A quick phone call was made to the motel in Branson where the shadow jury was being sequestered and then the defense team plus Sara crossed the street to Warren’s offices to await the jurors’ arrival.
The feeling in Warren’s offices was cheerful, even smug. What had the prosecution presented, after all? Their circumstantial evidence, boring, easily forgotten, all last Friday. This morning, the jury had essentially seen nothing but the judge agreeing with the defense and chastising the prosecution, and this afternoon the prosecution’s principal witness had exploded in their faces. The state had shot its bolt, it hadn’t laid a glove on Ray Jones, and now all the defense had to do was establish the principle of reasonable doubt and they’d be home free.
The self-congratulatory sense of well-being was infectious. Sara felt the lift of it herself, though it wasn’t her fight and, realistically speaking, the outcome didn’t matter to her one way or the other. She was an experienced reporter and an experienced magazine writer. Whatever the conclusion of the trial, Sara would find within it a larger meaning, a mirror in which America could gaze upon itself with perhaps a new understanding, blah blah blah. Nothing to it.
About twenty minutes later, the shadow jury’s bus — not a Ride the Ducks, but a charter from Interstate, for whom Ray used to do promos and, who knows, might again — arrived out front. Through the curtained former showroom window, Sara watched the people, who looked remarkably like the actual jurors she’d been observing in the courtroom across the street, climb down from the bus, squint in the sunlight — the bus windows were tinted — and cross the sidewalk toward the building.
“Oh my God!”
Sara jumped away from the window as though it had grown teeth and bitten her. The jurors were beginning to enter, to file past her toward the conference room. There was a secretary’s desk behind her; she dashed to it, sat down, swiveled the chair halfway around so her back was to the jurors, and became very interested in the contents of a bottom file drawer.
Immediately, Jolie was at her side, reaching down as though to slam that drawer, barking, “Get out of there! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Shut up!” Sara hissed, with such commanding urgency that Jolie stepped back, startled, and stared at her as though Sara were foaming at the mouth.
Sara risked a look over her shoulder. The last of the jurors was passing, was gone. Straightening, she said, “Jolie, get Warren out here. Now. Before anything else happens.”
“Have you lost your—”
“Don’t be a fool, Jolie. You can tell when I mean it.”
Jolie could. She gave Sara one last glare — this better be good, kid — then turned and bustled off to take Warren away from his jurors.
Which gave Sara a minute to look around and think, so that when Warren came back with Jolie, distracted and irritated, saying, “What’s this?” Sara merely rose, put her finger to her lips, and motioned for them to follow her outside. They didn’t want to — they wanted to believe she’d gone crazy — but they followed.
Hot humid sunlight beat down on the sidewalk. Sara turned, and as Warren and Jolie both started to demand something or other, she said, “One of your jurors is a ringer.”
That stopped them. They frowned. They stared at one another. Warren said, “What do you mean, a ringer?”
“I mean one of your jurors is not a bona fide Taney County voter. One of your jurors is actually a reporter for the Weekly Galaxy.”
Jolie nearly squeaked: “That rag?”
“You know it, eh?”
“The things they’ve said about Ray over the years—”
“Are nothing,” Sara interrupted, “to what they mean to say about him. And about all of you.”
Warren said, “What do you mean, all of us?”
“I’ve had a minute to think it out,” Sara said. “I know how those people think; I’ve had experience with Weekly Galaxy reporters before.” It seemed to her, all in all, better not to mention that she’d once been such a reporter. “And how did they get the information about the shadow jury?” she asked. “How did they get to know what you know fast enough to slip one of their own people in instead of the person you were going after?”
Jolie stared at the building with horror. “They bugged us!”
A man for whom light had suddenly dawned, Warren said, “The telephone repairers!”
“Sounds good,” Sara said.
Warren explained, “After everything was installed, these two came back and said there was a problem, and fixed it.”
“They sure did. Where did they work?”
“In my office,” Warren said, his usually robust voice gone hollow. His tan had faded, too.
“Everything you’ve said in that office,” Sara told him, “is now on a Weekly Galaxy tape.”
“My God.”
To Jolie, Sara said, “Aren’t you glad now you let me come along?”
Warren didn’t have time for good fellowship. He said, “Which one? We have to get rid of—”
“No no no, not that fast,” Sara said. “Jack Ingersoll, my boss at Trend, it happens he’s working on a Weekly Galaxy exposé right now. I want to call him, see how he wants to handle this.”
Outraged, Warren said, “How he wants to handle it?”
“You wouldn’t know a thing if it weren’t for me,” Sara pointed out.
“If what you say is true,” Jolie said. “If you aren’t just trying to scare us for some reason of your own.”
Sara looked at her. “You want me to walk away?”
Warren said, “Miss Joslyn, Sara, tell us who the ringer is.”
“Right after I find a pay phone and call Jack,” Sara told him. She turned away, then turned back. “And I suggest, if you don’t mind, that you find a pay phone and call a debugger.”
33
Branson is an early town. That was a real jolt for some of the performers, who were used to the pace and timing of the road, where your two shows would usually begin at eight and eleven, or Vegas, where some of the shows on the Strip started at nine and midnight. In Branson, where the families and the retirees bed down early and rise early — PANCAKES! ALL YOU CAN EAT! — the shows begin at 3:00 and 8:00 P.M. Some of the performers have trouble for a while, getting up to speed in the middle of the afternoon and then being required to turn off in the middle of the evening. But eventually, even the most night owl of the show folk adapt to the slower rhythm, and even come to enjoy it.
Ray Jones was one who had the hardest time shifting gears. In the old days, he’d toured 250 to 300 days a year, sleeping by day in the moving bus, rising like a vampire as the sun went down to perform into the night for the people out front, then partying back till it was time for Cal and the boys to pour him back onto the bus; occasionally stopping a town or two away to eject a lady friend who hadn’t realized the party was over.
The last few years, in Branson, he’d grown used to sleeping in a bed that wasn’t traveling at sixty miles an hour, he’d grown used to the concept of being up and about in direct sunlight, and he’d even grown used to performing the three o’clock matinee — pretending, on the rougher days, that it was a rehearsal or a record date. But the hardest mental shift had been the idea that by 9:30 in the evening, the day was over — no more shows, no more people out front, and even the members of the band yawning and scratching themselves and looking bleary-eyed. By midnight, even Honey Franzen would have gone home to her little ranch style on Mockingbird Lane, north of the Strip, toward Roark Creek.