Steve Martini - The Jury

“Don’t say anything else, just tell him to contact Epperson and have Epperson call my office,” I tell him.

Crone nods, winks from beyond the glass, circled finger and thumb like he understands.

We can hear half of the conversation, Crone breathing into the phone from the mike set in the thick acrylic that separates us.

“Aaron, David here. We have a problem.” Just like that. Crone says it as if he’s never left the office, like it’s something they can handle in a midmorning staff meeting. “Can you get ahold of Bill Epperson for me, and have him call somebody?”

“No. No. It’s nothing having to do with the project. It’s the case. There’s some mix-up,” he says. “Nothing serious.”

I’m beginning to grimace on the other side of the glass.

“Seems a witness is saying some things. .”

I tap on the partition with my pen, shaking my head as Crone looks at me. He nods like he understands, then looks away.

“Some garbage about our work,” he says.

Now I’m tapping with my knuckles, waving him off with my hand. Finger slicing across my throat like a knife as if to cut him off. He turns sideways in the chair so that I can no longer make eye contact.

“Nothing to worry about,” he says. “Bill can straighten it all out.”

I’m hitting the acrylic hard enough to break a regular window.

Crone gives me another bull’s-eye, this time blind, not looking at me, with finger and thumb.

“It’s that same old crap,” he says, “from back in the seventies. Yeah.”

Tash is commiserating on the other end of the line.

“Yes. The whole thing raising its head again. You get tired of people misconstruing your work,” he says. “Especially now. They’re saying I’m doing things when I’m not.”

“What’s that?”

“Yeah, it has to do with the same charges.”

I can only imagine what Tash is saying on the other end, hoping and praying that the operator is not recording it on Tannery’s orders.

“Let me check.” Crone cups his hand over the mouthpiece, and turns to look at me. He can see the fire in my eyes, but he ignores this.

“Aaron would like to know if he can come by.”

“What? Now?”

“Tomorrow morning. He’s got some numbers he wants me to look at. Maybe about nine one of you could be here?”

Harry and I look at him dazed, being from another planet.

“He is helping us get to Bill,” he says.

Harry sits in stunned silence, neither of us able to come up with the words before Crone is turned sideways again, and back to Tash on the phone.

“Good. Yeah, that’s fine. Nine o’clock,” he says. “No, it’s not something I can get into, at least not on the phone.” Like he’s going to discuss what happened in court behind closed doors with Tash. I decide I’d better be here.

Crone turns to wink at me, a look from furrowed eyebrows, a sly smile as if to say he understands the delicate situation here, the risks of tampering with a witness.

“Tell him it’s purely voluntary, but that I’d appreciate it if he’d contact my lawyers, in the interest of fairness.” He gives Tash my phone number to pass along. Then he hangs up.

He turns. Big smile. “You guys don’t mind, do you?”

You get the feeling we’re being used?” asks Harry.

Several months behind bars and on matters of common sense David Crone still lives in a criminally artless other world. It causes me to wonder what confidences he may be sharing with his cellmate at night. The gangs may have his attention, but nothing else seems to make a dent.

By nine the next morning I was back at the jail, this time to watch Crone and Tash flash pages with numbers back and forth. The only reason I did this was to ensure that they didn’t discuss matters relating to Kalista Jordan or Tanya’s testimony, for which Tash has no privilege. This mime act of number crunching took almost forty minutes. Tash would hold up a work sheet against the partition while Crone jotted numbers on a piece of paper with a dull pencil on the other side. Crone would then hold up his penciled sheet while Tash made adjustments on the original. It was Greek to me, though the guard behind Crone outside the door seemed to take particular interest in the doings. At one point he called in a supervisor who observed the antics for a moment through the window. Seeing that legal counsel was present, the supervisor, a sergeant, chose not to interfere. But I can imagine Tash on the stand being pressed by Tannery to explain what was happening. I raised the question myself, posed it to Tash as we left the jail.

All he would say was “Genetics. The project.”

“That’s crap,” says Harry. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of this hiding behind the high-tech veil. It’s like the holy of holies. Only the lawyers can’t go inside. How do we know what they’re doing?” he asks. “It’s a convenient cover, if you ask me. They don’t want to talk about their work, and yet everything always seems to come back to that. Now we have the victim’s mother telling the court they’re involved in collecting data with a racial tinge. And still Crone won’t tell us what’s going on. We need to draw a line in the sand. They don’t tell us, we withdraw.”

“It’s a nice thought, but Coats isn’t likely to let us out at this late date,” I tell him.

We are camped in the office, another late nighter. Epperson is up tomorrow, Tannery’s offer of proof and still I have nothing to talk to him about. If our message to Epperson from Tash got through, it has borne no fruit. I have called the answering service to make sure they put any calls through and will have them forwarded to the house when we leave here.

“I told you he wasn’t gonna call,” says Harry. “What did Tash say?”

“Says he talked to him. That Epperson told him he would make an effort to call us.”

“What does that mean? Makes it sound like it’s a marathon to push the buttons on the phone,” says Harry. “I’m telling you he’s not gonna call.”

I look at my watch. It’s almost eleven P.M. Harry is probably right.

“So much for Crone’s high regard and good working relations,” he tells me.

Harry spent the morning and afternoon chasing geese, trying to get a lead on the engagement ring Epperson supposedly bought for Kalista Jordan, and running down audit trails at the university on Crone’s research.

“Let’s start with the ring,” he says, “since that’s gonna be a short discussion. Came up with nothing.”

This is a long shot. With no drawing, no picture and no description, we might as well be looking for the Holy Grail.

“If I have to deal with one more jeweler trying to peddle me a watch. . They all wanna know the same thing: why some old fart is asking questions about an engagement ring.”

“I understand,” I tell him. “It’s not like old farts never get married. Right?”

He looks at me sideways. “Right. It’s just you get tired, everybody putting you in pigeonholes all the time.” Harry hates to be old, white and male. For Harry, it was hard enough being young. But then I have a feeling Harry was old even when he was young.

“The world is always making assumptions,” he says. “Don’t you get tired of it?” Harry doesn’t wait for me to answer.

“Pisses me off,” he says. He’s had a bad day. A lot of shoe leather left on the street, so that his shoes are now sitting in the middle of my desk on top of a stack of papers, as he lets off steam rubbing one foot crossed over his knee.

“So what are you telling them, these shop owners?” I ask.

“That we’re trying to verify an insurance claim. I describe Epperson. That seems to do it.”