The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (21 page)

“Oh, Colin,” Hannah said. “Have a sense of humor.”

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.

With her day-old
arrival and our new condom-free commitment, Hannah would never put up with an overnight visit to Rachel. But I’d resolved to see her. I opened the steaming door.

“I’ll be back in a tick, I’m getting some fags down in the lobby.”

“Say ‘cigarettes,’ Colin. If you don’t speak proper English no one’s ever going to respect you.”

“Cigarettes.”

I planned on ringing Phillip from the lobby phone to recruit him in my lie. This was getting to be as natural as shaving. I saw Kerri wearing her black vinyl cap. She was on the couch, eyes glued to the front door.

I pulled the brim of her cap so she’d look up. “Kerri, is Phillip up in the room? I have to ring him.”

“Phillip? He didn’t come home last night. They lost me yesterday at the Palladium.”

“What? Who’s they?”

“He phoned me this morning from an after-hours club. A pathetic excuse about Angus and him wandering around with too much vodka. He’s on his sorry way back now. How could he lose
me? Is that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Is he rooting around on me again?”

I answered her with my silence. Fucking clueless. I had always pitied her, but it wasn’t my place to give her the scoop on Phillip, an only slightly more discreet sex maniac than bloody Mick-O. Why did she put up with his bullshit? It was obvious that he didn’t give a toss. Kerri once told me that she grew up in Coober Pedy, the mining town in South Australia where to beat the heat everyone lives in deserted opal shafts. Now it’s a tourist trap; there’s a new hotel constructed around the abandoned shafts. Even before the tourist dollars though, residents learned how to compromise: blistering sun, but a steady wage. Perhaps bubblehead Kerri was a legend back home in the Outback, a brave girl who cut loose to Melbourne, and now the States. Maybe Phillip was another Coober Pedy–style compromise for her.

“I’m going to give him a little slack for the tour. But, Colin, you tell me if anyone gets serious. I want to be the one to marry him. I put in my time all these years. I’ve earned the payoff. Will you promise to tell me?”

I nodded and coughed. I couldn’t believe she still wanted him. “What did you think of our final gig?” I asked, to change subjects. Shit. I had to hurry this along. Hannah would be suspicious.

“It wasn’t a gig, Colin—it was a stadium concert. You were on display to the major music journos and execs in the States, but you were prancing on stage like a kid to a record. I’m your friend, so I’m going to tell you this: during the concert, I overheard Marty, one of the A&R reps, complaining to the head of EMI about you as unnecessary overhead. And your good friend Angus was saying
‘I told him not to strut across stage like an idiot, but he wouldn’t listen.’ Angus said how great it was that Phillip held court center stage.”

If this wasn’t spongecake Kerri I was talking to, I would have been devastated. She had it wrong. “Angus and Phillip
want
me to strut,” I explained.

“Rubbish. Fucking Angus’s setting you up. Marty’s his partner in crime. Truth is, since Buffalo, Angus’s been hinting to Phillip that he thinks he’d be better off solo. Phillip’s been knocking the idea back, but his ego might not hold out. If I were a fan of Angus, I wouldn’t be telling you this. Phillip needs to be punished, too. He thinks he’s such hot shit now. I drove him out to the Bendigo gig when his car was unroadworthy and in the panelbeater. Every week I do his bloody laundry. If he can’t keep his peter in his pants, he better know where he came from. Be aware, Colin. You’re the nicest guy in the band. You don’t deserve the lying shit I get. But please, don’t dob me in as the source.”

“Of course not,” I said, trying not to let my voice crack.

“Marty had Phillip try out for a soap opera role as an Aussie detective. He thinks he can launch his career with tie-in ballads—like his friend did for Rick Springfield years back on
General Hospital
.”

What was left of my own ego toppled onto the floor. Between my visit from Hannah the day before I was supposed to see Rachel, and now the news that my risky claim to fame had merely been a launching pad for Phillip’s pedestrian career, a wondrous week was tinged blue, like rancid fruit. Which fat-arsed cunt was Marty, and why did he have it in for me? The A&R reps were difficult to
distinguish by either name or importance, like Greenland and Iceland.

“Why don’t you go back up?” I asked with tremendously false composure. “Take a bath before Phillip comes back, so you can be calm and have the upper hand.”

“I’ll sharpen my knife. When he walks through that door, I’m going to take him to the forest and chop his head off.”

“Before you do that, can you get my new shirt back from him? I don’t want it to be bloodied.”

“Talk to you later, Colin. Watch your back.”

I took her seat on the couch, waiting for Phillip. What could I say to Hannah? A bellboy asked me if I wanted anything from the bar. I gave him a dollar to go away. “Thanks for asking,” I said.

Only two minutes had gone by when I saw Phillip walk into the lobby without Angus.

“Hey, mate,” he said, when he’d reached my square of lobby carpet. His eyes were red, and his pupils giant black circles. “You missed a real scene last night.”

“They’ll be a real scene for you, upstairs. I rang for the hearse and arranged the plot. Kerri’s mentioned something about a knife and the forest and your head.”

“I wish she’d get off my back. I didn’t invite her to America.”