The Legal Limit

by Martin Clark

  “What if Allen Roberts and I have a different recollection?” Mason challenged Hoffman.

  “You mean what if you lie and you tamper with a witness? Hard to say. Can’t predict who a jury’d believe. Three cops, or you and Mr. Roberts. One thing’s set in stone—you went in to see him and you kept the recorder dead. Why?” Hoffman finally broke off a chunk of biscuit and put it in his mouth, began chewing. “It’s no foolproof case for us,” he remarked through the bread, “but like I told you, if you ask me to handicap it, I’m comfortable the commonwealth will win. You gotta smell trouble, too. With Gates’s testimony alone, we’re down the tubes. But add the tape of you soundin’ so surprised. Blurting to Bass and Minter it’s not possible they found the gun at Roberts’s house. Jury takes notice. Then stir this last ingredient into the recipe: a commonwealth’s attorney who’s sittin’ on the lab-identified murder weapon and a confession to a polygraphed witness bebops in and tells the suspect he’ll never be charged. I’d be losin’ sleep if I was you, Mason.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Mason asked. “Guilty or innocent.”

  “At any rate, I’ve done what I came to do. I’ve salvaged my promise. Actually, there’s plenty good in this for you. A trade. You’re wounded by the judge and media discoverin’ you’re not lily-white, but now you’ll see Stallings’s punch coming. No trapdoors when it counts the most. Good luck, Mason.” Hoffman slid to the end of the bench. “I can’t cut any slack for you when we go to trial,” he said as he was rising. “I’ll lay it out true. Have to. Chips probably aren’t gonna fall completely the way they should, but you’ve brought a portion of this hurt on yourself. Brother or not, you were over eighteen and made a choice. Been lyin’ ever since, too.”

  Around the close of October, after the first hard frost had faded the pasture and yard, suffocating the last briar flowers and streaks of clover, Mason was in the barn replacing a lightbulb and he stumbled into an ashtray and butts and matches and a pack of cigs hidden inside a dented metal bucket. His curiosity piqued, he also discovered two wine coolers in the tack room, buried at the bottom of a box of rags. The bottles were clear with snazzy foil labels, the rags were sweatshirt strips, culls from the mill that were ripped lengthwise by a machine and sold in red, yellow, black and green bundles at the downtown outlet store. He put the cigs and ashtray in with the wine coolers and rags and deposited the whole damning collection on Grace’s bedroom desk. When he confronted her she lied to him and blamed the hired help, Mo Jenkins, who wore Carhartt, dipped Skoal and drank whatever beer was on sale at the grocery store. He referred to his spouse as “the wife.” “I’m sure Mo’s a huge fan of room-temperature strawberry wine coolers,” Mason said, and she quickly switched the subject, attacking him for not respecting her privacy and entering her room when she wasn’t there.

  “You forfeit your privacy by breaking rules and lying to me,” he told her.

  “None of it matters anyway,” she replied. “I don’t care what you do.”

  “You are grounded indefinitely,” he said firmly. “More for not telling the truth than for the smoking and alcohol.”

  “It can be forever,” she sassed him. “Ground me till I’m a hundred. Might as well.” She was snide and flippant in the fashion of someone who felt there was nothing at stake, no jeopardy, no fall past supreme bottom, no state worse than the worst. She lay down on her bed, blue-jeaned legs together, toes rigid toward the ceiling, arms against her sides, her hair fanned on a pastel pillow, her lips thinned and stitched, funereal except for her furious, blinking eyes, the lashes pounding “I hate you” over and over and over.

  At the beginning of November, Mason and Custis met again in Martinsville with Jim Haskins and Pat Sharpe. They were at Sharpe’s office, on the fourth floor of a bank building, the view of the parking lot and a low-slung, ramshackle furniture store. Sharpe showed them a photo of a twelve-point buck he’d killed with a bow and arrow, and they all briefly talked about Virginia Tech football, and Haskins mentioned an antique trunk he’d purchased at an estate sale. Finally, Sharpe opened a file on his desk to signal the preliminaries were through. “I’ve received an offer from Stallings,” he said, “and we need to discuss it.”

  It was apparent from Haskins’s demeanor that he and Sharpe had already conferred. Resting one leg on top of the other, he casually adjusted his sock to do away with a slight exposure of flesh at the end of his pants cuff.

  “Fuck Leonard Stallings and his offer,” Custis snorted.

  Haskins and Sharpe both smiled.

  “Easy for you to say,” Mason remarked. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Here’s the background,” Sharpe said. “I took a chance, just got in my car and drove to Waynesboro and stopped by Stallings’s office. Cold. Surprisingly enough, he invited me right in and was reasonably cordial.”

  “I’m trying to visualize the scene—does he use a booster seat?” Custis cracked. “Fisher-Price desk? Dr. Miguelito Lovelace shrine in the corner?”

  The room stayed somber; no one laughed.

  “The man’s a crusader,” Sharpe continued. “A true believer. Craves the spotlight as we all know. But he’s no dummy. I told him we’re aware the cops listened to the conversation with Allen Roberts and warned him we’ll be prepared. He’s lost the advantage there, although I’m assuming Ed Hoffman had already given him the news.”

  “Stallings had to realize we were on to him,” Haskins interjected. “And for what it’s worth, crazy ol’ Hoffman might be right about the discovery issue. Funny how we take things for granted because it’s the way we’ve always done it.”

  “The rule’s ambiguous,” Mason said. “I checked, too.” He was anxious to reach the payoff, tapping a foot on the carpet. “It’s academic now, anyway.”

  “Stallings is also bright enough to know what we all understand: you didn’t shoot anyone, and your brother’s an asshole.”

  “Amen,” said Custis.

  “But—and I want to phrase this as neutrally as I can—he thinks you were involved. I’m not saying Jim and I do, but because of the polygraph and your interaction with Allen Roberts, Stallings is convinced either you helped your brother or you’re covering for him. Unfortunately for us, Stallings is a black-and-white guy, and he feels you committed a crime. Broke the law—years ago and in a minor way, perhaps—but broke it all the same. From high on his soapbox, he also feels it’s…it’s hypocritical of you to prosecute people when your own house isn’t in order, so he’s not willing simply to let bygones be bygones.” Sharpe paused, shifting in his seat. He glanced at the papers in his file, then at Haskins and finally honed in on Mason. An overhead light pinpointed in the centers of his glasses, a tiny bright distraction. “He’ll accept a plea to involuntary manslaughter, five years with nine months to serve, a thousand-dollar fine and three years’ probation. Additionally, he wants to explore a charge against your brother. You’d be required to assist.”

  Everyone was silent. Mason could hear, barely, a phone in the adjacent office, more of a pulse than a ring or buzz. “A felony conviction and nine months in prison? I’d lose my law license, too. I mean, hell, I’d be ruined. My daughter, my mom…Grace is fifteen years old.”

  “It’s a diabolical offer,” Haskins said. “The kind you don’t want to take, but you’re afraid not to.”

  “We have a week to decide,” Sharpe said. He moved and the reflection was gone from his lenses. “After that, the offer’s withdrawn and we go to trial on murder one and take our chances. Could be a not-guilty verdict; theoretically could be life in prison. Or anything in between. I don’t have to tell you, of all people, how it works.”

  “We’re ready to fight if we need to,” Haskins added. “There won’t be any stone unturned, my friend.”

  Distress in its purest state occasionally cooks up to something approximating sickness, apes the first push of a fever or the raw creep of nausea, and Mason felt his skin spike hot, his stomach pucker, his spine sting and quiver and buckle, and he dipped his he
ad close to his knees and clutched handfuls of hair. His circumstances had finally penetrated him, found a foothold, and for the first time he let down in front of other people. Custis started to attend to his friend, raised from his chair, and then he thought better of it and eased back down, very slow-motion as he sat. Several seconds later, Mason stanched his despair and righted himself. His mouth was dry, his thoughts soupy. “Sorry,” he said. “It just hits home after a while. Damn.”

  “Perfectly normal,” Gentleman Jim assured him. “I’d be a wreck myself. It’s different if you’re on the other side of the table. You’re handling it better than I would.”

  “Truthfully, Pat, how do you see it?” Mason asked. “We all know the best thing you can do for me is give me an honest appraisal.”

  Sharpe nodded, understood. “You never can tell with a jury, but I rate it fifty-fifty. It’s one of those cases where the whole’s better than the parts. Ed Hoffman’s a strong witness, and your comments to Allen Roberts are difficult to explain away, given what you’d been told by Bass and Minter. There’s risk, Mason. Wish I didn’t have to say it.”

  Mason turned to Haskins. “Jim?”

  “I don’t think it’s quite fifty-fifty. I feel we’re in better shape than that, but dammit, Mason, it’ll go to a jury. Melesco can’t help us if your brother sticks to his story, can’t strike the commonwealth’s case, and once twelve random people start deliberating your future, well, it gets iffy. I’m not telling you anything new, but there’s always the possibility of a bad result.”

  “Okay,” Mason said. “Thanks.”

  “Call me here or at the house as soon as you make up your mind,” Sharpe told Mason. “And if you have a counteroffer, I’ll certainly communicate it. I sense Stallings has given us his bottom line, but you never know.”

  As Mason and Custis rode home in the Cadillac, their conversation sporadic, Mason noticed Custis was missing a tooth, had a dark stub at the corner of his mouth. “You break a tooth?” he asked.

  “No. Hell no. Damn thousand-dollar veneer popped loose last night.”

  “No kidding? Huh. Can the dentist glue it on again?”

  “Yeah. I called him this morning and told him the news. Problem is, I swallowed the little fucker. I was eating and felt it go down my throat before I figured out what was happening.”

  “Not good,” Mason said.

  “Dentist tells me I need to ‘recover it.’ Right, I tell him. Ain’t enough Clorox on the planet for that program to work. It’s only been a year since he did the job, so I inform him we’ll be starting from scratch, his expense.”

  “Only fair,” Mason agreed.

  “He doesn’t see it quite the same. Things get tense on the phone. He finally says he’ll knock off two hundred dollars, and I advise him he’d better be dustin’ off his malpractice policy. Lawsuit’s good as filed. Can you believe it? Like we need another headache. What else can happen?”

  “We’re done, aren’t we?” Mason asked, his voice floating, dim.

  “Done? Meaning what?”

  “There’re no more doors to try, no escape routes, no buttons to push. I’m going to wind up tried for murder with beaucoup exposure and my daughter’s welfare on the line, and the world’s soon going to learn you fancy men instead of women unless I bend a knee to Herman Dylan. Brick walls on every side.”

  “You could put it like that, I guess,” Custis said ruefully. “But there’s always hope. I try to stay positive.”

  “How do you rate my chances?”

  “Me? Me, I’d speculate there’re definitely some wolves between you and the gingerbread cottage. The kicker is this polygraph in the papers. Popular as you are, a Patrick County jury has been a major mack-daddy advantage for us, and now we might be in a fix.”

  “Aren’t you confusing your stories?”

  “Could be. But you get the picture.” Custis grinned, revealing his stumpy flaw. “Don’t say nothing ’bout my expertise with fairy tales, either. I’ll set you and your bad attitude out on the side of the road.”

  “Amazing,” Mason said, and it was apparent he was distracted by his own thoughts, temporarily deaf to what his friend had said. “Amazing.” The word was salted with disgust. “How symbolic, huh? Sums it up. Our teeth knocked so far down our throats we’re left to pick them out of our own shit. Unbelievable.”

  “It’s a dental problem, Mace. I wouldn’t make it into a prophecy or take it as a rooster crowing or burning bush or ring around the moon.”

  Mason was quiet for the remainder of the trip. The stereo played Teddy Pendergrass songs, and Custis hummed along, joining in on a few refrains. Nearly to Stuart, he asked Mason if he wanted to have a cocktail to soothe their spirits. “Why not?” Mason said. “But first I need you to take me by the office so I can check and see if my mom will watch Grace for me.”

  “Use my cell,” Custis suggested.

  “Nah, I need to sign a couple letters, too. Only take a minute.”

  It was around six o’clock when Custis pulled the Cadillac parallel to the awning at the front of their office, and he waited in the car while Mason went inside, kept the engine running. Mason phoned his mother, who was happy to have supper with her granddaughter, and then he hunted through his desk drawer until he found Ian Hudgens’s business card. He dialed Hudgens’s number and left a message: “Please have Mr. Dylan get in touch immediately. Not you, but him personally.” When he returned to the vehicle, it was growing dark fast, the sun all but exhausted, the fall evenings curtailed, and they traveled through the thickening black to Custis’s house and set to drinking.

  A few hours later, Mason—for the first time since Allison’s death—sidestepped his responsibilities and made arrangements with his mother to keep Grace overnight, and by nine thirty he and Custis were both blitzed off a bottle of good bourbon Custis had been hoarding. Theirs was a happy, sloppy, obliterating revelry, a soldiers-off-to-battle drunk, a stopgap and artificial joy that had them sloshing toasts to important cases they’d won and Mason’s best home run swing ever and the Wu-Tang Clan and San Juan and Custis’s several elections to town council. Mason had taken Shoni McClean out several times since their Mount Airy lunch, the last occasion a dinner and visit to a jazz club in Winston-Salem, and it seemed only liquor-appropriate to phone her late on a weeknight and include her in the party, and she was a good sport and came by Custis’s at eleven o’clock and pretended to be interested in a bourbon and Sprite, then danced with Mason to an Etta James standard in the living room so he’d quit pestering her about it.

  The bourbon finished—killed by Custis and Mason standing shoulder to shoulder and gunning the last shots straight from the bottle—Shoni drove Mason to his farm at two in the morning. She allowed him an inept kiss, but when he slid his hand over her belly and started up for more, she laughed and spun him toward the house and said, “Not tonight, cowboy.” Until then, he hadn’t tried.

  “Why not?” he asked, and before she could answer he apologized, confiding he was smashed.

  “Aw, really?” she said playfully.

  “Listen,” he slurred, facing the house, not her. “Tell Cus I got an idea. Something that might rescue us.”

  “I definitely will.” She was humoring him.

  “And don’t mention anything to Grace,” he said, and staggered around so he could see her. He slapped a weaving index finger across his lips.

  “You have my promise,” she replied. Earlier that night, he had admitted to her he’d yet to tell his daughter about their friendship, and she’d replied that she understood and wasn’t offended. She took his arm and guided him to the door but didn’t go inside with him, watching through the window as he stripped off his shirt and stumbled to a couch, collapsing facedown, thank God, so she wouldn’t worry over him strangling on his own vomit.

  Mason had experienced very few hangovers since college—it occurred to him the following day that Custis seemed to somehow midwife most of them—and he awakened displaced on his sofa, still c
lad in his suit pants and socks and shoes, his shirt on the floor, his tie missing, his jacket, with any luck, left behind at his buddy’s house. He stood up but was so drained and dizzy he crashed back onto the couch, got to his feet again and wobbled toward the kitchen. He checked the clock, flipped on the radio, started coffee and phoned his mom, who was about to leave with Grace for school. “We’re fine, Gates,” she said when he asked if they were okay.

  “This is Mason,” he replied, still woozy.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” she said coolly. “Not easy to tell the difference this morning.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Thanks for helping on such short notice.”

  As Mason poured a glass of orange juice, Jasper Griffith’s hick voice issued from the radio; he was a stalwart on the local call-in show, and he was giving Mason the dickens, citing newspaper accounts of the upcoming murder trial and the failed polygraph and recalling how Mason had high-hatted him at the seafood restaurant. But the final straw was the next yapper, a rational, relatively well-spoken lady from Goose Point Road, who agreed with Jasper, and Mason realized the sea change had begun: He was losing favor in his own county, and in some quarters the disdain would become especially brutal once people began to feel gullible and hornswoggled, their trust perverted. Even worse, Mason understood that in Patrick the heat of the torches and quality of the tar were usually in direct proportion to the size of the pedestal.

  He called Sheila at her house and told her he was ill, unplugged the phone, went to bed and never left the farm until late in the day, shaving and showering and hugging a limp, resistant Grace before driving to the courthouse in Stuart.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “I need your help, Judge,” Mason said straight off, no fooling around, no building up to it, no putting on airs. The request was stark and naked. “I’m in a bad fix. My family and I.” He took a seat, but he was restless and the chair seemed small and not to scale with him in it. He looked dreadfully wan and tired, but he was wearing a suit and a jaunty striped tie and his hair was still damp from a shower, full of combed rows. He’d rubbed off a streak of his daughter’s makeup onto his lapel when he hugged her at the farm, a foundation smear vivid against deep navy wool. Evidently, he’d failed to notice it during the ride into Stuart.