As for the shadow jury, it was agreed they would stay together for one more night at the Mountain Greenery Motel in Branson, then come back tomorrow to join the defense team in awaiting the verdict. There were also more debriefings to be done on the morrow — in case worse came to worst and appeals had to be readied. Did any of the shadows feel improper manipulation had been practiced by the prosecutors? The judge? The prosecution’s witnesses? In the meantime, for tonight they could still eat and sleep at Ray Jones’s expense; enjoy.
In his room at the Mountain Greenery, Bob Sangster, the false Jock O’Shanley, sequestered himself from his roommate by going into the bathroom, where he once again removed the cassette recorder from his side and extricated the tape, which now included the results of the first shadow-jury vote. Then he went out into the hall, where he did not make the expected rendezvous with Laverne Slagei.
Hmmmmm. Bob roamed the portion of the motel set aside for the shadows, and when at last he saw another maid and asked her about Laverne, she merely said, “Laverne isn’t around.”
“But she was here this morning” — when she’d given Bob the then-blank tape he wanted to pass back.
“I think she got sick or something,” the maid said, and went back to her work.
Unfortunate, Bob thought, but not critical. There was still plenty of space on this tape for whatever might happen tomorrow. So thinking, he went back to his room, hid the tape in his underwear drawer, put on a bathing suit, and went for a swim, followed by dinner, followed by cribbage with another juror, followed by a showing of Support Your Local Sheriff, followed by sleep, followed by a rude awakening at 4:30 in the morning by rough-handed Missouri state troopers here to make an arrest. They were delighted to find that Bob Sangster still had that tape in his possession.
Ten minutes earlier. Boy Cartwright and his guest for the night. Erica Jacke, had been awakened just as rudely, at the former hospitality suite in the Palace Inn, by even more state troopers.
“Who are they?” wailed Boy, pointing a flabby finger at the Trend photographers popping flashcubes in his face.
“None of your business,” a trooper said, and jabbed Boy painfully in the side with a gloved knuckle. “You wanna get dressed, or you wanna come along like you are?”
The residents of the 1000 block of Cherokee (nearly its only block, by the way) were not surprised to be awakened at 4:30 in the morning by many glaring lights and blaring sirens, and not at all surprised when the center of this sudden official attention turned out to be their new neighbors at 1023. A few of the good residents had already phoned their suspicions about those new people to the local police, with, as usual, not a damn thing being done, grumble, grumble. Their suspicions had generally involved Satanists, Arab terrorists planning to blow up Table Rock Dam, a coven of child abusers from out East, or possibly — though no motorcycles had as yet been seen — Hell’s Angels.
Whatever the deviltry would turn out to be, it had been clear from the instant of the arrival of those people that they were up to no good. They took all the parking spaces on the block, for one thing, including right in front of your own house. And there were so many of them, and they looked so strange, not like normal people at all, who, as everybody knows, are fish-belly white, drastically overweight, clad in pastel polyester, and shyly smiling unless your back is turned. These people weren’t normal in any particular, weren’t like us, and therefore must be up to no good.
As a result, the arrival of several platoons of state troopers at arrest hour — 4:30 A.M. — was no surprise and no inconvenience to the neighborhood, but was, in fact, a source of gratification. Even more gratification was provided by those photographers, who, having been rousted from sleep under tables, chose to resist arrest for a while. It was a fine hullabaloo over there, well lit, intelligently cast, imaginatively costumed, with good production values all around and the kind of minimal script that works best in an action flick of this sort. Afterward, a lot of residents could kick themselves that they hadn’t taped it.
(And much afterward, there was a moment of bewilderment when it was learned by some of the residents that those people had, in fact, been employees of their favorite newspaper. Ah well, not everything is understandable in this life. Think about something else.)
At 5:15 that same morning, the phone rang in a dark and pleasantly musky motel room. Jack awoke first and rolled over Sara (who then awoke) to answer the phone, saying, “Yuh?” Then he said, “Ah.” Then he said, “Oh ho.” Then he said, “Mmmm.” Then he said, “Right,” and hung up. Rolling back over Sara to his side of the bed, still in the dark, he said, “My story’s just about closed up. How’s yours?”
“The jury’s still out,” Sara said, and went back to sleep.
45
The jury began its second day of deliberations Thursday morning at nine. Among the news items they were being protected from, there now could be added the tidbit of the excitement early this morning among their shadow compatriots and the rather astonishing number of Weekly Galaxy employees crowded this morning into the Branson jail. So while the real jury continued to wrestle with the question of the murder of Belle Hardwick, the thirteen remaining shadow jurors who had gathered around the conference table in Warren’s offices spent their morning in awed discussion of the spy recently in their midst.
Actual juries sometimes have to deliberate twice in Missouri, if it’s a death-penalty crime. The first deliberation deals strictly with the question of guilt or innocence; if the jury decides the defendant is innocent, or is guilty of a lesser crime, that’s it, they can go home. But if they decide the defendant is guilty as charged, they have to stick around for part two of the trial, in which prosecution and defense can both produce witnesses all over again, this time to discuss the punishment to be meted out; that is, whether the defendant should be gassed to death or should do jail time instead.
In this part two, the defense can bring forward witnesses it couldn’t use before, people to testify to the defendant’s miserable childhood or evil companions or weakened mental capacity or whatever else might sway the jury toward clemency. On the other hand, the prosecution is very likely to parade the most tearful of the victim’s relatives on and off the stand, interspersed with the most grisly available photographs. At the end of all this, the jury goes back into solitude for its second set of deliberations, which are likely to be much more hair-raising and scarring than the first. They will at last produce a recommendation, death or something less, which the judge may, but probably will not, override. Then the whole jury can go into therapy.
Unfortunately for Ray Jones and his defense team, this scenario is never spelled out entirely to the jurors in advance, so most of them don’t realize the personal consequences involved in bringing in a verdict of guilty. At this point, the jury’s innocence becomes the defendant’s worst enemy.
The Ray Jones defense team managed to keep hope alive until 10:30 that morning, when the jury sent out its first request to the judge. They asked for clarification of two terms: manslaughter and depraved indifference. In a court now cleared of everyone but herself and the jury. Judge Quigley discussed these terms until all jurors had claimed a satisfactory grasp of the concepts. Then she and they retired once again to their separate rooms.
When the word came across the street to Warren, seated in his office with Ray and Jolie and Cal and Jim Chancellor (the shadow jury being in possession of the conference room), he took it stoically. “Well, we did our best,” he said.