Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  “Dillingham has connected with most of the jury,” Carol reported. “Take his opening statement, for example. I noted mimicry in the body language of several jurors—when Dillingham folded his hands or touched his chin, they did the same. It shows a subconscious connection.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning Dillingham found their wavelength, and they accepted what they heard from him.”

  Consulting her notes, she pointed out pictures on the wall.

  “Jurors one, four, six, and seven are especially affected by Dillingham,” she said. “I note open hands, and heads tilted to the side, indicating interest.” She sighed. “I’m afraid there has been very little negative body language toward Dillingham.”

  Martin flipped both middle fingers at the drawings and growled, “Read my body language.”

  “The jurors are, ah, less accepting of your case,” Carol said.

  “Don’t sugarcoat it,” he scolded. “If I gotta eat horse shit, let me savor the flavor. Makes me work harder.” He fished his eyeglass case from his coat pocket, opened it, saw a spider inside, frowned, and closed the case.

  “I’m noting a lot of fidgeting when you make your points—a sign of discomfort,” Carol said. “Two jurors crossed their arms as you spoke today; another crossed her legs. It’s defensive posture, an indicator of closed-mindedness.”

  “They don’t like what they’re hearing.”

  “Jurors two, three, and ten kept their heads down during your questioning this afternoon, which suggests they had reached negative conclusions. Worst of all, juror thirteen looked away and rubbed the back of her neck, which tells me she had mentally checked out of the process.”

  Martin looked at the sketch of juror thirteen, a heavyset fifty-year-old sales manager. “She’s made up her mind to convict him already. Goddamn!” He sighed and wiped his hand over his face. “So who can I work with?”

  Carol tapped a pen on the sketch of juror eleven, a pointy-chinned kid with a hard stare and a dark mustache as thin as a shoelace. “Alec Black,” she said. “Age twenty-two, an art-school graduate who studied film noir.”

  “Now working retail at Pottery Barn,” Martin guessed.

  “The food-services industry,” she corrected. “But he’s all yours.”

  “The kid stares through me the whole time. I thought he hated me.”

  “He maintains eye contact and open posture for you, which is good. And he is the only juror who openly despises Ethan Dillingham. It couldn’t be more obvious—he does everything but moon him.”

  “Skeptical of the law, eh?”

  “That skepticism probably comes from trouble in his teens. He’s got a juvie record, not serious—breaking and entering, vandalism, petty theft. He pleaded innocent but was convicted in a closed hearing in family court. Spent six months locked up at the training school. His counselor reported that he left more bitter than when he got there. But no arrests since he got out.”

  Martin raised an eyebrow at her. “Shouldn’t that record be sealed? How’d you get that?”

  She smiled and licked her lips. “When you put me on jury research, you told me to use all the tools at my disposal.”

  Martin covered his ears. “I don’t wanna know—if I have to testify, I can say you never told me. Do you think Dillingham knows this kid is trouble for him?”

  “I’m not the only one charting the jury. You wouldn’t need an expert to see that this kid is solidly on our side.”

  “Which means Dillingham will try to get him kicked off. We can’t depend on hanging the jury with one holdout. Tell me who else I got.”

  “This guy,” she said, tapping juror twelve’s picture. “William Povich. Worked for the paper as a reporter until a couple years ago—won all sorts of investigative awards, and was a Pulitzer finalist. Now writes obituaries on the night shift.”

  “Huh—a fallen star?”

  “More like crashed and burned,” she said. “He’s not in your pocket yet, but he’s got an open mind. Keeps his head up, very neutral posture. And he has held eyes with Peter several times. I’m reading curiosity and an honest desire to find the truth.”

  Martin stared at the picture in silence for a full minute. “I worry about the kid, Alec Black,” he said finally. “He’s young; he could be bullied. But not this guy, a former reporter—he could swing votes.” He folded his hands into a little pyramid and spoke to the drawing, “How do I get inside your head, Mr. Povich?”

  fifteen

  Habits form fast: As the jurors filed onto the yellow school bus borrowed from the city of Providence, they did their best to recreate the seating assignments from the jury box. Billy plopped down beside juror eleven, Alec Black, the smoldering kid in the monochrome outfits, who was cultivating a bandito mustache.

  “I love a field trip,” Billy said in a low voice as the doors wheezed closed and the bus grumbled away from the courthouse with the jury, a court clerk, two sheriffs, both trial lawyers, a court stenographer, and a judge in a gray chalk-line suit but no robe.

  “It’s all an act,” Alec said. “This is a Soviet-style show trial.” He stared out the window, looking grim.

  Billy recoiled from him, feeling singed. Then some long-buried reporter’s instinct surfaced; he wanted to know this kid.

  “How did somebody so young become so cynical?” Billy asked. It was an honest question, not a comment or a condemnation.

  Alec looked at Billy. “How can somebody your age be so naive?”

  The bus inched along beside the river canal as they passed through the financial district, lurching from stoplight to stoplight in heavy morning traffic.

  Billy smiled. The kid was sharp. The trial was only in its fourth day, and it was obvious most of the jurors were ready to vote their fears. They wanted Peter Shadd locked away, not because of the evidence—there wasn’t much—but because he had already proven himself a criminal beyond any doubt; they believed he had an evil heart and that he might hurt them someday.

  “My mind’s open,” Billy said.

  Alec stared out the window again. Twenty pigeons pecked at french fries spilled over the sidewalk. “You and me are the only ones who wouldn’t vote him guilty right now,” he said. He put his thumbs together and made a U with his hands. He squinted through the U at the pigeons and then panned his hands to one side. “I’d film that scene in black and white, real low contrast, to let the birds blend into the sidewalk—it’s symbolic of what they do: They’re creatures of nature that blend into the cityscape and become almost invisible.” He smoothed his thin mustache with a finger and then added with contempt, “Other than you and me, there’s nothing but sheep on this bus.”

  Billy glanced around. They were not supposed to discuss the case, but he was confident nobody could hear them.

  “What most people don’t realize,” Alec volunteered, “is that the justice system isn’t as high-minded as on TV. The courthouse is a manufacturing plant, and the product isn’t justice; it’s convictions. Prosecutors are measured by how many convictions they ring up. Truth? Justice? No—can I win this case? If not, they don’t prosecute. Instead, they pressure penniless kids with no lawyers to take deals, because the plea bargains help their case-disposal ratios. Just look at Dillingham. Why is he so anal-retentive? Why does he object over everything? He’s trying to run for governor and he’s protecting his conviction ratio.”

  Billy said, “You sound like you speak from experience.”

  “The best teacher.”

  The bus freed itself from city congestion and bumped over old trolley tracks, moving through the city’s unofficial red-light district, past a topless bar painted pink and two kinds of porno shops—the kind that advertises with black stenciling on a nondescript door next to a loading dock, and the kind that advertises in flashing red neon, and in the sports pages.

  “Take this field trip, for instance,” Alec said. “There’s no dispute that somebody shot Garrett Nickel, and no doubt he was shot by the waterfront, upriver
from where they found his body. So why are we being taken to view where he went into the river?” He waited. The question seemed rhetorical, and Billy waited, too.

  “This trip,” Alec finally explained, “has been orchestrated by the prosecution to prime our imaginations for later in the trial. So that when Dillingham says Peter Shadd went to the waterfront and shot Nickel in the back, we’ll already have the setting painted in our minds. We’ll be ripe for his suggestion. Our imaginations will superimpose Peter Shadd onto our memories of the location. It’s basic psychology.”

  Billy chuckled.

  “You laugh because you think I’m wrong?”

  “I laugh because I think you’re right.”

  “Right from the opening statements, this trial has seemed like a railroad job,” Alec said. “I’m not buying it.”

  “I can tell,” Billy said. “You practically block your ears when Dillingham is questioning somebody. Everybody can see it.”

  “I don’t care. He’s a twit.”

  “He could be our next governor.”

  “Governor Twit,” Alec said, raising his voice. A few heads turned.

  Billy grinned. “I admire your passion,” he said. “It will probably get you kicked off this jury before we deliberate, but I admire it.”

  “Would make a damn good movie script,” Alec said. “The up-and-coming filmmaker is kicked off the jury for refusing to be brainwashed by a twit prosecutor in a bow tie.”

  The stream was about eight feet wide. It led into a drainage pond that looked man-made—the edges of the nearly circular pond sloped too evenly to have been made by nature—and then it flowed slowly out toward the bay. A thick stand of phragmites had staked territory on the far side of the pond; the reed plant loved to invade wherever construction had disturbed coastline soil. A common yellowthroat, brown and yellow, with a black mask, fluttered inside the reeds. It sang for the jury: Wichity, wichity, wichity, witch!

  The stream passed through an enclave of manufacturing buildings that would have had water views—if they’d had windows. An unnamed access road ran alongside the stream. About a hundred yards downriver, a homely concrete bridge carried the pavement over the stream. The road then crossed a wasteland of pitted asphalt, heading toward a desolate cluster of corrugated steel buildings, which looked untouched and forgotten, like a movie set for a film about the end of the world.

  Farther downstream, maybe a quarter of a mile, a tremendous cargo ship, about as nautical-looking as a parking garage, had docked for unloading. Four huge mechanical cranes, painted lemon yellow, slowly turned in a million-ton ballet, moving steel cargo containers as big as trailer homes. To the right of the ship—to the southeast—the river widened into Narragansett Bay. To the north, giant storage tanks squatted along the shore wherever the land jutted out into the water. The tanks held oil and gas that had come by sea to one of the oldest ports in America.

  The bus hissed to a stop.

  The stenographer dismounted first, carrying her clunky portable note-taking equipment. The judge, his court clerk, and the lawyers exited next, along with one sheriff; the other sheriff waited onboard with the jury.

  Once the stenographer had set up on a tiny three-legged stool in front of her keyboard, the sheriff led the jury off the bus.

  The air smelled swampy. A southern breeze blended the odors coming off the salty sea. The sun was hot on Billy’s neck, and bright, too; he put a hand above his eyes as a visor. He could hear the distant hum of the cranes on the cargo ship. Otherwise, the place seemed deserted. A push to develop the area with new businesses had obviously failed. The building across the street was a half-finished tomb of steel and cinder block, festooned with graffiti. Maybe the contractor’s paycheck had bounced, and he had packed up his crew and abandoned the job.

  A short distance down the road, somebody had smashed the Plexiglas in a newspaper box chained to a utility pole beside the river. There was no traffic; a police car parked a quarter mile west ensured that the jury would not be disturbed. The jurors clustered in the street.

  The clerk swore in a state police detective. The trooper was a monstrous man of six-five, in better physical shape than a Superman action figure. His hair had been buzzed to blond fuzz. He was in uniform: gray slacks with red piping down the side, and tall tan boots laced almost to his knees. He held his wide-brim hat under an arm.

  Through gentle questioning by Dillingham, the trooper described for the jury what investigators had found. “The first blood spatter was over here,” he said, walking toward the graffiti-covered building. He stopped a few steps from a wall decorated by spray-can Picassos. Balloonlike red letters crowded into one another on the wall. They said:

  he that believeth shall not make haste

  A philosophical vandal? Who had heard of such a thing?

  “He was likely shot here by the building,” the officer said. “And then he went this way, toward the stream.” He walked toward the jury, which parted to let him pass. “We found a trail of blood on the street.”

  The trooper stopped at the rust brown pipe railing between the water and the road. “He would have entered the water somewhere around here,” he said, “after going over the rail. He had been shot four times with a twenty-two-caliber firearm. Three of the four bullets entered through the back. He was also shot one time in front, in the rib cage—here.” He lifted his right arm and gestured to a spot just below his pectoral muscle.

  “The autopsy showed that Garrett Nickel drowned, though the gunshot wounds would have proven fatal,” the officer continued.

  He looked over the rail, to the stream.

  “The water is approximately four feet deep. It’s probable he was mortally wounded when he jumped or fell in and could not save himself, despite the shallowness. From this point, I believe that the flow of the stream carried the remains”—he slowly stretched a hand down the stream, toward the bay, mirroring the flow—”until the body reached open water and became snagged approximately three hundred yards south of here, where the remains were discovered by two teenaged brothers digging for quahogs. The body, dressed in tan cotton pants, a checkered flannel shirt, and running shoes, was positively identified through dental records as that of Garrett Nickel.”

  The trooper paused a moment to consult a flip-top notebook that looked toylike and silly in his huge hand.

  He said, “The discovery of the body came three and a half days after Garrett Nickel escaped from custody. Due to the condition of the remains, which had been in the water for some time, the medical examiner was unable to fix a time of death with certainty.” He folded his notebook and put it away. Then he nodded to Dillingham. He was finished.

  Martin Smothers questioned the officer in a brief cross-examination.

  “Did you find any blood at this site that belonged to Peter Shadd?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find fingerprints here belonging to Mr. Shadd?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find any clothing or objects belonging to Mr. Shadd?”

  “No.”

  “Any physical evidence at this site—anything—that would prove Mr. Shadd was here?”

  The trooper paused a moment. His big fists clenched and unclenched. “No,” he said.

  Martin smiled. “Then I guess we’re done here.”

  sixteen

  The first clue that Billy was in a dream: the five leg breakers chasing him in one white Caddy—five muscle men for five bookies and sharks, to whom Billy owed various amounts of cabbage. Since when did those guys work together?

  Billy ran from them, around a corner, down an alley between two clapboard triple-deckers plastered with signs stenciled in a language he did not understand.

  The leg breakers were in front of him. The five men had fused into one hulk, which was grinning like a madman, at the controls of a steamroller. Except that the roller part that flattens the asphalt was not smooth; it was spiked and made of chrome.

  Billy stopped running and checked his wat
ch.

  The red second hand was turning the wrong way. He hid the watch under his hand for a second and then checked it again. Now his watch was digital. It said 42:42.

  “This is a dream,” Billy declared. He felt relief. The leg breakers were gone.

  He heard the echo of a suggestion planted by his conscious mind: Look at your hands.

  Immediately, Billy looked at his hands. They were blurry a moment, and then sharpened.

  Experts in lucid dreaming recommend focusing on an object at the critical moment when the dreamer, still asleep, becomes aware he is in a dream. Your hands are always with you, so the experts say to look at your hands. For the past three months, Billy had performed lucid-dreaming exercises before bed—reminding himself to watch for dream “cues,” the ridiculous events that happen only in dreams, and then to look at his hands. These were his last thoughts before he fell asleep.

  When it worked, Billy could take conscious control of his dreams, usually for a short while before he woke up. He had begun these techniques to fight the random violence he had watched every night as his subconscious indulged in revenge against the crippled cop.

  His hands in focus, Billy looked around the dreamscape.

  He was in Roger Williams Park, the four-hundred-acre Victorian park of fields, lakes, and woods dedicated to the founder of Providence. It was winter and the ground was white. Lucid dreams are full of sensations, and Billy felt his face tighten against the cold. He could feel the weight of his body on the bottoms of his feet—a subtle detail that perfected the illusion.

  Billy was on top of a hill, looking down a long road.

  To his left, a broad slope of snow sank lazily away from the street. Hundreds of tracks left by sleds crisscrossed the snowfield. From his vantage point, Billy could see the Temple to Music, a monument of Vermont marble, hollow inside and fronted by stone pillars—looking like the Lincoln Memorial’s little brother.

  This was where Billy had seen Maddox several months after the crash. The mangled cop had been in a wheelchair that afternoon. Like Billy, he had come to hear jazz. That night, Billy’s nightmares began.