Rough Justice (3 page)

Gonzo print reporters ran alongside Marta in the snow, grasping steno pads and hand-held dicta-phones, wearing baseball caps against the storm. “Marta, will they find him innocent?” “Marta, how long will they be out?” “Will Steere sell his properties to the city if he’s convicted?”

“No comment!” Marta snapped, charging to the street.

“Aw, come on, Marta!” TV reporters in orange-face makeup hurried in front of her, scurrying under colorful golf umbrellas held by interns. Their cameramen and technicians aimed videocams and TV lights as they ran backward in front of her, a practiced art. “Marta, will the deliberations be suspended because of the storm?” “Ms. Richter, will Steere be found innocent?” “What’s next for you, Marta?” “Got a book in the works?”

Marta didn’t stop to kiss up or propagandize. Didn’t even break stride. Let them print what they wanted; her spinning days were over and she didn’t have any time to lose. She elbowed her way out of the throng, and they didn’t follow because the assistant district attorney, Tom Moran, emerged from the courthouse.

“The gag order’s still in place,” Marta heard Moran say, and felt her gut twist. The D.A. had been right all along. Steere was a cold-blooded murderer. Now Marta had to prove it. But how? The bravado she’d shown in the interview room had vanished, scattered by frigid blasts of snow and reality. What was she going to do? Get back to the office. Get her bearings. Go!

Marta hurried to the corner to catch a cab, pushing the sleeve of her trench coat aside to check her watch. Three-fifteen. How much time did she have? Until noon tomorrow? She reached the corner of Market Street, where the traffic was heaviest, and tried to hail a cab. Snow flew in her eyes. The storm was worse than she’d thought.

Snow fell in thick wet flakes, blanketing everything in sight. Office buildings, subway canopies, and parked cars were already frosted white, their outlines indistinct. Icicles like pointy daggers jabbed from the power lines. The stoplight in front of City Hall was frozen red, confounding the already congested traffic. The sky was overcast. Soon it would be dark.

Marta wheeled around at a loud screeching behind her. A shopkeeper was pulling a corrugated security gate over a glass storefront. The other stores were already closed, their lights out. Commuters flooded the sidewalk to the subway stairs, leaving work early. Philadelphia was shutting down, freezing solid. What was she going to do? She had only one night and it was in the middle of a fucking blizzard.

Marta waved harder in the gray shadow of City Hall. Traffic accelerated as it turned the corner around the Victorian building and jockeyed for the fast lane to the parkways out of the city. Cars spewed clouds of steamy exhaust, and a minivan angling for the lead sprayed snow on Marta’s pumps. She spotted a cab and waved at it, but it drove by, occupied. Marta was struck by a memory appearing from nowhere.

Hey!
She’s standing at a curb. Waving. Cars speed by. Wind blows her hair. It’s cold by the road. Winter in Maine.
Hey, mister. Please stop!

BEEP!
blared a bus, almost upon her. Marta, startled, jumped back to the curb as its massive wheels churned by, dropping caked snow from its treads.
BEEP!

“You okay, miss?” asked a voice Marta only half heard as she spotted another cab halfway up the street. The cab’s roof light glowed yellow. It was empty!

Marta dodged passersby and dashed to the cab, her briefcase and bag under her arm. Snow wet her face and eyes but she blinked it away. The cab crawled toward her up the street, its headlights shining dimly through the snow. Marta waved like a fool. As the two converged she thought she saw a shadowy figure in the backseat. Damn. The windows were too dark for her to see inside. Marta reached the yellow cab and pounded on the back window.

“Hey, hey!” she shouted, battering the pane with her fist. “I need this cab!” An old man in the backseat recoiled from the window in astonishment, and Marta became vaguely aware that she was acting crazy, feeling crazy. Bollixed up by what she had to do and how little time she had to do it in. Marta tore open the back door of the cab. “I need a ride uptown! It’s an emergency!”

“No!” the old man wailed. He sunk deep into the backseat, his eyes widening behind his glasses. The cab fishtailed to a stop.

“Yo, lady!” the driver shouted, twisting angrily around. On his dashboard was a deodorizer shaped like a king’s crown. “What do you think you’re doin’?”

“This is an emergency,” Marta said. “I need a ride uptown.”

“Get out of my cab! I already got a fare!”

“Let me share the ride. I’ll pay you fifty dollars.”

“Are you crazy?” bellowed the cabdriver.

“Make it a hundred! We got a deal?” Marta thrust a foot into the back of the cab, but the old man edged away in terror and the driver fended her off with a hairy hand.

“Stop that! Get out of my cab!”

“
Two
hundred! We’ll ride together, you drop me off. Uptown for two hundred dollars!”

“GET OUT, LADY! You’re a fuckin’ PSYCHO!”

“No, wait!” Marta yelled, but the cab lurched ahead and the door banged shut, knocking her bag and briefcase to the snowy street. Marta fished them out of the snow and brushed them off. Fuck! She needed to get to the office somehow. Maybe she could call the cab service. Marta tore into her purse for her cell phone and punched its tiny
ON
button. Nothing. The battery had run out. Marta was about to hurl the phone across Market Street when she saw another cab coming her way. Was it empty?

She tucked her stuff under her arm and ran for it.

Across the street, a large man in a black leather duster was watching. He was hatless despite the freezing temperatures, leaning against the fake Greek facade of Hecht’s department store. Marta didn’t notice him. She wouldn’t have recognized him even if she had, for Bobby Bogosian wasn’t someone Elliot Steere would ever introduce to her.

C
hristopher Graham was tall and brawny, with big-boned features and a gray-flecked beard trimmed just short of the collar of his flannel shirt. He stood at the window of the large, modern jury room in the Criminal Justice Center, resting his callused hands deep in the pockets of his jeans and watching the snowstorm. The jurors in the Steere case had been told a storm was predicted, though they weren’t allowed to watch the news because of the sequestration; no TV, newspapers, or radios for two months. The jurors complained about it all the time, except for Christopher. He didn’t miss his VCR, he missed the horses whose shoes he reset and the money he’d make. The last thing he missed was his wife, Lainie.

“Okay, settle down, everybody. Settle down,” Ralph Merry called out. He was a bluff, king-sized man who called himself an “ad exec,” although the jurors sensed correctly that Ralph was never any type of “exec,” but some sort of advertising salesman, his life fueled by scrambling and Scotch. Ralph waved the others into their order in accustomed chairs around the rectangular table. “First order of business,” Ralph said, “is we elect a foreman.”

Christopher tried to ignore Ralph in favor of the snow flying past the window. He’d known it was going to snow even without the TV news. He’d smelled it in the air this morning when they came from the hotel and he’d seen it in the grayness of the sky, or what was left of the sky once the skyscrapers got through with it. Out where Christopher belonged, the horses would’ve known it was about to snow, too. They didn’t need weather radar and whatnot.

“Ain’t you gonna be the foreman, Ralph?” asked Nick Tullio. Nick was the last juror empaneled, an aged Italian from South Philly. Nick had a wiggly neck wattle and a chest so spiny he looked more soup chicken than grown man. A tailor all his working life, Nick wore a suit and tie all the time, so he was curiously overdressed for every occasion. His thumb had gotten chewed up in a sewing machine accident, and Nick kept it tucked out of sight, which served only to draw attention to it. “You should be the foreman. Don’t you want to?” Nick asked Ralph.

“Sure, but we gotta vote on it,” Ralph said.

Nick looked sheepish. “Okay. Sorry. What do I know? I never did this before.” He hated this whole thing. He wished the lawyers had never picked him in the first place. Nick couldn’t believe it when they got through all the other people to choose him. Now it was time to decide if Mr. Steere was guilty. What should he do? How should he vote? Nick wished his wife, Antoinetta, was here.

“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.”