Rough Justice Read online

  “Not foreman. Foreperson. You have to say foreperson,” corrected Megan Gerrity, a blue-eyed twenty-year-old with coarse red hair, shorn short. Megan was one of three jurors with any college experience. She had spent a year at Drexel University before she quit to design webpages. Her business had been growing until the Steere case, but jury duty could kill it. Megan lived on Internet time, and her clients needed their pages up and running yesterday. She couldn’t afford to be sitting here. She hadn’t been online in ages. She missed the sky, the sun, and the Microsoft clouds on the start-up of Windows 95.

  “You don’t want a man foreman?” Ralph asked.

  “A woman,” Megan corrected, unsmiling. She was so over Ralph. He always pulled this sexist crap, waging a sitcom gender battle with her. Megan suspected she wasn’t the only juror to tire of it. The black jurors — three men and one woman — didn’t like Ralph from the outset, Megan could tell. “I want to be the foreperson,” she said.

  “You?” Ralph shot back in mock disbelief. His large hand flew to the chest of his khaki shirt. It was Ralph’s favorite shirt because it looked like the one General Schwarzkopf wore in Desert Storm. Ralph thought Norman Schwarzkopf was our greatest leader since Patton. Ralph had taped the general’s press conferences from the Gulf War and had even stood in line to get a signed copy of his book. “Megan for foreman? No way. No women and no redheads. No redheaded Micks! Everybody agree?” Ralph smiled and so did the other jurors, except Kenny Manning.

  Kenny’s glare was as dark as his skin. He sat at the opposite end of the table, his muscular arms folded over his broad chest. Kenny hated Ralph’s jokes. He was sick of him from jump street. Kenny couldn’t wait until the fuckin’ case was over so he didn’t have to look at Ralph’s puffy pig face anymore. “Let’s get this thing over with,” Kenny said. “I been here forever.’

  “And the snow’s comin’ down hard,” said Ray Johnson, Juror 7. Ray called himself “Lucky Seven” and sat at the end of the conference table next to Kenny Manning and Isaiah Fellers. The group of three black men routinely ate, sat, and rode the bus together, although the quiet Isaiah was something of a third wheel.

  Isaiah glanced unhappily at the snowfall. Winter made him cranky, and he was living for the day when he would leave for his honeymoon in St. Thomas. Every conjugal visit, his fiancée would tell him the temperature there. She saw it on the Weather Channel. They would cuddle and talk about how they could spend all day together and drink piña coladas. Isaiah hoped they had a bar you could swim to from the pool and sit with your butt in the warm water.

  Christopher was looking out the window, too, but he wasn’t watching the snow anymore. He was picturing horses before a snowfall. They’d lift their heads from the hay in their stalls and swing them in a slow arc toward the window. Their dark, wet eyes would be unblinking, their gaze steady. They’d stamp their hooves, expectant, almost hopeful. Christopher knew just how they’d act because he’d grown up with horses and, like them, he’d grown accustomed to waiting. But he’d never allowed himself to hope, until now.

  “I’m with Kenny,” Lucky Seven said. “Let’s get this over with so we don’t get snowed in. Who says the man’s guilty? Me and Kenny and who else?”

  “Wait just a minute,” Ralph said. He wielded his yellow pencil like a number two scepter. “We have to pick a foreman.”

  Nick Tullio watched the two of them and felt that burning in his stomach. The doctor said he didn’t have an ulcer but Nick knew he did. He had to, he felt that burning whenever he got upset and he was getting all upset now. The moolies would want to send Mr. Steere to jail, but Nick wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sure of anything. He wanted to drink his water but he didn’t like to show his thumb, so he didn’t. What would Antoinetta say?

  “Fuck that,” Kenny said. “We don’t need a foreman. We can vote right now.”

  Ralph winced. He didn’t like swearing around the women. He’d asked Kenny not to do it but that only made him do it more. Ralph knew there was no reasoning with them. His thin lips set in a hyphen of determination. “Kenny, we’re gonna do this orderly. We all want to vote and go home but first we have to pick the foreman.”

  “Foreperson,” Megan said, to cut the tension. She felt uncomfortable when it got racial, and it always got racial lately. A white man had killed a black man, and Kenny couldn’t see it any other way. God, Megan wanted to go home, where it was just her and her Compaq, and they never fought. “How about foreplay?” she quipped, and the jurors laughed.

  Even Kenny smiled. “I’m down. Now let’s vote. Elliot Steere is guilty. That’s one vote for guilty. Who else? Lucky?”

  “Me too,” said Lucky Seven, and he snatched the verdict sheet from the center of the table.

  “Hey!” Ralph shouted. “You can’t take that. The foreman has to fill that out, and I should be the foreman. I nominate myself.”

  Megan shook her head. If Ralph were the foreperson, he’d never shut up. It would take forever. “No, I had first dibs. I’d like to be the foreperson. All in favor, raise their hands.”

  “People, don’t fight. If we’re going to elect a foreperson, it should be a secret vote,” said Mrs. Wahlbaum. Esther Wahlbaum was a retired English teacher at a city high school, and she knew how to keep order in a classroom. “That’s the official way to do it. A secret ballot.”

  Martin Fogel, sitting next to her, rolled his eyes. “Thank you, resident expert in everything.” Mr. Fogel was an old watchmaker who wore steel-topped bifocals and a thin white shirt. A stripe of thin gray hair covered his head like a seat belt. “The woman is amazing. You need a plumber, she’s a plumber. You want dance lessons, she does the fox-trot.”

  Mrs. Wahlbaum pursed her lips. “Don’t start up, Mr. Fogel. Everybody knows a secret vote is more official. Just like with the regular elections.”

  Gussella Williams shifted impatiently in her seat, her jersey dress stretched between her large thighs. Gussella was black, a heavyset bookkeeper still unhappy over missing Christmas vacation for this trial. She’d planned to go to South Carolina to see her new grandbaby, who was growing like a weed. “I’ll be damned if I’ll miss his first birthday, too,” Gussella grumbled, and nobody asked what she meant because they knew already. “Let’s just get to voting. Secret, public, makes no difference to me. Lord, let’s just vote.”

  Heads were nodding around the table, even of the two jurors who never participated, Wanthida Chandrruagphen, a thin, graceful Thai whose name no one could pronounce, and Ryan Parker, a shy man who worked for a yarn manufacturer. The jurors could hardly wait to have the trial over with and go home. They thought the lawyers repeated themselves and the exhibits were too technical. The experts talked down to them and the witnesses droned on forever. By the last two weeks of trial, nobody was even taking notes and crankiness had turned to hostility.

  Nick looked confused. “A secret vote? How we gonna have a secret vote? If we close our eyes, who’s gonna count?”

  Christopher closed his eyes at their chatter. He hadn’t heard as much yapping in his life as he’d heard these past two months. Since Lainie had left, he barely talked to anyone at all. At the barns where he did his shoeing, his only contact was with the horses. He avoided the rich ladies who took dressage lessons in tan jodhpurs and velvet helmets; ignored the barn managers who would steady a skittish mare as he pounded a nail into her hoof. No woman had ever really interested him until recently. Christopher felt like he’d been waiting for her his whole life, waiting like a horse for the snowfall. He turned from the window. “I’d like to be the foreman,” Christopher said, and because he spoke so rarely, each face looked up at him in surprise.

  “I think that’s a great idea!” Megan exclaimed, because it was a compromise that would head off trouble. Who could object to Christopher? He was serious, smart, and handsome, in a lumberjacky way.

  “Good for you, Christopher,” said Mrs. Wahlbaum, pleased that the young man was finally coming out of his shell. It proved what she always tol
d her class about patience.

  Kenny looked over his folded arms at Ralph, who nodded back, agreeing tacitly to at least a temporary truce. “Okay by me,” Ralph said. “You be the foreman, Chris.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate your confidence in me.” Christopher felt good. He had a job now, a purpose. He’d do everything in his power to persuade them to acquit, and fast. He’d take care of her, like he did his horses. Quietly, and without fanfare or thanks. He’d see to it.

  For Marta.

  “Okay, we’re all agreed,” Christopher said. “We’ll take a vote to start things off. Everybody write down what they think the verdict should be. Don’t put your name or anything. It’s secret.”

  “Roger.” Ralph nodded. He began ripping off sheets from the legal pad and sending them skidding around the table to each juror.

  “Ain’t we gonna talk about it first?” Nick asked, just to stall them. He didn’t know how to vote. He looked around the table for help, but his wife wasn’t on the jury. His stomach burned like hell. “Ain’t we gonna discuss? Just for a little?”

  Gussella shook her head firmly. “No, we’re voting first, we already agreed. Why waste more time? Maybe we’ll all agree on the verdict. Here’s your paper.” She reached across the table and handed him a sheet of paper. “Vote.”

  Nick took the paper obediently, and the other jurors grabbed sharpened pencils from a plastic tray on the table. Nobody skimmed the exhibits stacked in the middle of the table, tagged and labeled. Nobody gaped at the autopsy photos or puzzled over the DNA evidence. The jurors’ heads were bent for only ten minutes and they handed their papers in as eagerly as kids on the last day of school. Christopher opened each sheet with care, smoothed it out on the walnut veneer table, and wrote the juror’s vote on the blackboard behind him. There was complete silence as each chalk hash mark screeched on the board. It was as if Steere’s fate were their own.

  Christopher opened the last piece of folded-up legal paper and his face betrayed none of the happiness he felt inside. “Another vote for innocent,” he announced, making the final hash mark. He stood away from the blackboard and read it aloud. “It’s nine to two to find Steere innocent. Only one person abstained.”

  “Thank you, Jesus,” Gussella said, beaming. She had a gold filling on one of her top teeth, and it was the first time she’d smiled broadly enough to let it show. “Carolina, here I come.”

  “How do you like that?” Ralph said, grinning, and his voice sounded like he liked it just fine.

  “Who abstained?” Megan asked, annoyed. All they needed was a holdout. She was losing clients as she spoke. She scanned the faces around the table. So many old people with nothing to do. That was the problem. And the race thing. It was obvious who the two votes to convict had been, Kenny and Lucky Seven.

  Mrs. Wahlbaum clucked in disapproval. “Now, Megan, we can’t pick on whoever abstained. It’s a secret ballot. Everybody has the right to follow his own beliefs and conscience. Even if it does keep us here longer.”

  Nick Tullio looked down at his thumb, embedded between the wool pleats of his handmade pants. He didn’t know what he stained, but he guessed he was the only one who wrote I DON’T KNOW YET on his yellow paper. Nick was relieved Christopher had figured out a way to have a secret ballot.

  “Abstaining is against the rules,” Ralph complained. “The judge didn’t say people could abstain.”

  “Rules?” Kenny jumped in. “Ain’t no rules. The man don’t know, the man don’t know.” His glare had gotten angrier since the votes were counted. Kenny figured he and Lucky Seven were the only two who voted guilty. Isaiah musta pussied out and wrote I DON’T KNOW YET. Kenny would have to talk to Isaiah when they were in the TV lounge tonight, alone. They had to stand together. “The man’s allowed to take time. Make up his own mind. Goddamn don’t have to rush this thing.”

  “That’s true,” Mrs. Wahlbaum said. “They still haven’t sent in those exhibits about the fingerprints.”

  “What exhibits?” Ralph said, but Christopher shook his head. He didn’t remember what exhibits they were talking about and it didn’t much matter. It wouldn’t be long before he delivered on his tacit promise to Marta. Christopher’s chest swelled with satisfaction. And hope.

  5

  By four o’clock a foot of snow had accumulated on the sidewalks of Philadelphia and the brand-new law offices of Rosato & Associates were empty. The secretaries had gone home early and only two associates remained, waiting for the jury to come back in Commonwealth v. Elliott Steere. They’d been indentured to Marta Richter, who’d retained Rosato & Associates as her local counsel when Steere hired her.

  “We blew it,” said one of the young lawyers, Mary DiNunzio. She slumped over the conference table and buried her face in a hard pillow of correspondence. Her navy blue suit was wrinkled, her dirty-blond hair was genuinely dirty, and her compact body was worn to the bone. “We blew it and there’s no going back. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “The trial? No way. We won, easy.” Judy Carrier was spinning in the swivel chair on the other side of the conference table. A native Californian, Judy was tall and strong, with a face shaped like a dinner plate and features that registered more honest than plain. A wedge of light hair flipped up like a paper parasol as she spun in her chair. “I bet they come back before dinner tomorrow, assuming the court doesn’t close because of the snow.”

  “No. I mean our life, we blew our life. We had it made at Stalling and Webb, but no. We wanted to be on our own. Now we work for a psychopathic bitch. In an avalanche.” Mary closed her eyes, dry with fatigue. She could feel her contacts fusing to her corneas. Tonight they’d peel off like Band-Aids.

  “Hey, we gave it a try,” Judy said, going round and round in her chair. The walls of the conference room were eggshell white and the room smelled like latex paint. The front wall was entirely of glass and faced the hallway. A sculling print by Thomas Eakins hung on the far wall and three more in the series leaned against the wall, yet to be mounted. The Rosato offices were unfinished, but Judy didn’t mind. She liked working for a new law firm. It felt like a fresh start. “Nothing wrong with trying, Mare.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” Mary said, though Judy knew that already. They’d been through fire together and not everything needed saying.

  Judy’s chair slowed to a stop facing the large window dotted with snowflakes. “Look at that!” she exclaimed, bounding to the window. The downtown office buildings, The Gallery, and the United States Courthouse looked like they’d been dumped with confectioner’s sugar. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Mary blinked sleepily on the correspondence pillow. “They say it’ll go to four feet. What a mess.”

  “It’s so white!”

  “Last year I couldn’t get out of my house. They didn’t plow the side streets.”

  “The flakes are so big. They look like Wheaties!”

  “They’ll close the courthouse and the jury will never come back. The trial will never end and I’ll kill myself. They won’t find my body for days and the ground will be too cold to bury me.”

  “It’s exciting.” Judy pressed her large hands against the surface of the window. It chilled her palms, and her breath made a cloud at the center of the glass. “The first good snow we’ve had this year. Isn’t it a neat feeling?”

  “I have no feelings. I’m too tired to have feelings.”

  “Lighten up, Mare.”

  “I can’t, I’m a Catholic. Who works for Marta Richter.”

  “You mean Marta Erect.” Judy huffed another cloud onto the pane and examined it. “Cool.”

  “If you draw a happy face in that, I’m pushing you out the window.”

  Judy turned and laughed, silver hoops dangling from her earlobes. A peasant dress swirled around strong legs and she was wearing gray wool tights that ended in Dansko clogs. Judy always dressed artsy and not even Marta Richter could bully her out of it. “It was a long, hard trial, and it’s over. Erect will f
ly away as soon as the jury comes back. She’ll phone in the post-trial motions. You don’t have to take any more orders.”

  “No, she’ll never leave. She’ll never go. She’s not from anywhere and she’ll never go back.”

  Judy shook her head. “What are you talking about, Mare? She’ll go back to her office in New York.”

  “She said L.A. Her main office is in L.A.”

  “The letterhead says New York. I think she’s from New York.”

  “She’s not from New York, she doesn’t have an accent. You ever notice she doesn’t have any accent at all? The secretaries think she went to diction school.”

  “I thought the dictions went to law school.”

  “Be serious.” Mary lifted her weary head from the papers. “We don’t know where she lives. She has houses in Boston, New York, and Florida, I think, but I don’t know where she lives. She never talks about it.”

  “She doesn’t live, she just works. So what?”

  “So we don’t know where she’s from. Who her people are.”

  “Her people?”

  “Her people,” Mary repeated, without elaborating. Judy wouldn’t understand, since she was one of those unfortunates not raised in the Italian neighborhood of South Philly. “We don’t know her family, her religion, anything. She’s Jay Gatsby, the girl version.”

  “Erect? You have her blown all out of proportion. You’re giving her too much power. Erect is a workaholic and a control freak. She screams without cause and laps up publicity like a dog. In other words, she’s a lawyer.”

  “No, think about it. She hasn’t mentioned a single friend. She works alone. We have no idea when her birthday is. Mark my words, she’s not of woman born. It says 666 on her scalp, between her black roots.”

  “You’re out of control. You have trial fever.”

  “Remember, I warned ye. Ye be warned.”