I backed away from my dickering colleagues and slipped into the side room with the private, spiral staircase that ran down to the clerk’s office. I blew a kiss to the ladies there, grabbed a tough, leftover donut from the box I delivered to them each day of the trial, and made my way out to the side of the courthouse that had the basement entrance to the public men’s room.
I knew I had guessed right when I found a herd of cops around that side; they were bringing him out through the head. Wood saw me coming and held up a hand for me to stop. To show him I was armed only with good faith, I removed my jacket and dropped it to the ground. I put my hands to the back of my head and gracefully turned once on tiptoe like a music-box ballerina. Wood rolled his eyes and let me approach.
Legs and the Defendant emerged about some minutes later. The Defendant was pointing and gesturing at Legs from the waist, where his hands were cuffed and chained. The cops separated them and encircled the Defendant. Once one of the cops removed his glasses and pushed his head down, they began shuffling toward the car waiting for him at the end of the walk.
I put to my face the camera I still had from Lottie’s day on the stand and shouted: “Legs. Hey, Legs. How come your boy didn’t have the balls to testify for himself?”
I won a prize for best spot news photo that year. Of all people, me. Real shooters all over the state were pissed, exceptionally pissed, but once again, I had little to do with it. It was the subject of the photo and pure dumb look.
I did not think silver halide could capture a look of human malevolence so pure it made readers call Marley for a week after we published. The face framed between the shoulders of two cops as the Defendant twisted away from their grasp and back toward me awoke sweating adults from sound sleep and made their children cry, so Marley said, hyperbolically no doubt but not without a trace of pride.
I had tripped the shutter on reflex and instinct, without seeing. I did not know what I had until our shooter processed the film, tossed a souvenir print at me, and stalked off. The glossy sheet shimmered in the fluorescent light, still fresh with the fixer’s sour stench.
But that’s not why I held it as far from my face as my arms would reach. Looking at his face, I regretted asking that damned question and not for the last time.
A fat man jumping at chance? Not pretty. That’s just one reason I’ve not talked about these matters before now.
When I got back to Failey Thursday night, I went to the office and wrote it up. Two stories. The lead focused, of course, on Pratt’s testimony and Crandall’s blowup. The sidebar was a straight replay of Connie’s swill.
The next day and the day after, I held my breath while I waited to see whether anyone else among the clans would reach Crandall or Pratt before me and explain to our well-whetted audiences what really had happened. My colleagues’ experience, however, apparently was no better than my own.
I spent the better part of Friday trying to locate Pratt and Crandall.
I went to Crandall’s office and his house. He was nowhere to be found. I left messages with Crandall’s giggly secretary and at his home. He returned no calls. Like most cops and ex-cops, Pratt’s home number is unlisted, and only the machine picked up at his office.
Wood was not talking either. I reached other people who knew Crandall and Pratt, but none of them either knew what was going on or would discuss it if they did. I was about ready to get in my car and drive to the city to find Pratt, when Marley reminded me that I am forever indentured to the next day’s edition. I wasn’t going anywhere, he said, until I delivered something for Saturday.
Three hours, a noisy car, and a busted radio: the drive back from the Bluff had been agar in which certain, disquieting conclusions about where things now stood had bloomed and festered. All I need do was find someone besides me who would speak them aloud.
The Bluff lawyer who had initially asked if talking to me was a paying gig had found modest notoriety and its impact on his caseload to be adequately compensating. As a result, he was more than happy to explain to me that what we had seen during Pratt’s cross were old-school moves.
Old-school guys, he said, always hold in reserve a way to goad the opponent or the judge into doing something that could lead only to mistrial. If things start looking ugly for their clients, the old-school guys will run a trial off the rails and do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like it was their fault. If it looks like it’s their fault, they might have to call their malpractice carrier or talk to the Disciplinary Commission.
In the Bluff lawyer’s opinion—and mine—that’s what Pratt and Reardon had tried on Crandall. By using Crandall’s first name and suggesting that Crandall had previously tried to coerce Pratt into shortcutting procedure and arresting someone he did not believe to be guilty, Pratt had provoked Crandall into doing something that gave Reardon grounds to ask for a mistrial. During the meeting in Secrist’s chambers, the Bluff lawyer surmised—as did I—Secrist offered Reardon the mistrial. The fact that Reardon did not take it when he was offered the opportunity in court was itself significant.
“Most of us who’ve done this a while think it’s malpractice per se not to take a mistrial when things are going so badly you think you have to employ the moves that will derail a trial,” the lawyer said. “Listen. I don’t want to sound like I’m accusing someone of malpractice. Can we keep this off the record?”
I wouldn’t normally let a source off the record once we’d started, but I liked what he was saying so well I snapped that rule like a twig.
“How does ‘seasoned observer’ sound?” said I.
The fact that someone as experienced and old-school as Crandall let himself be goaded into blowing up made the lawyer wonder whether Crandall might have wanted the mistrial himself.
“I mean, come on. Maybe he realized the effect Pratt had on that jury. Maybe he saw he took a hit on the cross. Maybe he realized that kid is pretty unappealing. You think?”
I thought Crandall was under a lot of pressure and had, in my experience, never been very good about keeping a volcanic temper in check. I said, however, “I’m asking you.”
“Regardless, the fact that Reardon did not take the mistrial must surely mean that he thought Pratt’s testimony had been so effective he was willing to let the case go to the jury, instead of withdrawing and living on to fight another day,” the lawyer said. “That’s pretty ballsy.”
He paused.
“Is that a word I can use in a newspaper?”
“Not really, seasoned observer,” I said. “But then we’re off the record, aren’t we? What’re you betting? As it stands today.”
“Even money.”
“Which just another way of saying you don’t know how it’ll come out.”
“With a jury? In this case? Who does?”
The barbershop boys were of like mind.
“How many you got in there today?” I asked Carl, the older proprietor.
“Four. Plus Cal and me.”
“Take a poll. How many say guilty? How many not?”
He put the phone down. I could hear mumbling. To his surly son, I heard Carl say, “Come on, Cal. Get the cob out of your ass.” Must not have been children in there then.
“Split,” Carl said when he came back on the line. “Three-three.”
“Anybody want to tell me why?”
One of the loafers picked up the phone. He’d attended the trial, listened to the testimony, and reported back to the boys.
“That old cop,” the loafer said to me, “that Pratt, him, he said some smart things.”
It was a laconic man’s way of saying Pratt’s testimony had been jury magic, covering the spectrum of acts that defy explanation, starting with pure sorcery: charms and enchantments. Surely such a personable, intelligent, and upright man could not take money from someone whom he thought actually was guilty of the horrible things the Defendant was
accused of.
Pratt had worked in a little alchemy for range. By throwing Bunny and police incompetence into the pot, Pratt gave the jury a seemingly rational and factual basis for delivering a not-guilty verdict and delivered to Reardon the means of turning into gold the lump of lead that was the defense.
Pratt had topped off the performance with legerdemain. What else explained how Pratt had made the jury’s faith in Crandall disappear and replaced it with the innate resistance to authority that good citizens work so hard to suppress?
For pathos and just to remind devoted readers what was at stake, I called Naomi. She was only too happy to say for the record that she was sick, just sick, with fear that Crandall and the police had blown any chance of that jury convicting her son’s killer.
Marley could not stand to hang around and watch while I made the calls and wrote the piece, so he went home to an undoubtedly ascetic supper and returned. From my side of his desk, I watched him to gauge his reaction. When he finished reading the story the first time, he sighed and let his hands fall from the keyboard into his lap.
It could not be the jury magic stuff that bothered Marley. I made those points, without attribution, but left out references to all things mystical. Only Dill would’ve let me get away with something that metaphoric and then only after a fight. Nor apparently was it Naomi’s negative assessment, which I merely quoted in full without redaction.
“You don’t believe he’s guilty,” Marley said.
His eyes were fixed on the screen. They did not move. He did not read.
On my side of his desk, I laid my notepad. I thumbed through it for the third time, hoping I might find something more positive I may have left out.
“Well?” said Marley.
He turned to face me. He put both arms on the desk, clasped his hands, and aimed double-barrel forefingers at me.
“You don’t, do you?”
“The theme of that story, in case you missed it, is that it’s too close to call.”
“Is it?”
His persistence and a certain sharp edge in his tone made me look up.
“Yes, reggae king, it is.”
“Your use of a name you know annoys me makes me think I’m being diverted. What’s going on?”
We knew each other well. I had never told him that Dill called using someone else to voice your opinions writing in the fourth person, but he knew the concept and its temptation as well as I did. His job, among others, was to spot it and ensure that if I used it I did so rarely and only when he thought it wise. So, to mollify him, I said, “Yes, I believe he’s guilty.”
“But,” I said, when Marley sank back in his chair, “what I think—as we both know—counts for shit.”
Conversations of this sort we previously had had any number of times. He did not sit up, and he did not look away. He merely folded his arms to shield himself against rationalization.
“I’ve checked his background,” I said. “I’ve talked to his father. I think I’ve talked to him on the phone. I believe in Jake. I’ve watched him at breaks and before and after court.”
I reached across the desk to a corner where Marley had parked the photo I took outside the courthouse, and I planted my index finger in the middle of it.
“I looked at his scary-ass face—close up—when I took that picture. The jury, on the other hand . . . .”
I withdrew my hand from the photo, sat back, and shrugged.
“The jury has done none of those things. Not one. They know or they are supposed to know nothing about anything other than what they have been told or shown in that courtroom. So if you’re asking me if I believe this is a sure thing, then the answer has to be: Hell no.”
I said it as one word.
“And if you’re asking me to write something more positive about the likely outcome, I got to say: At this point, I don’t see how.”
More than twenty-four hours had passed, and we had not published the photo. The general manager took one look at the print and shortstopped it. He said it was inappropriate since the Defendant had not yet been convicted, and even though we were located across the state, really, we couldn’t know what a jury would and would not see.
What the GM did not say was that the photo scared him as much as it did the rest of us. He was just in a better position than Marley and me to do something about it.
“It’ll make for a hell of story if they acquit him,” Marley said, rocking in his chair, his eyes unfocused. “Probably better copy, probably more copy than if he’s convicted.”
Marley looked at me, hope for argument manifest on his face. I could not argue, so I only nodded.
Marley looked from the screen to the photo and back.
He said, almost to himself, “Takes twelve to hang a Defendant.”
I knew the maxim, too. “And just one to hang the jury,” I said, finishing it for him.
Marley considered the photo again.
“Truth will out,” said he, a reader of Shakespeare. “Regardless of form.”
With a reaper’s sweep of his bony arm, he gathered the photo to him and made me his fourth person.
Wood placed the call early Saturday afternoon.
We’d just published. Marley wrapped the analysis around the photo above the fold, enough fairness yin and yang to suit the most scrupulous of press watchdogs and the placement the mark of a good day’s work.
Just to remind me who’s boss, Marley had me make a couple of quick, and worthless, follow-up calls in another vain attempt to reach Crandall, Reardon, or Pratt. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and outlined his plans for me for the weekend: have a little chicken-fried steak at the Pug to tide me over, put the tab on the paper, go home, sleep for the next twenty-four hours.
The order of the day for Sunday consisted of a Meeting and a nap. He would be happy to handle any disasters that might require immediate reportage.
But perhaps it would be best, Marley said, if I left for the Bluff before Monday, since the GM was currently out of town and that would be the first day he would see that we—I was apparently now an official member of a conspiracy—had published the photo.
Wood called just as we were leaving. Had it been damn near anybody else, I would’ve told them to call back Monday.
“Can you talk?” Wood said.
“I can always talk,” I replied. “You mean: Have I, the sheriff of Austin County, correctly surmised that now that the paper is published Mr. Ambrose is leaving the place where secrets go to die? You probably mean: Is now a good time to tell me something you don’t want printed? At least not ‘til Monday?”
It took a moment or two before Wood could bring himself to speak again.
“You sound winded. You can’t walk without puffing?”
“Are we going to talk about my physical condition? Because that’s hardly a secret. It’s pretty much on display every minute of every day. Despite careful tailoring.”
“He wants to see you,” Wood said.
I put the handset on my chest, so I could think. Perhaps Wood could hear the arrhythmic beat of an overstressed heart.
Marley waited at the door. Since he is congenitally nosy, he raised his brows and put his fist to the side of his face to ask whom I was talking to. I waggled the fingers of my free hand to send him merrily home to the tykes.
“I don’t understand,” I said finally.
“He woke up this morning, told the turnkey to get me. Said he wanted to see you,” Wood said. “I was you, I’d bring my tools.”
Remembering the last time Wood had said that, I considered it wise to ask: “What’re your thoughts about this?”
“You ever think you’ve asked one question too many? Come on over. We’ll talk.”
We met at the jail in Wood’s office, an eight-by-ten-foot space formed of cinderblock and so many coats of institutional green pain
t its surfaces are smooth. Like its cousins in the back, it has bars on the windows and a heavy metal door. It contains a scuffed, metal, military-surplus desk, two armless metal chairs, framed news clippings of Wood’s many civic accomplishments, and a Thompson submachine gun in a display case on the wall behind the desk, a tribute to glory days long past. If you haven’t slept well for a week or two, as Wood apparently had not, the fluorescent lights and green walls will make you look as sickly and drawn as the cold-turkey meth freaks the county was starting to see.
Wood wore a white, V-neck T-shirt, jeans, white socks, and a pair of the screaming-orange, slip-on sneakers they make inmates wear so they can’t hide in a snowbank. The jailers keep the thermostat set to rain forest to make the half-dressed simians they house comfortable and lethargic. I sweat off a pound or two just walking back to his office.
We sat on opposite sides of Wood’s cluttered desk. He had said nothing since I arrived, so I started: “You look like I feel.”
He put the heels of his hands in his eyes and twisted them.
“I was really hoping to get out to the farm today.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Lottie and Moze’ve probably had enough of feeding your stock by now.”
He pulled his hands away and stared. His eyes were ringed and bloodshot.
“I don’t know how you guys could’ve missed me—the way my car sounds and all—but I caught up with your little convoy on the way back from the Bluff. Who’s going to stop a speeder without a muffler when every cop in the state wants to escort you, get in on the glory?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe ten miles east of town, you and your boy went straight, Moze
and a little woman he was carrying peeled off. I followed them to your country estate. I ‘spect if I check your claims for the last few months I’ll find some allowance for room and board of a witness. You think?”
“If you’re still pissed about Moze roughing you up,” Wood said, “I make no apologies for that.”
Fourth Person No More Page 35
