Levine felt lightheaded as he always did when daylight burst into the muggy, dark tunnel that was a homicide case. He glanced over at Washington, whose nod acknowledged that a special-circumstance-life-without-parole-murder had just collapsed to a winnable self-defense. Levine knew then that his streak, short as it was, would continue, and justice—maybe even Justice itself—would again be served.
A cool breeze gusted up the street from the bay. Levine watched a Taco Bell wrapper swirl up into an erratic flight down the blood-spattered sidewalk. A chill shuddered through him as the crinkled paper came to rest between the van’s flattened front tires. It felt arctic in its depth and radiated outward from an emptiness in his chest, rather than inward from the wind against his face. He looked back and forth between the old man and Washington and saw that neither had joined him in the sudden winter. For them, it was still spring.
“Where you been living?” Washington asked the old man.
“In the Rescue Mission when I can stand the company.” The man tilted his head toward a brush-strewn lot down the block. “In them bushes when I can’t.”
“And the night before last?”
“I wasn’t in the mood for company.”
Washington pulled out a business card, wrote a note on the back, then handed it over. “Show this to Mr. Patel at the Melrose Inn. He’ll give you a room for tonight. I’ll come by before checkout.”
The man looked down at the dollar in his hand, then grinned up at Levine.
“Not exactly the federal witness protection program, is it?”
Levine gazed up at the descending second hand on the courtroom clock as he walked from the defense table toward the prisoner’s box. The rotating metal sliver seemed to morph into a knife freefalling toward its target as Paul Washington’s voice rose up inside his brain:
Maurice’s voices are on a timer.
“Line 54, ” the clerk announced. “Hicks, Maurice. 187PC, Special Circ.”
Levine felt the marble tiles beneath his feet turn to muck. His legs weakened. The file folder in his hand softened with sweat—and in that moment he understood the end toward which the judicial means were now aimed.
In a thousand days, more or less, but as inevitably as the tides ebbed and flowed with the circuit of the moon, he and Maurice would once again stand together in this place, and another human being would lie drained of life on an autopsy table in the county morgue a hundred yards away.
Levine slogged the final steps, then came to a stop facing Maurice standing behind the low wooden barrier, his wrists cuffed to a waist chain.
The slap of paper against wood behind him told Levine the clerk had handed Maurice’s file up to the judge.
“I went out to the scene,” Levine whispered to Maurice, succumbing to the pressure of his client’s childlike expectancy, not knowing how his next sentence would begin or where it would take him.
Levine felt the judge’s gaze painting crosshairs on the back of his neck. His forehead warmed. He licked his dry lips. He again looked up at the clock. He felt his hands clench as if grasping for magic words that would prevent the second hand from completing its orbit.
The judge fractured the moment. “Mr. Levine, are you representing the defendant?”
Levine turned toward the bench, and bought himself time with the currency of legal exchange: “Yes, Your Honor. Stuart Levine appearing for Maurice Hicks. May I have a moment with my client?”
Levine watched the judge inspect Maurice, knowing what he was seeing: dreadlocks matted, jumpsuit soiled and wrinkled, face revealing the first vibrations of an emerging mania. The judge looked back at Levine and smiled as if to say, “Just get it done before your client goes berserk and the bailiffs have to wrestle him back to the holding cell.”
Levine again faced Maurice. He heard his own breathing, like an updraft levitating him from the floor. He felt himself hovering, poised in that centripetal moment between past and future—and stopped the clock:
“We’ve got no one to pin it on.”
Maurice’s eyes turned wild at the image of being caged in a maximum security prison, the rest of his days spent fighting off demons, most imaginary nighttime hallucinations, but others as concrete as a tattooed skinhead sharpening his toothbrush into a dagger in the next cell.
Levine leaned in closer, his voice still low, but now intent and conspiratorial.
“How long can you make it last in a locked ward if I can get the judge to send you 1368?”
“The rest of my life,” Maurice swallowed hard, “if I have to.”
Levine stepped to the podium, and with the same conviction with which he accused an innocent ex-husband of murder, said:
“Your Honor, my client is incapable of understanding the nature of the proceedings and is therefore unable to assist in preparing his defense. I’d like him sent 1368.”
The judge glanced over at the deputy district attorney. “Any objection?”
The D.A. opened his folder. Levine prayed to a God in whom he didn’t believe that the prosecutor would agree once he spotted the words “hearing voices” in the offense summary. Levine watched his eyes scan the page, then stop.
“No objection, Your Honor.”
The judge glanced down at the top of the clerk’s head. “Give me a date in six months.” He then looked over at the bailiff. “You don’t need to bring in the defendant if he still isn’t competent, just forward the report.” The judge made a note in the file, then flipped it closed. “Let’s move on to the next case.”
“Line 55 . . .”
“Hey, Stuart. Hold up.”
Levine turned at the sound of Paul Washington’s voice cutting through the roar of the traffic on the nearby freeway, and then waited at the crosswalk. The investigator’s approaching figure was lost for a moment in the glare of an orange and yellow sunset shimmering off the Hall of Justice windows behind him.
Washington began speaking two steps away. “What do you want me to do with the old guy in the Hicks case?”
“Let him go back to the bush he crawled out from.”
“You sure you don’t you want to depose him and preserve his testimony? Another cold winter and he might not live long enough to testify for Maurice in his trial.”
“There’s never going to be a trial.”
Washington drew back. “It was textbook self-defense. He was going to walk. If I was still in homicide, I might’ve cut him loose myself.”
Levine gazed into the distance, backtracking in his mind, trying to locate where he’d turned onto the path he’d followed after he climbed out of the sandbox that had been his career and slammed the door to the psych ward from which Maurice would never emerge.
Washington searched Levine’s face, then shrugged. “I don’t get it. What about you being the Defender of Justice and all that?”
After a few moments of silent struggle, Levine located the signpost marking the fork in the trail. He wasn’t at all surprised he’d missed it, for it had been written by an all-too-familiar hand in invisible ink. He looked back at Washington.
“Let’s just say I didn’t want to ruin my streak.”
Copyright © 2012 Steven Gore
* * *
STRANGLE VINE
SHELLEY COSTA | 6813 words
Okemah, Oklahoma, June 3, 1911
I don’t see him first thing. Or even second thing. And when I do see him, I don’t recognize him, he’s just that much too far upriver in the boat. Me, I’m standing downriver from the bridge, where it all happened not even two weeks ago, still looking for their shoes. Hers and L. W.’s. It’s not that I think I’m likely to find them—they might have been stolen, or they might have been left back at the farm in Dark Town and then stolen—nothing lasts long around here, I’m noticing—but every day after school, where Mama teaches fifth grade, I come back to the bank of the Canadian River and I look.
I have a good long stick I use for pulling at anything that looks like a shoe out there not too far from the riverbank.
Sometimes I think my heart will break all over again if I don’t find those shoes. But then sometimes I think it’ll break if I do. I only know for sure I have to come. It gives me something to do because when you’re twelve and the whole place is run by the devil it’s really all you can do.
If those same worn-out shoes I saw on Laura and L. W. every day are all I, Josie Templett, can save, I figure at least it’s something. It’s early June now, and the bank manager walks to his job managing the First National Bank like nothing ever happened, only I notice he got a new suit from the Sears Roebuck catalog like maybe he needed something clean and new, and the McLaren bay horse and wagon that brought them here—brought all of us here, really, that night two weeks ago—sits hitched outside the hardware store just waiting for its next load, its next delivery. But this time, maybe something different from humans. That might make a nice change. And the women whisper and just beat the rugs harder and argue longer over the clotheslines because when the whole place is run by the devil, that’s all they can do.
And Ella Joy Darnley has cuts and bruises, which Mama and me notice, but then we live next door to Sheriff Darnley and his poor wife. And that silly parson, just days after it all happened, was redder in the face than usual, and delivered that week’s sermon on charity and forgiveness and your brother’s keeper—nothing new there—in a voice so loud he nearly choked on his own spit, and then he acted like he had done his job. He slammed the church door shut behind the last few to leave. The Knights got together at the lumberyard to plan the annual ice cream social, that’s what they said, but we all knew it was to get their stories straight, in case somebody comes around to ask, some reporter, or that traveling magistrate, who must have got lost. And the jail got swept out with no more care than usual, because this here is Okemah, Oklahoma, and nothing ever happens here. Nothing except love mischief and horse thievery and shoplifting and whatever the slick strangers breezing through town try to talk you into buying or believing.
But then there he is. Floating, not moving, in a skiff half in and half out of the water. I can hardly make him out for sure there, the sun casting the shadow of the bridge over that upriver patch of riverbank. Suddenly I hear a cow lowing somewhere close. Somewhere through those woods on the far side is a pasture and just a regular day for cows. All they have to worry about at nightfall is whether they get back to the barn all right.
I set down my stick and head toward the skiff, keeping the bridge between me and the sheriff, because Tom Darnley isn’t the kind of man who appreciates being taken by surprise. Which in some ways, I see as I sidestep a water moccasin coiled on a little rock pile half out of the water, is how all the trouble started. Trouble is what they call it at the five and dime, and Damn Foolishness is what they call it at the bakery. Righteous Vengeance is what they call it at the lumberyard, and the Regrettable Incident is what they call it in the sheriff’s office, in case anyone takes notes or cares. Looks like no one does. Except for me, who drags the Canadian River for shoes. When I’m full under the bridge, a wagon crosses over, the driver clicking at his horse to giddyap, haw, giddyap, like hellhounds are in pursuit. I hope they are. I truly do. Because now I know you can’t tell the good folks from the bad.
It’s Darnley, all right, there in the rotten old skiff someone left tied up at that bend in the river and never came back. From the cover of the bridge, I secretly watch him for a few minutes, just to see whether he moves. He doesn’t. But I’d sooner trust the water moccasin with its still, black eyes open than I would Tom Darnley with his blue eyes shut. At least with a snake you know what you’re getting. I slip out from my cover and get closer, close enough to see the man sprawled on his back in his sheriff’s uniform, his mouth hanging open, his hat upside down on the river bank.
One of his big hands lies across his chest like a kid’s, his beefy fingers half curled. Is he sleeping? The other hand hangs half out of the boat. One knee is bent, and the other leg is twisted at a funny angle. Is he dead? Could be he’s dead. But from what? No gunshots, far as I can tell. And here in Okemah, firearms is just about as creative as they get. These are impatient folks out here, Josie, said Mama one time, soon after we had moved from Philadelphia for a new life after Papa died from the consumption, and guns suit them.
I get up close to the sheriff and look him over. I know about you, mister, I tell him in my head. Clean shaven, hair cut so close you can’t even tell what color it is any more, the barrel chest pulling at the shirt buttons, the cowhide boots he makes Ella Joy polish out on the back steps, sometimes her eyes so swollen shut I don’t know how she can see what she’s doing, the thick white scars on his neck he claims he “sustained” in a bar brawl with a Creek Indian with a skinning knife, over a woman—Mama says here’s where he swaggers—but pretty much everyone knows it was a mill accident when he was a boy. No one will say, though, because the last man who laughed the truth at him had both his legs broken one moonless night on his way home from Dugan’s Bar.
I see the worn black holster at his hip. And the gun. And the badge that’s too much in the shadow of the bridge to gleam. And the empty bottle of Jim Beam that has slipped to the bottom of the skiff. I think he’s dead and I raise my arms and spin, I actually spin here on in the riverbank in my blue cotton dress and high-button shoes. The stones churn and rasp under my feet, and my circles get wider as I find the sunlight there on the bank of the Canadian River. Daylight and scrub and a dead sheriff and a blot of blue—it’s the bridge—all go soft in the tearful blur of my spinning, where anyone passing on that bridge can see, but nobody does, because here I am, crying for Laura and L. W., finding something better than lost, soaked shoes. Finding the devil dead in a rotting skiff with great gaping holes in the bow.
I hear a sound, a deep rumble, and look up to the bridge, shading my eyes, expecting another wagon, or maybe a shiny new Model T, just other weak good people finding their way across the land God left behind, but there’s nobody crossing, and I turn to the skiff. The chest, that chest, rises and falls, and even in a half-death of drink a hand flies to its holster. And all of a sudden I am back in the chicken coop, back in that coop where it all started, and all I can do is crush my whole arm against my mouth to muffle the sound of the cries I truly don’t think I can stop.
Last May 21
I tore up the road to Dark Town on my bike, leaning hard over the handlebars, spitting away the dust from my lips. I hollered something I thought sounded like a Creek war whoop as I passed Laura and L. W., making their way home in their wagon pulled by Gorgeous the mule. As I wheeled by them in the bright sunlight, L. W.’s teeth shone in his friendly black face, and he yelled “Haw!” to Gorgeous like we were racing, him and me, and his mama, Laura, started to half stand, worried about whether I was paying attention.
I heard her talking me down about dang fool tomboys who tear around on dangerous machines like reckless savages, but I knew it was because she loved me. Standing tall on my pedals where the road dipped down, I bumped along and turned, fingertips just grazing the handlebars, blowing them kisses and pushing my red hair out of my face as Laura fell back against the wagon seat, fanning herself.
Laura Nelson worked their farm alone since L. W.’s father, Roster, ran off before the baby was born three months ago. Laura shoed the mule, boiled the laundry, plowed the small field, and built the new coop when the chickens got to be too many, but she still thought young ladies—leastways, young white ladies, she said—shouldn’t go tearing down dirt roads on bicycles. It seemed to me she was hogging all the fun for the girls down in Dark Town. When she came to town to clean for my mama, she thumbed through the latest issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, amazed by the pictures of lingerie hats you could make if the laundry didn’t have to get boiled, or the vegetable silk hosiery fine ladies got to wear when they weren’t shoeing the mule, or the Lotil hand cream you could buy for skin smooth as a baby’s backside, which came in handy after a day behind the plow.
Mama sent away for a jar of Lotil and g
ave it to Laura for her last birthday. Laura cried and rubbed a bit of the white cream no bigger than the size of a tiny pebble into her rough and beautiful black hands. She liked it so much that when the baby came she named her Lotil because she liked this word for a cream that was soft and sweet smelling and came from far away. Maybe Lotil the baby would get to go someplace far away from Okemah. Maybe it would bring her white luck.
I got to the farm first, just ahead of Gorgeous, who was suddenly acting lively. The Nelson farm wasn’t much of a farm, pretty much dirt and scrub and a patch of field that Laura and L. W. planted just for their own keep, but it had been homesteaded by Laura’s granddad, a freed slave, so the land held her. She kept the shacks in good repair and the harvest canned, pickled, and root-cellared. She kept an eye on L. W., who she called her “slow and dutiful boy,” because he was fifteen which, as she put it, the Good Lord knows is the age of devilment. As far as I could tell, both the Good Lord and the devil were matters of no great concern for Laura, who was too busy to pay much attention to either, although she liked using them in her conversation.
There was a dappled horse whinnying softly in what Laura called the barnyard, that space between the chicken coop and the cabin, the reins flung loosely over the branches of a buckbrush. I set down my bike and crossed my arms, waiting to see who was creeping around the Nelson place while Laura and L. W. were off in town. As their wagon caught up to me, I heard baby Lotil fussing, and turned to see Laura’s eyes looking sharply around her property. She stepped down out of the wagon, holding a hand out, palm down, to L. W. and me, which was as good as telling us to stay put.
Just then a man appeared around the far side of the plain little cabin. He caught sight of us and headed our way. It was the deputy sheriff, name of George Loney, and I admit I felt relieved. Not just because he was one of the handsome fellas in Okemah—pretty much all that took was regular features and ears that lay flat against his head—but because he always brought little gifts like flowers he picked himself or—from what I could tell, hiding behind our curtains—what looked like frosted cupcakes to Ella Joy whenever he snuck into the house next door to ours, which was pretty reliably when her husband Tom Darnley was off on a sheriff’s call far out in Okfuskee County somewhere.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Page 2
