Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  I was saying more was better than less, he could always give up a row to the public if the clans didn’t need it, when one of the wooden doors at the back of the courtroom swung open. Janelle put her head in, saw me, and said, “Well, crap.”

  With a straight face, I said, “Judge, if she doesn’t think any more of you than that, I’d hold her in contempt.”

  Janelle had stepped fully into the courtroom. She wore a maroon blouse under a black, pants suit and carried a black, leather purse the size of a brief case. From the other end of the aisle, she scowled at us, mostly me. Secrist gave her a long, well-practiced look of appraisal.

  “Perhaps,” he said, smiling as roguishly as I’d ever seen a judge smile, “I should withhold judgment until we’ve been introduced.”

  I made the introductions, but when I mentioned Janelle’s professional affiliation, the playful light went out of Secrist’s eye. He closed his eyes once, I would guess to erase disappointment, and when they opened, his face settled into the impassive mask that we later noticed he donned with the black robe when he took the bench.

  “How may I help you?” he asked.

  “Perhaps, we could talk privately?” she said, looking at me.

  “No,” Secrist said, “let’s talk here.”

  Janelle explained she’d just stopped by to see if he’d give her an interview. If now wasn’t good, she’d be happy to come back another time, although really it was better to do it in advance of the trial and, looking at me again while she said it, it didn’t look like he had anything scheduled right now.

  Secrist nodded as she talked, but only to indicate he understood her request. He said he intended only to give one interview prior to the trial and that was to me, he was afraid. I was the “media representative” from the place where the murders had occurred, he said, and the residents of that area had a right to know how the case was being handled. It was pretty much the same argument I made to him when he had told me right after he was selected that he wouldn’t talk to anybody.

  Janelle tried arguing that this was a story that the whole state was watching and that the best outlet for information to the whole state was her paper and not mine or any of the television stations, for that matter. They didn’t cover nearly as much territory as the Chronicle, nor would they give it the detail it required.

  Secrist almost smiled. You could tell: he, too, liked a gamer. But this was a guy who made his living listening to lawyers. Every day, he stood his ground in the face of hissing reptiles; an attractive, young reporter was not going to move him.

  “If I say anything of interest to the rest of the state, I’m sure a wire service will pick it up out of Mr. Ambrose’s article,” he said.

  He glanced at me, checking to see if he was right. It revealed more knowledge of how we work than he had let on or I gave him credit for.

  “But let me ask you a question,” Secrist said, turning his attention back to Janelle. “We have rules against cameras—still or video—in the courtroom, but I’ve had requests from other outlets—mostly radio, but perhaps your own paper—for daily transcripts of the proceedings. My office has the ability, but apparently not the inclination. My court reporter says it’s impossible from a time and energy standpoint, and I’m not inclined to make her unhappy since I have to work with her. What do you think?”

  It was a masterful attempt to co-opt her, but as a frequent target of Janelle’s fury, I could see a problem developing.

  “All radio guys care about is sound,” I said quickly before she could say anything she might regret. “Maybe you could rig up outlets that would allow them to tap into the Court’s sound system? Anybody wants to plug a recorder into the sound and make a transcript of their own could do it. Might satisfy TV, too.”

  Secrist brightened at the suggestion but judiciously said only that he would give the idea some thought. He shook my hand before he excused himself. He knew better than to try with Janelle. He just nodded to her.

  “I think he liked you,” I said as we waited for the elevator. “Might’ve asked you out. If he hadn’t found out you’re a reporter. He probably has rules. You know, against fraternizing, the appearance of favoritism, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

  She said nothing. Indeed, she said nothing until we were outside on the square, where she rounded on me.

  “What is it? Do I smell bad? Is there broccoli in my teeth? There’s not one damn person in this godforsaken town that wants to talk to me?”

  Over her shoulder, I saw a guy across the street turn his head. I said, “Maybe you want to keep your voice down?”

  “You don’t help a thing,” she said, not lowering her voice a decibel. “Everywhere I go, you’ve been there. I’ll bet they’re talking to you, asshole.”

  It was about three-thirty. I’d collected from the clerk’s office a list of potential jurors and a copy of the questionnaire that each had filled out about his or her background and experiences with and opinions of the legal system. The lawyers would use the questionnaires to select jurors from the pool of names that had been drawn for the trial.

  I didn’t know exactly how I’d use the information, since a story that profiled potential jurors by name and address was likely to raise concerns about the jurors’ security and impartiality and get me hauled up in front of someone, mostly likely Secrist, whom I did not care to alienate at that point. Maybe I’d just stow the information and use it for a sidebar story on the jury’s background once it had been seated or to contact jurors after the verdict. But in any event, I had the documents folded in thirds in the inside pocket of my jacket.

  I was pretty sure Janelle had them nowhere about her person, but short of frisking her, which I would not have minded, the best thing to do was to get Janelle off the square and away from the courthouse, which closed at four.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Any of these clods talking to you?”

  “I’m going to get a haircut,” I said. “Want to come?”

  I had seen a barbershop a couple of blocks off the square when I was making my rounds earlier in the day. I put it on my mental list of potential sources as a place to take the temperature of the town before, during, and after the trial. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the local newspaper guy, but I always like to talk to people directly.

  “Don’t even think about pulling out a notepad or a recorder while we’re in here,” I said to Janelle as we walked toward the shop. “If you can’t remember and write it down later, then just listen.”

  She was slowing down, hanging back.

  “I don’t think this is going to do us any good.”

  “Oh, come on. Where’s your can-do spirit?”

  She just shook her head.

  The shop was Norman Rockwell in hard times. It was a little storefront, with the name of the proprietor in chipped, gold paint on the window that covered the width of the store. The candy stripes twirled on a pole at the door, but it was bent and crooked like it had been bumped by a passerby. Pre-adolescent thug on a skateboard was my bet.

  Inside on the right stood a shoe shine stand that looked like it had been unoccupied for at least a couple of decades; newspapers were stacked a couple of feet high between the stirrups at the foot of the throne, and old magazines and comic books had been tossed up onto the seat. On the left against a wall was a row of chairs with duct-taped, plastic upholstery and chipped-chrome arms occupied only by one 10- or 11-year-old boy, reading a comic book.

  The place smelled of fresh talcum, stale lotions and aftershave, and a leaky oil furnace. There were four chairs, but only two guys cutting hair. One guy looked to be in his 60s or 70s, with a white flattop, a precisely trimmed, white mustache, and a shiny, cobalt-blue smock. The other was in his 30s maybe. He looked like the older man, only he wore his hair in a mousy, brown mullet complemented by a plaid shirt and khakis.

  They appeared to ha
ve sorted the customers by age. The old guy had another old guy in his chair, and the younger guy had a middle-aged guy in his. It looked like a toss-up who’d get the kid when one of them finished.

  I didn’t see how anyone would ever think we could sneak into a room that size, but a bell hanging above the door tinkled when we walked in. Everybody looked up to see who it was. Both barbers stared at my head, which being bald, brought a smile to the old man’s face and a dismissive glance from the younger man. The glance of both men stopped at Janelle.

  “We got no more to say now than we did an hour ago, Missy,” the old man said.

  Janelle looked away from me. That explained Janelle’s reluctance to come in here and, at least in part, her fury.

  “I need a haircut,” I said. I made a circle around the top of my head with my forefinger. “I pay full price for half the work.”

  That got a chuckle. The old barber rose to the challenge.

  “Half might be generous.”

  “Which one’s Wilson?” I said, ignoring it. I cocked my head at the sign on the door.

  “We are,” the barbers said in unison, nodding in satisfaction behind the heads of hair at their own, well-practiced line.

  “I’ll only let the proprietor cut my hair,” I said.

  “You win either way,” the younger man said in a much gruffer tone than I would use with a customer.

  “I need an appointment?”

  The whole place tittered at that idea.

  “Where’re you from?” the older barber asked

  I told them.

  “No kidding?” said the old guy in the chair. “You know anything ’bout those murders?”

  “I was there the night they occurred.”

  It worked like I hoped it would. The scissors stopped, and the middle-aged guy whose chin had been pushed to his chest stared up at me through his eyebrows. Even the kid looked up from the comic.

  “Have a seat,” the older barber said nonchalantly when the clock started ticking again. “One of us won’t be long.”

  Acceptance, like offer in this case, was implicit. I did not know at that point its bounds, but a guy in my business succeeds each day only by surmounting his ignorance. I took it as a good sign when the older man excused himself from his customer to make a couple of phone calls. As we each took a creaking chair, I caught Janelle rolling her eyes.

  When I picked up a magazine without saying anything more, the older guy in the chair said, “Well?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Well?”

  “You can’t just waltz in here and tell us you were there and not say anything more.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

  I introduced myself by name, position, and employer.

  “And, I’m sorry,” I said, “your name is?”

  He paused for a minute, then gave it. So I told him a little bit about Moze, a kid deputy and how he had got the call.

  “And, I’m sorry,” I said to the guy in the other chair. “I missed your name.”

  He gave me a knowing smile and told me, so I talked a little bit about the weather that night and the place where Aunt Lotty’s double-wide is located.

  “I know your last name’s Wilson,” I said to the younger barber. “I don’t know your first.”

  He waved me off with a comb, but the old man had returned by that time.

  “Carl,” he said, tapping his chest with the pointed end of his scissors, “and Cole,” pointing his scissors at his son, who was scowling again.

  Another couple of older men came in as he was talking. The old barber introduced them and said, “I thought maybe they’d like to hear what you got to say.” He looked only sheepish enough to be polite.

  “Sure,” I said. “You know, I’m going to be around here for a while in the next few weeks. I don’t want to forget who you are. Mind if I write your names down?”

  I had already pulled the notepad out of my pocket and started writing before I finished, and nobody said no.

  They asked some more questions about what had happened that night, and I gave them an abbreviated version of the first couple stories I had written.

  Then, I said, “So, what do people think about the circus that’s coming to town?”

  And because I was not condescending and because I’d offered up a little commerce and some new grist for the gossip mill, they told me.

  The younger barber thought it was a damned shame and would only bring embarrassment to the town.

  “It’s going to be just more of you poking your noses in our business,” he said bluntly.

  He struck me as a guy who dwelled in bitterness as the scion of the Bluff’s barbering empire. The others shushed him, his father loudest of all.

  The old guy in the chair thought it’d be pretty good entertainment and planned to go early every day to see if he could get a seat in the gallery. The kid asked whether the crime scene was gross. One of the newcomers thought it was damned shame their county had to pay for a trial from across the state.

  Cole whipped the apron off the middle-aged guy and snapped the hair out of it. As the guy rose, he said, “Let’s talk about the heart of it. I hope we fry the son of a bitch.”

  “Do you?” I said.

  “I followed ever’ word written or said about this case,” he said. “There’s nothing that anybody’s going to say that’ll change my mind. The son of a bitch is guilty.”

  He looked at me and grinned.

  “I ’spect you’ll quote me on that?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “You, too, young lady,” he said, pointing at Janelle.

  She merely smiled at the man, pleasantly and without commitment. She was getting the hang of this.

  When I checked the names on the list of potential jurors later, I found his. He was setting himself up to be rejected as a juror for prejudice. I quoted him anyway.

  Janelle said nothing during the conversation. Instead, her nearly black eyes moved constantly from one speaker to the next, absorbing and folding into her memory every word that was said.

  When the old man had swept up the white hair from the floor that surrounded his chair, he waved me in. As I started to get up, Janelle put her hand on my arm.

  “You know, asshole,” she whispered in my ear. “I swear, I am just not worthy.”

  Sometimes talking to Janelle is like having a religious experience. Too often, she talks in tongues.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said and gathered up that duffel bag she called a purse

  As the old barber cinched the apron around my neck tight enough to make my eyes pop, she turned to the room and threw us all a winning smile.

  “Nice to meet you friendly, friendly boys,” she said. “But it’s been a while since I had my hair done.”

  By the time I got away from the barbershop, I had lost her. Her story the next day was fuller, more comprehensive than mine. She had talked with and listened to both men and women of the Bluff.

  Our idea of ourselves drives the tempo of a murder trial. We do not care to be reminded that we remain, in significant part, animals. The mindless drives—the impulses to violence and sex—that mark us as such we save for the dark.

  When one of us runs too wild, the crime, at bottom, is not so much that he killed but that he brought our impulses to light, that he reminded us of that part of ourselves we must turn from to call ourselves human. And when we are forced to confront those markers so that we may once more decry them, we cloak our appalled fascination carefully in ritual, logic, and denial. Judges wrap themselves in black robes for good reason.

  The tension between our desire to see what drives a person to such lengths and our fear that we will see ourselves sets a trial’s cadence. The state says just look at what he’s done, and the defense says no, he could not reasonably have done so. In the good
cases, observers’ opinions of a defendant’s guilt swing back and forth, sometimes with each witness, and, in the end, regardless of the verdict, we remain mystified. Every murder trial should be called a circus because deep down we watch, not necessarily to see justice done, but to see whether the tiger will eat the tamer.

  This trial was little different. Only the quality and magnitude of the reminders made the tension greater than most.

  And so we—the clans—came like kids to the parade, only, as usual, we were the freak show. The cops temporarily forbade the angle parking normally allowed around the courthouse square for reasons of security, but by 7:30 on a fresh, summer morning under a bright, blue sky, a line of would-be spectators had formed at one of the four doors to the courthouse. It snaked from the locked, oak doors down the wide, limestone steps and the walk toward the street.

  Naomi and William Crawford stood near the door. She waved at me like the fair queen, slowly from her elbow, when she spotted me walking toward the square.

  Since I had spoken to Wood and therefore knew which door the cops would bring the Defendant in, I took up a position on another side of the courthouse about halfway down the walk leading to the door. A van jacked to a stop at the corner. A cameraman, an earnest, capable young guy I knew from working other stories, jumped out first with his camera. He looked at the line on one side of the courthouse then at me. He trotted up to me.

  “What d’you know they don’t? You talk to somebody?” he said somewhat breathlessly.

  “I had, you think I’d tell you?”

  He waved the rest of his crew over toward us.

  “I’ll bet on you, but meantime? Screw you.”

  He smiled when he said it. I smiled back. He was capable of intelligent speech, unlike some of his colleagues.

  His station had saddled him with a sour-looking, young reporter. Maybe she was tired. They’d had a drive, and under her fresh makeup, her face looked blotchy. Maybe she was nervous. It could have been her first important assignment; I’d only her seen her do strayed-dog and kids-fair stories. In any event, she chose not to acknowledge me when I spoke to her by name.