Jolie, around a mouthful of sandwich, said, “Forget character witnesses.”
“They’re forgotten,” Warren assured her. “And I also had three Ray Jones Theater employees to say there was never anything between Ray and Belle Hardwick, but so what? A guy who prefers his women to turn into pizzas at three in the morning isn’t likely to be known for his long-term relationships.”
Ray said, “What about my ex-wife?”
Warren gave him a look of deep mistrust. “What about her?”
“Put Cherry on the stand,” Ray suggested. “There’s a longterm relationship for you.”
Jolie was heard to groan. Ray turned to her, saying, “Come on, Jolie, you know that’s true. I’ve kept up with my alimony payments, and I was never a minute behind in my child support.” To Warren again, he said, “How’s that for character?”
“Ray,” Warren said, “do you really want Fred Heffner asking questions of your ex-wife?”
Ray thought about that, his eyes shifting back and forth. “Probably not,” he said.
Jim Chancellor said, “We have other witnesses, don’t we?”
“Oh certainly,” Warren agreed. “We have three scruffy shifty-eyed no-fixed-abode musicians ready to testify that they borrowed Ray’s sports car for short-term assignations with loose women all the time. Won’t Fred Heffner love them.”
Jolie said, “Forget the car. The car isn’t what it’s about, not anymore.”
Jim said, “Warren, a little earlier you said, if Ray did badly—”
“And at that time, I had no idea,” Warren interjected, “just how badly our friend Ray could do.”
“Thanks,” Ray muttered.
Determined to make his point, Jim said, “You said you’d put witnesses on until the jury forgot Ray’s testimony, no matter how long it took.”
“Not this testimony,” Warren said. “Our grandchildren will remember this testimony.”
Ray said, “Oh, come on. One song?”
“Circling in their heads,” Warren said, “with those ukuleles.”
“Electric guitars.”
“Electric ukuleles, for all I care,” Warren told him. “If I’d had my wits about me, I must admit, I would have insisted you recite those lyrics. Awful as they are, they wouldn’t have stuck quite so forcefully in the jury’s mind. But now, as those jurors sit there trying to determine your guilt or innocence, that song is going to circle in their heads, twang twang twang, and she turns into a pizza at three o’-clock.”
That line, delivered with that much savagery, pretty much silenced everybody in the room for a couple of minutes, until Jolie said, “Warren? Is there anything else to do?”
Warren didn’t answer. He was gazing across the room as though there were something he really despised on that wall over there.
Ray cleared his throat. “Warren,” he said, “if you really want me to go back on the stand …”
Warren roused himself. “No,” he said with a long and pessimistic sigh. “I realize now, that would merely be waiting for the other grenade to drop.”
“You’re probably right,” Ray admitted.
“My entire defense strategy,” Warren said, “is in ruins around my feet.”
“I’m sorry,” Ray said.
Jim said, “Warren? What are we going to do?”
“The only thing we can do,” Warren said. “The defense rests.”
They stared at him in astonishment. Ray cried, “What? I’m our only witness?”
“Let us hope,” Warren said, “I’m brilliant in summation.”
41
Judge Quigley decided to end the court day with Warren’s announcement that the defense would rest, so the summations would be given by both sides on Wednesday, giving everybody one more night to think it over.
Then Wednesday arrived.
Fred Heffner, in his summation, quoted the lyrics of “My Ideal”—all of them. A little later, he quoted parts of it again. He talked about Ray’s car, found in front of Ray’s house, stained with Belle Hardwick’s blood. He talked about depravity. He talked about rootless show-business people. He talked about Belle Hardwick as a God-fearing working person with a history in this community, a person about whom no one had found one unkind thing to say. He talked about Belle Hardwick trying to fend off the unwanted advances of a brutal and no doubt drunken suitor. He talked about that suitor having the arrogance of fame, show-business fame, leading him to believe he could have whatever he wanted in this world, that he was too important to be denied and that, in any case, he could get away with anything. Heffner talked about that suitor’s increasing fury at Belle Hardwick’s refusal to give in to his lust, a fury that had at last turned murderous. He asked the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to consider just who that suitor might have been. Who else could it have been? Who else had the qualities of depravity, rootlessness, arrogance, social apathy, and disregard for convention that had led to the assault on Belle Hardwick and then her murder? “Ladies and gentlemen, you see him before you, seated at the defense table. If you see anyone else, in or out of this courtroom, anyone at all who might have been responsible for this depraved and wanton destruction of a young woman’s life, then that is reasonable doubt and you must find this fellow innocent. But if he is the only one you see, the only one who might have done it, the only one who could have done it, the only one whose failings of character made such an outcome even possible, then there is no reasonable doubt, is there? Of course there isn’t. Raymond Jones is a murderer, a foul, foul murderer, and it is your duty, your privilege and your duty, to see that he is put away in such a fashion that he will never never never be in a position to wantonly attack anyone else’s daughter. Your daughter. Or mine.”
Heffner, finished, moved toward the prosecution table, and Ray called out to him on his way by, “If Belle Hardwick was a saint, I’m the Pope.”
Heffner gave Ray a small gratified smile and went on to his seat as the jury box turned into an iceberg, from which twenty-eight horrified eyes stared at Ray Jones. And Warren Thurbridge, with the longest and most heartfelt sigh of his career, rose and approached the iceberg. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said into the cold gale-wind force of their disapproval, “Belle Hardwick is not on trial here today. Her trials are over, poor lady. Ray Jones is on trial here, and I am in the unhappy position of being his defense attorney.”
Warren sighed again. He had at least diverted the jury’s attention from Ray to himself. He said, “My client, as you may have noticed, is an idiot. He has these moments of seeming rationality, when you almost think you can depend on him to have at least some small sense of self-preservation, but then he does it again. Foot-in-mouth disease.”
No one laughed; no one even smiled—not that he’d expected much jollity out here. He said, “After his last outburst, Ray apologized to the court, and to you, ladies and gentlemen. He described himself as ‘weak,’ and I guess that must be accurate. Ray is an artist, as you know, a singer and a songwriter, as well as a businessman operating his own theater over in Branson. The businessman side of him makes him sensible at times, but I’m afraid the artistic side is what you might call dominant in Ray Jones’s personality.”
Warren walked away from the jury to gaze down gloomily upon his client, who scowled back, not liking to be called an idiot, and liking even less to be called somebody who was an idiot because he was an artist. Warren didn’t much care what expression was on Ray’s face. He looked at it a while, then looked back at the jury and said, “If you’re looking for a fool, I have one for you right here. If you’re looking for a loudmouth, here he is. If you’re looking for a self-destructive buffoon, I’ve got the guy. But.”
Warren left Ray and moved again toward the jury. “But,” he said. “If you’re looking for a killer, look again. I don’t know who killed Belle Hardwick, and neither do you and neither do the police and neither does my friend Fred Heffner. The evidence they have against Ray doesn’t exist. A car with the keys in it. You could
have taken that car. The victim knew Ray Jones. The victim knew hundreds of people. Where are the eyewitnesses? Where are the people who saw Belle Hardwick and Ray Jones get into that car together? Nowhere, and believe me, the police searched for an eyewitness to that event, and they came up with nobody, because Ray Jones and Belle Hardwick did not get into that car together that night.”
Warren went over to the witness box and leaned on the rail there. Gesturing at the empty witness chair, he said, “Where are the experts to testify as to the blood found in Ray’s house, or on his clothing? You didn’t see such experts. Do you think that means no such experts were employed by the state in their efforts to pin this terrible crime on Ray Jones? Of course those experts were there. They went over Ray’s house with the latest scientific equipment. They took his clothing away to their laboratories. They used sniffer dogs on his property, looking for evidence Ray might have buried. And what did they find?”
Warren turned and looked at the empty witness chair. He appeared to be listening. Then he turned back to the jury, spread his hands wide, and shrugged. “Nothing. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, if the state’s experts had found anything at all to bolster their miserable case against Ray Jones, they would have been in this chair, testifying under oath. Their absence testifies, too. It testifies to Ray Jones’s innocence.”
Warren moved away from the witness chair. “An idiot,” he told the jury, “but an innocent idiot. So why did the police and the prosecutors and the whole mighty array of law enforcement press so exclusively on Ray Jones? Well, didn’t Mr. Heffner tell you why? Isn’t it because Ray Jones is a celebrity? Didn’t Mr. Heffner say so himself? Isn’t that why the hall out there is packed with reporters? Isn’t that why the television news all across this country shows Mr. Heffner’s face and Mr. Delray’s face every single night? If Belle Hardwick were murdered by some brutal anonymous drunk—and she was—where would be the television time for these gentlemen?”
Warren stopped his pacing and faced the jury flat-footed. “Ray Jones is not a murderer,” he said. “Ray Jones is a fool and a celebrity and an easy target for ambitious prosecutors, but don’t let yourselves be led astray. The prosecution has no case. If they had a case, they’d have showed it to you, and they didn’t. What did they show you? Eighteen-year-old song lyrics! Eighteen years old! That’s their case? Ladies and gentlemen, end this farce.”
Warren turned around and crossed to the defense table and took his seat, where Ray clapped him resoundingly on the back and announced, “That was terrific!”
Warren wheeled around, about to lose his patience for good and all, and found himself looking deep into the bright, innocent, mocking eyes of his unknowable client.
Innocent?
42
It took Jack nearly five minutes to attract the secretary’s undivided attention, but once he got it, he had it. “Oh my goodness,” she said, her typing forgotten, her filing forgotten, her phones forgotten, all her standoffish busywork forgotten. Looking at the photographs, pale beneath her makeup, rattled beneath her former display of competence, she said, “This is terrible.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Jack agreed, as serene as a monk on a mountaintop.
“None of us had the slightest idea.”
“I didn’t think you had.”
“Buford has to be told,” she said, staring at Jack with watery blue eyes. She was a decent lady of forty-something, and though she worked in a lawyer’s office, she had been till now essentially unfamiliar with the depths of human depravity.
“Yes, he must be told,” Jack said, agreeable as ever. “Privately,” he suggested. “Quietly. Don’t you agree?”
“Let me call over to the courthouse,” she said, and reached for the phone. Her finger trembled like a whip antenna as she punched the number, but apparently she hit all the right buttons, because she spoke briefly, in a hushed voice, with somebody named Janie, then cupped the mouthpiece to say to Jack, “The jury’s just gone out.”
“Ah,” Jack said, having timed himself to that event.
“So he should be able to come right—Buford?” she asked the telephone. “It’s Del, Buford. I think you ought to come over to the office right away.”
“By himself,” Jack suggested.
“Yes! By yourself, Buford. Don’t bring—don’t bring anybody with you. I don’t want to tell you on the phone, Buford! All right.” Hanging up, she said to Jack, “He’ll be here in five minutes.”
“Eight minutes,” Jack said, nodding at her desk clock. “See if I’m not right.”
It was seven minutes, actually, so Jack was closer, not that it mattered. Buford Delray the butterball rolled into the front office of his law firm, down the street from the courthouse, looking both worried and irritated, hating to be taken away from what was beginning to look like a really major feather in his cap, a tremendous victory in a capital case—the fact that Fred Heffner from upstate had done all the work wouldn’t matter a rap around Taney County, where Buford Delray had his private practice—but at the same time having to take seriously the undoubted sound of alarm, even panic, in his secretary’s voice. “Yes?” he asked. “What the heck’s so important, Del?”
Mute, Del pointed at Jack, who came forward, smiling amiably, and held up a photo for Delray to look at. “His name,” Jack said, “is Louis B. Urbiton. He’s Australian originally, and he’s a reporter for the Weekly Galaxy.”
“What?” Delray blinked but clung to previous certainties. “He is not. His name is Fernit-Branca. He’s with The Economist; that’s an English magazine.”
Jack held up a second photo. “Here’s Louis B. Urbiton with his Weekly Galaxy editor, a man named Boy Cartwright.” Another photo. “Here are Louis B. and Boy entering the house on Cherokee the Galaxy rented for the duration of the Ray Jones trial. Here’s another picture of the house; that’s a fellow named Bob Sangster, also a reporter with the Galaxy. Here’s a picture of the shadow jury the defense has been using. I guess you know about that. Recognize that fellow there?”
“Let me see that!”
While Delray stared at damning photo after damning photo, many of them with his own dumb and happy face clearly identifiable, Jack took from his inner jacket pocket a slender document, which he dropped on Del’s desk: “Here’s an affidavit from a maid at the Mountain Greenery Motel in Branson, named Laverne Slagel, stating that she was paid bribes by Bob Sangster and by a woman employee of the Weekly Galaxy named Erica Jacke to pass on to Miss Jacke from Mr. Sangster the audiotapes he was making at the shadow-jury sessions. She was told they were love letters. You have pictures there of the two women exchanging tape and money in the motel parking lot.”
“My God!” Delray spread photos out on his secretary’s desk, then leaned on the desk, the better to hold himself up while studying them. “What were these people doing?”
“Going too far, I hope,” Jack said. “By the way, I’m Jack Ingersoll. I’m an editor with Trend. We’re a magazine up in New York. You’ve heard of us?”
Delray, too late suspicious, frowned at Jack. “I’d like,” he said, “to see some identification.”
“Louis B. showed you identification,” Jack said, grinning cheekily at him. “You don’t want identification; you want to know what’s going to happen next.”
“All right,” Delray said, being guarded and wary now that it was all over. “What’s going to happen next?”
“One of two things,” Jack told him. “As you can see from those pictures, all the other people the Weekly Galaxy dealt with were completely taken in. Either I write the story that way, that everyone was taken in, or it turns out that you knew what was up the whole time and were just stringing them along until the time was right to make a number of arrests.”
“I see.” Delray turned and leaned his butt on his secretary’s desk. He thought a while. “There are certainly some misfeasances here,” he decided.
“Mmm.”
Delray squinted at Jack. “When am I going to t
hink the time is right to close in on these people?”
“Trend publishes on Friday. My deadline is nine A.M. Thursday, tomorrow morning. If you planned some predawn raids and arrests, I could have Trend staffers and photographers ready to accompany your men.”
“You want an exclusive.”
“Oh, I’ve got an exclusive,” Jack said, “one way or the other.”
Delray pondered, scratching some of his chins. “We’ll need a judge tonight, give us the warrants. We’ll need to do a bunch of paperwork between now and then, without letting the word get out.”
“I stand ready to assist in any way I can,” Jack assured him.
Suddenly decisive, Delray rose from his secretary’s desk and said, “Come into my office.”
“I’ll bring the pictures,” Jack said, starting to gather them up.
“God yes! And Del?”
“I know,” Del said. “Mum’s the word.”
“Double mum,” Delray told her. “And hold all my calls.”
He was already going through into his inner office, Jack following, when Del called after him, “You’ll want me to tell you if the jury comes back, won’t you?”
Delray couldn’t have cared less about any jury. Pausing in the doorway for a fraction of a second, he said, “Uh … uh … yes, of course. Come on in,” he said to Jack. “What did you say your name was?”
“Jack.”
“I’m Buford.” And the door closed.
43
The change in the atmosphere of the shadow jury had come, of course, with “My Ideal,” on Tuesday, which was probably a worse experience for them than for the real jury, because, in fact, one significant difference between the two juries was that the shadows knew they were being paid by the defense, had been hired by the defense to help in their strategies, their efforts to win a verdict of not guilty. However dispassionate they might try to be, the shadow jurors couldn’t help but think of themselves as part of the defense team, rooting for their side to win.
Baby, Would I Lie? Page 21
