Steve Martini - The Jury

They’ve got a problem, and somebody knows it. A key witness in a felony murder is dead, and the cops are telling themselves this is no suicide.

“You Madriani?”

I am interrupted by the detective holding my business card. He has come up the hill behind us and is now looking at Harry and me like something the cat dragged in, interlopers.

“I’m Madriani. This is my partner, Harry Hinds.”

“I understand you knew this man?” He squares off in front of me, legs spread, and gestures toward the dangling body with his head. The coroner’s guys have finally got their ladder up, and two of the firemen are giving them a hand, lifting the load so that they can sever the rope near the base and lower the body. They will cut this to avoid screwing with the knot, hoping that the fashion in which it is tied will tell them something about whoever tied it.

“We weren’t well acquainted,” I tell him. “I talked to him once, about a week ago. I was scheduled to cross-examine him in court.”

“Looks like that show’s off,” he says. “How did you get here so quickly?”

“We were alerted by a phone call,” says Harry. “He’s right over there. You want to talk to him?” Harry has spotted Max Sheen in the distance, reporters in a flock, Sheen trying to work his way toward us around the police tape. The last thing the cops want, a conversation with counsel close to microphones, on camera, or anywhere near the pad-and-pencil crowd.

“Why don’t you come this way,” he says. Open sesame. We are through the police line.

It’s Saturday morning, and we are all in the dark regarding Epperson. Coats’s courtroom went dark on Friday. With Epperson dead, Tannery had no one to talk to. The offer of proof is now in suspense while he scrambles trying to figure what to do next.

With no witness to confirm Tanya Jordan’s testimony, unless he can come up with another witness, her words are now hearsay. In an early-morning appearance in chambers, Tannery asked Judge Coats for time to consider his moves. He had no difficulty getting it. Harry and I didn’t even oppose the motion. The judge is as mystified as the rest of us concerning Epperson’s death, telling the D.A. he wants details as soon as they are available.

In the middle of a murder trial there is not much that can get your mind off events in the courtroom. But this morning is an exception. Still unhinged by Epperson and events of the last twenty-four hours, I am also confronted by the fact that the driving force that caused me to take this case is suddenly gone. Penny Boyd has died.

It happened earlier in the week. Doris called to give me the news, and for the first time since hearing it, I now have a moment to dwell on the passing of a child. It brings back memories of the first death I can remember as a kid. I was seven. A little girl crippled from birth and confined to a wheelchair had passed away. She lived up the block. I saw her often out on the sidewalk, wheeling along trying to keep up with the other kids. A perpetual smile on her face, she would call me by my first name. With her angelic blond hair and sunny disposition, she seemed not to comprehend the injustice dealt to her in life, legs that were dead and lungs that each year filled with pneumonia. I didn’t learn until many years later, after talking to my mother, that it was a bout with pneumonia that finally took her. After all these years, I can still picture her face and remember her name, an indelible impression. I remember the day my mother told me she’d died. I said nothing, went to my room and sat there in shock. In my sheltered world of middle-class America, children didn’t die.

It seems I have not grown a lot over the years. I was caught completely off-guard when Doris called. I would have expected such a message from someone else, a friend or family member. But Doris was amazingly composed, though her voice was strained, a little raw. The news hit me like a bullet in the brow. Penny had died in her sleep.

This morning I sit behind the wheel with Sarah in the passenger seat, headlights on as we motorcade from the church.

We are five cars behind the hearse when we finally park on a gentle curve in the cemetery. I had debated in my mind whether to bring Sarah. The last time she had been to a funeral was her mother’s.

Nikki has been dead nearly four years, and I feared that cemeteries and caskets would dredge up all forms of memories, most of them painful. But my daughter has come of age. Attending Penny’s funeral was not something for me to decide. When I suggested that she might stay home, that the family would understand, Sarah would have none of it.

This morning she wears an ankle-length black dress, gathered in high under her shaping bosom, and black leather pumps with heels. She is changing from a child into a young woman before my very eyes, a transition occurring with the speed of time-lapse photography.

Sarah has thick brown hair, generous and abundant, and has Nikki’s long legs, like a gazelle’s. Her thick ponytail now bobs above her shoulders as we walk toward the assembling crowd at the grave site.

If it must be, at least Penny goes to God on a bucolic morning, one of those blue Pacific days with transparent wisps of white high in the jet stream. There is only a hint of dew on the grass, and the soulful tune of birds, none of them visible, their songs erupting from the massive oaks and sycamores that shade the graves.

There are more people here than I would have expected for a child who has been largely homebound for two years. There are children here Penny’s age-wide-eyed kids, I suspect, from her grade school-and cousins, all confronted, most of them for the first time, with the stark reality of death. Someone they knew, a child, one of their own, is gone.

Folding chairs are set up in two rows under the canopy that covers the casket. Up front in the center is Doris, seated in one of the chairs. Relatives, another woman on one side and her two surviving children on the other, all within touching distance of the coffin, flank her. Frank, it seems, cannot sit. He stands behind her, his large hands on the back of her chair, his head downcast, a giant in pain.

Penny’s two surviving siblings, Donald, her little brother who is seven, seems in shock, eyes of wonder. Jennifer, his older sister, Sarah’s friend and classmate, is more controlled.

She looks to see Sarah and actually smiles. She has inherited the social grace of her mother. Even under the circumstances irrepressible. The last place she wants to be. She loved her sister. Still, this cloud has darkened much of her life; it is probably difficult for her to contemplate life without this load.

Frank’s gaze is fixed on the coffin, his face puffy, signs of grief. He wears a dark suit that doesn’t fit him terribly well, something no doubt purchased off a rack at the last minute. The spread of his shoulders would make anything not tailored a tough fit. It is hard to say who is consoling whom here. Doris seems, at least at first blush, to be more in control, though she holds a white handkerchief in one hand and is wearing oversized dark glasses.

For Frank, there is no hiding it. I can see by the way he looks that he is devastated. He had always placed more hope in the magic of medicine, though he never understood it well. For him, Penny’s placement in any study was seen as a guarantee, a reprieve. I tried to warn him, but he would have none of it. Hope sprang eternal.

If there is a silver lining to any of this, it is that his thoughts of divorce to save the family from financial ruin are at an end.

The priest has traveled with us from the funeral mass at the old mission a few miles in from the coast. I am told he is a longtime family friend. He opens his prayer book and begins the intonation from the head of the casket, sprinkling it with holy water from a gold canister held by an altar boy who has accompanied him for this task.