reporter, and Jack had learned it thoroughly.

  Everything here would be on his film: the maps on the walls, the people at the banks of phones, the photographers with their cameras and many bags, the rented office furniture piled every which way, the wastebasket in the fireplace—a nice touch—even the people posed in front of the blown-up life-size color photo of the courtroom at Forsyth that had been nailed to one wall. (These people, “realies” hired for the occasion because they looked so horribly like the actual readership of the Galaxy, had been practicing expressions of nausea and horror when Jack walked in, so that the photo being taken of them would seem to show spectators in the courtroom appalled by the gruesome details of the murder. Kid stuff.)

  These realies switched their attention from their photographer to this noisy newcomer but went on looking nauseated. Meanwhile, the regular staff was getting its wits about it. The fact that Jack looked so familiar had given him some lovely extra time. People lifted their heads and saw a face they’d very often seen in the past in circumstances like this, and it was only a few seconds later they remembered that was Jack Ingersoll and Jack Ingersoll doesn’t work here anymore! And it was an additional few seconds after that before they saw the little camera snapping away like a tortoise at his left hip (but faster). And by then, Jack was done.

  Most of the faces now staring at Jack were familiar ones, it’s true, but that didn’t mean any of them were friendly. In fact, the four or five guys who jumped to their feet seemed absolutely threatening in their body language as they hurried through the obstacle course of desks and tables and chairs and sleeping photographers, aiming their hands and shouts in Jack’s direction.

  As rapidly as he’d entered, that’s how rapidly he exited, and just as amiably, too. Still shouting hellos to old comrades, still waving the sucker hand without the camera in it, still shooting away with the other, Jack backpedaled, crying, “Well, I won’t keep you; I know you’re busy. We’ll be in touch!” And he was out the door, proceeding at a dead run for the rental.

  Two of them actually pursued him out of the house, though they hadn’t a hope in hell of catching him before he was in the car and on his way. When last he looked in his mirror, one of them, a true fantasist apparently, was running toward another car as though to turn this into a movie scene, while the other, more sensible, legged it back to the nest to make phone calls.

  “Shake in your boots, boys,” Jack told the receding figures in the mirror. “Trend is on the case. And I do mean your friend and mine, Jack Ingersoll, the All-American Boy.”

  20

  What a day! There was a sense of exhaustion and gloom within everybody else on the team bus rolling back to Branson after a full day of jury selection—not yet completed; only nine good persons and true were now settling into their sequestered quarters at one of the new motels on the hills just north of Branson—but for Sara, the day had been terrific. The others on the bus, driving through the late-afternoon traffic directly into the late-afternoon summer sun, were all too worn out, physically and emotionally, to sing or even to speak, but Sara was dancing inside.

  What a scoop! And all her own! If only she still worked for the Galaxy—

  No, strike that thought. She was happier with Trend, more productive, less embarrassed about the very fact of her existence. And what she’d gained today would be extremely useful when it came time to do her Ray Jones piece, whatever Jack might think about the irrelevancy of the underclass.

  In the first place, it wasn’t all underclass. Ray Jones might make his living off the great unwashed—just as Sara, and Jack himself, used to do, at a much lower economic level, at the Galaxy—but he didn’t surround himself with those folk, not up close. The people around Ray Jones were smart, talented, sharp, and fun to be with. The musicians weren’t very talkative, but they were bright and they appreciate
d a nice nuance in somebody else’s dialogue.

  As for Jolie Grubbe, she was great. If I ever have to go to court, Sara told herself, I want Jolie beside me. Once the fat woman had gotten over her natural distaste for the press, it turned out she and Sara had certain things in common beyond gender—attitudes, interests, histories, even some specifics, including a very strange link indeed.

  It worked like this. Sara’s first journalism job after college had been with a small local paper in New Hampshire. Shortly after she’d been hired, the paper had been sold to a conglomerate, who merged it with some other little papers and fired the redundant staff, principally Sara. Jolie Grubbe, it turned out, had gone to college, prior to attending law school at Columbia, in the area serviced by that newspaper, though years before Sara had worked there. Still, Jolie herself while an undergraduate had written some items for the paper and had maintained her subscription to it after she’d moved away, keeping the connection alive out of some sort of buried sentimentality (any sentimentality Jolie Grubbe might have would be very definitely buried) until the paper became merged, stapled, mutilated, and folded. So she must have read Sara, in Sara’s earliest incarnation, though neither of them could pinpoint at this late date any specific item Sara might have written that Jolie might have read.

  Still, the link was there, and Sara worked it for all it was worth. It was nice she had Cal Denny on her side, and also nice that Ray Jones permitted her to hang around with the entourage, but it was maybe more important to be pals with Jolie Grubbe, a smart insider who could be very helpful if she chose.

  At least for today, Jolie chose. With nothing else to do but wait, she took Sara around the Warren Thurbridge offices, showed her the conference room being set up for the shadow jury, and explained what a shadow jury was. She made this explanation in Warren’s private office, seated at Warren’s desk, since Warren was across the street in court and Jolie didn’t want anybody else to hear this. Sara should consider the conversation private and the information she was hearing privileged—until after the trial, privileged.