The Jury (33 page)

I smile at him.

"Let's see if we can find Tash."

As Harry and I open the doors to the car we can hear the crash of surf on the other side of the development. The condos back up on the cliffs overlooking the beach. We check the numbers on the mailboxes.

They are clustered in groups, by address, with unit numbers assigned to each box.

We find Tash's mailbox, unit 312.

"Third floor. Up top," says Harry. We head up the walkway toward the door. When we get there, it's locked.

"We could wait until somebody comes out," says Harry.

On the wall next to the door is a speaker for an intercom system, with buttons lining the wall, names penciled on placards next to them.

I press one of the numbers on the second floor and wait a moment. Nobody answers. I try another. A voice comes over the intercom.

"Yeah."

I look at another name, this time from the first floor hoping they won't know each other.

"This is Mr. Symington in one-oh-eight. I left my key in the lock to my apartment. I wonder, could you let me in?"

Whoever it is doesn't respond, but a second later there is a quick buzz and the lock snaps open on the front door. Harry yanks on it, and we're in. We move quickly up the stairs before the guy on two can check to see who came in.

By the time we get to the top floor, both Harry and I are sucking wind. He's holding the back of his head like it's going to come apart. I'm feeling like some NFL linebacker tattooed me in the chest with his helmet. We lean against the wall, catching our breath.

"You all right?"

"Yeah. Gotta start jogging again," he say.

"When did you ever jog?"

"When I was a kid," he says. Harry winks at me.

I look at the number on the door across from the top of the stairs. Tash's unit is to the right. We work our way down the hall, trying not to make the floor squeak as we walk. We pass four doors, two on each side of the hall, until we come to 312. Tash's place is on the back side, an ocean view.

There's a peephole in the center of the door at about eye height. I lean down and take a look. Shielding the light from around the lens, I try to peer through it backwards. All I can make out is light and dark, what appears to be an absence of any movement inside. A couple of points, specks of brightness, bleed rays of light. These, I assume, are lamps that have been left on.

"See anything?"

I shake my head. I put an ear next to the door and listen. Nothing.

"We could just knock," Harry whispers.

I hold my hand up, shake my head.

Farther to the right there are two more apartment doors. Beyond that the hallway widens and forms a T. Quietly I move toward the intersection in the hall. On one side, in the intersecting hallway toward the front of the building, are two elevator doors. In the other direction, toward the ocean, is a sliding door leading out onto a veranda.

I head toward the sliding door. Harry follows. I flip the catch lock on the doors handle, slide it open and step out onto the balcony. There is a brisk breeze off the Pacific, rising as it hits the cliffs below us. I slide the door closed, and Harry and I can talk.

"What do we do?" he says.

I'm looking toward the balcony outside of Tash's unit. It's about thirty feet away. I can see from here that the sliding door to the unit is partway open.

"I want to take a look inside that condo."

"How?"

I look toward the balcony next to the one Harry and I are standing on. There's a span of about six feet between metal railings, a three-story drop and jagged cliffs below that, white surf crashing on the rocks. I would have to negotiate two of these spans to make it to Tash's balcony. Its not a long reach. It's just the fall if you miss.

"You're crazy," he says.

"Do you know any other way to get in there?"

"We could ring the buzzer. Knock on the door."

"And what if Boyd is in there? He'll kill Tash in an instant. Cut his throat and throw him off the balcony." As I'm talking to Harry, I'm sliding the belt out of the loops in my pants. Leather, about an inch and a half wide.

"Give me your belt," I tell him.

"I'm not going over there."

"No, you're not. I'm going alone."

"As long as we have that settled." Harry whips his belt out of the loops of his suit pants and hands it to me. I string the two belts together, putting the tip of one belt through the buckle of the other, the tongue through the first hole, and pull on them making sure they will support my weight. Then I loop the belt over the steel railing and buckle the ends together. I adjust it for length, and look at Harry.

"Wish me luck." I ease myself over the railing, my feet through the wrought-iron spindles so that my toes are supported by the concrete deck of the veranda.

Harry has me by one arm looking at me like I'm crazy. He is no doubt right.

I slip my right foot into the loop made by the belts and use it to swing out just a little at first, testing it. I can feel the pain in my chest pulling where Boyd nailed me.

Then, with my foot in the belt supporting my weight, one hand on the railing near Harry, I swing out once, come back; swing out twice. On the third try I catch the far railing, plant my foot through the spindles and in less than two seconds I'm over the railing.

I signal to Harry to uncouple the belts, and carefully he tosses them to me. I set up the arrangement on the far railing nearest to Tash's apartment. I avoid looking down, though it's hard to ignore the sound of the crashing surf below me.

I swing out. This time I catch the railing on the second try, put my free foot through the spindles and ease myself over the railing. Now the belts are behind me, left on the other balcony. The only way out is through the door in Tash's apartment.

The slider is open about four inches. The vertical blinds are pitched so that I can see everything in one direction, the right side of the room. To the left, visibility is more obscured by the canted blinds that dance and clatter in the breeze from the open door.

There is no other movement in the living room. Two lamps are on. I slip my shoes off and step to the other side of the balcony. From here I can see slivers of the kitchen, visible through the openings as the blinds waft back and forth.

Though I can't see it all, there are no shadows being cast, and the kitchen lights are all on. If there was an energy crisis, you wouldn't know it from Tash's condo.

There's a smaller window a few feet over from the sliding door. This looks into the bedroom. While the lights are off in this room, I have no difficulty seeing in, reflected light streaming down the hallway. The bed is neatly made. I can see the door to the master bath. There's no one home.

I signal to Harry, shaking my head. He hangs by the railing, watching. I motion that I'm going in. He nods.

I pick up my shoes and quietly slide open the door, stepping through the vertical blinds.

I am focused to the front, the hallway off to my right, the kitchen to the left, sock toes buried in the deep pile of Tash's carpeted living room, wondering what I'm doing breaking and entering, stealing across some stranger's living room with my shoes in my hand.

"Hi, Paul."

When I turn, he's behind me. Frank Boyd is seated in a tall wingback chair in the corner, his back against the wall at the far left of the sliding door: the one blind spot in the room. In his lap is a short double-barreled shotgun, the muzzle pointed lazily in my direction. His finger outside the trigger guard, but close enough that I'm not going to argue with him.

"I was hoping you wouldn't come," he says. Frank's face is etched with deep lines, a countenance that is tired, worn, showing no emotion, a lifeless mask.

His hair that hasn't seen a barber in months is

hanging ragged halfway down his ears. There is a kind of wild look in his eye, the glassy gaze of some jungle cat on the prowl.

"I hope I didn't hurt you," he says.

I smile.

"Oh, no. Not at all." I touch my chest.

"Just a little bruise."

"That's good. Why are you carrying your shoes?"

I look at them, a sick smile. I give him a face, shrug my shoulders.

"I don't know."

"Maybe you should put them on," he says.

"May I sit?"

He nods.

"Sure."

I back into a chair across the room from him, a tufted sofa back.

"When did you figure it out?" he asks.

"Figure what out?"

"Don't play games," he says.

"Oh, you mean ..."

"Yeah."

I take a deep breath.

"Tonight."

If he's surprised, his expression doesn't convey it.

"When I put all the papers together and looked at them," I tell him.

"You mean if I hadn't come by your office, you wouldn't have ..."

I shake my head.

His eyes look away, a quizzical grin, wonder on the level of a galactic riddle.

"Shows to go you," he says.

"I thought for sure that when you picked up the file from the house you were on to me. Huh." A vacant stare, like how can he go back in time?

"I heard Crone got off," he says.

"It was on the radio."

"Earlier today," I tell him.

"That's good. I always felt bad that he was being blamed for something he didn't do. I had to take care of it," he said.

"Did pretty good, don't you think?"

"You mean the suicide note?"

He nods.

"Never was any good at typing. It took me a while. One finger at a time. But then he wasn't going anywhere. He was a tall one,

a long drink of water. I didn't think the ladder was gonna be high enough. The note--I had to play with it to get it right. Wrote it out longhand at home first. Took it with me. The printing was a bitch," he says.

"I almost called Doris to ask her if she could help me over the phone. That woulda been a mistake."

"Doris doesn't know?"

"She has no idea."

"Why did you do all of this, Frank?"

"What do you mean?" He says it as if killing two people and lying in wait for a third is a normal evening's work.

"I mean Kalista Jordan."

"She ended the program. Penny's program. What do you think I was gonna do, just sit there?"

I don't argue the point. His finger slides toward the trigger. I try a different subject.

"How is Doris?"

"What?"

"Doris and the kids?"

"Oh. They're fine. Fine."

"Where were they tonight? I tried to call."

"Doris is out of town. Took the kids with her."

"Where did they go?"

"Took a few days off. She needed to get away. They went to her mother's up in Fremont. We had an argument."

I don't know whether to believe him or not.

"Did she leave tonight?"

He looks at me as if he can't quite figure this out.

"What day is it?" he asks.

"It's Friday night."

"Oh." He thinks for a second.

"I guess she left a couple of days ago."

"What did you argue about?"

"The file," he says.

"The file from Penny's project?"

He nods. I can see him flinch with the mention of his daughters name. It's as if something has rubbed this point raw on his soul.

"When do you think he's gonna be home?"

"Who?"

"Aaron Tash," he says.

"Man whose house this is."

"I don't know. Maybe he went away for the weekend."

Frank looks at me as if this is not a pleasant thought.

"He's not a good person, Paul. He ended the project for Penny. He wanted the money."

"He didn't," I tell him. I watch his eyes for signs of anger. He looks at me warily.

"He signed some papers, but he didn't know what he was signing."

"You're just telling me that because you want to save him."

"No. I'm telling you because it's the truth."

"I don't want to hear it," he says.

"Dr. Crone was trying to keep Penny's project together. Other people ordered him to end the funding," I tell him.

"Who?"

"I don't know. They didn't know what they were doing either."

"I don't believe you," he says.

"Do you think Dr. Crone was trying to hurt Penny?"

"No."

"Do you think I was trying to hurt Penny?"

"No," he says.

"That's crazy."

"Then you can believe that Aaron Tash wasn't trying to hurt her either."

"Then why is she dead?"

I sigh.

"There are no simple answers," I tell him.

"I don't want to talk about it." The muzzle of the gun is going up and down, tapping against his knee in frenetic movement, a kind of weird half-light in his eyes, what I can imagine Kalista Jordan might have seen as she took her last breath.

"We can't wait much longer." He says it as if Tash has stiffed the two of us on a scheduled meeting.

"Why don't you go home? Get some sleep. You'll probably feel a lot better."

"I can't sleep. I tried. Besides, you think I'm stupid? Why didn't you call the cops?"

"Why would I want to do that?"

He looks at me, not sure how to answer, as if I've asked him to solve one of the deep mysteries of the cosmos.

"I was hired to represent Dr. Crone. I did my job. Now that's over."

He nods as if this makes perfect sense. Then stops his head in mid motion

"Then why did you come here?"

"I was looking for Dr. Crone."

A dense look. What would Crone be doing at Tash's house?

"How did you get outside? Out there?" He points with the barrel of the shotgun toward the sliding door and the balcony.

"I was out there all the time."

"You mean when I came in?"

I nod. At this point, I'll try anything.

"I didn't hear you come in," I tell him.

"Yeah. Used some tools," he says.

"Why don't you put that down?" I gesture toward the shotgun.

He looks at it, looks at me; the expression tells me he's not sure how the two go together. Man on the edge.

"You're not going to shoot me, are you?"

"Oh, no," he says.

"I wouldn't do that."

"I didn't think so. You got scared tonight, didn't you? At the office."