Have You Seen Luis Velez?(58)

Raymond winced, because he knew Isabel hated that. And who wouldn’t, really? Nobody wants to be touched by a total stranger, and pregnancy is hardly an excuse. Or so it seemed to him, anyway.

“Oh, when is your due date?” the woman asked, her voice breathy and high.

Raymond knew Isabel was tired of answering that question, so he answered for her. “Five days ago,” he said.

“We’re going there,” Isabel said, pointing to a room number: 559.

“Yeah, so am I,” the woman said.

They all walked inside together.

Raymond had expected to see the courtroom filled to overflowing, like the hallways. Standing room only. He expected to have to stand in the corner, or sit on the floor. Or take a seat all the way in the back.

Instead, he saw the room populated almost entirely by people on the other side of the low gates. The nonpublic side. The bench side. In the seats provided for a public audience, Raymond saw only a blond-haired thirtysomething man and woman, sitting behind the defendant and her attorneys. Raymond tried to get a good look at her, the defendant. Some sense of her. But there wasn’t much to be gathered by the back of somebody’s dark hair.

Isabel led them up the aisle to the front row of seats, and they chose a bench right behind the prosecuting attorney—the district attorney, or an attorney from his office, Raymond guessed. He realized he’d better find out who was prosecuting this case, and keep those details straight. And make careful notes. Because a report was due at the end of the trial. The principal had hit him with that requirement last-minute.

They sat in silence, waiting for . . . well, Raymond wasn’t sure. Waiting for whatever would happen next to begin.

“Where is everybody?” he whispered to Isabel.

She turned her eyes to him, and in them Raymond saw utter confusion. As if he’d spoken to her in an ancient, dead language. The Latin he’d grown to despise, maybe.

“Everybody?”

“Yeah.”

“What everybody?”

“Well . . . I thought there would be other people here. You know. Wanting to see the trial.”

Isabel laughed one bitter little bark of a laugh. “Welcome to the world,” she said. “Luis is dead, and the world can live with that. It’s fine just going on without him. Nobody really cares what happened to Luis except us.”



Raymond made careful notes on his laptop during the almost two hours of jury selection. He made observations beyond what was actually said, noting his thoughts as well as the procedures themselves. He nervously eyed his battery readout, worrying he’d be using pen and paper before the end of the day. Unless he could find someplace to plug in over lunch.

Both lead attorneys asked questions of the prospective jurors. Raymond could feel what the questions were getting at.

Have you ever been mugged or otherwise robbed? Ever been a victim of violence? Are you a gun owner? Are you for or against gun control laws? Ever heard of Stand Your Ground laws, like the ones they have in Florida and several other states—though not this one? What are your thoughts about them?

Each lead attorney could dismiss potential jurors. For obvious cause, or without stating a reason. But if they did so without stating a reason, they had only a limited number of those wild cards.

“Peremptory challenges,” he typed. “Three for each side.”

But that much he could have learned by reading a book.

What Raymond observed on his own was this, though he might not have gathered it into these words: The idea, on the surface of the thing, was to weed out prejudice. But underneath the surface, Raymond saw that both attorneys were quite aware of prejudice, even in the jurors they let stay. Their whole job seemed to rely on prejudice. Prejudices in a courtroom felt to Raymond like a deck of cards to be strategically played in some kind of cynical game. Everyone had some prejudice, and that seemed to be part of the process. And the attorneys seemed to want that.

Just not against their client.

The tricky part appeared to be that people rarely stated their prejudices out loud. You had to read between their lines and hope you were reading them correctly.



“I want to start by making one thing very clear,” the attorney said. The one Raymond had been calling “their” attorney in his head. “I am not against carrying a licensed handgun for the purpose of self-protection.”

Raymond typed the words “Opening Statement: Prosecution” on his keyboard.

The man paced back and forth as he spoke, briefly turning his back on the jury, then facing them to drive a point home.

“And of course we all want to have the right to protect ourselves. And we should have that right. It’s a funny thing about our rights, though. There’s a fact about them that we don’t want to see, but we have to see it. We simply have to, if we’re expected to live together in any kind of peace. We’re all living right on top of each other in this city, and there will be times when our rights will be in conflict.

“What’s the first thing you ever learned about rights in school? I know the first thing I ever learned about them, and it was in kindergarten. My kindergarten teacher taught us that the right to swing our fist ends where the other guy’s nose begins. Remember that?

“So maybe you’re sitting here thinking, I have a right to fire my gun if I think I’m in danger. But does your neighbor have a right to fire his gun at you if he thinks you’re a danger to him? You might notice how the question looks very different from the two different ends of the firearm.