Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction

by Grif Stockley

  The only people left for me to interview are the couple next door to the Wallace house, and I park the car in front of the empty home, feeling I’m wasting my time. I’m not going to find anything new. Still, if Chet gets worse and I have to try this case, it won’t have hurt me any to have talked to the witnesses.

  According to the statement they gave to the police, Ann and Bobby Wheeler overheard an argument between Art and Leigh the night before Art was killed, but it doesn’t seem like much to me. (My Rosa, true to her Latin temperament, could sound emotional just talking about taking out the garbage.) True, the subject matter was Shane Norman. Supposedly, they heard Leigh yell at Art as they were getting out of the car that she was “sick of him bad-mouthing her father.” Art had said something unintelligible while slamming the door but ended the exchange when both looked up and saw they were being watched.

  On this pleasant afternoon, I am met at the door by an attractive redhead in her early thirties wearing sandals and an aqua jumper over a flowered jersey. I have called ahead, and she invites me in as if I were a neighbor down the street instead of somebody who conceivably could be grilling her on cross-examination. Her husband, a tall, distinguished-looking man who could pose as a male model, is a little cool, but the woman offers me a drink, which I regretfully decline. We sit in their living room, which has more floor space than my entire house. I sometimes forget how much money there is in Blackwell County. People who have it don’t take out ads on TV. They have talked to diet’s investigator already, and the husband especially seems to regard my visit as an unnecessary intrusion, which it probably is.

  “We didn’t hear much,” the husband volunteers.

  “I’m not sure it was even a fight.”

  This is good news, and I dutifully make some notes.

  mrs. Wheeler adds, “I never heard them argue before.”

  These aren’t the kind of people who want their names in the paper except on the society pages. Who knows what they’ll say at the trial, but as long as I’m here, I might as well see what I can get out of them. I ask Ann Wheeler, “How well did you know her?”

  This is the right person and question to ask.

  “A lot better than my husband did,” mrs. Wheeler says, daring him to shush her.

  “We became friends. Leigh was about as sweet as you could get. She sometimes came over for coffee in the mornings. Art would get jealous if she was gone an hour. He liked her right under his thumb.”

  The husband places a hand on his wife’s knee as if to restrain her. I pretend not to notice.

  “How’d she react to it?”

  Ignoring her mate, mrs. Wheeler leans forward and says, “I think she was so used to it that it didn’t bother her; apparently her father had treated her the same way.

  Leigh didn’t have it in her to rebel like she said her sisters had. I think unconsciously she married Art hoping he’d rescue her from her father. Actually, Art probably was a lot like him. To hear her describe her father, and then listen to her talk about her marriage. Art and her father could be the same man. It was almost spooky.”

  Crowding her on the long couch, Mr. Wheeler whispers urgently in his wife’s ear, but she shakes her head.

  “I’ve tried to talk to Leigh a half-dozen times since all this happened, but it’s like she’s been kidnapped. I didn’t say much to the police or your investigator right afterward, because I didn’t want to get involved, but this just isn’t right. Leigh couldn’t have killed Art. She just couldn’t get that angry at anybody. There was a lot of emotion in her, but it was completely repressed. Besides, she worshiped Art like he was some kind of god.

  Actually, I thought he was kind of cold, and so did you,” she says, turning to her husband.

  Mr. Wheeler is plainly uncomfortable. He is immaculate in his chino trousers and olive blazer, and his kind doesn’t become involved in a murder trial, but his wife has put him on the spot.

  “We had them over a couple of times, but he didn’t say much. Since they never reciprocated, the friendship was between Ann and Leigh,” he says, in a low voice.

  “Art seemed okay to me. He just kind of sat back and watched Leigh, but when he was ready to go home, there wasn’t any doubt about who was boss.”

  Unlike his own home, fortunately.

  “Were either of you home for any portion of the morning Art was killed?” I ask, double-checking the police statement and Chet’s investigator’s report.

  Neither was, but mrs. Wheeler isn’t through.

  “You ought to get in touch with at least one of her sisters. I know her father’s a famous preacher around here, but he was obsessed with Leigh. Mary Patricia came to visit not too long before Art was killed. Leigh brought her over, and she gave me an earful about the father. Any sign of independence in them he hated. Christian Life was like a prison for them; they never got to go any where else. According to her, their father didn’t pay any attention to them until they were almost teenagers, but he didn’t make the same mistake with Leigh. He started taking her everywhere with him when she was five years old.”

  I sit there, watching the husband glower at his wife.

  There is no stopping her. I ask, “What was Leigh’s re action to her sister telling you this?”

  Ann Wheeler makes a face as if the memory pains her.

  “She just laughed and said she had loved it. I truly believe she did, but it had its price. She felt a lot of guilt when she stopped going to church all the time.

  There was areal battle going on inside her between Art and her father, and Art was winning.”

  Mr. Wheeler can’t stand it any longer.

  “You don’t know anything from anyone’s point of view except Leigh’s. Most kids would love to have had a close relationship with their father. Leigh’s sisters were probably just jealous.”

  I look around this big house for signs of children, but there are none. I change the subject to lower the temperature.

  “I talked to Mr. Tyndall before coming over. Is he reliable?” I ask, hoping the wife will trash him, too.

  mrs. Wheeler nods.

  “According to Leigh, he practically built Christian Life when it was first beginning. In fact, he’s Mary Patricia’s godfather, Leigh told me, and he and Shane Norman are still close.” I think of Tyndall’s trophies. The guy bragged about his running, but didn’t mention his connection to Shane. Why in the hell not? If anybody had a reason to lie for Leigh, that old guy would. I think of Chet’s comment: “We don’t do things that way.” Well, maybe not, but it seems odd that he wouldn’t have volunteered his connection with Christian Life. Perhaps he kept an eye on Leigh for Shane and didn’t like what he was seeing. I don’t know what to make of his omission. It is probably meaningless, but with Chet acting as screwy as he has been, maybe it’s significant. I stare blankly at the Wheelers, realizing, not for the first time, how little confidence I have right now in the man who has hired me to help him. I can’t avoid the feeling that this case is like watching a play being done in a foreign language that sounds like English but isn’t quite. Until now, I’ve thought that if I just listened hard enough, I would be able to pick it up, but clearly, that isn’t happening.

  Glowering at his pert and increasingly loquacious wife, Mr. Wheeler stands up, ending the interview. He’s had enough of this conversation, and I have no choice but to take my leave as gracefully as I can. I have undoubtedly ruined this evening for the Wheelers, but there’s nothing to spice up a marriage like a good fight.

  The wife seems slightly disappointed, but I can always call back for more information when Mr. Tightass isn’t around between now and the trial, if she wants to cooperate.

  Outside, parked in Leigh Wallace’s driveway, I find waiting on me Chet and the cop assigned to assure minimal damage to the crime scene. I don’t see what the big deal is after all these months unless the prosecutor is going to try to take the jury on a tour. Chet looks exhausted but gives me a nod as if to say that we’ll talk later about what I’v
e learned.

  “Gideon, this is Officer Brownlee. He’s our nanny for your tour,” he adds superfluously

  I shake Brownlee’s hand. All arms and legs and so young that I wonder if he has a driver’s license, Brownlee grins as if being in the presence of the state’s premier criminal defense attorney has been more excitement than he can stand.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Brownlee says politely. The kid has a nice smile.

  “My pleasure,” I say, winking at Chet but meaning this pleasantry sincerely. Unlike some lawyers, I like cops, and the older I get, the more I like them. Every profession has its bad apples, but try giving lawyers a gun and a nightstick to carry around, and we would quickly acquire a worse reputation than we already have. You don’t have to be a psychologist to realize that if you give people the power and opportunity to abuse others (as cops unquestionably have), some of them will inevitably oblige you. But so will a convent of nuns.

  Like all the homes out here, Leigh’s home is monster size. I’m glad I don’t have to make the mortgage payments on an empty house, but it would give me the creeps to keep living in a place where my spouse had been murdered even if I had done it. Nice double-wide yard, I notice enviously. Woogie would be in heaven pissing on all these shrubs. However, given my live and-let-die approach to yard work, it would surely look like a desert inside of a month if I owned it. As we enter immediately to our right off the foyer are a living room and adjacent dining room the size of a train station. They could have hosted the Blackwell County Bar Association meeting in here. Why do people buy what they least need? Because they can, I guess.

  “Great party room, huh, Mr. Page?” Brownlee says, gawking at the scene before him.

  I nod. The place looks like a museum. The walls are covered with exotic tapestries, paintings, and engravings, the quality of which I’m not fit to judge. We would have been happy to get an Artmobile full of this stuff where I grew up. I am in awe of the solid oak dining room table, which could seat a busful of schoolchildren, but I’m glad I wasn’t part of the crew that wrestled it in here. I can feel a hernia coming on just thinking about it. Even though Chet has been here before, he remains impressed. He whistles, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Gideon.” He knows as well as I that while a few eastern Arkansas farmers may have had homes this size, almost none looked like this on the in side. He leads me to a room off to the right.

  “This is where he bought it,” he says, pointing to a desk located next to a window looking out on the lawn and the Wheelers’ house next door. I’ve seen the pictures. Art was seated in his chair behind the desk when he was shot. According to the autopsy report, he died instantly from a bullet through his heart. According to the report, the time of death was between ten and eleven-thirty.

  I stand in the doorway waiting for some brilliant in sight, but feel only a slight headache from hunger. I like the office, too. It has a fireplace, books, and photographs on the wall that Wallace must have made during his business trips. Besides imposing architecture of Third World banks, there are kids on burros, Latin American campesinos, Asian peasants. It is nice to think that Wallace got out in the countryside a bit.

  There are also pictures of more than a few women.

  Without a doubt, Wallace had an eye for female beauty.

  There is one portrait of an Asian teenager that is unusually arresting. Her gentle, round face is dazzling in its luminosity. With eyes the color of washed graphite, she glows with a beauty so serene it is difficult to associate it with youth. Of all the women he encountered, how odd he found the one he wanted in a state as obscure to many Americans (until Clinton’s election) as the country of Albania. It is easy to forget that Wallace was from a small town in the state almost equally as obscure to Arkansans. His pictures of Leigh are gems, her face expressive, alive, and joyous in a way I’ve yet to see.

  The portraits of her are enough like the others that I have to assume Wallace made them. If so, the proof of her love for him is staring me in the face. Her face radiates happiness.

  “Even if she doesn’t go to prison,” Chet comments from the window where he is studying the pictures, “how does she put her life back together?”

  I think of the tug of war between father and husband.

  Depending upon how a person looks at it, either her life is over or she’s gotten a second chance. If we can some how get her off, she may never leave her father’s side again.

  “Maybe being married wasn’t all that different,” I say quietly, thinking of the comments I have heard this afternoon. Despite their best intentions, how many women, I wonder, swap one form of domination for an other?

  We are here to look for evidence that will help our client, but I know I am just going through the motions.

  If somebody other than Leigh killed Art, surely it had to be somebody he knew well enough to invite back to his office. I can’t help thinking the evidence is somewhere outside the house, not in it; but that’s the mind of a lawyer at work, not a forensic investigator. Yet, according to the police reports nothing has turned up in the lab no exotic grass stains in the carpet, no unusual bullet pattern. Naturally, the absence of physical evidence will be used against Leigh.

  Brownlee appears in the doorway.

  “Come check the view,” he invites us.

  Chet smiles at the cop. As a watchdog, he isn’t much.

  “Go on,” he says to me, “it’s not bad.”

  I follow Brownlee down a hall and through French double doors onto a deck that overlooks a swimming pool and below that the Arkansas River.

  “Nice, huh?”

  Brownlee says, leaning over the railing.

  Real nice. We are on the second floor, I realize. They probably ate dinner on the deck when the weather was nice. Spring is here today in all its glory. The air is soft and without the soaked-cotton-ball effect of a humid Arkansas summer. Between the pool and the water is fifty yards of no-man’s-land of thick brush, containing perhaps a .22 pistol. On paper there has been a search of the area, but it looks as though Leigh would have gotten all scratched up if she had tried to hide a gun down there.

  “Makes you wonder why rich people kill each other,” Brownlee says, his eyes on the drained pool beneath us.

  “If they can’t get along, why don’t they just divide up the loot and move on?”

  Good question. The problem is, few people really think of themselves as rich. To Brownlee and me, this looks like heaven on earth, but Wallace probably figured he was just barely ahead of the rat race. It turns out he had credit life insurance on the house, but it’s hard to believe a woman would kill her husband just to avoid a mortgage payment. No other insurance policies, no significant bank accounts. Down on the river I can barely make out a speedboat. It is growing dark, but the urge to be outdoors is irresistible.

  “They don’t have any more sense than we do, just more money,” I tell Brownlee. A comforting thought, but not one I really, believe. Down deep, I’ve always had the feeling they know something I don’t.

  I go back into the house and find Chet sitting in the kitchen with his head between his knees. Damn. I wanted to tell him what I learned from the neighbors, but it will have to wait.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, glancing behind me to see if Brownlee is coming. This would be a hot story for a cop to spread around the station: the great Chet Bracken can’t even hold his head up. Maybe it’s just as well. I’m not so sure I would trust him any way. Why? Is it because he is sick, or because at some level I don’t think he is being straight with me? I’m not sure.

  Chet looks up at me in obvious pain, but struggles to his feet.

  “Yeah,” he grunts.

  I still don’t know what kind of cancer he has. This doesn’t seem the time to ask. I have begun to like the man, but he doesn’t invite sympathy.

  “I’ll go tell Brownlee we’re leaving.”

  He nods, and two minutes later I watch his Mercedes creep away. The real question I wanted to ask remains unanswered: How good
is Shane Norman’s alibi? Actually, I realize now that the question I really want to ask Chet is: Are you somehow covering up for Norman? I don’t have the guts at this point. Why? I can’t explain it. Fear, I suppose. He’s like some kind of god to lawyers of my ilk. I need to get over that, but so far I haven’t quite managed it. Besides, he’d bounce me off the case quicker than some of the checks I’ve written since I’ve been in private practice. Brownlee, bursting with vitality, watches for a moment.

  “That guy may be a hotshot, but he looks like death warmed over to me.”

  I can’t disagree. If he croaks before the trial, will I get this case by myself? I want it in the worst way. But there is too damn much I don’t know. The best I could do is second-degree murder and that seems like a remote possibility at this point. People will say that Chet would somehow have won it. I lie, “That’s what happens when you hit thirty, Brownlee.”

  He grins. In his early twenties, he is safe from old age and death. Sure he is.

  thursday night. my daughter’s night to open cans, for surely what we do can’t be called cooking. Yet food is the furthest thing from her mind. I sit at the kitchen table while she checks a pan on the stove. Always the optimist, Woogie, whose culinary requirements are almost as simple, watches hopefully beside my chair.

  “I feel so sorry for Pastor Norman,” she says.

  “All that he is doing, and his wife is an alcoholic, too.”

  I reach down to pet Woogie and decide my sympathies lie with Pearl Norman, who sounds as if she has been starved for attention ever since she married Shane and especially since Leigh was born.

  “It could be that she has a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism,” I point out.

  “And I suspect she feels lonely a lot of the time.”

  Sarah, judgmental as only the young can be, will have none of it. She tosses an empty box in the trash.

  “She doesn’t have to drink,” she says blithely.

  “She has a choice.”

  I feel a bump on Woogie’s head and wonder if it is a tumor. Surely not.