Gibbon's Decline and Fall (44 page)

She looked back the way she had come, seeing the lights of houses here and there, thinking of Jake's helicopter, which she had never seen but had always visualized as a vehicle in Jake's image, with eyes that could see through walls and weapons that could kill. He would come soon. He would follow her. He would chase her into the hills and kill her there. Someone would find her bones, in a year or ten or a hundred. Well, let them. She had done what Carolyn had asked. That much, at least, she had been capable of.

She went on climbing, limping, pain in her ankle jabbing at her relentlessly. Higher on these slopes, the piñon forest gave way to ponderosa pines, and under the shelter of those trees, one could hide like a little animal, crouched against some trunk, invisible from the air.

She heard a sound and ignored it. It was far away; it was meaningless. Still, it was persistent, like the buzz of an insect trapped behind glass. Unfamiliar. Strange.

She stopped, stood up tall, looked around herself. It was still there, a kind of humming. She got onto her hands and knees and crawled to the nearest juniper, squirming in beneath it to crouch there, her head on her raised knees, making herself a stone, a blot, a shadowed nothing. The humming went on and on, seeming to grow no nearer, and after a time she looked up, puzzled. It wasn't the thwack, thwack, thwack of a helicopter. It was a different sound altogether.

She peered out at the night, up the hill, down the hill, across the valley. There was a light across the valley, and it was moving. Helicopters, at least the ones she had seen on TV, had glaring lights, like searchlights. This was an amber glow, a bubble of firelight on the hills, low, next to the ground, where no bubble of light should be.

The amber bubble moved slowly, making no threat. Up a hill and down again, disappearing into the valley. Appearing
again at the crest and dipping once more, finally achieving the slope on which she sat huddled beneath the tree.

Whatever it was, it hummed its way purposefully toward her, gradually becoming visible. A school bus. An old, beat-up yellow school bus, rumbling along as though it were on a road. Which it wasn't!

The bus came up the long slope toward her, swerving around chamiza and piñons, passing her to swing around in a gentle arc and pull up beside the juniper where she hid. The door opened. An old voice, quite kindly, said, “You need a ride, lady?”

She was having a dream. Either that, or she'd lost her mind. In either case it was silly to hide. He obviously knew where she was. She crawled from beneath the tree, rose to her feet, flinching as weight came on the twisted ankle.

“Here,” he said. “I help you.” He came down the step, a very old man, wrinkled and brown, wearing a soft shirt and baggy trousers and boots that were worn into shapelessness.

She felt herself slipping into hysteria. “Who?” she giggled. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

“My name is Padre Josephus,” he said, patting her shoulder, taking her arm. “I hear from a friend of yours maybe you need some help.”

At the prison, in the visiting room, Lolly began the visit by shouting at Carolyn. “She knock me down, an' I get all cut up.”

“She who?” asked Carolyn, completely lost.

“That woman in the kitchen. I ask her does she wan' me to do, you know, an' it's like she goes nuts an' breaks this whole tray full of bottles, an' she knock me down, an' I get all cut up on the glass.”

“I'm sorry. Is it healing?”

The girl extended her bandaged hand. “Yeah. They put in four stitches, though. She went nuts. She says somebody stole her nature from her. Some
bruja
. Some witch. Was it some witch stole it?”

“I don't believe so, Lolly. It's just something that's happening.” Something that was happening so universally that the secrecy about it was ripping at the seams. “Don't worry about it right now. The trial's next week. This weekend I'll be bringing two women to see you. One of them's a doctor. She'll
want to talk to you, examine you. I've arranged for her to use the infirmary here. They're going to be witnesses for you.”

“Is my mama gone be a witness?”

“Why do you ask?” Carolyn said softly, stopping herself from casting a surreptitious look at the light fixture above her. She was ninety percent sure there was a microphone there. Maybe even a camera.

“My aunty came. Mama tell my aunty, she gone be a witness. They put her in the hospital, so she can't get drunk before then.”

Bingo, thought Carolyn. They'd picked up on the fetal alcohol defense. Good. “Well, if she wants to be a witness, we'll certainly use her, Lolly. It's good that she's drying out. Maybe she can quit drinking. Wouldn't that be nice?”

Wouldn't that be nice! She sounded like a kindergarten teacher. She sounded like an idiot. Well, the more idiotic, the better. She left Lolly, patting her on the shoulder.

From the hallway she spotted Josh through the window in the vault-room door. He was showing something off to a visitor. Carolyn waited until he was alone, then slipped in through the double doors. “Josh, I need a favor.”

“Anything I can do.”

“This girl I'm defending. It's important I get her looking halfway decent for the trial. I don't want her to look like a hooker, and something hookerish is what she's going to want to wear.”

“They don't never learn, do they?”

“No, they don't. If I bring some clothes, can you be sure they're the ones she has on for the trial?”

“I can try. Couple of those women guards back there, I'd say they're bein' paid off.”

“If it takes money, I'll pay.”

“That legal?”

“It's not suborning a witness, Josh. Greasing the skids a little, maybe.”

“Won't promise, Ms. Crespin, but I'll see what I can do. Hey, didja hear what happened at the courthouse?”

“What's that, Josh?”

“Lately, the whole calendar's been messed up, people droppin' cases, cancelin' appearances, cases bein' settled out of court, whatever. Anyhow, Judge Loretta Frieze, she's the chief judge, she's been reschedulin' stuff, movin' it up, reassignin' the cases. So she had this big fight with Rombauer.”

“You're kidding!”

“Judge Frieze told him he better watch it because he's gettin' too many cases reversed on appeal.”

“You're kidding,” said Carolyn again, slack-jawed.

“He said he'd be more careful. The way my friend tells it, he looked like he'd been kicked by a horse when he left there.”

Carolyn went outside, trying to figure out how she felt about all this. She'd been depending on Judge Rombauer being just what Rombauer always was. If he actually tried to appear impartial, she might have a hard time on appeal. Damn. Double damn. Another of life's little uncertainties working itself out.

On the other hand, if Rombauer started being careful, she might have a chance of winning the case on her own, first time around.

It should have been a comforting thought, but it wasn't.

O
N
F
RIDAY MORNING THE WAITING
room outside Judge Rombauer's courtroom was overfull of people, fifty of them at least, the panel from which the jury would be chosen in the case of the people of the State of New Mexico versus one murdering fiend or one helpless rape victim, depending upon whose side one was on. To hear the media tell it, the world was on Jagger's side.

United against the world, the DFC had agreed to support Lolly's defense. Ophy and Jessamine were to be expert witnesses; Faye had been chief preparer of exhibits; Bettiann had supplied funds; and Agnes had been asked to serve as chief liaison with heaven, praying for a miracle.

“If you think you've got any credit up there, Aggie,” Carolyn had said. “I don't think I do.”

Aggie had swallowed the retort that came to mind and accepted the role. She'd seen children like Lolly in the parish. Though she didn't generally sympathize with the type, she agreed with Carolyn that they were incapable of “deciding” to do anything.

Josh had kept his word about the clothing. Lolly was neatly dressed in jeans and a loose shirt. Carolyn made a mental note to send Josh a gift of some kind. He was a true friend.

The clerk, referring to his notification list, began calling
names at nine in the morning. The first twenty people rose and shambled into the courtroom, their manner so uniformly decorous and blank-faced that they might have been cloned, none of them showing the slightest expression of interest: men, women, black, brown, and pale, including one turbaned Sikh, associated with the Sikh community in neighboring Rio Arriba County.

Carolyn spoke to the panel about scientific evidence. Could they weigh scientific evidence if it was clearly explained? One man, a scientist who had worked for years at Los Alamos, said yes—somewhat forcefully. Others believed they could also, if it was clearly explained. One man said he could understand it perfectly well, but a lot of science was just wrong, like evolution, for example.

Ordinarily, Jagger would have gathered that particular juror to his heart, but if fetal alcohol syndrome was to be offered as a defense, he wanted people on the jury who would understand the scientific evidence he intended to bring to the contrary. He marked down to be excused, therefore, not only the creationist, but also a woman who saw no reason to understand science because she believed people just made it up. “Like pi,” she babbled. “They say it's three point one four, when anyone can see it would be so much easier if it was just three.”

Carolyn, pretending not to notice Jagger's uncharacteristic queries, laid down a false trail by asking about drugs. Did the jurors believe drugs could make people do strange things? Most of them believed so. One gentleman believed it was purely a matter of character. No one, he said, could make him do anything he didn't want to. Carolyn marked him down to be excused. She asked about birth control and abortion: Did anyone have strong feelings about these issues? Each panel member denied having feelings, one man and one woman with such vehemence that Carolyn put question marks by their names.

No one expected that the jury would be selected in one day. Both sides anticipated finishing the selection on Monday and beginning the trial on Tuesday, the twenty-seventh. They were not in a hurry.

Some of Bettiann's support was being used to pay an investigator who would be available until the trial was over. This past week he'd been looking into the lives and histories of members of the jury panel, and Carolyn, glancing down the
list he had prepared, found a number of items she considered helpful. By four in the afternoon, to everyone's surprise, there were fourteen jurors, evenly split as to sex. Jagger had excused the unscientific, of whom there were several, and the Sikh. Jake knew nothing about Sikhs but distrusted them on principle.

Carolyn, turning from her notes, intercepted a glance between the two jurors who had been so definite about contraception. It was a very self-satisfied, self-important little look, like one canary-fed cat to another. Seeing Carolyn's glance, both of them put on poker faces, which raised the hair on the nape of her neck. She had a couple of peremptories left, and her mouth opened to use them, only to close it again. If they had lied, if she could prove they had lied, there might be grounds for a mistrial, if she needed grounds. If she needed a mistrial. She looked down at her notebook, where her fingers were busy underlining the two names. Hitchens. Bonney.

The judge was waiting. “Ms. Crespin?”

“I am satisfied with the jurors,” she said. Aside from that glance she'd intercepted, she was fairly well satisfied.

“I am satisfied,” said Jagger with a straight face. He was extremely satisfied. With this jury and Rombauer, he couldn't go wrong. Rombauer was always good for some fine oratory, and he could weave a set of instructions that hog-tied a jury to only one possible verdict. Nonetheless, Jake preferred that the trial look good. The people on this jury were capable of weighing facts, and Jagger had lots of facts to give them. If that didn't do it, he had Gloria Hitchens and Alf Bonney on the jury, two of Harmston's prolife warriors who would accept no excuse for baby murder and would hold out for conviction until January if necessary. He wouldn't need to sweat it. Gloria and Alf would take anything he gave them and make a noose out of it. So to speak.

The fourteen were impaneled and sworn, twelve jurors and two alternates, though the members wouldn't know which were which until the testimony was in. By ten after four on Friday afternoon, the task was finished, far earlier than any of them had expected. But, then, Carolyn mused, who would have expected a district attorney to have listened to opposing counsel's phone calls? Or a defense attorney who knew damned well she'd been bugged and had misdirected the prosecution.

“We had planned jury selection to continue on Monday,”
the judge intoned, tapping his folded glasses against his long, pale hand. Rombauer was a gray man with turtle eyes, bony though not thin, an ominous presence inside his dark robes, like a hangman doubling in justice, cunning old Fury himself. His voice was insinuating and sometimes querulous, as when he said: “The prosecution was expected to begin on Tuesday. Will there be any difficulty in moving it up to Monday, Mr. Jagger?”