The Holdout, page 5
“I’ll let you know in a bit.”
Maya could feel the eyes of the others watching them. They must all have been dreading bloodshed. Instead they saw smiles.
“I’m sorry about the courthouse. Showing up like that.”
“It’s fine.” She realized that she meant it. “I’m sorry I just ran off.”
“It was important to me—really important—that you were here. I didn’t handle it well. I hadn’t meant to start an argument, but I did. You came anyway. So…thank you.”
He never would have apologized with such grace a decade ago. The effect was disorienting.
She had certainly changed over the past decade, but maybe he’d changed even more. The last thing she wanted now was another fight. She didn’t want to talk about Bobby Nock. She didn’t want to know what Rick’s mysterious “new evidence” might be. All she wanted was to enjoy being in the presence of one of the few people on earth who had shared the most intense experience of her life.
“So,” she said. “What do you do?”
He shook his head. “Did you ever think, ten years ago, that one day you’d be asking me ‘What do you do?’ Like a stranger?”
“If you’d asked me ten years ago whether this would be any of our lives, I’d have said you were crazy.”
“I can’t believe you’re a lawyer.”
She took a sip of wine. “Guilty as charged.”
He winced at the bad joke. She found herself hoping that he wouldn’t use this mention of the law to bring up the case. Don’t spoil this lovely moment.
“If there’s one thing you know,” he said obliquely, “it’s the inside of a courtroom.”
She chose to deflect with honesty. “I learned a lot from our trial. Some law. But mostly, how a courtroom really works. How twelve strangers work together to decide the fate of someone they’ve never even met.” She took a breath. By talking honestly about herself, she could avoid talking about anything more controversial. “I was an expert in something, for the first time in my life. I wanted to apply what I knew. After the trial, law school was a snap.”
“Maya Seale,” he said quietly. “For the defense. You’ve come a long way from planning a robbery.”
“Right! That first afternoon…I’d been trying to remember.”
“If you thought I forgot…”
Then, in a flash, they both looked anywhere but at each other.
“Your doctorate,” she said, staring at her shoes. “Did you finish?”
Her Google searches hadn’t turned up any mention of his completing a PhD.
He gestured around the room. “Do you think any of us were allowed to go back to real life?”
Maya didn’t think of herself as a lonely person or a misunderstood one. And yet being around him, here, made her feel as if she’d spent a good number of years being both. “Did you want to?”
He thought for a moment. “Probably not.”
She knew what he meant. There was no point in pretending that any of them had left that courthouse unaltered on some molecular level.
Suddenly she became aware of the cameras surrounding them.
She reminded herself that she was not inside their old hotel restaurant. She was inside the TV re-creation of it. She thought about the few—two? three?—glasses of wine she’d had already and hoped she hadn’t said anything stupid.
“This is pretty weird, isn’t it?” Rick said, nodding toward the nearest camera.
“Do you want to keep talking somewhere…not on camera?”
“Yes please.”
Her first thought was to go to the restaurant’s main area. But then she realized they’d still be within sight of all the others, not to mention stray employees of Murder Town. The hotel lobby would pose the same difficulties.
“My room?” She said it instinctively. It took an instant for her to realize how it must sound to him. “Not like that.”
“Not like what?”
She looked up at the perfectly crafted curiosity on his face and realized that she was being teased.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said.
He smiled. “I know, I know, calm down. I remember what you’re like when you’re flirting with someone, and ‘my room’ isn’t it.”
“At least you’ve remembered my virtue.”
“I was more thinking about your subtlety, but sure.”
“Are we going?”
He set down his glass. Then seemed to catalogue the remaining jurors left in the room. “I know we’re not actually doing anything scandalous, but if we leave together…”
Maya saw Trisha out of the corner of her eye. She was talking to Yasmine and Peter; none of them seemed to be paying Maya or Rick any attention.
Maya adopted an absurd English accent. “To avoid even the mere whiff of scandal, good sir, why don’t I head upstairs now, and you’ll follow in five?”
“M’lady,” he replied, mock-tipping his hat.
She set down her glass beside his. The two glasses made a light clink as they touched.
She approached each of the others one by one to say goodbye, feeling silly for working so hard to make sure everyone saw her leaving alone.
* * *
—
INSIDE HER ROOM, she was pleasantly surprised to find the minibar fully stocked. This had certainly never been the case during the sequester. She remembered opening up the minibar that first night, hoping to find at least a few bottles of something—anything. If only. They’d even taken out the candy.
Maya poured herself a vodka soda, then another for her guest, before she heard a knock.
She opened the door to see Rick standing there, backlit by the hallway lights.
“You didn’t forget my room number,” she said, leading him inside.
“Some things a man doesn’t forget.” He took the glass she extended toward him.
“Careful.”
“Of?”
“No flirting.”
He shook his head. “When I’m flirting with you, you’ll know it.”
She sat on the sofa. He took the seat beside her. She could feel the cushions sink with the weight of his body.
Instinctively, she glanced at the bed in the next room. She wished she’d thought to shut the bedroom door. Then she felt stupid for noticing, for even letting her thoughts drift in that direction.
Why was she being so dramatic? Nothing was actually happening.
He took a sip. “Vodka soda?”
She nodded.
“Funny thought,” he said. “We’ve never had a drink before.”
“Wow. That seems…nuts.”
“Right? Now I can’t stop thinking about all the normal, boring stuff we never did together.”
“We never took a walk.”
“We never made dinner.”
“I’ve never seen you drive a car.”
“I’ve never seen you purchase anything.”
“We’ve never been in a store together!”
“We never used money back then,” he said. “The most fundamental exchange of capitalism. ‘Here’s some cash in exchange for that thing.’ ”
She smiled. Of course he took this thought to the most theoretical place possible.
“What do you think that means?” she asked. “About the way we all knew each other? How specific it was. How…protected from the real world.”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
She laughed. She set her hand down on the sofa and let Rick place his hand on top of hers. It seemed perfectly natural—both the gesture and the feeling of his warm skin.
What was she doing?
He leaned forward. She felt their knees touch.
He set his glass down on the coffee table. A damp ring of condensation bled out beneath the glass onto a white piece of paper.
“Is that…?” Rick asked. His eyes had gone to the cover sheet she’d prepared on the evidence against Bobby Nock.
“Is that the DNA analysis?” Rick asked.
She squeezed his hand. There was nothing she wanted to think about less than the DNA analysis.
But Rick’s hand didn’t squeeze back.
He moved his glass aside and picked up the packet. It was full of tables, percentages, summarized conclusions presented in bold type.
“You brought this with you,” he said, “for the show.”
“Yes.”
“To debate me. After everything, you still honestly believe that Bobby Nock is innocent?”
She pulled back her hand. “Not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. What I’d always believed. Some of us have managed not to change our mind about this six times.”
“People should change their minds when presented with new information,” he said. “That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
“Is condescension a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Come on. You’re telling me that none of the facts that came out after the trial—all the stuff we hadn’t heard about Bobby—none of it changed your mind? And if not—well, does that say something about the case? Or does that say something about you?”
She wished she hadn’t had that last drink. She stood, crossing her arms in front of her. “You are obsessed.”
“Shouldn’t I be? Bobby Nock murdered Jessica Silver. And because of us, he went free.”
“You mean ‘because of me.’ ”
Rick stood too. “You think that I blame you for the verdict.”
“I think you wrote a whole book blaming me for the verdict.”
“I blame myself.”
“For losing an argument?”
His voice grew soft, almost tender. “I was the one who let you trick me into voting not guilty. I was the one who let you use me. In a moment of weakness…I was the one who caved.”
“What, I coaxed a vote out of you with my feminine wiles? Please. That’s insulting to us both. We had an argument. I won.”
“Yes you did. And when I gave up, I betrayed everything I believed in. That shame? I’ve got to live with that for the rest of my life. If it wasn’t for my failures, Bobby Nock would be in jail. So yeah, I am obsessed. I am obsessed with my responsibility to put him there.”
“How? There was a trial. He was acquitted. That’s it.”
“Maybe.”
“Double jeopardy. The state can’t try him again.”
“Yes, you’re a lawyer now. Criminal defense. But I’m the only one who’s obsessed?”
She didn’t know how to explain to him that she hadn’t become a lawyer to avenge Jessica Silver or exonerate Bobby Nock. She’d done it for herself. She truly didn’t care about the case anymore. She was so sure of it that she was seething.
“This amazing new evidence you’re supposed to have,” she said. “What is it?”
“I can’t talk about it right now.”
She scoffed. “You couldn’t talk about it before, you can’t talk about it now….”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “I have to wait for…” Why was he being so damned cryptic? “On the show. Tomorrow. I promise I will tell you everything then.”
“So let me get this straight….” She paced the carpeted floor as if it was a courtroom. “You’ve spent years obsessively researching this case, and while you’re not going to share your earth-shattering findings with me, you will share them with a bunch of TV cameras?”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Doesn’t sound that way to me. It sounds like deep down, you’re terrified that I’m right. That I was always right. That’s why you came. Not to drink with our old buddies downstairs and not to flirt with me. You came because you are petrified that you might be forced to admit that maybe, just maybe, you were wrong.”
She couldn’t believe his gall. “Right? Wrong? You think that we’re ever going to know what really happened to Jessica? We’re not. Some sort of grand, definitive answer—it doesn’t exist. We’re never going to know for sure.”
He shook his head. “I’m telling you, I know.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s say you know: Bobby Nock did kill Jessica Silver. And we let him off. For the first time in history, a black guy in L.A. wasn’t convicted for a crime he actually committed. The opposite happens every day. But this is the injustice you want to spend your life railing against? Really? This one?”
He stood motionless in front of her. “Fuck. You. Because I’m black, I’m supposed to be okay with a child-killer getting off—because that murdering asshole happens also to be black? No. No. There are rules in this world. I don’t mean the law—fuck the law. I mean rules about being a human being. Bobby Nock broke them. He did an unforgiveable thing. But you want him to go free because other black guys were unfairly convicted? You want to talk about injustice? You want to pretend you’re so racially enlightened because you invite me up to your room and consider fucking me but then, in the next breath, you tell me that because I’m black I have to let a killer go free? Fuck you.”
Maya had no idea what to say. She felt her fingers tremble and her eyes begin to water.
Rick saw what his words had done. He sighed. “I didn’t mean to…”
“Leave,” she said.
“Calm down.”
“I said fucking leave.”
The momentary guilt he appeared to feel had vanished. “Don’t do this again.”
“Do what again?”
“Bail the first second the conversation gets difficult.”
That was not how she would have described what happened between them ten years ago. But she had no interest in re-litigating what had gone on the last time they were in this room. All she wanted—had wanted—was to spend time with the Rick that she’d first met. The Rick who’d made her laugh on day one of the trial. Not this person in front of her who hated her—maybe really, truly hated her—in a way that she simply could not bear.
“Leave,” she said.
He looked furious. As if he’d been holding a well of anger just below the surface and now it was finally ready to erupt.
“No,” he said. “I’m not letting you do this again. I’m not letting you cut me out because you’re too chickenshit to have a conversation about what I look like, and what you look like, and what Bobby Nock and Jessica Silver look like, and that conversation isn’t polite.”
She moved to the door and opened it. “If you won’t leave, I will.”
“Stop,” he said.
She stared him straight in the eye. She tried to think of some last, pithy insult. But nothing came.
She walked into the bright hallway and slammed the door shut behind her.
The lobby was busy, so she kept her head down. She didn’t want anyone to see the tears that she was unable to hold at bay.
* * *
—
SHE WALKED QUICKLY down the sidewalk, not sure where she was headed. She just needed to get as far away from that terrible room as she could.
What had she been thinking, inviting him upstairs like that? She was as angry with herself as she had been with Rick. He was probably pacing around her hotel room right now, waiting for her to come back so he could tell her again how she’d ruined his life.
What tactical martyrdom! Oh woe is him. She didn’t think he even meant the worst of his accusations; he was only trying to dig the knife in deeper.
She was forced to stop at a traffic light. She brushed away her tears and felt the calming cool of the night air.
Downtown after dark. When she’d first arrived in L.A., no one she knew would ever have ventured here so late. This neighborhood had been a desolate collection of half-empty office towers bordered by the razor’s edge of Skid Row. The lawyers and accountants who worked in the glass skyscrapers fled as soon as night fell, drawn like moths toward the distant glow of the Valley.
Now, only blocks from the Omni Hotel, Maya found a crowd gathered outside the Silver Museum. This area had been a derelict stretch of concrete, a no-man’s-land between the on-ramps to two different freeways. Now, thanks to a $400 million donation by Lou Silver, it was home to the finest modern art museum on the West Coast. Free to the public, though you had to sign up for tickets months in advance. Every piece of artwork inside the three-story museum came from Lou Silver’s private collection. City Hall had given him the land for one dollar, and he’d built a monument to his own civic generosity.
Some sort of concert seemed to be happening on the lawns. A band was playing, something synthy and shimmering. The crowd swayed along. Maya continued down through the darkened areas beneath the nearby off-ramps. The highway construction had created so many of these non-places, as if there were so much land to go around that there was no need to be efficient about its use. The cityscape was dotted with stretches of unkempt grass and concrete without addresses, without owners, without function other than to be between something and something else. Walking in the dark beneath the ramp, Maya thought that sometimes Los Angeles felt like it was half liminal.
Jessica Silver had disappeared just blocks from here. There’d been some highly technical evidence about where her cellphone had gone, some difficult mathematics having to do with cell tower triangulation. But the gist was that she’d almost certainly been near here, the rough wilds of downtown, before her phone had been switched off. And she was never seen again.
Since then, a half dozen new skyscrapers had been erected. Now they gleamed into the night; the Korean Airlines building cut a blue arc the shape of a shark’s fin into the black sky. Twelve years ago, Lou Silver had been on his way to becoming the savior of Los Angeles, personally rebuilding the city’s long-desolate historic center, when the city had swallowed up his only child. Whatever had happened since—whatever had happened to Maya, to Rick, to the other jurors, to the Silvers, to this country that had doomed itself to bad decision after bad decision—Los Angeles was now thriving.
