“Why?”
“You’re planning a robbery.”
She threw back her head and out came a deep laugh, straight from the gut. A few people nearby turned to look at her.
Rick really liked her laugh. He had to remind himself that it was against the rules to ask her name.
A few minutes later, the administrator called for Juror 111 and duly dispatched an annoyed-looking white man to his assigned courtroom. Rick and the girl agreed that he must have come here to enjoy a day off work from a job he despised, hoping to sit and read his Sports Illustrated in peace.
For the rest of the morning, they kept up their game, concocting motivations and histories for each of the jurors as their numbers were called. She was funny. More surprisingly, Rick felt like he was funny, which didn’t happen every day. He was trying to figure out a way to ask if she wanted to get lunch when the administrator called for Juror 158.
“That’s me,” he admitted.
“Good luck delivering justice.”
“Juror 158!” barked the administrator.
“Good luck with your robbery,” Rick said as he walked away.
Man, did he wish he could have gotten her name.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Rick realized he was in deep shit. He and eight other prospective jurors had each been handed a black pen and a dozen-page questionnaire. There were hundreds of questions, but the very first one clued Rick in to the situation at hand.
“Have you ever personally met, or had any dealings with, Robert Nock?”
Damn. Was he about to be screened for the Jessica Silver case?
Question #2: “Have you ever personally met, or had any dealings with, Jessica Silver?”
Rick vaguely knew what Jessica Silver looked like. He and Gil didn’t have a TV, but he’d seen her face dozens of times on screens at Mohawk Bend or any of the other spots he went to read when he wanted to get out of the apartment. She looked like so many of the pretty white girls whose disappearances filled twenty-four-hour news cycles: blond, blue-eyed, ever smiling, the epitome of well-appointed innocence. She looked like she could be the daughter of any of the suburban parents who were the target audience for those broadcasts. They were the real victims of all those shows that existed to terrify comfortable, decent people into believing that their well-ordered lives were under constant threat of attack. Never mind that the likelihood of a white kid from a wealthy family and a good neighborhood suddenly getting murdered was minute. The news shows never mentioned that a kid like Jessica Silver had a higher chance of being struck by lightning. Instead of explaining the rarity of such events, the message was always, This could happen to you. They broadcast it every hour on the hour. This could happen to your children.
Had Rick ever met Bobby Nock or Jessica Silver? No. But he knew that Jessica Silver was white and rich and Bobby Nock was black and had no money and that the guy was going to be eaten alive.
This is when a reasonable person would lie on the form and go home. Answering a jury summons was one thing, but serving on the Bobby Nock trial would be something else. If Rick was selected, he’d be here for weeks. Half the summer, maybe. Was he really up for that? There were so many easy lies he could tell: Say he knew someone who’d been murdered, or that he hated cops so much that he couldn’t ever believe a word they said. Or he could just say something nuts so they’d think he was a crazy person.
He looked down at the sheets of questions. And then, with a sigh, he realized he couldn’t stop himself from answering them truthfully.
Shit.
NINETY MINUTES LATER, Rick was ushered into a courtroom. The judge told him to take a seat in the jury booth, alone, while the prosecutor and the defense attorney each looked over his answers to the questionnaire. Rick was surprised to see a young black guy seated at the defense table. Was that Bobby Nock?
For the first time, Rick got a good long look at him. In person he looked like a teenager. He was definitely younger than Rick, and it wasn’t just that the suit hanging from his shoulders was too big; the dude was scrawny. His eyes were cast down at his folded hands. This kid was supposed to be a murderer?
The judge was balding and white, with a voice so close to a whisper that Rick had to strain to hear as he explained that Rick was about to undergo something called voir dire.
“It’s Old French,” the judge said, “for ‘to say what’s true.’ ” The prosecutor and the defense attorney would take turns grilling Rick about the answers he’d put on his questionnaire.
The prosecutor was a heavy-set, jowly man named Ted Morningstar. He had the arrogant air of hard-won experience. When he asked Rick if he knew of any reason why he couldn’t be impartial in this case, Rick answered no. When he asked Rick if he’d developed any opinions about the defendant’s guilt up to this point, Rick answered honestly that he hadn’t.
But Rick wasn’t blind. There were four black people in the courtroom. They were the defendant, Bobby Nock; an assistant prosecutor, a woman who didn’t say a word as she perused questionnaires at the prosecution table; a uniformed police officer providing security; and Rick.
What did Rick know about the defendant? Only that they were both black men in Los Angeles. If the lawyers thought that meant that Rick couldn’t be fair, then that was on them. Rick stared at Bobby. The kid’s face was unreadable. It was like looking at an old TV, tuned to static.
Morningstar continued to dance around the question that Rick knew he really wanted to ask. The question that was formed by the legacies of all the trials that had taken place in this room, and in so many others just like it.
Can you, Rick Leonard, a black man, fail to consider that Bobby Nock, currently on trial for the murder of a white girl, is also a black man?
Can you, Rick Leonard, just let all that shit go?
More than anything else, Rick wished that the prosecutor would simply say it. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen.
Pamela Gibson, the defense attorney, was younger than the prosecutor, thin and angular. She cut across the courtroom floor like an athlete running a well-practiced play. If the prosecutor’s tone was one of We all know what’s really going on here, don’t we? then hers was more like Who’s to know what’s ever real?
After Morningstar was finished, it was the defense’s job to find a way to not quite ask Rick how that whole “being black” thing was going to impact his decision-making.
Will you, Rick Leonard, give Bobby Nock the benefit of the doubt because you and he share—well, you know?
In the forty-five minutes of questioning, Rick made eye contact only once with Bobby Nock. Gibson asked Rick to list the people he knew who’d been victims of violent crimes—it was a short list—and as he explained that his mother had gotten mugged once, when he was nine, Bobby Nock looked straight at him.
“It wasn’t really a violent crime, though,” Rick clarified. “The guy just grabbed her purse and ran.” And then he was staring into Bobby’s eyes, the scared eyes of this poor kid who everybody thought had killed a teenage girl. Was Bobby’s look, in that moment, a plea for help? Was it some kind of signal? Can you help me out here?
Rick didn’t have a clue, and he realized that he didn’t care. The only people who thought that he and Bobby Nock had anything in common were people who didn’t know either of them. Rick meant what he told the lawyers: He would be fair. Impartial. He would follow the evidence, wherever it led.