He would, of course, be very careful in the selection of jury members. He was allowed an unlimited number of challenges for cause, and he was allowed to peremptorily challenge a total of thirty-six prospective jurors. He could, for example, excuse a man simply because he did not like the color of his eyes. Ideally, he’d have wanted at least three Puerto Ricans on the jury. He knew this would be impossible, and he’d consider himself lucky if the defense permitted him to empanel even one. He debated in his own mind whether or not he preferred men or women on the jury and decided that it didn’t make much difference either way. Whereas men would more readily accept the testimony of Louisa Ortega, they might unconsciously identify with the virility of the three killers. And whereas a woman’s maternal instinct might cause her to embrace the image of Morrez protectively, she would certainly rebel against anything a prostitute said under oath.
As it almost always did, it would break down to a sense of feel. He would know instantly when questioning a prospective juror whether this man or woman would be impartial. He knew lawyers who maintained that the best way to select a jury was to accept immediately the first twelve men or women and let it go at that. He did not agree with them. He felt that there was more to winning a case than pure chance, and he tried to establish during the questioning period whether or not the jury member would like him personally. He was, after all, an actor in a show — one of the stars — and unless the jury empathized with him his case would indeed be a difficult one.
His own personal gauge was a prospective juror’s eyes. He always stood very close to the man or woman he was questioning, and he liked to believe that he could read intelligence or lack of intelligence, fairness or prejudice, empathy or antagonism in that person’s eyes. Perhaps his gauge was fallacious. He had certainly empaneled jurors in open-and-shut cases only to have the verdict go finally against him. But if the eyes were not the windows of the soul (and he had forgotten who made that original observation) he did not know which part of the body was a more accurate measure of what went on inside a man.
He called Karin at six to say that he would not be home for dinner.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “That means I’ll be eating alone.”
“Isn’t Jennie home?”
“No, she’s gone out.”
“Where in the name of God does that girl go all the time?”
“There’s a new Brando picture at Radio City. She went with some of the girls.”
“Neighborhood girls?” he asked pointedly.
“No. The neighborhood girls seem to be avoiding our daughter. She called some friends from school.”
“What the devil,” Hank muttered. “Can’t they even leave her alone? What time will she be back, Karin?”
“Not too late. Don’t worry about it. There are two detectives prowling the house like sentries. One of them is very good-looking. I may invite him in for dinner.”
“Ja, ja, you do that.”
“Would it make you jealous?”
“Not in the slightest,” he said. “But it may lead to a homicide in Inwood. Honey, I may be home very late. Don’t wait up for me if you don’t feel like it.”
“I’ll wait up. Hank, if you get lonely, call me again, will you?”
“I will.”
“All right, darling. Goodbye.”
He hung up, smiling, and went back to work.
At 7:10 P.M. his telephone rang. Absent-mindedly he lifted it from the receiver and said, “Hello?”
“Mr. Bell?” a voice asked.
“Yes,” he said.
There was no answer.
“Yes, this is Mr. Bell.”
He waited. There was still no answer.
“Hello?” he said.
The silence on the phone was unpunctuated, unbroken. He waited with the receiver in his fist, saying nothing, listening, waiting for the sound of the phone being hung up on the other end. The sound did not come. In the stillness of his office, the silence on the phone seemed magnified. He was aware all at once that his hand was sweating on the black plastic of the receiver.
“Who is this?” he said.
He thought he could hear breathing on the other end of the line. He tried to remember what the voice which had said “Mr. Bell?” sounded like, but he could not.
“If you have something to say, say it,” he said to the empty phone.
He wet his lips. His heart was pounding, and he resented the foolish staccato beat in his chest.
“I’m hanging up,” he said, not expecting the words to find voice, surprised when they did. His statement had no effect on the party at the other end. The silence persisted, broken intermittently by staticlike sounds, the minute impulses of electricity on any telephone wire.
He slammed the receiver back onto its cradle.
When he picked up the outline on Louisa Ortega, his hands were trembling.
He left the office at nine that night.
Fanny, her white-thatched head drooping slightly, opened the doors of the one elevator which was still running.
“Hello, Hank,” she said. “Burning the midnight?”
“Got to wrap up this Morrez case,” he told her.
“Yeah,” she said. She closed the doors. “Well, what’re you going to do? That’s life.”
Solemnly, remembering the shaggy-dog story, Hank said, “Life is a fountain.”
“Huh?” Fanny said. “What do you mean, life is a fountain?”
He looked at her with a mock stunned expression. “You mean life isn’t a fountain?”
“Hank,” she said, wagging her head, “you’re working too hard. Close the windows in your office. Don’t let the sun in.”
He grinned, and then he remembered the silent phone call, and the grin dropped from his mouth. In the street outside, the buildings of justice had closed their faces for the night. An occasional light burned like an unblinking eye in the otherwise gray façades of the buildings. The streets, thronged with counselors and clerks and offenders and witnesses during the daytime, were almost empty at this hour. He glanced at his watch. Nine-ten. With luck, he’d be home before ten o’clock. A nightcap with Karin, outdoors perhaps, and then to bed. It was a beautiful balmy night, and the night stirred something deep inside him, a memory impulse leaping into vague restless prominence. He could not pinpoint the memory, but he felt very young all at once, and he knew the memory was connected with his youth, the smell of a summer night, the giant black arc overhead dotted with swarming stars, the sound of the city all around him, the myriad sounds gathering and rising to become the sound that only a city possessed, the heartbeat of a metropolis. It was a night to drive along the West Side Highway with the top of a convertible down and the jewel lights of the city gleaming in the sky, reflecting on the waters of the Hudson. It was a night for listening to “Laura,” a night designed to show man that romance was a very real thing which had nothing whatever to do with the daily grind of the rat race.
He was unconsciously smiling when he entered City Hall Park. His step, too, was lighter, and his shoulders were back and his head was erect and he felt as if he owned the city of New York. Lock, stock, and barrel, the city was his, a giant wonderland of peaks and minarets and soaring towers designed for his pleasure alone. He hated this city, but, by God, it sang in his blood, it roared there like the intricate tonality of a Bach fugue, it was his city, and he was a part of it, and as he walked beneath the spreading leaf canopy of the park trees he felt as if he were merging with the concrete and the asphalt and the steel and the blazing tungsten, as if he were truly the city personified, and he knew for a fleeting instant how Frankie Anarilles felt when he walked the streets of Spanish Harlem.