The assistant DA’s hunky junior associate was going to play the first cassette tape for us, one of three conversations recorded by the FBI after Mrs. De Meglio’s arrest. He handed out fourteen headsets to the jurors and two remaining alternates. I hadn’t legally made up my mind yet, but you’d have to be a dolt to think Grandma Vigilante hadn’t shot her grandson’s dealer dead. Her fingerprints covered the gun. As far as I was concerned, the only thing that could get her off at this point was if it turned out that there had been a police violation, like Miranda rights not being read. But in that case, how the hell would the case have gotten past the indictment stage? No, granny was guilty.
A year or so back, I’d bought a week-old copy of The New York Times at an Australian newsstand. The dead drug dealer was fourteen years old, from a broken home.
While the prosecution had my sympathy, they were now losing it a bit by “testing” the audio levels for the upcoming confession tape with a convenient snippet of Pavarotti; was that a coincidence, considering Grandma Maria was Italian? I imagined that the jury pro in the DA’s office had instructed them to get it subliminally in our minds that the murderer is Italian, like ice cubes that read sex in a liquor ad. Hunky Assistant then took the even more obvious opportunity to connect with his jurors, as his senior partner studied her notes for the next round of questioning. One by one he asked us if we could hear okay, a time to repeat our names and make legal eye contact. “Mr. Kaluzny can you hear?” Fred nodded. “Mr. De Jesus can you hear?” Louis nodded. “Rachel, oh pardon me, Ms. Ganelli, can you hear okay?”
Now that was going to keep me in his camp, saying my first name like that. Was he thinking I was adorable, too? This was like Bonfire of the Vanities, when the schmucky Bronx assistant district attorney fumbles every time he sees a classy fox of a juror from upscale Riverdale. Except this lawyer was a catch; he was polite and trés cute. And while I wasn’t social register or soap opera–siren material, he could think I was spunky and attractive, crazier things had happened, it was possible. And he worked in the same office as John F. Kennedy Jr., how pop-culture cool was that? What a trip it would be to grab a beer with JFK Jr. when Legal Boy and I finished up on the trial. We could double date with Darryl Hannah, or whoever the Prince of Camelot was screwing at the moment.
“Are you paying attention, Ms. Ganelli?” Judge Berliner asked. He looked asinine with remote headphones dangling around his neck.
“Of course, Your Honor,” I said. Did I say the words Your Honor in a courtroom? Do we learn etiquette for life’s oddest moments from our parents, or TV? I tried to make eye contact with Assistant Hunk. “Yes, I can hear it perfectly.”
“Mr. Cohen,” the judge said, “I don’t think you need to go down the line. Is there anyone on the jury who cannot not hear the tape clearly?” No one raised their hand. “Proceed with the case then, Mr. Cohen.”
The senior ADA asked for extra minutes to move the evidence from her cart onto the prosecution table in an orderly fashion. Young Mr. Cohen still looked a bit shaken up by the judge’s admonition, and busied himself with a notepad, checking off each confession tape as it went on the table. Cute indeed. And Jewish. Mom’s side of the family would love him. My niece met her mensch while she was on the De Meglio murder trial.
The jurors and the courtroom took the opportunity to chat, not a legal worry if we kept it to meaningless banter, like asking around for a hard candy to soothe a sore throat. “I think the junior district attorney likes you,” Louis whispered. He sat directly to my left.
“Oh please, stop,” I said. “He made a mistake. You think so?”
“Unless he said your name in a calculated move to get you to convict, like their playing opera music on the tape levels.”
“Can you believe that?”
“What do they think, we’re idiots? By the way, I’ll take him if you don’t want him.” Louis licked his lips.
“You’re gay?” I formed a mock-shock letter O with my mouth.
“Half.”
“Bi and Catholic?”
“The Pope would have a heart attack, but I still believe in God.”
A little sniff of laughter came out of my nose. “The halfies—the Italian Jew and the bisexual bartender jurors from hell,” I said. “Outsmarting all of them.”
“They might want us to have this conversation—then they’re smarter than the two of us.”
“Okay. Jurors we are going to resume. Mr. De Jesus and Ms. Ganelli, I trust you weren’t discussing the trial.”
Eagle-eye Berliner.
“No, Judge, I was admiring her unusual brooch.” Louis’s reply struck the entire courtroom as a particularly odd response, and there was a collective snicker. Berliner let out an unguarded grin, which made him seem more human.
“Your Honor, I’m afraid we are still waiting for the one last essential tape from the DA’s office,” said Ms. Gorsham after we quieted down. “Can we take a short break?”
“Please come forward to the bench to discuss this matter.” The lawyers approached the judge.
“I won’t object,” I heard the schlumpy defense attorney agree.
“Very well, we’ll take a half hour break.” He addressed the full courtroom. “I want to remind the lawyers, and the jury for that matter, the more breaks, the longer the trial.” We were escorted back to the jury room.
“Is it Wednesday?” I asked, grabbing my favorite seat.
“Thursday,” Louis said, reaching for the two-pound bag of M&M’s Bailiff Kevin had brought us. “Hey, did you hear that Berliner is sixty-four?”
“Please,” I rolled my eyes. “Try again. He’s about forty-five.”
“Nope, sixty-four. Kevin told me when I was out by the water fountain.”
“The legal system is probably what keeps him young. If he left his dictatorship, he’d probably shrink up like the heroine in Lost Horizon.”
“It’s hot in here,” Mrs. Ricasio protested. She went over and opened the window, getting soot on her yellow sundress. “Nobody gives a damn in here except me.”
Leslie, the Rockette who had replaced the pregnant woman in seat one, was now our foreperson. She leaned over to me and Louis. “Do you think Mrs. Ricasio is okay? Should I ask the judge to send us back to the hotel?”
“Mr. Nessenbaum doesn’t look so well either,” I said. Mr. Nessenbaum’s face was flushed, and he was resting his head on a copy of the Times with trial references cut out of it.
“I need a shower,” Louis said. “That fan’s a joke.”
“The woman’s seventy-five,” Mrs. Ricasio said. “How come we only have the choice of murder in the first degree?”
“We’re not supposed to be discussing the trial yet,” Raj, the cute Nietzsche reader reminded us. He’d had a conjugal visit the previous evening from his pretty Columbia journalism school grad-student wife, at which time I reluctantly gave up on him as a distraction from my boredom and woe.
Fred Kaluzny sipped his canned iced tea. “Isn’t it cruel,” Fred asked, to no one in particular, “how cats and dogs only live such short lives and then turtles get to live to a hundred and forty? Rats live for three years but they kind of deserve it.”
Our foreperson Rockette knocked on the inside of the door, and Kevin answered with his usual cheery whine: “Is this a demanding jury or what?”
“Our exhausted crew needs to go home,” Leslie said.
“You have to write out your request,” Kevin said.
Leslie asked for a reprieve in a tight one-room-schoolhouse handwriting that lacked modern curves and flourishes; she was a synchronized kicker in more ways than one. At least my writing worried people a little.
A few minutes later the judge summoned us in and officially called it a day. We were escorted to Forlini’s on Baxter Street, one of the less touristy standby Little Italy restaurants I knew from childhood; Dad had his old reliables in Manhattan if our family was too tired to trek to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx for the real thing. The sixteen of us law-abiding jurors were given three huge platters of cold antipasto to share, a choice between pasta and a side salad, broiled sole, or veal parmigiana. Then, coffee and spumoni. After the lousy deli sandwiches and overcooked vegetables we’d stuffed down that week from the court cafeteria, we were most enthused. When everyone was through with the restrooms, for the third day in a row, we were escorted via minibus back to our motel rooms.