The Other Shoe

by Matt Pavelich

  At last he allowed himself five quiet minutes of green tea in a translucent cup, and he calculated that his old friend Henry Brusett, his very old conscience, should not be more than two days from freedom, or from as much of it as any man with a past can enjoy. The day’s central chore was done for Meyers—he’d got the right jury for his purpose.

  There were at least two of them in the box, he thought, who could be counted on to vote down almost any proposition the county attorney might care to advance. Mrs. Larson, for all Meyers’s probing, had never mentioned how he’d kept her son on probation for five years, and how poor Jimmy had been in constant trouble with so much official intrusion into his life. Meyers remembered seeing her at nearly all the boy’s hearings. The woman would surely loathe him for prosecuting her boy—he knew a mother’s heart, a certain kind of mother, and she’d avenge herself the moment God showed her how. There was also Connor Shrenk, now juror number six, who had just a year earlier lost a right-of-way and with it some business in a dispute with the county commissioners. This trouble had a face for Shrenk, and that face was Meyers’s. “No,” he’d said when asked, “no, I mean, I do know you from before, from another thing, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Would it? It really couldn’t have, could it?”

  One of these two, or at least someone of the twelve, must certainly see that he had no case. That was the saving thing, the particularly odd thing about it: He had no case. Hoot Meyers came into court just thirty seconds before Judge Samara gaveled them into session, and the county attorney began the afternoon by waiving his opening statement.

  “Ms. Meany? Do you wish to waive also?”

  “I . . . no.” She was not in rhythm. It was the county attorney’s style to punch and punch, and it was unprecedented for him to forgo the first punch. Giselle’s own opening was scripted, but she’d written it to refute what she’d expected Meyers to say. It would sound ridiculous now that he’d said nothing. She made her way before the jury, suddenly ponderous, an old-time, orotund orator, buying that extra moment to improvise. “This,” she ultimately said, “is the part of the trial, ladies and gentlemen, where both sides summarize the evidence as they see it.” Why did her voice always quake? A mangled face and stage fright, what was she doing in a public line of work? “Either way, on either side, as you’ll see, there’s not much evidence to talk about in this case. The evidence the state will show you in support of this very, very serious charge is a stained pair of dungarees. And that is all. And . . . I believe they’re called ‘dungarees.’ But, that’s it. That’s all, and I am very confident that in my closing statement I’ll be able to talk to you again, and marvel with you at how anyone would ever be so . . . carried away, so carried away that they’d ask you to make such a terrible assumption based on about a scintilla of evidence.” She saw their eyes glazing. Keep far, she told herself, far from the conceptual, and she sat down.

  Hoot Meyers called young Deputy Lovell as his first witness, and from the moment he took his oath, Lovell was unable to tear his vigilant eyes from that part of the gallery containing the press corps. He’d worn his body armor for the occasion, a very brown tie, and his hair and scalp glistened with gel. Meyers had coached him on his performance to the extent of telling him to keep his answers short and direct, but Lovell had some trouble with this as he came to the juicier parts of his testimony.

  “I knew the subject was deceased the minute I saw him, but just to be sure I checked for a pulse, and there wasn’t any, and you could see he was nonresponsive, completely nonresponsive, and that’s what you’re trained to look for, the eyes don’t respond to light, so we knew he was dead.”

  “Deputy Lovell, let’s just take it one thing at a time.”

  Taken one thing at time, there wasn’t much to relate. His time of arrival. Who he’d found, where he’d found them, what their condition had been. The blood, its amount, its location. What, if anything, they’d said to him. Meyers had got as much as he wanted from Deputy Lovell in under twenty minutes. Already disappointed, the deputy was crushed when the public defender said she did not wish to cross-examine him at this time. The county attorney hadn’t asked a single question about the separate investigation he’d done, his discovery of the victim’s car, his early discovery of the kid’s identity. Why, Lovell wondered, wouldn’t they be interested in that? Why was recognition always slinking around the corner whenever he approached? Though he’d been on the stand very briefly, Lovell’s hair gel had begun to slide down all points of the compass, trickling down his head, and even if the dignity and hope he’d brought into the courtroom with him were gone, he sat at attention until the very end of his testimony.

  Meyers then called Detective Flaherty, who came to the stand with an unauthorized campaign hat tucked under his arm, the regulation Kevlar and nylon ensemble, and he wore on his chest a good-conduct ribbon, also unauthorized. Meyers walked him through his name, his job description, his length of service with the sheriff’s office, and he then referred him back to a certain night in August.

  “Were you on duty that night, Detective Flaherty?”

  “They paged me.”

  “At what time did you make it to the Brusetts’ place?”

  “Twenty-three thirty-nine hours.”

  “Civilian time,” Meyers suggested.

  “Eleven thirty-nine PM.”

  “Who else was there when you arrived?”

  “The subject,” said Flaherty. “There, we had the subject, and . . . ”

  “The subject of what?”

  “I mean the victim. He was there. Obviously. Then Mr. Brusett. Deputy Lovell, Deputy Sisson, Mrs. Brusett. The medical people, the EMTs, I guess there were three of them, with the driver.”

  “Who, if anyone, did you speak with when you got there?”

  “Well, the deputies. One of the ambulance people. I think he was the one who looked Mr. Brusett over. The way he was acting, because of the blood on him we didn’t know. It was hard at first to see who was hurt. But he wasn’t. We finally figured out he was fine. Mr. Brusett. But he was still acting funny.”

  “Tell the jury what you mean by ‘funny.’”

  “Well, he just wouldn’t, he was kind of staring off into . . . Maybe it wasn’t so . . . because it was a little bit like now. How he looks now. Sorry, Mr. Brusett, but . . . ”

  “He looked like this?”

  “But worse,” said the detective. “I’d say he looked quite a bit worse than this. In some ways. But there was nothing wrong with him. That EMT really did a nice job of looking him over, and there wasn’t anything wrong with him. Getting that sorted out was, well, we prioritized that so it was our first thing we did.”

  Flaherty spoke of examining the body of the victim as well, and this he’d done personally but not for very long. The light and the environment were so poor, and the cause of death so obvious.

  “What did you do after you’d looked the victim over?”

  “That’s when I first tried talking to Mr. and Mrs. Brusett.”

  “What, if anything, did you learn from them at that time?”

  “Their names. I think that was about it. Out there, that’s all they told us. I think she mentioned they were married. That was it, though. Mr. Brusett didn’t say a word one way or the other about anything.”

  Meyers showed the detective a pair of Can’t Bust ’Em overalls bundled in a plastic bag, within a grocery sack. He showed him the evidence tag. “Identify this item, please, Detective Flaherty.”

  “That’s his coveralls. Mr. Brusett’s coveralls that he was wearing that night. We got a good chain of custody on that. Hasn’t been out of the bag except one time since I put it in there, but you can see right there on the log where I signed it over to the lab, and the lab signed it back to me. Because we had it checked to make sure it was the victim’s blood, even though it was. Well, that was pretty obvious, too.”

  Meyers had the coveralls admitted into evidence, and then he removed them from the paper and the
plastic bags, and he held them up so that Flaherty and the jury could see the chocolaty stain on the bib and in the lap of them. “Is this what it looked like before Mr. Brusett took it off?”

  “Yeah, that stain was a lighter color then, but otherwise, yeah, the same. His shirt was bloody, too, and we had that, but it got misplaced.” As a result of uncorrected eyesight, the detective’s neck was crooked as a turtle’s.

  “What, if anything, did you find by way of physical evidence that might have explained what had happened to Mr. Teague?”

  “Well, we didn’t know he was Mr. Teague yet.”

  “All right. Did you find anything that might explain how the victim became a victim?”

  “Objection,” said counsel for the defense. Giselle had been so long without speaking that her voice broke as she raised it. “Counsel keeps referring to a victim, when the state has done nothing to establish that Mr. Teague was in fact a victim. Facts not in evidence.”

  “Withdrawn,” Meyers volunteered. “I’ll rephrase the question. I’ll rephrase it so everyone is happy. Detective, was there on or about the person of the deceased anything that might suggest how the deceased became deceased?”

  “You mean physical evidence?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “No. There wasn’t any.”

  “No?” Meyers needed convincing.

  “Well, they were both wet. Mr. Brusett and the, uh . . . young man. Water and blood. More water on the body, more blood on Mr. Brusett, even though, you know, it wasn’t him who’d been bleeding. We found ’em wet and bloody, I can tell you. Tell you that much.” Detective Flaherty had been Meyers’s witness nearly a hundred times, and he hadn’t learned a thing by it, and getting anything out of him by direct examination was very much harder than it should have been. But Meyers didn’t want much from him today. Today the dull detective was a jewel for his purposes.

  “What, if anything, did you do after you completed your investigation at the Brusetts’?”

  “We transported the suspects to town. The Law and Order Complex. Gave ’em a chance to relax a little, see if they’d open up to us. But they didn’t.” Flaherty wore a hat of some kind everywhere except for church and for these unfulfilling trips to the witness stand; he longed to have his hat on his head.

  “Are you telling the court you questioned them?”

  “You could call it that,” said Flaherty.

  “What would you call it?”

  “Where you ask questions but the people don’t answer. We thought they wanted to cooperate at first. They didn’t. We had some one-sided conversations, put it that way. They didn’t want to say anything.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “Next?”

  “The next step of your investigation.”

  “Oh, uhm, well, we found out who he was. The deceased person. Got a positive identification on him. Calvin Teague. Found out he was from Iowa.”

  “What else?”

  “Objection,” croaked the public defender. “Leading.”

  “Ms. Meany,” said the judge, “I’m inclined to give some latitude on this, otherwise we’ll never get through it.”

  “We’re through it now,” said Meyers. “Or my part of it. I’ve got nothing more for this witness at this time. Pass to the defense.”

  She had written her sequence of questions for Deputy Flaherty on a short stack of recipe cards that she now chose not to use. Giselle cleared her throat, rose, and she felt wonderfully exposed, standing where she stood. Counsel for the defense. “Detective Flaherty, how many shoes was the body wearing when you first examined it?”

  “One.”

  “One shoe? To your knowledge, was the other shoe ever located?”

  “Not that I know of. That would be a low priority.”

  “Would it? You say the young man was wet, you mentioned water. Do you know how he got wet?”

  “Not for absolute sure, but they were just outside this shower stall they had rigged up, an outdoor shower. Just outside the door of that. His clothes were wet.”

  “Were the clothes drenched? Soaking wet? How wet were they?”

  “Does it . . . I don’t remember exactly. Not real wet. Damp?”

  “Where were you able to locate blood?”

  “Fair amount of it on Mr. Brusett, like I said, and some of it on the vic . . . just there on the back of the deceased person’s head.”

  “Was there a lot of it?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘a lot.’ There was enough, I guess.”

  “Any blood on the ground?”

  “Not that I could see in the dark.”

  “Any blood in the shower house?”

  “It would have got washed away if there was.”

  “Any blood splatter anywhere?”

  “I didn’t find any, but . . . okay, you could say there was not a lot of blood. Just what was on those two guys. But, you know, he didn’t bleed to death, I don’t think.”

  “Now, in your investigation you must have looked for signs of a struggle.”

  “Sure.”

  “And according to your report . . . ”

  “I didn’t find any.”

  “Did you look for a weapon?”

  “We did. But you have to understand, they’re up there in the middle of a forest. Weapon’s pretty easy to hide up there; you could hide a tank.”

  “You looked for a weapon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find one?”

  “No.”

  “You took statements?”

  “I tried to. Didn’t get any. That’s not my . . . ”

  “No statements were given?”

  “No.”

  “So, based on your investigation, you arrested Mr. Brusett at the scene on the charge of deliberate homicide?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I did transport him down to Law and Order.”

  “Where you arrested him on the charge of deliberate homicide?”

  “No. I called the sheriff. He thought we should . . . complete the investigation first. Before we filed.”

  “So you completed the investigation?”

  “Yeah. Yes.”

  “And in your ongoing investigation, what more did you learn about the case that you didn’t know that night?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You let Mr. Brusett go that night with no charges. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “You continued your investigation?”

  “Correct.”

  “What more did you find out?”

  “Who the young man was. We got his identity figured out.”

  “And now that you had the name of the deceased, you thought you had enough evidence to go forward with a charge against my client?”

  “That wasn’t my decision,” said Flaherty. There was a flesh tab on his nose about where he might have pierced it had he been a girl.

  “You could have charged him with deliberate homicide at the scene. That’s within your authority, isn’t it?”

  “It is. But there are times when you don’t work it that way.”

  “You could have charged him with deliberate homicide at the Law and Order Complex, if you had chosen to do so?”

  “I talked to the sheriff.”

  “And the sheriff told you not to charge him?”

  “Not charge him at that time. I wasn’t supposed to charge him yet.”

  “Why?”

  “As I said, ma’am, to complete the investigation.”

  “Then, because the body was identified, you felt you had enough evidence to charge Mr. Brusett with a crime?”

  “I didn’t. As I say, they took that decision out of my hands real early.”

  “You were the lead investigator on this case, Deputy Flaherty?”

  “I was. I always am if it’s anything very serious around here.”

  “And, as the lead investigator, you did not at any point choose to charge Henry Brusett with any crime?”

&n
bsp; “No,” he said.

  It had been too easy, gone too well. She told herself to stop now. “Defense has no further questions for the officer at this time.”

  Hoot Meyers declined to redirect.

  There was a small chance, a wild hope that he might present the whole of the state’s case before five o’clock. Meyers called the medical examiner to the stand, elicited Dr. Fitzroy’s credentials and a brief description of his arrangement with Conrad County, a county whose curious deaths were not yet sufficient in number to warrant a full time ME. He was summoned as necessary from Kalispell. And, yes, following the aforementioned night in August, he’d examined the decedent.

  “Dr. Fitzroy, in the simplest possible terms, what caused Calvin Teague to die?”

  “Blunt force trauma to a site bordering the parietal and occipital zones, which in turn caused the brain to swell, probably quite rapidly. A severe concussion.”

  “Would it be accurate to describe it in layman’s terms as a blow to the back of the head?”

  “Yes. Not the very back, but yes, that’s essentially it. The swelling starts at the site of the blow, but becomes general at times, as it did here, and when it involves the brainstem even peripherally, then autonomic function ceases and mortality occurs very quickly.”

  “Is it at all possible that this young man bled to death?”

  “No. A scalp laceration can bleed quite a lot, but here the injury occurred in . . . The blow occurred where the young man’s hair was quite thick, and the injury to his flesh was minimal, a fairly slight lesion. Then, too, the heart would have ceased pumping very soon after the blow was delivered. It was probably more like a steady leak than any serious bleeding.”

  Mrs. Teague moaned and buried her face in her husband’s chest.

  “How much force,” Meyers asked, “does it take to cause the kind of concussion you observed in Mr. Teague?”

  “The force of the actual blow is just one factor. But you find it doesn’t take a lot in some cases. The brain can be a very willful organ, and very fragile; it survives impossible injuries at times, and at times succumbs to fairly slight ones.”