Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  I held up a hand to cut off the security lecture.

  “Bygones are long gone,” said I.

  “What’re you telling me?”

  “That I’m not an idiot. Nor am I entirely unprincipled. I did not immediately stop at your place to bother Lottie for an interview, for example, although I admit that I was a little shy of material yesterday and if I’d thought she would’ve said anything better than what she said at trial, I would’ve called her.”

  “And this relates to him talking to you how?”

  “What’s Reardon think about it?”

  “He’s going to fire Reardon. He’s pissed Reardon wouldn’t put him on the stand.” Wood tipped his head to the side and back. “Besides, I might not be able to talk to him about the case without his lawyer present, but there’s nothing says you can’t. If he wants you to. And he does.”

  “What’s Crandall think about it?”

  Wood’s way too honest for a public official. He put his foot up on the desk, leaned the chair back, and looked away.

  “So Reardon doesn’t know about it and Crandall doesn’t know about it,” I said.

  Wood does not often resort to reptile eyes, but he did now, looking back at me, saying nothing. I put my own foot on his desk, tilted my own chair back, and cast my eyes upward, so he’d know I was about to cipher.

  “Let’s start with time. It is now well into Saturday afternoon. Even if I went back and wrote a story tonight, we couldn’t publish it until Monday afternoon. You’d know that. What little I know of your boy back there, he’d know that.”

  I looked at Wood for confirmation, but he gave away nothing.

  “Under those circumstances, where’s the harm? You’ll want to know what he tells me. That’ll be the quo for the quid. Yes?”

  Wood pursed his lips and his eyes slid away.

  “Yes,” I said. “Someone in the room or behind a mirror. Bug the room or listen to my tape. If your boy tells me anything that’s valuable to your case, there’s plenty of time to get it to Crandall for rebuttal. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. Either way, you figure the jury’ll probably have the case by the time the story runs. No interference, probably nothing that would give Reardon grounds for a mistrial or an appeal. How’m I doing so far, Wood?”

  Wood had lowered his chair. His hands are large, thick, with short, stubby fingers. I couldn’t even see the paper clip he worked in those hands.

  “You missed your calling, Clay,” he said, not looking up. “Maybe you should’ve been a lawyer.”

  “Not a cop?”

  He looked at me sharply to see if I had intended insult, but I grinned to disarm.

  “So what’s the gain, I ask myself. Why would the sheriff of Austin County go behind the back of his prosecutor and collude with the likely perpetrator of the biggest crime of this county’s storied history to arrange an interview with a reporter that the aforementioned sheriff doesn’t care that much for to begin with? That’s the question I ask myself, Wood.”

  I paused, giving him a chance to respond, but he sat there working that paper clip with an expression of complete concentration.

  “Well,” said I, “here’s the only answer I can come up with. You’re feeling uncertain about the outcome of this case. More than that. Something has made you a little queasy about how this is going to work out. More than that. You’re a little desperate. Am I ringing any bells here, Wood? Striking any chords? Am I making music of any kind?”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time this afternoon asking yourself questions. Maybe you ought to ask somebody else questions. Maybe do your job.”

  “Wood, I am always loath to give editors their due, but they do have their place, and it’s not to fix my grammar or punctuation. I’m pretty good at that. Their job is to ask me the questions that I did not or would not ask myself or my source.”

  “So now you’re my editor,” Wood said softly for he does not sputter and yell when he is angry. “You’re not here to talk with ‘my boy,’ as you keep calling him?”

  He talks slower and quieter.

  “You’re not here to get the biggest story of your career?”

  When I could barely hear his last question, I was pretty clear about how angry he was.

  “You’re here to second-guess the way I handle my job?”

  “Talking to him would not be the big story, Wood,” I said. “He’s just going to spin me some shit. The bigger story, Wood, is what you think you or Crandall did wrong, why you’re so eager to have me talk to this guy.”

  Wood silently measured me long enough to make it uncomfortable. He stood.

  “I’ll tell him you’re not interested. I ‘magine that girl you been hanging around with’ll do it if you won’t. Since she’s female, he’ll probably like her better’n you anyhow.”

  A high, hard one, just clear of the Adam’s apple, and I did not see it coming.

  “Wood, you’re scaring me,” I said. “You really think this guy is going to walk?”

  “Yes or no, Clay. Last call.”

  “Oh, I’ll do it. When has that ever been a question?”

  He gave me a tight-lipped grin and nodded once as though I had confirmed his suspicions. He turned to the door again to lead me out before either of us changed our minds, then turned back.

  “Lesser of evils?” he asked.

  “Pretty much.” I sighed. “But then that’s the basis for damned near every decision I make.”

  “Most times?” Wood said. “Me, too.”

  When Wood and I entered the interrogation room, he said, “I have been waiting.”

  He noted it as a fact, not a complaint, a premise for what he said next.

  “Which one of you had compunctions?”

  It was the voice I’d heard twice on the phone. I looked at Wood. I wanted to tell him that then, but it wasn’t the time.

  “I don’t reckon introductions are necessary,” Wood said and took a step back out the door.

  He wore the inmate’s outfit: stained, orange jump suit, the orange slip-on sneakers, greasy hair, unshaved jaw, sallow skin. All in all, a remarkable letdown from his courtroom appearance and all accomplished in thirty-six hours.

  He sat slouched at the table, which was a trick since his right wrist was cuffed to the tabletop and he was hobbled by a chain on the ankles he had crossed and extended out under the table. In situations that make him afraid, the reporter reaches tenure by attending to security first.

  He had put his eyes on me when I first entered the room, and I admit to finding it hard to meet them. I remained standing as I slowly drew my pad from my back pocket and a handheld recorder from the side pocket of my jacket and arranged them deliberately and precisely on the table. For the time being, the pen in the right front pocket of my pants I left there because, after all, his left hand was free.

  I’ve been in a jail or two, for both personal and professional reasons, and body odor or stale vomit taint the air in nearly every corner. In that hot, humid room, there was also a coppery, electric smell.

  It might’ve come from him. Behind the twin shadows of his photograys, his eyes glittered with a volatile energy that arced from some place deep within. The incongruity of the light in his eyes and his exhausted pose did little to put me at ease.

  I picked up the recorder, pushed the buttons to record, identified myself, and stated the date, the location, the names of those present, and my intention to interview the Defendant if he would give me permission to do so. Still standing, I set the recorder on the table between us.

  “Well,” I said to him, “do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have your permission to talk with you and to record this conversation and to use anything you say in any story I may want to write?”

  “Yes. That is what I said.” He spoke, as always, evenly and deliberately, just above
a whisper. “Is that the journalist’s Miranda warning?”

  “That’s the reporter covering his ass.”

  He looked around me at the mirror in the wall behind me. He understood the deal, too. He returned his attention to me.

  “You have not sat down,” he said. “Afraid?”

  “If you’re asking if I’d rather meet you muzzled and strapped to a handcart, Dr. Lecter, the answer is no, not that afraid.”

  The left side of his mouth twitched once in what for him must have passed for amusement.

  “Twice now you have been honest with me,” he said. “In your way.”

  It seemed to be some kind of revelation to him. He considered it.

  “You hide the submissiveness of it with a sarcastic delivery.” He thought about it again. “It is a very effective technique.”

  He looked up at me.

  “But if you expect me to be forthcoming, you should come to my level. Sit. Or are you trying to assert dominance, control, by standing?”

  His regard was arrant and grating. Like being swaddled in burlap, so Dill might’ve said.

  “What’s your attorney think about you talking to me?”

  He shrugged. “I doubt he thinks anything. He does not know about it yet.”

  “Think he’ll be pissed?”

  “Yes.”

  I had forgotten that he is entirely literal. The questions would have to be open-ended.

  “But?”

  “I intend to discharge him.”

  “Because?”

  “He does not act according to my instructions.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I believe you know what I mean. You noted it outside the courthouse.”

  “He wouldn’t put you on the witness stand.”

  He smiled. I waited.

  “In your mind, that made you look bad.”

  His expression did not change.

  “Is that yes?” I asked.

  He did not speak or move his head. He only smiled.

  We were joined.

  This much I had thought about as I drove over. I knew what I’d do.

  I shrugged. I snapped off the recorder and put it in my pocket. He watched me curiously.

  “I thought sitting would probably be wasted motion,” I said.

  I folded the notebook closed and returned it to my jacket pocket.

  As I turned, he said, “He would not allow me to speak for myself.”

  I took out the recorder, pushed the buttons to record, and set the recorder back on the table.

  “Maybe you want to repeat that,” I said. He did.

  “Your attorney won’t let you talk to the jury, so you’re going to talk to me. Just to get your side of the story out.”

  “I am.”

  “No other reasons?”

  “None.”

  There were probably half a dozen other reasons, all of which had to do with gaming, gambling, and him getting over: on Crandall, on Reardon, on the cops, on the jury, on me, on anybody who read my story, on anybody purely as a matter of course. But I did not share my doubts, not then. Instead, I pulled out the chair and sat.

  He looked across the table at me with approval. To him, this was no more than an encounter with a dog. He threw me a bone.

  “You ran a good bluff,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a bluff.”

  His eyes fell to the middle of the table. He put his free hand to his face and spread his index finger and thumb across his mustache.

  “It was not?” he said, looking back up to me.

  I would not let my eyes slink away from his. I shook my head once.

  “Are you always curt with the people you talk to?” he asked.

  “No. I’ll lick a boot or two for a story.”

  “But not mine?”

  “No.”

  He cocked his head.

  “Why?”

  “I hold no great hopes you’ll tell me anything different from what I’ve heard before. Or more to the point, one damned thing that’s true.”

  His eyes fell again to middle of the table while he processed it. When he looked up at me, his eyes were again full of that frenetic light, and he had stopped smiling. In my head, I tracked the sweat as the room’s moist heat made it seep down my neck and the sides of my face.

  “You know the judge won’t let you fire Reardon,” I said, to get off the subject of me. “Not this late in the trial. He’ll make the both of you see it through to a verdict.”

  He put his index fingers and thumbs together in a diamond on the table, pulling the cuff deep into flesh of his right wrist. He looked at it curiously as though the sensation were new and the arm something separate from his body.

  “If he is ineffective counsel, should he not be dismissed? Regardless of the stage of the trial?” he said. “That would be the argument. Only if I need to appeal, of course.”

  He looked at me.

  “Why do you mention it?” he asked.

  “It’s not too late to back out. To say no to talking to me. You know how I feel about you, so you have reason to think my story will be less than sympathetic. You’re not going to be able to fire your attorney. You might want to call him and talk to him first.”

  He appraised me in a way and for a time that made it easy to imagine that to him I was the most gutless of fools. It was some measure of his power that, at that moment, I cared what he thought.

  “Your tape is running,” he said. “Let us put something worthwhile on it before it runs out.”

  When I was a kid, I had a game. The object was to direct a marble through a maze on a tray. The tray set in a box, and you used knobs on the sides of the box to tilt the tray left, right, up, or down to maneuver the marble past holes in the path to its destination at the other side of the maze. Talking with him was like riding the marble. In the end, it left me wiped out and bilious.

  Yes, he had been home in bed when the murders occurred. No, of course he did not hate his father. In fact, he did not know how he could repay his wife and his parents, particularly his father, for their love and support and his wife for coming forward to testify on his behalf.

  Of course, he wanted to testify himself, but his lawyer would not allow it. Legally, the lawyer said, the burden of proof was on the State and he did not have to prove anything, but he knew better than that. People want to hear a person’s story directly, and he should have been allowed to tell his. No, he was not giving this interview in the hope that a juror would see it and be influenced by it or that a mistrial would be declared.

  He was naturally disappointed that Jake, a boy he had “mentored,” should say, under oath, such outrageous lies about him. He could only believe it was Jake’s overwhelming guilt about killing those children that drove him to say those things.

  He himself obviously was a scapegoat. He had been an informant for the police. His role was to spy on Jake, who was really the one selling drugs. He was to provide the police with information about drug activities in and around the area where he lived and worked, and he could only assume they coerced Jake into saying those things because he himself would not lie about the drug activities of certain people, whom the police disliked and whom he could not name because he did not wish to defame them.

  “This informing,” I said, “that part’s news to me. Think it’ll be news to the cops?”

  “Ask them.”

  “I will.”

  “They may not tell you, of course, if it is an ongoing investigation.”

  “Is it? I thought you were arrested for drug dealing two days before the murders.”

  “It was just the first step in their campaign to smear me.”

  “Because you would not inform.”

  We looked at each other for some time. The light was gone from his eyes. He had
dropped to an amateur level of lying, telling a story that could be verified, and we both knew it.

  “I have nothing else to say,” he said after a time.

  “I don’t imagine you do.”

  I clicked off the recorder and stood. He looked at the middle of the table, then he glanced toward the mirror. If anyone was behind it, my fat ass blocked him from view.

  He took his eyes off the mirror and looked at me. With his head, he gestured for me to come closer.

  I looked at his face and at his free hand, laid palm down on the table next to his cuffed hand. I wondered what the exact distance was between the room behind the mirror and where I stood. I wondered how quick he was and how fast Wood could be. I wondered exactly what a broken neck might feel like, whether there would be pain at all or just the sound of vertebrae cracking.

  He gestured again, his eyes still dull. I put my own hand on his free hand, leaned as much of my bulk as I could muster onto that now not-so-free hand, and brought my face close to his.

  “Here’s one damned thing that is true,” he said, softer than usual. “It was a Jonathan.”

  He pulled his hand free and sat back. He smiled, watching me, waiting to see if I got it.

  If he’d wanted to wring my neck, he could have, because I just stood there, propped over the table, trying to figure out what he’d just said. Then I did.

  Moze came in.

  “Moze, did you hear that?” I said, straightening.

  “No, I was told not to eavesdrop.”

  “Bullshit. Did you hear what he just said or not?”

  “No.”

  He sat slouched again, his head down, his face impassive. His eyes were closed, but they moved back and forth as though he dreamed. My guess? He watched light burst like fireworks on the back of his lids.

  Moze pulls him up and out. The sneaker squeaks and the chain rattles recede down the hall. The fat boy stands, staring at the table, listening to a voice or two in his head.

  A single, inane detail. Can a story—a trial—turn on only that much?

  Sure, the fat boy decides. So, the fat boy thinks, what to do?