Gravewriter (13 page)

Carol tapped a pen on the sketch of juror eleven, a pointy-chinned kid with a hard stare and a dark mustache as thin as a shoelace. “Alec Black,” she said. “Age twenty-two, an art-school graduate who studied film noir.”

“Now working retail at Pottery Barn,” Martin guessed.

“The food-services industry,” she corrected. “But he's all yours.”

“The kid stares through me the whole time. I thought he hated me.”

“He maintains eye contact and open posture for you, which is good. And he is the only juror who openly despises Ethan Dillingham. It couldn't be more obvious—he does everything but moon him.”

“Skeptical of the law, eh?”

“That skepticism probably comes from trouble in his teens. He's got a juvie record, not serious—breaking and entering, vandalism, petty theft. He pleaded innocent but was convicted in a closed hearing in family court. Spent six months locked up at the training school. His
counselor reported that he left more bitter than when he got there. But no arrests since he got out.”

Martin raised an eyebrow at her. “Shouldn't that record be sealed? How'd you get that?”

She smiled and licked her lips. “When you put me on jury research, you told me to use all the tools at my disposal.”

Martin covered his ears. “I don't wanna know—if I have to testify, I can say you never told me. Do you think Dillingham knows this kid is trouble for him?”

“I'm not the only one charting the jury. You wouldn't need an expert to see that this kid is solidly on our side.”

“Which means Dillingham will try to get him kicked off. We can't depend on hanging the jury with one holdout. Tell me who else I got.”

“This guy,” she said, tapping juror twelve's picture. “William Povich. Worked for the paper as a reporter until a couple years ago—won all sorts of investigative awards, and was a Pulitzer finalist. Now writes obituaries on the night shift.”

“Huh—a fallen star?”

“More like crashed and burned,” she said. “He's not in your pocket yet, but he's got an open mind. Keeps his head up, very neutral posture. And he has held eyes with Peter several times. I'm reading curiosity and an honest desire to find the truth.”

Martin stared at the picture in silence for a full minute. “I worry about the kid, Alec Black,” he said finally. “He's young; he could be bullied. But not this guy, a former reporter—he could swing votes.” He folded his hands into a little pyramid and spoke to the drawing, “How do I get inside your head, Mr. Povich?”

H
abits form fast: As the jurors filed onto the yellow school bus borrowed from the city of Providence, they did their best to recreate the seating assignments from the jury box. Billy plopped down beside juror eleven, Alec Black, the smoldering kid in the monochrome outfits, who was cultivating a bandito mustache.

“I love a field trip,” Billy said in a low voice as the doors wheezed closed and the bus grumbled away from the courthouse with the jury, a court clerk, two sheriffs, both trial lawyers, a court stenographer, and a judge in a gray chalk-line suit but no robe.

“It's all an act,” Alec said. “This is a Soviet-style show trial.” He stared out the window, looking grim.

Billy recoiled from him, feeling singed. Then some long-buried reporter's instinct surfaced; he wanted to
know
this kid.

“How did somebody so young become so cynical?” Billy asked. It was an honest question, not a comment or a condemnation.

Alec looked at Billy. “How can somebody your age be so naive?”

The bus inched along beside the river canal as they passed through
the financial district, lurching from stoplight to stoplight in heavy morning traffic.

Billy smiled. The kid was sharp. The trial was only in its fourth day, and it was obvious most of the jurors were ready to vote their fears. They wanted Peter Shadd locked away, not because of the evidence—there wasn't much—but because he had already proven himself a criminal beyond any doubt; they believed he had an evil heart and that he might hurt them someday.

“My mind's open,” Billy said.

Alec stared out the window again. Twenty pigeons pecked at french fries spilled over the sidewalk. “You and me are the only ones who wouldn't vote him guilty right now,” he said. He put his thumbs together and made a U with his hands. He squinted through the U at the pigeons and then panned his hands to one side. “I'd film that scene in black and white, real low contrast, to let the birds blend into the sidewalk—it's symbolic of what they do: They're creatures of nature that blend into the cityscape and become almost invisible.” He smoothed his thin mustache with a finger and then added with contempt, “Other than you and me, there's nothing but sheep on this bus.”

Billy glanced around. They were not supposed to discuss the case, but he was confident nobody could hear them.

“What most people don't realize,” Alec volunteered, “is that the justice system isn't as high-minded as on TV. The courthouse is a manufacturing plant, and the product isn't justice; it's convictions. Prosecutors are measured by how many convictions they ring up. Truth? Justice? No—can I
win
this case? If not, they don't prosecute. Instead, they pressure penniless kids with no lawyers to take deals, because the plea bargains help their case-disposal ratios. Just look at Dillingham. Why is he so anal-retentive? Why does he object over everything? He's trying to run for governor and he's protecting his conviction ratio.”

Billy said, “You sound like you speak from experience.”

“The best teacher.”

The bus freed itself from city congestion and bumped over old trolley tracks, moving through the city's unofficial red-light district, past a topless bar painted pink and two kinds of porno shops—the kind that advertises with black stenciling on a nondescript door next to a loading dock, and the kind that advertises in flashing red neon, and in the sports pages.

“Take this field trip, for instance,” Alec said. “There's no dispute that
somebody
shot Garrett Nickel, and no doubt he was shot by the waterfront, upriver from where they found his body. So why are we being taken to view where he went into the river?” He waited. The question seemed rhetorical, and Billy waited, too.

“This trip,” Alec finally explained, “has been orchestrated by the prosecution to prime our imaginations for later in the trial. So that when Dillingham says Peter Shadd went to the waterfront and shot Nickel in the back, we'll already have the setting painted in our minds. We'll be ripe for his suggestion. Our imaginations will superimpose Peter Shadd onto our memories of the location. It's basic psychology.”

Billy chuckled.

“You laugh because you think I'm wrong?”

“I laugh because I think you're right.”

“Right from the opening statements, this trial has seemed like a railroad job,” Alec said. “I'm not buying it.”

“I can tell,” Billy said. “You practically block your ears when Dillingham is questioning somebody. Everybody can see it.”

“I don't care. He's a twit.”

“He could be our next governor.”

“Governor Twit,” Alec said, raising his voice. A few heads turned.

Billy grinned. “I admire your passion,” he said. “It will probably get you kicked off this jury before we deliberate, but I admire it.”

“Would make a damn good movie script,” Alec said. “The up-and-coming
filmmaker is kicked off the jury for refusing to be brainwashed by a twit prosecutor in a bow tie.”

The stream was about eight feet wide. It led into a drainage pond that looked man-made—the edges of the nearly circular pond sloped too evenly to have been made by nature—and then it flowed slowly out toward the bay. A thick stand of phragmites had staked territory on the far side of the pond; the reed plant loved to invade wherever construction had disturbed coastline soil. A common yellowthroat, brown and yellow, with a black mask, fluttered inside the reeds. It sang for the jury:
Wichity, wichity, wichity, witch!

The stream passed through an enclave of manufacturing buildings that would have had water views—
if
they'd had windows. An unnamed access road ran alongside the stream. About a hundred yards downriver, a homely concrete bridge carried the pavement over the stream. The road then crossed a wasteland of pitted asphalt, heading toward a desolate cluster of corrugated steel buildings, which looked untouched and forgotten, like a movie set for a film about the end of the world.

Farther downstream, maybe a quarter of a mile, a tremendous cargo ship, about as nautical-looking as a parking garage, had docked for unloading. Four huge mechanical cranes, painted lemon yellow, slowly turned in a million-ton ballet, moving steel cargo containers as big as trailer homes. To the right of the ship—to the southeast—the river widened into Narragansett Bay. To the north, giant storage tanks squatted along the shore wherever the land jutted out into the water. The tanks held oil and gas that had come by sea to one of the oldest ports in America.

The bus hissed to a stop.

The stenographer dismounted first, carrying her clunky portable note-taking equipment. The judge, his court clerk, and the lawyers
exited next, along with one sheriff; the other sheriff waited onboard with the jury.

Once the stenographer had set up on a tiny three-legged stool in front of her keyboard, the sheriff led the jury off the bus.

The air smelled swampy. A southern breeze blended the odors coming off the salty sea. The sun was hot on Billy's neck, and bright, too; he put a hand above his eyes as a visor. He could hear the distant hum of the cranes on the cargo ship. Otherwise, the place seemed deserted. A push to develop the area with new businesses had obviously failed. The building across the street was a half-finished tomb of steel and cinder block, festooned with graffiti. Maybe the contractor's paycheck had bounced, and he had packed up his crew and abandoned the job.

A short distance down the road, somebody had smashed the Plexiglas in a newspaper box chained to a utility pole beside the river. There was no traffic; a police car parked a quarter mile west ensured that the jury would not be disturbed. The jurors clustered in the street.

The clerk swore in a state police detective. The trooper was a monstrous man of six-five, in better physical shape than a Superman action figure. His hair had been buzzed to blond fuzz. He was in uniform: gray slacks with red piping down the side, and tall tan boots laced almost to his knees. He held his wide-brim hat under an arm.

Through gentle questioning by Dillingham, the trooper described for the jury what investigators had found. “The first blood spatter was over here,” he said, walking toward the graffiti-covered building. He stopped a few steps from a wall decorated by spray-can Picassos. Balloonlike red letters crowded into one another on the wall. They said:

he that believeth shall not make haste

A philosophical vandal? Who had heard of such a thing?

“He was likely shot here by the building,” the officer said. “And
then he went this way, toward the stream.” He walked toward the jury, which parted to let him pass. “We found a trail of blood on the street.”

The trooper stopped at the rust brown pipe railing between the water and the road. “He would have entered the water somewhere around here,” he said, “after going over the rail. He had been shot four times with a twenty-two-caliber firearm. Three of the four bullets entered through the back. He was also shot one time in front, in the rib cage—here.” He lifted his right arm and gestured to a spot just below his pectoral muscle.

“The autopsy showed that Garrett Nickel drowned, though the gunshot wounds would have proven fatal,” the officer continued.

He looked over the rail, to the stream.

“The water is approximately four feet deep. It's probable he was mortally wounded when he jumped or fell in and could not save himself, despite the shallowness. From this point, I believe that the flow of the stream carried the remains”—he slowly stretched a hand down the stream, toward the bay, mirroring the flow—”until the body reached open water and became snagged approximately three hundred yards south of here, where the remains were discovered by two teenaged brothers digging for quahogs. The body, dressed in tan cotton pants, a checkered flannel shirt, and running shoes, was positively identified through dental records as that of Garrett Nickel.”

The trooper paused a moment to consult a flip-top notebook that looked toylike and silly in his huge hand.

He said, “The discovery of the body came three and a half days after Garrett Nickel escaped from custody. Due to the condition of the remains, which had been in the water for some time, the medical examiner was unable to fix a time of death with certainty.” He folded his notebook and put it away. Then he nodded to Dillingham. He was finished.

Martin Smothers questioned the officer in a brief cross-examination.

“Did you find any blood at this site that belonged to Peter Shadd?”

“No.”

“Did you find fingerprints here belonging to Mr. Shadd?”

“No.”

“Did you find any clothing or objects belonging to Mr. Shadd?”

“No.”

“Any physical evidence at this site—anything—that would prove Mr. Shadd was here?”

The trooper paused a moment. His big fists clenched and unclenched. “No,” he said.

Martin smiled. “Then I guess we're done here.”

T
he first clue that Billy was in a dream: the five leg breakers chasing him in one white Caddy—five muscle men for five bookies and sharks, to whom Billy owed various amounts of cabbage. Since when did those guys work together?

Billy ran from them, around a corner, down an alley between two clapboard triple-deckers plastered with signs stenciled in a language he did not understand.