The Wages of Sin

by Nancy Allen

“I’ve told her. I’ve told her time and again that any professional should create a Word document when preparing arguments or examinations. You compose and make a record of it at the same time. She never listens.” Madeleine’s eye twitched again. She gave her eyelid a delicate rub with a pinkie finger, as if she needed to remove a speck.

  A small metal pitcher of milk, sweating with beads of moisture, sat near the coffeepot. Parsons reached for the milk and poured a measure into his coffee cup. “What TV stations are out there?”

  “One of the Joplin Stations,” Elsie said.

  “Joplin always gives us good coverage,” Madeleine said. She pulled a silver compact out of her purse and opened it, studying herself in the mirror.

  “What about Springfield? Is Springfield out there?”

  “Maybe. I couldn’t see.” Elsie leaned out of the booth in an attempt to peer out the front window, but her view of the street was blocked.

  Parsons stirred his coffee with a battered spoon. “We need KY3. KY3 from Springfield. Their audience is huge.”

  “Joplin’s stations go out to four states,” Madeleine said. She sounded defensive.

  “Yeah, but KY3 has a better market.”

  “Oooh,” Elsie said, with mock awe. “The Queen City.”

  Parsons looked at her in confusion. “Huh?”

  Madeleine answered. “Springfield. It’s the Queen City of the Ozarks.”

  Elsie met Madeleine’s eye and they broke into genuine laughter. Elsie waved a hand in apology. “Sorry, Sam. In out-­state MO, we like to have a little laugh at Springfield’s expense. They think they’re such big shit over there, third largest city in the state.”

  “So cosmopolitan in Springfield. They have a mall. And four Walmart Supercenters.” Madeleine flashed her a wink from the non-­twitchy eye. It occurred to Elsie that the sisterhood of small-­town Missouri was one of few connections she and Madeleine shared.

  Parsons sipped the last swallow of his coffee, holding a hand over his tie to protect it from a stray drip. “Let’s roll, ladies.”

  They strolled across the street to the courthouse entrance, Parsons and Madeleine shoulder to shoulder, Elsie a pace behind. They hadn’t proceeded far when Elsie heard Parsons whisper, “What the hell?”

  Peering around Madeleine, she saw the ­people surrounding the van: a dozen or so, as she estimated. But they didn’t look like any Right to Life supporters Elsie had ever seen. They were assembling posters of another kind. She caught a glimpse of one: Down with the Death Penalty. It depicted a hypodermic needle with a large X painted across it.

  Standing alone, at the end of the courthouse steps, was a woman holding a sign that said, End Abortion Now.

  Parsons made a beeline for the anti-­abortion protester. Elsie heard him ask, “Where’s your friends?”

  The woman shrugged, a helpless movement of her shoulders. Then the cameras—­both of them—­moved in, and the death penalty opponents made a dash for the press.

  “Move,” Elsie said. “Now.”

  She gave Madeleine a shove, almost causing her boss to trip up the stone steps. The three of them ran for the door, followed by a reporter with an outstretched microphone, shouting, “How does it feel to be part of a death penalty case?”

  The deputy in charge of security was a new hire; when they reached the door, he instructed them to empty their pockets and send their bags through the metal detector.

  Madeleine scowled at him, her eyes ablaze. In a high-­pitched shriek, she said, “Get. Out. Of. My. Way.”

  Oh shit, Elsie thought, she’s losing it. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the reporter had captured it on camera.

  Parsons tugged at her elbow. “Come on,” he said, and they bypassed the elevator, heading up the stairs at a brisk trot.

  On the second floor, Claire O’Hara leaned over the rotunda railing, laughing as she watched their procession. “That was quite a show. Brava,” she called. Her voice echoed in the vaulted space.

  Madeleine’s fingers shook as she pressed the security code buttons for entrance in the back door of the Prosecutor’s Office. Once inside, she marched back to her private office, unlocked the door, and hurled her briefcase against the wall. It connected with her law school diploma, knocking it to the floor.

  Parsons turned to Elsie; they exchanged a look. “Does she get like this often?” he asked.

  Elsie opened her mouth to answer, then clamped it shut.

  Parsons shut the door behind him. Elsie sat in her customary seat on the couch, but he remained standing, watching Madeleine with a wary eye as she fiddled in her purse and pulled out a prescription pill bottle.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Sam. I’m not myself this morning.” She shook a small tablet into her hand and dry-­swallowed it. “Get me water,” she said to Elsie.

  Elsie slipped through the door, glad to have a reason to escape. As she pulled it shut, she heard Madeleine say in a wavering voice, “I think this death penalty issue is getting to me, Sam.”

  The admission bolstered Elsie’s spirits. The specter of Larry Paul’s execution was certainly boring into her. Twice, in the previous night, she had resorted to staring at the gory photos of Jesse Rose and her unborn son, to bolster her resolve and give her strength to make it through the night. When the images didn’t provide the relief she sought, she added an additional step to her regimen: she poured a shot of gin and downed it. Liquid valium, she thought, jumping to her own defense. Not everyone could resort to the luxury of Madeleine’s pill bottle.

  In the reception area, she met Stacie, stowing her lunch in the community office refrigerator. “Hey, Stacie. Do we have any bottled water around here? It’s for Madeleine,” she added as an afterthought, hoping it would add weight to the inquiry.

  Stacie blew her wispy bangs out of her eyes with an impatient explosion of breath. “What am I, a convenience store?”

  Elsie interpreted that as a negative. She peered through the glass door into the rotunda, debating the wisdom of a dash to the courthouse snack bar. But the hallways were already filling up, with spectators for the Larry Paul trial by the looks of it.

  She dodged into her office and opened the small fridge where she stowed her personal stash. Elsie had refilled it on Friday, as a necessary preparation for trial. It contained twelve cold cans of Diet Coke. She grabbed one and ran down to Madeleine’s office.

  When she entered, Elsie saw that Madeleine and Samuel Parsons were bent over her handwritten Opening Statement, as if checking if for errors. Elsie’s jaw clenched. She’d presided over more trials in the past four years than Madeleine and Parsons combined.

  She set the Diet Coke on the desk by the Opening Statement, giving Madeleine a look of resentment. “Drink this,” she said. She bent over and snatched up the pad with her handwriting, flipping the pages back into place and smoothing them with a possessive hand.

  Chapter Thirty-­Five

  Elsie sat at the end of the prosecution counsel table, in the spot farthest from the jury and closest to the courtroom door. Strategically, it was the weakest spot in the trial court. The prosecution should be seated at the table beside the jury box, to initiate an unspoken bond with the group of twelve (fourteen in this case; they had seated two alternates, and no one but the judge knew which two these might be) through physical immediacy.

  But the prosecution team had wasted precious minutes that morning, lingering in Madeleine’s office as Parsons wrangled on the phone with his absentee Right-­to-­Life constituency. While the prosecutors loitered, Josh Nixon and Claire O’Hara set up camp at the prime table.

  That made two battles lost by the prosecution and won by the defense that morning; and court had not yet convened for the day.

  Elsie smoothed the skirt of her best suit; not purchased on sale at J.C. Penney, but a graduation gift from her mother and dad over four years ago. It was no
longer the cutting edge of fashion, even for McCown County, and it was growing increasingly difficult to fasten the zipper in back. She managed to create additional space around the waist by leaving the button undone and securing the waistband with a large safety pin. Under her jacket, no one would know.

  Judge Callaway’s courtroom was large, by McCown County standards. In addition to the space devoted to court business—­ the judge’s bench, the witness stand, the jury box and counsel table—­there was a generous gallery for public spectators, benches built a century ago to accommodate fifty ­people. Today the benches were full, seating reporters, onlookers, and curiosity seekers. No witnesses were seated inside: the defense had invoked the rule prohibiting witnesses from being present in court when they were not giving testimony. All of the witnesses for the State were roaming the halls of the courthouse, except for one. Ivy was seated at Elsie’s desk in her office, attended by Tina Peroni.

  At least we won’t deal with her shit-­for-­brains foster mother today, Elsie thought. Holly Hickman had begged off, claiming that her husband worried that the baby would catch something at the courthouse, exposed to so many ­people.

  The bailiff opened the door and ushered the jury into the room. Elsie stood as they made their way to the jury box, taking careful note of the attitudes and expressions of the four men and ten women. Several of the women looked nervous; a middle-­aged man appeared to be supremely self-­conscious, probably unused to being the focus of so much attention. The youngest panelist, a bearded college student in his early twenties wearing a maroon Missouri State University T-­shirt, smiled as he made his way to his seat.

  Oh please God—­let that boy be an alternate, Elsie prayed. He was a walking Not Guilty vote. She could already read it on his face.

  It took the jury a few minutes to settle into the jury box. When it had been designed in the 1900s to accommodate twelve citizens, ­people were smaller. The fourteen twenty-­first-­century jurors were a tight squeeze. Elsie was glad to see that jurors hailing from the Queen City of Springfield were just as fat as the home folks in Barton, Missouri. Maybe fatter. The thought was painfully interrupted when the safety pin enlarging her waistband popped open and jabbed her in the back.

  During the judge’s reading of instructions to the jury she struggled under her jacket, trying to fasten the pin. When Madeleine turned on her with a wild-­eyed stare, she gave up the attempt and folded her hands on the counsel table. Maybe the pain will keep me on my toes, she comforted herself. As long as she didn’t start to bleed, she should be okay.

  She pulled out the pad that held her Opening Statement and scanned the first page. While she concentrated, Madeleine elbowed her. She looked up.

  Madeleine was passing a sheet of paper to her. She jerked her head in Sam Parsons’s direction, apparently to indicate that it was a communication from him.

  Elsie stared at the words on the paper, wondering what Parsons thought she’d omitted in her Opening. It was surely a matter of some importance, for him to interrupt as she was poised to begin.

  The paper, in handwritten caps, said USE THIS. Underneath was a typewritten paragraph. It began with the following words:

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, a trial is like a jigsaw puzzle.”

  She swiveled her head to face Parsons, her eyes bulging with a look that conveyed: are you kidding me? The puzzle metaphor was so tired and passé, even law students scoffed at it in their trial practice classes.

  He nodded at her with insistence, pointing at the puzzle shtick again.

  She slid the page to the side. Opening Statement was the job that fell to the low man. Unlike Closing Argument or voir dire, no one ever claimed that a trial could be won or lost on the basis of Opening Statement. But she was prepared to make her very best showing, and she’d be damned if her speech would incorporate a boring three-­minute comparison of evidence to pieces from a puzzle box.

  Judge Callaway spoke from the bench. “Is the State ready to proceed with Opening Statement?”

  Elsie rose. “We are, your honor. If it please the court.”

  When he nodded, she approached the jury box, clutching her legal pad. The old-­time lawyers, like Billy Yocum, didn’t require notes; when they spoke to juries, it was always off the cuff. Elsie knew that some young trial layers attempted to mimic the extemporaneous style, but she didn’t dare. She still needed the security of a script to refer to when she was interrupted by defense objections, to ensure that she had covered all of her bases.

  She stood up straight. The safety pin pierced her spine. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she began.

  She didn’t smile.

  “I’m Elsie Arnold, Assistant Prosecutor of McCown County; my cocounsel in this case, as Judge Callaway told you earlier, is County Prosecutor Madeleine Thompson and Sam Parsons, from the State Attorney General’s Office. And the defendant in this case—­”

  She paused to turn on the defense table to point a literal finger of accusation at the defendant. “Is Larry Edward Paul. He has been accused of two separate counts of murder in the first degree.”

  She let her gaze linger on Larry Paul, knowing that if she stared at him, the jury would follow her example. For trial, he was dressed in his orange jail scrubs, which surprised her; she would have expected his attorneys to scrounge up more suitable garb for his courtroom appearance. His hair was trimmed and his beard was gone; Paul was fresh-­shaven, revealing a dimple in his chin that could rival the dent in Ben Affleck’s face.

  But the cold blue eyes were the same she had encountered before; though this time, his courtroom manner resembled a case of shell shock.

  She turned back. In a voice conveying deep solemnity, she said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the evidence will show.”

  Elsie took a deep breath, and let it out. “Jessie Rose Dent was twenty-­six years old. She was the mother of a daughter, Ivy—­a six-­year-­old. Jessie Dent was expecting her second child. She was eight months pregnant; the evidence will show that the unborn child had reached thirty-­six weeks’ gestation.” Elsie paused. “It was a boy.”

  The jurors’ eyes were glued to her. She was glad she had disregarded Parsons’ advice. She’d still be halfway into the puzzle piece explanation, and many of the jurors might be staring out the window by now.

  “Jessie Dent lived in a trailer in McCown County, Missouri, right inside the city limits of Barton. She had been a working mother, employed at a local meatpacking plant until her swelling, due to pregnancy, rendered her unable to work.”

  She walked to the other end of the jury box, trailing her fingers down the wooden railing. “She lived with the defendant in that trailer. For a period of two years, she had lived with Larry Edward Paul. He was her boyfriend, her partner.” Her voice intensified. “DNA evidence will show that the defendant, Larry Paul, was the father of the baby she carried—­the unborn son in her womb.”

  A middle-­aged woman with iron gray hair sitting on her head like a helmet nodded at Elsie, as if instructing her to continue. Score, Elsie thought.

  “On the sixth of September of this year, at approximately ten o’clock in the evening, Jessie Dent and her young daughter, Ivy, were at home at the trailer, with the defendant and a friend of his, named Bruce Stout. We’ll provide evidence that the defendant took a baseball bat and beat Jessie Dent with it. The coroner will testify that she suffered massive skull fractures, which caused her death; and that she also suffered internal injuries. Because the coroner’s examination revealed that in addition to blows to the head, Jessie Dent sustained repeated blows to her abdomen—­her belly—­with a blunt instrument.” She leaned forward, scouring the jurors with eye contact. “Her unborn son died with her.”

  Elsie was on a roll; but she couldn’t help but wonder why the defense table was so quiet. She had anticipated a dozen objections by this juncture, had jotted notes of how she might respond to th
e protests of the defense counsel. She was tempted to glance over at Josh Nixon and Claire O’Hara, to gauge what they were planning; but she steeled herself to resist the urge. She must retain her focus and keep it aimed at the jurors in the box.

  Elsie gained more momentum as she talked, dropping nuggets of what the jury could expect: medical evidence from the coroner, fingerprints, hair, and DNA evidence from the state crime lab; eyewitness testimony from Ivy; and toxicology reports showing that the defendant’s blood had .15 alcohol as well as methamphetamine.

  Silence still reigned at the defense table.

  She took a step back; it was time to cut the snakebite and suck the poison. “But ladies and gentlemen, those are not the only shocking facts in this case. The evidence will reveal other disturbing truths. Toxicology reports will also show that Jessie Dent, the victim, had traces of alcohol and drugs in her system. And in addition, she was HIV positive.” She paused. “Though her son was not.” She repeated it, to make certain they understood. “The baby did not have AIDS.”

  Now that she had bloodied her victim, it was time for the final punch.

  “When the police came to the trailer after an anonymous call to 911, they found Jessie Dent’s battered body in a pool of blood. A bloody baseball bat lay beside her. The police found the defendant, Larry Paul, passed out in the bedroom. He had blood on his hands and body. It was the blood of Jessie Dent.”

  Why didn’t they object? Emboldened by their silence, Elsie was using language she knew was inflammatory, referring to the defendant as “passed out” rather than “asleep.” But she dismissed the concern; her adrenaline was pumping, and she forged on.

  “Detective Ashlock questioned the defendant. Detective Ashlock, the head of the Detective Division of the Barton Police Department, will testify that the defendant confessed to killing Jessie Dent. He admitted that he beat her to death. That he meant to do it, had been thinking about it for months, as she grew larger and larger with his baby.”

  She leaned into the jury, all but invading the space of the jury box.