Mina's chair was directly below the bench and to the left, at a small walnut table with a microphone she never used and a lamp she always did. From there she could see everyone: the witness box to her right, the counsel tables in front of her, the twelve chairs of the jury box along the wall to her left, the rows of public benches beyond the rail where the panel would sit. She liked the position. It was the place in the room from which everything could be seen and nothing was looked at. People in a courtroom watched the judge, or the witness, or the lawyers, or the clock. Nobody ever watched the court reporter.
She set up the machine on its tripod with hands that were slightly less steady than usual. The stenograph was a black Stenograph Data Writer, the newest one, which recorded onto a cassette as well as onto the paper tape that folded itself into the tray beneath like a flag being put away after a funeral. Twenty-two keys, no letters on them, pressed in chords like a piano, two hundred and twenty-five words a minute, which was what the State of California required before it would let you swear that what you had written was true. Mina could do two hundred and sixty on a good day. Her fingers did not stammer. They had never stammered once.
At one-twenty-nine she gave the blue summons card to Thurston, the bailiff, a vast and patient man who had been a lineman for the Rams for two seasons in the 1960s and still moved like he expected someone to hit him from the side.
"A juror dropped this at lunch," she said.
Thurston looked at the name. "He'll be in the panel. I'll give it to him." He looked at her. "You okay, Mina? You're kind of pink."
"It's hot."
"It's always hot." He tucked the card in his breast pocket. "Fourteen's the hottest room in the building. They should put the climate in the jury instructions."
At one-thirty-five, the panel came in.
There were forty of them, called up from the big assembly room on the second floor where prospective jurors sat for days in rows of folding chairs reading Danielle Steel and waiting to hear their numbers. A retired schoolteacher with a cardigan and a crossword. A young man in a Members Only jacket. A tired nurse still in white shoes. A man in a tie that had a small tasteful pattern of ducks.
Remy Agostini came in near the end, still carrying Moby-Dick under his arm, and stopped dead in the center aisle like a man who has walked into a glass door.
He looked at her. She looked at her machine. Thurston leaned over and murmured something to him and handed him the blue card, and Remy took it and looked at it, and then looked at her again with an expression of such pure, comprehensive dismay that she had to press her lips together hard to keep from doing something unprofessional with her face.
"Be seated, please," Thurston said, to everyone, and Remy sat down in the third row, and opened his book to page three hundred and twelve, and did not read it.