Hit List - Lawrence Block [88]
“Not that I noticed.”
“When I said I’d been picked for a jury, the first thing my sister-in-law said was maybe I’d be on TV. You know, if they panned the jury. Which I don’t think they’re supposed to, but who cares anyway? What’s the big deal about having your face on a few million television screens?”
“I think it makes it real,” Keller said. “You’ll see some woman, her baby gets eaten by a coyote, and some reporter sticks a microphone in her face and asks her how she feels.”
“And instead of telling him to go fuck himself, like you’d think a normal human being would do—“
“She answers the question and shares her pain with the world. People think that’s what they’re supposed to do. They think you have to be on television if you get the chance, because it validates your experience.”
“Dum-de-dum-dum. ‘Deep Thoughts.’ But you know what? I think you’re right.”
The next day she said, “I was talking to my brother-in-law about Mr. Bittner and how he can’t keep his eyes open.”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t say he was on the jury, and I didn’t mention his name. He said it might have something to do with Mr. Bittner being morbidly obese.”
“Morbidly obese?”
“He’s a paramedic, he knows all the terms.”
The man was obese, Keller thought. Large enough to have his own zip code. But where did morbid come into it? Did carrying all that weight around make you think depressing thoughts? Did you spend hours wondering how many men it would take to carry your coffin?
“Maybe he’s just tired,” Keller suggested. “Maybe he can’t sleep nights because he’s weighed down by the responsibility of sitting in judgment over his fellow man.”
“Or maybe he’s just bored to the point of petrifaction. It’s really boring, isn’t it?”
“It has its moments,” he said, “but they’re few and far between, and the rest of it’s like watching water evaporate.”
“On a humid day. The lawyers go over everything until you want to scream. They ask the same question over and over. They must have a real high opinion of jurors.”
“It’s not like TV.”
“No, or you’d turn it off. Well, take Law and Order. The two cops catch the guy in the first thirty minutes, and Sam Waterston puts him away before the hour’s up. It takes thisprosecutor longer than that to find out what brand of VCR we’re talking about.”
“Court TV’s more realistic.”
“When they’re reporting live. Otherwise they just show you the part where something’s happening. And even with their live coverage, they tend to cut away during the dull parts.” She stirred her iced coffee. “I guess we shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“You can relax,” he said, deadpan. “I’m not wearing a wire.”
She stared at him, then burst out laughing. And put her hand on top of his.
“The cop’s black,” he told Dot, “and the defendant’s white. I don’t think I mentioned that before.”
“You and Justice,” she said. “Both color-blind.”
“At first,” he said, “we didn’t know. I mean, we knew about the defendant, because there he was sitting with his lawyers, a middle-aged white guy with an OTB face and a bad rug named Huberman.”
“His rug’s got a name?”
“What is this, English class? You know what I meant. His name is Huberman.”
“I know what a rug is,” she said, “whether it’s got a name or not, and I never saw a good one. But what’s an OTB face? Off the books? On the button?”
“Off-track betting,” he said. “There’s a look horseplayers get.”
“A kind of a woulda-coulda-shoulda look.”
“That’s the one. Anyway, you don’t get to see the cop until he gives testimony, and the prosecution’s case is fairly far along by then. And it turns out he’s black. And the thief’s black, too.”
“A minute ago you said he was white.”
“Not the defendant. The thief, the guy who stole the VCR in the first place and sold it to Huberman. He’s a prosecution witness, and he and the cop are both African-Americans.”
“So?”
“So that explains a lot about jury selection. The big question in voir dire was do we believe cops lie or tell the truth. Well, generally