Headquarters of the Ray Jones defense team was a recently defunct furniture showroom, a broad one-story glass-fronted structure across the street from the courthouse. Inside, the building had been a hollow shell, with offices at the rear that had once held the shop’s owner and credit manager, two people with a penchant for making wrong decisions. Gray industrial carpeting had covered the main showroom floor, with indentations in it where the unsold furniture had once stood, and old phone lines had jutted like hairy moles from the walls.
Now the place was transformed. Beige draperies covered the front showroom windows. Office furniture and equipment and cubicle partitions made a bustling atmosphere within. Phone and fax lines were in place, plus copiers and a darkroom and a water cooler everyone was too busy to gossip around. Twelve car parking had been obtained at the rear of a nearby restaurant. Warren himself was installed in the former owner’s office, with furniture that looked too good to be rented but was, and the onetime credit manager’s office was now the conference room, with bulletin boards, TV, VCR, and a polygraph.
The staff in this building numbered seventeen, beginning with Warren himself, and Pat Kelly, his secretary of the last twenty-one years, plus five young attorneys and two legal secretaries from Warren’s home office in Dallas, plus Jim Chancellor, who had once himself been the Taney County prosecutor, plus his secretary, plus six various researchers and clerks, all of them very busy.
What they were mostly busy with at the moment was the list of potential jurors. What with one thing and another, fewer than 9,000 of Taney County’s 22,000 residents were eligible jurors, and Warren wanted to have at least the beginning of a handle on every one of them before Wednesday — day after tomorrow.
Normally, in a particularly gruesome murder like this one, well covered in the local press, it would be almost automatic to ask for a change of venue to some county beyond the reach of regional papers and TV, but Ray Jones was already a famous person, famous everywhere. The national press would definitely cover this trial, so there was no way to get out from under the glare of publicity.
Still, fame could cut both ways. In the four years since Ray Jones had built his theater and bought his house out at Porte Regal, he’d done a number of things to ingratiate himself with the community, lending his name to hospital fund drives, putting on a charity performance for the local Boy Scouts, things like that, things any sensible celeb would do when trying to establish roots in a community. Some portion of that pool of potential jurors would harbor warm feelings toward Ray Jones as a result of his good deeds in Branson, and it was part of the job of Warren Thurbridge and his team to find those people and get them on the jury. Swallow the bad publicity, hope the good publicity does some good. Stay at home in Taney County.
This is where Jim Chancellor came in. A local boy, former prosecutor, he could tell you something about half the people on the jury list — but not till the phone people left.
In the meantime, Warren busied himself at Pat Kelly’s desk, going through his message slips. Nothing important; he’d spent part of the drive from Branson on his car phone to the Dallas office, getting brought up to date on the firm’s other affairs. In fact, most of these messages were from the media; the usual press feeding frenzy was about to begin. Later on, Warren would be more than happy to wage his Ray Jones battle in public, a kind of warfare at which he excelled, but at the moment journalists were useless to him, and so he’d have nothing to do with them. “Have Julie take care of these,” he told Pat, Julie being the file clerk who would also double as media spokesperson.
“Right,” Pat said as the phone workers came out of his office, both grinning happily but apologetically, saying, “All fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“No trouble,” Warren assured them, now that the trouble was over, and he and Jim went at last into his office and shut the door, while the two phone workers left the building and walked down the block to the Contel repair truck they’d obtained the same way they’d gotten the IDs and the tools and the hard hats: bribery.
Stashing their hard hats and tool belts in the back of the truck, the ex-phone repairers drove sedately away, circling one extra block to go past a small RV park. Half a dozen RVs, big, ungainly traveling hotel rooms on wheels, faced the street in a row across the front of the park, and in the driver’s seat of one of these an old geezer sat reading the latest Modern Maturity. When the Contel truck went by, he looked up, grinned, and gave an everything’s fine O sign with thumb and first finger. The former phone people waved and drove on, and the geezer went back to reading about how retirees could avoid paying their fair share of the cost of society. Behind him, two technicians from the Weekly Galaxy hunkered over recording equipment, and the sound of Warren Thurbridge’s voice was heard, saying, “Now, Jim, don’t hold anything back. Say what you want about these people. Not a word of this will ever leave this office.”
6
The Weekly Galaxy hospitality suite was jumping when Sara arrived a little after five o’clock. Three connecting rooms of sofas and easy chairs and big-screen satellite TV. A bar in each room, with a generous gent in a black bow tie behind each one. White cloth — covered tables offered the kind of airy snacks that stave off hunger without protecting from inebriation. And present for the largesse were many representatives of the fourth estate.
The first thing for Sara to do was get a full glass, for protective coloration. A few customers were ahead of her at the bar she chose, giving her an opportunity to see just how lavish a hand these bartenders had, so when her turn came, she asked for a white wine spritzer with lots of ice, and then, as she moved among the three rooms, she didn’t drink it. Nor did she stop to chat with anyone; at first, all she wanted here was a general feel of the occasion.
The occasion was unbuttoned, is what it was. Mostly, these were the entertainment reporters of our news-hungry nation, more of them from television than print, and more from cable than network, which meant the room wasn’t exactly awash in high-flown rhetoric about the nobility of the journalistic profession. These were mostly wannabes, people who’d started covering showbiz only after they’d given up their own showbiz dreams. Many garage bands, many regional theater productions, many department-store modeling jobs, many public access-channel shows, all shimmered in the past around these people, giving them that weird edge, that manner of caring passionately about something they don’t care anything about at all. It can pass for sophistication, in the dark, with the light behind it.
While she wandered around, getting a sense of the scene, of the people here, the kind of journalist assembled for this story — okay, the competition, if you insist — familiar faces from the bad old Galaxy days, familiarly ravaged, passed by from time to time. She made no effort to establish contact. Principal among these faces and among the most ravaged were the Down Under Trio, those practiced enticers, hard at work sabotaging American journalism. Sara saw them one at a time, sheepdogging their victims to the party.
Harry Razza she saw first, the matinee idol who’d told her about this cheery reporter trap. He came in with a pair of girls all in dark leather, who had perfected the ability to giggle and sneer at the same time, so they were definitely from either a teenage magazine or MTV. Harry gave them to some boys and left.
A little later, Sara saw another of the Down Unders, Bob Sangster, the one with the big nose and an easy working-class manner, who had reeled in an older gent smoking a pipe and wearing leather elbow patches, a former reporter retired to People, probably. And sometime after that, in came Louis B. Urbiton with a pair of scruffy thirtyish proles under his wing, urban cowboys who’d dressed themselves down at the mall exclusively in imitations — polyester and vinyl. These must be reporters from one of the Galaxy’s direct imitators, the Star or the National Enquirer or one of those. True competitors, in other words, toward whom no mercy would be shown.