The Juror (10 page)

“Hey, Turtle? I don’t want to talk to you.”

The hissing, the slow wheeze of the connection. Sounds like desert animals, sick and thirsty, a chain of whimpering animals
from here all the way to Guatemala.

Finally he says, “This isn’t a good time?”

“There isn’t any good time. Look, we had something between us years ago. And since then we’ve tried to be friends, but it
doesn’t work, does it? I’ve got somebody with me now. OK? And he doesn’t like these phone calls. OK? And frankly I don’t either.”

Only those cracklings. They go on for so long, she starts to wonder if he’s hung up—and then she hears him blow out some breath
and say, “Woo. Jesus. God. I’m
sorry
, Annie.”

She thinks, For Christ sake,
I’m
being the asshole and
you
say you’re sorry. That’s why we never made it in the first place, Turtle. You’re too god damn nice.

“Hey, it’s no big deal,” she tells him. “Just leave me alone now. OK?”

T
HE TEACHER
lies half-asleep in his bed in this ancient one-room schoolhouse, listening to channel four: her bedroom. He hears her cradle
the phone. He waits for the sound of her crying, but no such sound can be heard.

He knows that to banish her friend couldn’t have been easy for her. He’s proud of her.

He hears her bed sigh and the creak of a floorboard. Then her footsteps as she walks out to the hall, descends the stairs.

Ah, Annie, he thinks, why don’t you get some sleep now? I know you’re troubled. But it will seem better in the morning.

All of us can use some sleep.

He switches to channel one. The kitchen. He hears something slippery. Her jacket? Yes, she’s putting on her jacket. The back
door. Then faintly the whining screen door. Nothing for a moment. He turns up the volume. He hears the fridge, the stutter
of a clock. Then her car engine starting up.

“Annie,” he murmurs. “Oh, come back, girl. Come to bed.”

He puts his hand wearily on the phone and waits for Eddie to call.

Eddie’s been posted near her bungalow tonight as a precaution. In case the Teacher has misread her, in case she panics and
has dreams of flight. But the Teacher knows he hasn’t misread her.

The phone buzzes. Eddie tells him, “She’s going, Vincent, she’s in her car. I don’t know
where
she’s going.”

“I do,” says the Teacher.

“Where?”

“Jesse Grabowski’s house. Where her child’s staying.”

“She’s picking up her kid? She’s gonna take off?”

“I don’t think so, Eddie. I think she just wants to be close to her child.”

E
DDIE
, ten minutes later, drives through a silent hillside development and spots her car parked across the street from a mailbox
that says GRABOWSKI.

He sees her silhouette. She’s sitting there in the car. He sweeps past her quickly and tells the telephone, “Yeah, she’s here.”

But there’s no answer. Vincent has fallen asleep again. Eddie has to say it again. “She’s here.”

“Good,” says Vincent.

“Like you said.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t get it, though.”

“What don’t you get, Eddie?”

“I don’t get what the fuck is she doing? I mean how does it do her any good to be parking across the street from where her
kid is sleeping?”

Says Vincent, “It’s a mystery.”

“Why doesn’t she go in there and get him?”

“Wake them all?”

Oh, thinks Eddie. That’s reasonable.

But he also thinks, How the hell does
Vincent
know the deal here? Vincent has no kids. How does he know more about what a parent thinks than Eddie does? Eddie’s got a
daughter, and he’s practically raised her by himself. Vincent has nothing. Vincent’s got nobody, so how does he know? How
does that cocksucker always know?

“Hey, Vincent.”

The voice comes back sleepily. “What?”

“Let me ask your advice.”

“My advice? My advice is to call it a night. She’ll be fine, really. Pretty soon she’ll go home on her own.”

“No, you gotta help me.”

“With what?”

“It’s about my daughter. Roseanne.”

A sigh. “OK.”

“She’s fourteen years old, you know?”

“Close. She’s fifteen, Eddie.”

“What?”

“Your daughter’s fifteen. She just had her birthday. I sent her a present.”

“Bite my crank, Vincent. You mean those roller blades? She loves those fuckin roller blades.”

“That’s good.”

“Vincent, did she send you a thank-you note?”

“She did.”

“Yeah? Well, OK, now get this. Got a call from the doctor the other day. He was giving Roseanne her physical exam? For school?
Standard shit? And he says, get this, her
labia
, he says. Her lips. Her pussy lips, my
daughter
.”

“What about her labia?”

“She had em
pierced
. And she’s got rings in em. One on each side. And she’s got this little padlock that goes through the rings. So nobody can
get into her pussy if they don’t got a key. She’s fifteen fuckin years old, Vincent. You hear this? And guess what?
She
don’t got a key. Only her
boyfriend
’s got a key. I come home? I says, Roseanne, tell me the boy’s name. No, she says. I says, this prince among men, tell me
his name. She says no. I says, Roseanne, I mean, I got ways I can find this out. She says, Oh yeah? You gonna throw me in
the East River? I says, listen, Roseanne, my dear fuckin child, I ever hit you? She says no. I say, well I shoulda! You fuckin
psycho, I shoulda knocked the brains outta your skull! Padlock on your pussy! And still she won’t tell me the guy’s name.
So what do I do? Vincent, I’m losing this kid, what the hell do I do?”

Eddie drives along Pharaoh’s main street. Cones of streelight. One lonely cop car, trolling. On the phone he hears Vincent
say softly, “I don’t know, Eddie. Find a mother for your child?”

“Yeah? Where am I gonna find a good woman? Guy as ugly as me?”

“You’re not ugly.”

“Fat, face all squashed-in on one side, what’re you giving me here?”

“There’s plenty to love about you, Eddie. Talk to one of your friends. For example D’Apolito, who has that nightclub? Let
him set you up with one of the girls.”

“I’ve had enough fuckin whores in my life! Girl’s mother was a fuckin whore! Fuckin Rita, don’t get me going about Rita, Vincent.”

“All right. The important thing is, do you love your daughter?”

He’s asking this in his whispery trance-voice that he sometimes uses.

“Yeah,” says Eddie.

“Well then I think she’ll muddle through. You must keep showing her you love her. Sooner or later she’ll get rid of the padlock.
In the meantime, at least you know she’s not sleeping around. Now let me go back to bed, Eddie.”

A
NNIE
, a week later in the courtroom, turns the page of her transcript, and so does everyone else. It’s like test time in school:
GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE
NOW
.

On the tape, Louie Boffano is speaking. The tape comes from a microphone that was hidden in the back room of a shoe repair
shop in Queens. Mostly it sounds like those bristly bursts of CB chatter that sometimes stray into TV reception. Annie can’t
understand more than a few words without the help of the transcript. Even with the transcript, Louie Boffano’s gassing is
all but incoherent:

“So I said, you know, I said what, what, what the fuck’s going on, he’s coming in? He’s coming to see me? You know, Paulie?
He says, no he don’t want to. He’s not, he doesn’t want to see you. I say, OK. So what the fuck is going on with Carbone Construction?
He says he talked to this guy Wilton.”

Then Paulie DeCicco’s voice, bed of gravel, muttering something that the transcript interprets as “Who?”

Says Louie, “Or… Walton. What the fuck? You know? Or Wal-ton or something, I don’t know. You know this guy?”

This time the transcript gives up on Paulie DeCicco. It reads: “(IN-AUDIBLE).”

Louie rolls on: “I don’t know. I don’t know, Paulie. But if he’s working for me, Wilton or Walton, I don’t know. You know?”

Grunts Paulie, “He’s a scumbag.”

Louie says, “Who? Walton?”

“Who?” says Paulie.

“Or Wilton or I don’t—you know this guy?”

“I don’t (INAUDIBLE). Talking about, weren’t you talking about Vito?”

“Vito,” says Louie. “You know what I’m saying? And they’re
all
fuckin hard-ons. And those, those, Paulie, those are the good ones. But that’s where the shit comes in.
Minchia
!”

Paulie DeCicco makes some hawking noise.

Annie has no notion, none, not the least shred, of what Louie Boffano is talking about.

Perhaps lack of sleep has something to do with her confusion.

But she’s pretty sure no one else in this courtroom knows what he’s talking about either. Although nobody’s going to give
that away.

Everyone stares down at his script, everyone turns the page in unison—everyone except Annie and Louie Boffano.

Louie looks bored. He pays no attention to the tape. Annie watches him. He bounces his pen against his legal pad. He smirks
for an instant at something he hears inside his head. He tears off the corner of a sheet from the pad and crumples it and
pops it in his mouth. A spitball, he’s making a spitball. Everyone else is so studious but not Louie the class cutup.

He leans back and sticks his tongue out at the ceiling—and there, up on the tip of his tongue, behold: the little yellow spitball.

But they’re all so busy reading that nobody notices, nobody laughs.

So after a moment he flicks the tongue and the spitball back into his mouth. Straightens up. Looks at the jurors. Annie slaps
her eyes down to the page but not quick enough: Louie Boffano has seen her watching him.

And then abruptly, through all the murky chatter on the tape, she gets one glimmer of meaning, of
intention
.

Louie Boffano is saying:

“I mean, Paulie, does the stupid fuck think he can hide from
me
? ’Cause that’s what Salvadore thought, you remember? Fuckin Salvadore Riggio, fucking invincible, right? Everybody said he
was invincible. Remember? He can’t be killed. He won’t come out of his house, and he’s got twenty fuckin guards and an electric
fuckin fence. The works, Paulie. But then I was talking to the Teacher, and he says to me, ’Man doesn’t want to be killed?
Man won’t come out of his house? So what? We can dig a
tunnel
,’ Remember, Paulie?”

Says Paulie, “(INAUDIBLE).”

Says Louie, “I told the Teacher, OK, you want, you want to dig a tunnel,
dig
a tunnel. Kill that motherfucker! Jesus!”

Says Paulie, “Yeah, that was funny.”

Says Louie, “It wasn’t so fuckin funny to Salvadore Riggio. And it’s not fuckin funny if you’re some scumbag you won’t come
in, you won’t come see me, you’re trying to hide from Louie Boffano. Am I right?”

“(INAUDIBLE),” says Paulie.

“(INAUDIBLE),” says Louie.

“(INAUDIBLE),” says Paulie.

Annie looks up again and Louie has his eyes shut. His lawyer Bozeman is still wincing from the blow. Must have known it was
coming but he’s wincing anyway. And in the corner of her eye Annie notices that the juror next to her is slowly, unconsciously,
shaking his head.

Annie knows that before this trial is over she’ll hear this part of the tape played over and over and over again.

You idiot, she thinks. Why not tell the world, make a formal announcement, take out an ad in the
Times
? How the hell do you think anyone can sit down in a jury room and explain that idiotic rooster-strut away?

I told the Teacher, OK, you want, you want to dig a tunnel, dig a tunnel. Kill that motherfucker! Jesus!

S
LAVKO
sits in a booth of the Croton Dam Diner with this astonishing seraph Sari Knowles.

“So,” he says. “You just want me to find out where he’s been going at night? Whether he’s sleeping with this client of his?”

“Yes.”

“Got any ideas?” he asks her.

“About what?”

“About where he goes.”

She shakes her head.

Slavko presses. “Well, where does he
say
he goes?”

“I don’t know, his work. Deals. I told you, he manages a commodities fund.”

“So when he says he’s busy with that, why don’t you believe him?”

She thinks about it. She puts the tip of her tongue between her teeth.

She must know what a piece of work she is. That hair of hers, all that honey-white hair breaking sumptuously across her shoulders.
It reflects in the mirror beside her. It reflects again in the mirror across the way. It seems to glimmer all over this noontime
diner. She’s got to be aware of this. The short-order cook who leers at her, the two truckers who murmur and snicker—she pays
them no mind at all but she must know what effect she’s having.