"You never communicated in any fashion?"
"He turned the pages of his book," she said. "One a day. I watched him do it. If that's communication, counsel, then I'm guilty. He started the trial on page three hundred and thirteen of Moby-Dick and by the verdict he was on page five hundred and two. That's all I know about Juror Number Seven that I didn't learn in this courtroom. That, and he tips too much."
"And the pie."
"I didn't know about the pie," said Mina, "until about twenty minutes ago." And then, because the stones seemed to have gone somewhere, and because she found that she had something to say, and that she had been waiting thirty-two years to say it in a room where people would hear: "Counsel, I've sat in that chair down there for eleven years. I've taken down something like eleven million words in this building. Every one of them was somebody else's. He made a promise to Her Honor in September, on the record, I have it on my tape, and he kept it, every day, for thirty-one days, sitting eighteen inches away from me in a booth by the kitchen door. He didn't say one word. I've never been so bothered by anyone in my life."
The gallery laughed. Hettie laughed loudest. Judge Moy let them, for a moment, and then tapped her pencil once, and the room was quiet.
Judge Moy ruled from the bench. The court found, she said, that there was no evidence that Juror Number Seven had discussed the case with the reporter or with anyone else; that the juror had disclosed his prior contact with the reporter voluntarily and on the record at voir dire, which the court had reviewed that morning, with some interest; that the napkins were napkins; and that the pie, while perhaps not within the letter of the admonition, was in the court's view a slice of lemon meringue and not an attempt to influence the outcome of a civil action in the Superior Court of California. The motion was denied. The verdict would stand.
"And Mr. Agostini," said Judge Moy, taking off her half-glasses, "you are no longer a juror in this department. You are free to speak to any member of the court staff you wish." She glanced down at Bunny's table, and then, very briefly, at the witness box, and something happened at the corner of her mouth. "I'd suggest you start soon. We're adjourned."
Mrs. Lucchesi caught Mina in the aisle and kissed her on both cheeks, hard, and said something rapid in Italian that Sy Feinberg declined to translate. When Mina got loose and looked for Remy, the second row was empty.
She found him at a quarter to one in the morning, at the turntable at Powell and Market.
She had known where he would be. She had worked it out on Bunny's floor with a Muni schedule: the last Powell and Hyde car of the night left the turntable at twelve-fifty, and on Thursdays, his week, the gripman was Agostini. Market Street was nearly empty, wet and shining, the fog down low so that the neon of the Emporium glowed through it in soft smears of red and green. The man with the saxophone was gone. There was nobody in the line at all.
The car rolled down onto the turntable, empty, and stopped, and he stepped off it, pulling off his gloves, and saw her.