Дональд Уэстлейк - Baby, Would I Lie?

Heffner, finished, moved toward the prosecution table, and Ray called out to him on his way by, “If Belle Hardwick was a saint, I’m the Pope.”

Heffner gave Ray a small gratified smile and went on to his seat as the jury box turned into an iceberg, from which twenty-eight horrified eyes stared at Ray Jones. And Warren Thurbridge, with the longest and most heartfelt sigh of his career, rose and approached the iceberg. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said into the cold gale-wind force of their disapproval, “Belle Hardwick is not on trial here today. Her trials are over, poor lady. Ray Jones is on trial here, and I am in the unhappy position of being his defense attorney.”

Warren sighed again. He had at least diverted the jury’s attention from Ray to himself. He said, “My client, as you may have noticed, is an idiot. He has these moments of seeming rationality, when you almost think you can depend on him to have at least some small sense of self-preservation, but then he does it again. Foot-in-mouth disease.”

No one laughed; no one even smiled — not that he’d expected much jollity out here. He said, “After his last outburst, Ray apologized to the court, and to you, ladies and gentlemen. He described himself as ‘weak,’ and I guess that must be accurate. Ray is an artist, as you know, a singer and a songwriter, as well as a businessman operating his own theater over in Branson. The businessman side of him makes him sensible at times, but I’m afraid the artistic side is what you might call dominant in Ray Jones’s personality.”

Warren walked away from the jury to gaze down gloomily upon his client, who scowled back, not liking to be called an idiot, and liking even less to be called somebody who was an idiot because he was an artist. Warren didn’t much care what expression was on Ray’s face. He looked at it a while, then looked back at the jury and said, “If you’re looking for a fool, I have one for you right here. If you’re looking for a loudmouth, here he is. If you’re looking for a self-destructive buffoon, I’ve got the guy. But.”

Warren left Ray and moved again toward the jury. “But,” he said. “If you’re looking for a killer, look again. I don’t know who killed Belle Hardwick, and neither do you and neither do the police and neither does my friend Fred Heffner. The evidence they have against Ray doesn’t exist. A car with the keys in it. You could have taken that car. The victim knew Ray Jones. The victim knew hundreds of people. Where are the eyewitnesses? Where are the people who saw Belle Hardwick and Ray Jones get into that car together? Nowhere, and believe me, the police searched for an eyewitness to that event, and they came up with nobody, because Ray Jones and Belle Hardwick did not get into that car together that night.”

Warren went over to the witness box and leaned on the rail there. Gesturing at the empty witness chair, he said, “Where are the experts to testify as to the blood found in Ray’s house , or on his clothing ? You didn’t see such experts. Do you think that means no such experts were employed by the state in their efforts to pin this terrible crime on Ray Jones? Of course , those experts were there. They went over Ray’s house with the latest scientific equipment. They took his clothing away to their laboratories. They used sniffer dogs on his property, looking for evidence Ray might have buried. And what did they find?”

Warren turned and looked at the empty witness chair. He appeared to be listening. Then he turned back to the jury, spread his hands wide, and shrugged. “Nothing. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, if the state’s experts had found anything at all to bolster their miserable case against Ray Jones, they would have been in this chair, testifying under oath. Their absence testifies, too. It testifies to Ray Jones’s innocence .”

Warren moved away from the witness chair. “An idiot,” he told the jury, “but an innocent idiot. So why did the police and the prosecutors and the whole mighty array of law enforcement press so exclusively on Ray Jones? Well, didn’t Mr. Heffner tell you why? Isn’t it because Ray Jones is a celebrity? Didn’t Mr. Heffner say so himself? Isn’t that why the hall out there is packed with reporters? Isn’t that why the television news all across this country shows Mr. Heffner’s face and Mr. Delray’s face every single night? If Belle Hardwick were murdered by some brutal anonymous drunk — and she was — where would be the television time for these gentlemen?”

Warren stopped his pacing and faced the jury flat-footed. “Ray Jones is not a murderer,” he said. “Ray Jones is a fool and a celebrity and an easy target for ambitious prosecutors, but don’t let yourselves be led astray. The prosecution has no case. If they had a case, they’d have showed it to you, and they didn’t. What did they show you? Eighteen-year-old song lyrics! Eighteen years old! That’s their case? Ladies and gentlemen, end this farce.”

Warren turned around and crossed to the defense table and took his seat, where Ray clapped him resoundingly on the back and announced, “That was terrific!”

Warren wheeled around, about to lose his patience for good and all, and found himself looking deep into the bright, innocent, mocking eyes of his unknowable client.

Innocent?

It took Jack nearly five minutes to attract the secretary’s undivided attention, but once he got it, he had it. “Oh my goodness,” she said, her typing forgotten, her filing forgotten, her phones forgotten, all her standoffish busy work forgotten. Looking at the photographs, pale beneath her makeup, rattled beneath her former display of competence, she said, “This is terrible.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Jack agreed, as serene as a monk on a mountaintop.

“None of us had the slightest idea.”

“I didn’t think you had.”

“Buford has to be told,” she said, staring at Jack with watery blue eyes. She was a decent lady of forty-something, and though she worked in a lawyer’s office, she had been till now essentially unfamiliar with the depths of human depravity.

“Yes, he must be told,” Jack said, agreeable as ever. “Privately,” he suggested. “Quietly. Don’t you agree?”

“Let me call over to the courthouse,” she said, and reached for the phone. Her finger trembled like a whip antenna as she punched the number, but apparently she hit all the right buttons, because she spoke briefly, in a hushed voice, with somebody named Janie, then cupped the mouthpiece to say to Jack, “The jury’s just gone out.”

“Ah,” Jack said, having timed himself to that event.

“So he should be able to come right — Buford?” she asked the telephone. “It’s Del, Buford. I think you ought to come over to the office right away.”

“By himself,” Jack suggested.

“Yes! By yourself, Buford. Don’t bring — don’t bring anybody with you. I don’t want to tell you on the phone, Buford! All right.” Hanging up, she said to Jack, “He’ll be here in five minutes.”

“Eight minutes,” Jack said, nodding at her desk clock. “See if I’m not right.”

It was seven minutes, actually, so Jack was closer, not that it mattered. Buford Delray the butterball rolled into the front office of his law firm, down the street from the courthouse, looking both worried and irritated, hating to be taken away from what was beginning to look like a really major feather in his cap, a tremendous victory in a capital case — the fact that Fred Heffner from upstate had done all the work wouldn’t matter a rap around Taney County, where Buford Delray had his private practice — but at the same time having to take seriously the undoubted sound of alarm, even panic, in his secretary’s voice. “Yes?” he asked. “What the heck’s so important, Del?”