P.J. Shields had taken the day off from work at the store to do a more important job than selling shoes. That much he remembered. He had forgotten he was on jury duty until the call from the defense attorney in the Blue Monday case opened his community affairs channel.

The man representing the State of Michigan was a former Negro named Ed Macky, an assistant Wayne County prosecutor, hand-picked by the attorney general himself. He had straight brown hair, piercing blue eyes and a strong Caucasian chin. He appeared next to Leah Flores in the split T-window of P.J.’s wristband computer.

P.J. thought all of them were sick; the man acting for Fleetwood, the woman acting for Monday and all of the people in the criminal justice system like them working for or against Estelle Gidarb. Now that was one misguided lady. She reminded him of Momma Cara, his maternal grandmother, in her overall philosophy of morality, except that Dr. Gidarb’s solution to the problem ignored were the real problem lay—in immoral women.

In one year, five enlightened states showed the country the right way to go, with a strong pro-life policy that did what its detractors said it could not do. Death warrants speedily carried out on only sixteen women who conceived children out of wedlock and murdered them before they were born, reduced the country’s murder rate of innocent children in the womb by two thirds. All such women had loose morals in general. They deliberately dressed and adorned themselves to be sexually provocative, which, of course, led some men to commit violence upon them. Many had a look and a smell about them that was unmistakable. They needed to be disposed of in a manner as close to public execution as good-taste would allow.

Men needed only to have Momma Cara’s lesson beaten into them at an early age, the way she had done for him, God rest her soul. No woman alive was ever going to make him have sex with her unless they were married in church the way God intended. Maybe his grandmother’s beatings had something to do with his occasional memory lapses, but that was a small price to pay for the strong moral character she had given him. The woman was a saint.

His mother had been one of those sluts who conceived children out of wedlock and murdered them in the womb. Had the courts not intervened in his behalf when Momma Cara discovered her daughter’s pregnancy and her plans for termination, he would have been terminated. His mother had never wanted him. His grandmother had. She believed, as he did, that all innocent life was sacred.

The courts had been right in awarding her custody of him as a baby in his mother’s womb, and wrong in returning him to his mother when he was so close to puberty. He had been old enough then to know what she was and how she—his own mother—had tried to seduce him.

The people involved on both sides of this Monday thing were wasting their time and his. P.J. resented having to participate in their clearly political game when the outcome was of no serious consequence to the community one way or another. Until the government took preemptive steps to remove the true source of unwholesome sexual temptation, the way he was doing in his own small way, the plague of immorality in the real America would continue. Anyone ought to have been able to see that.

Still, a good citizen had to vote, which meant he had to serve as a juror. That was another thing Momma Cara had taught him before she went to heaven and her slut of a daughter took him to live with her. Momma Cara had served on juries many times and had played an active role in putting a cigarette smuggler and another controlled substance dealer on Michigan’s lethal injection gurney. No one could call her a racist, because one of the men she voted to put to death was white.

P.J. had voted three drug pushers onto the gurney, including one low-life who sold guns and liquor to unlicensed citizens, resulting in the death of an innocent, rosy-cheeked little girl and her younger brother. All of those characters had been black, but there simply didn’t seem to be many whites who committed those kinds of crimes anymore. The whites were getting better and the toasties were getting worse. It was a simple fact of life. The Democrats blamed the social polices of the Americans and their Republican predecessors. Which was silly, because the Americans believed in being socially color blind. And, like the Republicans always say, you can’t call a man a racist for telling the truth about race and crime. Crime was caused by criminals. Most criminals were black. End of story.

Anyhow, P.J. would be happy to go along with whatever the majority wanted to do in this case, although the officers of the court had chosen a singularly bad time to interview him.

The raven-haired young woman he was strangling with his brown leather belt was wearing the red shoes she’d purchased at the Magic Slipper and the same whorish red lipstick and French perfume. The black dress she’d worn was laying neatly folded on the floor near her head. True, he had asked her to meet him in this abandoned house dressed this way. But what kind of woman would do it? She was nothing but a slut, and the elaborate steps she had to go though to arrive undetected at her place of execution was the final proof.

She deserved what she was getting. The community deserved to be rid of her. P.J. Shields deserved a medal for doing the job the authorities couldn’t. One day, he was sure it would happen, as long as he was correct in his identifications of the guilty and discrete about being seen by people in the immediate area. If the authorities had wanted him on the gurney, he would have been there years ago.

The young woman was lying face down on a smelly, tattered, badly soiled mattress, with one of P.J.’s knees pressing his full weight against her lower spine. A stiff left arm pressed the open palm of his left hand between her shoulder blades. The right hand, wrapped twice around with the tapered end of the belt, strained to pull the looped end tighter around her neck.

There had hardly been a struggle, the stupid bitch thinking it was a game all the way to the end. Then the court clerk calls, using that name he hated, and tells him to stand by for questioning right at the point of tension release. Now here he was, in the ridiculous position of taking the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth with his limp business hanging down out of his pants. The whole day had been a bust. He would have done as well to stay home and watch flashbacks of Jack The Ripper.

When he said his, "I do," he took the opportunity to inform whoever was listening that Piedmont was not the name he went by.

"Is that why you didn’t answer your orientation call?" asked Macky with an accusatory scowl.

P.J. hesitated. "No. I must have been on the phone."

Macky shook his head. "When you’re assigned to a jury pool, you’re supposed to keep your public announcement channel open. That’s the law. You’ve been through this three time. You should know that."

"Things change," said P.J. in his disarming, soft-spoken way. "The first time I served on jury duty I had to go to downtown Detroit and sit in a courthouse for eight hours."

He relaxed his grip on the belt and tucked his exposed organ back into his pants. It didn’t bother him that his answer was moronic. The reasoning skills of all jurors were presumed to be adequate to the task of rendering a fair and impartial judgment regardless of how much or how little of it they demonstrated. As long as the attorneys for both sides were satisfied that they were not predisposed to vote against them and the judge didn’t object, they were as good as in.

The face of a kindly-looking old man with pale skin, pale blue eyes, a thick gray mustache, and wavy brown hair with streaks of gray, displaced the split window view of Leah and Macky. He had deep wrinkles in his face and neck. Enough of his upper body was shown for P.J. to see that he was wearing a black robe and tie.

"Mr. Shields. I’m Judge Kakowski."

P.J. recognized the nasal voice as the one that administered the oath.

"You’re in my court, whether it looks like one in your immediate surroundings or not. Apparently you missed the orientation and a few other preliminaries. I don’t know how that happened, but I think we can take care of those things forthwith."

"Thank you, your honor."

"Have you met the prosecutor, Mr. Macky, and the defense attorney, Ms. Flores?"

He hadn’t, but he knew who the prosecutor must have been when he saw the face of that fat Mexican slut who everybody knew was defending Blue Monday. He assumed that they and the defendant must have been introduced to his jury panel as a whole, before the seating of the first juror. That’s the way they did it the last time.

The judge was a slick old bastard. If P.J. didn’t say yes, he knew he’d be in trouble.

"Yes your honor," said P.J.

"The defendant?"

"Yes sir."

P.J. picked up his phony gun, a convincing replica of a .32 automatic, and stuffed it into the deep pocket of his slacks as he rose and moved away from the nude body. The media loved nude bodies of strangled women. Even if they couldn’t show it, they could say it, which had the effect of putting the picture they wanted into the minds of the public. The public loved nude bodies of strangled women. The ones he’d left with their clothes on, didn’t get nearly as much attention or generate as much casual conversation.

He walked to the side door of the house which faced the doorless, windowless side of another abandoned house, extracted a floppy, wide-brimmed hat from his other deep pocket and pulled it down to his ears. To his right, across the street, was an empty lot overgrown with weeds. To his left was a broken-down fence leading to a backyard overgrown with weeds. As always, he had picked a good spot for his work. He could have left by either rout without being seen and the body might not be discovered for years if he didn’t call T-win 5, Spotlight News, to tell them where it was...

As the interview proceeded, Andrea wondered how her lawyer friend, the judge or the prosecutor, could discern anything worthwhile from the questions they put to the thin blond man. They had only a bad ELF of him to look at while he spoke, which was worse than nothing.

Seeing a face associated with a voice when it was, in fact, disassociated from the speaker, added a layer of deception to any verbal exchange. Like an actor speaking and reacting to the lines written by someone else, the ELF could express only those body language instructions written into the program. Therefore, all of the kinesthetic tells that psychologists, con-men and presumably cops and lawyers relied on to distinguish utilitarian or socially acceptable words from true thoughts and feelings, were missing. But the speed with which the human brain processed sight and sound cues and filled in gaps on its own, made it impossible to know how many gaps there actually were and how much filling had been done to make sense of everything.

In the end, they would see and hear only the things that blended into or clashed with the primary colors of their preconceptions. Important truths which may have existed in the nuances of the real face, responding in real time, would have been lost.

"Thank you, Mr. Shields," said Leah

"Mr. Macky," said the judge.

"Yes, your honor."

"Do you have any more questions to ask of the juror."

"No your honor. Mr. Shields is acceptable to the people."

"Ms. Flores. Is the juror acceptable to the defense?"

"Yes, your honor; he is."

"Mr. Shields."

"Yes, your honor?"

"You are now juror number twelve in the case of The People of Michigan vs. Blue Monday. Let me remind you and the rest of the jurors in this case, those seated and those alternates we will try to seat within the next hour or so, that this is neither a civil nor a criminal case. It’s what we, in the legal profession, call a hybrid."

The judge paused twenty seconds to cool a glass of water in a compact Nitro-burst container, extract it, take a few swallows and set it down.

"However, as in criminal cases," he continued, "relating to illegal money transfers, banned weapons and intoxicating substances found in the possession of the defendant during the exercise of a lawful search, a presumption of guilt must be applied. That means, the burden of proof which is normally on the prosecution, shifts to the defense. The defense must prove to all twelve jurors beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is not guilty of violating the obscenity statutes of the State of Michigan as charged in the indictment. You must ponder only the evidence and testimony presented. If you are not absolutely sure that Mr. Monday is innocent after weighing all the evidence presented by the people and the defense, you must find him guilty. If the foreperson of the jury avers that you cannot agree on a verdict, the defendant will be convicted as charged. Is that clear, juror number one?"

A woman answered, "Yes, your honor."

"Juror number two. Is the presumption of guilt requirement in this matter pending before the court clear to you?"

"It is, your honor," said another woman.

"Number three?"

A man said, "Yup."

The judge didn’t seem to mind the informal answer. He went on to the next juror and the next until he was satisfied that all nine women and three men understood the presumption of guilt.

Then he said, "The issue of punishment will be addressed in a separate hearing before the Supreme Court of The State of Michigan. It is a separate matter which should not be considered in your deliberations."