Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira

shudders upward.
    The elevator opens at the 302 bullpens. Guerrero unlocks the men’s cell with a large brass skeleton key. He uncuffs each prisoner, and they hand him their IDs and head in.
    “Can you tell my lawyer I wanna speak to him before we go in court?” a prisoner asks Guerrero.
    “I don’t know who your lawyer is—it’s not my problem,” Guerrero snaps over his shoulder. He drops the handcuffs, the IDs, and the key with a clang onto a metal desk in an anteroom around the corner.
    Although he’s been wearing gloves, Guerrero heads straight for the jury room washroom now, as he always does after a stint on the bridge. “Gotta wash my hands,” he says on the way. “Been touching DOC all morning.”
    Meanwhile, Cameron has found a spot on a bench and has started peeling the plastic from his lunch tray. He’s not hungry yet—it’s only eight A.M . But he’d rather eat his lunch before one of his bullpen mates tries snatching it from him. The other prisoners are unwrapping their lunches, too. Ain’t no way I’m gonna win on this case, Cameron thinks as he bites into his sandwich. It’s gonna go like everything else in my life.
    LARRY BATES glances at the clock on the wall above the jury box: 9:25. Six black women and two black men have joined him in the gallery. Like Bates, they’re stiff, silent, and grim on the benches. The gallery has six wooden pews, three on either side of an aisle, all of them carved with gang insignia—pitchforks, stars, and crowns. The gallery is separated from the front of the courtroom by tinted Plexiglas and a glass double door.
    The benches rapidly fill, and the courtroom staff begin arriving as well, marching through the gallery and on into the well of the courtroom. Bates recognizes some of them from his previous visits and guesses at the rest of the cast. He remembers that the chubby balding man in the short-sleeved shirt and tie is the clerk. The man lugging a steno machine in one hand and a laptop in the other is obviously the court reporter. The two young men with the closely shaven chins, the dark pin-striped suits, and button-down shirts have prosecutor written all over them. That means the two young women in business suits, cradling file folders, must be the PDs. Bates can tell that someone works here as soon as he or she enters the door at the back of the gallery, and not just by how they’re dressed. The workers move with the comfort of those who belong, and they greet each other amiably as they pass through the gallery, like one big happy family. Not to mention that they’re all white.
    Bates checks the clock again. Nine thirty-five; still no judge. Sure, he can come late, Bates thinks; we do, and it’s a warrant.
    AT HIS KITCHEN TABLE , Dan Locallo sips tea, munches on toast, and scans the morning’s Chicago Tribune . His wife, Jean, and his twelve-year-old son, Kevin, are elsewhere in the house, dressing for their day at a Catholic grammar school, where Kevin is a seventh-grader and Jean ateacher’s aide. His seventeen-year-old daughter, Lauren, has already left for her Catholic high school. By eight-thirty A.M . he’s out the door as well.
    The Locallos live on the outskirts of Chicago, in Norwood Park, one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, an area of brick homes and quiet streets whose residents fear property tax hikes more than crime or unemployment. Polish, German, Italian, and Irish ancestries predominate. There arevirtually no blacks. Locallo grew up not far away.
    The reassuring drone of an AM news station fills his 1992 Lumina as he cruises south on Austin Boulevard—traffic and weather, sports, business. The overnight crime reports always interest him. They’re like coming attractions—the first accounts of the mayhem wrought by future 26th Street customers, any one of whom could end up in his courtroom. His ears are tuned especially for the potential heaters, the crimes with a special twist that are likely to captivate the press;