Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause

by Grif Stockley

  As I cram my notes into my briefcase, she begins to hum.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Gentry looks over at her comatose roommate and says, with great dignity, “I’m still sexually active.”

  I nod, unable to bring myself to tell her that I am aware of this remarkable fact.

  She says,”

  “They discourage that sort of thing here. In fact, they treat you like a child and make you feel dirty. You have to sneak around.” Her voice has become a whisper.

  “I have a friend here whom I’ve known ever since my son admitted me. He and I were caught in kind of a compromising position a couple of weeks ago in the food pantry. I would die if that comes out in court.”

  Mrs. Gentry’s spotted, wrinkled face has turned a bright red.

  “I think it’s totally irrelevant,” I assure her, “and I’ll object if your son’s attorney tries to bring it up.”

  Mrs. Gentry sighs, apparently relieved, but it occurs to me that the incident would be wonderful evidence that she shouldn’t be here. As I try to suggest this, however, the humming grows louder until it seems to fill the room. It sounds like “Sentimental Journey,” but I couldn’t swear to it.

  Hell, I don’t blame her. A person ought to be able to screw in peace. Still, it would be nice. As I finally leave, telling her that I will see her again before the hearing, she looks at me as if she has known all along that lawyers are perverts.

  Rainey scrapes the bottom of her empty yogurt cup like a chicken scratching for food. A kiddie-size cup hardly seems worth the trouble, but Rainey, as I have learned to my regret, has the self-discipline of an old-fashioned nun.

  “I have some information for you,” she says and then licks the white plastic spoon.

  “It’s all gossip, but since it’s about sex, you’ll pay attention.”

  This reference is prompted by my disclosure that I have a date with Kim Keogh tomorrow night. We could never work out lunch, so I swallowed hard and asked her out to dinner.

  Rainey and I have gotten to the point where we tell each other about our love life, or at least parts of it. It seemed strange at first, but since we have become such good friends it was probably inevitable.

  “She’s probably home looking at herself in the mirror,” I say gloomily. Now that I’ve asked Kim out, I’ve started to worry that we don’t have anything in common. I scoop out an M&M from my cup and pop it onto my chocolate-and-vanilla-flavored tongue. God, if chocolate tasted any better, it’d have to be outlawed.

  “What’s the deal?” I ask, remembering that I have asked her to find out what she could about Yettie Lindsey.

  As if she has forgotten, Rainey stares for a moment at the traffic whizzing through the intersection of Davis and Edgemont and then back at me. She is wearing pink twill jeans and a soft, clingy aqua top. She brushes a strand of her frizzy red hair back from her temple in the humid, oppressive night air, raising her left breast in the process.

  “Yettie supposedly used to have a thing for your client,” she says, “but apparently he wouldn’t give her the time of day.”

  I watch as some teenage boys who don’t look old enough to shave pull up to the red light in a 280 Z and then scratch off.

  “Why wouldn’t he?” I ask, thinking I know the answer.

  “She’s attractive, young, and available. At least she wasn’t wearing a ring.”

  Rainey snaps her spoon against the table, splintering it into two jagged pieces of plastic.

  “What you mean is that she’s got a figure that would wear out the elastic in your jockey shorts.”

  Somebody has given Rainey a good description of her. I dig into my yogurt. “If a woman that good-looking were to come on to me…” I say, letting my voice trail off.

  My friend takes her napkin and wipes her mouth.

  “It doesn’t take much to set you off,” she says.

  “Maybe she just wasn’t his type.”

  An M&M goes down the wrong way, and I launch into a fit of coughing after I say, “I think he’s the type who likes white women.”

  Rainey watches me unsympathetically as I hack until I think I’m going into convulsions.

  “That sounds so racist. I thought you were married to a black woman yourself. Is that how you choose women by color?”

  Her voice is sharp, even hostile. I wonder what I have said that is so offensive to her.

  “Not particularly, but some white women, for example, prefer black men,” I say, trying to defuse the subject. “It’s just a matter of taste.”

  Rainey sniffs, as if this subject is far more complicated than my simple-minded statement implied.

  “Anyway, he has never even asked her out once and it pissed her royally, ac cording to my sources.”

  I try one M&M at a time.

  “Have you heard any rumors about my client and Olivia Le Master?”

  “No,” Rainey says irritably.

  “You know, I might as well get on your payroll.”

  I wish I could afford her. On the way to her house to drop her off, I get Rainey to promise she won’t breathe a word of what I’m about to tell her and then give her the whole story.

  If I am violating any of Andy’s confidences, then so be it. I would trust her with my life. We pull up in front of her house and sit in the dark in the car until I finish.

  “Do you think there’s a chance anything funny could have been going on, or was it just an accident?” I ask.

  Rainey sits with her back against the door of the Blazer.

  Apparently mollified that I have told her about the case, she says, “It’s all too problematical. If that aide who was holding her hadn’t let go, Pam wouldn’t have been electrocuted.”

  My eyes have begun to adjust to the darkness. I respond with my latest theory, “Unless he was in on it, too.”

  Rainey snorts, “You’re beginning to sound like those people who still write books about the Kennedy assassinations.”

  I grin in the darkness, yet I am serious. Ever since the Hart Anderson murder, I see conspiracies everywhere.

  “Well, what do you think happened, based on what I’ve told you?”

  Rainey opens her door, and the dim, dirty car light comes on, causing her face to appear harsh and prematurely old.

  “It sounds like a tragic accident to me, but I know I think that your client should never have shocked that child!”

  Her tone is almost shrill, on the verge of being out of control. Why is she so mad? I wasn’t the one who used a cattle prod. Irritated, I shoot back, “Hindsight doesn’t take much courage. If she had been your child, wouldn’t you want somebody to try to give her as normal a life as possible?”

  Rainey fairly yells, “Not that way, for God’s sake!” She pushes open the door and takes a deep breath.

  “I guess I’m just tired, Gideon. I’m sorry.”

  Tired myself, I take her at her word. “That’s okay,” I say.

  She must be getting her period. Poor women.

  “I’ll call you this weekend and let you know how my date goes.”

  “Fine,” she says shortly, and I wait until I see the light in her house go on before I drive off. It is a bad sign that Rainey’s reaction is so unsympathetic to Andy. Other than being much more liberal, Rainey shares many of the characteristics of the average Blackwell County juror: a middle-aged white female who has at least one child. If she thinks that Andy is in trouble, I suspect he is. I wish I knew the guy well enough for him to level with me. But maybe he has.

  Can’t a black man try to help a white female without everyone thinking that sex is involved?

  I turn into my driveway and walk into my stale, hot house.

  Woogie stretches but does not get up to greet me as I turn on the light.

  “The dog days of summer,” I say to him. He makes a squeaking sound that I take to be assent. I drink a beer and go to bed.

  kim keogh’s apartment (only two blocks south of Rainey house) is much smaller than I had i
magined and quite a bit funkier, too. In fact, it appears to be hardly more than a one-room efficiency. Maybe there is a bedroom, though from the couch where I am sitting I cannot identify which door leads to it. On the wall behind me, on each wall actually, are blown-up pictures of old-time movie stars: Marilyn Monroe, dark Gable, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, William Holden, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, but also current ones like Robert Redford, Cher, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, and my favorite, Michelle Pfeiffer.

  We managed to do nicely at dinner—a seafood place on the Arkansas River, where she considerately declined my invitation to order lobster and instead had catfish and salad.

  She talked mostly about herself (which is fine with me, since in the back of my mind I am worried she will try to pump me about Andy’s case). Despite Rainey’s snide comment about how well she conceals her makeup, she is gorgeous—beautiful blond hair and the longest natural eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a human. She is sitting encouragingly close to me on the couch, which is so slick it seems inevitable that we slide toward each other.

  “I was going to be a model,” she says, sipping on a glass of white wine while I drink beer, ‘but I wanted to do something really meaningful with my life, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure.” I nod, thinking that her ambition to be a TV anchor would be judged, when the big meltdown comes, hardly to have qualified, but there is no doubt this woman takes herself quite seriously. And for all I know, she may be the next Barbara Walters.

  She is wearing a jade cotton jersey dress that comes modestly below her knees. There is something touching to me about ambitious women who are in fields where they are required to rely on their looks. She has said enough for me to realize she has enormous doubts about herself, and with good reason. She seems to sense that it is only a matter of time before someone notices a few wrinkles that can’t be hidden-and asks her to start filling in on the 6 a.m. farm show. I find myself giving her a pep talk about how much she has achieved already.

  “Half the women in Arkansas would switch places with you in a New York minute,” I tell her.

  “You’re beautiful, poised, and talented. What else do you want, for God’s sake?” I do not add intelligent, because it is apparent she is probably below average in this department which will probably be her professional death.

  For this rhetorical question, she has already thought about an answer. She crosses her legs and balances her wine against a thigh.

  “I’d like to be quicker, smarter,” she admits, “I don’t really understand a lot of the stories I cover,” she says.

  I sip at the Coors she has brought me. There is a sad, sweet quality about her that is touching. I feel heat rising as if someone had lit a boiler under me. Women want so badly to be taken seriously and listened to it is almost embarrassing. I have promised myself that I will not get involved quickly with the next woman, but I hear myself lying, “You’re a lot brighter than you give yourself credit for. I’ve watched you too many times cover difficult stories not to believe that.”

  She pats her lovely hair self-consciously and gives me a hopeful smile.

  “Are you serious?”

  As I gulp at my beer, trying to cool down, I look at the pictures on the opposite wall. Humphrey Bogart, Sally Fields.

  She is living in la-la land. Please don’t do this to this woman, I tell myself. She doesn’t want to go to bed on the first date, but she will if I handle her right.

  “You’re your own worst critic,” I say, putting my beer on the cheap coffee table in front of the couch. All her money must go into clothes, I think. This place is just short of a dump.

  “They wouldn’t have hired you if they weren’t certain you could do the job.”

  She puts the wineglass to her lips and finds it empty. I pour her some more from the beaded, sweaty bottle in front of us. Over the years I’ve found that it doesn’t matter if you look like an orangutan—all you really have to do is listen.

  From her bedside table she reaches over and pulls open a drawer. I watch her right breast swing free as she strains to reach a brown envelope. I’ve had better sex the first time but not with anyone less inhibited. The alcohol must have loosened her up, because, until the last hour she has been almost ploddingly serious. The bottle she brought into the bedroom is almost empty. I am expecting marijuana, but instead she pulls from the packet a handful of pictures. Incredibly, they are of her naked in various poses.

  She looks at me through the harsh glare of the lamp and says in a slurred voice, “I had these made when I was twenty. What do you think?”

  She looks incredible—slim hips and small but attractive breasts which appear larger because of the way she is bending toward the camera. My immediate reaction is embarrassment, not arousal. I am too recently spent for that. Why is she showing me these? I look slowly through them. Was she trying out for Playboy or what? I have a slight headache from the six pack of beer I have drunk and rub my head. I say truthfully, “They’re stunning.”

  She nods, her right hand stroking my back, the other holding the pictures up for her to see in the light.

  “I think they’re good, too,” she says, her voice sodden with the liquor.

  Finally, I understand why she has shown me these pictures. She is almost pathetically insecure. Somehow, she considers the photographs are proof of her value. I say, “No matter what happens, you ‘ll have proof what a knockout body you have.”

  She tosses the pictures onto the table instead of putting them back into their envelope. She smiles and rests her head on my chest.

  “How’d you know that?” she says.

  “My body works a lot better than my mind.”

  I stroke her hair, noticing that Rainey was right. This close I can see her makeup.

  “The old mind body problem,” I say. I am a little drunk myself.

  She reaches down and peels off my condom and holds it up for us to inspect. Waving it over my head like a pennant, she says, “Wanna hear a joke?”

  Fearful that she is going to spill my jism onto my head, I lean back but say quickly, “Yeah.”

  She pulls the condom down and rests it on her pubis. “You know what the rubber said to the diaphragm?”

  I pat her right thigh.

  “Naw, what did it say?”

  She turns her head and smiles crookedly at me.

  “Was it good for you, too?”

  I begin to laugh and find I can’t stop, shaking the bed and her body in the process. The truth of the joke has struck some nerve I can’t begin to understand about my own life. I guess the joke works because our protection against each other has become the most important element in the equation.

  At some level we have become merely matchmakers for our own technology. I glance across the room, noticing again that the largest picture she has in her bedroom is a picture of herself. It is enormous, an eleven by fourteen, probably a promo by her employer. Kim Keogh, the latest and prettiest member of the Channel 11 news team. I wonder but do not have the courage to ask if she has had her name changed.

  She reaches across me and casually tosses, like a worn-out sock, the swollen condom into the wicker wastepaper basket beside her bed and says sourly, “It wasn’t that funny.”

  For some reason she thinks I am laughing at her. I roll her off my chest and cradle her in my arm.

  “It was a good joke.”

  She snuggles against my chest, “I like you,” she says, “You understand me, you know?”

  So I will not have to answer, I kiss her hair, which is damp from her exertions. In three minutes she is sound asleep, snoring gently against my shoulder. For all her nude pictures, aggressive lovemaking, and vanity, the always kind and pleasant Kim Keogh who appears on TV is the dominant personality. Alcohol and a sympathetic ear have uncovered a wilder side, but before she got halfway through the bottle of Chablis, Kim moved me with her own unpublicized work as a volunteer tutor for the last two years to black girls who live in Needle Park. A nice woman, I think, sleepily, nicer
than she’ll sound if I ever tell someone about the pictures….

  Remembering Kim’s joke and my extreme reaction to it, for some reason I think of Amy and wonder if she had an abortion. I should call but realize I’m not anxious to be confronted by either of the choices available to her. What would I do if Kim becomes pregnant and wants to have a baby? I yawn so loudly Kim stirs beside me. Somehow, I don’t think either Sarah or Rainey would be pleased….

  I awake feeling pain in my rectum and notice a growing need to defecate. I turn my head and check the luminous red dial on her clock. It is just after three. I have been asleep only an hour. Kim has turned over toward the wall, and I slide carefully out of the bed, trying to remember the location of her bathroom. After opening a closet door, I find it and sit on the commode hoping a good shit will take away the pain. Though I strain like a man who has been constipated for weeks, nothing doing. It feels like someone is going into my bowels with a corkscrew, and I break into a sweat as I stand up and look into Kim’s bathroom mirror.

  “Gideon,” Kim calls through the door.

  “Are you okay?”

  I come into the room almost dancing with pain. She turns on the light, and I would feel embarrassed were I not hurting so much.

  “Something’s wrong,” I admit and explain my symptoms as if she were a physician making a house call.

  Perhaps sobered somewhat by what she is being forced to witness, she pulls the sheet over her breasts.

  “Has this happened before?”

  I would be less alarmed if the corkscrew feeling were in my stomach. Food poisoning would be bad enough, but I might live. There is no mistaking the location however. I begin to put on my clothes as fast as I can. If I am going to die, I don’t want to do it like this. I can see Sarah’s face as they tell her, “Your dad’s ass started hurting, and then drunk and naked as a jaybird he fell over dead on top of a pile of nude pictures of some TV reporter he had known only a few hours.” I catch my big toe on a belt loop and fall sideways on the bed. She scoots backward as if I were now trying to rape her.