Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  “You started without me,” I said.

  “I don’t remember inviting you.”

  She tried to slip the novel off the table and into her duffel bag of a purse.

  “Guilty pleasure?” I said.

  “No guilt here.”

  “Liar.”

  A freckled, plentifully pierced, teenage girl in a pink t-shirt and black jeans sauntered over. She held a pad on a flat hand at her shoulder, like it was a tray loaded with food. She smiled at Janelle and looked down her nose at me.

  “Ditch the ‘tude, honey,” I said from deep within the menu. “I tip as well as this lady for good food, better for good service.”

  I ordered pot roast, potatoes and carrots, a slice of rhubarb pie, and iced tea. As the pierced waitress sulked off, I hoped fervently she would not spit in my meal.

  “Does she have an opinion about our trial that will see the light of day in the Chronicle?” I asked.

  Janelle started to gather up her tools.

  “Stay,” I said. “I’ll buy you pie. You can tell me whose call you’re waiting on.”

  “I’ve got work to do,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. Morning paper? Statewide circulation? Your deadline’s what? Ten, maybe ten-thirty? Top-off at eleven? You’ve made all your calls, and you’ve filed. You’re just sitting here with that monster phone out and your pad open because you’re young and ambitious and optimistic enough to think you’ll get that Pulitzer-Prize-winning tip at any time.”

  I made sure I spoke with a soft voice and a smile.

  “Let me tell you, it’s hard to avoid, but that’s the road to burnout. Take a break. Somebody calls? Feel free to go outside and talk to them. You can’t offend me, although I might try to listen.”

  Janelle stared at me, not sure whether I was trying to be helpful or insulting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that look, usually after something I’ve said at a Meeting. She finally shrugged and sat back.

  First-time social conversations between reporters are always hard. The good ones hate to give up anything about themselves. Training and experience condition us to focus on getting information out of other people and keeping ourselves out of the story. Stir the competitive aspect of our trade into the mix, and a conversation between reporters who do not know each other well can sound like an exercise in deflection, the verbal equivalent of air hockey.

  “You’re staying where?” I asked pleasantly.

  The question called for a fact, so she told me. It was one of the chain motels, out near the interstate, a place significantly better appointed and higher priced than mine.

  “How do you like it?”

  “Where’re you staying?”

  I told her.

  “Tight budget?” she asked.

  “Not a problem your paper apparently has since you’re only an hour and a half away.”

  The pierced waitress set down my food with more clatter than necessary. When she left, I scanned it for a long moment to be sure it was untainted and all there. Then I looked at Janelle.

  “I’m going to tuck into this. I’d like to hear your story, your background. But I’m pretty hungry, and I don’t want to have to stop stuffing my face to offer up tidbits about me to entice you into telling me more about yourself, so here’s my story.”

  And so, before I picked up my knife and fork, I told her about how I had grown up in Chicago, the son of an alcoholic train conductor who occasionally thumped his wife but never his kid. I said my fondest childhood memories were from the newsroom of the Sun-Times. I had gotten a job doing gofer work there in high school to escape my house and quickly decided that it was way more interesting than anything I was doing at home or in school.

  The fondest of the fondest were the pressmen I did favors for. They nurtured my alcoholism by putting me in one of the square, ink-smudged skull caps they made by folding a sports page so that they could sneak me into Billy Goat’s, the subterranean newspaper guys’ bar near the offices.

  I told her that an editor I knew got me a scholarship to Northwestern, but I promptly set about pissing that opportunity away with lackadaisical grades and substance abuse. I got kicked out and, thanks to the draft, wound up in Vietnam.

  That place was its own education, but I was more than ready to leave when the time came, and the Sun-Times, the dysfunctional family I had substituted for my own, was more than ready to let me come home. I did obits and fill-in work, then eventually they let me cover cops for a long, sweet period of time, then a head-case editor cut me loose for reasons I pretty much understood but hated to think about.

  “And now,” I said, “thanks to the Program and the benevolence of another recovering alcoholic who owns a chain of small papers, including the one I now work for, I sit before you, grateful for this hearty pot roast, of which I am about to partake. That, by the way, is as close to grace as I get. Did you want pie?”

  Abashed would best describe her expression and probably explain why she said nothing for what seemed like a considerable amount of time.

  “Tell me about Billy Goat’s,” she said finally.

  “Nope,” said I. “Now it’s a tourist trap and, anyway, I’m not taking questions. I’m eating, remember? Your turn.”

  “Even if I wanted to,” she said, “I don’t think I could compete with that.”

  “It’s not a contest. Indulge me. I am sincerely and genuinely interested.”

  “Upper middle class, upper Middle West,” she began diffidently, “A lawyer dad without sons expecting me to follow.”

  But she wrote for everything she could in high school—school paper, local paper, creative magazines—and that’s what she liked. She figured she could either teach or write, and despite what her mother thought, the teaching would’ve been just too boring, and the urchins did not need her particular talents. Instead, she went to IU, majored in journalism, spent more time working for the Daily Student there than she did in class, and still graduated with honors. That and an internship got her the job with the Chronicle.

  The story itself wouldn’t have been worth writing up. It didn’t amount to anything I hadn’t heard or seen before.

  What made it worth listening to was the joy she bared the longer she talked, the pure fun of knowing all and telling well. I would not embarrass her now by quoting her, but as she completed one of probably only three decent war stories she would have had at that point in her career, her dark eyes folded away in an abundance of laughter and she surprised me by reaching out and touching my arm.

  I envied her her present and pitied her her future because my own experience was that the job would soon grind out the joy. The Program, however, teaches that no matter how much a drunk is inclined to do so he has no right to deny others their feelings. When Janelle was done, I said nothing. I only smiled and nodded in appreciation and affirmation.

  She eventually took out her novel, and I finished what was truly exceptional pie, and for a comfortable time, we sat in silence. I have not a lick of experience from which to draw, but I suspect it was a good deal like being well-married. That’s another thought I kept to myself.

  Reardon dispensed with the usual smarmy tactic of trying to ingratiate himself with the jury by wishing them good morning and thanking them profusely for their service and the attention they were about to give. It was entirely out of character, but he’d already read this bunch as a tough minded. He cut to the chase.

  “Mr. Crandall,” he began and paused. “He didn’t tell you some things yesterday.”

  His big, handsome head ticced to one side when he said it, as though his indignation at the omissions made him twitch. The jurors saw it. He had captured their attention with the mention of Crandall’s name and by remaining seated at the defense table when he spoke. We had to follow his soft, rueful voice to find him in the big room.

  “What didn’t
Mr. Crandall tell you?” he asked a little louder, buffing another coat of rhetorical wax on the allegation of Crandall’s deception as he rose.

  “Mr. Crandall,” Reardon said, standing in front of Crandall and pointing at him as Crandall had pointed at Reardon’s client the day before. “Mr. Crandall did not tell you that Ms. Nusbaumer, his best witness, never saw the faces of the men who shot her and the children.”

  Reardon tried to make eye contact with each juror, but they were all looking at Crandall, who returned their “is-this-true?” glances with his own puzzled expression as though he had no idea of what Reardon was talking about.

  From behind me, I heard Naomi gasp and the pen scratching among the clans suddenly seemed louder and frenzied.

  “Do you remember how he phrased it yesterday?” Reardon asked.

  He turned and went back to the defense table. Legs, looking exceptionally shapely even under the unisex veneer of a boxy, charcoal gray suit and royal blue, silk blouse, handed him a legal pad turned to an appropriate page.

  “He said, ‘Lottie Nusbaumer’s going to describe the man and boy who entered her home that night.’”

  Reardon noisily flipped the page noisily back and forth.

  “He said, ‘The man she will describe has all of the characteristics of this man.’”

  Reardon tossed the pad back at Legs, who fielded it expertly.

  “He said Ms. Nusbaumer’s going to describe. He said Ms. Nusbaumer’s going to talk about characteristics. What he did not say was that she is going to identify the man who shot her and the children.”

  Crandall had had enough. He started to rise to object, but Secrist told him to sit.

  “Mr. Reardon,” Secrist said, “you’re at the line.”

  Everyone but the jury on that side of the rail knew Secrist was referring to the boundary between statement and argument. The jurors looked puzzled, but Reardon merely said, “Of course, your honor” and tipped his head in deference to the Court.

  “The reason Ms. Nusbaumer cannot identify the men who entered her trailer is that both of them wore masks.” He passed a hand across his face and smiled. “Ski masks. Mr. Crandall did not tell you that.”

  He closed his eyes, tilted back his head, and shook a fifty-dollar haircut into place.

  “Mr. Crandall,” Reardon said finally, pointing again at the prosecutor, “did not tell you that this boy he’s so fond of—the one who’s admitted pulling the trigger on all four of the victims, the one who’s supposed to know so much about how this crime occurred because he did it—Mr. Crandall did not tell you that this boy will never stand trial for his role in this crime. That’s because this man”—Reardon aimed his index finger at Crandall for the third time, beating Crandall now by one in the number of opening statement finger points—“This man gave that boy a deal to get his testimony.”

  Most of us on this side of the rail knew about the deal. What was new was that Reardon clearly had decided to make trying Crandall part of his strategy. He would not be interviewed later, but we “veteran observers,” who have rehashed the trial any number of times since, agree that from the beginning Reardon had to be concerned about the relationship Crandall had so quickly forged with the jury and decided immediately to undermine it.

  For his part, Crandall did not flinch. He met each juror’s stare and nodded once, acknowledging the truth of it.

  “Why?” Reardon asked, his brows raised in confusion. “Why coerce a boy to say such things about my client? Because—at the time—my client was charged with dealing drugs in another county, and the authorities there could not prove it.”

  He walked from one end of the box to the other and back as he talked. Three long strides each way and the jurors’ eyes followed.

  “The police and the prosecutors decided they were going to get my client for something . . .”

  “Mr. Reardon,” Secrist said in warning as Crandall again started to rise again.

  “. . . and they used that boy to do it.”

  Reardon held up a hand to show Secrist he would submit. He really did not want to dwell much more on the subject because bringing up it at all had been a risky move.

  It is a maxim among litigators that an opening statement is a promise a lawyer makes to a jury. If the lawyer does not deliver on his promise to provide a jury with evidence the lawyer says or implies he has, a jury usually will feel cheated and may react vindictively against his client.

  Reardon had essentially promised to tell this jury not only about his client’s past criminal history, but also about what is, in this part of the world, a particularly offensive allegation against his client. He also tipped his hand to Crandall, who would now prepare to address the “they’re-out-to-get-my-guy” defense, if he had not so already.

  No doubt, Reardon offered the defense because he had concluded that Crandall would get evidence of that part of the Defendant’s criminal history in anyway and Reardon figured he could minimize its persuasive effect on the jury if they heard it from him first. The “inoculation” theory among litigators runs like this: No fact can be as bad as my opponent would lead you to believe it is if I’m happy to tell you about it myself.

  But Reardon had too much time in the saddle to risk exposing his defenses and hardening a jury’s heart to gain just one advantage. Tying the fact of his client’s drug dealing to a theory that the cops used Jake to get his client could elegantly undercut the credibility of Jake, Crandall, and the police and weaken not only Crandall’s case but also the drug-dealing case. If Reardon could make a police-conspiracy theory work in the murder case, he would also turn it back to greater effect on the drug-dealing charge. And if the jury believed Jake and convicted on the murder charges, well, the outcome of the drug-dealing charge wouldn’t amount to much in the larger scheme of his client’s life.

  “Keep that in mind as you listen to the evidence,” Reardon repeated.

  “And keep in mind some other things Mr. Crandall did not tell you. Keep in mind a set of footprints found at the crime scene, footprints that proceed directly from Ms. Nusbaumer’s trailer into the woods that surround it and then toward a neighbor’s house. These footprints don’t match up either to my client or to anyone else the police talked to in this investigation.”

  Reardon was making me more than a little nervous now, but neither he or anyone else turned to look at me so I kept my head down and wrote notes as fast as I could. At that moment, I very much wanted to appear no different than the rest of my colleagues.

  “As you listen to the evidence,” Reardon continued, “listen for what is not said, as well as what is said. It’s how you figure out whether someone’s telling the truth.”

  Reardon walked toward the bench and turned. With his back to Secrist, Reardon stood as if to align himself with the judge and keep the jury’s attention off Crandall and the victims’ families sitting behind him.

  “What will our witnesses tell you?”

  He extended a welcoming hand back to his table.

  “My client’s wife, the mother of his infant son, will tell you that, like nearly every other night of their life together, he was lying beside her on the night of the incident.”

  Reardon ironed the inside flap of his double-breasted jacket back into place with the flat of his hand.

  “A detective who was with the state police for nearly 40 years before he retired will tell you that the police who investigated this matter screwed up. He’ll say there are areas where the investigation was sloppy, and, most important, he’ll say the police failed to rule out all other persons before they arrested and charged my client.

  Reardon stood with his hands folded across his stomach, measuring the jurors’ reaction and apparently finding them to be satisfactory since he started to wrap it up.

  “So where will that leave you, the jury, at the close of evidence.”

  He held up one hand, hi
s first point.

  “You’ll know where my client was not. He was not in Lottie Nusbaumer’s home on the night she and the children were shot. Someone else was.”

  He swept his gaze across the courtroom gallery as if to suggest that someone else could be here. He seemed to linger on me longer than I would have liked, before he raised his other hand.

  “You’ll know where my client was. He was at home with his family asleep.”

  He threw up his hands.

  “It’s physics. Simple physics. A man can’t be in two places at once. If my client was not at Lottie Nusbaumer’s that night, as he was not, if he was, in fact, somewhere else, as he was, you have to find him not guilty.”

  Reardon had given the jury plenty to think about, and he wanted them to think about it some more. As he sauntered back to the defense table, he looked at Crandall for reaction, then pulled himself up short and turned to Secrist.

  “Maybe it’s a little early, Judge,” he said, touching his temple as though he had just thought of it, “but if the first witness is going to take some time, as I suspect he will, maybe we ought to take a break now.”

  Secrist looked at the jurors and Crandall, who shrugged, and agreed.

  Those of us among the clans who had deadlines before noon did not exactly skip across the heads of those behind us to get out of that courtroom, but it was close. Reardon’s claim that the assailants wore masks and that Lottie therefore could not identify the Defendant was contrary to everything Crandall, McConegal, Wood and every other cop who would talk had been implying for months. That was certainly news. Reardon’s suggestions of police sloppiness and conspiracy to get his client had their own charm.

  I hip-checked a radio guy at the top of stairs, tucked myself in behind a couple of twinks who were stiff-arming dawdlers in front of them, and drafted down to the first floor, where I made a break for a side door to get to a phone.