The Legal Limit

by Martin Clark

  “Lord, Lord,” she said. “Tell me Gates hasn’t gone and done somethin’.”

  “Gates was with me and a bunch of other people. He has an absolute alibi. We were at Denise’s, then at a lounge in Martinsville. Gates is fine on this. The police simply have to dot their i’s and cross their t’s. Their being here is routine. Once Gates is eliminated, they’ll move on.”

  She was looking at the floor, on the verge of tears. “Why would they come if he wasn’t in trouble?”

  Mason drew her closer, releasing her hand and sliding his arm around her waist. “Mom, they’re just checking things. It’s nothing serious.”

  She snapped her head up and nailed Gates with a furious stare. “Gates, certainly you aren’t part of a killin’? The drinkin’ and lyin’ and sorriness I can take—I’m used to them—but you better tell me right now you had nothing to do with what happened.”

  “Goodness, Mom, you know me better than that. I’ve done some stupid things and let you down, okay? I sure have. But you know I wouldn’t cause you this kind of grief. I—”

  “Hush,” she said, not allowing him to finish even though she’d demanded an answer. “I don’t want to hear your same old pitiful apology again.” She turned to Mason. “He was with you?”

  “All day, Mom. I promise.” He was relieved to utter a few literally honest words.

  She blinked and brushed her eye with the back of her wrist. “There’s some family I would lie for, Mason, ’cause that’s what blood does. Some I would lie for even if they don’t deserve it. And some I wouldn’t no matter what. You’re almost free of this place, Mason, so close to bein’ a success.”

  The words pained Gates, causing his mouth to shrink and his posture to lose shape. He didn’t speak, though.

  “I understand,” Mason said. “Gates couldn’t have done this. A lot of people besides me will stand up for him. I don’t know when Wayne was killed, but we were with a group of people who will vouch for Gates’s whereabouts, then at a bar miles away.” He continued to keep his arm wrapped around his mother.

  “I trust you on what we ought to do,” she said to Mason. A tear broke loose on her cheek, but her voice was steady. “You decide.”

  “I think we should tell them they can search, so long as they don’t go into your room. Everywhere else is fine.”

  “There you go,” Gates chimed in. “That’s a good solution.”

  “Whatever you think is best, Mason. I’m puttin’ this in your hands.”

  Mason removed his arm from around her. “Let’s go tell the police they’re free to search on those terms. I’ll stay with you. You don’t need to worry. I’ll be right here until they’re gone.”

  “If that’s how you see it, then that’s what we’ll do,” she said.

  The two officers both thanked Sadie Grace for her cooperation, and Owen told her he very much regretted the inconvenience, leaving everyone with the impression he truly felt bad about rummaging through her home and handling her property. They found nothing, and Mason and Gates allowed them to take the .22 rifle with them when they departed, along with a pair of substituted jeans and a shirt Gates dug from a hamper and identified as Saturday’s dress. “You can look at my shoes, but I ain’t gonna let you have ’em,” he informed Owen, helpfully raising a foot.

  “Think they’ll be back?” Gates asked as he and Mason stood at the threshold to the mudroom, watching the police car and its long, thin antenna tail poke toward the main highway.

  “I don’t know,” Mason replied. “Keep me up to speed if they do. And try to stay sober, huh? It would help the odds of your remaining quiet.”

  “I’m not stupid, Mason, contrary to what you and Mom might want to think.”

  “I never suggested you were. That’s why I know you recognize it’s your ass on the line if there’s a slipup. You’ll be the one wearing the colorful jumpsuit, pleading for cigs and extra shower privileges, not me, not Mom. Try to remember that.”

  They ate a somber supper together, silent except for requests to pass a dish and the scrapes and squeaks of silverware on plates as they cut through hamburger steak and arranged bites of vegetables. Sadie Grace packed a full meal for Mason to take with him, and Gates accompanied him to his clunker Chevy Monza. They hugged and backslapped, but Mason was on edge as he drove away with the pistol hidden in his trunk, trained as he was to always anticipate every possibility and worst-case scenario: he could wreck and the damn gun be discovered, or the cops might just have a search warrant ready to go, waiting at the foot of the drive to bust him with the .38 in his possession—pretty difficult to explain, especially since he didn’t envision his brother charging in to accept responsibility.

  He traveled cautiously, keeping to the right lane on the divided highway, lights dimmed regardless of traffic. In South Boston, he stopped at a Burger King and placed a drive-through order. He parked in a far corner, popped the trunk, pretended to search his suitcase and laundry bag, removed the cylinder they’d separated from the .38, palmed it with a napkin, pulled on his jean jacket, then sat in his car and made a show of eating his chicken sandwich and fries. Every time a vehicle circled past, his pulse would surge and the food would turn to sawdust in his mouth. A teenager in a uniform and paper hat appeared at the rear of the business, taking a cigarette break, another worry. Mason and Gates had cleaned and wiped the gun before burying it, and they’d used needle-nose pliers to damage the firing pin. The barrel had been scratched and pitted with a Phillips-head screwdriver, so that if the weapon did somehow turn up and was reassembled, its firing patterns would be useless to the forensic lab and couldn’t be traced to Wayne Thompson’s shooting.

  When the smoker returned to work, Mason placed the napkin and cylinder in the sandwich carton, bagged the carton and, wearing a baseball cap so low it hit his eyebrows, walked to a Dumpster and tossed in the sack. The remains of the sandwich, fries, and large drink and the lump of metal landed without complaint, didn’t strike bottom or clash with anything too solid. Paranoid and jittery, Mason left the parking lot and worried all the way to Richmond that a tramp or Dumpster bum would discover the pistol piece or—his luck—it would turn up miraculously wedged onto a tomcat’s nose, the perfect kind of filler for the local news broadcast.

  He went out of his way to Petersburg, where he ditched the gun frame, concealed in a Richmond Times-Dispatch, at a public green-box site. It was late when he returned to his apartment on Hanover Avenue, and his two roommates were asleep, although they’d left the TV playing and most of the lights burning. Mason lay in his bed with his clothes still on, his shoes, socks, jeans and jacket, unable to rest, his conscience flogging him, his thoughts ragged and horrific. For several nights that followed, his sleep was tenuous, fitful, just beneath a translucent surface, never either completely here or there. He’d done nothing but watch, slack-jawed, as his brother slew another man, and yet the turn of events had left him morally hog-tied, an accessory after the fact, the entire damnable bundle laid at his feet by someone he loved dearly, and that visceral, epic connection to Gates, unfortunately, was the alpha and omega, trumping everything and everybody.

  As it happened, Mason had no need to be concerned about Gates incriminating himself—he was far too narcissistic and egotistical to do or say anything that might bring him hardship. He proved to have a rascal’s capacity to write off his crime and a gift for absolute self-preservation that kept him from ever mentioning the killing, no matter how drunk or high he became. In early November, he even found a job as a floor supervisor at a textile plant in Martinsville, and he announced to Denise he was cutting back to only beer and pot—no more coke and hard liquor and three-day binges. He lost the job after six weeks, showed up for work with the giggles, sunglasses and rum tainting his breath, then packed off his dismissal on his boss, claiming the guy had it in for him for no legitimate reason. In the months after his firing, there were sporadic trips to church basements for AA meetings, a monstrous blowout with Denise that prompted her to call
Mason and hotheaded feuds with his mom followed by the usual fulsome apologies and vows to shape up. In other words, typical Gates.

  The police worked diligently to solve Wayne Thompson’s murder, but they had no leads, no witnesses and no worthwhile evidence. The shooting had occurred on a rural stretch of road, and the occupants of the closest house a mile away didn’t hear a thing, or if they did, it didn’t register in an area where most people owned guns and there was frequent hunting and target practice and carrying-on that occasionally included firing a few Jack Daniel’s rounds at a stump or the wide-open sky. Danny Owen visited Gates a second time, and Gates frowned and sighed and told the officer he simply didn’t know what else to say—they last saw Wayne at Denise’s and never saw him again. Owen flew to Florida and interviewed Cousin Suzi, hounded Allen Roberts about his alibi after the pool game, contacted Mason’s credit card company and the girl he’d met at Peter’s Lounge, took a trip to Charlotte to question a drug dealer who’d been arrested with a .38 and obtained statements from Wayne’s coworkers and family as well as the owner of the Old Dominion. According to the laboratory, there was marijuana and a small amount of methamphetamine in Wayne’s car, but the RX-7 was devoid of anything helpful in the murder investigation. Toxicology revealed he was legally drunk; the small club next to him suggested a confrontation. Owen and an older deputy returned the .22 rifle to Gates in March and futzed around with a few more questions, but it was apparent they had nothing fresh or important to quiz him about.

  The file went from Danny Owen’s desk to the very front of a cabinet drawer to a thick collection of papers tucked behind ten or fifteen other baffling problems to a case number on a computer disk of unsolved crimes to a statistic that showed up every year on the report the local office sent to the state. Letters were written to the paper highlighting the sheriff’s department’s failure to solve a cold-blooded murder, the sheriff himself had to hear about his inability to bring the case to a conclusion when he stood for reelection in 1987, the family offered a reward and there were fits and starts and false leads and flashes of effort until there was eventually nothing left but inertia, lore and a rubber-banded old folder with a battered tab and a case number from an obsolete system. When Danny Owen retired in 1991, he didn’t even mention the Thompson murder to his successor, instead spent most of his time briefing him on an undercover drug operation and a theft ring that was targeting vacation homes in Kibler Valley. Even the gossips and busybodies lost interest, as they generally do the moment there’s something new to excite their tongues.

  While the death of Wayne Thompson would always trouble Mason, the raw, punishing anguish started to recede after a couple months—it became permanent in him but less acute, a submerged shame that would occasionally be roused and set his palms to sweating or cause a bolt of adrenaline to burn across his abdomen. He’d see a cop show or hear the name Wayne or hit some catalyst—an RX-7 always did the trick—that would send him through a rabbit hole of speeding thoughts and blurs and fragments and return him to the side of Russell Creek Road and the sight of his brother holding the gun, his arm fully extended.

  Near the end of the year at law school, Mason’s guilt and concern were unexpectedly piqued when he received a brass-tacks assessment of his brother’s situation during an advanced criminal law seminar. The professor had organized a panel discussion on how to properly defend a murder case, advertising the event throughout the university. With a single exception, the panel contained the usual collection of academics who’d never set foot in a courtroom and habitually filed tedious, sixty-page amicus briefs in high-profile appeals so they could see their names in the newspaper or snag an appearance on a Sunday talk show. For most of the presentation, the guy everyone in the class wanted to hear from had very little to say, and when the moderator solicited student questions, the peacock professors jumped in with clever answers and grand, drawing-room circumlocutions.

  Jim “Bulldog” Young was one of the best criminal trial lawyers in Virginia, a charming, robust man whose genuine decency never failed to influence a jury and whose capacity to take a witness apart and not seem like a showboat had served him well for thirty years of practice. He was wearing a brown suede jacket and an ordinary tie, a white shirt. He was quick to smile, listened with a gentleman’s interest to what was being said, and seemed satisfied to let his fellow panelists dominate the show while he scribbled notes, sipped water and fingered the point of his tie. At last a questioner called him by name and asked for advice: “Mr. Young, what’s the most important thing to consider when you try a murder case? If you had to give us one insight?”

  Without any flair or preening or affect, Young rocked back in his chair. “Only thing that matters in a murder case is did the fellow who’s dead need to be killed, and did the right sonofabitch do the job.”

  The class roared and laughed and stood for an ovation, Mason along with everyone else. As he was leaving the lecture, though, he became pensive when he replayed the lawyer’s response. If the police ever located enough evidence to take Gates to trial, his prospects were not too sound when judged by Young’s standard, and Mason understood there was a chance he could be dragged into the bog right behind his brother. He stopped suddenly in the hallway outside the classroom, causing the woman behind him to veer off and graze him with her backpack. He repeated Young’s test, mouthing it quietly while a stream of yapping law students washed through the hall. “Zero for two,” he said out loud. “Damn.”

  Chapter Three

  By early 1990, Gates had journeyed around the bend. His mother, with Mason’s blessing, had evicted him from her house, the Corvette was a two-hundred-thousand-mile heap of scarred fiberglass, bungee cords, duct tape and leaky gaskets, Denise had served him with a no-trespass notice and was engaged to an algebra teacher at Patrick County High School, and he was residing with a twenty-year-old feckless skank and her illegitimate toddler, living off her food stamps and welfare check and what he could earn peddling small amounts of pot and cocaine. On rare occasions, he’d do some logging or help in a hayfield or get paid under the table for a week of warm-weather construction work. Patrick County being what it was, most people greeted him with a word or two and a stony expression or simply acknowledged him with a stiff nod when they saw him in town. His hair was too long, his clothes unkempt, his conversations laden with hustle and excuses and get-rich-quick schemes. He’d spent a month in jail in 1989, after he busted out the windows of a girlfriend’s car and was dumb enough to hang around making threats—an eight ball of coke in his pocket—until the police arrived to arrest him.

  To no one’s great shock, it was a failed, inept attempt to sell drugs that ultimately did him in. Very few people aspire to a job retailing baggies of marijuana or carefully build toward a career in powdered cocaine, but for Gates, it just seemed to be an inevitable fit as time went by, a hey-why-not vocation that promised easy money, scarcely any labor and a business inventory of his favorite drugs, a layabout’s trifecta. He started in the mid-eighties by selling from his own pot stash, then bought a quarter extra on credit, which he mixed with oregano and sold to his buddies in the Old Dominion’s bathroom or at the parking lot of Moody’s Funeral Home. A biker from Greensboro who went by the name Kong hooked him up with a steady supply of coke, and at first Gates simply took his payment in kind, distributing in exchange for free dope. Given the size of the community, it didn’t take long for the police to get wind of what Gates was up to, though for several years he avoided the authorities by sticking to nickel-and-dime transactions and dealing with the same people, friends he’d known since grade school and the regulars at the roadhouse.

  The serious trouble arrived in the summer of 1990. By June, Gates and his girlfriend, Sandra, were beset with difficulties. Their trailer rent was in arrears, and the landlord had seen enough, wanted them gone. The Corvette had completely given up the ghost and was parked at a haphazard angle in the yard, the grass the push mower didn’t catch outlining the car in a shaggy frin
ge. Social services had sent legal papers seeking “custody of the infant known as Jade Bon Jovi Bowman,” and Gates and Sandra didn’t like that plan one bit, hell no, vowed to fight the state tooth and nail and ranted about the injustice of it all, the idea that a bunch of meddling bastards thought they could take Jade away from a parent who loved her so unconditionally. “They’re tryin’ to claim I’m a bad mother?” Sandra indignantly demanded of the poor deputy who’d delivered the paperwork to her. The fact that they would lose a monthly check, rental assistance, Medicaid and free food wasn’t important. It was the principle. The principle. Wanting only what was best for sweet Jade, they realized they’d need money for a lawyer, since Gates’s uppity brother in Richmond was no help whatsoever.

  In an effort to raise cash, Gates agreed to unload the Corvette, which would leave them only a single vehicle, Sandra’s ragtag Chevette with its mismatched, primer-colored fender. He’d received the car after graduation from high school, obtained it from a Christiansburg auto dealer who supported Virginia Tech and wanted to do all he could to ensure that the talented freshman linebacker from Patrick County understood just how welcome he was in this new world. Gates was…uh…employed by the dealership, and he drove the car home for the first time during August of 1975, in an era when the NCAA wasn’t so nosy and draconian. His friends in Patrick were proud of him and didn’t begrudge him the flashy red reward, believed he’d more than earned it, what with his daddy absent for years and he and his brother struggling to stretch Sadie Grace’s meager paycheck from the plant. Right off the bat, Gates took his mom for a joyride, kicking it up to eighty through Spoon Creek bottom, both the windows open so the warm, whipping air could add to the thrill. She squealed at him to stop but was laughing when she called him down, delighted with her boy and what he’d accomplished.