I suppress a smile. Only a woman would think of her wardrobe when she was on trial for murder.
“We don’t want to tip him off,” I say, looking for Rainey’s phone book to call the Excelsior.
“You might want to begin by asking him why Chet killed himself. Your father might say something about him before he would implicate himself. Don’t accuse your father, but give him the opportunity to talk. You may not get anything, but it’s worth trying.”
Leigh spreads her hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“I’m not going to know what to do.”
As I dial the Excelsior’s number, I smile and say, “I know just the person to teach you.”
Twenty minutes later, in Jessie’s hotel room, I intro duce the two women to each other. If they were from opposite sides of the planet, they couldn’t be more different. In her borrowed tight sweats and sunglasses, Leigh, with her voluptuous body and striking ebony hair, looks like a Hollywood starlet not trying very hard to appear incognito; Jessie, in baggy jeans and a newly purchased Razorback sweatshirt, grins like a twelve year-old boy playing hooky from school. After they have sized up each other like rivals for the lead in a high school play, Jessie winks at me.
“Get out of here for a few minutes, Gideon, while I show Leigh how to wear this thing.” She opens her hand and shows me the equipment. I marvel at the tiny microphone.
“The way you’re built,” she says to Leigh admiringly, patting her own flat bosom, “you could hide an entire recording studio in there.”
Leigh giggles and turns crimson. As far as I am aware, Jessie knows nothing about the video Leigh made. Not even for an instant can I imagine Leigh taking off her clothes before a camera. Her sensuality is essentially unconscious and must be coaxed. Art, I think, not for the first time, must have been quite a guy.
“I’ll go down to the lobby and call my office.”
“You do that,” Jessie says, escorting me to the door.
“We’ll be fine.”
Standing alone in front of the elevators, I feel slightly cheated and wonder again about Jessie’s sexuality. For all I really know, she could be a man. Damn. If I lived in California, I’d be too confused to get out of bed.
From the lobby I call Julia and am told a half-dozen re porters have called. So has Shane Norman. Good.
Shane, my man, I think, we are about to set the hook for you.
“Have you heard the rumor going around,” Julia says, not lowering her voice at all, “that you shot Chet Bracken in your front yard?”
I rub my head. I might as well hire a sound truck and broadcast it all over Blackwell County or simply let Julia ride around in the back of a pickup and talk in a normal voice.
“I’ve heard it,” I whisper. At the next phone, with his back to me, is a guy in a dark suit and sunglasses who is either almost asleep or doing more listening than talking.
“Do you believe it?” I ask sarcastically.
This is the wrong question to ask Julia.
“I dunno,” she booms in my ear.
“What I can’t figure is why you’d pick your front yard. I know you’re the kind of guy who shits in his own nest, but that’s ridiculous.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” I say, exhausted by this conversation.
“Is Dan in his office?”
“Naw, he’s off trying a million-dollar lawsuit,” Julia says, snorting at her little joke.
“Of course he’s here.
He’s too fat to go anywhere. Speaking of heavyweights, there’s this enormous Oriental man wearing a black shroud who insists on waiting for you. I can barely understand him. He’s sitting here crying his eyes out. Poor thing.”
The motel manager. I tell Julia to put him in the empty office across the hall and have him pick up the phone.
“Mr. Page, I’m so sad. So sad. My wife she not coming back. Please help me. I can’t wait no more.”
I don’t even know this guy’s name.
“You’ll be seeing my assistant, Mr. Bailey. He’ll take care of you.” I tell him how to switch me back to Julia.
Julia comes on the line and snaps, “You’ve got to help this poor man. I mean it.”
I’m moving right after this trial. I don’t care if I have to open an office on the sidewalk.
“Do you mind buzzing Dan ? I’ll ask him to see him.”
“I’m paid to keep you guys happy,” she says, and puts me on hold.
Finally, Dan comes on the line and says, “How’s it going, buddy?”
“You want to sit at the counsel table with me tomorrow and make some notes?” I ask.
“We’re gonna be flying by the seat of our pants.”
“Sure,” Dan says loyally.
“I’ve got an uncontested at ten, but I can postpone it. Want me to come over tonight to go over the case?”
Good old Dan. I think he’d amputate his right arm to help me. Too bad he can’t cut off his stomach. Paranoid about the man next to me (he hasn’t said a word in a minute), I don’t go into what’s happening above me in Room 542. Without asking for details, Dan also agrees to pretend to be my assistant and interview the motel manager, and we set a time for him to come to the house, and then I take the elevator back to the fifth floor.
Upstairs, Leigh and Jessie are fast becoming friends.
“Leigh’d be great undercover,” Jessie says dryly, “up to a point.”
She is studying Leigh with unconcealed admiration. I ask, “And what point is that?”
Jessie nudges Leigh in the ribs.
“I don’t get many requests to take off my shirt in my line of work,” she says.
“I suspect Leigh would.”
Leigh giggles unexpectedly, and for the first time since I’ve known her, I get a glimpse of the woman inside the stiff, frozen mask. I have mistaken fear for haughtiness. Jessie tells a story about an arson investigation she conducted in Southern California involving a building owned by a nude sunbathers’ association.
“I swear to God the owner talked to me buck naked. She looked so comfortable I would have joined her if I hadn’t been wired for sound.”
Jessie, even as she entertains us, remains sensitive to Leigh, who must have confided in her while I was downstairs.
“He won’t suspect a thing if you just act natural,” she says, patting Leigh on the shoulder as we talk to her about the conversation she will have with Shane. I tell her to call him and suggest they meet in his office. If her mother is there, Shane won’t implicate himself.
When Leigh calls and reaches him at the church, I notice a flicker of uncertainty on her face. I wonder if this idea will backfire. Shane has spent a lifetime dominating her. The possibility that she may put him on the defensive seems remote. Jessie, to her everlasting credit, invites Leigh to spend the night in her room after I tell her that I was followed to Rainey’s. I do not trust my old friend Kim Keogh or her cameraman not to reveal where Leigh is staying. As Leigh and I leave the room together to drive to the Delta Inn to get her car I make her promise to come by my house after she has talked to her father and picked up her clothes from her parents house. I advise her not to go back to Rainey’s.
Sarah can run over there for her clothes.
“We have a lot of work to do tonight,” I tell her.
She nods, but I can tell she is already thinking about meeting her father. I wonder how I would feel if I suspected my father had murdered my spouse. My father’s own suicide in a mental hospital when I was fourteen left me with questions that will never be answered. As we hit the freeway traffic, I am forced to admit to my self that Leigh may be conning me. Yet she seemed so innocent in the hotel room with Jessie that I was convinced for a moment I was representing a person incapable of murder. Maybe the jury will think so, too.
14
“Do you want me to go with you to Mr. Bracken’s funeral?”
Sarah asks from the couch where she is scratching Woogie. Our dog, who is on his back with his legs in the
air, seems as happy as I am that his mistress has returned and moved back into the house with all her belongings.
Unlike myself, Woogie had no one to assuage his grief at her temporary abandonment. Jason Von Jason could make a fortune in this country treating animal depression.
“There’s no need,” I say cautiously.
“I’m sure Dan will go with me.” For the longest time I have tried to shield Sarah from death, as though the loss of her mother was a quota that must not be exceeded. I slice the sausage pizza that has just arrived from Domino’s.
I sense a reluctance on her part to come to terms with what happened in our front yard only a few hours ago.
I can understand her feelings. I’m not sure it has completely sunk in on me. I check my watch. Seven o’clock. Leigh should have been here by now.
“Come wash your hands and let’s eat before this stuff gets cold.”
Sarah smirks at Woogie as if to say, “When will he learn not to treat me like a kid?” but obediently comes into the kitchen and scrubs her hands in the kitchen sink. I give her a graceful way out.
“Do you have any tests you’d be missing?”
“Actually, I do have a couple,” she says, drying her hands on a dish towel she has taken from the counter by the sink.
“I guess I better not. Did you like him?”
I open the refrigerator and take out a couple of Coke Classics and hand one to Sarah. No booze tonight, though I could use a couple of beers. Did I like Chet?
A good question.
“I think I would have if I had gotten to know him better and hadn’t been working for him.”
As we eat at the kitchen table I tell Sarah about Wynona and Trey.
“The kid was crazy about Chet,” I conclude.
“That was obvious.”
“Most children go through a stage where they worship their parents,” Sarah says dryly, wiping her mouth on a paper napkin.
Trey was a stepchild, but I won’t quibble.
“I haven’t exactly felt worshiped lately,” I say, getting a smile out of my daughter.
“How do you feel about Leigh coming over here tonight?” I add, realizing I haven’t given a moment’s thought to Sarah’s reaction. For some reason I don’t fully understand I won’t be content until I have rammed this case down my daughter’s throat. I know I risk further alienation, but I’m determined that she see the other side. Even if she is guilty, Leigh seems more human than her father.
“Weird,” Sarah confesses, “but a little curious. Our house seems to attract death these days.”
I try not to react while I absorb her remark. She’s absolutely correct. What a great father I’ve been lately.
There is a knock at the door and, of course, it is Leigh. As I glimpse her face in the glow of the porch light I realize that I had been afraid she wouldn’t show up. I invite her to share our pizza, but she tells me she has eaten with her parents. She follows me into the kitchen, and I introduce her to Sarah.
As they exchange pleasantries, I am struck by how much they resemble each other. Leigh is taller, not as dark, but her ebony hair and delicate facial structure make her look like Sarah’s older sister. She has discarded Rainey’s sweats for a white turtleneck sweater and red skirt, making me fear she intends to spend the night in her parents’ house. Smiling, Sarah informs me she has to study and takes her pizza and Woogie to her bedroom. Leigh takes Sarah’s seat at the kitchen table, and as soon as we hear Sarah’s door shut, she says, taking the tiny tape recorder from her purse, “My father doesn’t say a word on the tape that would make anyone suspect he was involved in Art’s murder.”
I try to mask my disappointment. I had naively been convinced that he would implicate himself. After the trial he might, perhaps, but not now. If he confesses to Leigh before she is tried, there is no telling how she might react. She pushes the “on” switch and I hear Shane’s voice scolding her for not telling him and her mother where she has been. Ruefully, I recognize the tone: manipulative, judgmental, perfectly calibrated to induce a sense of pity and guilt. Sounding defensive, Leigh says she was “afraid,”
“ashamed,”
“exhausted,” but in no manner explains her refusal to call her parents Shane does most of the talking but says very little of substance, making me wonder if my conversations with Sarah are equally one-sided and meaningless.
Leigh admits to taking a room in a motel and gives its correct name but omits to mention her state of drunkenness. On tape she sounds no older than Sarah.
Disappoint her father? No more than necessary, even if he might have murdered her husband. For the first time she reveals to her father that she had allowed Art to photograph her dancing naked. I had encouraged her to bring this up to get Shane’s reaction.
“How could you take off your clothes and dance nude in front of a cam era?” Shane exclaims, his voice boiling with righteous indignation. I listen hard to gauge his sincerity. If we knew he somehow had found out about her little performance Shane would have even more of a motive than he already had. He sounds angry, but there is a professional tone to his words as if he were preaching in church. Leigh does not immediately answer, giving Shane an opportunity to give further vent to his outrage:
“What did you get from displaying yourself naked like that? Is your lust so out of control that you’d do any thing to gratify it?”
Leigh no longer sounds like a woman but a child as she attempts to explain.
“I loved him. Daddy. Nobody else saw. He said that he wanted to capture my beauty forever. It didn’t seem wrong….”
“Not wrong?” Shane shouts.
“How can you say that?
You were made in the image of God, Leigh. Have you forgotten that? How can you hope to reflect the love of Jesus Christ when you let a man satisfy his nature by taking your picture with your legs splayed apart like some drug-crazed whore?”
Leigh’s voice is teary but stubborn.
“He was my husband. “Wives, be subject to your husbands.” Don’t you remember saying that in your sermons?” Though she has set up an argument, one not without its own internal logic, her voice pleads for forgiveness.
I glance at Leigh, but her eyes are shut, her lids fluttering with each blow as she relives each moment. It is as if she has forgotten why she went over to see him.
“God has given you a free will, Leigh,” Shane says severely
“You can’t justify your own sin by hiding be hind your husband.”
“You won’t try to understand,” Leigh says.
“I wanted to please him because I loved him. Didn’t God give men and women this nature to please each other?”
I listen, fascinated as always by the topic of desire.
The official line at Subiaco, of course, taught that sex was for procreation. If you were married and were trying to make a child, it was okay to like it. The practical absurdity of this dogma was apparent to every boy old enough to masturbate. The first joke at Subiaco I ever learned was couched in the familiar language of the catechism Why did God give Adam two hands? So he wouldn’t wear one out. Shane can’t, or won’t, shed the role of preacher.
“He gave us our nature to please Him,” he says, his voice didactic and cold.
“And making ourselves objects of lust does not do it.”
Leigh’s face is now buried against her knuckles. Un less she is willing to argue that evolution has dictated the female form to be an object of sexual desire, she is fighting a losing battle. Shane holds all the cards. Ethics morality, and religion are all on his side. Biology is on hers, but it is a weapon she cannot bring herself to use. She does not respond, and he continues to rant until he realizes that she will not answer him.
She clicks off the tape when he insists that she eat dinner with her mother and him.
“What was that like?”
I ask, allowing myself to speculate about Shane’s own sex life. Surely no man is more tempted to stray than a minister. Women of all ages at al
l hours of the day and night wanting assurance that they are lovable and that their lives have meaning. I would be only too happy to assure them.
“Horrible,” Leigh says, finally raising her eyes to meet mine.
“Mother cried the entire time; Daddy alternated between a grim silence and lectures. He kept demanding that I ask the judge to postpone the trial and allow me to get a new lawyer.”
I stare out the window into the darkness. Not a bad idea. I’m not even capable of getting a week’s continuance for her.
“Did he say why?”
Leigh, her voice a mixture of indignation and embarrassment, straightens her spine and looks me in the eye.
“He said you were just Mr. Bracken’s flunky that he checked your record out and you’ve never won an acquittal in a big case.”
I see the beginning of panic in her eyes. She wants me to tell her that I am a great lawyer, another Chet Bracken. I ask, “What did you say?”
“That I trusted you!” she says sharply, as if the emphasis in her voice justifies her decision.
Instead of gaining confidence, I feel more burdened than ever. I didn’t lose much sleep over the convictions of the drug dealers, rapists, pimps, and killers who made up the clientele at the Blackwell County Public Defender’s office. I will if Leigh goes to prison. I realize that the fact she was willing to tape Shane has convinced me of her innocence. If she really does trust me, now is the time to find out.
“Despite the fact you didn’t get anything on tape,” I say, challenging her, “you know I’m going to have to argue in court tomorrow that your father may have killed Art.”
Leigh drops her eyes, her long lashes a temporary screen against reality. Finally, she raises her head.
“I know.”
Mightily relieved, I resist the urge to go over and hug her. This moment has been a long time coming, and though I am exultant, I am forced to wonder what has changed her attitude. Was there something in his tone that made her doubt him? As if reading my mind, she clicks the tape back on and lets it run until I hear her voice.
“I don’t believe anymore. Daddy. I just don’t think every word in the Bible is true. Art was right. The world is older than six thousand years. The Bible was written by men who couldn’t know what we know today. They just didn’t know.”
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