Дональд Уэстлейк: Baby, Would I Lie?

“Not one place to drink in this hamlet,” Harry informed her. “That’s how horrid it is. We’ve set up a little hospitality suite, you know, just for our friends, over at the Palace. You go out here,” he said, pointing at the door, “turn left, go just one mile through this horror, and you’ll find a cottage inaccurately called the Palace. We’re in Two-two-two. Easy to remember, yes?”

“Very easy,” Sara agreed.

Harry stepped closer, lowering his voice, looking serious and concerned. “I’ll tell you how bad this place is,” he murmured. “They have an Australian restaurant. Could you believe it? With oysters.”

“That doesn’t sound bad.”

“Look about you, Sara,” Harry advised. “Do you see an ocean?”

“You may be right,” Sara said. “See you later, Harry.”

“Don’t forget. Two-two-two.”

“I’ll remember,” Sara assured him, then went up to her standard-issue motel room, neat and inert. Having unpacked, she phoned Jack Ingersoll, her editor back in New York, to say, “While checking in, I ran into Harry Razza.”

“Oh, good old Harry,” Jack’s voice said in her ear. Jack, too, had worked for the Galaxy at one time, where he’d been both Sara’s and Harry’s editor. “Did he try to get you drunk?”

“Apparently that’s difficult in this town. No major hotel with a bar, no airport with a bar, nothing central and useful. So the Galaxy’s set up a hospitality suite at one of the other motels. The Down Under Trio’s out rounding up the nation’s press.”

“Go over there,” Jack said.

Surprised, Sara said, “What? Why? You know what they’re up to; it’s the same stuff they used to do for you.”

Which was to eliminate the competition . Given a story like the upcoming Ray Jones trial, the Galaxy would undoubtedly flood the area with anywhere from fifty to a hundred reporters and photographers and sneak thieves, and the task of the Down Under Trio was to distract, befuddle, and snooker the rest of the press, thus hobbling the world of journalism with booze and disinformation like the Princess Di gambit, while keeping all actual scoops and sidebars and juicy tidbits in the story for themselves; that is, for their team at the Galaxy . Sara might once have been a coworker of Harry Razza’s, but today she was a rival, so why would Jack want her to fly into the Galaxy’ s web?

“Because,” Jack explained, “they need stuff for this week’s paper, and you don’t. You are there to study the whole scene, to do a think piece and a summing-up after it’s all over. And what’s going to be a big part of that scene, all along the way? The Weekly Galaxy .”

“Ah,” Sara said, following the idea. One concept that Jack had retained from his days on the Galaxy was that the story is never really the story. The story is just the doorway that lets you get inside and find and cover the real story, the story you want to cover. So Jack had just nosed out one possible story, which was not, in fact, the upcoming murder trial of country singer Ray Jones but was — surprise, surprise — the Weekly Galaxy . In the past. Trend had tried and failed to do a Weekly Galaxy exposé; maybe this was the time.

This could be fun, Sara thought, and said, “Two-two-two.”

“Right you are,” Jack said, misunderstanding.

After a late lunch with some state legislators over in Branson, Warren Thurbridge drove back to the defense team’s offices in Forsyth, the county seat, and when he walked in, Jim Chancellor was standing there, a lot of computer printout in his hands. He had good news, and he had bad news. “We’ve got our first jury lists. We can go over them now,” he said. “The phone company’s at work in your office, so maybe we should use the conference room.”

“Phone company?” Warren didn’t like that; everything was supposed to be done and ready to go. “What for?”

“Beats me,” Jim said. He was a local attorney, under forty, amiable, chunky, with a good sport’s thick black mustache. “They just said there was a little glitch.”

Warren, frowning massively, strode to his office, stood in the doorway, and there they were, a man and woman, both in plaid shirts and jeans and work boots, both wearing white hard hats with the word CONTEL on the side, both lumbered with big heavy tool belts jangling and dangling with equipment. They had Warren’s desk shoved out of the way and were doing something to the spaghetti of phone wires at the baseboard along the back wall. While the man went on working with a small screwdriver, the woman, apparently sensing the weight of Warren’s glare on her back, turned, smiled brightly, and said, “Just a couple more minutes.”

Jim stood behind Warren, outside the room. “We can use the conference room, Warren,” he said. He was new at saying “Warren,” and it came out a trifle lumpy.

But Warren pointed to the papers in Jim’s hands and said, “That stuff’s our secret. We’ll wait.”

“You’re the boss,” Jim said.

That’s right. Warren Thurbridge was not Ray Jones’s criminal lawyer. He was much more than that; he was the chief attorney of Ray Jones’s defense team. As such, he was a cross between a battlefield commander and a movie producer, and he looked the part: distinguished, handsome, confident, heavyset, a very well preserved sixty-one, with silvery hair and piercing eyes and a booming laugh that could as readily turn into a roar of rage or a silken snakelike hiss of contempt.

What Warren Thurbridge was good at was deploying large forces to powerful effect. He wouldn’t be a damn bit of use one-on-one, walking into court as a lone counselor arguing the case of one small defendant. But that didn’t matter; no one would ever think to offer him such a job. Nor would he accept it. What he would accept, and happily, was the Ray Jones kind of case. Lots of publicity, lots of money, and maybe even a shot at getting the son of a bitch off. Perfect.

Headquarters of the Ray Jones defense team was a recently defunct furniture showroom, a broad one-story glass-fronted structure across the street from the courthouse. Inside, the building had been a hollow shell, with offices at the rear that had once held the shop’s owner and credit manager, two people with a penchant for making wrong decisions. Gray industrial carpeting had covered the main showroom floor, with indentations in it where the unsold furniture had once stood, and old phone lines had jutted like hairy moles from the walls.

Now the place was transformed. Beige draperies covered the front showroom windows. Office furniture and equipment and cubicle partitions made a bustling atmosphere within. Phone and fax lines were in place, plus copiers and a darkroom and a water cooler everyone was too busy to gossip around. Twelve car parking had been obtained at the rear of a nearby restaurant. Warren himself was installed in the former owner’s office, with furniture that looked too good to be rented but was, and the onetime credit manager’s office was now the conference room, with bulletin boards, TV, VCR, and a polygraph.

The staff in this building numbered seventeen, beginning with Warren himself, and Pat Kelly, his secretary of the last twenty-one years, plus five young attorneys and two legal secretaries from Warren’s home office in Dallas, plus Jim Chancellor, who had once himself been the Taney County prosecutor, plus his secretary, plus six various researchers and clerks, all of them very busy.

What they were mostly busy with at the moment was the list of potential jurors. What with one thing and another, fewer than 9,000 of Taney County’s 22,000 residents were eligible jurors, and Warren wanted to have at least the beginning of a handle on every one of them before Wednesday — day after tomorrow.