Hit List - Lawrence Block [92]
“It’s not like they could take them out of here and ship them to Somalia for famine relief,” she said, and a black woman across the table from Keller frowned momentarily, then evidently decided there was nothing essentially racist in the remark and let it go.
“Is there a consensus?” Morgan Freeman asked. “Are we all agreed that we’ll keep the food and drink handy?” No one said otherwise, and he smiled. “Well, we’ve settled the difficult issue,” he said. “Now we can turn our attention to the question of whether the defendant is guilty or innocent.”
“Guilty or not guilty,” Gloria said.
“I stand corrected,” he said, “and thank you. Judge hammered away at that one, didn’t he? We don’t need to believe in the man’s innocence to acquit him, just so he hasn’t been proved guilty. Anybody have any thoughts on how to approach the question?”
A hand went up, a Mrs. Estévez. The foreman nodded to her, and smiled expectantly.
“I got to go to the bathroom,” she said.
The bailiff was summoned. He led the woman off. When he brought her back, he was accompanied by the two willowy young men, who began clearing away the leftovers. No one said a word.
“I wonder if we could go back to the VCR,” Gloria said.
“My cousin had one just like it,” somebody said, “and it was fine for playing movies from the video rental, but you could not get it to record a program.”
“She couldn’t program it,” someone else said.
“My cousin’s a man, thank you very much, and he programmed it just fine. It would start recording something, and then it would switch to another channel all by its own self. I swear that machine had a mind of its own.”
That put it ahead of the jury, Keller decided, which at the very least didn’t know its own mind, if it had one at all. They kept going off on tangents.
And now Gloria led them on a particularly oblique path. After the vagaries of VCRs in general had been explored at some length, she took up a thread the defense had pursued with some vigor. Nierstein had called several witnesses to trace the history of the VCR the prosecution had brought to the courtroom, from the moment when Clifford Mapes had allegedly purchased it from the defendant all the way to the present moment. The prosecution had taken pains to identify it as one of a shipment stolen from a Price Club warehouse on Long Island, and had produced a witness, one William Gubbins, who had acted as lookout for the thieves and had received the VCR as part of his share of the proceeds. Gubbins had testified that he sold the VCR to the defendant.
Nierstein’s contention was that the chain of evidence had been corrupted, that the electronic marvel on the evidence table was not the same one that his client had allegedly bought from William Gubbins and allegedly sold to the undercover policeman.
“Remember what he asked that property clerk? Asked him if he ever took home items entrusted to his own care?”
“The man said no,” said one of the Asians, a Ms. Chin.
“But Nierstein didn’t stop there,” Gloria reminded them. “He asked about a specific item, a video camcorder.”
“Wanted to know if the guy didn’t borrow it to film his daughter’s birthday party.”
“And he said no,” Ms. Chin countered.
Keller remembered the exchange. The property clerk, who Gloria felt would cut a much more impressive figure if he lost ten pounds and shaved off his mustache, had admitted that his daughter had a birthday party on such-and-such a date, that he himself had attended, and that he had immortalized the event on tape. He had admitted as well that he had not owned a video camera at the time, and did not own one now, but he steadfastly denied that he had taken one home from work, maintaining that he’d borrowed one belonging to his brother-in-law. Sheehy had objected to the whole line of questioning,