Baby, Would I Lie?

by Donald E. Westlake

  She missed Jack; already she missed him. His plane out of Springfield would have been airborne for about half an hour now, on its way to St. Louis—for the change of equipment, as the airlines say, for some reason not wanting to acknowledge that they use airplanes to move people from place to place. The new equipment would take Jack to New York and their dear little apartment on West Eleventh Street. She missed him. She missed the dear little apartment. She missed New York. But mostly, she wished he were right here in Branson this second, this instant, standing next to her here inside this tent, so there’d be somebody around she could share her reactions with, someone she could understand who would understand her. It’s never an entirely comfortable feeling to be alone deep inside another tribe’s territory.

  Mr. Frock Coat thanked everybody for the warm welcome. He reminded them how much Skaggs Community Hospital had done for folks over the years and he thanked them for helping to support that good work. He thanked the performers who were about to come out here and give selflessly of their time and talent so the good work of Skaggs Community Hospital could go on. And he said he didn’t want to take up any more of everybody’s time; he’d just introduce the first artist, who was Soandso!

  Soandso was a somewhat hefty, tall woman dressed entirely in vermilion, head to wrist to toe, covered with bugle beads. Her hair, of which she had a lot, was a clashing orange in color, and the electric guitar she carried displayed most of the other shades of the red section of the spectrum. Her eyelashes were long enough to hang laundry on, her smile would light Central Park, and when she thanked everybody for the applause that had welcomed her, she had a voice like a backhoe.

  But it was powerful, all right, and even melodic when used for purposes of singing. Soandso was a belter; she stood well back from the microphone and delivered two songs about hard times on the field of love. Both songs were clearly well known to the crowd and well liked by them. After the applause following the second, Soandso said, “You’re all gonna see Ray Jones in a little while,” and that got its own rush of fervent applause, following which Soandso said, “Ray’s havin more than his share of troubles these days, but he’s always been a good friend to me and he’s a fine songwriter. I’d like to dedicate this to Ray and wish him the best.” And she did a gravelly honky-tonk version of the song Ray had sung to Sara in the bus: “It’s Time to Write Another Love Song (This Time, The Song’s for You).”

  Big applause. Soandso blew kisses, waved her guitar, disattached the guitar from the amplifiers, and jounced away, revealing a behind that looked like the world’s largest candy apple. Mr. Frock Coat bounded back and introduced somebody else, and Sara spent her time watching the audience, trying to think about Ray Jones and his trial—trials, there was also the income-tax thing—and his relationship with his audience, these people here. What did it mean? What could she make it mean, in a piece for Trend, that wouldn’t make Jack, or Hiram Farley, throw up?

  Then at last, Ray Jones was introduced, and he got a whole lot of applause. When it died down, he said, “You know, Branson’s my home, been my home for a while now, and if I feel like maybe I can do something to help Skaggs Community Hospital, it’s mostly a selfish act, because it’s my community and my community hospital, and I can’t tell you how happy I am, as a local boy, that they are there. So thank you all for supporting their good work. And now”—strum the guitar—“I’d like to sing about my favorite girl. Anybody out there with that name? My favorite girl’s name?”

  Squealing, absolute squealing, from the crowd. Girls and women of all ages jumped up and down, waving their hands over their heads, yelling, “Me! Me!”

  And yelling something else, too: a name. Their own name, it must be, and Ray Jones, like so many songwriters before him, must have written a song to a particular girl’s name. A popular name among the country fans, from the agitation in the crowd. What were they shouting?

  Fllrrumm went the guitar, and Ray Jones sang:

  Tiff-fa-nee, you’re pretty as a picture.

  Tiff-fa-nee, you’re sweet as berry jam.

  Anywhere you are, I’ll be right witcha.

  Anywhere you go, that’s where I am.

  Tiff-fa-nee, you’re good as golden apples.

  Tiff-fa-nee, you’re nice as apple pie.

  In your eyes, the light of lovely chapels.

  In your eyes, the blue of heaven’s sky.

  When we met, I heard your name so sweetly,

  Ringing like a bell, a chandelier.

  You know you have captured me completely.

  You know I will always be sincere.

  Tiff-fa-nee, your voice is like a robin.

  Tiff-fa-nee, you move with such sweet grace,

  I can feel my heart within me throbbin.

  Every time I gaze upon your face.

  When we met, I thought you were above me.

  Your sweet lips were open in a smile.

  Tiffany, if you could only love me,

  How I’d love to walk you down the aisle.

  Tiff-fa-nee, if we could live forever,

  Tiff-fa-nee, I’d live life by your side.

  Beautiful, you know I’d leave you never.

  Come with me, my love, and be my bride.

  Sara couldn’t make a sociological statement out of that one at all.

  32

  Monday, the trial got into high gear. Sara sat between Cal and Honey Franzen again, watching, remembering, wishing she could take notes but afraid it might just be the gesture to drive Jolie’s forbearance beyond endurance. And anyway, what was happening was memorable enough.

  Over vociferous defense objections, the jury was shown photos of the dead Belle Hardwick, as well as of the scrubby lakeside land where the murder had taken place and the bloodstained interior of the red Acura SNX. The prosecution wanted to bus the jury over to the actual murder site—on a Ride the Ducks?—but even Judge Quigley realized that was going too far, both figuratively and literally, and ixnayed it.

  Still, the prosecution made its approach clear from the opening salvo. Their two-pronged attack was first to demonstrate the absolute depravity of the crime and second to establish the absolute depravity of Ray Jones, thus linking him to the crime by making him the only person in the vicinity vile enough to have committed it. Since all they had in real terms was circumstantial evidence, and rather shaky circumstantial evidence at that, this was clearly their wisest approach. As the old legal dictum has it: If the facts are with you, pound the facts; if the facts are against you, pound the table. The prosecution pounded the table.

  There was a lot of stuff they wanted to pound the table with, and the defense blocked them at every turn. They wanted to bring in the Ray Jones tax problem. They wanted to introduce supposedly cynical or unchristian lyrics from his songs. They wanted to talk about his marital life. They wanted to talk about a previous legal record that seemed to consist of the various things that can happen when you combine alcohol with automobiles. They even wanted to mention a decades-old song plagiarism suit against Ray that had been dismissed as frivolous and without merit the first time it had reached a court.

  Every time one of these unacceptable side roads appeared on the horizon, Warren Thurbridge was at once on his feet, objecting loudly, eloquently and unceasingly, drowning out the offending matter, seeing to it by his volume and vocabulary that not one extraneous syllable tainted the jurors’ ears. And each time, Judge Quigley would pound her gavel and order the jury removed while she consulted with the attorneys at the bench, and the technician running the defense team’s video camera would switch it off, not to switch it back on until the jury returned.

  The jury did a lot of marching back and forth Monday morning and the video technician did a lot of switching off and on. Sara, watching all this, thought there wasn’t going to be much tape for the shadow jury to look at later today, which made her realize she wanted desperately, hungrily, voraciously to watch the shadow jury in action.

  At lunch, which she was permitted to take
with the defense team in the conference room of Warren’s offices, presumably because all strategy had already been worked out and nothing of dangerous importance was likely to be said over the ham-and-American sandwiches and really sweet coleslaw, Sara began to wheedle Cal for permission to sit in on today’s shadow jury session, “even for just one minute, just to get the idea of it.”

  At first, Cal didn’t even want to broach the subject with the lawyers in the room, not wanting his head bitten off, but then Sara said, “Ask Ray. If he says yes, they’ll have to go along with him. If he says no, I’ll give up.”

  “Well, I’ll try it,” Cal agreed, and went away around the conference table to hunker down beside Ray and engage in muttered conversation for a while. Ray raised an eyebrow in her direction at one point (she smiled like a sunny schoolgirl back at him), then muttered with Cal some more, then turned to mutter at Jolie on his other side, and from the great lightning-flash thunderclouds that immediately formed all over Jolie’s head, Sara knew the answer was good news even before Cal came back and said, “It’s okay. Ray’ll fix it.”

  “Thank you, Cal. And thank you, Ray.” She smiled and nodded in his direction, but he wasn’t looking at her.

  “Only for a minute, though,” Cal warned.

  “That’s all I want; that’s all I ask. Boy, I appreciate this, Cal.”

  “Sure,” Cal said, looking dubious but relieved.

  The afternoon session in court brought more meat but not less controversy. A skinny rat-faced young woman, Jayne Anne Klarg, identified as an ex-employee of the Ray Jones Country Theater, had allegedly been called by the prosecution to testify that she had seen Ray Jones in what appeared to be intimate conversation with Belle Hardwick on more than one occasion (not including the night of the murder, unfortunately, which was not emphasized), but it soon became clear that she was actually on the witness stand to suggest she’d left Ray Jones’s employment because he’d made unwelcome sexual advances and had frightened her when she had rejected him.

  Warren was getting a lot of exercise today, popping to his feet at every other word, objecting all over the place, while Jayne Anne glared. Fred Heffner, the state prosecutor from Springfield handling the testimony, did his best to insert the information into the ears and brains of the jurors despite Judge Quigley’s reluctant agreement that he really shouldn’t do that.

  Sara had expected Warren to chew Jayne Anne to bits when it came time for cross-examination, but he had a different tack in mind. Mildly, he said, “You quit your job at the Ray Jones Country Theater?”

  “Because he was all the time—”

  “I asked you,” Warren overrode her, “if you quit your job.”

  “Of course I did! Nobody likes to be treated—”

  “You weren’t fired, is that right?”

  She blinked. She looked wary. “I was quittin,” she insisted, which was an odd locution, all in all.

  Warren returned to the defense desk, picked up a piece of paper—a business letter, it looked like—and returned to the witness. Holding it up in front of her, he said, “Is this a copy of a letter that was sent to you by the box-office manager at the Ray Jones Country Theater?”

  She squinted. She didn’t like that. “I guess so.”

  Fred Heffner was on his feet. “May I see that letter?”

  “After Judge Quigley, I think,” Warren told him. He handed the letter to the judge, who read it, frowned with disapproval at the witness, and handed the letter to Fred Heffner, who read it, looked extremely expressionless, handed the letter back to Warren, and returned silently to his seat.

  Warren: “You were dismissed, were you not?”

  Jayne Anne: “I was quittin.”

  Warren: “You were not dismissed for any reason having to do with Ray Jones or unwanted overtures, were you?”

  Jayne Anne: “What?”

  Warren: “You were dismissed for—”

  Heffner (rising): “Your Honor, the reason for Miss Klarg’s dismissal is immaterial to the matter at hand. We do not dispute the defense contention that Miss Klarg did not resign, as she earlier suggested to us, but was dismissed.”

  Warren: “Thank you, counselor.”

  Quigley: “The reason for the dismissal need not concern us.”

  Warren: “Agreed, Your Honor.” To the witness (smiling): “But you did pay it back, didn’t you?”

  Heffner (rising, wounded): “Your Honor!”

  Warren: “Withdraw the question. I’ve finished with this witness, Your Honor.”

  The next witness was the gate guard at Porte Regal, who for Fred Heffner was absolutely positive it had been Ray Jones’s red Acura SNX he’d waved through into the compound late that night, and who for Warren Thurbridge was equally absolutely positive he couldn’t be sure who’d been at the wheel, or indeed how many people had been in the car.

  And there, astonishing everybody, the prosecution rested. It was barely three in the afternoon. Warren agreed with the suggestion from the bench that the defense didn’t feel like starting its presentation today and Judge Quigley gaveled the court closed until 9:30 the following morning.

  A quick phone call was made to the motel in Branson where the shadow jury was being sequestered and then the defense team plus Sara crossed the street to Warren’s offices to await the jurors’ arrival.

  The feeling in Warren’s offices was cheerful, even smug. What had the prosecution presented, after all? Their circumstantial evidence, boring, easily forgotten, all last Friday. This morning, the jury had essentially seen nothing but the judge agreeing with the defense and chastising the prosecution, and this afternoon the prosecution’s principal witness had exploded in their faces. The state had shot its bolt, it hadn’t laid a glove on Ray Jones, and now all the defense had to do was establish the principle of reasonable doubt and they’d be home free.

  The self-congratulatory sense of well-being was infectious. Sara felt the lift of it herself, though it wasn’t her fight and, realistically speaking, the outcome didn’t matter to her one way or the other. She was an experienced reporter and an experienced magazine writer. Whatever the conclusion of the trial, Sara would find within it a larger meaning, a mirror in which America could gaze upon itself with perhaps a new understanding, blah blah blah. Nothing to it.

  About twenty minutes later, the shadow jury’s bus—not a Ride the Ducks, but a charter from Interstate, for whom Ray used to do promos and, who knows, might again—arrived out front. Through the curtained former showroom window, Sara watched the people, who looked remarkably like the actual jurors she’d been observing in the courtroom across the street, climb down from the bus, squint in the sunlight—the bus windows were tinted—and cross the sidewalk toward the building.

  “Oh my God!”

  Sara jumped away from the window as though it had grown teeth and bitten her. The jurors were beginning to enter, to file past her toward the conference room. There was a secretary’s desk behind her; she dashed to it, sat down, swiveled the chair halfway around so her back was to the jurors, and became very interested in the contents of a bottom file drawer.

  Immediately, Jolie was at her side, reaching down as though to slam that drawer, barking, “Get out of there! What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Shut up!” Sara hissed, with such commanding urgency that Jolie stepped back, startled, and stared at her as though Sara were foaming at the mouth.

  Sara risked a look over her shoulder. The last of the jurors was passing, was gone. Straightening, she said, “Jolie, get Warren out here. Now. Before anything else happens.”

  “Have you lost your—”

  “Don’t be a fool, Jolie. You can tell when I mean it.”

  Jolie could. She gave Sara one last glare—this better be good, kid—then turned and bustled off to take Warren away from his jurors.

  Which gave Sara a minute to look around and think, so that when Warren came back with Jolie, distracted and irritated, saying, “What’s this?” Sara merely rose, put her
finger to her lips, and motioned for them to follow her outside. They didn’t want to—they wanted to believe she’d gone crazy—but they followed.

  Hot humid sunlight beat down on the sidewalk. Sara turned, and as Warren and Jolie both started to demand something or other, she said, “One of your jurors is a ringer.”

  That stopped them. They frowned. They stared at one another. Warren said, “What do you mean, a ringer?”

  “I mean one of your jurors is not a bona fide Taney County voter. One of your jurors is actually a reporter for the Weekly Galaxy.”

  Jolie nearly squeaked: “That rag?”

  “You know it, eh?”

  “The things they’ve said about Ray over the years—”

  “Are nothing,” Sara interrupted, “to what they mean to say about him. And about all of you.”

  Warren said, “What do you mean, all of us?”

  “I’ve had a minute to think it out,” Sara said. “I know how those people think; I’ve had experience with Weekly Galaxy reporters before.” It seemed to her, all in all, better not to mention that she’d once been such a reporter. “And how did they get the information about the shadow jury?” she asked. “How did they get to know what you know fast enough to slip one of their own people in instead of the person you were going after?”

  Jolie stared at the building with horror. “They bugged us!”

  A man for whom light had suddenly dawned, Warren said, “The telephone repairers!”

  “Sounds good,” Sara said.

  Warren explained, “After everything was installed, these two came back and said there was a problem, and fixed it.”

  “They sure did. Where did they work?”

  “In my office,” Warren said, his usually robust voice gone hollow. His tan had faded, too.