Hit List

question? Is there anybody here thinks he didn’t do it?”
    No one else answered, so Keller said, “Did the man ever receive stolen property? I would say yes. Did he ever sell stolen property? Yes again. Did he sell it to a cop? Did he sell this particular stolen article to this particular cop? I could believe that and still not believe the state proved its case.”
    “Beyond a reasonable doubt,” someone murmured.
    “But I don’t know that I do believe it,” he went on. “It comes down to the same question all the time. Do we believe Mapes?”
    “Even if Mapes stretched the truth some—“
    “If Mapes isn’t telling the truth, there’s no case. And if Mapes is lying, there isn’t even a crime.”
    “He’s a police officer,” someone said, “and the ones I’ve known have been pretty decent and honest, but there’s something about him that seems a little shifty.”
    “Now that’s funny,” someone else said, “because my experience is cops lie all the time, but he impresses me as a real straightforward young man.”
    “That property clerk was lying.”
    “Yeah, I’m with you on that one.”
    “Took home a camcorder to tape his kid’s party. That don’t mean the evidence got tainted about the VCR.”
    “And it doesn’t mean Mapes lied.”
    “Doesn’t mean he didn’t, either.”
    At a quarter to five Morgan Freeman polled them again, informally this time, going around the room. By the time it got to Keller there were six voting to convict and three voting to acquit. Keller figured it didn’t matter, they weren’t going home that night no matter how he voted, but he had to say something. “Guilty,” he said.
    “Not guilty,” said the woman to his left.
    So it evened out. Last time they’d done this, Keller had been for acquittal, the woman to his left for conviction. Now Morgan Freeman voted to convict, and they were eight to four, with fifteen minutes left to work it out.
    “Okay,” the foreman said. “I don’t say we’re deadlocked, not by any means. It’s just taking us a little while to sort things out. It’s whether or not a man goes to prison, and we don’t need to rush ourselves. Looks like we’re going to spend the night in a hotel.”
    There was some grumbling, but Keller thought it seemed pretty good-natured. These people were New Yorkers, after all. You had to expect a certain amount of grumbling.

Twenty-three
----
    The hotel was a Days Inn in Queens, not far from JFK. It looked familiar to Keller, and he realized that he’d met a client in the lounge a couple of years ago. The man had flown up from Atlanta to hand Keller a couple of photographs and an address. Then he’d caught his flight to Europe, an ironclad alibi if there ever was one, while Keller flew down to Atlanta and back again. The client was at a business meeting in Brussels when he got word that his wife had been shot dead by a burglar. He cut his trip short and went home, and four months later he married his secretary.
    But that hotel had been a Ramada, hadn’t it? Keller was positive of it, he remembered the client talking about the virtues of the Ramada chain. So it couldn’t be the same hotel, and yet the layout was somehow familiar to Keller.
    There was nothing familiar about the room they gave him, but he hadn’t been in any of the Ramada’s sleeping rooms, just the lounge and the lobby. He took a quick shower, then called downstairs and ordered dinner from room service, then sat in front of the television set until the guy showed up with his food. Keller signed the bill, and added a couple of dollars in cash for the waiter, who seemed surprised. Keller figured he didn’t get many tips from sequestered jurors.
    “I was wondering,” he said. “Was this place always a Days Inn?”
    “If you go back far enough,” the fellow said, “it was a swamp.”
    “How about if you go back two years?”
    “It was a Ramada.” He flashed a grin. “But that was before my time, so that’s only hearsay evidence.”
    Keller, eating his dinner, wondered how they could do that, take a hotel out of one chain and add it to another. It struck him as awfully arbitrary.
    He was trying to decide whether he wanted another cup of coffee when there was a knock on his door. He checked the peephole, then opened the door. Gloria darted inside and closed the door behind her, reaching to lock it.
    “It felt funny,” she said, “eating alone. And instead of Vietnamese food I had a hamburger and fries and a