Steve Martini - The Jury

“He’s been placed on unpaid leave pending the outcome of his trial.”

Fortunately, Crone is financially independent, able to pay my fees without strain. I am told he has family wealth, eastern roots. His great-grandfather was one of the railroad barons of the mid-Atlantic states. All I know is that my bill, computed on an hourly basis, is paid every month without question by an accounting firm in the Big Apple, and the checks don’t bounce.

“Maybe if he was out on bail the university would see it differently?” she says.

I explain to her that the court has already denied bail. And even if they did let him out pending trial, the university would never reinstate him as project director. Not while the case is pending. Crone is charged with killing a fellow employee of the university. This has implications. A possible lawsuit for damages.

“Oh.”

I can’t get into the details, but the fact that Kalista Jordan filed a sexual-harassment claim before she was killed places the employer on thin ice. Their lawyers are already conjuring thoughts of civil liability, wrongful death with the university as a party on grounds that they permitted a hostile work environment.

This leaves only one thought in Doris’s mind: that I must win the case, and do it quickly.

I’m not even sure this will change the landscape. “You should steel yourself to the possibility that none of this may help,” I tell her. “The funds are probably gone. The study may be too far along for them to change it at this stage.”

“I don’t want to think about that.” Doris is in denial.

“We may not be able to get her in, and even if we do, effective gene therapies may be a long way off.”

“I know. But I can’t think about that.”

“There’s something else,” I tell her. “The possibility that even if Dr. Crone is acquitted, the university may not reinstate him.”

This is something she hasn’t considered.

“Why not? Why wouldn’t they?” Her eyes are now large and round with indignation. Crone is the only person in a position to help her child, and I am now telling her that even this may be an illusion.

“Embarrassment. Public humiliation. The university may want to stay clear of the scandal even if the jury is not convinced that Crone killed the woman. It’s a fact that reasonable doubt is not the same thing as a social seal of approval. Crone is going to be carrying a lot of baggage when this is over, no matter what happens.”

“So what do we do?” she says.

“We may have invested too much hope,” I tell her.

“What else can I do?” Parent hanging from a frayed thread.

I have no answer.

"He was wrong,” says Crone.

“Who?” Harry is sitting at the table, the one bolted to the floor of the small conference room near Judge Coats’s courtroom.

Crone is busy readying himself for court, running a comb through long wisps of thinning dark hair so that he doesn’t look like the mad professor. He peers into a stainless-steel mirror on the wall to make sure his tie is straight, this despite the fact that the ends are uneven. He is not what you would call a natty dresser. Even with these final acts of preening there is a certain professorial slouch in his stance and a slept-in appearance to his clothing. He doesn’t wear a suit. Instead, he opts for the less formal appearance of a corduroy sport coat over a plaid shirt, and gray Dockers, none of which he has allowed to be pressed. It is as if seamless trousers and wrinkled cloth were a badge of academic honor, a message to the world, and the jury, that he flies by some other convention. A generation ago this might have been a problem. Today half the jury pool shows up in T-shirts and jeans and has to be scanned for weapons before they are admitted to the jury commissioner’s waiting area.

“The coroner, Max Schwimmer,” says Crone. “If he’s going to testify under oath, then he should get it right. And it’s not ten percent.”

“What are you talking about?” says Harry.

“The percentage of left-handed people in the population. It’s more like fifteen, not ten.”

“I’ll be sure and make a note,” says Harry. He gives me a look out of the corner of one eye as if to say, That’s gonna save us. Harry has not warmed to Crone. There is something in the air between them, like ozone following lightning. Neither of them will bend to make the first gesture toward the other in order to dispel this miasma of ill will.

Crone is into the little things, meticulous about details, and religious when it comes to numbers. In Crone’s eye, mathematics governs the universe. To get an equation wrong is a mortal sin.

He is a man always in charge, brimming with confidence. Except for the orange jumper, on the days we don’t go to court you would swear he was running the jail. He strides the dayroom jostling and bumping shoulders with career cons whose sole concern with science is whether some street vendor stepped on their crack too many times to get high. David Crone shrinks for no one, and he seems to mingle with everyone as if there is something to be learned from each new experience in life.

I have seen him in animated conversations with droopy-eyed losers, men whose arms were covered with tattooed messages punctuated by needle tracks. Crone always seems to leave them smiling. As strange as it might seem, he has found a home here. There is no family to miss, since he’s never been married.

They call him the professor. “Professor’s buffin’ himself up again.”

Crone does a session with the weight machine every morning and is beginning to look fit, having lost that stodgy pudginess with which he started the trial. Jail has provided him with an element of discipline that his life lacked, and Crone, efficient in every aspect, has made the most of it.

He plays cards, mostly blackjack, with other prisoners in the dayroom each evening. I have interrupted some of these games to meet with him. They play for cigarettes, the con’s currency, even though Crone doesn’t smoke. They have cheated on him, resorted to elaborate signals and even used shills on the tiers above the tables to read and telegraph his hand. Still they cannot figure out how he keeps winning, the man with the gray-celled supercomputer between his ears. They could shuffle in four more decks and it might slow his counting of the cards to light speed.

This morning Aaron Tash has accompanied Harry and me to the courthouse to talk to Crone. Tash has been trying to see him for days, but I have left strict instructions that the two are not to talk except in my presence. Tash works with Crone at the university, his number two on the genetics project until Crone was placed on leave following his arrest.

Why he continues to report to Crone, who is suspended from his job, I am not sure, but I’m not anxious to have them talking through glass at the county jail on a phone that is monitored by deputies. The possibility of Crone saying something that could be construed as incriminating is too great, particularly if the issue of Kalista Jordan’s employment came up.

Tash is in his mid-forties, tall, six-four, even with his knees bent and his back hunched a little, which appears to be his normal posture. He is a wiry, sinuous man, with a graying fringe of hair surrounding a bald dome. He is the antithesis of Crone: a man whose personality, if he has one, is cool and reserved to the point of being glacial.

He appears entirely committed to Crone and his cause. Still, he is a university employee and, I assume, anxious to retain favor with the powers that be. For all I know, he could be eying Crone’s job. There is no telling what he might be induced to do if the regents sensed they could be on the hook financially for Jordan’s death. After all, they were on notice of her complaint for harassment.