*
We are well inside the town now. The houses on each side of the tree-lined streets are wooden, painted white, and gleaming in the sunshine. The sidewalk is almost deserted. The few late morning strollers who are there saunter with the air of people who know that God created their town first – and used up most of his good material on it.
We pull up by a bench where an old man in a tweed jacket is sitting reading the Macclesfield Sentinel.
“Could you tell me the way to Broad Street?” I ask.
“Who you visitin’?” he replies, like he wants to check out my credentials before he hands over such a valuable piece of information to me.
“Mrs Martha Dillworth.”
He gives me a toothless smile.
“Now ain’t that nice for her? Martha don’t get too many visitors, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know,’ I admit. “Now if you could just tell us where Broad Street is, we could pay that call on her.”
“Oh sure,’ the old man says. “First on the left, second on the right – you’d have to be some kind of Eskimo to miss it.”
“Are Eskimos particularly poor at navigation?” I say – and the moment the words are out of my mouth, I hate myself for asking the question.
The old man grins again. “They must be pretty poor, ’cos you don’t never see any of ’em in JC Penney’s, now do you?”
I agree you don’t, and am just about to pull away from the sidewalk when Carrie sticks her head out of the window and says: “Excuse me, sir, but do know Mrs Dillworth’s son – Harvey?”
“Used to know Harvey,” the old man replies. “Only he don’t live here in town no more. He’s an attorney, you see, and a while back he got himself a job with a real fancy law firm in Boston.”
*
The Dillworth place has small front yard with a neat lawn and a border of roses. The porch is clean, the woodwork is neatly painted. Mrs Dillworth herself is tiny and thin – almost wispy. Her eyes are a washed-out hazel, the eyes of a woman who has struggled long and hard, and survived countless disappointments.
I glance around her living room, an inner sanctum which we have only been admitted to because Mrs Dillworth thinks Carrie and I are working for the Columbia Law Review. The couch and easy chairs we are sitting on look at least thirty years out of date. The carpet is worn so thin that it is hard to see the pattern any longer. The TV is ancient, and the radio under it probably won’t pick up any tunes written after 1950.
On one wall there is a cheap print of an overly-cute child with apple cheeks and big blue eyes. On another there is a photograph of a man with an old-fashioned haircut and a thick moustache. He is wearing the kind of suit that my father used to own when I was a kid. He reminds me of somebody – though not my old man. Maybe he looks like some other guy I knew back in my Brooklyn days.
Mrs Dillworth notices my interest.
“That’s my late husband,” she says. “He died when Harvey was no more than a little baby.”
“Why don’t you tell us something about Harvey?” Carrie suggests to her.
Mrs Dillworth smiles.
“He always wanted to be a lawyer. Even when he was little, when all the other kids were playing cowboys and injuns, Harv wouldn’t join in. He used to sit at home, all by himself, watchin’ law shows on the TV. The Defenders – stuff like that.” A sudden look of panic crosses her face. “You ain’t gonna use Harvey’s name, are you?”
I smile reassuringly.
“This is a general survey that we’re conducting. He’ll only appear in the article as a statistic.”
The word ‘statistic’ seems to terrify her.
“A sta-what?” she asks.
“A statistic,’ I repeat. ‘Part of a column of figures, which answers questions like: ‘Of a hundred lawyers who started out their careers in a small town, how many have ended up like this, and how many have ended up like that’?”
She is still not convinced.
“Only, maybe, Harvey’s boss wouldn’t like it.”
“His boss?”
“Mr Tait.”
But I am no longer convinced that Tait is the boss.
I remember Tait’s study – so perfect in every way, except for absence of diplomas. And I recall that, according to Colston, the unhappy associate with a drinking problem, he didn’t know anything about corporate law when he bought his way into the law firm of Walsh and Fineberg.
So maybe Tait still doesn’t know corporate law. Maybe it is Harvey who is practicing the law, and Maxwell is just a front.
And maybe it is Harvey who struck up the deal with Pine that led to Bobbie Hopgood’s death!
“Where did Harvey study law?” I ask.
“He wanted to go to one of them fancy law schools. Told me it would give him a good start in the profession. But I didn’t have the money for that. So he went to this place up-state instead. He tried to hide his disappointment, but I could see it anyways.”
“And what did he do when he graduated?”
“He came right back home. ‘Won’t be here long, Mom,’ he said to me. ‘Any day now, I’m gonna get a job in Boston.’ Musta written hundreds o’ letters. Didn’t even get an answer to half of them—”
“But then he did get a job in Boston, didn’t he?” Carrie interrupts. “And now he works for Tait, Walsh and Fineberg.”
“That come later,’ Mrs Dillworth says. “For the first few years, he did his lawyering right here in Macclesfield. He worked out of his bedroom. Course, there ain’t much call for a lawyer in a small town like this. Wasn’t much money to pay for one, neither, not till the Pure-Maize biscuit factory opened. But Harvey stuck it out – ’cos he had a dream.”
“How often does he come back to see you?” Carrie asks.
Mrs Dillworth falls silent for a moment, then, in a voice which is almost a whisper, she says: “He don’t come back at all.”
“But you go to Boston to see him, don’t you?”
Mrs Dillworth shakes her head.
“Why not?”
Harvey’s mother struggles to find the right words.
“Well, see, Mr Tait comes from a real classy background, and so do most of the people who work for him. The only reason Mr Tait took Harvey on in the first place was because he was so smart …”
Oh yeah! Because he was so smart – and because he was so willing to do all the work himself, then let the unqualified Maxwell Tait act as his mouthpiece.
Mrs Dillworth is still talking – still justifying her son.
“I … I just wouldn’t fit in, you see. An’ Harv worked so hard to get where he is now … I don’t want to be an embarrassment to him. But he’s a good boy. He sends me money as regular as clockwork.”
I look around the room again and wonder where it goes. Mrs Dillworth catches my expression.
“I don’t spend it. I put it in the bank, in case Harv ever needs it – in case Mr Tait changes his mind, and Harv loses his job. When Harv phones me – an’ he phones me once a week – I tell him all the things I’m buyin’. He’d be real mad if he knew the truth, but since he can’t come back to Macclesfield, he ain’t never goin’ to find out.”
“Why do you think Mr Tait gave him a job in Boston when it seemed that no one else would?” I ask.
“It was because of the Gary Stacey case,” Mrs Dillworth says without a second’s hesitation.
“The Gary Stacey case?”
“Yeah. That’s what made his name for him. Harvey defended Gary Stacey, and got him off.”
“And what was this Gary Stacey accused of?”
Mrs Dillworth looks down at the floor.
“A bad thing,” she mumbles. “Gary did a very bad thing.”
Gary did a very bad thing, I note. So even if Harvey did succeed in getting him off, Mrs Dilworth still believes he was guilty.
“What kind of bad thing did he do?” Carrie asks.
“A very bad thing,” Mrs Dilworth repeats.
“I’m sure it was,” Carri
e says soothing, “but you really need to be more specific. Did he, for example, rob a convenience store?” Carrie asks. “Was there any physical violence involved in this bad thing he did?”
But though we press her, Mrs Dilworth will say no more.
32
It is like we are stuck in a very narrow tunnel, and are plowing ahead for no other reason than that it is impossible to turn back. Maxwell Tait led us to Harvey Dillworth; Dillworth led us to the Stacey case; and the Stacey case leads us to an old man sitting on a bench in the park, who is not the same old man we talked to earlier, but could easily be his brother.
Yes, he tells us, he knows all about the Stacy case. More than that – he knows all about the Stacy family.
This does not surprise me, because this old man has the glassy, darting eyes which only seem to be issued to wild hares and professional busybodies.
“Who exactly did you say you were working for?” he asks.
“We didn’t,” Carrie tells him, “but, in point of fact, we’re both reporters for Confidential Detective Magazine.”
The old man nods. “Will you be using my name?” he asks.
“Not if you don’t want us to,” Carrie says.
“I don’t mind you using it if you have to,” the old man tells her. “The name’s George Woodstock – not Woodcock, which is what some people think it must be, but Woodstock, like the festival.” He pauses for a moment. “You’d better write it down.”
Carrie dutifully flips open her pad, and writes down ‘George Woodstock’.
‘I’m ready when you are, Mr Woodstock,’ she says.
“I never did like Gary Stacey,” the old man says. “He was mean as a boy, meaner when he’d growed up. The whole family’s the same. Father, mother, brothers, sisters – even cousins – it don’t make no difference. If they’re Staceys, then you can be sure they got a streak of evil running through them.”
“About the court case,” Carrie says impatiently, but the old man knows that for once he has a captive audience, and he is not going to be hurried.
“I used to see him playin’ in the front yard, with his kid sister. Thought at the time it was strange, him bein’ a lot older than what she was, but I didn’t really pay it too much mind. Even when the attacks started, it never occurred to me he might be behind them. Just goes to show.”
“Yes, you never can tell,” I say, playing his straight man.
The old coot shakes his shiny head.
“You sure can’t. Who’d have thought that, even as bad as he was, Gary would turn out to be the sort of man who raped children?”
*
We spend the rest of the afternoon in a variety of disguises – sometimes operating together, sometimes apart. With Harvey Dillworth’s neighbors we are still working for the Columbia Law Review, but with the people on Gary Stacey’s street we stick to our story of being crime reporters from Confidential Detective. At the offices of the Macclesfield Sentinel I pose as a private eye, flashing the assistant only the briefest glance of my shield, and telling him I am trying to track down the missing heir to a large fortune. Between us, we talk to a score of people, telling maybe half a dozen different stories. We improvise, we embellish – we lie through our teeth.
It’s risky, because in a town the size of Macclesfield it will not be too long before a couple of people get together and soon discover that the crime reporter who called on one of them sounds very like the man from the Social Security who visited with the other. Then, I guess, they will probably call the police. But with a little luck, we will be long gone before that happens. So as risks go, it only rates a six – which puts it somewhere between breaking into Tait’s house and nearly being driven off the mountainside.
By the time Carrie and I meet up at the Magnolia Café to compare notes, we have a pretty complete picture of both Gary Stacey himself, and of the investigation and the subsequent trial.
“It’s like the cases in Harrisburg,” Carrie says, as we sit in a corner, far away from the other diners. “All the kids were between six and nine, all of ’em were attacked either on their way from school or when they’d wandered away from home.”
“Yeah, but Gary Stacey was no Bobbie Hopgood,” I say. I reach into my pocket and take out a photocopy of a picture of Stacey which appeared in the Sentinel at the time of his trial. “Just look at the eyes.”
“Creepy,” Carrie says.
“Creepy – and cunning. He’s about as different from Bobbie Hopgood as it’s possible to be. All Bobbie ever wanted to do was help out. This Stacey kid was a serious sociopath. Shop-lifting, auto-theft, larceny, breaking and entering – he’d done the lot. When he was arrested for the rapes, he’d already served a term in the County Prison Farm for Juveniles.”
Even with his record, the local cops hadn’t suspected him of this crime until one of the witnesses positively identified him as the young man she’d seen hanging around the grade school yards. Then pictures were shown to other witnesses and they agreed that, yeah, he did look kind of familiar. The police searched his home. They were hoping to find stained panties – like we did at Bobbie’s house – or maybe magazines of child pornography. All the search did turn up was nine hundred dollars in twenty dollar bills.
Further evidence would have been nice, but it wasn’t really necessary, the DA decided. With the witnesses who had placed Gary near the schools, plus the testimony of one of the victims who had picked him out of a line-up, they could send Stacey away until he was old enough to draw his retirement pension.
Enter Harvey Dillworth, Attorney-at-law. At the time, Harvey had been practising for six years.
“An ambulance-chaser,” Carrie says.
“Except there weren’t many ambulances to chase in Macclesfield,” I point out. “I’d guess that most of the family income was still coming from his mother’s welfare checks.”
The DA was amazed when Harvey offered to take on the Gary Stacey case as a pro bono attorney. There could be no glory in it, because, even though the evidence was mainly circumstantial, they had Stacey cold. Best for everyone just to leave the job to the Public Defender’s Office, he told Dillworth.
“But Harvey wouldn’t accept that,” says Carrie. “He said he’d visited with Gary Stacey, and he was Stacey’s attorney of choice.”
“So the DA figured ‘Why not just save the taxpayers some money’?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Carrie agrees. “What about the trial? Did you get to see the transcript?”
“Enough of it.”
“And what does it read like?”
“Like prime time drama that owes a hell of a lot more to Perry Mason than it does to LA Law. Dillworth said that hanging around school yards proved nothing and produced several witnesses – mainly lonely old guys – who admitted they liked to do the same thing.”
“Smart,” Carrie says.
“But nowhere as smart as the stroke he pulled with the child witness. He didn’t raise a single objection when the kid told the court how a big boy called Gary had taken him into an alley and pulled his pants down. He didn’t even seem to mind when the witness pointed out Gary out.”
“And then?”
“And then, in cross-examination, he asked the kid if he was sure. Sure he was sure, the kid said. So Dillworth waves his hand, and three boys of Stacey’s age and build stand up. And get this! They’re all dressed pretty similar to Gary, and their names are Jerry, Georgie and Joey.”
“Jesus!” Caroline says.
“Dillworth asks the kid if he can be certain it’s not one of them who took him into the alley – and, of course, he can’t. The judge is furious and tells the jury to ignore such a cheap trick, but the damage is already done.”
“And Stacey gets off.”
“Yeah. And the day he’s released, he leaves town and is never seen again.”
33
The Stacey home is a ramshackle frame house. Several dirty, unlovely children play in a front yard, where the only things which grow are empty Coke ca
ns and discarded candy wrappers. Mrs Stacey is a large woman with thick, brutal arms which she folds aggressively over her heavy, drooping breasts.
“Who’d ya say you’re representin’?” she demands, as she glares down at us from her front porch.
“We work for the Society for the Compensation of the Unlawfully Arrested,” Carrie says.
“Come again?”
“We have at our disposal certain funds that we pay out to people who have suffered because of injustice. We think your son might qualify.”
“Ya mean, ya got some money for Gary?”
“I mean that I think we might have.”
Mrs Stacey glances suspiciously up and down the street.
“Ya better come in,” she says.
The family room she leads us into is crammed with garish, expensive furniture resting on a thick, claret-colored carpet. It might look fine in one of the flashier Las Vegas casinos, but in a run-down house in Macclesfield, it is nothing short of grotesque.
Carrie reaches into her purse and takes out a sealed brown envelope which could contain a thick wad of cash, but is, in fact stuffed with currency-sized pieces of the Macclesfield Sentinel.
“That the money?” Mrs Stacey asks.
“Yes, it is.”
The fat woman’s eyes flash, and I can see in them the same low cunning which is also present in her son’s photographs. Her hand shoots out to grab the envelope, but Carrie has already restored it to the safety of her purse.
“Give it to me,” Mrs Stacey demands. “I’ll make sure that Gary gets it.”
Carrie laughs lightly, as if she and the other woman have just shared a very funny joke.
“I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that, Mrs Stacey,’ she says. ‘First off, we’ll have to interview Gary. Nothing difficult, but it’s just one of the procedures we have to go through before we can hand over the money.”
The eyes blaze with greed. “Can he ring you?”
Again, a laugh from Carrie – the tinkling amusement of a superior do-gooder who is used to dealing with dull, slow people.
“I’m afraid we’ll need his signature.”
Violation Page 19
