The Spire

by Richard North Patterson

  Skip gaped at the check, then at Darrow. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Nothing,” he answered. “It’s an anonymous gift. But it might help with fraternity rush, or when you invite alumni back over Lutheran weekend to see the improvements you’ve made. If they think other alums are supporting you, they might.”

  Leaving, Darrow checked his watch. In an hour, Sunday visiting time would commence at the penitentiary in Lucasville.

  FACING HIM THROUGH the Plexiglas, Steve looked mildly surprised. “You came back.”

  Darrow’s smile felt synthetic. “I said I would. This may sound strange, but I’ve never shaken what happened. Especially to you.”

  Steve’s laugh was a derisive bark. “Then this is a new record for delayed reactions.”

  “I keep getting reminded.” Darrow looked into Steve’s eyes. “I saw George Garrison the other day. He’s chief of police now.”

  Steve’s reaction was contradictory—a sardonic smile, a guilty flicker in his eyes. “So I heard. Seems like everyone’s moving up but me. George isn’t exactly a fan of mine, is he?”

  “Not exactly. Before he thought you were a murderer, he just thought you were a racist prick.”

  “Guilty,” Steve said with sudden softness. “At least on the ‘racist prick’ count. In high school, we had a little incident.”

  “Over your kid sister?”

  “Yeah.” Steve looked down. “As best I remember, I told George I didn’t want him trying to stick his black dick into Mary.”

  Darrow winced inside. “George left that part out. But it helps explain why he remembers the moment so clearly. Also why he thinks you might be a psychopath when it comes to interracial sex.”

  Steve’s head jerked up. “So how does Sigmund Freud Garrison square that with me and Angela doing it? That I’m a racist and a hypocrite?”

  “And fucked up. In George’s estimate, you turned on yourself. And her.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Steve’s voice became a whisper. “It’s like a curse, man. It never expires.”

  Darrow watched his face. “I don’t follow.”

  Steve’s eyes misted. “What I’d said to George about my sister. I told Angela about it. She was tending bar and I was drinking—”

  “You must have been, to bring it up. Especially there.”

  Through the grid, Darrow could hear Steve exhale. “It was something I’d begun feeling shitty about. So I told her what I’d said to George, kind of like an apology.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That George had told her about it, years before. And that maybe I should be apologizing to him.” Steve shook his head. “For a minute, I thought she was pissed off—like she was my all-purpose black confessor, stuck listening to a stupid white boy purge his conscience of bigotry. Then she admitted she’d ripped into George for asking out a white girl. ‘I wonder if it’s something we learn,’ she told me, ‘or it’s just hardwired in the species. Either way it’s pretty sad.’

  “She went to serve drinks at the other end of the bar. I just sat there for a while, thinking. That’s when we started to be friends.”

  Gazing at Steve, Darrow pondered the story. It might not be true; Steve had had sixteen years to invent, or even imagine, a redemptive tale. But the story accounted for the casual friendliness between Steve and Angela—perhaps hinting at more—at the Alibi Club when Angela and Darrow had first spoken. It also explained why Steve had invited her to the party, and why she had felt inclined to leave with him. And it turned George Garrison’s theory of Steve’s psychology inside out.

  Thought you didn’t like black folks, Darrow had said to Steve.

  Times change. Gazing at Angela, Steve had added softly, Who wouldn’t like that?

  “I was over that crap,” Steve said now. “But they wouldn’t let me be over it.”

  “When?”

  “At the trial.” Steve’s voice filled with anger. “What was Caldwell College supposed to be for? Making you think, right? Being challenged by people like Lionel Farr to question your assumptions and prejudices.” Steve’s voice thickened. “Part of my deal with Angela was about that—wanting to learn more about her, find out what her life was like. I think that’s why she went with me that night, when we’d never been alone before. I wanted to know her, not strangle her.” His voice steadied. “I even think that’s why Farr comes to see me once in a blue moon. Caldwell—Durbin and Farr—may have thought it was convenient for me to be a sacrificial lamb. But I think deep down Farr sees that giving me a scholarship to Caldwell made me a better person, and that now I’ve been thrown away.”

  Darrow wondered. Farr was too deeply skeptical of human nature and, it seemed clear, of Steve’s innocence. In Darrow’s estimation, Farr had helped Steve find a lawyer only because Darrow had asked; if, after the trial, Farr had shown Steve kindness, it was because—despite his deeper fondness for Angela—Farr knew that men were too complex to be defined by the worst moment in their lives. But all Darrow said was “Farr’s a good man, Steve. I’m sorry I’m not a better one.”

  Steve simply nodded.

  8

  D

  ARROW BEGAN HIS SECOND WEEK AS PRESIDENT BY meeting Rusty Clark for breakfast at the Bluebird Grill.

  The first to arrive, Darrow took one of three booths at the rear, surveying the once-familiar setting. To accommodate more customers, the wooden counters were configured around two T-shaped spaces in which waitresses served breakfasts or lunches to diners on both sides. All were white. Most of the men wore jackets and baseball caps with the logos of local employers; the women tended toward pantsuits and short hair, often stiffly lacquered. In the eyes of some women, Darrow detected a vaguely fretful, worried look, reminding him that surrounding Caldwell College sat a small midwestern town where jobs were limited and paychecks finite. Most of the diners seemed to know one another; they chatted sporadically, laconically, their speech uninflected. Eyeing that morning’s specials, scrawled in Magic Marker on a board over the open grill, Darrow saw Rusty hurrying through the door.

  His college friend waved, giving Darrow a wide smile that seemed to melt away years. “Had to drop my oldest boy at school,” Rusty explained as he slid into the booth. “Takes after his old man—slow to wake up. By ten or so he’ll resemble human life.”

  Darrow laughed. “How many do you have?”

  Rusty whipped out his wallet, displaying a picture of a pert, pretty woman with a red-haired boy and two strawberry-blond girls flashing smiles just like Rusty’s.

  “These aren’t children,” Darrow adjudged. “They’re clones.”

  Rusty chuckled with pleasure. “At least I know they’re mine. Meg says that all she did was perform a storage function.”

  “Other than that and tolerating you, what else does Meg do?”

  “Teaches English at the high school—she loves the kids and likes her colleagues. And I’ve cobbled together a decent practice out of what happens in a place like Wayne: death, divorce, real estate transactions, and petty crime. Together we’ll get our kids through college without going into hock. Some days it’s a mini–rat race, but life’s turned out okay.” He smiled again. “Remember Tim Fedak?”

  “How could I not? He helped us stick Betts’s Miata in the library.”

  Rusty seemed momentarily sobered by the underside of memory. “So he did. Anyhow, Tim’s into real estate development around here. His family, mine, and two other couples with kids take a group vacation every year at a small lake in northern Michigan—the kids fish, swim, and water-ski while we cook steaks and keep them all from drowning. With any luck, someday us and our kids will be trekking up with their kids. We grandparents will be happy, and our children can do the cooking.”

  Smiling, Darrow absorbed his friend’s contentment. If Rusty was spared life’s random tragedies, Darrow had little doubt, the future would unfold much as he intended: marital fidelity, attentive parenting, deepening roots in a chosen place and time. Though he envied
Rusty what fate had taken from him—a wife and child—Darrow knew that he had become incapable of choosing a course so circumscribed; for him, and for Lee before she died, hell was knowing with utter certainty what one’s path would be. But it pleased him that Rusty was realizing his fondest hopes. “I’d say you were lucky,” Darrow told him. “But as Lionel Farr once told me, luck is a talent.”

  Nodding, Rusty acknowledged the compliment. “I figured out what I wanted and went for it. So did you.” He paused, adding quietly, “What happened to you surely wasn’t fair.”

  Perhaps not, Mark thought—too often, the consequence of not fully comprehending someone close to you far exceeds the sin. But he had never expressed to anyone his fear that Lee’s accident was not, in one sense, accidental. “My life has its fair share of compensations,” he answered. “Certainly compared to Steve’s.”

  Rusty studied the table. “I keep thinking I should visit him,” he said at length. “But I’ve been thinking that for almost fifteen years. I can’t get past what Steve’s inside for.”

  The plump young waitress arrived. Rusty ordered scrambled eggs; Darrow, English muffins. “Sorry,” the waitress told Darrow. “We don’t have those. Only toast.”

  When Rusty smiled at Darrow’s look of perplexity, Darrow realized, yet again, how far he had journeyed from Boston. After Darrow ordered wheat toast, Rusty asked, “Have you seen Steve yet?”

  Darrow took a sip of coffee. “Twice.”

  “Does he still ‘think’ he’s innocent?”

  “So he says. You know the story. He’s never had a better one.”

  “He never had a good one. The racial thing didn’t help him, either.”

  Once again, Darrow felt a lingering guilt about avoiding his friend’s trial. “I gathered that. Did you know his lawyer?”

  “Griff Nordlinger? I met him maybe once—he quit practicing about the time I got out of law school.”

  Surprised, Darrow said, “He wasn’t that old. Mid-forties, I’d have said.”

  Rusty furrowed his brow. “I think something happened to him, maybe medical. Of course, a case like Steve’s would give any lawyer around here a heart attack.”

  “How so?”

  “We get a couple of murders a year, max. That’s no way to build up expertise.” Rusty added more sugar to his coffee. “Plus, homicide cases are ballbusters—no lawyer wants to get a client executed or locked up for life, like Steve. But there’s no money to pay for the time you need to put in, no private investigators in town to help. So you end up relying on the cops who helped indict your client in the first place.”

  “That’s no good,” Darrow said flatly.

  Rusty spread his hands. “What else can you do? A solo practitioner like Nordlinger has got no one to cover his other cases, and a client like Steve’s got no money to cover his lawyer’s time. They’re both screwed.” Rusty’s voice lowered. “I tried one homicide, Mark. I swear to God I’ll never do another. By the time I pled the guy out on the eve of trial, I was a nervous wreck who could hardly pay my overhead, reduced to praying that my guy was as guilty as he looked. He’d have been better off with a public defender—that’s not what most people think, but it’s the God’s-honest truth. At least the PD’s office has investigators and a budget.”

  The waitress served their breakfasts. Darrow’s wheat toast was soaked in butter. When the woman left, Darrow said, “Heart attack on a plate. How do people in this town ever become old?”

  Rusty patted his stomach. “Prepaid quadruple bypass. My insurance guy is working on a plan.”

  Darrow smiled at this. “As near as you could tell,” he asked, “what was Nordlinger’s reputation?”

  “For high-end criminal work? I don’t think he had one.” Rusty took a bite of his eggs. “To be fair, Steve didn’t give a lawyer much to work with.”

  “Ever think about how you might have defended him?”

  “You mean if they’d held a gun to my head?” Distractedly, Rusty moved his eggs around the plate. “I’d go into every aspect of his relationship to Angela. Then I’d scour his memory of the day she died, hour by hour, and whatever the cops did with him after that—interrogation, tests, any clue to what he was up against.” He looked up at Darrow. “You can’t assume the police are rubes—they’re smart and highly trained. Like the lawyers, all they lack is murder cases to practice on.”

  “So the next step is replicating what the cops did?”

  “Exactly. Interview everyone at the party—you, me, Carl Hall, anyone else who saw anything at all. Including Joe Betts. Especially Joe, even if he hadn’t turned out to be Farragher’s star witness.” For a split second, Rusty hesitated. “You knew him better than I did. Was he doing coke that night?”

  “I don’t think he needed to be. That night seems to be why Joe quit drinking.”

  “Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be anywhere near him.” Rusty took a quick gulp of coffee. “Speaking as a lawyer, you’d want to find out what Joe’s thing about Angela was, and what he did after he left the party. Not to mention whether he saw what he says he saw on a pitch-black night—including inconsistencies, or any reason he’d want to nail Steve.” Abruptly Rusty’s voice softened. “I’m just thinking like a defense lawyer. Joe is make-or-break—his story is either true, or a mistake, or a setup.”

  “Then one more thing,” Darrow added quietly. “He’s also your alternative suspect.”

  Rusty focused on his eggs. “I’d sure like to have a motive, Mark. Jealousy seems like a stretch to me.”

  “So what was Steve’s motive? Even drunks and bigots have a sense of self-preservation. Why kill her when you’d be such an obvious suspect?”

  Rusty looked up. Quietly, he said, “She’s stayed with you, hasn’t she?”

  “Her face has. It wasn’t a drive-by shooting, Rusty. This was personal.”

  Rusty took his last bite of sausage. After a time, he said, “Steve didn’t seem like that, did he?”

  “Not to me.” Darrow hesitated. “Even now, that bothers me. Especially after seeing him again.”

  “So, as a lawyer, a big question is whether you’d have put him on the stand. That’s what Nordlinger did. It’s also what a good lawyer should do, if he can. I’ve never believed that relying on the presumption of innocence and a defendant’s right to silence cuts it with a jury.”

  “I agree. But the downside would have been leaving Steve wide open to whatever Farragher’s got. If you make the wrong decision, he’s done.” Signaling the waitress for more coffee, Darrow turned back to Rusty. “What are the chances of looking at the transcript of Steve’s trial?”

  “You personally?” Rusty asked in a tone of surprise. “If you wanted to, you could—Ohio has an open-records law for old files. The practical problem is what kind of shape they’re in. The last old files I dug up had been stored in an attic infested with hungry rats and sparrows—they’d converted the most critical papers into pellets and bird poop. Hopefully Steve’s files aren’t as appetizing.”

  “What about files from the autopsy and forensics?”

  “Those should be fine. Our coroner’s just a functionary. When an autopsy is called for, he farms it out to the ME in Columbus. Same with the crime lab. The Bureau of Criminal Investigation stores the records.”

  When the waitress brought the check, Darrow grabbed it before Rusty could. “This is on me,” Darrow said. “I could use a favor, though. If I become a paying client, think you could copy Steve’s files?”

  “Sure, at cost. But not without Dave Farragher knowing who wanted them.”

  Darrow shrugged. “That’s okay.”

  Rusty gave him a dubious look. “Is it? You’ve just come back here, and you’ve got big problems at the school. For years Farragher served on Caldwell’s board of trustees, and he’s still got lots of friends there. I can imagine someone asking why you’re wasting time reading the transcript of a fifteen-year-old murder case.”

  “Who would care that much?”


  “Farragher. Our local congressman’s about to pack it in, and Dave wants to take his place.” Rusty frowned. “That was the biggest case Dave ever had. The only thing between him and Congress might be for someone to suggest that he convicted an innocent man.”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, Rusty. I’m just curious about how and why Steve got convicted. Maybe the only way to ease my mind is to read the trial transcript.”

  Rusty glanced at his watch. “Up to you, pal.” He paused again, then added, “If you’re poking around, the police chief’s where you can do some business.”

  “Garrison? You didn’t go to high school here. He despises Steve.”

  “Maybe so. But George has graduated, all the way to chief of police.” Rusty leaned forward. “Farragher pushed a white guy for the chief’s job, a Republican friend of his—pushed him hard, in fact. But the mayor chose George. So there’s no love lost between our chief and our county prosecutor; Farragher’s still a threat to George’s job, and George still has something to prove. Undoing Farragher’s finest hour would not break George’s heart.”

  “Small towns,” Darrow said with a smile. “All I want is a look at those files. I’m a long way from threatening anyone’s ambitions.”

  Rusty stood. “Including your own, I hope. For a lot of us, Caldwell College is a very special place. We’ve got a stake in your success.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Darrow promised.

  9

  T

  HE MAJOR EVENT ON DARROW’S SCHEDULE THAT DAY WAS A midmorning meeting with Ray Carrick, the chairman of Caldwell’s board of trustees. Darrow intended to spend the preceding two hours reviewing budget projections, calling prominent alumni, and scanning plans for a new science building—which, although badly needed, would require $20 million Caldwell did not have. Then a sharp knock punctuated his thoughts, and Lionel Farr leaned through his office door. In a tone drenched with irony, Farr said, “As Sartre once remarked, ‘Hell is other people.’ ”