Gods Go Begging (24 page)

Once again his smile dove into the business end of the sandwich. Jesse noticed that when the judge bit into the pastrami, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, just like a shark’s. From the other end of the sandwich, through the pores of the rye bread and between the slices of spiced, oily meat, and finally, from the spaces between his slick, stubby fingers, muffled words nonetheless emerged.

“Come to think of it, they made a helluva pastrami at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach. A helluva sandwich! Jesus, my father took me there as a child to see Louis Prima and Keely Smith in the Mediterranean Lounge. Can you believe it, they had to play the lounge? A class act like that had to play the small room!”

A small, wistful shadow of sadness passed across the judge’s face for a fleeting instant. He had once had a powerful boyhood crush on Keely Smith. In fact, his overwhelming feelings for the woman had required six years of postadolescent therapy to straighten out. To this day he demanded that his wife Lavon dye her hair raven black and wear a pixie cut. Even as he lapsed momentarily into a familiar, lifelong love for Keely, his lips moved silently to the words of her hit song “Sweet and Lovely.”

“What does the jury want this time?” he said, bursting from his precious revery. “A bunch of kvetching yekls, I swear to God. Somebody read me the damn note already.”

Peter Cling obliged. After hearing the contents of the note, the judge swigged down a bottle of Cel-Ray and announced that he would send the pertinent instructions directly into the jury room and they could read about premeditation for themselves.

“I should have to drag them out here and read it to them again? The first time they didn’t hear it? Sorry to say this, Pasadoble, but a verdict they should’ve come back with two days ago. Your boy is a shmuck, Jesse. And this was a slam-dunk for you, Peter. Shame on you! I tell you, it’s that guy in the first row wearing the Birkenstocks and white socks; you never should have left him on the jury. He’s a fashion catastrophe! He’s a goddamn artichoke, a momzer! The rest are nuchshleppers, goyim … present company excepted, of course. God, such a panel they sent us! Half of them have been victims of violent crimes and the other two-thirds were molested by a parent. Now look here.”

He signaled with both grease covered hands that the two lawyers should move closer.

“Approach the bimmeh, my friends. Both of you guys are pros Enough said about that. You both know that it’s never too late to settle this case. Enough said?” He lowered his voice to intensify the air of sincerity. “Jesse, would your client take a voluntary manslaughter if Peter offered it right now, this very moment? We all know that this jury could hang up. You could be exposed to a homicide all over again.”

“Peter is never going to offer a voluntary,” said Jesse, looking at the prosecutor, who said nothing but who fully concurred by his silence. “Besides, the only plea bargain my client would take is a full apology from the state and a free taxi ride home.”

“Bruce!” The judge yelled out to his bailiff, who appeared in the doorway almost instantaneously. He had been on his way into chambers when he was called.

“We have an instruction to send into the jury room,” said Judge Taback. “I’ve written my comments on the bottom,” he said while pointing with the remnants of his sandwich.

“Too late,” said Bruce with a wide smile, “they have a verdict.”

“Oh, Jesus!” said Jesse. No matter how many trials he had done, those words always sent a chill down his spine. Reflexively, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his key chain. Instead of a fob. the chain held two dog tags side by side. One of them was his own. He ran his thumb over the raised letters of the two tags, feeling the letters and words that had been burned into his mind for decades. The tags calmed him. They reminded him that there were far worse things on this earth than jury trials and verdicts. No matter how difficult this experience was, it was only an asshole pucker factor of three, maybe four.

The judge smiled broadly. He could go home early today. He really needed a deep massage and a double martini. There was a new masseuse at the club Concordia Argonaut, a raven-haired Sephardi from Morocco who had the strongest fingers in San Francisco. The judge’s shoulder muscles twitched at the thought. His pet name for her was Keely.

The prosecutor’s only visible reaction was to grind his teeth nervously beneath his ruddy cheeks. The defendant had made it easy for him, but anything could happen in a court of law and he knew it. He knew from experience. Sympathy or anger could send a jury reeling sideways into completely illogical verdicts. They could hate the judge’s dandruff or be disgusted by an attorney’s choice of tie. If they didn’t like the way you looked, they ignored what you had to say.

A working-class jury despised anyone wearing expensive Italian suits. Well-to-do jurors sneered at the audacity and pretense of someone wearing the same Italian suits. Every jury hated any sign of smugness in a district attorney. They didn’t mind it in a defense lawyer. Defense attorneys were expected to have transformed their desperation into poise and polish and into the ability to do the unexpected. Jurors wanted to be entertained by defense lawyers, but if by chance they were, they felt sure that they had somehow been tricked, defrauded.

Jesse waited nervously in the back hallway while his client finished putting on the baggy, wrinkled blue suit. He had changed into his jail clothing when the jury had begun its deliberations. The defendant did a pathetic job tying his tie, but Jesse let it go. Bao Vung could use the sympathy. When they walked into the courtroom, the jury had already been seated and everything was silent and tense. Only Bruce the bailiff was smiling.

Jesse looked into the faces of the jurors. No one returned his inquisitive stare. They were looking everywhere but at one another or at the defense table. It was a bad sign. They felt guilty about rushing their verdict. He moved his eyes from one juror to the next. Still no response, not even from the young, progressive lesbian in the second row.

Jesse’s stomach began to tighten. His dark-blue suit felt tight and ill fitting. A thin film of sweat had appeared on his forehead. With all of his strength he forced his hands to stay absolutely still. His key chain and dog tags had been making a racket. Beneath his thumb he felt his own name, a serial number, a blood type, and the words No Preference.

There were two gay men and a lesbian on the jury. The gay men owned property in the Castro district and were definitely for the prosecution, thought Jesse. Jesse regretted keeping them on the panel, but the jury pool had been so thin. The judge was wrong about the man in the Birkenstocks. Jesse guessed that it had been the lesbian who had held out. The rest of the jury had been blue-hairs, retirees who had nothing better to do with their time than sit on a iury. Jesse sighed. For them, this was as good as a soap opera.

The entire jury pool had been a travesty, nothing but blue-hairs, sweaty bicycle messengers with rings in their noses, conservative, older Asians who had heard the rumor that all you had to do to get out of jury duty was shrug and answer in Cantonese. The venire had included two or three Filipino clerks who wanted only to be excused from jury duty altogether or be allowed to vote guilty and go home. There had been a smattering of tall, white-haired bank executives clutching their portfolios and cursing that foolish day when they had registered to vote. There had been a few Barbie doll people, young socialites with surgically sculpted faces and new sweaters draped over their shoulders.

There had been no Latinos on the panel. Immigrants from Nicaragua and El Salvador were so distrustful of government that they never voted; they never registered, either at the polling booth or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Older Mexicans who had voted south of the border believed that every election was surely rigged, that every cop was on the take. Younger Mexicanos would register their cars, but they would use aliases and false addresses. They had learned from their elders, and didn’t want to be picked up for all of their outstanding traffic warrants. Russian Jews knew better than to voluntarily place their true names onto a piece of paper.

Jesse had used all his peremptory challenges on this jury. He had never been satisfied with it. In the entire voir-dire process he had not heard a single answer that rang true. In desperation he had even reached into his pocket and placed the sliver of jade he had found almost thirty years ago onto the tip of his tongue. But it hadn’t helped; he’d heard nothing. Every mind on the panel had slammed shut the instant the judge had read the charges against the Vietnamese defendant : “… did intentionally and with malice aforethought murder a human being…”

He had kicked off every older Asian juror in hopes that the prosecutor would move for a mistrial based upon Jesse’s exercise of racially motivated challenges to a set of jurors. The court would be forced to bring in a whole new panel. Any other prosecutor in this building would have jumped to his or her feet and objected strenuously, righteously, and mechanically. Peter Cling wouldn’t fall for it. His case was too good. He’d given Jesse all the peremptory challenges he wanted. He knew what Jesse knew: other than juror number seven, the lesbian, there had been no freethinkers on this panel, no artichokes.

“May the record reflect that all parties are present in the matter of the State of California versus Bao Han Vung. Madame foreperson,” asked Judge Taback, “does the jury have a verdict? There were stray pieces of pastrami in his teeth and shining beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead as the follicles and pores of his crown responded to the magic Atomic horseradish.

“Yes, we do,” said the foreperson. She rose and handed two pieces of paper to the court clerk. The judge, the prosecutor, and the defense lawyer knew immediately that the verdict had to be a second-degree murder. Judge Taback smiled knowingly at both the prosecutor and the defense attorney. Better than a first-degree, sighed the defense lawyer to himself. His thumb stopped moving over the dog tags. Better than a voluntary manslaughter, thought the prosecutor, whose jaw had loosened up perceptibly.

“Feh!” muttered the judge to himself as he perused the forms. This was a farshtinkener jury panel. They could’ve done this two days ago. He glanced at his gold watch. He was about an hour away from that martini and those unbelievable fingers. A smile appeared on his face as he imagined the sweet pain. The jurors saw the smile and surmised, with great satisfaction, that his honor was quite pleased with their verdict. One day in the future, two of these jurors, while hearing another case, would vote for guilt simply to please the judge.

“Will the defendant rise.”

Jesse rose with his client.

“Will madame clerk please read the verdicts.”

“We the jury in the above stated cause do hereby find the defendant Bao Han Vung not guilty of count one, murder in the first degree.”

Though Jesse knew that this was coming, he still loved to hear the words “not guilty.” It helped cushion the blow that was sure to follow. Bao Han Vung, not knowing the significance of two sheets of paper, smiled confidently.

“We the jury in the above stated cause find the defendant Bao Vung guilty of count two, murder in the second degree. Further, we find the allegation to be true, that in the commission of the above crime he did personally use a firearm.”

“Caínày ngha là gì?
What this mean?”

Jesse could not believe his ears. Since he had been appointed to represent this defendant, more than a year ago, the man had stubbornly refused to speak to anyone—not his lawyer, not his family. Jesse had sent various Vietnamese interpreters into the jail and even a Buddhist monk from the defendant’s hometown, but Bao Vung had maintained his cold silence. And now he was speaking out loud, and in passable English.

“What this mean?” he repeated.

“It means,” whispered Jesse, “that you will get fifteen years to life for murder in the second degree. You will also get a mandatory consecutive term of three, five, or ten years for use of a weapon. It means the judge could give you a maximum of fifteen years to life, plus ten years consecutive.”

As the lawyer and his client spoke for the first time, the judge was thanking the jury for their service and excusing them from any further duty. As he spoke to them, the jury was treated to a glimpse of scattered remnants of the judge’s lunch still clinging to his teeth. Before filing out of the courtroom and into the hallway, the departing jurors had all hazarded a last backward glance at the defendant.

“Well, what do you think?” asked the lesbian juror audibly as she slowly put on a jacket. There was a disturbed, pensive look on her pretty face. The young woman was clearly shaken by the whole experience.

“I’m not really sure,” answered another juror, “but I think it was pastrami.”

When the door closed behind the last juror Vung spoke again.

“The gun not belong me. I took from Ky.”

“You took it from the victim?” asked Jesse angrily. He reached out for his client and grabbed a lapel of his suit. He jerked the defendant’s face toward his own. Bruce, the bailiff, rose quickly from his seat, shrugged, then sat back down. A lawyer was attacking his own client? He had seen the reverse often enough. This situation just wasn’t covered in his job description.

“You took the gun from the victim?” The fingers of Jesse’s free hand were moving furiously over the dog tags now. “When did you do that? If you say the night of the killing I’ll kick the shit out of you right here and now.”

“I took one from Ky just before he die. He had two gun.” Vung meekly held up two fingers and repeated his comment in Vietnamese. Hong Ha, the interpreter, repeated in English, “Ky had two guns.”

“I’ve been trying to get you to talk to me for over a year. Your wife has been begging you to talk to me or to Eddy. Why are you bothering to tell me this today, thirty seconds after the damn verdict? It’s too late, man.”

Jesse turned away from his client. The enormity of his client’s foolishness was almost overwhelming.

“Your brilliant strategy sure paid off, didn’t it, asshole? First you got your boys to scare off all of the witnesses by threatening to kidnap their grandparents and children. Then you threaten all of their extended families with death, and what happened? They all waltzed in here, one right after the other, and testified against you, pointed you out in the courtroom.