Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  “Charlie,” I said to her shooter, “maybe you ought to tell her, when the babblers on your early morning show cut away to her for the one live news shot they’re going to run today, they’ll expect her to be pleasant, fun even. Morning news? This early? Prissy bitchy’s worse than bad hair.”

  It wasn’t true. The hard news comes earliest, and the shows get softer as the morning wears on and the breadwinners leave, but she apparently did not know that or chose not to argue. She started to say something but thought better of it. Charlie waited until she turned away from me before he grinned and shook his head, yet another who could not believe I would say the things I said.

  By eight, I half expected to see vendors setting up sno-cone and cotton candy booths. Townspeople stood along the sidewalks across the street on the three sides of the square I could see. Most of the clans had gathered as a gauntlet along the walk where I stood. The rough parallel lines of reporters and shooters narrowed as they reached the steps up to the door, with each news photographer or camera jockey taking a position closer to the center so he or she could get a clear shot down the aisle. The lines pulsed and squirmed with the jostle for vantage.

  Not all my colleagues were so willing to bet on me as the first twink. The shooter from my own paper, along with a few others from the bigger crews, roamed as scouts from corner to corner of the square on the chance that the star of the show would be delivered to another door.

  My shooter knew that I would and could hold a place for him. In the undulations of a crowd, my size and density tend to make me unmovable. Call me a seawall upon which waves of humanity occasionally crash. Or, come to think of it, don’t.

  “There,” someone shouted above the buzz, as a black Town Car with tinted windows pulled up along the curb. Again, the clans jockeyed for position. Through the swarming, I saw the Rear emerge from the front passenger’s side.

  He had donned a new costume for a trial in the heartland. He still wore an expensive black suit, but he had shaved the goatee and washed the slick gel from his freshly cut and styled hair so that he would not immediately remind jurors of Satan. With one brushstroke, he painted on a completely fresh and confident smile and waved to us, his public.

  As he did so, a petite, young woman in a gray suit with a very tight and very short skirt followed a shapely and demurely extended leg out the back door and went around to the trunk. She removed and unfolded a luggage cart and, with the incongruous strength and grace of a longshoreman, hauled out two, apparently full, banker boxes and tossed them on the cart. She strapped them down with a bungee cord, hoisted the cart one-handed up onto the sidewalk with a bounce, and stood waiting obediently for Reardon.

  He grabbed a slim, attaché case from the trunk without looking and began to make his way up the sidewalk, smiling and speaking to reporters by name. We shouted questions at him, but he wasn’t biting.

  “Can’t really answer questions right now. Hey, Kyle. Sorry. Kind of busy, you know. Morning, Suzanne. Have to keep my head in the game. I know you’ll understand.”

  The young woman remained at the end of the walk. She looked perturbed that he had not bothered to close the trunk. She slammed it and tapped on the roof to signal the driver before she followed in his wake with the luggage cart, highlighted and stylishly coiffed head down, looking grim.

  “Where’s Crandall?” Janelle said.

  She had appeared at my elbow without warning but did not call me an asshole. I note, but do not question, good omens.

  “Who’s the cute gunbearer?” I asked.

  “An associate,” Janelle said dismissively. “He prefers young, female, and good looking. Intelligent hard-workers, most of them, but he never makes them a partner. Most are smart enough to move on before their looks run out and they have to start wearing pants suits.”

  “That’s very cynical for so early in the day, but I suspect commitment is always an issue with the Rear.”

  I turned to look at her closely as we swayed with the jostling. In honor of the warmth of the day, she wore no jacket, just a loose, short-sleeved, gold, silk blouse with black trousers. A camera hung by a thin strap from one shoulder and her monster purse from the other.

  “And where have you been?” I asked. “Talking to Reardon? He let you out at the corner before he made his entrance?”

  She shrugged, looking this way and that, trying to get a fix on what would happen next.

  “I tried,” she said. “He’s busy, like he said. I drive slow.”

  “Well,” I said, “since we’re being honest with each other.”

  I told her that Crandall had arrived at the same time as Reardon. While the Rear worked the rope line here, I saw Crandall get out of a state police car on the south side of the square. He and a young trooper lugged his boxes in without a cart.

  “I didn’t see a short skirt on either of them, and, judging by the way he sneaked in, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t taking questions either.”

  Janelle looked at me and smiled.

  “He wasn’t.”

  He arrived as I tried to figure out whether she was putting me on. An unmarked, state police car cruised past slowly, went around the block, and cruised by once more.

  “Heads up,” I said to Janelle and anyone else who was listening.

  From our left, a marked squad driven by Moze pulled to the curb just beyond the walk to the courthouse door. Behind it, Wood’s unmarked car coasted to a stop. The Defendant was in the back with another deputy.

  Behind Wood’s wagon came McConegal’s car bearing him and three troopers. Moze and the three biggest troopers I have ever seen got out first. They stood by their cars, scanning, first across the street at the spectators there then at the clans’ gauntlet. I saw Moze shake his head.

  McConegal got out of his car, went to Wood’s, and rapped on the passenger’s window. Wood got out and walked around the car to the walk. As he did, he scanned the crowd across the street and let his eyes roam along the rooflines of the buildings there. Wood and McConegal took up positions on either side of the rear, curbside door and pointed Moze and the troopers into place as their own little gauntlet on either side of the door.

  Wood made eye contact with me and cocked his head just slightly back toward the car. I understood they had decided to set security slightly aside for just a moment so that the photographers could get a clear view, but Wood’s glance suggested something else.

  The shutter clatter and cats-spit whine of the cameras’ motor drives started when Wood opened the door. Wood and McConegal reached into the car and, with McConegal’s hand on his head, lifted him out and set him upright on the walk in one smooth move. I saw what Wood meant.

  He had not changed his appearance. He had not shaved off the mustache or beard. He had not cut the long hair. He wore no suit, just the same faded denim jacket and jeans. Best of all, his cowboy shirt opened to show a silver cross gleaming against black chest hair.

  Reardon was too good a lawyer not to have provided him with a suit and told him to clean up for trial, so Reardon was likely to be furious. It might explain the associate’s grim countenance. I put a forefinger to my temple and threw Wood a salute.

  The Defendant looked around. He smiled serenely and breathed deeply from the silky, morning air. Another wave of clatter and whine rolled down the walk toward him when he raised both handcuffed hands to his face to rub it as though he had just awakened from a nap in the car.

  The lines of the clans’ gauntlet started to collapse and surge toward him in the excitement, but the three big troopers formed a wedge in front of him, scowled, and waved the clans back into place. They moved forward, the three troopers in front, Wood and McConegal on each side, and Moze and the spare deputy in the rear, walking backward, facing the crowd across the street, heads swiveling carefully from one side to the other.

  “How do you feel?” someone shouted.

  I wai
ted for him to respond. Wood and Moze had raised the question during the trip to the capital to take him into custody. I wanted to hear his voice, run it past my memory of the voice on the phone. But he said nothing, only glanced toward the source of the question and smiled.

  “How will it come out?” another called.

  He said nothing.

  “Are you guilty?”

  The gauntlet had begun to collapse at the rear and follow as they moved him forward toward the courthouse. A trooper flinched, and the clans stopped short to hear the answer to that one. But he pretended not hear.

  “Did you intend to leave one alive?” Janelle shouted.

  The first questions had been too simple and crude. Janelle’s was smarter. It laid the classic trap, like “When did you stop beating your wife?” A direct answer either way would be an admission.

  It piqued his interest. Like a lizard coming out of a cave, he slowly raised his head and turned it to find the one who asked. On instinct, I stepped into his gaze. It was patronizing, I know, but truly, in that moment, I feared for her and did not want him to see her. Janelle hooked a fist into my kidney because I blocked her view.

  I smirked at him, and for an instant, there might have been recognition. But McConegal pushed a trooper with one hand and jerked his prisoner forward with the other before he could respond.

  “What’s with all the security, Sheriff?” someone else shouted.

  Wood raised a hand to ward off more questions. “Routine,” he said.

  “Aren’t you a little short to be bringing up the rear?” I said to Moze as the party shuffled past. Moze shot me the bone, a Kodak moment judging by the volume of shutter clatter that rose the instant he did it.

  Janelle went down when Carter, the twinkliest of the twinks, shoved her out of his way.

  He had, as usual, arrived late, but no one was going to give him a standup in this mob scene. This was live and would, no doubt, go a long way toward spicing up the audition tape he would send the networks when the trial was over.

  He and the cameraman to whom he was tethered by a microphone jumped from the SUV they left double-parked on the north side of the square and sprinted to our side of the gauntlet. There, they danced and skipped along the back side of the crowd, looking for a place to break through to cop some tape and maybe an answer to a blurted question or two.

  Carter was running out of sidewalk when he apparently decided Janelle was a weak link. He whipped a forearm into her shoulder blade with such force that he drilled her into the grass. Carter was almost onto the sidewalk, tipping the microphone back at his mouth to catch the question he was about to lob, when I raised my foot as high as my gut and balance would allow and stomped the cord. It whipped Carter backward and the cameraman forward. When they collided, the camera lens knocked Carter’s toupee askew, and the viewfinder nearly broke the shooter’s nose.

  As Janelle scrambled to her feet, she turned to unload on Carter, but I put my hand under her upper arm and jerked her upright. I inserted my big butt in the middle of the surging crowd, opened a place for us, and pulled her into it in front of me. The clans’ current carried us forward and away from Carter like otters on the sea.

  “God damn you,” she hissed back at me over her shoulder.

  “Oh, you’re welcome,” I said.

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “No doubt, but I didn’t want you to miss a seat in the courtroom ‘cause you were busy reaming out Carter.”

  She said nothing as we climbed the stairs to the courthouse door.

  “Fuck you anyway,” she said when we were inside, but with much less force than she spoke the first time.

  We becalmed halfway up the wide, oak-rail stairs that lead from the first to the second floor, where the courtroom was located. For this trial only, the county had set up security at the courtroom door. Anyone wishing to enter the courtroom during the trial had to submit to a frisk or a once-over with a wand, a hand-held metal detector that looked like paddle. There were so many spectators and media it was slow going. To speed things up, Moze and the three beefy troopers had been recruited to assist.

  When I got to the top of the stairs, Moze looked at Janelle then me. The smile that crossed his face told me he would have me. As Janelle moved off to be scanned by one of the troopers, Moze put the paddle on the inside of each of my wrists and deftly batted them up and away from my body like he was flipping eggs.

  “How’s Lotty?” I asked.

  He froze, the wand wavering for an instant over my left shoulder before he moved on to rap me on the side of the head, just above my left ear.

  “Was that a battery, Moze?” I asked.

  He slid the wand over my right shoulder and right arm, and rounding the end of my hand, he rapped my knuckles not unlike nuns I had known during a somewhat mouthy youth.

  “That’s the second time your scan has caused me pain, Moze. Am I onto something, asking you about Lotty?”

  He had tapped each of my ankles to get me to spread my feet. Now he moved the wand up my inseam. He cocked his wrist at the crotch so that the paddle grazed my left testicle. I didn’t think I’d throw up, maybe just turn a little green.

  “You tell me,” Moze said.

  I needed to sit down. I said, “Thank you, Deputy Beard,” pushed the wand out from between my legs, and moved off into the courtroom.

  The courtroom was nearly full. The roar of so many voices bouncing off its high, hard surfaces sounded like an unrelenting wave. Radio and television sound guys squatted at the back of the room arguing with each other about who had dibs on splicing into the courtroom’s sound system. At the front of the room, the hounds were starting to cull prey from the herd. A pack had gathered around Naomi soaking up quotes while William cowered next to her.

  Individual reporters wandered over to talk to Bobby and Ruth Russell, who huddled against the pew arm of the front row as far from the Crawfords and the gaggle as possible. They kept two older women and an older man—their parents, I learned later—as a buffer between them and the Crawfords.

  Each Russell looked a little haunted and uncertain around the eyes, but they set their mouths in granite lines, they held their heads up, and they shook them once each time a reporter approached. Only for me did Bobby nod when our eyes met, but I knew better than to take it as an invitation. He is unfailingly polite, and he intended only to acknowledge that we had met.

  A couple of other reporters had crossed the aisle to talk with the Defendant’s father and an older woman I assumed to be his mother. There appeared to be no one on that side of the aisle who might be the Defendant’s wife.

  The defense in a murder trial usually wants the Defendant’s spouse sitting doe-eyed and supportive nearby. It tends to cast a decent and humane aura over whatever creep happens to be sitting across the rail.

  The wife’s apparent absence made me wonder whether the defense wanted to protect her from the clans, whether her appearance at trial would be detrimental to the defense, or whether she just didn’t want to be there. I filed the questions away to ask Reardon or maybe the father later.

  The father was pointing at the chest of one of the reporters as he talked, his face red, then he stopped abruptly and shouted so it could be heard above the noise, “Get away.” The reporter smirked, shrugged and joined the crowd gathered around Naomi.

  Who would talk to the clans and who would not were becoming clear. That the ambitious, diligent, and energetic Janelle was not among them, that she had seated herself in the first of the press rows, and that she waved me over to a space next to her made me suspicious that she had already done her advance work. Perhaps she was only returning the favor of getting her into the courtroom after the Carter episode, but as a misanthrope, I preferred to suspect that she had home, motel, and cell numbers already for those who would talk to her to assess the day’s events and that she wanted me to
sit next to her so that I could not engage in similar spade work.

  As I took the seat Janelle saved, she gave me a child’s goofy, twitchy grin. She couldn’t hide it if she’d wanted to. Like the rest of us, she was stoked. I made a mental note to keep coffee away from her.

  The room fell silent when a door to one side of the bench opened. Crandall, Reardon, and Reardon’s leggy associate trooped in. Naomi’s face fell when the reporters who had been talking to her rushed to the rail with others to call out questions to the attorneys.

  Reardon waved and smiled and shook his head. He and Legs took up a position on either side of an empty chair at the table farthest from the jury box.

  Crandall stopped halfway into the room. His eyes sought the Russells and the Crawfords. When he found them, he bobbed his head once to each family and pursed his lips.

  He looked around the room once, making sure he knew who was here. To us, the clans, he offered his off-the-shelf, mocking smirk. He took up a position behind the chair closest to the jury box and began unloading files from two banker’s boxes he had stowed under the table earlier.

  I found out later that Reardon had not jockeyed for the table—and accordingly the chair—closest to the jury, as attorneys frequently do before a trial. It surprised me that he did not. It was directly in front of the witness box so that a questioner could more easily direct a witness’s answer and face toward the jury, and it allowed the jury to more easily observe the demeanor of those sitting at the table, not only because of proximity but also because, depending on the time of day, people sitting at the other table tended to be silhouetted against the windows on the other side of the room.

  The intensity of a trial means that, by the end, everybody in the courtroom becomes pretty well acquainted with everybody else there. In this one, by the end, the body language of whoever sat closest to them would be an open book. Maybe Reardon knew something about himself—or his client—that made him want to keep the cover closed for as long as he could.