Дональд Уэстлейк - Baby, Would I Lie?

After lunch, she’d headed for court, and there was the crowd from the bus at last in the spectator seats, a particularly scruffy bunch among all the lawyers and other official types, like a medieval troupe of errant minstrels wandering into Versailles. (Sara wrote that down, then crossed it out.)

The afternoon had been, in a word (which Sara didn’t bother to write down), tedious. Lawyers in the process of questioning potential jurors operate from such bizarre mind-sets and follow such complex and arcane private agendas that there’s nothing for an observer to hold on to, no story being told, no melody playing out. Every time Sara looked around, the faces of all the musicians had the same inward living-dead look as they quietly beat time with a finger or foot, playing songs in their heads, living in some recording studio or on some blue-and-red-lit stage, light-years from here.

But at last, the day in court came to an end. Riding back to Branson, drained by doubt and monotony and confusion, the gang in the bus sat silent, glumly brooding about life or fate or whatever it is unhappy, frustrated people brood about, and Sara kept her own good cheer — she was the fly on the wall! she was the fly on the wall! — absolutely to herself until after they’d dropped her at Jjeepers! outside the guard shack entrance to Porte Regal, where she’d left the rental. She stood on the parking-lot asphalt in the late-afternoon sun and waved at the bus, and Cal and Jolie and a few others waved dispiritedly back, and she maintained her solemn face as the bus drove on through the gate.

It wasn’t until she was in the car and driving away up 165 toward the Lodge of the Ozarks that she permitted herself to release the broad grin that had been struggling to emerge all afternoon. Driving along in her packet of silence and air conditioning, she chuckled, she chortled, and she imagined the conversation to come with Jack, his astonishment and admiration at her brilliant good luck. She couldn’t help it, she burst into song: “Baby!” she sang, belting it out at the top of her voice. “Baby!” pounding the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. “Baby, would I lie ?”

Jury selection took all of Wednesday and most of Thursday. Warren Thurbridge and his defense team played the voir dire like a Wurlitzer, prying out the prejudices and the eccentricities of the potential jurors, looking for strengths and weaknesses, potential sympathy, potential hostility. At the end of the process, mid-afternoon Thursday, they were reasonably well pleased with their performance. Nine of the jurors they were not unhappy to have on the panel, three more they could live with, one could probably be neutralized by the interaction of the jury room, and as for the fourteenth, all they could hope was for that God-fearing harridan to be chosen one of the two alternates when that cull was made at the end of the trial. In any event, Warren and his team felt they had done reasonably well in this opening round and were slightly ahead of the other side.

The other side, of course, was the people of the state of Missouri, though not all of them were in court. Legally speaking, Taney is a third-class county, which means the Taney County prosecuting attorney is a part-timer, with a private practice of his own to think about in addition to the county’s business. The current holder of the office, Buford Delray, had requested the assistance of a criminal-trial specialist from the state attorney general’s office, and his request had been granted in the form of a Lincolnesque gentleman named Fred Heffner, whose record, so far as the Thurbridge team could discover, seemed to be limited almost completely to the prosecution of drug couriers picked up by the state police in the course of traffic stops along Route 65, a known drug transportation lane north out of Arkansas, or on Interstate 44, a similar through route crossing Missouri east-west from Springfield to St. Louis.

This meant the Thurbridge team did not look upon the arrival of Fred Heffner as a threat likely to cause sleepless nights among the partisans of Ray Jones. Of course, Buford Delray did also have at his command the assistance of the Missouri Highway Patrol, the Taney County Sheriffs Department, and, since the body had been found in water and with water inside it, the Missouri Water Patrol — a fairly formidable array, all in all.

What that array might be doing with itself on Thursday afternoon, after the close of court, Warren neither knew nor much cared, but what he was doing was getting to know the shadow jury.

As each actual juror had been agreed upon by prosecution and defense and accepted by Judge Quigley, the word had flashed from the courtroom to Warren’s offices, where the staff had at once pored through its computer files, finding the half dozen or so other Taney County voters who most closely matched the demographic profile of the just-empaneled juror. Staff members then hopped into cars and went in search of these people, with a simple question to ask: How would you like to take a vacation for the next week or two, live all expenses paid in a nice motel, have your meals provided, and be guaranteed an exciting, if unpublicized, part in the famous Ray Jones murder trial? Some restrictions apply: You won’t be allowed to read a paper or watch TV or communicate with family and friends until the trial is over. But you’ll be paid well — better than the state pays its real jurors, who have no choice — and you’ll actually get to meet Ray Jones his own self!

Child’s play. There were very few turndowns among the potential shadows, partly because everybody likes to have a role in an ongoing drama, but mainly because most people aren’t doing much of anything, anyway. Take a couple of weeks off from this life? You betcha!

Court adjourned on Thursday at 2:25 P.M., and at 6:30 Warren, bringing Ray Jones his own self along, walked into the conference room in the former furniture store to greet the fourteen people sitting around with grins on their faces as though Ed McMahon had just called them personally to say, “No shit, now, this time you are a winner!”

“You all know Ray Jones,” Warren said unnecessarily.

“Hi,” Ray said generally, waving a casual hand and grinning a casual grin.

“Hi, hello, hi, Ray,” they all said back.

Warren said, “I’m Ray’s defense attorney in the trial just getting under way here, my name is Warren Thurbridge, and I want to tell you right now, for both Ray and myself, how pleased I am, and how grateful, that you folks have consented to take time from your busy schedules to come in here for the duration of the trial and help us see that justice is done.”

They all looked solemn at that, prepared to do their duty come hell or high water. The fact was, however, that even though there’s nothing illegal or underhanded about the use of a shadow jury in a felony trial, the jurors all had the sneaky feeling there ought to be, and the idea that they were part of the process of pulling a fast one made them feel giggly all over.

Warren went on to explain the concept of a shadow jury, and one woman raised her hand to ask, “Does this mean we’re going to be in court every day?”

“No, I’m sorry,” he told her. “I wish we could do it like that, but we just can’t. What we’ll do is, we’ll videotape the proceedings every day and then we’ll all gather in this room and you’ll watch the tape; you’ll see and hear everything the jury saw and heard that day. And then we’ll discuss it.”

A laconic fellow with a big nose and some kind of English or Irish accent said, “You mean, we won’t be here in the daytime at all?”

“You’re going to have your days free,” Warren assured him, “at the motel. There’s a nice pool there, a well-equipped game room, and we’ll get you any movie at all you want to watch on the VCR. I’m sorry you won’t be able to hang out with the other guests or anybody at all except your own group and our staff, but those are the same conditions the regular jury faces, and that’s what we’re trying for here, to get you people as close to the actual jury as we possibly can.”