Then Judge Moy asked the question she always asked last, the one Mina had typed so many times that her fingers had a single compressed stroke for it.
THE COURT: Mr. Agostini, do you know, or have you ever had any contact with, anyone here in the courtroom today? The parties, the attorneys, any of the witnesses whose names you heard read, or any member of the court staff?
There was a pause. It was not a long pause. It was perhaps two seconds. In a courtroom, two seconds is long enough to hear the radiator ticking and a pigeon walking on the windowsill outside, and Mina heard both. Her fingers rested on the keys, waiting.
PROSPECTIVE JUROR: Yes, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Who?
PROSPECTIVE JUROR: The court reporter.
Every head in Department Fourteen, for possibly the first time in its seventy-three-year history, turned and looked at the court reporter.
Mina kept typing. It was the only thing to do. Her face was hot to the roots of her hair, and the lamp on her table seemed to have become a spotlight, and she could feel Sy Feinberg's basset eyes and Sterling Pratt's cool silver ones and the curious, delighted gaze of the retired schoolteacher in the cardigan, who had put down her crossword. But her fingers kept going, steady as a heartbeat, taking down the record of her own embarrassment at two hundred and forty words a minute.
THE COURT: In what way, Mr. Agostini?
PROSPECTIVE JUROR: We had lunch. Today. Not together. I mean we were at the same table. At Tillie's, on Larkin. I was sitting in her booth, it turns out, and there was nowhere else to sit, so she sat. I didn't know who she was. She didn't know who I was. We didn't talk about anything to do with this. We talked about Moby-Dick, mostly. And fog. And cable cars. I talked about cable cars. She mostly told me I talked too much.
(Laughter.)
THE COURT: Madam Reporter, is that accurate?