“So you’re turning down what I’m offering because you don’t like the press. Or me.”
For a long moment, Crandall graced me with an extra helping of contempt. He shook his head and pushed the bottle across the table at me.
“I ‘spect you need this more than me right now,” he said.
He rose, put on his jacket, and stood over me, waiting to see what I’d do.
To the Defendant, I had looked a fool. To Crandall, I looked pathetic. They were both right. Over the years, I’d pretty much pared the rules I live by down to a handful. You don’t have to ask yourself as many questions that way. Since I walked out of the newsroom on Saturday, I’d broken nearly all. I had one left.
I dipped my index finger in the liquor of the untouched glass and held it up. I felt its chill in the air. I brought my finger to my lips and kissed its tip. I put both hands in my pockets and leaned back. I looked at Crandall the whole time, so long he finally broke my gaze and left.
I waited until he was gone to lick my upper lip. I liked what I found there, as I knew I would. I admired the bottle and the glass. I wanted to touch them because I liked everything about them: their cool, smooth surfaces, their contours, their colors.
Above all else, I liked the aroma that bound them together and to me. Aroma was closest to taste, and taste was closest to sighs.
I heard Mal open the cash drawer and slam it shut. I heard glass clink from his end of the bar. I heard him rocking like a troubled child on the crooked-legged stool.
The taste was gone when I licked my lip again. On that day at that time, at least that much I knew.
I pushed away from the table, stood, and left.
Screw Crandall and his demand that I write nothing from what we said. I went back to the office and did what I could.
I wrote about an apple: the fact of its presence in the trailer, the fact of the Defendant’s reference to it in the interview, and the State’s awareness of both.
The oracle Dill chanted in my head, but I refrained from any reference to the popular belief in the apple as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Instead, the apple became the fulcrum on which I hung the facts of each side’s case.
I made each nugget in each pan Chuck Duprey clear. I asked what if the apple were added to one side or the other and by implication: Did Crandall and Wood do enough? Could they have done more?
I did what I was supposed to do. I laid it out clearly and let the reader decide.
And when I was done, I moved the story to Marley’s queue, I got in my car, and, with fear and hope in equal measure, I drove through the night clean across the state. If Dill must know, that is how a High Beam’s born. It’s how we sleep at night.
It took all day and a slice of the night.
When Reardon got wind his client had talked to me, he demanded that the court order the paper not to publish. When that was denied, he demanded a mistrial. When that was denied, he demanded a continuance.
When that was denied, Reardon told Crandall he would turn him into the Disciplinary Commission, he told Legs she would have to deliver the close, and he left, left altogether, taillights aimed straight at his client, who sat through the morning’s turmoil with the most radiant of his out-of-phase smiles.
Secrist said he would see the trial done that day. He gave Legs an hour to talk to her client and pull herself together for the close. The jury had been cooped up in the jury room during the morning’s proceedings. Secrist told Luther, the bailiff, to get them a late breakfast—no one eats
brunch in the Bluff. Then he favored me with his most withering scowl. I hate critics who denounce before they read. It happens all the time.
The clans rushed me at the break to find out what the Defendant had said. I advised them I was not taking questions that day. To be honest, as this time I have pledged to be, I was half afraid that I’d feel compelled to tell them about my meeting with Crandall. Janelle pouted for a while before she got up to sit next to a twink whom she knew.
Elizabeth Reynolds—Legs—did an admirable job. She rose, she resolutely pulled the pinstripes of her charcoal gray jacket as straight as her figure would allow, and she proceeded to spend the next 67 minutes telling those jurors about reasonable doubt and how it “permeated” the State’s case. She recited completely the facts that were favorable to her client, methodically explained the weaknesses of the State’s evidence and the strengths of the Defense’s evidence, and logically concluded there was too much doubt about the identification of her client for a jury to convict. I was only marginally pleased to hear her use many of the same points I’d made in the story that shot through the printing press even as she spoke.
If her close had been an answer on a law school exam, Ms. Reynolds would have scored the A star. It wasn’t, though, was it, and her logic was no match for Crandall’s wrath.
Just before Crandall spoke, Moze escorted Lottie to a seat on the front row between Bobby and Ruth Russell. In full view of the jury, Lottie took one of Ruth’s hands in both of her own and raised it to her lips where she held it for a long moment. She smiled gamely at Bobby before her solemn eyes fell on the jurors, not all of whom were prepared to meet her gaze.
I like to think that little piece of stagecraft was Crandall’s doing, a riff inspired, if not necessitated, by our little talk. I’ll never know.
Crandall rose, turned, and bowed to Naomi and William Crawford, who sat as far from Lottie and the Russells as the pew would allow. He bowed to those other victims. As he did, the warmth he held his eyes as he paid his respects evaporated, and he bit a hard lump into each cheek.
“A year ago,” Crandall began, reluctant to turn away from those whose suffering stoked him. “No, not even a year ago, somebody came to the place I have lived all my 63 years and killed three of my neighbors’ children and tried to kill the neighbor woman who was taking care of them.”
He turned to share his face with the jury.
“It made me mad that someone would do that,” he said quietly. “Come to the place I feel safe, where my wife and our children feel safe, and shoot people. Children. Kill them. An old woman. Leave her for dead.
“It made me mad then.” He blew out air. “Been mad about it ever since.”
With one hand, he rubbed his chin and down his jowls, as though trying to make his jaw work.
“I want you to be mad about it. I want you to be mad about it because I’d like you to do to that guy sitting behind me what I cannot do. He came into the county where I live and where my family and friends live, and he killed my neighbors’ children and tried to kill the lady who cared for them, and he did all that just for the hell of it.”
His voice rose, and he repeated each word separately. “For . . . the . . . hell . . . of . . . it.”
Crandall stopped, collected himself, and spoke softly.
“I want you to convict him. Send him away. Don’t let him come back to my county or your county and do it again. Here’s how I know he’s the one.”
He needed only 32 minutes. He made it simple: simple words, simple facts, simple reasons. He did not shout, he did not wave his arms, and he did not pace. But his words came in bursts, staccato, and the whole time, but particularly near the end, his voice was rough and hollow, his words like rocks tamped into a downspout.
For rebuttal, he merely stood, leaning wearily on the State’s table, and said: “You’ve got all the evidence I have.” He pointed his finger at the Defendant and said: “It shows he did it. Damn it. Are you mad yet?”
One juror, an older woman on the back row, nodded, but she was only an alternate and therefore could not decide.
They took six hours and eighteen minutes, damn them. Deliberate they did. They took that word at face value, every face of it.
The foreman told us later: They spent a half hour electing him and another half hour deciding they would st
art from scratch for each victim and each charge. What was the evidence for and against? Was there enough to convict?
The first time through they wanted to hear Lottie’s testimony again. The note Luther delivered from the jury room and warily dropped in front of Secrist said they wanted to hear just one part. No one would say which part, then or later, but I’d put money on the cross.
Ms. Reynolds argued that, in fairness to her client, they should hear the whole thing. Crandall argued that rather than waste a lot of time reading to them what they had already heard the court could send back the transcript of all of Lottie’s testimony. Secrist agreed. It took a half hour to print it out.
The foreman said their decision making went quicker with each victim since they were covering the same ground. Still, they offered to continue working if the court would send in supper.
Through it all, the clans milled. We could leave the courthouse, but we couldn’t go far or stay away long. The court staff would not promise to call us if the jury returned, nor would they assure us the courthouse doors would be unlocked after closing time.
Janelle and the twinks tried to find Crandall or Ms. Reynolds or Lottie or the children’s’ parents to get quotes or arrange interviews after the verdict. From what I could overhear, only Naomi was making herself available, during or after.
A couple of cameramen ran pools on who the foreman would be and the amount of time a verdict would take. There was an argument about whether the period would be measured by the time when Luther announced a verdict had been reached or when the foreman actually read it aloud.
I did not feel like playing. As soon as Secrist sent the jury on its way, I strolled out of the courthouse to the drugstore, nodded to the pharmacist, and planted myself on his phone booth’s very comfortable stool. I called Marley and delivered the bad news he had already surmised: no verdict story that day.
We would not be able to publish the verdict until the afternoon of the next day after every morning paper and radio and television broadcast had told our readers what they wanted to know. That meant, said Marley, I should get off my dead ass. Talk to people. Start putting together yet another analysis. No goddamn speculation this time. Get some sources—on the record—for opinions. Maybe tell our readers something they won’t already know.
I held the phone away from head. A certain frosty vapor emanated from the end of my arm.
“Problem, Bob?” I said.
“You couldn’t tell me about your weekend adventure? You couldn’t give me some time to read your story and to talk to you about it and maybe fix it, so we don’t like we’re his butt boys.”
“GM’s unhappy? Afraid of what advertisers will say?”
“I don’t like being blindsided.”
I thought about apples and wondered where the pharmacist kept Tums.
“Me neither, Bob,” I said. “Me neither.”
And I was afraid and did nothing but wonder whether I could have or should have done more until 7:47 p.m. when the jury returned and declared the psychopathic bastard guilty of each and every count. Since society had spoken, I did not use any form of the word alleged in the story I wrote that night. In that alone, the pleasure was exquisite.
The appeal took seven months. Nobody can hold their breath that long. We stayed busy instead.
Naomi and William Crawford moved to Chicago a couple of months after the trial. She called me once in a while to update me on her accomplishments in the field of interior design and to remind me that she was still healing from the loss of her son. William she mentioned only when I asked.
The Russells divorced and Ruth moved away, where no one knew or would say. When the paper did a six-month follow-up, a neighbor said Bobby had stopped talking pretty much altogether and Ruth decided she could live with death no longer. You saw Bobby now and then at the grocery or in the field. His expression lived flat in the middle distance, eye contact and waving gone from his repertoire, too.
When he was sentenced, Jake sank like bait into the System, but every month or so, he coughed up a letter to Alice and Wood. Each told rough tales, and always they ended the same. Jake asked if Wood could please find his daddy.
Wood would not respond, and after the first couple, Alice started keeping an eye out. She shortstopped them. They made Wood just pretty tough to live with, she said.
The Convict’s father fired Reardon and Ms. Reynolds and hired an appeals specialist. In the brief she filed with the Court of Appeals, the specialist claimed her colleagues had been ineffective as counsel. The primary arguments were that Reardon failed to thoroughly pursue and present evidence to support his theory that someone other than the Convict had been present in Lottie’s trailer and committed the murders and that he should have taken the mistrial when he had the chance.
Two of the three-judge appellate panel, enough to stick the decision, ruled against the Convict. They concluded that since the high burden of proof was on the State and not the defense a reasonably competent defense attorney need not have produced any more evidence to persuade the jury of reasonable doubt than Reardon did. Whether Reardon could have gotten a mistrial was speculative, the judges said, and whether there would have been a different outcome if the case had been retried was even more so.
The dissenting judge inferred from what he called the “tortured” reasoning of the majority’s decision and the nearly record speed with which they reached it that his colleagues had no stomach for second guessing the jury’s documented, underlying opinion. That opinion, the judge said, was expressed by the jury foreman in an interview in a certain local paper. It was that the Convict was a monster.
There was some slim evidence that the Convict’s father and the bar had come around to that view as well. When the old man turned off the tap and fired the appellate attorney, the appeals ended, and word among those who should know was that no lawyer in the state was willing to sue Reardon for malpractice, despite what the Convict wanted.
As soon as it was clear the legal maneuvering was done, Lottie let me interview her. By that point, we knew almost everything we needed to know about her, but two points stood out.
She does not babysit anymore. Children and, more likely, their parents, she said, were almost certainly spooked by her place and probably by her. Such a pleasurable way to spend time, being with young people, she said. She hadn’t found anything that could replace it.
She’d gone back to living in that damned double-wide. She said she stayed because all the years of good memories outweighed a night’s worth of bad, and it was just easier to have Bunny rip out a bloody carpet than build new memories. Dill would accuse me of High-Beam thinking here, but it was, for Lottie, a fairly typical response.
Lottie would talk only to me, not to anyone else in the clans. She said she owed explanations to no one but the friends and neighbors here whom she’d troubled. I would stand in for them, ask the questions they would ask and tell them what she said. As someone who was not born here and therefore would always be an outsider, I was touched by her trust. I thought it counted for something valuable. Not at all.
“Your sins,” Marley said, “were that you knew too much, held onto what you knew too long, and made decisions about what we print and don’t print that were not yours to make.”
Bob spoke not to absolve but to can me. I knew it as soon as he opened his mouth. The syntax, the color on his otherwise pale cheeks, and his inability to meet my eyes told me he’d written his words and memorized them well before we met across his desk after hours for the last time.
The timing was the odd. With Lottie’s interview, we’d finally wrapped up the story, and we were ready to move on. In the meantime, I’d made a point of behaving myself.
But then I remembered that Moze had pulled the General Manager over and charged him with drunk driving a week or so after the Lottie interview ran. And that Crandall, a first-order hardballer with a crystalline
memory, had called the GM at the paper a day or two later. And that the terms of the GM’s plea agreement, which we published above the fold for credibility’s sake, were remarkably light for a second strike.
In light of those circumstances, I’ll appreciate if you don’t call me cynical when I thought now that my employer had sucked everything it wanted out of me I might be part payment of the GM’s fines and fees.
When I’d worked it through, I said, “Too much knowledge. In our business? That’s a sin?”
Anger torched Marley’s embarrassment. His eyes jumped off the desk and grabbed mine.
“You thought you knew more than we did—than I did—about what we were going to do with what you knew. It wasn’t your job to solve the case. It wasn’t your job to try and convict the culprit. You’re ungovernable.”
“Your word?” I said. “Or the GM’s?”
That doused the ire. He bit his lip, looked way, and sighed.
“Clay, damn it, if you hadn’t gone into the damned trailer and then crawled so far under the covers with Moze, we wouldn’t be here.”
Tempted as I was to point out to Marley that what Moze, Wood, Crandall, and even he had chosen to do or not do with their own knowledge and suspicions was on them, there was still, as always, the Program. Honestly? Marley had me, as I suspect the GM had had him before me.
That’s why we shook hands, and I left. That’s why I was mostly wistful and only occasionally irate that somebody—my bet rides on the GM—blackballed me as unmanageable among the 28 newspapers I applied to.
And that’s why—along with the fact there’s not much else available for someone with my skill set in these country places—I wound up deep in a warehouse where I spend my days picking products off shelves, packing them in boxes, and talking to no one. It’s cost me an affordable pound or two and turned an otherwise sunny disposition partly cloudy, but there’s been more than enough time to think and write.
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