Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

  “Why Pickeral Point?”

  “Why not?” He smiled ruefully. “Come back a big success, lord it over all these little assholes who’d given me grief when I was a kid. All these guys who were big men on campus, hot dates, star of the football team, now they’re bagging groceries. And me? I was on the damn Tonight Show.”

  “How long did the pleasure in that last?”

  “About thirty seconds.”

  I laughed. “So what next?”

  “The funny thing is, there’s no next. By the midseventies I was making money hand over fist. I bought that big old house on Riverside. We traveled a lot. India, Africa, Japan. Europe, of course. I wrote, and Diana just came along for the ride.”

  “That sounds almost anticlimactic.”

  Miles closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling, a fond expression on his face. “Every marriage is different, I guess, but I really believe that what we had was unusual. We were just a matched pair. I worked, and Diana—oh, she gardened, she read, she cooked, she painted watercolors.” He smiled gently. “But mostly we just . . . lived. It was a really full life. Every day felt like a gift to me while we were together.”

  His brow furrowed for a moment.

  “I can’t begin to express to you the way I was brought up. I was raised by people who were absolutely devoid of worldly expectations. Partly it was a religious thing. My folks were both religious cranks. But it was partly just a lack of imagination. My mama and daddy, they came from the poorest, most miserable background, and they were so afraid of the world that they never raised their eyes from the dirt six inches in front of their feet. They didn’t like each other. They didn’t like me or my sisters. They didn’t like their work. They didn’t like anything. Oh, Jesus is gonna take me home someday!” He spat the last sentence out like an epithet. “That was their out, see—their excuse for never doing anything to improve their lot.

  “I guess there’s a side of me that’s still angry at them. I used that rage to become Miles Dane, Famous Writer. I built a persona with it, a mask to hide behind.” He squinted at the locked door behind me. “But sitting around being pissed off is for the birds. What finally dawned on me, what I learned from Diana, is that you can just live right now, right here, and that it can be perfect. Every moment can be a small jewel. That’s what made Diana such a marvelous person, and why I feel so privileged to have had thirty years in her company.

  “You’re looking for a narrative of my life?” He laughed a little. “All the colorful episodes? Shooting holes in walls, getting in fistfights with movie stars, all that crap—it was just theater, public relations. My real life, the one I had with Diana, was just one small moment after another. Diana was the most marvelous cook. She could spend half an hour making a piece of toast. And she’d bring it out and it would be the best piece of toast you ever ate.”

  Lisa wiped one eye with the back of her wrist. “That is so sweet”

  “The prosecuting attorney is obviously looking at money as a motive,” I said. “Tell me about the insurance policy.”

  Miles looked scornful. “What a joke. I bought that policy on her twenty years ago. It’s a fifty-grand payout. I know there are people living in trailer parks all over America who are stupid enough to kill somebody for chump change like that, but I’m not one of them. If I were going to kill her for money, I’d have at least bumped the policy up to a million.”

  “You mentioned earlier that she had a trust fund,” I said. “That came up in Denkerberg’s testimony, too. What can you tell us about that?”

  Miles shook his head. “This is going to sound strange, but I genuinely don’t know much about it. Maybe it’s a rich girl thing, but Diana had an aversion to talking about money. That’s partly why we ended up in the financial hole we’re in. I mean, aside from the fact that we’ve been living like rich people without having rich people’s income. Anyway, all I know is that she got income from the fund. But it wasn’t big money. Maybe thirty, forty grand a year? Back when we were flush, she used it for her hobbies, clothes, gas money, Christmas presents, the occasional vacation, that kind of thing. The last few years we’ve been living on it. But what happens when she dies—whether I inherit the principal or whatever—I honestly don’t even know. Sounds strange, but like I say, I never even discussed it with her.”

  “Does she have a will?”

  “Yes. I’m her sole heir. But the trust was set up by her father or her grandfather or something. Long, long time ago. So for all I know it may have provisions that prevent me from inheriting the money. Hell, it might revert to the family.”

  “If it looks like you could profit in any way from her death, we need to find out.”

  “She had a lawyer in New York. Somebody at a firm called Shearman & Something? You’ll have to talk to them.”

  “Shearman & Pound maybe?” Lisa said, naming a well-known white shoe law firm from New York.

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  After a moment I said, “Miles, Lisa and I had a long discussion last night. I told her that this job is best performed if you don’t worry about whether your client is guilty or innocent. She disagreed. And now that I’ve heard your story, I think she was right.”

  “Oh?” Suddenly he looked resentful and annoyed again.

  “My instincts say you’re innocent. And if that’s the case, then we need to know who really did this and why.”

  I let the silence eat at him for a while. I could see in his odd gray eyes that there was something he was holding back. It was terribly frustrating. There’s nothing worse than fighting your own client.

  “I told you what I know,” he said finally, his voice flat, uninflected.

  “You told us what you saw,” Lisa said. “That’s not the same thing.”

  Miles looked over at my daughter, then back at me. He grinned. “She’s a sharp one, isn’t she?”

  “You’re not answering the question,” Lisa said. “Let’s just assume you told us exactly what you saw. Now tell us what you know.”

  Miles didn’t answer.

  “There was somebody at your house that night,” Lisa said. “A man driving an old black Lincoln.”

  Miles’s face went blank and unreadable, but still he didn’t speak.

  “Who was the man in the black Lincoln, Miles?”

  Suddenly Miles stood, started banging on the heavy steel door with the flat of his hand. His face had gone hard—the same face he showed to Chantall Denkerberg, the same face I’d seen him wear on the TV shows back when his career was still hot. “Guard? Hey, bud. We’re about done in here.”

  “Who was it, Miles?” I demanded.

  As the guard’s key rattled in the lock, Miles said, “You might fish around, see if the prosecutor would be willing to go for a plea. Manslaughter? Five, six years, something in that range? Hell, I might just take it.”

  Seventeen

  After the troubling meeting with Miles, I went next door to the courthouse to take care of a few minor matters, but the whole time I was thinking about what Lisa and I had discussed. Suppose Miles was innocent; then why would he be behaving the way he was? Why, after protesting his innocence, would he suddenly be saying he was interested in a plea? And what about the clothes and the murder weapon that Detective Denkerberg had found in the boat? How could you explain those away?

  Either he’d fooled us both, and he did it. Or he was protecting someone. Someone who drove an old black Lincoln with the suicide doors.

  I stopped by Stash Olesky’s office on the pretense of asking him about Leon Prouty and some other small cases I was handling. As our conversation appeared ready to wind down I said, “You really plan to go all the way with Miles Dane, huh?”

  “As opposed to what?”

  I made a face to indicate that I hadn’t given the issue much thought. “Oh, I don’t know. You haven’t offered him a plea yet.”

  “I’ve got his clothes. Covered in blood. Why would I offer a plea?”

  “That reminds me,”
I said. “How in the world did you find those clothes? I looked at a map. That neighbor whose boat you found those clothes in is ten houses up the street. Don’t tell me you searched every house, every yard, every boat, every dock on the entire street. Somebody tipped you.”

  Stash’s face suddenly took on a cagey expression. “So? What’s that got to do with a plea? Does he want to plead or not?”

  I shrugged, languid as a sunbather on a beach in Tahiti. “I haven’t really discussed it with him. He’d probably laugh in my face if I did. He maintains he’s a hundred percent innocent, never say die, the whole nine. And you know what? I believe him. But I’m a big boy, Stash. Looking at what’s out there right now, frankly, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask.”

  Stash met my gaze with his skeptical blue eyes. “One of my general rules in life is that any time anybody says ‘frankly’ to me, they’re being less than entirely frank.”

  I put a look of comic horror on my face. “Are you, sir, accusing me of prevarication? Meet me at sundown, my good man, and I shall challenge you to pistols at two paces.”

  “Only two?”

  “Anything more than that, I’d be just as likely to shoot myself as to hit you.”

  Stash laughed.

  “Seriously, though . . .” I said. “Any thoughts on a plea?”

  Stash laughed again.

  I stood and stretched. “I take it your derisive tone means you have no interest in offering a plea?”

  Stash continued to laugh. “Get out of here before I think of something else to charge him with.”

  “You’re a terrible, heartless man, Stash,” I said. “And a discredit to your profession.” This had become my standard farewell to the prosecuting attorney lately.

  Stash, however, preferred to improvise a new insult every time. “The only thief worse than your clients is you, Charley.”

  And off I went. So there would be no plea.

  After that I paged Leon Prouty. He called me back on my cell about ten minutes later. “What?” he demanded.

  “It’s Charley Sloan. You got a minute to talk?”

  “I’m kinda busy.”

  “So am I.”

  Leon hawked up some phlegm. I’m sure that was his way of showing how much he liked me. “Yeah, okay. I’m at a job site.”

  “Not stealing anything, I presume.”

  “Nah, this is more or less legit.”

  I didn’t care to ask what “more or less” meant; I just got directions and drove over.

  I found Leon and a crew of Mexicans planting bushes in the parking lot of an aging strip mall over on the bypass. The bushes looked half-dead, and the strip mall was by no means prosperous: a down-at-the-heels Bible store, a martial arts academy, a nail salon with a sign written in Vietnamese, and two empty spaces, their windows covered with plywood.

  Leon was leaning on a shovel.

  “Whassup?” he said sleepily.

  “Yeah, same to you, too,” I said. “The reason I’m here is I wanted to talk to you a little more about this guy you claim to have seen coming out of Miles Dane’s house.”

  “I claim to have seen?”

  “You’re practically a professional thief. I’m supposed to take your word for it?”

  Leon Prouty shouted something in Spanish to one of the Mexicans.

  “You speak Spanish?” I said.

  “It’s what I call Spandscapelish.” He tossed his shovel on the ground, looked at me with a hard expression. “You got a lot riding on this case, Mr. Sloan. I seen what I seen. You want me to help you, then you got to help me. It’s that simple.”

  “I told you the other day I can’t pay you for testimony. That’s unethical.”

  “Hey, then nothing personal, Mr. Sloan, but screw you and screw Miles Dane. Why should I give a damn about him?”

  “I don’t know. Common decency?”

  “That don’t pay my rent.” He yelled something at another crew member. “Anyway, I don’t like Miles that much.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You know him?”

  “Sure.”

  “How?”

  “From church.”

  “Neither of you seem like the churchgoing type.”

  “I don’t go much anymore. But we’re both old snakeheads.”

  Snakeheads. I remembered that Regina, the receptionist at the police station, had referred to Leon as that snakehead boy.

  “Snakeheads?” I said.

  Leon looked at me curiously. “How long you been living in this town?”

  “Somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade.”

  Leon nodded. “Surprised you don’t know what a snakehead is by now.”

  “Why don’t you just explain it?”

  “Tell you a little story, might interest you. Back around the Depression, they was a sharecropper by the name of Ralph Lee Dinwoodie from aroundabouts Philadelphia, Mississippi. Down on the delta. Ralph Lee, he come up this way intending to get a job at Ford. Overshot somehow, ended up working on the docks here. Within a couple years fifteen, twenty families, white sharecroppers, poorer than dirt, they all moved up to Pickeral Point. I don’t know why, but all them families stuck together. The people in Pickeral Point never could seem to tolerate us. Never did mix. That little neighborhood over by the boat factory—you ever heard it called Snaketown?”

  “Yeah. I never knew why, though.”

  “Well that’s where us snakeheads live at.”

  “What’s this have to do with Miles Dane?”

  “Ralph Lee Dinwoodie? He’s my great-great-uncle or something like that. And he’s Miles’s grandfather. That makes us some kind of shirttail kin.”

  “No kidding. So what about this snakehead thing?”

  “All them rednecks—my people, Miles’s people—when they come up here, they built ’em a little old frame church on the edge of town. Still there. Church of the Living Water? You ever seen it? And Ralph Lee Dinwoodie, he was the pastor. When he kicked, his son-in-law, Miles’s daddy, took over preaching. Wasn’t a full-time job or nothing, he was just a lay preacher. It’s a charismatic church. Speaking in tongues, whooping, rolling on the floor, spirit-filled witnessing . . .”

  “Where’s the snakehead part?”

  “That’s what I was getting at. Miles’s daddy one time he had him a vision. That passage in the Bible about drinking poison and taking up serpents? You familiar with that?”

  “You’re talking about snake handling.”

  Leon Prouty nodded. “Miles’s daddy, man, he got him a bunch of rattlesnakes, started using them in the service. Hollering and preaching and waving these goddamn snakes around, jack, it must of been some crazy shit. This would of been when Miles was ten, twelve years old. So anyway, one day his daddy’s going at it, fire and brimstone, kissing them snakes on the lips and everything, and that snake just—SHOOMP!” Leon mimicked a striking snake with his hand. “Sumbitch bit him right on the goddamn nose. The way I heard it told, he kept preaching and everybody’s beating tambourines and singing and hollering. Big old test of faith, see? Because the faithful, according to the scripture, they can take up snakes and drink poison and it won’t do nothing to them.

  “Well pretty soon his face goes to swelling up. He’s still waving them snakes around, preaching the Word, lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, blahdy blahdy blah, and everybody’s singing and hollering. And old Miles, man, he’s sitting right there on the front row watching it. Watching when his daddy falls down on the floor, all them snakes crawlin’ around on his ass and everything?

  “And do they take him to the hospital? Shit no! This bunch of crackers—my people!—they just keep slapping the tambourines and singing: Oh, hell yeah, they’re mighty in the faith, ain’t they? Miles’s daddy, his head’s blowed up like a balloon. Lips start turning black, ears swoled up, tongue sticking out. Oh, but he’s mighty, mighty in his faith!” Leon Prouty pantomimed clapping and rocking, waving his hands in the air, his tongue sticking out and his e
yes rolled back in his head.

  He kept up this horrible eye-rolling performance until finally I said, “So what happened?”

  The performance abruptly stopped. “What you think, Mr. Sloan? He died.”

  My eyes widened a little. “Right there in front of Miles?”

  “Sure.”

  “My God. No wonder the guy writes such gruesome stories.”

  “So that’s why they call us snakeheads. Church is still there, still the center of Snaketown. Ain’t nobody taking up by-God serpents in there, though.”

  “Miles must feel terrible guilt about that. Terrible shame.”

  “Shame!” Leon Prouty looked at me quizzically. “Man, his daddy’s a hero over in Snaketown. Took his faith right to the grave.”

  “You still go to church?”

  “Hell, no. I don’t believe none of that propaganda no more. But when I was a kid, old Miles use to show up every now and then. He’d only come to church when he was drunk.” Leon laughed. “All us kids loved it. He’d get to confessing what a sinner he was, some terrible thing he’d did back in the day, bawling and crying like a baby. He’d come up for the altar call, lay there on the floor howling like a sick dog, ‘Oh, I’m coming home to Jesus.’ Then he’d head out the door, and you wouldn’t see him again for like a year.”

  “What terrible thing had he done?”

  “How should I remember? It was a long time ago.” Leon shrugged. “Anyway, I got to get back to work.”

  “Doing what? Holding up your shovel?”

  Leon raised his head back so he could look down at me in a vaguely threatening manner. “I don’t have to tell you nothing.”

  “Did you see that guy or not? The one with the black car?”

  “It was a black Lincoln Continental, early-sixties model, the type with the suicide doors. I told you that already.”

  “What else? What else did you see?”

  “Asked and answered, Counselor.” Leon smirked at me. “Come back when you willing to get serious about my situation.”