I think you don’t read these but you will know what I mean soon.
I hope it isn’t mean if I tell you that boy was a good boy. Or maybe he was a man. He was nice in a nice way and this is hard for us but what can we do. Bad people would not care but I am the kind of person who sees him all the time when I close my eyes. That boy was way nicer than I am and that is one of the things wrong and I have been wondering if you read my letters or if they read these letters, if the cops do. What do I ever say? Do they get a thrill when I say I love you? When you get home I will put so many eggs in your cake you won’t believe it. I know how much you like it rich. No matter how hard I work I cannot sleep now. I get tired but cannot sleep. It is the middle of the night again. What can I say? For sure I will say good luck because I am out of room on this sack.
Forever yours,
Mrs. Henry Brusett (also known as Karen)
MEYERS LIVED IN the house he’d bought his wife as her reward for surviving her illness, and he kept her ashes in a pot. He’d managed to give Claudia less than two months of her darling Craftsman-style home down by the river, and now he was already rounding into his second decade here. His son Robert had made Claudia’s urn, and it was displayed with several other Robert Meyers ceramics in a Plexiglas case above the mantel, pots on sculpted sand, on reed matting, pots as kinetic and pregnant as seeds, and proceeding from out of a serenity that Hoot Meyers envied, even begrudged, even of his son. For his part, in his generation, he could appreciate elegance as it occurred, but it would never be the dominant theme of a house he’d densely furnished as a museum. Meyers owned a McClellan saddle, if he no longer owned a horse. By his bed stood a treadle-driven grindstone, a Swede saw, an ice auger; similar devices were all through the house, standing idle now, but ready to serve, to bore, to crush long after the men who’d made them were no longer even afterthoughts. From every parcel of land he had ever owned he’d gathered up at least one of these indestructible tools, equipment that, like Hoot Meyers himself, had its proper historical place somewhere near the end of the Iron Age, and his clutter could make getting up to pee in the night an iffy proposition; Meyers had left himself just a few narrow lanes to negotiate his way through his house, and his toes were frequently some shade of red or blue. Once he’d been up for any reason, he rarely succeeded in going back to sleep.
He kept spread on the wall above and behind his refrigerator the blood orange fan she’d carried in The Mikado. At eye level, at every snack and meal, Claudia’s permanently rising sun, the only artifact in the house that he dusted with any diligence. Well acquainted with 3 AM, Hoot Meyers made coffee and scrambled some eggs. He stood, breakfast in hand, at the picture window overlooking the river. There was a tower on the far shore with lights and cable rising to it from the near shore. Closer at hand, two tall poles bore crowns of osprey nest that were sometimes active all night. There had been a drawdown at the dam earlier that week, and wide, green mudflats had been revealed along both banks of the river; all through dusk a hatch of some newly prolific bug had been shimmering just above the water. Now the water was black except where the cable lights and a waning moon were reflected in it.
A cider press, a cracked bellows.
He showered, shaved, trimmed the hairs in his nose, and he pitched a change of underwear, a can of Right Guard, some gum, and a lightly used notepad into a war bag, and he walked to the courthouse with a suit and a shirt still in the drycleaner’s plastic sack. For as long as he’d been a town dweller, he still found it novel and nice to walk to work, a brief walk on pavement, and to arrive there with his boots unmuddied. Meyers let himself in with his key and climbed up through the dark of the back stairwell. He did not need or use the lights; he preferred that it not be known how early, how sometimes absurdly early, he came in to prepare. His job wanted silence and seclusion, from which he might sometimes impose a moment’s order. Only by winning what he thought he should win could Meyers endure or take much warm interest in himself anymore, and he liked to leave the impression that he won by luck or brilliance, or that he won because he was in the right, but his luck was manufactured here in this half-lit building. He suffered to completely prepare, and so, in most things, his judgment seemed to prevail, as was only proper.
But the routine for throwing a trial, if there could be such a thing, simply would not occur to him, and he was very much afraid he’d given himself six hours to dress for court—and to brood on it—a hundred times the time he’d require.
▪ 23 ▪
HE HAD ALWAYS wanted to say he’d hit the boy, but he knew that from the moment he might confess, that from then on and thereafter, he’d be hounded for his reasons, and it was his reasons he could not bring himself to speak. What would be left of a man who had admitted, who had accepted in himself, that he’d been so wrong-hearted and mean as to kill some poor kid? So he did not confess, and he would not lie, and the fruit of this principled cowardice was a hundred citizens congregating to make Henry Brusett their constant study. Now, no matter what came to pass, they would never devise a more perfect hell for him than this trial.
It was a churchy room with its ranks of pews, the judge’s bench for an altar. Behind the bench a portrait of Wilbur Farrand Conrad, mournful in his vigilante’s tweeds, stared down at everyone. Having given his bloodied name to this courthouse, this county, he was now quite as dead as any dangling road agent.
With much fussing, the bailiff arranged sixty-two citizens according to the plastic placards on their chests; he seated them fifteen abreast on the pews, and from the prosecutor’s table, Hoot Meyers looked them over and made notes. In the gallery were reporters, and a high school civics class come to see the workings of justice, and there were loiterers and ghouls, and, off in the corner farthest from the accused, Mr. and Mrs. Wesley Teague had joined hands with each other and with a local man of the cloth; they were unremitting in their prayers. Henry Brusett knew them at once for the young man’s parents and thought that they were among the mildest people he’d ever seen. They were dressed in pastels, as for a garden party. Still, he could hardly suppose that they were there to wish him well.
There was no part of the room to which he might comfortably turn, but Henry thought it would seem artificial of him to stare a hole in the defense table or into his own folded hands, and, as was usual for him in any crowded place, he didn’t know what to do with his eyes. “Coast to coast,” he thought he heard Ms. Meany say. “A farmer in every poem and kitchen.” She spoke to him in fast and low outrushes of breath, and she knew she was hard to understand. She had set out a legal pad before him and provided him with two sharp pencils; with one of these she slashed a clearer message:
HELP ME
GIVE ME GOOD JURORS, BAD JURORS
G FOR GOOD B FOR BAD
MARK BY NUMBERS WHAT YOU THINK
SEE LIST NEED YOUR OPINION AND
YOUR HELP PLEASE REAL IMPORTANT
He read his lawyer’s note and was too ashamed and too embarrassed to do more than shrug.
Fine, she thought, because she did not think she would require his active cooperation. For once she might be getting all she needed of a man. Giselle Meany was set up at last in the right case, with the right cause and the right client, and she had assured herself in the middle of the previous night that this time she’d be the right advocate. In her mind, she welcomed Mr. Brusett to be as indifferent as he wanted; they were still going to win. He could be as mulish and mute as ever he might wish, and so much the better, because his reticence was the meat of their defense; he simply seemed too shy to do much evil. Giselle thought she’d done well by him in the way of wardrobe, too—brilliantly, miserably turned out it in the Salvation Army sports jacket with its tiny, twisted checks and with its cantilevered shoulders, he did not look the wino as she’d feared he might, but a Cuban band leader, pre-Castro, and too ridiculous and secondhand to fit anyone’s notion of a killer.
Giselle thought that as soon as she brought her occasional tremors and her heartbu
rn under control, she might begin to brim with confidence this morning, and what a lovely fall morning it had been. She’d had a brisk walk before dawn and told herself how she must try this case in a confident mood, and to that end she was already permitting herself some pleasure in the victory she so fiercely intended, and even with the foofaraw of the judge coming into court, even with the rising and being bidden to sit again, even the sight of the judge’s faceted skull and his preening, soaring self-regard—none of it slowed her heart rate or polluted her resolve. Judge Samara made an address containing the words “grave,” and “gravity,” and “graveman,” and, though she despised him no less for it, Giselle Meany was exalted when he intoned the lyrical old legalisms. “The state,” the judge finally said, “can commence with its voir dire.”
Hoot Meyer’s bearing was that of the quickest chicken at the cockfight, but he had taught himself a passably friendly manner, and, adopting this, he stood and introduced himself to the jury pool as the county attorney. He mentioned the judge’s name again and the length of the man’s storied career, and then to take full possession of the room, and out of a standard courtesy, he introduced Giselle Meany and her client. He referred to Henry Brusett as the defendant, another customary designation, but one that in this case did not come handily into his mouth.
Hoot Meyers would never in his life look upon or think upon Henry Brusett without seeing the big-eyed boy forever running the perimeter of Mrs. Callahan’s playground, a faint and hopeful smile for his schoolmates, the kid who could not quite make himself join in. Henry was as timid as ever, and ravaged, and draped in some kind of fat man’s clown suit they’d got him to wear, but here he was, against all odds and as luck would have it the only citizen in the county to whom Meyers owed any specific loyalty. Meyers had signed onto many mortgages in his time but was rarely otherwise burdened. He had conducted himself with a bright zeal about owing no favors, and the last thing he had expected so late in an essentially honorable career was to find himself caught out this way, indebted, compromised. He was so far from knowing what he was about that on the thinnest of evidence he’d charged a man—a man whom he knew to be gentle—for murder, and the defendant stood accused primarily by his silence, a silence Meyers himself had recommended and upon which he continued to rely.
Hoot Meyers had long wished to let more light and air into his being—instead of this bramble of subtleties.
“We have to ask you some questions,” he threatened, “because we have to make sure we seat twelve fair-minded people in that jury box. Completely fair-minded. So I’ll need to ask you some things, and some of them may get a little personal—information that usually wouldn’t be any of my business.” Meyers knew at this moment that the fix was in, he found himself doing it—there was no poorer trial craft than to scare your jury with the first words from your mouth. With questions blunt and numerous, he’d have many chances to make them uneasy about him even before he’d even started to argue his weedy little case, and with startling and disappointing ease, the winning tricks and instincts could be reversed; he’d been naive to worry that he couldn’t botch a prosecution as necessary. Nervous jurors. They sat very erect on the benches, their chins traveled up, their chins traveled down, all with equal misgiving.
“So, to start—do any of you know Mr. Brusett here, or know about him? I only want a show of hands.”
Jurors fourteen and forty-four raised their hands, Muriel Crown and Brick McQuiston.
“And how is it you happen to know him, Ms. Crown?”
“You know how. Same way I know you. Same way I know about everybody.” For many years now she had worked the counter during supper shift at Auntie Belle’s Family Diner. She wore an amethyst choker, cut the widest wedges of pie, and tenderly called every male she served “mister.”
“I know,” said Meyers, “but why don’t you go ahead and let everybody else in on it, too.”
“Well, I mean, I didn’t know him that good. I’m a waitress. He was a customer, or used to be. Not lately. It’s been a while back since he came in.”
“Anything about that, what you do know of him, that would prevent you from looking at the evidence impartially?”
Ms. Crown, accustomed to coo at distracted diners, had little experience of having her opinions, her wisdom sought this way, and it was something exhilarating. “He was a quiet guy,” she considered. “Real quiet. And he never left me less than fifteen percent. That’s all I could say for sure.”
“He’s not charged with being cheap.” Meyers, with his desire to fail, was liberated from all but the most formal courtesies; surely he’d get his jury chosen by noon. It was good to finally be on his feet, working. “Is there anything you know about Mr. Brusett that would prevent you from looking at the evidence and hearing this testimony impartially? Can you be fair? Fair to both sides? That’s all we need to know.”
Ms. Crown desired very much to do her duty. “I think I’d be real fair. Only thing I got is my common sense, but I’ve got that. Might as well try and put it to good use for once.”
Meyers only looked at Mr. McQuiston, a man of middle age with a dewlap and slight, oddly square shoulders, and McQuiston volunteered all in a rush that he was a millwright, or had been until recently, and that he knew Henry Brusett from “around,” and that as far as he was concerned, the whole damned thing was a scam. Meyers cut him off before he could explain his theory, and asked that he be excused for cause. The jury pool was reduced to sixty-one.
For an hour then he was at them, probing every sinkhole of their memories for traces of unacknowledged bias, unmentioned debility, and in the name of thoroughness, Meyers was at them until he was very sure he saw their faces calcify in resentment. Some admitted to prior acquaintance with certain officers of the court, some of them also admitted to having strong feelings on account of it. Some admitted to intolerance for the law itself, an abiding mistrust. A felon was excused from duty, a nursing mother, a gentleman with a bad back, a gentleman with bad hearing. There were the usual clever ones who thought to cite some arcane or invented prejudice to get themselves released back to their own business. “ . . . and she was my little cousin, and they never caught the guy, so now, I think it would be just about impossible for me to let somebody off on a deal like this. I just wouldn’t risk it. Somebody getting away.”
When at last Meyers sat down, there were forty-eight jurors left in the pool, and Judge Samara mercifully called the trial’s first recess, after which Giselle Meany went to work on them, and where it had been restless before, the jury pool nearly revolted under her new line of questioning which was couched, as near as anyone could tell, in algebraic terms. “Now as we examine . . . you are Mr. . . . Hellbron? Well, Mr. Hellbron, have you ever stopped to think why it is that innocence must come before guilt in our system of justice? And, more than that, do you think that guilt can ever be any kind of absolute?”
“Have I? Probably . . . what was that again?”
Even Ms. Meany knew that she wasn’t going over well, and that she’d not be learning anything more about them nor teaching them anything more of Anglo-American jurisprudence, and so she soon let them alone, and then there was the ceremony of passing the jury pool for cause by which it was agreed that those left had not exhibited or admitted any unacceptable taint. Then there was a longer rite, a more secretive and medieval shuffling of notes from attorneys through the bailiff to the judge, and back again, and a dozen more jurors were excused, two by two, on peremptory challenges, excused on lawyer’s whims or for no reason at all, most often to their great relief, but finally twelve had been selected, and an alternate, and when they’d taken their places in the jury box and had their half hour of Judge Samara’s preliminary jury instructions, every one of them regretted to be among the chosen.
Henry Brusett, five weeks without the pills, was finding it nearly impossible to sit so long in one posture, in a hardback chair, and he was mortified to be the wretch who was putting everyone to so much bother, and the routin
e they so elaborately followed for his protection was often inscrutable, always tedious to him, and so he concentrated on holding himself together as some semblance of a man. When at one o’clock the judge finally called for a forty-five minute lunch, Henry was returned to the barracks cell, and there he passed the time writhing, stretching, breathing deep. His mind was very clear—no consolation. Nat told him he looked sharp, that a fresh shave really went a long way toward sprucing him up. The bars were painted that baby blue, as they had always been.
Giselle Meany sat in her idling Subaru with the world news from the BBC and a tuna fish sandwich that was not half as much as she found she wanted to eat, and she told herself in various ways that things were going well for the defense. That was a jury, she thought, with a strain of sweet rationality running through it. Simplicity, she reminded herself, was the soul of elegance, and elegance a function of truth. She must somehow keep things simple.
The county attorney, who could not afford to let other crises stack up while he was at trial, took some calls. There was a conflict of police authority in Elisis with a tribal cop, a city cop, and a sheriff’s deputy who had somehow convinced one another that a certain Canadian had immunity to fistfight on Main Street. No one could see where they had clear jurisdiction to interfere. There was a conference call. “If he hurts somebody,” Meyers told them, “arrest him. What do you think, it’s an international incident? If he’s outta hand, run him in. How many different ways can you guys dream up to not do your damn job? Same goes for a Mexican or a Mongolian or Hmong, or whathaveyou. When they’re here, they’re under our law.”
There was also a dog bite in the western end.
“You do not mess with somebody’s Achilles tendon,” the victim was saying. “Doc says the vicious bitch could’ve crippled me. Then what, huh? And these people, these Billingsleys, they seem to have her throw a new litter every six months or so, and now it’s got to where it’s just about intolerable around here anymore.” Perhaps. Meyers sucked on oat and molasses pellets originally rolled as horse feed; he made only such sounds as he needed to make into the phone.
The Other Shoe Page 27