by Reed Arvin
Rayburn watches me a moment, assessing me. “Capital crimes always require two lawyers in this office,” he says. “You and Carl were a great team, but he’s retiring.”
“I’m going to ask Deborah Housel to act as cocounsel on the Bol case,” I say. “She’s young, but she shows a lot of promise.”
“Yeah. I’m thinking Stillman, actually.”
I stare. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you just fired me.”
“He’s smart, Thomas. He reminds me of you.”
“I tender my resignation, as of this moment.”
“Want me to tell you why you need him?”
“I’d be fascinated, yeah.”
“Unlike you, he’s merciless.” He pauses. “Especially now.”
“What do you mean, now?”
“Just look at your right leg.”
I look, and my leg is bouncing up and down in tiny, nervous rotations. I put my hand on the leg, stopping it. “Stillman doesn’t have the experience for a murder trial,” I say. “He’s a wet pup.”
“He’s also a pain in the ass. Yeah, I noticed. Thing is, I don’t hire people because they’re nice. I hire them because they’re smart, aggressive, and committed. And with this Hale thing, I can’t afford to have you lose focus.”
“I’m not going to lose focus.”
“I know. Stillman is going to make sure.” He stands up and starts walking me toward the door. “Incidentally, Carl said the same stuff about you when you came on.”
“He did not.”
“Sorry, he did.”
That stops me. Maybe it’s true; it’s been nine years now—the last seven with Carl—and maybe I really was a snot-nosed, eager-beaver kid anxious to make a mark. But I could never have been like Stillman, I tell myself. Stillman would prosecute his own mother, if he thought he could get a promotion doing it. “If Stillman comes on, you have to promise me there are going to be ground rules.”
“Such as?”
“Such as other than getting me coffee, he doesn’t move without asking me first.”
Rayburn watches me a second, then nods. “I’ll explain things to him.”
“You can do it now, since he’s probably standing outside the door, trying to listen through the keyhole. Based on what he just heard, he’ll probably have a little puddle around his shoes from excitement.”
Rayburn nods, a tiny smile escaping his lips. “Send him in.”
CHAPTER
2
I LEAVE THE 222 West Building in downtown Nashville in something like a daze. I try to forget about Stillman for the time being—he’ll remind me of himself often enough, anyway—and wonder if I’ve ever had a worse day as a lawyer. I walk onto the sidewalk, which is oddly empty for 3:30 p.m. I look up at the sky; it’s a typical late August day, about a million degrees, with the haze that sits over Nashville most summer days. It’s going to get worse, I think. I can remember Augusts so hot and humid, outdoors was someplace you had to be in-between buildings with air-conditioning. I wonder what I might do if I wasn’t a prosecutor. I could sell real estate, I think. Or maybe BMWs. I’ve always liked BMWs.
I walk to my truck, which is parked in the employee lot on the side of 222 West. I sit in the truck—a Ford F-150, the same model my father drove—and let the engine run a few minutes, still shell-shocked. Apparently, I’m going to have to drive to Brushy Mountain prison in a few days to have a face-to-face with Kwame Jamal, née Jerome. Since he and his law-professor attorney have gone to the trouble of setting up the meeting, I have no doubt what Hale is going to say. He’s going to tell me what really happened that day at the Sunshine Grocery, and we are going to have to deal with it. Carl’s going to be all right, I realize. He’s retiring, which will get him out of the limelight. He’s indestructible, anyway. Rayburn, I’m not so sure about. He’s ambitious, not in an ugly way, but he has plans. He’s kept his nose clean, done a decent job, and carried the mail for the Republican party since he was in college. That means being staunchly, uncompromisingly, for the death penalty. He’s about two elections away from collecting the rewards, and if Kwame Jamal Hale is the real killer of Steven Davidson and Lucinda Williams, David Rayburn can kiss the last ten years or so of bricklaying good-bye. Tennessee isn’t very forgiving of politicians who fall from grace. We’ve got an ex-mayor in Nashville who currently sells aluminum siding.
I look up at the inside rearview mirror and scan my face. I’m thirty-six, but I’ve always looked younger than my age. I have my father’s eyes—brown, wide-open. I’m less rugged, probably because for every hour he worked on jet engines at McConnell Air Force Base, I spent the same hour poring over legal briefs and drinking coffee with lawyers. But I can still feel him inside me, receding year by year. I don’t like this gradual erosion of his clear-eyed optimism, and that, maybe, is why I catch my fingers strumming or a leg bouncing sometimes, as Rayburn did in the office.
The rush-hour traffic is picking up, and I need to get my daughter a birthday present. In a way, I’m relieved to have something to do other than think about what has just gone haywire. Jasmine lives with her mother and her stepfather, a Greek plastic surgeon named Michael Sarandokos. Although Michael is a doctor, the decisions he faces are a long ways from life and death. Mostly, he spends his days giving the wealthiest 10 percent of Nashville liposuction and implants and tucks and dermal abrasions and any of the other techniques he’s mastered to help the affluent give nature and age the finger. The fact that my daughter lives with him in his six-thousand-square-foot house in a subdivision for rich people called President’s Club makes buying her a birthday present a complicated process. Anxious to supplant my place in her life—even at the expense of ruining her character—he denies her nothing.
I pull out onto Second Avenue, a crowded street the town hoped would become a tourist mecca, but which ended up an iffy street bookended with a defunct Planet Hollywood and a dying Hard Rock Café. I lean back in my seat, unbuttoning my collar and loosening my tie while the truck cools.
Birthday present for the girl who has everything. Jasmine is ten years old. She’s got an iPod and a computer in her room. Her clothes cost more than mine, and last time we were together I could have sworn she had a professional pedicure. She is also living proof that the genetic browning of the human race scientists are always braying about—the melting together of ethnic groups into one mocha milkshake—has at least as much upside as down. I’m watered-down Irish, with black hair, blue eyes, and the frame of a basketball player. Rebecca Obregon, the woman I married in San Antonio while stationed at Kelly Air Force Base, is mother-country Andalusian, with the kind of olive skin that doesn’t get a tan line. The baby we made was so beautiful it made my eyes hurt. Jazz’s eyes are brown, like her mother’s, her skin is light olive, and she is probably going to be six feet tall. She is going to break hearts all over Nashville, at least until she leaves, which she’ll start wanting to do about fifteen seconds after she realizes how beautiful she is. Then she’ll go to New York or Los Angeles or somewhere to watch better-dressed men fall all over themselves opening doors for her.
I turn right on Broadway, heading to I-65 and the malls. I love that Jasmine is beautiful, and I even love that she reminds me of her mother. But I would love her just as much if she had a nose like a hockey player. She’s my daughter, at least on weekends. She seems to enjoy our time together, and she understands that I’m her real father, not Dr. Knife. But this coming weekend she’ll be at soccer camp, and the next, she’s going to Orlando, for her birthday. Dr. Knife is attending a conference for doctors like him who have figured out how to make a handsome living mining people’s vanity, and Jazz wants to go to Universal Studios. As much as I love spending time with her, I’m smart enough to know there’s no percentage in saying no.
The traffic is still light, and I make good time going east the short drive to where I pick up I-65 south and head toward Franklin, an affluent and rapidly growing Nashville suburb where the smart money in Nashville is moving. I
drive in silence, the radio off. Every half mile or so I force the picture of Wilson Owens begging for his life from my mind. I remember that as the bailiffs—it took two of them—removed Owens after sentencing, he stared at me the whole way out of the room. They were dragging him out, his shoes scraping the floor, and he was locked on my eyes like a missile. And I stared back, positive that hell was where he belonged, happy to be his sword of justice.
I look up and see the exit for Moore’s Lane, where a collection of retail shops and car dealerships circle the mother ship of Cool Springs Mall. There’s a Toys “R” Us in there, and I’m hoping something brilliant and affordable will explode off the shelves and into my shopping cart. Ideally, this item will costs less than seventy-five dollars. I pull into the parking lot and park, for a reason I don’t yet understand, a good thirty yards away from any other cars. It’s still hot and muggy out, and this makes the walk longer. I put the car in park and stare back at the toy store, wondering what the hell I’m doing. Then my hands, still clenched on the steering wheel, start shaking. I look up at the mirror, and I see that I’m crying. I’m shaking the steering wheel and crying, and I’m seeing Wilson Owens, that asshole, being injected with choline, a respiratory-suppressing drug which was recently outlawed for veterinarian use in putting down animals because it was deemed too cruel. Jesus, maybe I do need Stillman. I sit there and vibrate awhile, seeing my life and Carl’s and Rayburn’s and everybody else who’s about to be fucked if Kwame Jamal Hale is the real killer of Steven Davidson and Lucinda Williams, and it takes me a good five minutes to come down enough to pull my hands off the steering wheel.
I LAST LESS THAN ten minutes in Toys “R” Us. It’s the wrong place for me right now, this happiest store in the world, where the frozen, plastic faces of Barbies and American Girls stare down at me. If there’s anything in this place Jazz wants, she probably already has it. I circle back out to the parking lot, ready to drive home. I walk up to my truck and I notice something stuck under the wiper, like a parking ticket. I look around; there’s nobody near the Ford, which sits alone in the half-full lot. I pull out the paper, which is a pamphlet folded in half. I open it up and see an amateurish-looking leaflet from an organization calling itself Citizens for a Just America. I look up, trying to figure out from where it came; scanning the lot, I can see no other cars with anything on their windshields. The pamphlet has a picture of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents. The pamphlet says Peltier has already spent more than twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Under Peltier’s picture is a handwritten message in dark marker: NO MISTAKES WILL BE TOLERATED. I can’t figure out why the pamphlet is there, and I definitely don’t like the tagline, since it’s more gung-ho than the tone of the anti-death-penalty faction.
I stand around for a minute or so, confused, wondering if some bogeyman is going to jump out and tell me he put the pamphlet on my car. The pamphlet is too weird to be a coincidence, but I only just found out about Hale myself, so I can’t figure out how somebody could already be tailing me. Normally, I’m pretty good at ignoring the list of a hundred or so people who have a reason to be pissed off at me; I found out on my first day in the office that would be a part of the job, when I noticed the half-inch-thick bulletproof glass between the office receptionist and the waiting room. But if this is one of the usual wackos, it’s pretty interesting timing. Maybe it’s Professor Buchanan, softening me up for the kill before I meet him and his client at Brushy. If it is, it’s a mistake, because it’s pissing me off, which will definitely make me more difficult to deal with. I get in my car and pull out onto I-65 south for the three-mile drive from the mall to my house. At least as far as I can tell, nobody’s tailing me. Unfortunately, my time in the army didn’t include counterinsurgency or anything like it. I spent my time in a courtroom, when I wasn’t playing racquetball or jogging with the other junior officers.
By the time I get home fifteen minutes later, I’ve decided to ignore the pamphlet, just like I ignore the three or four letters I get every month from prisoners describing, often in lurid detail, the various acts of revenge they contemplate against me, should the legal system ever be crazy enough to let them back onto the streets. I pull into my garage and walk into the house. My cat, Indianapolis, is waiting inside. He was a stray when I found him, about as lost as a cat can get. The tin ID tag on his collar was worn down, and the only thing legible on the street address was the city, Indianapolis. I don’t like cats, something I impressed on this black-and-white fur ball the first ten times he came around by steadfastly ignoring him. But he took to me, or maybe the smell of my pine mulch. He ended up planting himself outside my door meowing his brains out until late one night I made the mistake of giving him a saucer of milk to shut him up. From that moment on, he regarded me as a tenant on his property, and I resigned myself to cans of cat food and bags of litter. Not that Indianapolis is in any way untidy. Compared to me, he’s a monk. He looks at me steadily as I come in the door, inscrutable as a sphinx, and slinks his way through my legs, rubbing against me. I wonder sometimes why he picked me out of the hundred other houses he could have chosen in the middle-class suburban landscape. He must have known something about me I didn’t know myself, because he was relentless. The damn cat would have starved himself before he left. I tell myself I keep him around because he’s spectacular at hunting moles, which my yard attracts like frat boys to an open kegger. He makes gifts of their blind carcasses from time to time, dropping them off on my back deck like a sacrificial offering. But when he stares up at me with those pale, fathomless eyes, I keep thinking he’s got something on his mind. Until I figure it out, it’s Mi casa es su casa, cat.
THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, I wake up and calm myself with my ritual two cups of coffee and a Zoloft. The Zoloft is courtesy of Dr. Tina Gessman, who convinced me that being an assistant district attorney is the kind of job that the human body isn’t necessarily genetically prepared to do. She has a long list of clients, like social workers, third-grade teachers, and cops, who carry around what she likes to call “psychic weight.” My father would have referred to the idea of psychic weight as psychic bullshit, but then, his world was a lot simpler than mine. I think about him a lot, making my morning coffee—I exclusively use Peet’s—which, after I pay for shipping, costs me fourteen dollars a pound and is the single Sarandokos-level luxury I allow myself. My father fixed airplanes, and the idea of Zoloft and gourmet coffee making his day would have struck him as pretentious idiocy. I have his tools in my garage, and I tinker with things, little projects that bring me back to the days when he was alive. They’re Sears tools, made in the sixties, and they’ll be here when the earth is roamed by postnuclear holocaust cockroaches. I put on a back deck and later enclosed it; I swapped out older windows in the sunroom off the kitchen for newer, more efficient ones. Maybe the tools keep me centered, maybe the Zoloft, maybe it’s the gourmet coffee. Zoloft wasn’t my first try with mood-altering drugs. I went through a short list of pharmaceutical aids before finding the one least offensive. The first one, perversely, made me more combative; the second, foggy and sexually irrelevant; the third, Zoloft, had theoretically evened things out. Theoretically, because I’ve now taken it long enough to not clearly remember what things were like before. All I know is that spiked edges of nervous energy still run through my skin from time to time, clicking upward through my mood like electricity. Rayburn isn’t the only one who catches me with a nervous leg twitch. I do it myself, all the time.
What I’m thinking while I wash the Zoloft down is that I’ve made it nine years in the DA’s office, and I don’t want Kwame Jamal Hale to be the reason I ship out. My talk at Vanderbilt yesterday wasn’t just bullshit, after all. I do love what I do. I love it enough to endure the gradual grinding up of a lot of subtle distinctions in my personality, like the ability to be horrified by photographs of dead people.
Stillman is standing outside my office when I arrive, his ever-present gri
n pasted on his face. His arms are full of files, which I assume are from the Moses Bol case. Until this plays out, it’s business as usual, Rayburn said. No continuances, no delays. How Stillman got the files out of my office to spend the night with, I have no idea. But I think again that maybe Rayburn is right; I probably would have spent the morning wondering what the hell I was doing getting ready to send somebody else to the death chamber while Kwame Jamal Hale was a few days away from giving his deposition. Stillman, however, is as untroubled as a puppy. I unlock my door, and he steps through in front of me, as though I were holding the door for him. He drops the files on my desk, plops down in a chair, and says, “Whaddaya think, partner?”
What I think isn’t actually appropriate to share, so I walk past him and sit behind my desk. “David explained to you how I like to work, right?”
“He said to get you coffee. I assumed he was joking.”
“Don’t ever get me coffee, Stillman. You wouldn’t make it right, anyway.”
“Fine.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He said you’re the boss, and I said I had no problem with that.”
“So, if somebody wants to schedule a conference, what do you say?”
“Check with you?”
“Correct. And if you want to take somebody’s deposition, what do you do first?”
“I think I got where you’re headed here, Thomas.”
