by Jay Brandon
Here was a defense he hadn’t thought of, though it should have come instinctively to him if he’d been a long-time defense lawyer. Blame the victim. If you couldn’t find another defense, make the victim seem deserving of killing. Here was his witness for that purpose.
Sure. He could see the stony faces of an imaginary jury, with the very real rock face of the judge beside them, as he tried to put across the idea that the golden girl had really been some trampy little flirt who’d gotten what was coming to her.
So Jordan discounted everything he was hearing from Swin Wainwright, but he stayed for half an hour to listen to him, partly because he thought no one else had. The man had had a vehemence of words dammed up in him, now gushing out and pooling around Jordan’s feet.
And Jordan found himself oddly touched. Everyone else he had talked to dismissed Kevin as an inconsequential sidelight to the story of Jenny’s death. But at least one person grieved over Kevin alone. No grave should be without a mourner.
“So you think the fight between Kevin and Wayne was over Jenny Fecklewhite?”
“Hell, yes. What else did they have to fight about?”
“Well, I heard they’d fought before, it was almost—”
“Kid stuff. Shoving each other around. Even when they were boys, Wayne’d be sleeping over here, and I’d have to go in an’ tell ’em to knock it off with the pillows or I’d put ’em in the garage.”
Mr. Wainwright sniffed abruptly, buried his head under the car’s hood again. He emerged with his harshness restored. “But this, fighting to the death, you can bet there’s a girl in that. Wayne had eyes for her, too. Course he did. She’d twitched it at him, too, bet your life on that She couldn’t stand the thought of somebody not makin’ a fool of himself over her.”
It was some time later before Swin Wainwright wound down. There were fresh grease stains beneath his eyes that did not make him look clownish. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Wainwright,” Jordan concluded. “You know I’m representing Wayne in the trial. But I—”
“Do a good job for him,” the dead boy’s father said. “Wasn’t his fault.”
It just went to prove, Jordan thought as he drove away, that there are no universal opinions. If you kept looking long enough, you could find another angle.
For the first time, he saw the possibility of a jury in this case’s future. If he could make vivid the jealousy, the pressures of small-town life that could lead one old friend to kill another—
Listen to him. Him make them understand.
He spent that night in Green Hills, his first, or rather he spent it in the motel twenty miles down the interstate, the closest accommodation for strangers. His room seemed depressingly familiar as soon as he stepped into it: linoleum floor, window-unit air conditioner, worn chenille bedspread, painted pasteboard dresser bolted to the wall. That night, his Dairy Queen cheeseburger lodged somewhere between his throat and stomach, nothing on the six cable channels, he got up suddenly from the bed and drove away. It was ten o’clock at night, but it seemed later. Main Plaza was ghost-ridden. Its empty pedestal, looming in the moonlight, looked as if the statue had walked away on business of its own. The courthouse, which seemed to absorb sunlight during the day, was now giving it back, glowing faintly. One office light had been left burning; it was lonely downtown, where no other lights kept the night at bay. Nothing was open, of course. Rolled up the sidewalks was right; even the gas station looked abandoned. He drove through the residential neighborhoods, but even there, he could see no signs of life except the flicker of blue lights leaking through screens.
He found himself at the high school and got out to walk around. The air was dead and humid, but a little cooler since the sun had gone down. Jordan was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and felt comfortable. Maybe kids were having a late-night drama rehearsal or conferring in their cars in the parking lot. Maybe he could find someone to ask about Jenny or Kevin or Wayne.
But it was summer, no kid would be caught dead near the school. Jordan sat in the shadow moonlight cast under the facade, lingering until a fake nostalgia overtook him. When he drove away, his car took him to Pleasant Grove Park. If it was ghosts he was seeking, why not go to the source?
He parked close to the death grove and walked toward it, skin prickling, but before he reached the darkness of the trees, he was blinded by a spotlight. He froze the way a brainless deer would have. As he gathered his legs to spring away, a voice shouted, “Halt!”
“Halt?” Jordan said, turning and shading his eyes.
He walked toward the squad car, its outline barely visible behind the spotlight But Jordan was sure it was a squad car because of the light mounted on the driver’s door and because of the command.
“Delmore?” he said. “Is that you?”
“Stand back! Raise your hands.”
“I will if you’ll take that goddamned light out of my face.” The driver’s door opened, swinging the light to the side. Jordan blinked. “I knew it was you, Deputy.”
“What are you doing here?” Deputy Delmore asked harshly, putting a hand on Jordan’s chest and pushing him backward.
“What’re you? Why aren’t you out on the highway harassing tourists?”
Jordan said it lightly, but Delmore didn’t accept the banter in kind. The deputy was stiff as a fence. “That was you trespassing at the high school, too, wasn’t it?” he bristled.
“My God, what a security system you people have here.”
He heard the note of pride when Delmore spoke again. “I heard the squeal on the radio. But by the time the city P.D. got there, you’d fled.”
“Fled? Wasn’t me, Deputy. There must be a high-speed chase going on right now, you’re missing out on it”
“What are you doing here?” Delmore’s voice softened a trace but still admitted no nonsense. He looked at Jordan as if he’d caught him in the church graveyard. “What are you messing with?”
“Isn’t the evidence all tucked away by now? You were the first officer on the scene, weren’t you, Deputy? You found her.”
They were standing close enough that Jordan saw the deputy’s eyes shift to the side, looking into the dark grove, where moonlight strangled in the treetops and never reached the ground. “Yes,” Delmore said softly.
“Was she dead?”
“Of course. Otherwise I would’ve called for an ambulance.”
“Had she been dead long?”
“You’d have to ask the doctor.”
“Didn’t you touch her?”
He saw Delmore’s Adam’s apple move in his throat. “She was still warm. It was July.”
“What killed her?”
“Mark here.” Delmore touched his left cheekbone. “Bad mark, almost a gouge, but it hadn’t come up a bruise because she didn’t live long enough after it to bruise. I figured that was the one that did it.”
“Who did you suspect?” Jordan asked quietiy. The deputy seemed almost hypnotized by the darkness and the sight of the fatal grove. Jordan had the feeling he could get anything he wanted out of him if he didn’t break the spell.
He was wrong. “My speculations are none of your business,” Delmore snapped. “Get over there, put your hands up on the car, and spread your legs.”
“The boy friend, didn’t you? Isn’t the boy friend or the husband always the first suspect? Or the wannabe boy friend. Terrible waste of pretty young flesh, wasn’t it, Delmore?”
“You shut your fucking mouth!” The deputy grabbed Jordan’s arm and slung him around.
But Jordan jerked free. Delmore’s fist came back but stopped. Jordan looked at it. “Is that your response when you don’t get what you want?”
The moment froze, then slowly leaked away. The deputy lowered his fist. “How did you happen to be the first officer on the scene?” Jordan asked.
“I got a call of two vehicles speeding near here. Didn’t find them, but when I cruised the park I saw the other car, the victim’s, and went looking.”
“Does your dispatcher keep a record of those calls?”
“It was anonymous,” Delmore said, looking at him dead on.
“Did—?”
“Get over here. I told you to assume the position.”
“What are you going to call it this time, Delmore, trespassing? In a public park?”
“Park’s closed.”
“Really? You should have the hours posted.”
“Everybody knows. I’ve warned enough—”
“But I’m a stranger here, Deputy.” They both hesitated. “Do we have to talk to the judge about this?” Jordan added.
“You get the hell out of here. Now you’ve been warned. Next time—”
The deputy shoved him again. Jordan let himself be ordered out.
As he drove, the squad car followed him. Jordan kept carefully five miles under the speed limit, smiling for the benefit of the rearview mirror, until the squad car impatiently pulled out and roared past him, spraying small rocks. But when Jordan reached the interstate, he saw the car waiting, crouched under an overpass. He didn’t see it pull out to follow him, but he had the strong feeling that Deputy Delmore knew where he slept that night.
He had a court appearance the next day, but not until later in the morning. On an impulse, he drove by the Fecklewhites’ house again, saw no stirrings, and went on past it to the white house down the road. When he saw Mrs. McElroy on the porch shaking out a rug, he stopped. She didn’t return his wave, but when he came through the gate, she asked, “Tea?”
“I don’t—yes, ma’am, please.”
So they sat on the porch drinking iced tea at nine o’clock in the morning. The first thing Jordan said was, “Think if I’d hung around the high school a few minutes longer, they would have arrested me?”
“None of my business,” Mrs. McElroy said, not looking at him. But added, “If Tom Delmore arrested everybody he’d like to, the jail’d be full and the town empty.”
Jordan smiled in satisfaction. Mrs. McElroy seemed satisfied, too, at having beaten back his challenge.
“I met the Fecklewhites yesterday,” Jordan said.
“Nice people.”
Jordan nodded. “Everybody sure loved Jenny.”
“She was something special,” Mrs. McElroy agreed.
“Do they have other children?”
“The twin boys that’ll be twelve before school starts and a little girl, Edwina.” By keeping her tone perfectly neutral, Mrs. McElroy invited criticism of the name.
“Are they all something special, too?”
“Not that anybody’s noticed. Not even ’specially troublesome.”
“Well, they’ve got a big reputation to live up to. Still—”
“What is it?” Mrs. McElroy asked, letting her keenness show.
“I’m just having a little trouble putting it together. After I heard so much about Jenny, I made some offhand remark about how she must have started with advantages, and then Laura Stefone took me—”
“Laura was giving you the tour, was she?” Mrs. McElroy said enigmatically.
“Yes, ma’am. It was like she deliberately took me to meet the Fecklewhites to show me I was wrong, Jenny started off no better than anybody else. And when I met Ed and Joan— well, they seem like nice people, like you say—”
“Oh, yes, after Ed’s one little stint in jail, he settled right down and made a pretty good husband. Good as husbands get, I guess.”
A hint of amusement crept into Mrs. McElroy’s voice at the sight of Jordan’s startled look. But Jordan chose to stick to his topic.
“Yes, but nice as they are, it’s hard to see Jenny coming from them. I didn’t see a book in their house, and everybody tells me what a great student their daughter was.”
“You’d’ve found some books if you’d gone into Jenny’s room, I ’magine. Ed finally built her a case when they started falling off their stacks.”
“Well, but he wasn’t the one who encouraged her to start reading, was he? You know, and I couldn’t even see her in their faces. She didn’t even look like them.”
Mrs. McElroy decided it was time she could release a tidbit. Casually. “Oh, didn’t you know? Jenny wasn’t theirs.”
“What?”
“No, no, she was adopted. Yes, I remember, Jenny just showed up at their house one day when she was a baby. Nobody’d even known Joan and Ed were looking to adopt. Joan never would say where she came from, but everybody knew. Joan’s kid sister had come from Midland to visit them one summer, and everybody saw what a wild girl she was. Pretty, though, and had a smart mouth on her, but just out of control. Joan spent the summer dragging her out of one man’s car or another. So when a year after that Joan showed up with a baby girl all of a sudden, everybody knew it was the sister’s from Midland. Parents probably couldn’t handle the sister, and the sister wouldn’t’ve wanted a baby to raise—”
“Did she come visit?”
“No, sir. She was wild right up to the end. Got killed in a car wreck years ago when Jenny was just a girl. Jenny never knew who her real mother was, I guess.”
Unless somebody had been kind enough to let her in on her family history. Even without such knowledge, she might have sensed that her parents treated her with a certain delicacy. Waiting for that wild streak, her inheritance, to display itself in Jenny’s character. The way she turned out must have been a wonderment to Ed and Joan Fecklewhite. They must have watched her grow like an exotic plant brought back from a foreign clime, wondering what strange fruit she would bear.
Having dropped a big mossy rock into his mental pond, Mrs. McElroy paid Jordan the courtesy of letting him sit and roil in thought. The heat of the ascending sun brought Jordan to himself. He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McElroy, I’m due in court. You make a nice glass of tea. May I come back for another some time?”
“I don’t know the answers to everything,” she chuckled. “But you come back and visit.”
He stopped on the porch steps. “Oh. Ed. He served time in jail, you said? When was that?”
“Oh, Lord, Mr. Marshall, ancient history. It was right before he and Joan got married or about the same time. Twenty years ago?”
“What was it for?”
She wrinkled her nose. “What is it you lawyers call beating somebody up real bad?”
“Assault?”
“That’s it. Why can’t you folks say what you mean?”
Mrs. McElroy had given Jordan more to think about than she probably realized. So Jenny had been a changeling child, not the biological child of Ed and Joan Fecklewhite at all, or even of Green Hills. How many people in town remembered ironically that “the best Green Hills had to offer the world” had actually been transplanted from outside?
And Ed Fecklewhite, her ostensible father, had a history of violence. Had the violence continued in the private confines of the family? Jordan remembered Joan Fecklewhite patting her husband’s hand, lovingly or calmingly. He’d seen wives who stayed with abusive husbands, denying for years what was clear to everyone on the outside.
The courtroom was twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. Heat rose to its high ceiling. The atmosphere was unpressured today, too. Apparently the previous hearing had ended earlier than expected; the court personnel were taking their ease in the quiet of the airy room. While he was setting up at the defense table, Jordan was surprised to hear someone speak to him.
“How’d you like your antique food?”
Jordan looked up. You talkin’ to me? The bailiff, Emilio Arroyo, clearly was. He lounged back in his chair, grinning.
Laura Stefone emerged from the court office, carrying a stack of fresh paper. Her pace didn’t falter when she saw Jordan, but she didn’t have the woodenness he’d observed in her before, either. She seemed pleased with her work as she prepared her machine for the hearing.
“I’d say it was the best antique store lunch I’ve ever had,” Jordan answered the bailiff. “I like my beef well aged.”
On his other side, Mike Arriendez chuckled. “On the hoof or in the can?” he asked.
While the DA and the bailiff appreciated their own wit uproariously, Jordan watched Laura. She wore a private smile, one in which Jordan felt included, though she obviously hadn’t sheltered much of their encounters in a cloak of privacy.
Jordan smiled along. When the laughter died, it left a conversational atmosphere in its wake. “We get lots of San Antonio lawyers,” the bailiff said, “but we never saw you down here before. Don’t you get out much?”
“Maybe I should travel more,” Jordan speculated. “Right now I’m just getting my practice established, I’ve only been out a year.”
“Take anything that comes or just criminal?”
“I wish more did come.” Jordan adopted the bailiff’s lounging attitude. “Right now I’m doing almost nothing but criminal cases and a few divorces. I’d like to get into more P.I.”
The bailiff sounded genuinely interested. “Private investigation? That pays more than being a lawyer?”
The silence was embarrassed as Jordan tried to think of a kindly way out. It was Laura Stefone who chimed in.
“He means personal injury, ’milio. He means trying to drive some poor company bankrupt because some clumsy moron tripped in their parking lot.”
“Oh, a lawyer hater,” Jordan said to her.
“Just certain kinds of lawyers,” she came back.
“Yeah, I’d like to get into some P.I. work on the side,” Emilio mused. “You need some investigation, Mr. Marshall, you keep me in mind. I know everything happens in this county.”
Jordan’s and Laura’s mouths twitched simultaneously. For a moment their eyes spoke until she turned away.
“Your Honor, I believe this date was set for me to file the remainder of my pretrial motions. You have them before you, including a motion to suppress evidence.”
“I believe we’ve already heard your motion to suppress, Mr. Marshall.”
