by Tim Green
"Innocent?" Lunden said the word as if it was the first time he'd considered it. The truth was, they hadn't discussed it between them. It was enough that the murder and Trane's arrest was good for Zeus Shoes. "You mean after the trial?"
"No, before trial. My man, just so you know, didn't kill no bitch. I'm gonna prove it."
"You are?" Lunden said skeptically.
"Yeah, but I wanna do it at the right time."
"And you're asking me?"
"Yeah."
"If you could do something like that," Lunden said, narrowing his eyes and feeling the effects of the cocaine flooding back through him like an IV injection. "If you could, well, hell, I'd do it right when the media starts to lag, right when the stock starts to fall again. Then you could start it all up all over again. You know, rant and rave about racism the way you do. Get the whole media whipped up again. All of a sudden Trane Jones is a victim! The stock'll shoot up like a rocket. Shit, Conrad, you do that and I'm gonna have to find a way to make more goddamn shoes."
Chapter 32
Clark sat alone on the cold, damp sand encased in the early- morning shadow of a rocky cliff. In the distance a lone figure jogged steadily toward him along the water's edge. Clark turned his eyes to the high ceiling of clouds overhead. Underneath they burned orange so that their gray tops appeared to be the smoke of some chemical fire. The pungent smell of the ocean's nighdy excrement, rotting fish and seaweed, wafted gendy past Clark's nose on the tail of a warm breeze. He hugged his hairy blond knees one final time, then stood to stretch. The uncomfortable tugging against his knotted muscles distracted him. It was a pleasure not to think, not to be teetering on the mental precipice he'd been flirting with for the past half hour--no, for the past two weeks. Any quiet moment of contemplation seemed to exacerbate his tense, excitable condition. Peace seemed to come only at the price of some physical act, some exertion.
Clark stretched for five or six minutes, finally straightening his back just as the bright rays of the sun topped the bluff. The fire was snuffed from the clouds, leaving them cool and white. The mechanical chugging form of Tom Huntington was now close enough for Clark to see his eyes and the shiny glaze that always accompanied a bloodstream full of endorphins. Clark dropped in alongside and ran the last two miles with his spiritual mentor in silence. Clark knew he was welcome. "Anytime," Tom would say.
Tom ran the same ten miles every morning. Annie once suggested he was an addict. She said he'd simply gone from painkillers and alcohol with the Raiders to endorphins with Jesus. But Clark didn't like to think about that. He didn't like to think about Annie at all, even the things she had said--especially the things she had said. Still, he couldn't help himself. Even pouring out his heart to Tom three days agp hadn't helped him to shake her ghost.
When they reached the beach just down the street from Tom's house they slowed to a walk.
"Good run," Tom huffed, beaming at Clark.
"Yeah," Clark said, holding out his hand. "Thanks for havin' me."
Tom turned Clark's handshake into a fraternal embrace and patted him gently on the back. He did it the same way he always did, as if everything was as it should be. But everything wasn't. They walked up the beach, the sweat on their skin turning clammy, cooling down in silence.
"How are you, Clark?" Tom finally said with a hopeful smile. He grasped the back of Clark's thick neck.
Clark didn't speak, but his eyes brimmed with tears, and Tom turned his hold into a headlock, then hugged him tight, tighter than before. Clark could feel all the angles in his mentor's body as he stroked the back of his head like a small child. Clark began to cry silently, his body shaking, drawing his shortened breath in gasps. He felt himself slipping and unable to control it.
"Clark, Clark, Clark," Tom said, holding him by the shoulders at arm's length. "You have to forgive yourself. You have to."
"But my God, Tom. She's dead!"
"Come on, sit down."
There was a bench next to an empty lifeguard's chair and they sat down together facing the ocean. An older woman wearing a headset and waving a metal detector walked past them, stopping only to scoop a lug nut out of the sand with a truncated Clorox bottle. When she had passed, Clark swabbed his whole face with one violent downward swipe of his hand.
"I told you," Tom said quietly but forcefully, "God uses His people as instruments to do His will. Vbu're one of His chosen people, Clark. Look what you've done with your life! Look what you mean to this ministry! Without you, there is no ministry. My work is nothing without you! "Vbu are the Peter of my church, the rock that it's built on. "Vbu're a sword of God, Clark. Sometimes He strikes with that sword. That's His will, not yours or mine. We sin. Of course we sin! But we're forgiven, Clark. Vbu're forgiven."
"I want to be forgiven," Clark said desperately.
"You are, Clark. You are!"
Tom grabbed his leg and squeezed hard. They looked off into the postcard view of ocean and sky. Clark nodded to himself, willing himself to believe. A troop of gulls swept up the beach, screaming down at them. The birds passed by effordessly and wheeled in descent a hundred yards farther down, where an old man and a boy with a bag of Tip-Top bread were scattering crumbs. Clark hacked up a clear gob of phlegm and spit into the sand before reaching into the front pocket of his sweat top. He took out a check.
"I want you to take this," he said to Tom. "I want to do what Jesus told the rich man to do in the parable. He said, 'Give away all your worldly possessions and follow me.' I want to give away my worldly possessions. I want to follow Jesus. I think that may be what happened to me with her. I was of the world, not of Jesus. She was a worldly temptation."
"She was a minion of Satan, Clark," Tom said bitterly. "I told you that. She was the devil trying to take you away."
Clark nodded that he knew this.
"I don't want all your possessions, Clark," Tom said, pushing his hand with the check gendy away.
Clark insisted. "I want you to have it. I want it to go into the ministry. I don't need this money, Tom. I need my soul back, and I think this will help me get it. I'm not buying it. That's not it. I just don't want this money. I don't want things of the world."
Tom nodded now, too, and looked sadly at Clark, taking the check and unable to keep from noticing that the figure was so long it required two commas.
"My son," he said. "I will take this and I will use it to start a fund for our own church, a real church with stained-glass windows and a steeple and a bell. And you will be the rock of that church. "Vbu will be its Peter. You already are. But you have to promise me one thing. . ."
"I will."
"You have to forgive yourself for what has happened, and you cannot tell anyone about it. I know your nature. I know you want to shout your confession from the top of a mountain. But that's not what God wants. That's not what our church wants. We need you, and when you feel like punishing yourself for all that's happened, you have to tell yourself that it's the devil. It's Satan, and you have to tell him to get behind you because you are a man of Jesus and you are forgiven . . . Will you do that? Will you make me that promise?"
Clark grabbed at his face with his hand. He was slipping, but he shook his head violently against it.
"I will, Tom," he said, his voice muffled by his own hand. "I promise. I will."
Chapter 33
Madison and Chris flew to L. A. on Monday night. They got in late, which made Tuesday even more grueling. They devoted the morning to retrieving the police records from the DA and finding a suitable office to rent. In the afternoon they questioned Trane. He was hungover and surly, but they pressed him until the sun slanted directly through the window and continued even as it dropped out of sight behind the high-rise across the street. Of course the whole thing ended with Trane walking out the door. He said that if they needed more they could wait and talk to him after the next day's practice.
"I had enough of this shit," he told them. "I ain't no killer, an' I ain't no fuckin lab rat chump mot
herfucker. That's enough of that shit for one day. I need a goddamn drink."
He slammed the door behind him.
"That was pleasant," Madison said, tapping her pen against the legal pad that lay on the table in front of her. It was fat with notes from the afternoon. Empty coffee cups and Styrofbam takeout boxes bulged from the wastebasket by the door. They were dressed casually, Madison in jeans and a white blouse and Chris in a faded black polo shirt and khakis. One of Madison's bare feet was tucked up underneath her on the big leather chair. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. The gray room smelled like new carpet.
"When do you want to go through all these police records?" she said through the middle of a yawn.
"Now," Chris said, unable to suppress a yawn of his own.
"Now?"
"After something to eat," he said. "If we're going under the assumption that someone else killed Annie Cassidy then we don't want to wait. A murderer leaves a trail that tends to go cold fast. Most murder cases are solved in about forty-eight hours. The ones that get solved, anyway . . . We're already a week behind schedule."
"Fine," she said, "we'll do it after we eat. No more Mexican, though."
"You got something against Latinos? Hang on, let me put in a call to US/4 Today, I see another article coming on."
"Go ahead. There aren't enough Latin Americans in the NFL to hurt the business," she countered.
"Vicious," Chris said. "Wicked and vicious."
"Aren't you?"
"Why, because I pushed you into all this?" he said lightly.
"You didn't push me," she said, becoming serious. "Well, maybe, but I was going there anyway."
Chris looked at her with a defensive frown and said, "Just so you know, it's not all about money . . ."
"I know that, Chris."
"I mean, it wasn't too long ago when I would have asked you how you could represent someone like that," he said, nodding toward the freshly slammed door. "But I really understand something you said to me once. You told me that everyone deserved the presumption of innocence because sometimes they really are. Sometimes the evidence looks overwhelming, but when you get to the truth of the matter, it's something totally different. And if the truth is different from the way things look, then someone who is totally innocent gets punished, and that in itself is a crime and we, all of us, are the criminals.
"I thought you were crazy, you know that. I'm an ex-cop. In my mind every defendant was a guilty lowlife and defense lawyers just got them off. I thought that about Luther Zorn, remember? I mean, who would have thought he was innocent? Not me. Then it turns out he was... So I understand what you mean when you say, 'What if it were you and what if it were true.' Things happen, witnesses lie, people are framed, innocent people do get punished, and your job--our job--is to make sure they don't. . . Look, this guy's a lowlife. But the fact is I don't think he killed the girl."
Madison looked surprised.
"I don't," Chris said. "I mean, maybe he did, but in my mind, from being around you, I'm thinking that, sure, it's possible someone set him up. And the other thing? I don't think he's acting like he's guilty. If you're guilty, you kiss your lawyer's ass. You don't pull the same crap you pull with everyone else, because you know you did it and the only thing between you and a jail cell or the electric chair is that lawyer. I don't care how bad, how tough, how mean you are. If you're guilty, you kiss your lawyer's ass, or at the least you don't treat him like . . . like this shithead is treating us."
"Did you buy the story he told us about just finding the bloody club in his trunk after the police questioned him?" Madison asked.
Chris stroked his ragged mustache, thinking. "Yeah," he said after a moment, "I guess I did. That could happen. If someone wanted to make it look like Trane. That's what they'd do: Grab his club, kill the girl, and somehow put the club in his car."
"And if they grabbed it with a golf glove on then only Trane's prints would show up. I know," Madison said. "But how did that club get into the trunk of his car?"
Chris shrugged. "I know. They'd have to have his car keys to do it, but it's possible. The club is easy. Like he said, he left his golf bag outside the pro shop after the tournament. Anyone could have grabbed his three-iron."
"But the car," Madison said. "I don't see how it could have gotten into his car. He said himself no one took his keys. They were in his pocket the whole night.. ."
"Did you know he ran for two hundred yards against the Vikings on Sunday?" Chris said.
"I read about it."
"Doesn't sound like a guilty conscience to me."
"God, this is funny," Madison said, shaking her head. "This is too much."
"What?"
"You think he's innocent?" Madison paused, then looked at him and said, "I think he did it. I don't think he's got a guilty conscience because I don't think he's got a conscience."
Chris raised his eyebrows.
"I know," she said, "not like me at all. But you're right. I'll represent him like he's innocent because he might be... I can do that with a clear conscience. It's not my job to be the judge and the jury. It's my job to advocate for him like he was my brother. I believe in the system. It's not perfect, but it's the best thing I've seen."
"What about a polygraph?" Chris asked.
Madison shrugged and rubbed the back of her neck. "I dismissed the idea because I thought he did it. I don't know now. If you think he didn't, maybe a polygraph can help. It can't hurt, that's for sure. It could help with the media. If we don't get something positive going there it's going to be tough to find twelve jurors who haven't convicted him before opening arguments. If he fails then we're no worse off. No one has to know . .."
Chris exhaled loudly and said, "Well, we can put that on our list of things to do. I'm tired, but I've got to get through this stuff. If Trane really didn't kill her, the best thing I can do is to find out who did, or at least who could have. So Mexican is out. How about a pizza?"
"How about you call for pizza while I call home? Jo-Jo should be getting ready for bed and I want to say good night."
"How about anchovies?"
"Leave me alone, Chris."
He knew she hated anchovies. Madison slipped her shoes on and went into the empty office adjacent to their conference room. It was gloomy, so she put on the light and swiveled toward the window. Fifteen minutes later she was back in the conference room, where Chris already had half the police materials spread out over the long table.
"I didn't order anchovies, if that's why you're so gloomy," Chris said after glancing up at her.
"Don't worry about me," she said sarcastically. "I just did my best impression of a mother and a wife."
Chris didn't know how to respond to that so he kept his eyes on his work. When he finally looked up, Madison was still staring blankly at a gold-framed copy of a Warhol print, a close-up of some Lois Lane type with a word bubble saying, "Can you save me?"
"I can't," Chris said.
"Can't what?" Madison said, redirecting her attention.
"Can't save you."
"From?"
"From trying to be everything at once," he said. "It's not fair, you know."
"Why not?"
"Because there's no way a woman like you can be everything you want to be as a mother, everything you want to be as a wife, make a living, save the world, and still be home in time for dinner ... At least I got you to smile."
"Thank you. You're right. It's not fair. But I want to do it all. I really do."
"You do damn good," Chris told her gently. "Wasn't that you I spoke to on Sunday afternoon, whipping up a batch of fudge in time for the Outlaws game? Fudge, for God's sake!"
"My mom used to make fudge."
"And wasn't that you I saw today, negotiating a lease, hiring a secretary, and hammering away at one of the most obnoxious personalities known to mankind, all in the same day? You do damn good. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise."
"Thanks, Chris. You're a good friend."
"I'll get it," Madison said. "I need the stretch."
When she returned Chris looked gravely up at her from the midst of his papers.
"What's the matter?" Madison asked, setting down the cardboard box on the end of the table. She popped the top and the warm smell of pepperoni quickly filled the room.
"Look at this. Read this," he told her, holding forth a one-page police report.
Madison read it. When she was through she looked up at Chris. He was staring at her intently.
Madison said, "You don't think . . ."
"You told me to look for whoever might have killed this girl if Trane didn't... If I didn't know who Clark was, yeah, that's what I'd think."
"But you do know who he is," Madison pointed out. Chris had recruited Clark as a client and knew him even better than Madison.
"I do . . ."
"And?"
Chris took the report back from her and gave it a cursory glance. "Well, you and I know that he was pretty bitter about his contract being crammed down to make room for Trane in the first place. Now put this on top of that... I don't know. "Vbu'd almost think that if he were going to hurt anyone it'd be Trane. It depends on how serious he was about the girl."
"Real serious," Madison said.
Chris's eyes widened just a bit.
"If it's the same girl he told me about this summer," Madison continued, "and it probably is. It was serious. He told me she was the one."
Chris tugged on his mustache for a moment, then said, "From what I've read so far, they haven't found anyone else who might have had any reason at all to kill that girl."
"Do you think they're even looking?"
"Probably not too hard. When you got a guy tossing a bloody murder weapon into the bay and that same guy has a history of violence ... It's just a natural presumption. By the way, nothing else I've read so far gives me any reason to believe that it wasn't Trane."
"You said you didn't think he did it."
"I said that was my instinct. It doesn't mean I'm right. I'm just saying that based on what's written here, the police have a pretty tight case as long as they can discredit Dobbins as a witness, and I doubt our friend the DA is going to lose much sleep over that one."