Local Rules

by Jay Brandon

  “I understand Swin Wainwright’s feelings,” Christine Ca­valetti said. “Of course he’d like to think that Jenny had somehow kept Kevin hanging on, so what happened was her fault. But he’s just wrong. Jenny wanted to be rid of Kevin, but she was being too gentle about it. He was the one des­perately hanging on.”

  Desperate because he thought he was losing her, Jordan thought. To whom? Had Kevin known about Jenny’s much more important relationship—with Judge Waverly?

  He wanted to ask Chris Cavaletti some variation of that question, but in the quiet of her classroom it seemed inap­propriate. The teacher was watching him more than atten­tively as if she were probing Jordan’s mind while he questioned her.

  When his hesitation continued, Ms. Cavaletti went on, “None of us understood that attraction in the first place. Kevin’s for Jenny, I mean. What he saw in her was obvious. I think— Jenny gave more of herself to Kevin than she intended.

  “Not that way,” the teacher added hastily. Jordan hadn’t thought his expression had said anything lascivious. His eyes widened innocently.

  “I mean she couldn’t do anything halfway,” Cavaletti con­tinued. “Even the way she walked. She turned heads when she walked down the hall, and not just boys’ heads. I know male teachers in this school who made sure to be standing at their doors every day at a certain time.” She paused, obviously wanting to add something but afraid that Jordan would misunderstand again. Jordan just stood, leaning slightly toward her, face empty and receptive. “She was going to be head cheerleader her senior year, you know,” Chris Cavaletti finally continued. “That’s an elective posi­tion, very competitive, and you don’t get one vote for good grades or being nice. You have to—”

  Look good in the sweater and the little skirt, Jordan fin­ished for her silently. He could picture her, and he remem­bered his first impression of Jenny from the grainy newspaper photo— that glint in her eye that had seemed to speak to him.

  He wasn’t the first grown man to have thought that about Jenny, was he?

  “And when Jenny was enthusiastic about something,” Ca­valetti hurried on, “when she laughed and her eyes lit up— Kevin was mesmerized by that glow, I think. He thought it was for him. He didn’t understand that it was just a part of Jenny, it was what happened when her heart beat.”

  “And what kept Jenny with Kevin?” Jordan asked gently.

  Chris Cavaletti shrugged. “We all want to be loved, and it was obvious Kevin loved Jenny. Especially at that age, it’s hard to reject somebody who loves you. Isn’t it?”

  She paused as if the question weren’t rhetorical. When Jordan didn’t have a ready answer, she continued, “There were certainly other perfectly nice boys she could have gone out with. Boys more her peers.”

  “Some of them actively hoping for Jenny to throw Kevin over?” Jordan asked, hoping for another suspect.

  “Maybe,” Chris Cavaletti answered calmly. “But I only ever saw one who seemed to be actively in the hunt to succeed Kevin.”

  “Who was that?” Jordan wondered why she made him ask. Ms. Cavaletti was studying him as if thinking maybe she shouldn’t tell him.

  “Your client,” she said. She seemed to admire Jordan’s surprised expression before she continued. “Oh, yes. You didn’t have to see the three of them together very often to catch Wayne staring at Jenny. And if Kevin happened to interrupt the stare, Wayne’s look would change dramatically. Yes, I’m sure,” she answered Jordan’s not-yet-asked ques­tion. “Besides, I broke up a fight between the two of them one time, Kevin and Wayne, and since the fight happened here at school, one could imagine its object.”

  If one were inclined that way, Jordan thought. But Chris Cavaletti didn’t sound or look like a small-town gossip. She appeared to take no delight in the information she’d con­veyed. What she said next confirmed that impression.

  “I’d appreciate it if you could avoid calling me as a witness.”

  “If things go well, there won’t be any trial,” Jordan said. “And I can’t think of anything you’ve told me that I’d want you to repeat from a witness stand.”

  “So you’d drive around with Kevin, following her?”

  “Yes, sir,” Wayne admitted, “like a couple of spies, like she was selling state secrets.”

  As he talked to his client, Jordan remembered Kevin’s father. “All anybody thought of Kevin as any more was Jenny’s boy friend,” Swin Wainwright had said, anger dark­ening his face, anger that was supposed to ward off tears. “If he’d’ve lost her, he’d’ve lost everything. He wouldn’t’ve been able to show his face in this town again.”

  Now Kevin’s best friend was saying the same thing. “Kevin wasn’t nothin’ when we was in high school. But then he kept hangin’ around, until he got to seem like an older man, you know, and he got this second go-round, with Jenny.” Wayne shook his head. “Kevin wasn’t no Einstein. He thought— he thought you could change things.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, live your life over. Or he thought if he caught Jenny at something, he could change her, make her stay with him. Poor stupid old Kevin, he was the only one didn’t see he couldn’t hold her. No way.”

  Jordan was looking at Wayne’s hands. They were healing, only one scab left on one knuckle. Wayne looked like a skinny kid, and like many easily provoked men, he seemed unusually mild when sober and unaroused. But his hands promised pain. Wayne and Kevin’s fights, Swin Wainwright’s dark face, Ed Fecklewhite’s assault conviction. There was an undertone of violence to the whole town. People thought fighting no big deal, just part of the landscape, until it ended worse than anyone had expected.

  “Who did you see her with?” Jordan asked.

  “Not hardly with any boys from her own class,” Wayne reminisced. “We’d see her talking to grown men. Like Kevin had just been the first step up, she was still moving on. Jenny didn’t even look like a girl any more, you know, and she damn sure— she wasn’t no flighty kid. She knew what she wanted.”

  Jordan listened for the sound of jealousy in his client’s voice. He wasn’t certain he heard it, but he certainly heard the tone of admiration—of longing?—when Wayne talked of Jenny.

  “Who did you see her with?” Jordan asked again flatly.

  Wayne’s eyes shifted. “That cop.”

  “Deputy Delmore?”

  “No.” Wayne frowned as if Delmore were one he should have known about. “That city cop. Briggs.”

  The officer who’d rushed outside his jurisdiction to be at the murder scene.

  “Jenny said she was getting another speech ready,” Wayne continued. “About law enforcement. She said she had to do research. Kevin just went nuts when she’d tell him things like that.”

  “Who else did you see her meet, Wayne?”

  Wayne looked shifty, but did it so poorly he looked like a bad actor portraying shiftiness.

  “Help yourself out, Wayne, tell me the truth.”

  “Don’t you know?” Wayne finally said.

  “You say it.”

  But Wayne wouldn’t.

  Jordan had to: “The judge.”

  Wayne nodded, not looking at his lawyer. “That’s right.”

  “So you know what the judge thinks of you now, Wayne. You know what that does to our chances.”

  The boy looked startled. “What?”

  Jordan shook his head disgustedly. He sat down at the small table so that for the first time his face was close to his client’s. “Listen, Wayne, there’s not much point in my doing more investigating if you’re going to take the DA’s offer. Thirty years. I’d be so embarrassed I wouldn’t even tell any­body I’d let you take it, but maybe you’re right, maybe it’s the best way. You’re the one has to decide.”

  Jordan wondered why he cared. Usually when he put a plea bargain offer to a defendant like this, he was silently praying for the jerk to take it. Spare me any more of this grimy case. Whatever Wayne decided, Jordan knew he wouldn’t like it.

  �
��Tell the man.”

  Wayne looked up meekly from his troll-like posture at the defense table. “I’ll take your offer, Mr. Arrendez.” As well as the district attorney seemed to have known Wayne, Wayne had never learned to pronounce Arriendez’s name.

  Thee prosecutor’s face did not light up. “Thirty years?” he said insistently.

  “Yes, sir.” Wayne lost his resolve and looked down again.

  “All right. I’ll get the plea papers ready.” His face giving nothing away, Arriendez glanced into Jordan’s disgusted eyes as he turned away. Jordan dropped into the chair at his idiot client’s side. Well, at least the damned thing was over, which was always a relief. Having a client plead not guilty was a terrible responsibility. The plea was also a relief because if Wayne was willing to plead guilty, it probably meant he was guilty— of both murders, so Jordan could be done with them all, with the whole case, the whole town. Be guilty, Wayne. Let me out of here.

  Wayne didn’t speak. He’d decided, but he didn’t like his decision, but he thought it best. He’d have a long time to wonder.

  Jordan half-turned away from him and glanced around the courtroom. The witnesses he’d called for his now-not- to-be-heard motion to suppress, Officer Harry Briggs and Deputy Tom Delmore, were sitting shoulder to shoulder in the audience. Arriendez had gone to give them the good news that they wouldn’t be testifying after all. Delmore’s lip lifted in a wretched simulation of a smile aimed at Jordan. Jordan turned away. “Look around,” he said to his client. “What?”

  What are you doing? Jordan thought to himself. But his voice went relentlessly on: “Look around at who you’re making happy by taking the plea. Somebody in this town’s going to heave a sigh of relief, because this will close out their books. Once you plead, everyone will be sure you killed Jenny, too, or Kevin did, and somebody’s going to know they got away with something. Maybe somebody in this building.”

  Wayne was looking back. “One of them two?”

  Jordan shrugged. “One was the first one to officially find the body, the other one was lurking close by. One of them you saw with Jenny, the other one almost punched me when he lost his temper.”

  There was a low hum of idleness in the courtroom. The district attorney was rapidly filling out the guilty plea papers, everyone else knew what he was doing, knew that in a few more minutes a short ceremony would bring the case to a close. The news had already reached the judge’s office, Jor­dan was sure.

  “It won’t make any difference to you,” he said easily. “They probably won’t ever be able to prosecute you for Jenny’s murder. But everyone will know you did it.” Wayne was still watching the cops, who looked back at him contemptuously. Jordan, surreptitiously watching his cli­ent, saw Wayne’s eyes turn suspicious. A few minutes later the district attorney approached their table.

  “Your attorney can explain these to you,” Arriendez said. “When you’re ready, I’ll—”

  Wayne stood. “I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble, Mr. Arrendez, but we’re not going to take your offer after all.”

  Arriendez frowned at Jordan, who looked innocent. “Did he tell you the offer is only good for today, after this we go back to the original fifty-year offer?”

  “Yes, sir, he did.”

  “All right. It’s your decision.”

  Jordan was thinking how stupid defendants were. “We’re not going to take your offer,” Wayne had said as if Jordan would be accompanying him to prison at the conclusion of the trial. That was how defendants sometimes got, they began to think of themselves as a team with their lawyer. But the lawyer and the defendant always left the courtroom by different doors after a guilty finding. Jordan felt suddenly hollow. He had tricked Wayne out of years of his life.

  Wayne was sitting there with his head bobbing slightly, pumped up, more emerged from his shell than Jordan had seen him. Jordan suddenly felt immensely sorry for him. Poor fool, he didn’t know what was coming.

  Why had Jordan goaded him into withdrawing his guilty plea? Jordan wasn’t sure himself. The shoving match with Green Hills was over. When Jordan had encountered block­ades, he had fought back on automatic pilot, but that re­sponse was long since dead. He would have been happy if Wayne had persisted in pleading guilty. That would have meant he was guilty, as all defendants are— Hadn’t Jordan said that, or something like it?— and the case would end as every criminal trial should, with the defendant on his way to prison.

  But Wayne wasn’t guilty, not of the murder that mattered. Jordan was convinced of that now, and he felt the weight of his knowledge. It was the first time he’d experienced feeling responsible for the fate of an innocent client, and he didn’t like it a bit.

  But Wayne sat there looking eager for the proceedings to begin. Jordan could hardly bear to see his client’s con­fidence.

  He hoped Wayne hadn’t invested any hope in the out­come of the hearing on Jordan’s new motion to suppress evidence, because the hearing went quickly as if toward a predetermined conclusion. Judge Waverly brought testimony to an early halt.

  “Mr. Marshall, is it going to be your legal contention that all evidence from the investigation of Miss Fecklewhite’s murder should be suppressed because one or more of the investigating officers was outside his jurisdiction?”

  “Yes, Your Honor, that’s my basic premise.”

  “Can you show that any evidence obtained in that investi­gation is going to be introduced against Mr. Orkney in the case in which he's charged?”

  “If I may develop that issue, Your Honor.”

  As Jordan resumed his questioning of Officer Briggs, he watched the judge. Waverly looked remote, watching a dis­tant wall or sorting through papers on his bench rather than watching the witness. The judge had other cases to get to, other lives to weigh. He bore his responsibilities casually, the same way those responsibilities had been conferred on him by public accord. Power over people’s lives appeared the judge’s God-given right when in fact he was the one who deserved to be investigated. Jordan had listened for hesitation or distraction when the judge mentioned the dead girl but had heard none.

  “Your motion to suppress evidence will be denied,” the judge said soon afterward.

  “Thank you, Your Honor.

  “Just what I was expecting,” Jordan added to his client before the deputy took Wayne away. Wayne nodded, but his eyes had lost their sustaining anger. He looked bewildered.

  “Gonna make me work for it, huh?” Arriendez said, but Jordan didn’t feel like joshing. “May I talk to you for a minute?” he asked Laura Stefone.

  “You want a transcript of this one, too?”

  “No. I have a different kind of problem.” He led her aside, which had the effect of focusing the attention of ev­eryone remaining in the courtroom—Emilio, Cindy, Harry Briggs—on the two of them. Jordan turned his back on them.

  “The Austin Ballet’s coming to San Antonio, did you hear?”

  “The Austin Ballet?” Laura’s mouth relaxed into humor.

  “I know, I know, it’s not the Joffrey, but they have this one number that’s supposed to be more modern dance than—”

  “The gangsterish number.”

  “Yeah, so you’ve heard of it. Me, too.” He was talking quickly. “So as soon as I heard they were coming, I ran out and got tickets, like a fool, before I realized I didn’t know anyone who’d really want to go as much as I did until I remembered you.” He paused and regained his composure, although it wasn’t her face that helped him do so. “So would you like to go?”

  “Yes,” she said deliberately.

  He smiled, but Laura didn’t, and his suspicion of her reas­serted itself. “With me, I mean,” he added.

  Laura hesitated a long time. “If that’s part of the pack­age,” she finally said, beginning to smile.

  His relief was out of all proportion, much greater than any emotion he’d felt over the hearing he’d just concluded on behalf of his client. “Great. It’s on Sunday night, is that okay?”<
br />
  “Mm huh.” Laura still smiled, but she had grown re­served. They were different with each other now that Jordan had revealed himself.

  “In San Antonio,” he stressed.

  “Yes, you said that. Um—I’ll meet you there.”

  “Oh. All right.” Jordan felt as if he’d grown taller, was looking down on her from a great height. They made plans. He wanted to touch her hand, maybe even her cheek, but Laura grew more businesslike as their conversation wound down. When she walked away and he turned to follow her, he saw that people were still in the courtroom watching, people he didn’t have to see again but whom Laura worked with every day. Of the observers, only Emilio the bailiff gave Jordan a friendly look, one of pity. He held up his little finger.

  “She said to me once, ‘Mama, what’s going to become of me?’ ”

  “You think she sensed—trouble coming?” Jordan asked.

  On his way out of town, he had returned to Jenny’s house hoping to find only Mrs. Fecklewhite at home this time, and he’d gotten his wish. Not only was Joan Fecklewhite home alone in the midafternoon, but her cordiality remained in­tact. She welcomed Jordan into her home almost as if he had a right to enter at will, as if she lived in a crime scene or a museum.

  What Jordan was hoping for was some hint of tension between Jenny and her father, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask the question. Instead he asked if Jenny had kept a diary, and Joan Fecklewhite had said indulgently, “She kept it secret from me if she did. But you’re welcome to look.”

  So they were in Jenny’s room. It wasn’t perfectly pre­served as Jordan had expected. In a small house with three other children, someone else, the younger daughter, had al­ready inherited the room, so that the room was undergoing transition. It was still Jenny’s room in spots, but it didn’t have the eerie atmosphere of a room in which no one lives any more. A pile of dresses lay on the twin bed. Stuffed animals were scattered on the floor nearby.

  “No,” Joan Fecklewhite said patiently. “Not trouble. Not this kind. She meant life, Mr. Marshall. She was seventeen years old. She was trying to imagine how her life was going to be.”