So should about half the population of this country, I think, having had enough of Teresa’s righteous indignation It must be nice to be on the side of justice all the time.
“I’ll go talk to my client,” I say, and scoot away before I shoot off my mouth.
Ten minutes later, we announce to a relieved Rick Crawford that we have a settlement. He tells our clients to make sure they pay Teresa’s fees within thirty days, and I walk back to my office, relieved I have lost another case and telling myself for the tenth time since I have been in private practice to turn down all but childless divorce cases with ironclad prenuptial agreements.
“Why, Mr. Page,” Leigh says, displaying only mild surprise, “I didn’t know we had a meeting set up.”
Though it is after two in the afternoon, she looks fresh and crisp, and, as usual, is dressed as if she is ready to go out on a moment’s notice. What is different is her hair. When I had seen her before it was up. Today it is down past her shoulders and more gorgeous than ever.
She is wearing a pure silk emerald green shell with padded shoulders over a tan skirt. Even her belt looks expensive.
Maybe Art laundered a lot more money than we know.
“You didn’t call me back,” I remind her. In the background I can hear her mother’s voice on the telephone.
“Why don’t we go for a ride? I need to talk to you, and I don’t think you want your mother present.”
She gives me a quizzical look. She has seen the deferential version of the faithful sidekick and probably likes him better, but she nods.
“Just a moment.”
I try to look into the house, but my eyes don’t have the time to adjust to the dimness before she is back striding past me out the door. It is a brilliant spring afternoon, the kind of day that makes me wish I had a job out of doors. After this morning’s travesty, I ought to try to get one. The best thing about Arkansas is that even its most populated areas are within fifteen minutes of the country in any direction. Since we’re out in the western part of the county anyway, I head for Pinnacle Mountain, only a short drive west. No one will mistake us for an illicit couple looking for a place to neck. No McDonald’s employees I know have girlfriends who look this classy.
“Why didn’t you call?” I ask, trying not to sound like a rejected suitor. I realize as soon as I ask that my feelings are slightly hurt. I pride myself on being able to get clients to talk to me. I didn’t expect her to fall in love with me, but I assumed she would keep her word. Just like a man, Rainey would say.
“I’ve been talking to Mr. Bracken,” she says carefully.
“I’m sure you know that.” I glance over at her, but she keeps her eyes on the road.
I decide to wait to respond until we are at the park.
I want to see her face when she is speaking. I tell her where we are headed, but she has no comment. Surely Chet has told her that I have been to San Francisco. It is all I can do to keep my mouth shut.
I turn off the engine in one of the parking spaces near the picnic tables, remembering one Saturday long ago with Rosa and Sarah. Sarah was about nine years old, and it was her first ascent to the top. We treated it as if we had climbed Mount Everest. An ache comes into my heart as I remember the exhilaration we all felt as we came down. I turn off the motor and ask, “You ever climb Pinnacle?”
“Sure,” she says, her face softening for the first time.
“My dad used to bring me out here lots of times. The best thing about being a preacher’s kid is getting to see your father. His days off were in the middle of the week.”
The park is virtually deserted, with only a couple of cars in it. Too late for picnickers, too early (I hope) for the teenagers who come out here to smoke and hang out. We get out and both wander around, each of us locked for a moment inside our own memories. Eastern Arkansas, with its rich Delta soil nourished by the Mississippi, for the most part, is flat as a table top, and it does not take much of a climb to impress me. Leigh, in four-inch heels, is hardly dressed for an assault on a peak I’ve seen five-year-olds conquer, but such is the mystique of heights that we both search the brush for the trail that leads to the top. She could easily be taken for my daughter, I realize. Not for the first time I wonder if I have smothered Sarah as much as Norman has smothered Leigh. Sarah is still angry at me. Though she pretended to have gotten over our fight the night before I left for San Francisco, she said barely two words after she picked me up from the airport. How much am I really like Norman? Probably more than I care to admit.
He got Leigh a job in the church to keep her close; secretly, I’ve dreamed for the last year that Sarah would attend law school at UALR and come into practice with me. Norman and I both use guilt in the same quantities the Nazis used gas. I think Leigh is protecting her father.
As disgusted with me as she is right now, I’m not sure Sarah would be so charitable.
I sit on one side of a picnic table and watch Leigh staring at a squirrel that is eyeing her with an equal amount of curiosity. Could she really have murdered her husband? At the moment, nothing seems more unlikely.
Bending down and clucking at the bemused animal, she seems about ten. Finally, it scampers away and she comes to the table, smiling as if she had tamed it. I say, hoping to catch her off guard, “I didn’t learn anything in San Francisco that will convince a jury you were at risk.”
She does not respond but places her hands over her mouth as if she is becoming nauseated.
“Art wasn’t a lot different from your father, was he?” I say, and tell her my belief that they must have hated each other.
“It must have seemed like Art was fighting for your body and Shane was fighting for your soul.”
Parting her hands, Leigh gives me a fierce look.
“My father didn’t kill my husband, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
The bench is hard. There is no getting comfortable on it. I follow up quickly.
“But you’re worried that he might have, aren’t you?”
When she doesn’t say anything, I plunge ahead.
“He was furious that morning at Art because you hadn’t come to church. He knew you were home, and when you went up there to pretend to check in, he went to the house and killed Art.”
Her beautiful face is flushed.
“That’s ridiculous!” she shouts at me.
“My father is incapable of killing anyone.”
She is breathing too hard for me to believe she is convinced of that.
“You know how jealous he was of Art,” I say.
“He thought he was the very personification of evil, and that’s what you now think, too. What was it you stayed home to do with Art that morning? Was it sex? Is that what you’re ashamed to tell?”
She begins to cry. Somehow she has to open up to me. I tell her, “My own daughter and I have become incredibly close since her mother died. I feel so helpless right now, because it seems like I’m about to lose her-ironically, to your father’s church. Could I kill somebody?
I think I could, but if I couldn’t, I suspect the reason is that I don’t know anybody at the moment who I can say is evil. If somebody abused her, hurt her, I doubt it would take me long to work up some uncontrollable anger. Did your father know about Art’s porno skimming plan? Is that what tipped him over the edge?”
Leigh reaches into her purse for a tissue. Her hands are shaking. Most women look terrible when they cry.
Instead, her eyes have become more enormous and beautiful.
“I don’t see how he could,” she gets out.
With the trial next week, it is now or never. I fear that someone will drive up, but it is quiet and peaceful, beyond words. In the distance I can see a park ranger’s truck stop down by the entrance. I say, “I know how attached your father is to you. He lost your sisters, and he was about to lose you. He probably loves you more than he loves your mother, Leigh. And Art stood for everything he hated. Your dad knew how the world seduces people, and he spent his l
ife building a fortress so you could be safe from it. He didn’t want you to marry Art, did he?”
Leigh’s breasts rise and fall under the silk. She shakes her head.
“He wanted me to delay the wedding, but he couldn’t find anything specifically wrong with Art. He did say that if Art really loved me, he wouldn’t mind waiting until we got to know each other better.”
Men in their forties don’t have much patience. We see too many heart attacks in our age bracket. I stand up, unwilling to inflict the bench on my butt any longer.
“Shane hired an investigator to try to turn something up, didn’t he?” This is pure speculation, but not out of the realm of possibility. Shane, like Chet, doesn’t seem the type to leave much to chance if he can avoid it.
Leigh brushes her hair away from her neck. Though it is gloriously mild, doubtless she has begun to feel warmer since this conversation began.
“Art told me after we married that he thought Daddy had done something,” she confesses.
“He said somebody was looking into his business. Naturally, he assumed it was Daddy, but he was never able to confirm it.”
I glance up at the mountain, fearful that someone is suddenly going to come walking out of it. Turning back to Leigh I say, “A pretty logical assumption, don’t you think? After your sisters left the church and the state, I imagine he was paranoid about his favorite daughter.
And after you married Art, his worst suspicions were confirmed.” She looks down at the ground. There is something she hasn’t told me, but it may be too difficult. All her life she has been dominated by middleaged men. She may have had her fill of us.
“What about Art?” I ask.
“Was he worried about your father?”
Leigh wipes her eyes.
“Not physically,” she said.
“Three months after we were married, he told me I had been brainwashed by Daddy. He said Christian Life was fine for people afraid to live in the real world. He said our family groups were essentially spies, part of the thought police that Daddy used to control our behavior.”
I watch the park ranger’s truck drive slowly toward us. If he sees Leigh crying, he may stop.
“He never took Christian Life seriously, did he?” I ask.
“He said he did,” Leigh says, her voice bitter, “but I didn’t believe him.” She turns to watch as the ranger creeps slowly past us. He waves. I wave back. It is too lovely a day to go looking for trouble. I don’t know what the pay is, but I wouldn’t mind the job, cruising around the parks in perfect weather, hoping to catch couples making it in the backseat.
Leigh, I see, has some of her father in her. There is an unrevealed vein of anger at Art I haven’t tapped into yet.
“You wanted to believe him,” I say, encouraging her.
“That’s pretty obvious.”
She wets her lips, and her voice becomes high with indignation.
“My husband was a con artist of the first order. He could make you think black was white before you knew it. Of course I wanted him to believe in Jesus Christ. What was wrong with that?”
Am I the one being conned? She sounds so convincing my reaction is to doubt her. Still, I ask, “Did he make you doubt your faith?”
Leigh’s voice takes on an accusing tone.
“He could ridicule something without you even realizing that’s what he was doing. Before I knew it, I had begun to question the book of Genesis.”
Her look of astonished anger seems genuine. I try to put myself in her place. Despite her exquisite beauty, she has never lived in the world like a normal woman.
My supposition until now has been that anyone who looks like this can’t be naive. I realize I have been applying the same standards to Leigh that I apply to Sarah and to Rainey, but their situation is not even remotely similar. If Sarah and Rainey did not want to take the Bible literally, there is no one on earth who could talk them into it.
“You had to realize at some point Art was calling into question everything you and your father had lived for,” I say, not quite asking a question. What better motive for murder? If her actions weren’t a crime, they would be easy to justify. A jury made up of Christian Life members would probably acquit her in five minutes or at least would keep her out of jail.
Leigh looks pained as she admits, “It wasn’t as easy to see that as you think. For the first time in my life, I guess, thanks to my husband, I began to rebel against my father. Art was subtle about it at first. It was only right before he died that he really began to criticize Christian Life.”
I watch as the ranger drives back by. He waves again.
What a tough job.
“Was Art open about it?” I ask, wondering how much of it was getting back to Shane.
“No,” Leigh explains.
“You’d have to have known Art. In public he was charming and would give a million excuses for us not being up there more. In private, he made fun of my father.”
The prosecutor’s office would have a field day with this information. It is as damaging to Leigh as it is to her father. It hits me that it is not out of the realm of possibility that Leigh and her father could have planned this murder together. They certainly had a motive. Perhaps at the last moment someone is going to step forward to support Leigh’s alibi that she was at the church the entire time.
“Where has your mother been in all of this?” I ask, struck by how little Pearl Norman figures in her account.
Leigh shrugs as if the answer is obvious.
“Mother’s been out of the loop for as long as I can remember.”
I’m put off by her apparent callousness, but I think I can understand. She’s been looped for years, is what she means. You learn to maneuver around a parent like that and pretend things are normal. Two cars come roaring toward us. I know there is more that she needs to tell me, but it will have to wait, as an ancient Volkswagen and an equally old Dodge Dart swing in next to the Blazer. Six teenagers equally divided between boys and girls spill out and come toward us. They look like punks to me, though Sarah is constantly telling me I judge kids too harshly. The guys instantly begin to give Leigh the eye. Their girls, dressed in jeans, pale in comparison.
Though the age differences are clearly obvious (Leigh looks older than twenty-three), one of the guys can’t resist saying to her, “Hey, why don’t you drop this old fart and come with us?”
My manhood is threatened, but I can’t very well fight a kid, especially not one this big. Though I am an inch under six feet, this boy goes at least six feet two inches and looks in a lot better shape. My first and last fight in the last thirty years (less than a year ago) cost me a tooth. I am too young for a full set of dentures, so I mutter, “She doesn’t want to spend the afternoon changing your diapers.”
Naturally, this gets everyone’s attention, and I’m quickly surrounded by three kids whose ages barely add up to my own. Wonderful. In the course of twenty seconds I’ve gone from being a lawyer who has finally conducted a decent interview to becoming a hopeless jerk.
“I think pops wants his ass kicked,” the smallest kid says, clenching his fists.
I could probably whip him if I got lucky. Leigh looks frightened, though it seems extremely unlikely that she is in any danger of being harmed or raped. The three girls who came with the boys are plainly unhappy with the turn of events, even though they are silent. Their expressions range from disgust to jealousy. I wish one of them would announce that she will be organizing a sexual boycott if there is trouble, but the silence grows as I rack my brain for a suitable reply. Finally, I come to my senses and allow us all to save face.
“I’m not looking for trouble,” I say.
“All I’m trying to do is take this woman back to Christian Life, where I picked her up an hour ago.”
I have said the magic words. The least attractive of the girls, a dumpy blonde in denim overalls with hair the texture of straw, says, apropos of nothing, to her surprisingly sexy neighbor on her left, “I got an a
unt who goes there. She says the minister’s really cool.”
Without missing a beat, Leigh says, her voice strong and confident, “He’s my father.” She doesn’t add that she suspects he is a murderer or that she is believed to have shot her husband through the heart. Nor does she add that one of her lawyers thinks the other one may somehow be involved. I would be willing to bet my false tooth that none of these kids has ever heard of Leigh. My bias against this motley crew is so strong it is next to impossible for me to concede they know much beyond each other’s names. Most information among the young, unless it is gossip, is baggage whose weight they consider excessive. The group parts like the Red Sea, and my client leads me to the safety of the Blazer.
Whatever closeness Leigh and I achieved (and I have at least the illusion that she has confided in me) vanishes We return to her parents’ house like a couple on their first real date, which didn’t quite work out. I feel I was near some information that would explain her to me. My remaining questions go ignored as she insists upon returning to the Christian Life compound. Instead, she protests mildly, “Why’d you say something smart to that boy? They could have hurt us.”
I look over at her to see if she is serious. I am so frustrated I’m about to burst. The last hour has convinced me she is covering up for her father in some manner, but I don’t know how to get it out of her. I can’t remember the last time I felt this irritated with a client.
“Was I supposed to kiss his ass?” I say crudely.
“I suppose I should have told him to be my guest.”
Shocked by my reaction, she seems to cower against the door.
“Men are such bullies,” she complains.
“You don’t sound any different than those boys.”
“You’re forgetting I backed down,” I remind her.
Bullies, are we? Is she talking about her father or Art or both? As we hit the traffic near town, I try again.
“What did Art bully you into doing?”
I look away from the road to see her reaction. For an instant I see anguish in her eyes, but she says nothing.
What was it? I know there is something she wants to tell me but can’t. I blurt out, “I think you know your father killed Art but you won’t admit it.”
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