Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  Yes, Wood said, Deputy Beard still worked for the sheriff’s department, but he was on special assignment. No, Wood said, he would not tell me where Deputy Beard was working or when he would be done with his special assignment. Yes, Wood said, Miss Nusbaumer was in good health and staying at an undisclosed location, and, before I even asked, no, he would not tell me where or allow me to interview her, either by phone or any other means. And, no, he wouldn’t talk about whether Moze’s special assignment had to do with Lottie Nusbaumer because he’d already told me he would not discuss Moze’s special assignment.

  Naomi called once or twice a month, just so I wouldn’t forget she was out there. One time, she wanted to know why exactly it was even necessary to have a trial since the police had told her they were certain the people they’d arrested had done it. I said I didn’t think I was capable of explaining the constitutional principle of due process to her and maybe she should talk to a lawyer if she was really curious. She said she already had, and that prosecutor had better get a conviction or she’d sue. Whom she would sue and for what was unclear to each of us.

  Another time, she said I should write a story letting people know that she was coping well and moving on with her life. At Marley’s insistence and against my better judgment, I started such a story, not only about Naomi, but also about how all the survivors were coping. In the end, though, Marley had to write it.

  I didn’t have a problem reporting that in addition to what Naomi described as the “myriad” of her other interests she had started a fashion design course by mail. But I started to lose my stomach for the story when she told me: “Unlike my husband, I’ve stopped taking Prozac.” And I knew I couldn’t finish it when neighbors told me the Russells had stopped going to church and they’d spotted Bobby Russell, a normally energetic and diligent fellow, a couple times that spring sitting dead-still on a tractor in a half-plowed field, his head bowed to the steering wheel.

  “You picked a hell of a time to get squeamish,” Marley said.

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” I said, looking him in the eye, daring him.

  In my head, Dill murmured High-Beam homilies, but in my heart, I knew I had not one thing new or instructive to say about despair.

  The Rear provided me with some motivation by telling me in the car ride to Failey that I didn’t need to write about his client’s background, there really wasn’t any news there.

  It took a while, but I’ve grown comfortable in the understanding that the relationship between lawyers and reporters is symbiotic. At any number of points in our careers, we must feed off each other to thrive: for information, for explanation, for advocacy, for ego. Who knows what else?

  The trick is not to buy into the other guy’s notion that you need him more than he needs you. Thus, it is a rule of mine that sources, particularly lawyer sources, don’t get to decide what I report. In fact, when sources, particularly lawyer sources, tell me what they think is not news, that’s usually a pretty good reason to look into it.

  Armed now with the Defendant’s name, address, and date of birth, I made my way the day after the arraignment to the next county, where records in the recorder’s office and the clerk’s office told me, respectively, his family owned about 600 acres of prime farm ground and he had married his wife two years previously when she was exactly 15 years old.

  “I suppose we’ll be seeing more of your kind now,” said the woman who identified herself to me as the clerk. She was short, round, and slightly beyond middle age. She had dyed her hair to a matte shade of cast-iron black, she had meticulously mudded on a palette’s worth of makeup, and she liked her glasses to dangle on a black, beaded string, perhaps to call attention to an ample chest.

  “What kind would that be?” I said absently as I thumbed through a three-inch-thick, red-leather-bound volume of marriage license records.

  “Nosy press,” she said.

  The sharp, nasal tone made me look up. Her smile was wry.

  “That obvious?” I said.

  She stood at the other end of the counter from me. She hoisted another of the hernia-popping, two-foot-by-three-foot books out of the rack under the counter and flopped it open in front of her, her finger poised on the right page.

  “Cops and press,” she said. “Who else carries them skinny little pads?”

  She set the glasses low on her nose, cocked her head back to look through them, and examined the page she had her hand on.

  “You guys,” she said. “Always looking at things. Being nosy. I just can’t leave anything out around here.”

  “Am I the first?”

  “So far’s I know.”

  “Well, these are all public records, you know.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “That they are.”

  She looked up from the book to me and tapped her index finger on the page of the open book once more.

  “Nancy,” she said to a younger, less flamboyant woman who had been listening attentively to us without raising her eyes from her keyboard, “help me out here.” They went into another room.

  I moseyed down to the end of the counter and looked at the book the clerk had left open there. The page the clerk had tapped showed that on the morning of the day of the murders someone with the same last name as the Defendant’s had posted a rather substantial bond that apparently allowed the Defendant to walk out of the county jail.

  I wrote down the case number. When the clerk and Nancy returned, I handed the clerk my skinny little pad.

  “I’d like to see the file with that number and a local telephone book, if I could, please.”

  She looked at the pad and grinned in triumph.

  “Bet you would,” she said.

  The arresting officer’s affidavit of probable cause in the case file alleged that the Defendant had been arrested two days before the murders on several counts of dealing controlled substances. He allegedly offered an undercover cop a smorgasbord of product, ranging from marijuana to PCP.

  That last item on the menu caught my eye. Phencyclidine, or angel dust, is remarkable as drugs go. Once marketed as an animal tranquilizer, it used to be fairly easy to obtain in farming areas. More importantly, depending on the dose and the creature you give it to, it is as effective at anesthetizing a pig as it is at turning people deranged and violent. It’s kind of like Thermopane glass that way: makes things warm in the winter, cool in the summer. How does it know? It made me wonder what effect it would have on a teenage boy looking for love.

  The guy who posted the bond for the drug charges was the Defendant’s father, a jailer I talked to said. The father owned the 600 acres, which he had pledged as collateral for the bond. I saw a good deal of the acreage when I drove out there.

  The father was tall and barrel-chested. He had me by 10, 15 years, and his hair was gray, but I recognized the GI brush cut and the black, plastic glasses as artifacts some guys can’t leave behind when they’re discharged from the service.

  “Korea? Marines?” I said. This was after he had opened the interior door, I had introduced myself, and he had told me to fuck off.

  “Yes. No,” he said. The fact he’d answered the questions told me he might talk more.

  “Army,” I said, jerking a thumb back at my chest, “Vietnam.”

  I’ve spent about all the time I care to talking about that time in my life at Meetings, but I’ve never had a problem exploiting my experience for a story.

  “Drafted?” he said.

  “Hell, yes,” I said.

  There was no point in mentioning either the youthful transgressions that had cost me a student deferment or the hubris and juvenile sense of immortality it took to volunteer for that cluster.

  He grunted in a snide, superior way. I was more than willing to bet that he’d never seen combat, but finding out was tangential at best to why I was talking to him, and there is little that is more un
seemly than old vets pissing on each other’s shoes.

  We stood on opposite sides of the screen door of his farmhouse. The house was a well-painted white, trim, narrow, and two-stories upright, kind of like a strict, maiden aunt. Through the screen, he had crossed beefy arms across a spotless white T-shirt and unfaded bib overalls.

  “Thought I told you to leave,” he said, when I made no moves.

  “I’d like to talk with your daughter-in-law,” I said. “She lives here, I understand.”

  “About what?”

  “Your son’s attorney said your son was in your house on the night that three children were murdered and an old lady was shot. That true?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And you know that because?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “When did your son come in that night?”

  “No comment.”

  “Your son leave your house at any time that night?”

  “No comment.”

  “Where is your room in relation to that of your son and his wife?”

  “That’s none of your goddamned business.”

  “I’d like to speak to your daughter-in-law. She home?”

  “She’s not allowed to talk.”

  “By you?”

  “No.”

  “Your son’s lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Your son.”

  “No comment.”

  I took that as a yes, but assuming that wouldn’t get me anywhere. He had not told me to go away again, so I tried another tack.

  “What’s your son like? What kind of kid was he growing up?”

  “Smart, hard worker, well behaved.”

  “Where’d he go to school?”

  When he told me, I asked, “When’d he graduate?”

  “Didn’t. Self-educated. Read a lot. Knew more’n his teachers, other kids.”

  His voice sounded clenched. He seemed to have forgotten how to use subjects.

  “Did he?” I said. “What did he do after he quit school?”

  “Worked.”

  “Where?”

  “Me, some. Himself, too. Self-employed.”

  “Self-educated, self-employed, himself. A lot of selfs there.”

  “What’re you getting at?”

  “Nothing. He ever work for anyone but you and himself?”

  “Well, he tried a couple of places, but they never had anything he was really qualified for.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It was just factory work. He’s too smart for that.”

  “He is well spoken, I agree.”

  “You didn’t say you knew him.”

  “I don’t. I think maybe I talked to him on the phone a couple times.”

  “Then you know he should be in a supervisory position, not line work.”

  “What’d he do for you?”

  “A little farming, when I need the help.”

  “Meaning he ran the machines, fed the stock, that kind of thing?”

  “That’s what farmers do.

  Maybe, but it didn’t sound like supervisory work.

  “How about for himself?” I asked. “You said he was self-employed? Doing what?”

  “He was an entrepreneur.”

  “Yeah, I heard he marketed pharmaceuticals.”

  “Now what’re you saying?”

  The old man had done nothing but blow smoke up my ass, and by then, I had way more than a buttload.

  “He was busted two days before the murders for dealing drugs,” I said.

  “I think we’re done with this conversation.”

  A faint odor of pig manure crept up over my right shoulder as we talked. That I could tell by smell the difference between one type of animal manure and another was yet one more sign I had lived in a rural community too long. I half turned toward the odor.

  “How many hogs you raise?” I asked, raising an arm to sweep the expanse of horizon in the direction of the smell.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “In the last few years, say, you ever have any of them come up missing?”

  He blinked and looked suddenly haggard and ill. In his expression, for just an instant, I could see the years of whitewash he’d painted over what he knew about his son crack open down to the rotted black wood. Then his face sealed. His jaw bulged, and the flush of anger rose on his neck. I half expected him to put his fist through the screen to hit me. I was already backing away when he waved me to my car and slammed the interior door.

  By the time Janelle arrived in the Bluff on the afternoon of my scouting expedition, I had traded the promise of two five-night, midweek stays for a very favorable rate at a locally owned and somewhat aged motel, I had located a fine donut shop and determined the range of prices and cuisines at other food establishments, and I had been assured by tellers at two different banks they would be happy to provide me with change and other financial services as I might require.

  The editor of the local weekly agreed that, since our papers were on opposite sides of the state and we accordingly were not really competitors we should look for opportunities to exchange information and photographs. I was welcome to use his facilities, phones, and equipment to file. He gave me a key. The editor was even kind enough to give me a complimentary copy of his paper, in which I coincidentally found a listing for the times and places of Meetings in the area, information Marley insisted I return with.

  The ladies at the clerk’s office, their dispositions sweetened by pastries from the aforementioned donut shop, said they saw no problems with my visiting them and examining their records whenever I chose, during normal business hours, of course.

  “Where’s the secret passage?” I asked my newest clerk friend.

  “Whatever do you mean?” she responded coyly in what may have been a failed attempt at a flirtatious, Scarlett O’Hara accent.

  “Every courthouse in this state has a set of stairs, usually spiral, that leads from the clerk’s office to the courtroom. Where’s yours?”

  She pointed to another room.

  “Yonder.” I tried to remember the last time I’d heard that word outside of a western. “But we never use them anymore. The telephone, the elevator in a pinch, work better if the judge needs something.”

  “May I?”

  I walked around the counter before she could say no and went through a hallway that served as a storage area and into the room to which she had pointed. In one corner of the room, behind a curved oak door, were the spiral, metal stairs.

  It was a tight fit for a guy like me, but the stairs put me into a room off the judge’s chambers, where lawyers could meet with their clients. The judge happened to walk by the open door as I emerged, which is how we came to be talking when Janelle arrived. He had agreed to an on-the-spot interview about his background and how the trial would be handled in exchange for some advice about managing the clans.

  We stood in the courtroom. As with most such rooms built before the Civil War, it was large, taking up about a third of the top floor of the courthouse, and it had a high, tin-print ceiling. Like a well-designed church, its size and volume aimed to swallow petty human ambitions and motives and impress upon its occupants a certain attention and respect, if not fear, for what went on there. A row of tall, narrow windows made up one side of the room, and the judge and I were bathed in the warm, golden haze of sunlight reflected off surfaces that were primarily original, shellacked oak.

  In contrast to his environment, Philip Arthur Secrist was young and colorful. He popped right off the wall.

  He was in his early thirties, a pup as judges go. Like a holdout from the 1970s, he wore round, gold wire rims, and he let his brown-going-gray hair fall over his ears. He sported a blue shirt with a white collar and cuffs, gold links in those
cuffs, and a red silk tie. I wondered what his father looked like and whether Secrist grew up admiring his old man.

  He was born and raised in Bluffwood, went off to college and law school, and returned to set up a solo private practice for a few years before he ran for judge. He won, he said, because none of the other attorneys in the county thought the job paid enough to make it worth their while. He personally thought the challenge, the honor, and the opportunity to serve the people he had grown up with more than made up for the pay, which he didn’t really need all that much of because he was single and it was a small town and the cost of living was low.

  “Hard to meet women in your line of work?” I asked.

  He pulled one corner of his mouth tight in what might have been a grin but said only that other questions I had about his personal life were, really, in his opinion, irrelevant to the reason for my story, which he decided was to assure the folks in Austin County that he would handle their case well.

  Let’s say it was easy enough to spot a healthy dose of self-esteem in Judge Secrist. Even so, he did not act like a martinet or a publicity hound. Instead, he seemed to have given the handling of a sensational trial a lot of thought. He said he was concerned about balancing rather than favoring competing interests he knew he would be asked to accommodate: The Defendant’s right to a fair trial, the victims’ passion to see justice done, and the clamor of press and public for full and immediate access.

  With our rumps hooked on the oak rail that separated the courtroom proper from the gallery, we looked at the two columns of ten, long pews each, enough seating for maybe 200 people. Pointing, Secrist said he was thinking of putting the victims’ families and cops in the first few rows of one side of the gallery and the Defendant’s family and friends on the other side of the aisle. The clans could have a few rows behind the victims’ families and cops, and other spectators could have the rest.

  “I ’spect it’s wise to keep state people and defense people separate,” he said. “You think three or four rows for you guys?”