Steve Martini - The Jury

“Hi, Paul.”

When I turn, he’s behind me. Frank Boyd is seated in a tall wingback chair in the corner, his back against the wall at the far left of the sliding door: the one blind spot in the room. In his lap is a short double-barreled shotgun, the muzzle pointed lazily in my direction. His finger outside the trigger guard, but close enough that I’m not going to argue with him.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t come,” he says. Frank’s face is etched with deep lines, a countenance that is tired, worn, showing no emotion, a lifeless mask. His hair that hasn’t seen a barber in months is hanging ragged halfway down his ears. There is a kind of wild look in his eye, the glassy gaze of some jungle cat on the prowl.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you,” he says.

I smile. “Oh, no. Not at all.” I touch my chest. “Just a little bruise.”

“That’s good. Why are you carrying your shoes?”

I look at them, a sick smile. I give him a face, shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should put them on,” he says.

“May I sit?”

He nods. “Sure.”

I back into a chair across the room from him, a tufted sofa back.

“When did you figure it out?” he asks.

“Figure what out?”

“Don’t play games,” he says.

“Oh, you mean. .”

“Yeah.”

I take a deep breath. “Tonight.”

If he’s surprised, his expression doesn’t convey it. “When I put all the papers together and looked at them,” I tell him.

“You mean if I hadn’t come by your office, you wouldn’t have. .”

I shake my head.

His eyes look away, a quizzical grin, wonder on the level of a galactic riddle. “Shows to go you,” he says. “I thought for sure that when you picked up the file from the house you were on to me. Huh.” A vacant stare, like how can he go back in time?

“I heard Crone got off,” he says. “It was on the radio.”

“Earlier today,” I tell him.

“That’s good. I always felt bad that he was being blamed for something he didn’t do. I had to take care of it,” he said. “Did pretty good, don’t you think?”

“You mean the suicide note?”

He nods. “Never was any good at typing. It took me a while. One finger at a time. But then he wasn’t going anywhere. He was a tall one, a long drink of water. I didn’t think the ladder was gonna be high enough. The note-I had to play with it to get it right. Wrote it out longhand at home first. Took it with me. The printing was a bitch,” he says. “I almost called Doris to ask her if she could help me over the phone. That woulda been a mistake.”

“Doris doesn’t know?”

“She has no idea.”

“Why did you do all of this, Frank?”

“What do you mean?” He says it as if killing two people and lying in wait for a third is a normal evening’s work.

“I mean Kalista Jordan.”

“She ended the program. Penny’s program. What do you think I was gonna do, just sit there?”

I don’t argue the point. His finger slides toward the trigger. I try a different subject.

“How is Doris?”

“What?”

“Doris and the kids?”

“Oh. They’re fine. Fine.”

“Where were they tonight? I tried to call.”

“Doris is out of town. Took the kids with her.”

“Where did they go?”

“Took a few days off. She needed to get away. They went to her mother’s up in Fremont. We had an argument.”

I don’t know whether to believe him or not.

“Did she leave tonight?”

He looks at me as if he can’t quite figure this out. “What day is it?” he asks.

“It’s Friday night.”

“Oh.” He thinks for a second. “I guess she left a couple of days ago.”

“What did you argue about?”

“The file,” he says.

“The file from Penny’s project?”

He nods. I can see him flinch with the mention of his daughter’s name. It’s as if something has rubbed this point raw on his soul.

“When do you think he’s gonna be home?”

“Who?”

“Aaron Tash,” he says. “Man whose house this is.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he went away for the weekend.”

Frank looks at me as if this is not a pleasant thought.

“He’s not a good person, Paul. He ended the project for Penny. He wanted the money.”

“He didn’t,” I tell him. I watch his eyes for signs of anger. He looks at me warily.

“He signed some papers, but he didn’t know what he was signing.”

“You’re just telling me that because you want to save him.”

“No. I’m telling you because it’s the truth.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he says.

“Dr. Crone was trying to keep Penny’s project together. Other people ordered him to end the funding,” I tell him.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t know what they were doing either.”

“I don’t believe you,” he says.

“Do you think Dr. Crone was trying to hurt Penny?”

“No.”

“Do you think I was trying to hurt Penny?”

“No,” he says. “That’s crazy.”

“Then you can believe that Aaron Tash wasn’t trying to hurt her either.”

“Then why is she dead?”

I sigh. “There are no simple answers,” I tell him.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” The muzzle of the gun is going up and down, tapping against his knee in frenetic movement, a kind of weird half-light in his eyes, what I can imagine Kalista Jordan might have seen as she took her last breath.

“We can’t wait much longer.” He says it as if Tash has stiffed the two of us on a scheduled meeting.

“Why don’t you go home? Get some sleep. You’ll probably feel a lot better.”

“I can’t sleep. I tried. Besides, you think I’m stupid? Why didn’t you call the cops?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

He looks at me, not sure how to answer, as if I’ve asked him to solve one of the deep mysteries of the cosmos.

“I was hired to represent Dr. Crone. I did my job. Now that’s over.”

He nods as if this makes perfect sense. Then stops his head in midmotion. “Then why did you come here?”

“I was looking for Dr. Crone.”

A dense look. What would Crone be doing at Tash’s house?

“How did you get outside? Out there?” He points with the barrel of the shotgun toward the sliding door and the balcony.

“I was out there all the time.”

“You mean when I came in?”

I nod. At this point, I’ll try anything. “I didn’t hear you come in,” I tell him.

“Yeah. Used some tools,” he says.

“Why don’t you put that down?” I gesture toward the shotgun.

He looks at it, looks at me; the expression tells me he’s not sure how the two go together. Man on the edge.

“You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

“Oh, no,” he says. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“I didn’t think so. You got scared tonight, didn’t you? At the office.”

He smiles, nods, his head canted off just a little to one side. “Yeah. You surprised me when you came through the door.”

“I surprised you?”

The smile turns to a broad grin; he laughs, middle-aged kid. I look at Frank and wonder what dark and twisted thing got ahold of his mind. Whatever incarnation of the devil it is, we are still struggling. Frank hasn’t put the gun down.

I take a quick glance at my watch. It’s after ten. If Tash comes through that door, the place is going to turn into a shooting gallery.

“Frank, you can’t go on like this.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me help you.”

“How? How can anybody help me?”

“We can start by ending the violence,” I tell him. “Do you think Penny would want you to do this?”