Trial Run Read online

  Kerrin didn’t interfere. I could see her mentally cataloguing the different responses, grading the credibility of the pathological intoxication argument, assessing points of contention. If a single convincing argument could not be found, it might benefit the defense to divide the jurors along just such sexual lines as Lila and Chad were drawing. A hung jury might not be the best case scenario for Randy Outray, but neither would it be the worst.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Are you not planning to participate at all?” Kerrin said.

  She had allowed us a one-hour break for lunch. The group had scattered to various eateries in the neighborhood, among them a soup and sandwich counter, a deli bar specializing in alfalfa sprouts, and a linen-service restaurant. I had made a detour to the washroom. Kerrin was there, combing out her hair before dampening the ends and coiling them back up into the French twist she habitually wore.

  I watched her in the mirror. “I’m waiting for you to get serious,” I said.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “That pathological intoxication stuff was, to quote Jerry, crap. You have no more intention of selling that to Mel Deloitte than I have of flying to the moon.”

  Kerrin ignored my tone and carefully inserted a comb to hold her hair in place. “It’s part of my strategy,” she said, “To get these people riled up a bit first, so I get some honest feedback from them. The prosecutor’s going to play to the jury’s emotions just as hard as Mel is when this thing gets going. You’ve seen it before, you know both sides choreograph their movements and their words to maximize dramatic impact in the courtroom. It’s my job to find out what movements will get the response we’re looking for.”

  Her eyes met mine in the mirror.

  “Do you never worry about manipulating the system, Kerrin?”

  The challenge surprised her. She crumpled the paper towel in a tight fist and flung it into the bin. “What I’m doing is providing a service to a defendant. Without that service, that leveling of the playing field, justice for the accused is a crapshoot.” She spoke with bitter irony. “We may have to accept the mercies of fate over a lot of things but criminal justice, at least, ought to be something more than simply a roll of the dice, don’t you think?”

  She turned on her heel and yanked open the door to the hall. I followed like a well-trained puppy, anxious for approval after giving offense.

  In three years, this was the best we had achieved. Our conversations tended to skate past moral issues, avoiding the depths like a novice afraid to strike out from the safety of shore to the more exposed, but potentially perilous, ice further out. We bore our separate grief with whatever dignity we could muster, burying pain as we had buried our family. I didn’t have the courage to continue the encounter and as always, sought refuge in the trivial.

  “Lunch?”

  Kerrin shook her head. “Louise left a sandwich in my office. I have a few things to do before the others come back.”

  I wandered out of the building, feeling anxious and unsettled, unsure of my destination. At this point, I only had forty-five minutes left, which let Ristorante Tarina out. Since alfalfa sprouts have never held much appeal, I headed for the hearty comforts of the Sandwich Board, finding when I got there that the only available stool had a broken swivel top. Lunch would have to be take-out, I thought resignedly, until someone said, “Share my booth?”

  I recognized the voice immediately, which surprised me, because I had heard it for the first time just that morning. It held an underlying note I couldn’t quite define but which gave the impression of someone casually and good-temperedly on terms with life. It is an accent rare among the pompous, rarer still among the self-pitying, and I found it infinitely attractive. David Maitland offered me the extra seat in his booth with a small gesture of welcome.

  “Rumor has it the tuna salad is the fastest, but I’m here to tell you that the hamburger is worth the wait.”

  “It looks it,” I said, eyeing a small mountain of beef stacked with tomato, onions, and hot peppers. “The question is, can anyone eat that and not suffer the heartbreak of heartburn afterward?”

  “Ah, now there is something only the daring can answer. Are you daring?”

  “Not very.”

  “How ’bout if I buy you a beer to quench the fires?” A pattern of water rings on the table in front of him marked the recent passing of a pilsner glass.

  “Make it white wine and I’ll accept.”

  The waitress who drifted over to take my order focused so intently on my mouth that I wondered for a moment if she was hearing-impaired. Though I have often been complimented on my smile, I didn’t really think the lipstick I was wearing should excite that much interest. When “Hello, my name is Tara” turned her appraising eyes on the rest of me, I decided she was not so much fascinated as rude. Bad manners have a way of attracting the same; her impudent scrutiny provoked me to examine her just as closely, and I felt David Maitland’s gaze sharpen into amusement at the circling of the dogs. I suspected that Tara had been making time with him before I arrived and it was clear that she considered me an unworthy rival. I noted that she had applied her own lipstick far too liberally, inking in contours that nature hadn’t given her. Her figure, too, had been adjusted to startling proportions by a French, a very French, half-cup bra. I saw her glance slide momentarily to my own lesser endowments. David saw it, too, and I felt myself color faintly.

  “Not to worry,” he said blandly, as Tara finally moved away.

  “Gee, thanks, Dad.”

  He grinned, a gesture that instantly transformed him from inscrutable to teddy bear cuddly. I controlled an unexpected urge to snuggle up beside him.

  We talked nothings for a while and David ordered the house specialty, apple crumble, to keep me company while I waded through my burger.

  “There’s a shaker of chilis here, if you want to liven that up a bit,” he said, laughing at the tears the hot peppers had already produced.

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “No.” He paused. His manner was casual, even abstracted. Then he said, “Do you think Randy Outray is?”

  The sudden shift in conversation threw me and I felt obscurely disappointed to be brought back to the subject at hand. “What?”

  “Randy Outray. Do you think he’s insane?”

  I dabbed at streaming eyes with my napkin. “How would I know?”

  “How would anyone? But what other defense could there possibly be for what he did?”

  I shook my head, gulping half a glass of wine to dampen the fire in my mouth.

  “There is precedent for it, you know,” he went on. “Remember John Hinckley? They had a videotape of him shooting President Reagan — played it over and over on nationwide TV. When the trial began, no one seriously thought the insanity plea would work, but in the end it did. They said he was schizophrenic.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, “But wasn’t the Hinckley case the exception to prove the rule? Juries aren’t usually very receptive to the insanity defense, are they?”

  “Aren’t they? What about Mark David Chapman?”

  “The man who shot John Lennon.”

  David nodded. “I think a lot of jurors balk at the death penalty. An insanity plea gives them a way to find someone guilty and then punish him by getting him treatment.”

  His tone should have clued me in, but it didn’t. I finished my burger and we walked back to Kerrin’s office.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “We’re going to look at some photographs,” Kerrin said. She opened a manila envelope and withdrew half a dozen pictures, which she placed one at a time on the table in front of us. “Tell me what you see.”

  “A bloody knife,” Chad said.

  “A very bloody knife,” amended Jerry, sliding the picture across the table. Daintry Gregg visibly withdrew, as though
touching the photograph might mean touching the murder weapon itself. Her lips tightened over a picture of Tracey Forrester holding up a ginger kitten and waving its paw to the camera. It was a blowup of a shot that had appeared in the Press the day the little girl was buried.

  A professional portrait of Susan Forrester drew a low whistle from Chad. It appeared to have been taken at a glamour studio, one where cosmeticians pay close attention to the sitter’s hair and makeup. Something black was draped low around Susan’s shoulders, underscoring a pale beauty more refined than in the days of the centerfold.

  My stomach clenched at the sight of the mother and child who had been so unsuspecting of what awaited them in the woods. As so often, I thought of Brian and Rory, who had been equally unaware as they tooled along the highway that fine summer evening. The Beach Boys were cranked up on the stereo, the tape somehow surviving amid the wreckage of the car. For weeks, Brian had been teaching Rory the words to “Sloop John B.” The little boy loved to mime the action as his father belted out the refrain, pulling on make-believe ropes as he hoisted an invisible sail.

  We were told they wouldn’t have seen it coming. The tire that spun from the logging truck to smash through their windshield would have been moving too fast.

  There had been little enough left of Rory. I had identified him only by a scar on one foot and the tattered cowboy shirt he had been wearing. Kerrin couldn’t leave Brian to go to the morgue and, in any event, the doctor had advised against her seeing her mangled child.

  Without meeting her eye, I handed the photographs of the Forresters back to Kerrin.

  The remaining shots were of the crime scene. People glanced at them quickly and passed them along.

  “Gruesome,” said Chad.

  “They look so vulnerable.”

  A faint humming began to fill the room, one of those sounds with no translation in human speech that starts low in the back of the throat and issues from the lips as a moan of pain, or a scream. Heads swiveled to stare at Daintry Gregg, who sat hunched in her seat, oblivious to all but her own thoughts. Abruptly she stood up, knocking over her chair in her clumsy haste to escape the room. I noticed a fine tremor in David Maitland’s hands as he moved to set the chair back upright.

  Kerrin signaled to Louise, then turned back into the room. We all looked at her expectantly. With no change in expression, she said, “Gruesome, okay. Vulnerable. What else?”

  There was an interval before someone said, “Butchered.”

  “The word compassion doesn’t even enter in when you look at those pictures.”

  At his end of the table, Brent murmured, “Aberration.”

  Kerrin picked up on it quickly. “Does that word come to anybody else’s mind? Insane? How many say a person has to be insane to cut two people up like that? Insane to have sex with their dead bodies?”

  “Fuck-in’ loo-ny tunes,” said Jerry. “No question.”

  • • •

  When the rest of the group disbanded for the day, Kerrin motioned me to linger. I half-hoped David might make the offer of another drink, but once the session was over, he departed with almost ungracious speed. Daintry Gregg had never returned. Shortly after three, Louise had delivered tea to the conference room along with the message that Daintry had resigned her position. Louise had found her in the washroom, draped over the toilet bowl. She offered to call a doctor, but Daintry refused, insisting instead on a cab to take her home. She would leave her Mercedes in the lot until someone could be sent to fetch it.

  As soon as the door closed on the last juror, Kerrin was on the phone to Mel Deloitte. With a flick of her hand, she motioned me to the wing chair by her desk. I kicked off my shoes and curled up into it, feet tucked protectively under me, arms wrapped around my knees.

  “I’m not sure,” Kerrin was saying, “That they can hear anything I say once they look at the photographs.”

  Mel’s swooping baritone rumbled at the other end of the line, a startling counterpoint to Kerrin’s uninflected accent.

  “Mel, we can’t change the facts. The facts are there. So are the pictures. And the prosecution’s going to use them. We’ve got to live with that.”

  She listened for a moment.

  “One for sure, maybe two, figure he has to be a nutbar. The rest were too distressed at the sight of the victims to even spare a thought for him. One woman, who started out leaning to our side, totally lost it. She won’t be back. What we need to do now is identify which people will at least listen to us once they’ve seen those pictures.”

  Kerrin cradled the receiver and made one or two notes on the pad in front of her. Then she leaned back in her chair, surveying me with her arms folded across her chest, in much the same way that our mother used to signal a showdown. The gauntlet had been thrown in the washroom at lunchtime. It was too late to wish it back. Kerrin and I sat poised on the edge of a confrontation that had nothing to do with the Outray case and everything to do with the unpalatable mixture of guilt and resentment that had strained our relationship to the breaking point. I silently willed the moment away. We had lost everything else. Must we lose each other as well?

  I hugged my knees to my chest in a defensive posture that had become habitual and tried an obvious sidestep. “Since you’re going to have to find a replacement for Daintry anyway, why not make it two?”

  Kerrin refused to be deflected. “No. It’s time we had this out.” Her words were measured, her voice a curious and strangely comforting blend of psychologist and big sister. “I saw the look on your face while those photos were being passed around. You were thinking about Brian and Rory, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.” I raised my head to look at her. “Yes, I was. Weren’t you?”

  “No.”

  Kerrin’s answer was as composed as her features. I studied her carefully. Loss had hardened her lovely face, erasing from it something fundamental that I remembered there. Three years into unremitting ache, I still searched for it but, like Winnie the Pooh, the more I looked for it, the more it wasn’t there. We never spoke of Brian or Rory, or even of our parents. Until now, their lives, and our lives with them, had been a chapter closed to us both.

  “What is it you want from me, Nina?” Kerrin said. “Should I light an eternal flame? Become a professional widow?”

  I tried to frame a response but she overrode me, moving with the ease of long practice from defense to attack. “Look at you. Thirty-two years old and you exist like a cloistered nun, floating on the edge of other people’s lives. For three years, you’ve devoted yourself to nurturing me. You think if you hover over me like some kind of ministering angel, making sure I eat properly and don’t forget the stockings at Christmas, that things will be … restored. That I will be restored.”

  I hugged my knees tighter. Rigid self-control made my voice colorless almost to the point of stupidity. “That’s not fair.”

  Kerrin said wearily, “Life isn’t fair. Just ask me. So what? You endure what you must and thank God it’s not worse.”

  I stared at her, appalled. “Worse? How could it possibly be any worse? They’re dead!”

  Kerrin drew a long breath, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger. It seemed to fit much looser than it used to, dropping to her first knuckle when she moved her hand. She spoke very quietly and carefully, as though addressing someone of limited intelligence. “That’s right. Brian and Rory are dead. Whether by accident or as part of some grand design, I don’t know. I haven’t asked God for explanations lately; I’ve never believed he sees justice quite the same way we do anyway. I only know I can’t live my life bemoaning fate.” Kerrin’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Brian and Rory are dead and here am I, still alive and kicking, and glad, yes, glad,” she said fiercely, “That my husband isn’t lying like some vegetable in a hospital, glad that my son didn’t suffer when he died.” She stop
ped playing with her ring. “Glad that I’m still alive.” Her face showed no expression, but her eyes pleaded for acceptance.

  I stared at her. I had never understood before then that my sister was a Stoic. Somehow it widened the gap between us. Anger as powerful as pain twisted in my gut. I said bitterly, “Kerrin Adams, a parable for our time.” The words echoed like a slap in the quiet room.

  Kerrin recoiled as if I had indeed hit her.

  Gathering dusk spilled through the window, obscuring the details of the room. In the half-light, my sister’s face looked hard as stone, and as strange.

  Silence stretched. The moment hung suspended, like a wave before it breaks.

  Then Kerrin said, “I’m sorry, Nini,” and the wave washed over me, the salt drops tingling and smarting in my eyes at her use of the childhood endearment. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help the way I feel. Things happen, and life goes on, and you change, and you can’t go back. You have to live it the way it comes.”

  She was sitting very still behind her desk. Was it a trick of the light or was my sister really a very long way away from me, a lonely figure in the near darkness?

  It came to me suddenly that this was how I would always remember her; a woman alone. And I think, for the first time, I began to see her as she really was — not any more as a projection of my adolescent romantic fantasies, the young wife so cruelly widowed, the bereaved and heartbroken mother … this was Kerrin, who had been a determined fighter from our earliest days of schoolyard bullies. She had made a career of redeeming the socially unredeemable and she had borne devastating loss with a strength that I, wrapped up in my own crippling despair, had not recognized. We had hoed the same painful row; I, it now seemed, for the more bitter harvest. Kerrin had managed acceptance of what was left to her. It was I who had not.

  They say that moments of self-revelation come to everyone. I wonder if they are ever pleasant.