The Other Side of Dark

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  “That means our chances are a whole lot better,” Markowitz answers. “A lot of what will happen is up to the judge and the jury and the prosecuting attorney.”

  We both look at Mrs. Latham.

  She sucks in a sharp breath and blinks a couple of times. Finally she says, “Let’s start over, Stacy. Maybe I was coming across a little hard and fast. I guess I want to win this case as much as you do.”

  I sit back in my chair and wait. “Then let’s get with it.”

  “Stacy,” she says, and her words are slower, more gentle, “you’re very angry at Jarrod Tucker. Are you sure that your emotions are not going to cloud this case?”

  “I’m not going to let my anger get in the way.”

  “How about your resultant feelings of guilt?”

  “Guilt? What are you talking about?”

  “I mean the common progress in grief. Naturally you’d begin to shift some of the blame from Jarrod Tucker to yourself in cause-and-effect relationships— for example, your mother’s death. If you had been in the house with her, if—”

  “No! You’re wrong!” I jump to my feet.

  She stares at me in bewilderment.

  Markowitz stands up. “Mrs. Latham, we’ve probably covered enough for now, don’t you think? I’d like to take Stacy home.”

  She talks to him as though I were not in the room. “With this emotional instability, I doubt if she’ll be a good witness.”

  “She needs a little time. She’ll have it before she has to appear in court.”

  I take a long breath and force my voice to become steady. “Appear in court as what? I’m only a witness, remember? Or have I suddenly turned into the accused?”

  “Stacy—” Markowitz says, but I stand a little taller.

  “I’m the victim—on both sides!”

  Mrs. Latham slowly rises and says to Markowitz, “Perhaps you can talk to her father. Is she getting any type of therapy?”

  “I’ll talk to you later,” he says, and pulls me out of the office before I can catch my breath and tell her what else is on my mind.

  He drives me home in his own car and tries to explain that Mrs. Latham is somewhat new in the department and is trying very hard to prove herself and do things right and that I shouldn’t react to everything she said.

  “It’s going to be a lot tougher than that when Jarrod goes to trial,” he tells me. “You’ll hear the defense witnesses lie through their teeth, and you’ll have to sit there and keep quiet. And Tucker’s attorney will blister you with questions, and you’ll have to take it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way the system of justice is set up.”

  “Justice for whom?”

  “Don’t be bitter. It’s got its flaws, but at least it attempts to give everyone a fair chance.”

  “Nothing about this seems to be fair. It would have been fair only if somebody had shot Jarrod!”

  He doesn’t answer. We drive past the Galleria and Neiman-Marcus, and slowly my anger simmers down, like a pot of water with the burners turned off. “Detective Markowitz,” I say, “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I acted like a little kid. I won’t do it again.”

  I try to sort out exactly what happened, but one thing puzzles me. “I’ll do what Mrs. Latham wants, but she doesn’t like me, you know. When I walked in, I could tell that she didn’t like me. And I don’t know why.”

  He smiles. “Ummm, could be a little jealousy.”

  I twist toward him. “Jealousy? About what?”

  But he just slowly shakes his head and chuckles. “Stacy, you really are still a little kid.”

  “You’re as bad as she is,” I mutter.

  “I didn’t mean to get you riled,” he says. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Okay. I want to talk about Jarrod’s gun.”

  “I told you. It didn’t match the slug and casing we’ve got on file.”

  “I know. But when did Jarrod buy this gun? Four years ago he may not have owned one. He might have used someone else’s gun—probably one belonging to his father.”

  He turns to me and smiles. “We’re thinking in the same direction. Granted, it’s pretty much of a long shot, but we’re requesting a search warrant. We can see if Jarrod’s father owns any guns, and we can subpoena them for testing. The Houston Police Department has one of the best ballistics experts in the United States. If there is anything to be found out, he’ll find it.”

  “Before the hearing?”

  “It doesn’t have to be before the hearing.”

  “I want to be there.”

  “Have anyone to take you?”

  “I’ll ask Donna.”

  He’s silent for a minute, and I know he’s thinking of what Donna went through in the police station. “Let’s leave your sister out of this. I’ll send a car for you. The driver will be at your house around two.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s okay. Now, do me a favor and relax.”

  I lean back against the seat and try to relax. I really do. Especially I try not to think of everything Mrs. Latham said.

  But when I’m finally in the quiet, lonely house, it comes back to me. I pick up the picture of Mom that Dad keeps on the dresser in their bedroom. She’s squinting against the sunlight and laughing as though someone had just told her a wonderful joke.

  “Oh, Mom, it wasn’t my fault, was it?” I ask the picture. The picture just smiles back. I sit on the floor, my back against their bed, hugging the picture to my chest. For the first time I wish I could cry. But the tears are locked behind the hard lump of hatred that grows and chokes and burns inside me. I can’t get rid of that hatred, and nothing can help me get rid of it. Not until Jarrod is dead!

  Chapter Thirteen

  Early Tuesday morning Jan calls to invite me to dinner. I promise to come over to her house around five. As soon as Jan is off the phone I call the head counselor at the high school. I find out his name is Mr. Dobbis.

  “Oh, we’re right up on our toes about your case,” he says, and I picture him pirouetting around his office in toe dancer shoes. “Come to the office now if you’d like to,” he adds. “We were going to give you a little more time, but I’ve already met with your seventh-grade teachers, and gone over your records, and have a pretty good handle on a plan for your future studies.”

  “Will I have to go back to middle school?”

  “No. Come on, and we’ll talk about what I have in mind.”

  Dad gives me a lift to the school and shows me a bus stop where I’ll be able to catch a bus that comes down Memorial Drive. From there I can walk home.

  “Remember, I’ll be at Jan’s house for dinner tonight,” I tell him. “She’ll bring me home—probably around ten.”

  “Then I won’t come home for dinner,” he says.

  “Don’t work too hard, Dad.”

  He just smiles, waves, and drives off.

  The high school is a mixture of old brick and modern, with two-story buildings stretching across a large campus. There are lots of trees and a wide grass lawn in front of the school. At the side is a gigantic parking lot. Kids are beginning to arrive for classes, and the street in front of the school is almost blocked with a chain of cars trying to get into the parking lot. I keep swallowing as I go up the steps of what looks like the main building. I have to ask a second time how to find Mr. Dobbis’s office, because I’m so nervous I can’t remember what the first person told me.

  I’m in Mr. Dobbis’s office for about an hour, talking about makeup study and exams and the school’s tutoring program and summer school, and I leave feeling pretty good. It’s going to mean a lot of work, but I can do it. He thinks I can, and I know I can. There’s no way I can graduate with my class, but I honestly didn’t expect to. With math and science and four years of English and everything I’ll have to cram in, I couldn’t cover it that fast. But at least it won’t take four or five years. I won’t be the oldest student in the history of the world ever to graduate fro
m high school.

  I smile to myself as I leave his office, hugging the books he gave me, and plunge out into the hall. It’s filled with fast-moving bodies, and I find myself pushed aside. I plaster myself as flat as I can against the wall, trying to stay out of the way.

  Someone skids to a stop in front of me. “Stacy?” Tony asks. “What are you doing here?”

  “Tony! You didn’t answer my phone call.”

  “Yeah. Hey, well, I was busy.” He begins to move off. “I’ll see you.”

  “Don’t go.” I grab his arm.

  “Look, I’ll call you tonight.”

  “What I have to ask you won’t take very long. You’re one of Jarrod’s friends. Right?”

  The pupils of his eyes flick to each side, and he licks his lips. “Not really friends. He comes to my parties, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re really dense.”

  It takes just a moment for what he said about Jarrod to sink in. I tighten my grip on Tony’s arm as I say, “You’re telling me he has a reason for being at your parties. Are you talking about drugs?”

  “I gotta get to class, Stacy. Let go.”

  “Answer my questions, or I’ll start yelling and screaming.”

  Again he seems to check from side to side, then leans close. “So he’s a supplier. Most of the kids know it.”

  “Why hasn’t he been arrested?”

  “Proving it is something else.” He scowls at me. “And don’t go telling your cop friends.”

  Friends. “One more question. Who are Jarrod’s friends?”

  “A guy like Jarrod doesn’t have friends.”

  “You must have seen him with someone.”

  He thinks a minute. “Yeah. Sometimes he comes on the grounds here. Sometimes I’ve seen him at places he hangs out. I’ve seen Jeff with him. Remember Jeff Clinton? He was at my party. Somebody said he took you home.”

  I clutch my books to my chest and shiver, but a big guy barges into Tony, knocking him off-balance, so he doesn’t notice. “I gotta go, Stacy!” he complains.

  A bell rings. The hall is emptying fast. “Go ahead, Tony. Thanks for answering my questions.”

  “Remember,” he says, “keep some of that information to yourself.”

  I have to lean against the wall for a few minutes. The metal locker is cold, and the handle pokes into my back. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Everything seems to be all wrong. Tony must have been lying about Jarrod’s friend. It couldn’t be Jeff.

  I find myself walking down the hallway toward the main doors. I’ve got to go home.

  As I walk into the house, about forty minutes later, the telephone rings. I don’t want to answer it, but what if it’s Donna? What if it’s Dad? So I clutch the receiver and manage to say a weak “Hello?”

  It’s Detective Markowitz. “Mrs. Latham has some more questions she wants to go over with you,” he says. “Do you feel up to it?”

  “Now?”

  “As soon as we can get you downtown. She wants to get more information from you before the hearing. There are some things you didn’t cover in your first meeting.”

  “Okay.”

  He pauses. “Uh, Stacy, she’s kind of unbending, but she’s a good prosecutor. If you could relax with her—” The sentence dangles.

  “I’ll stay calm,” I promise him.

  “Fine.”

  “Do I have to testify at this hearing?”

  “No. It’s just to set a date for Tucker’s trial, give his attorneys a chance to ask for a postponement, all that sort of legal stuff. You don’t even need to be there.”

  “But I want to be there.”

  “Believe me, it won’t interest you.”

  “Yes, it will. Really.”

  “Get ready,” he says. “The car will be at your house in about twenty minutes.”

  I change from my jeans and blouse to a dress. I want to look just right. If I had a suit, I’d wear that. I can be just as businesslike as Mrs. Latham.

  The driver from HPD arrives. I wave to Mrs. Cooper, who comes out on her porch again. How can she be so aware of everything that’s going on?

  She calls to me as I’m climbing in the police car, “Stacy, it’s all right about that car.”

  The driver shuts the door, so I roll down the window and stick my head out. “What car?”

  “Tell you later,” she yells.

  We soon arrive at the courthouse, and again it’s a quick hello to Detective Markowitz, through the lobby with him, into the elevator and up to Mrs. Latham’s office.

  She’s a little less formal with me now, and I don’t let her officiousness get to me. If she’s a superprosecutor, then that’s what I want. For some reason she slows down on the questions, so I don’t feel bombarded, and I answer them over and over and go into all the details I can remember.

  It doesn’t take long. She looks at her watch and says, “Very good. I think I have all the information I’ll need for now. I’ll go to court and see what I can accomplish.”

  “I’m going to be at the hearing too.”

  Mrs. Latham looks at Markowitz, who just shrugs. “Some of the media will be bound to be on hand,” she says.

  “I thought they had written enough about it,” I say. “It hasn’t been on TV or in the newspapers lately.”

  “It will again. They’ll cover each new development.”

  “I don’t care. I have to be there.” I can’t explain to either of them that I need to know what is happening each step of the way, that I need to see Jarrod standing before the judge.

  We go to another floor, where each door along the hallway opens to a courtroom. Mrs. Latham leaves us, and Markowitz and I enter one of the courtrooms, and slip into seats near the door in the third row. The room is painted a shade of off-white, and the seats are like padded theater seats. A large desk faces us at the far end of the room, and I know that’s the judge’s bench. Flags of Texas and the United States hang at one side of his bench. There are no windows in the room. I feel closed in, a little panicky, but I won’t leave. I huddle against the curved, molded back of the seat and hug my elbows for comfort.

  A well-dressed woman enters the room, pauses for just a moment, and glares at me. It’s Mrs. Tucker. A man joins her. She murmurs something to him, nodding in my direction. He gives me an angry glance, then ushers her into one of the seats at the opposite side of the room.

  A woman bustles back and forth between the judge’s bench and her desk. A few other people are in the room, and more straggle in. Four men carrying briefcases push their way through the hinged panel that separates the front section of the courtroom from the seats for visitors. They chat as though they were friends, then separate, going to opposite ends of a long table in front of the judge’s bench. Mrs. Latham arrives and begins to talk to a couple of the men. They both look up at me, then go back to their conversation.

  “I told you, this will be boring,” Markowitz mumbles.

  I just shake my head. He doesn’t understand how much I need to see this happen.

  “Everything going all right for you?” he asks, so I tell him what Tony had said about Jarrod and drugs.

  He doesn’t seem surprised. He just says, “That won’t figure into this case.”

  “But it shows what kind of person Jarrod is!”

  “The trial will be concerned with whether or not Jarrod Tucker was the person who murdered your mother. Whether or not he’s supplying drugs now has nothing to do with what happened four years ago.”

  “You mean, he’s going to just get away with the drugs thing?”

  “I didn’t say that. We have a narcotics department. I can pass along what you told me and let them look into it.”

  “You should work together.”

  He stretches out his long legs. “We do work together.”

  “Well, I think—”

  I don’t have time to tell him what I think because the woman near the judge’s bench suddenly announces th
e arrival of the judge, and we all stand. A tall gray-haired man strides in, his black robes billowing around him. He sits down, and everyone in the courtroom sits down too.

  A door at the far end of the room opens, and two men dressed in tan uniforms come through. A young man in jeans and what looks like a jogging shirt is between them.

  “Who are they?”

  “Bailiffs,” Markowitz whispers, “with one of the prisoners.”

  “But where’s Jarrod?”

  “On the other side of that door is a holding pen, where prisoners are kept until it’s their turn to see the judge or to be taken back to jail.”

  One of the prosecuting attorneys quickly goes through charges against the man before the judge. His attorney says something to the judge about the man’s lack of a previous record, and the judge sets bail of $5,000. The attorneys go over to talk to the court clerk. Everyone on the judge’s side of the railing seems to be talking, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. In a few minutes the bailiffs go off with the man, and another one comes in with an elderly woman who looks like a bag lady.

  “When will they bring in Jarrod?”

  “Be patient. I told you this would be boring.”

  Finally the first two bailiffs return. They enter the courtroom with Jarrod walking between them. He’s dressed in a really sharp suit, white shirt, and tie. He looks like a model student here to accept an award. They stop at the right end of the table. The two men who have been sitting there stand and talk to Jarrod. I recognize one of them. He was there at the lineup. Jarrod’s attorney. I can’t hear what they’re saying. They point to a chair between them.

  Jarrod’s mother makes a little whimpering noise, and Jarrod shifts to look at her. His lower lip curls downward, and he looks like a spoiled little boy ready to throw a tantrum. I think Jarrod hasn’t noticed me, but before he sits down, he turns and stares at me. One corner of his mouth twists, and he glares with such fierceness I gasp. I get his message. I couldn’t miss it. But I know it as well as he does. Without my testimony there would be little way that Jarrod could be convicted of murder. I know Jarrod would like to kill me if he could only get the chance.