The Juror (16 page)

A
NNIE
in the courtroom, on a misty morning, a week after the meeting at the reservoir. You wouldn’t know it was a misty morning,
though, there are no windows in here. There’s a sort of deconstructed skylight way up in one of the odd ceiling angles—but
it’s been painted black, who knows why?

She studies the woman on the witness stand. Mrs. Riggio, wisp of a woman. Widow of the murdered Salvadore, grandmother of
the murdered boy. Her hair is a thin froth, her skin is the skin of an onion, but she holds her back straight and she speaks
in a clear voice. She says:

“Then I go say goodnight to my grandson.”

Says Tallow the prosecutor, “To Thomas?”

“Yeah. Tomasino, he stay with us for four day. I don’t see him since he was eleven. Then for four day he stay with us.”

“And when you went to his room, was he still awake?”

“He watch his little TV.”

“His TV?”

“The little TV that Sal give him for his fourteenth birthday. And I say, ‘Tomasino. So late. You gotta turn it off. You gotta
go to sleep.’ He says, ‘OK, Nonna.’ Then I kiss him. I say, ‘I love you, Tomasino.’ And I go to bed.”

“To your bedroom.”

“Yeah.”

“And your husband, Salvadore Riggio, is there?”

“Yeah. And I’m crying, I say, ‘Sal, let’s go to Florida. Why we no go to Florida like everybody else? I want to see my daughter.’
I say, ‘I’m sick of, we never go out of the house. Four day I get to see my grandson.’ I say, ‘Not enough. Why we got to hide
all the time?’”

“Did your husband answer you?”

“Yeah, he say, ‘We can’t go till things are OK with Louie Boffano.’”

“What did he mean by that?”

Says Bozeman, “Objection. State of mind of another.”

But Tallow doesn’t falter. “What did you say to him then, Mrs. Riggio?”

“I say, ‘I’m scared.’ He say, ‘Hey, we got guards, guards all around the house, we got Aniello downstairs, nobody comes in
here, every-thing it’s OK. We just gotta wait.’ I say, ‘I’m scared somebody gonna kill you.’”

“And what was his response?”

“He laugh at me.”

“What happened then?”

“Then the door open and a man come in. He got a hood on his head. He got a gun. Me, I’m gonna scream. The man say, ‘Don’t
scream.’ He say, ‘Salvadore, don’t let her scream or I kill her too.’ So, Salvadore, he tells me, ‘Don’t say nothing, Angela.’”

“And then what happened?”

“Then Sal, he say, ‘How did you get in?’ And the man say, ‘A tunnel. From next door, we dug a tunnel right to your basement.’
And he laugh.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then he say he was come from Louie Boffano and he was gonna kill Sal.”

“And what did your husband say?”

“He say, ‘Me, I no mind. You think my people, they gonna sell the drug? They no gonna sell the drug.’”

“Your husband told the intruder—”

“My husband, he no like the drug. Louie Boffano, he wanna sell the drug to ever one—”

Bozeman objects.

“Sustained,” says the judge. “Strike her remark, the jury will disregard. Mrs. Riggio, please confine your description to
what you saw and what you heard, to what was said and done—”

“But that’s what was done! He sell the drug to the little kid. To my own kid, to my grandkid he want to sell—”

“Objection!”

“Sustained. The jury will disregard…”

But since it’s more or less the truth, thinks Annie, and since it’s spoken by this ancient elf, how in the world are we going
to disregard it?

For God’s sake, thinks Annie, why don’t they shut this woman up? We know her husband was killed, we know her grandchild was
killed, we already
know
that. So why don’t they leave it alone and stop raking up all this pain?

But Tallow keeps bearing in. “And now the man with the mask, what did he do then?”

“He lie down on the bed.”

“On the bed with you and your husband?”

“Yeah. Between us. On his stomach. He lie there.”

“And then what did this intruder do, Mrs. Riggio?”

“Objection,” drawls Bozeman. “Leading, leading this good lady down the garden path—”

“Enough,” warns Wietzel.

Says Tallow, “Mrs. Riggio, what,
if anything
, did this intruder do then?”

“He, he—”

But this is as far as she can get. She waves her hand in front of her. She lowers her eyes.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have to ask this. What did the man do then?”

Mrs. Riggio mutters something, but no one hears.

Says the judge, “Will the bailiff please adjust her microphone?”

The bailiff comes over and grasps the neck of the microphone and twists it down, down to where the old lady’s head is hanging.
She put her lips close to the mike and says, “He made, he made Sal open his mouth.”

“He made him? How did he make him do that?”

“He say, ‘If you no open you mouth, I’m gonna have to shoot you in the face. Make a mess, and your wife, she won’t like that.’
He say, ‘Come on, Sal. We have to work together.’”

“And did your husband open his mouth?”

“Yeah. And the man said, ‘Wider, now. A little wider.’ Like a dentist. And then he put, he put the gun in my Sal’s mouth.”

“And then what—”

“And I turn, I try to turn away but he, he, he take my, the man he take my face, and he make me look, and I say, ‘
Ci vediamo
.’ I gonna see you again. To my husband. Because
you
say he’s a bad man. But he’s no bad man. He’s a good man. He, maybe OK he does
some
bad, but he don’t sell no drug, he—”

“And then what happened, Mrs. Riggio?”

“And then he kill my Sal. He shoot him.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then the door open and my, my, my—”

The woman weeps.

“Did someone come in then?”

“Yeah.”

“Who came in?”

“My Tomasino. My little one. Not so little.”

“Your grandchild?”

“My Tomasino.”

“How old was Thomas?”

“Fourteen. I don’t see him. Never, he’s a stranger. Since he was eleven. Then for four day he stay with us. For four day.”

“And when he came in did he say anything?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say?”

“He say, ‘Nonna, you OK?’ Then, then he see.”

“What did he see?”

“My Sallie.”

“Your husband, Mr. Riggio?”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“And Mr. Riggio was dead?”

She nods.

“And then what happened?”

“The man, he turn around and he see my baby. Tomasino run away. And I try, I try to, I try to… but he don’t care. He, he,
he, run after him. And then I hear the shot. He shot, he…”

She stops.

The judge says, “Do you need some time, Mrs. Riggio? Would you like to take a break?”

She sits with her head down, shaking, sobbing.

Tallow says, “No, I tell you what, Your Honor. I have no further questions at this time.” He walks back to his table. As he
sits he murmurs to Bozeman, “She’s all yours.”

But all the jurors can see that the prosecutor is keeping a deadly squint locked on Louie Boffano.

T
HE TEACHER
steps off the moss bank into the brook. Two gingerly steps through the ice-cold water to the edge of the rock shelf. Then
he tilts forward and plunges. He slowly somersaults, and holds himself jackknifed under the water for a full minute.

Then he surfaces.

Sits on the rock shelf, with the numbing flow of the brook up to his rib cage. But his shoulders are out in the sunlight,
and he leans his head back against the bank of moss and shuts his eyes.

Provoke her, he thinks, and she transforms herself.

You sound like an undertaker, you know that?

He laughs to remember it.

Provoke her, and all her quills start to quiver and she’s dangerous.

She’s trying to keep it under wraps, how much she detests him. But he can feel her struggle. Her struggle to survive, it brings
out all her diamond spines.

Such a jewel, where did she come from?

In the last few weeks, he’s learned a great deal about Annie Laird. She was raised by her mother. The father, with a record
of four DUIs and two assault convictions, vanished from the picture when Annie was four. Her mother kept a beauty parlor in
Allentown, Pennsylvania, and she and Annie lived above it. In fourth grade Annie took first prize in the West Allentown Elementary
School Art Fair. Her grades in high school were middling. She flunked math three times. But her art was daring and personal and original and the Tyler School of Art gave her a scholarship.

Then she tried New York for a while, living in a loft in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. She was admitted into the MFA
program at Yale but she never entered. She had a child instead.

No clue as to who the child’s father was.

She moved to the village of Pharaoh six years ago, when Oliver started school. When Annie’s mother fell under the spell of
Alzhei-mer’s, Annie took her in and cared for her till she died last year.

Annie’s career as an artist has been floundering. Too few connections in the New York art world, and Inez Gazzaraga’s is a
gallery on the skids. But still she’s kept feverishly working, slave-typing all day and turning out those Grope Boxes at night.
She seems to have a stubborn and unassailable oak-root understanding of who she is, of the value of her work.

When his cellular chimes, he half turns in the freezing water. He reaches for the phone on the mossy bank.

“Yes.”

Leaves come revolving down upon him.

Says Eddie, “Remember that nosy guy that showed up at the reservoir last week? When you and her was meeting?”

“Yes.”

“We got that plate traced.”

“And?”

“He’s a detective.”

Police
. The Teacher checks his reaction. Well, he is sitting in a mountain stream in October, which would account for his shivering,
his thumping heart. But there’s also a certain added clarity to these leaves that come pouring down on him out of the sky.
A precision of detail that he lays to his fear.

My sweet mentor, fear.

Whoever can see through his own fear, said Lao Tsu, will be delivered from fear.

“State?” he asks. “Local?”

“Private.”

“Private?”

He laughs so hard that Eddie on his end of the line joins in a little, saying, “What? What’d I say?”

“Nothing. I thought you meant the
po
-lice.”

He gets up out of the water, takes a few steps into the grass, into pure sun, and sprawls. “What in the world would a private
detective want with us?”

“With you, Vincent—he wasn’t following me. I had my eye out for a tail.”

“OK, what does he want with me?”

Eddie suggests, “Maybe Annie hired him?”

That’s a fascinating thought. The Teacher turns it over in his mind a few times.

“No. First she’s too smart, second no detective would take the case, third if he had taken the case, he never would have blundered
like that. Showing himself to us.”

“So what do you think, Vincent? Coincidence? What? What the fuck was he doing?”

Three brown moths, winter owlets, tangle in the black cherry tree above him.

He asks Eddie, “You know that boy Frankie? Works for Joseph Boffano?”

“Sure.”

“Get him to help you. Tell him he’d be doing a personal favor for the Teacher. Tell him I admire his character. Get him to
go with you, and pay a visit to this detective. Would you do that for me?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t imagine what the man thought he was up to. But it should be amusing to find out.”

A
NNIE
watches the cross-examination of Mrs. Riggio.

Bozeman asks, “Ma’am, do you know this man? And let the record show that I’m pointing at the defendant.”

Mrs. Riggio flicks her eyes that way. She says, “That man? That’s Louie Boffano.”

“Have you ever seen him before?”

“Yeah.”

“Where have you seen him?”

“He come to my house for dinner. Many times.”

“Did he ever argue with your husband when he came for dinner?”

“Nah.”

“Did you ever see him kill anybody, Mrs. Riggio?”

“Nah.”

“Ever see him hand out drugs to little children?”

“Do I see him sell the drug? I
know
he sell the drug.”

“What kind of drug, Mrs. Riggio?”

“All kind.”

“Heroin?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Did you see him sell heroin?”

“Nah.”

“But perhaps other people told you he did these things?”

“Sure.”

“Were these
trustworthy
people, ma’am?”

Tallow is on his feet. “Objection! Witness is not remotely qualified to assess the trustworthiness of—”

“Sustained.”

Says Bozeman, “Who told you that Louie Boffano sold drugs?”

“Who told me?”

“Who told you.”

“Everyone.”