The Holdout, page 22
“The jury.”
She nodded.
“How are they?”
She realized that he didn’t know any of them. They were all just faces he’d stared at for hour after hour, day after day, month after month. He’d probably learned their names on television.
“What must you have thought of us?” she said.
He frowned. “I hoped you were trying to do your best.”
A sadness washed over her. Despite Bobby’s understandable bitterness, this was the most generous thing he could have said.
And it broke her heart.
* * *
—
THE MOMENT WAS interrupted by the rising sound of commotion outside the tent.
Opening the canvas flap, they found chaos. Across the campsite, people were running in every direction at once. Bobby led her into the fray, and together they saw what was freaking everybody out: five black SUVs, headlights blaring, racing toward the camp like an invading army.
Headlights sliced across the dark. As the SUVs got closer, people put their hands over their eyes, shielding themselves from the painful lights.
Ishmael appeared beside her. He held his shotgun at his waist.
Then the SUVs were upon them.
A few of the artists fled back to the tents. Two others had drawn guns.
The SUVs turned, forming a horizontal wall. It was only then that she saw the BuzzFeed News logos on their sides.
Ishmael raised his shotgun.
“No!” Maya yelled. “No guns!”
“Fuck that,” he said. The SUVs came to a stop. Dirt burst into the night sky.
“Please!” Maya placed her fingers gently on the barrel of his shotgun. “They’re not cops. They’re reporters. They’re not here for you.”
“They came here for you?”
Cameramen poured out of the SUVs.
Maya glanced at Bobby, who was frozen in the lights.
He directed his terrified, bitter glare at Maya.
And then he ran.
He was quickly enveloped in the panicked crowd.
She needed to chase after him—but she also needed the confrontation between the stoned-out-of-their-mind desert people and overzealous reporters to end peaceably. The camera lights beamed across the shotguns to Maya’s left and right. She shouted a plea for calm. No one was listening. Given the commotion, they wouldn’t be able to hear her even if they were.
There was only one option. She raised her hands and stepped into the no-man’s-land between the press and the guardians of East Jesus.
One step at a time, she felt her way across the dirt.
Five cameras trained on her.
“Everybody!” she screamed, turning back to the artists. “Let’s take a deep breath. No one wants to hurt anyone. No one needs to get hurt.”
She addressed Ishmael: “They’re reporters. They’re here for me.”
He didn’t seem convinced.
“Is Bobby Nock with you?” one of the reporters shouted.
“Bobby Nock is in there,” Maya yelled. “But if you barge in after him, my friends here will feel threatened, and they will be within their legal rights to protect themselves. Some of them are armed.”
She addressed the artists: “Friends. I really think it would be smart to lower your guns. These people aren’t here for you. If someone gets hurt, we’re all in a ton of trouble.”
Finally, Ishmael lowered his shotgun.
Seeing what he’d done, his compatriots followed suit.
“Motherfuckers can’t come in here,” Ishmael yelled.
She shouted to the reporters: “This camp is private property. You go in—they have a legal right, California state law being what it is, to shoot you.” This was total bullshit, but she figured the reporters wouldn’t know.
The reporter answered: “Can we talk to Bobby Nock?”
“You going in there is a nonstarter. I’ll go in, find Bobby, see if he’ll talk to you. I can deliver a message.”
No objection from the press. She addressed the camp: “That okay with you?”
“Only you come in,” Ishmael said.
“Only me.”
“Ask Bobby why he ran,” came the reporter’s voice.
“Okay,” Maya said. She refrained from pointing out that the answer would assuredly be, You.
“And,” the reporter said, “ask him if he killed Jessica Silver.”
“Asked and answered,” Maya said reflexively. “But I’ll do my best.”
“You don’t spook too easy,” Ishmael said as Maya walked past him toward the camp.
“It’s been a long week.”
* * *
—
ISHMAEL STAYED ON the front lines while she maneuvered through the commotion in the camp. Without too much searching, she was able to find her way to Bobby’s tent. She found him throwing all his worldly possessions—what few there were—into a duffel bag.
“You led them to me,” he said, as if she were just one in a very long line of people who’d sold him out.
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe I wasn’t the only person Lou told about where you were.”
Bobby shook his head. Why should he care about her rationalizations?
“You can’t keep running,” she said.
“The fuck else am I supposed to do?”
If the cops caught him, he’d go back to jail for breaking parole. That would mean another six months in Chino, maybe twelve, and then back to Miracle. Then the cops would find some other way to violate him back to prison. This would be the ebb and flow of the rest of his life: prison, a colony of sex offenders, prison again.
Bobby Nock was only thirty-four years old, she realized as she watched him stuff boxers into his bag. His face looked thin; his whole body looked wired to the point of breaking. His life was far from over. But no sliver of hope or even possibility of freedom remained. This was his lot; there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it.
Running was his only move now. This is what it had come to, for this man whose life she’d once believed she’d saved.
“I’m on your side.” Maya knew this was a pretty lame response. But it was true.
“I know.” He said it like he was speaking to a child.
He grabbed the alligator drawing from the wall. “You want to help me, Maya Seale?”
“Yes.”
He held up the alligator drawing. “Then you remember this.”
She looked at the alligator. The orange teeth, bared for a fight, were too big for the animal’s frame. In even this silly picture, there was a tinge of violence.
“I don’t have much of anything that’s mine anymore,” he said. “That reminds me that even though I’ve made mistakes—that even though I’ve done wrong things—I’m not the person they all think I am. So whatever happens, whatever they say about me next…you remember that I was, once, an actual human being.”
He folded the drawing and put it in his bag. Then he pushed past her and out of the tent.
She didn’t chase after him. She followed slowly, watching him run, the duffel bag bouncing on a shoulder that didn’t seem built for the weight.
He disappeared into the darkness.
CHAPTER 16
TRISHA
OCTOBER 4, 2009
Trisha Harold watched the news cameras that arrived, as if on cue, at 5:00 A.M. each morning. She felt, not for the first time, like an accidental performer, thrust onstage in a play she’d never agreed to star in. The roles had been cast. The audience had assembled. The reviewers were ready with pen and paper. She felt as if the curtain were about to rise on a bloody Jacobean drama of revenge and deceit—only she hadn’t learned her lines. She felt like she was in The Revenger’s Tragedy by way of Christopher Durang.
She turned away from her hotel room windows to the short bench at the foot of the bed, on which she’d set her clothes, neatly folded in advance of the coming day. Laying her clothes out the night before was a habit she’d picked up as a teenager—a way to start the new day off efficiently, given the inevitable late nights of theater rehearsals. She’d thought she wanted to be an actress then. Musicals were her first love. She’d taken more quickly to the melodies than to the choreography.
Between eighth and ninth grades, she’d spent the best summer of her life at a Michigan arts camp. She’d gotten to do Fantine, Roxie Hart, and a few side characters from Into the Woods, all in the span of two months. She still listened to the Broadway cast recordings of those shows. Most days at City Hall, where Trisha set up (and repaired, and re-repaired) IT systems, she could put her headphones on and imagine herself on a faraway stage. But she’d never felt like she was acting a part as much as she had during this trial.
Four wearying months had passed, and not once in that time had anyone mentioned that Trisha was one of only two black people on the jury. That she was the sole black woman. She’d tried making jokes about it a few times—to Jae, to Fran—but they’d ignored her, pretending not to hear.
Some days all she wanted was for one of the other jurors to just hand her the script they’d written for her in their heads: the angry black woman fighting the tyrannies of the LAPD.
Maya was the worst, Trisha thought as she dressed. Once Maya had set off on her insane mission to save Bobby Nock, she had expected support from Trisha that Trisha was not inclined to give. Maya seemed offended that Trisha could possibly have arrived at a different conclusion. She seemed offended precisely because Trisha wasn’t playing the role in which she’d been cast.
Maya kept saying that there was no way the prosecution would have gone forward with a murder trial without a body if the defendant had been white. Trisha kept saying that while that might be true, maybe the reason they’d gone forward was that Bobby had clearly and obviously done it.
The guy had had sex with his teenage student, for Christ’s sake. For Maya to pretend that racism was the only reason he was in trouble only demeaned the genuine problems inculcated by American racism. If everything was racist, Trisha had tried to say, then nothing was. Was Bobby Nock really the guy who most needed defending against the systematic injustices of law enforcement?
Over the past week of deliberations, Trisha had watched Maya win a few converts to her side. Lila had been easily swayed by a commanding voice. Carolina had been confused by the endless claims and counterclaims of the evidence. Cal had enjoyed playing detective; Maya had sent him off digging through the information they’d been given to find some evidence of who the real killer might have been.
Trisha steeled herself for another day of wearying debate.
She left her room and trotted into an open elevator. She found Rick Leonard inside.
“Hey,” Rick said.
“Hey.” Trisha stood beside him in silence as the elevator doors closed.
He’d spent most of their sequester with Maya. Trisha had watched them drift away from the others during meals. She’d seen them disappear behind hotel room doors to watch the smuggled movies. Trisha had been unsurprised when Fran had told her that Wayne had spied Rick sneaking out of Maya’s room early one morning. If they thought they were fooling anybody, well, they were not.
Rick had seemed genuinely shocked, on the first day of deliberations, to find himself on the opposite side of the case from Maya. Trisha had watched a cold front settle in between them. The two of them had hardly spoken to each other since.
“How are you today?” Rick asked, breaking the ice.
What could she say in the space of an elevator ride that would accurately answer this question? “Tired.”
He nodded empathetically. “Hopefully, we can go home soon.”
“How do you figure that’ll happen?”
“Maya will back down.”
Trisha had witnessed the way Rick had directed all his arguments in the jury room toward Maya. She’d noticed the way he kept looking at her. That boy was smitten. And he was acting the way lovesick boys always did when they were ignored: obsessed, angry, oblivious to everybody else.
Meanwhile, Maya was making progress. She’d won Jae to her side just yesterday. The more Rick focused on her, the more she focused on everyone else.
“No,” Trisha said as the elevator doors opened on the lobby. “She won’t. Not before you will.”
She exited in the direction of the restaurant, ready for coffee and another long day of not allowing herself to be bullied by people too deluded to see what was right in front of them.
* * *
—
THEY STARTED EACH day’s deliberations with a fresh vote. It was supposed to be Kathy’s job to lead them through it, but starting on day two Maya had snatched control of the process. Honestly, Kathy had seemed relieved. Lately, though, as everyone else wore each other down, Kathy had been gaining energy. She had reserves that Trisha hadn’t predicted. She was speaking out more. It was as if, for the first time in her life, Kathy found herself listened to. And she discovered that she enjoyed being heard.
That morning, Kathy seemed to take pride in passing out index cards and Sharpies and then leading them in the ritual reading of their twelve verdicts. They stood at nine to three in favor of conviction.
“Why don’t we go through the text messages again?” Kathy suggested.
Fran grimaced. Reading the texts out loud was clearly not her favorite jury-room activity. Trisha doubted that it was anyone’s.
The messages had become the paramount battleground in their arguments because they provided their only window into the defendant’s state of mind. The prosecutor had put a single charge before them: murder in the first degree. As defined by California Penal Code, section 187, which the judge had read aloud now many times, first-degree murder was “the unlawful killing of a human being, or fetus, with malice aforethought.” (The “fetus” bit came with paragraphs of clarification, but since it had no bearing on this case the judge had skipped over it.) The final phrase was the one that had provided Maya with a hole through which to puff the translucent smoke of her doubts. “Malice aforethought” took many paragraphs to explain, in the California Penal Code, but the gist was this: In order for them to vote “guilty,” they’d need to believe that Bobby had not only killed Jessica, but that he’d planned the murder ahead of time.
That’s how Maya had won Jae to her side. In his opinion, Bobby had probably murdered Jessica in a spur-of-the-moment kind of situation. Maybe she was going to tell someone what they’d been up to; maybe she didn’t want to keep doing it anymore; whatever. Maya had said that if Jae believed that, he had to vote “not guilty.” And in this way they realized that a jury’s votes were like Tolstoy’s families: All “guilty” votes had to be alike in reasoning. But all “not guilty” votes could be for different reasons and still reach the same result.
“The point you’re going to emphasize,” Rick said, “is that we can’t say for certain that Bobby and Jessica were having sex.”
“That’s right.” Maya had to stand and lean over to reach the stack of printed text messages that was among the evidence left for them on the table. “ ‘I’m not wearing any underwear.’ If they’d just had sex, Bobby would already know that.”
Fran sighed loudly. This whole thing was murder on her, wasn’t it?
“I think,” Cal said, “that dirty messages might not lend themselves to being read so literally.”
“What’s the point of this?” Fran interjected suddenly. “Whether they were involved like that, whether they weren’t…aren’t these messages bad enough?”
“To get him fired from his job?” Maya said. “Yes. To get him convicted for murder? I don’t think so.”
“But fear of losing his job,” Rick said, “was the motive. The texts are plenty of evidence for that.”
“You think Bobby would kill Jessica—this young woman whom he clearly cared about—just to hang on to his job?”
“ ‘Young woman’?” Trisha said. Her tone, she realized, was probably harsher than she’d intended.
“She was fifteen,” Maya said. “You’d prefer ‘girl’?”
“She was fifteen,” Trisha said. “I’d prefer ‘child.’ ”
“My daughter is seventeen,” Kathy said, “and there is no way she is old enough for this type of stuff.”
“I’m not saying it’s right,” Maya said. “I’m saying that whatever happened between Bobby and Jessica was maybe more complicated than we can know.”
Maya quickly glanced at Rick. That was all Trisha needed to figure out what was really going on here.
Maya was projecting, wasn’t she? She was living with her boyfriend, back in the real world. She was practically married. Her thing with Rick broke more rules than just those of the court. Trisha was pretty sure she knew where Maya’s insistent live-and-let-live morality was coming from.
“We’re all sinners?” Trisha said sarcastically. “Who but God can weigh our private sins?”
Maya flinched. As if she was being called out for a secret that Trisha could not possibly know. “I’m saying that it’s hard to take a look at someone and claim to know who they really are.”
Trisha had always been uncomfortable with anger, but honestly she could not take another minute of Maya’s sanctimonious bullshit.
“Don’t you think you know me?” Trisha said.
“Okay,” Kathy said. “Maybe we should take a break.”
“No,” Trisha said. “I can’t keep listening to this. To all these implications. Maya, do you want to just say what you really mean?”
“I…I don’t…What I mean?”
“You think I have to identify with Bobby Nock in all this. That our blackness is the most defining feature about us. It’s okay, Maya. It doesn’t make you a racist. This is the craziest thing about good, well-intentioned white people, isn’t it? What lengths you’ll go to not to come off as in any way racist. Heavens! So instead of saying, ‘Bobby is a man and Trisha is a woman, so they don’t have much in common,’ you’re saying, ‘Bobby is black and Trisha is black, so that must be what they have in common.’ What’s the salient feature? The defining part of an object?”
