by Jay Brandon
“They spent a lot of time together. People have said he was just teaching her about the law, but I think there was something more. Is that true?”
Jordan had come for confirmation, because Laura’s emphatic denial of the relationship between Jenny and the judge had made him wonder if he was wrong. But then he had remembered how protective Laura was of Judge Waverly, how much she owed him. She would deny anything that cast him in a bad light.
He had remembered, too, that Judge Waverly had as good as admitted the relationship to Jordan.
If Mrs. Swanson had seen anything like lascivious interest in Jordan’s face she would have glared him out of her office. It was his seriousness that started her talking. “I never saw them in a car or a motel room,” the newspaper editor said slowly. “But I saw them together, and if looks and touches mean what I’ve always thought they do, yes, they were in love.”
“In love?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Swanson said firmly. “Love. That’s not what you asked, is it, but that’s what I saw. The two of them saw each other almost every day. Look out our window, see our view.” Jordan knew the view; it was of Main Plaza and the courthouse. “Jenny made no secret of it She’d go to the courthouse every day after school, like going home. Sometimes he took her to dinner or lunch on weekends or during the summer. Sometimes somebody else would go with them, like Laura Stefone, but sometimes they didn’t bother with that. He wasn’t discreet at all. People in this town said he was teaching her, that he was just fond of her. Nobody wanted to acknowledge what was right in front of their eyes. But I know love when I see it.”
Jordan looked into the ungainly, at-least-twice-married editor’s face, with its ruddy complexion and snapping eyes, and felt no desire to challenge her knowledge of romance. “Did you ever see them when they were together?” he asked quietly.
Mrs. Swanson shot a harsh glance at him, but Jordan’s expression mollified her by telling her he wasn’t enjoying asking the questions. “Yes, sir. Of course I spend time at the courthouse, or I might’ve been in the diner the same time they were. In a town this size—”
“I know.”
“Judge Waverly’d put his hand on hers or give her a quick hug, that kind of thing. Are you sure this is evidence?”
“The judge has already given me permission,” Jordan said. “I told him I might have to.”
Mrs. Swanson’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “Then you understand what it was,” she said harshly. “It wasn’t something dirty. It was beautiful in its way. That middle-aged man, that young girl, they loved each other. People like you have to make something dirty out of that, I know, but it wasn’t. There were the little touches, like I said, but that wasn’t where you could see it. You could see it in the judge’s eyes. The way he looked at her. It was plain as day, he loved her and was proud of her and proud of himself for being with her. I’ve seen him just sit and listen to her, smiling, and you couldn’t find one other person in this world Judge Waverly could stand to listen to for very long.”
“So — ” Jordan said slowly but had no finish. He sat thinking and Mrs. Swanson let him, watching him.
“And you’re going to use this?” she finally asked.
“I hope not,” Jordan said resignedly. But he owed no loyalty to the judge.
He had a room at the motel for appearance’s sake, he had hoped, but it turned out to be reality, the harsh reality of bare linoleum and unfiltered light. He could hear two people talking desultorily outside his window, and when they went away, they took his hope of sleep with them. Feeling hopeless, feeling stupid, he pulled on a few clothes and got into his car. He rolled his window down; the night air flowing across him was pleasant after the stuffy motel room. Besides, he wanted to smell the magnolias on Flowing Springs Boulevard.
He saw only one other moving car on the streets of Green Hills, and they sneaked by each other guiltily. Laura’s street was dark and still. Mrs. Johnson’s porch was empty, her windows unlighted. He slowed to a crawl, then to nothing, coasting to a stop across the street from Laura’s. Her car was in the driveway. The front of the house was dark, but he thought he saw a fraying glow of light from the back bedroom. He wondered if she had her windows open. When the house had first come in sight, Jordan had suffered a gladness of heart, a sense of homecoming. But as the house remained tightly contained, it seemed to be consciously excluding him. He thought he sensed a dark presence behind the front window, but he would have felt that whether it was true or not.
“You look tired.”
“I hear the note of accomplishment in your concern, Miguelito,” Jordan said to the district attorney, “but it’s strictly a result of a bad night’s sleep.” To Arriendez’s studied silence he added, “I don’t recommend the motel’s beds. But to give you your due, you certainly didn’t help me rest. Are you going to finish up today, or does this parade go on forever?”
The DA just smiled and withdrew. Jordan turned, looking for his client, and saw two witnesses in the front row. Surprised, he approached them. “Hello, Ms. Riegert, Dr. Prouty.” He turned his attention to the nurse. “Are you going to be a State’s witness, Ms. Riegert? I’m the one who subpoenaed you.”
He had to resist an inclination to call her Evelyn. After all, he knew her past; he had seen her high school yearbook photo.
There was nervousness in Evelyn Riegert’s manner as she smiled. “No, I just got a ride with Dr. Prouty. I thought I’d watch some of the trial before it was my turn.”
“Oh. Well, I’m very sorry, Ms. Riegert, but you can’t do that We have a rule that witnesses can’t hear other testimony. If you watched some of the trial, I wouldn’t be able to call you to testify.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, rising hastily. “I didn’t know.”
“Not your fault. I should have told you.”
“I’ll just—” She gathered up her purse and a file folder, then regarded a small cardboard box doubtfully. “These are the other things you asked for. Kevin’s effects that his father never picked up. Should I keep them with me or — ?”
“Um—I guess I’ll keep it, so you won’t have to lug it around. I am sorry about this, can I —?”
“It’s perfectly all right,” the nurse said, regaining her poise. She eyed the door at the front of the courtroom but instead left through the back spectators’ door, leaving Jordan to gather up the box, which he touched gingerly as if it were Kevin’s remains.
“And how are you doing, sir?” he said to Dr. Prouty, a corpulent, balding man with a pugnacious nose, who sat with his arms folded.
“Getting tired of waiting,” the doctor said. “I have other things to do than wait on lawyers and clerks.”
Mike Arriendez called the busy doctor as his first witness of the morning so Dr. Prouty could more quickly get on with his life. His testimony was brisk and brusque. Quickly reducing Kevin Wainwright to a corpse, he spoke of him as he would have to a medical seminar.
“Broken ribs here, here, and here, one of which was in danger of puncturing the lung when he was brought in, but we took care of that. Cracked cheekbone, but that was superficial. His nose was broken. There was internal bleeding. Multiple abrasions and contusions. Shall I detail those?”
“Please,” Mike Arriendez asked graciously.
As the doctor hurried on, Jordan turned slightly to see that the spectator seats were more filled than they had been the day before. On an aisle near the back he saw Swin Wainwright, sitting very straight, his face rigid.
“What was the cause of death, Dr. Prouty?”
“Coronary arrest,” the doctor said at once. “Might have been a blood clot that broke loose and blocked the major artery, might have been just the strain of trying to recover from all that damage. He was never really on the road to recovery from the time he was brought in.”
“In your capacity as medical examiner, what was your ruling as to the cause of death?”
“Homicide,” the doctor said.
When it was his turn, Jordan stared at Dr. Prouty for a long moment, until eyes turned toward Jordan curiously. Jordan was thinking of asking the doctor no questions at all.
“You treated Kevin in the hospital, didn’t you, Dr. Prouty?” he said.
“Yes.”
“So you were told how his injuries came about?”
“Yes. It was part of his file.”
“Did you find his injuries consistent with what you were told?”
“Absolutely.” The doctor answered quickly, displaying no curiosity about the questions.
“And you didn’t really expect him to recover, is that the effect of your testimony?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Someone else in his condition might well have recovered. But this boy never showed much improvement in the few days we had him.”
“So then, let’s say, his death was no surprise to you?”
“No, sir,” the doctor said in the tone of someone seldom surprised.
Dr. Prouty had reduced Kevin Wainwright from victim to statistic. With his last witness, Mike Arriendez corrected that impression.
“How old are you, Jason?”
“Eighteen.”
“You’re a senior this year?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked like he was probably a linebacker for the football team, maybe a lineman if it was a light team. A pale boy six feet tall, with big-knuckled hands, a head like the rounded top of a telephone pole, a face that looked as if it would break easily into a grin, but uneasy and serious now on the witness stand.
“Did you know Kevin Wainwright and this man here?”
“Yes, sir. Hello, Wayne.”
“Did you see the last fight they had on July fifteenth?”
“Yes, sir. I was driving by, and when I saw Wayne’s truck pull up so sudden, I thought something was up, so I stopped, too.”
“How did the fight start?”
“Well, Wayne yelled that he was gonna kill Kevin, and Kevin stopped on the sidewalk and just looked at him.”
“Did he look frightened?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Jason Merritt said. It appeared Kevin’s expression had left an impression on him. “He just looked kind of blank, like he couldn’t place Wayne.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then Wayne went runnin’ up, and it was perfectly obvious he was gonna punch him, but Kevin didn’t do anything to duck or block it. He just stood there, and Wayne ran up and hit him with his fist right in the face. That’s when I came across the street to watch.”
“What happened then?”
Jason’s hands had crept closer to each other on the railing in front of him, but they didn’t touch. They gripped the rail as if in a terrible attempt to stop their movement. “Kevin’s head snapped back against the glass and his eyes went like — ” Jason demonstrated, lifting his head back and fluttering his eyes. “And then Wayne hit him again in the nose. The blood spurted out, it went all the way up Wayne’s arm and all across the sidewalk, out to the street.”
“Did Kevin fight back?” Mike Arriendez asked quietly.
“Aw, no, sir. But I don’t think Wayne even noticed, he was screaming, screaming names, you know, and he punched Kevin in the stomach and Kevin fell down on his hands and knees. When Kevin fell down, Wayne looked like he was going to punch the wall. I looked at Kevin. He was still awake, but he was spitting up; spitting up, you know, blood and — I think he was choking because he was tryin’ to get his breath at the same time. Then Wayne kicked him.” Jordan felt immobilized. He wasn’t listening as a lawyer, he was just letting the scene unfold before him, watching Wayne’s merciless beating of his best friend. Gradually another sound intruded itself and he became aware of the boy beside him. Jordan turned and saw that Wayne was breathing heavily as if he couldn’t get enough air. His eyes were wet. His Adam’s apple moved as he gulped. Wayne’s hands had turned to claws on the table before him. He was on the verge of crying.
Jordan turned slightly and saw Swin Wainwright again. The older man, darkly tanned, face creased, looked very similar to Wayne in his posture and expression: a man holding it in but barely.
“Mr. Stimmons got there ahead of me,” Jason Merritt was saying in answer to another question. “I was standing right there, but I couldn’t move. It was just—I was afraid to touch Kevin at all for a minute.”
The district attorney sat quietly for a moment before asking, “Have you been in fights, Jason?”
“Oh, sure. Yes, sir.”
“Have you been in any since you saw this one?”
“No.”
The boy’s hands had finally come together. They gripped each other, making his arms bulge. But his face looked like a little boy’s, bewildered by his helplessness. “And I got cut from the football team,” he added. “Coach says I don’t hit hard enough any more.”
Jordan felt rather helpless himself when Jason Merritt was passed to him for cross-examination. Mike Arriendez’s cunning had not been better displayed than in this, his last witness, a callow high school boy who had been so traumatized by witnessing the fight that he could no longer smash into opposing linemen. Jordan didn’t think he could do anything to make less vivid the picture Jason Merritt had painted, even for himself. He asked his usual questions about how crazy Wayne had looked, how remorseful he’d been afterward, whether Jason had ever threatened to kill anyone himself, but the boy still looked shaken. Just before he was going to pass him away, Jordan was struck by an idea. It might have been a bad idea, because it required him to revisit Jason’s most horrifying testimony, but there was no time to dissect the idea.
“The first punch you saw Wayne throw,” Jordan asked, “where did it hit Kevin?”
“Right in the face,” Jason repeated. He lifted his fingers to his right cheek, then changed his mind and made it the left. “Here.”
“A hard punch?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Kevin’s head spun around and the other side of his face hit the window.”
“Thank you, Jason.” Jordan received some curious looks by ending there. He felt them on his back, on his own cheek. He kept his head down.
“The State rests,” Mike Arriendez said.
And a good rest they deserved. The case the DA had put on against Jordan was the equivalent of the beating Wayne had given Kevin Wainwright. Judge Waverly mercifully broke for lunch before requiring Jordan to call his first witness.
For the first time since trial had begun, Laura looked at him as she left the room, as if she wanted to say something. Jordan wondered if she had seen him drive by her house the night before. But he knew she wouldn’t say three words to him now.
He found his way out of the courtroom blocked, and the sight of the person in his path brought Jordan to a dead halt. He hoped he hadn’t flinched broadly enough for anyone to notice. But Officer Harry Briggs didn’t look angry; he looked nervous. His tall face looked softer than it had the night in Barney’s, softened by the conflict of its emotions.
“I came to say I’m sorry,” he said. He rushed forward, making Jordan step back. “I was drunk and stupid and it wouldn’t’ve happened without both. What you said was right — what I remember of it. What happened with Laura and me, you didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Okay,” Jordan said, and stopped, remembering the effect lengthy speeches had on Officer Briggs. He started to brush by, but Briggs stopped him, realized he might have been squeezing the lawyer’s arm too hard, and released him.
“But what’s this?” he asked, holding out a piece of paper.
“Surely you’ve had subpoenas before.”
“Not from the defense,” Briggs said perplexedly. “What’s up?”
“You are,” Jordan said. “My first witness, right after lunch.”
Harry Briggs still looked puzzled, tempered by sullen suspicion, on the witness stand. He even said, “I don’t know anything about this case,” drawing a reprimand from Judge
Waverly, be
cause the remark wasn’t in response to a question.
“I want to ask you about the murder you did investigate,” Jordan said. “The other murder committed that July fifteenth. Do you remember that one, Officer Briggs?”
“Of course.”
“Who was murdered?”
“Jenny Fecklewhite.”
Mike Arriendez was half-turned away as if to exclude himself from this unorthodox portion of trial. But he was listening intently.
“Did you find her body, Officer Briggs?”
“No. I was the second officer on the scene.”
“What scene was that?”
“Pleasant Grove Park.”
Briggs’s bare hands were clasped across his knee, apparently at ease. Jordan studied the hands. They tightened when he asked, “Would you describe the position of the body, please?”
Briggs did succinctly: Jenny on her back, head at a wretched angle on the cypress root, her hands at rest. “Who put her hands together, Officer?”
“I don’t know. They were like that when I got there.” Jordan knew that Ed and Joan Fecklewhite were in the spectator seats behind him. As trial had progressed, the crowd had grown and grown familiar. Mrs. McElroy had retained her good seat for two days, anger at being passed over for the jury giving way to curiosity. Swin Wainwright remained, all alone. Today was the first appearance by the Fecklewhites, who must have gotten wind that their daughter’s name was going to come up. Jordan no longer gave a thought to how word like that spread through the little town. He only accepted that it would.
He asked, looking down, “That wasn’t your first visit to Pleasant Grove Park that day, was it, Officer Briggs?”
Briggs’s alertness increased. “Yes, it was,” he said firmly.
“Jenny was a friend of yours, wasn’t she?” Jordan asked in the same quiet, knowledgeable voice. Laura Stefone glanced at him from her position behind her machine.
And Briggs looked at Laura. “Jenny was a nice girl,” he said. “Everybody liked her.”
