by Jay Brandon
The jail was an annex to the courthouse; together they held down one side of Main Plaza, a grassy spot a city block in size, circled by Main Street. The plaza was equipped with trees, benches, some sort of monument, and two or three idlers who watched Jordan as he walked to his car. There was also a glass-fronted bank on Main Plaza and a couple of dead-looking stores. The plaza wasn’t the center of town, it anchored one end, as if the bulk of the courthouse and jail had stopped progress dead at that point. Jordan looked up at the eyes of the courthouse and found the one unshaded window of Judge Waverly’s office, but the window was mirrored by the sun.
Jordan drove slowly down Main. It was only after he crossed under the interstate to the other half of Green Hills that he no longer felt that courthouse stare on his shoulders. Low as it was, the red brick building, with its jail attendant standing at attention behind it, brooded over the whole town. That was how Jordan felt, but probably only because without the courthouse he’d have no business here.
Green Hills was cruciform in shape, with the interstate highway dividing it, and a few businesses that catered to passing motorists stretched along that highway spine. But just a block to either side of the interstate, the town changed character. It became older, slower, with Victorian houses right on Main Street and old-fashioned emporiums that depended on long-time customers. The hardware store’s window was too dusty to entice customers inside with its window display, but that was just the sort of signal to attract a man interested in serious hardware.
Anchoring the far end of the town was the hospital, a three-story tower that was the most modern building in town, no more than fifteen years old, but with a built-in out-of-step look to it as if someone had sold the builder an old set of plans. The parking lot was only big enough to hold about thirty cars and was not full. Most of the cars were nuzzling head-in to the lone oak tree on the lot, like nursing kittens. Jordan parked in the blaring sun. The door handle of his car was already almost too hot to touch as he locked it behind him. He lunged across the parking lot, the waves of heat passing right through his back and head, then hitting him in the eyes as the heat rebounded from the asphalt. The sun killed thinking. All he wanted was to hear the doors of the hospital whoosh closed behind him and feel the blast of air-conditioning turning his sweat icy.
But the hospital doors were already standing open, and the only blast of air he felt was from a standing fan pushing hot air around the lobby.
“We’re having a problem with the air-conditioning,” the receptionist said as if she’d said it over and over, as if her only entertainment today were watching the disappointment of people stepping into that lobby where the air was so dead you had to keep walking in order to draw breath. Jordan just stared at her for a moment The receptionist had her own little fan, mounted on the counter ledge in front of her, so that her hair was continually swept back. She looked like an oasis.
“Is Dr. Prouty in?”
“No, sir, he’s in Cotulla today at his other office.”
“Oh, good,” Jordan said. “I’ll come back some time when the air-conditioning’s working.”
But as he turned away he thought of having to drive back to Green Hills another day, and that thought was enough to turn him back to the happy receptionist “Well, is there maybe someone else who was on duty when Kevin Wainwright died? Like a nurse?” A Dr. Prouty had signed the death certificate, but Jordan didn’t have any deep medical questions.
Without consulting a record, the receptionist said, “I think Evelyn was here that night Evelyn Riegert the head nurse. She’s on the second floor.”
“Oh, no,” Jordan said. Heat rises. “Is it hotter up there than it is down here?” The receptionist grinned at him. He must have been the most entertaining sufferer yet It didn’t seem much like a hospital on the second floor, it seemed more like a cheap hotel, with the doors and windows
of all the patients’ rooms open, so that a sterile corner would have been hard to find. There were fans every few feet, whirring and throbbing at different rhythms. Jordan had shed his suit coat and didn’t redon it when he found the witness.
“Evelyn Riegert? My name is Jordan Marshall. May I talk to you for a minute? I need to ask you about Kevin Wainwright. I’m an attorney, I’m looking into his death. No, no, I’m not that kind of lawyer. Judge Waverly appointed me to represent Wayne Orkney. The one who killed him? I just need to ask a couple of routine questions.”
The nurse was the first person he’d met in Green Hills whose face didn’t close down at the sound of Wayne Orkney’s name, but then her face had just reopened after Jordan had seen the thought cross it that he must be a plaintiff’s attorney sniffing for a lawsuit against the hospital. Compared to that possibility, a criminal lawyer defending a murderer was a welcome visitor.
“You need to talk to his doctor, Mr. Marshall, and Dr. Prouty isn’t—”
“Ma’am, I’ve never yet talked to a doctor who knew as much about a patient as the nurse in charge did.”
Evelyn Riegert looked at him skeptically just so he’d know she wasn’t a fool susceptible to flattery, even though he had happened to voice one of life’s universal truths.
“Well, there’s not much I can tell you. I haven’t seen the autopsy report, so I don’t know the exact time of death. I wasn’t on duty the evening he died, but the way Kevin was— he’d been in and out of consciousness ever since he was brought in—he could have lain there for a while without anyone’s noticing he’d passed. We tried not to disturb him any more than—”
“He wasn’t on a monitor?”
Ms. Riegert shook her head quickly. At first, as he’d approached her, Jordan had thought she looked like a kid. When he’d gotten closer and heard her talk, he’d thought she was older than he was, but he couldn’t be sure. Evelyn Riegert was one of those women who move at the same speed their whole lives, whose skin has grown masked and crisp, so that she would look about the same for the next thirty or forty years before her close friends realized she’d gotten old. Everything she did was decisive.
“He didn’t seem that dangerously close,” she said briskly. “He was on a breathing tube the first day—no, the first two days—and he stayed on a glucose feed, but he was getting better.” She was rattling off this information without consulting any record other than her memory.
“No one performed any new procedures on him that last day?”
She shook her head. “We’d set the broken bones the first day. After that there was nothing to do but change the dressings and see he got his rest”
“Did he have any visitors?”
“Oh, yes,” Evelyn Riegert said. “Police officers in and out, of course, hoping to talk to him, but Kevin never came to enough to be any use to them. Somebody from the court to take a statement, but they didn’t get any. His folks, of course, a couple of his friends, Reverend Abernathy.”
“He was here what, five days?” She nodded. “And never got any better?”
“He was getting better.” The nurse was standing with her arms folded, displaying a reined-in impatience as if she wanted to terminate the interview but correcting Jordan’s misimpressions was more urgent “He was showing gradual improvement—”
“Right up to his death.”
“That’s not uncommon, Mr. Marshall. Kevin was hurt very badly when he came in here. He had broken ribs, he had a crushed nose, he had abrasions and hematomas and cuts deep enough to require suturing, and he’d lost blood. You should have seen him, there was hardly a spot on his body that didn’t require treatment of some kind. He was improving toward the end, but his body was working so hard to repair everything that his heart just gave out. Basically, he was dead when he got here.”
He was just slow, Jordan thought, like his friend Wayne.
The air-conditioning inside his car welcomed Jordan back like a friend he’d brought from home. He drove back up Main, and when he reached the interstate, he stopped. There was home, ninety miles north. He could be there in t
ime for a late lunch. But he knew there was more he should do here.
Defending was a pain in the ass. No partner to chat about the cases with. The defense team was always Jordan and a defendant who, if he rarely struck Jordan as the incarnation of evil, seldom seemed bright enough even to understand what he’d done wrong. In the DA’s office, cases had been delivered to him already worked up by police officers, and if he didn’t know enough, he could send the case to an investigator for more work, or Jordan could call up witnesses who would be glad to talk to him, would usually come to his office. It was a cushy way to practice criminal law; he seldom had to leave the courthouse.
Now that he was on the defense side, what little investigation he cared to do was stifled from the outset by his necessary introduction to potential witnesses: “Hello, I’m representing a murderer/rapist/aggravated robber, I was hoping you wouldn’t mind talking to me about the case.” So I can twist whatever you tell me into some devious defense and help my nasty client avoid the punishment he so richly deserves, witnesses finished for him in their minds.
And it didn’t matter how much he did, because they were always so damned guilty he was going to lose no matter what he did, and he didn’t even feel bad about it. Already a couple of times he’d had clients who had made Jordan afraid of what they’d do next if he did get them acquitted.
Still, he had to keep up appearances. Impress the judge with his diligence, since this was his first appointment outside home base. Another hour ought to do it, he could be on his way home and only return once for the guilty plea. He sighed, drove under the shade of the interstate, and back into the heart of Green Hills.
“... Judge Waverly appointed me to represent him ...” Jordan realized he’d already made an invocation of this phrase. Not only did it make it sound as if the request were coming from the judge himself, but it allowed for a subtle undertone of It’s not my fault, I didn’t ask for the case.
“I know,” the woman said. “You’ve already been in the paper.”
“Really?” She pulled over a copy, which could have been hot off the press, since he was standing in the office of the Green Hills Register. He saw below the fold on the front page a headline saying “Accused Killer Arraigned” with a photo of Wayne looking as if he’d just awakened groggy from a night of feasting on carrion.
“But we wouldn’t have a file,” the young woman said. She was a skinny blonde with narrow cheeks and bright, almost colorless eyes that skipped around Jordan’s face. She looked not long out of high school. “You’re welcome to look through the last few issues, though.”
“All right,” Jordan said reluctantly. “I guess there’d be something on the sixteenth, the day after the beating.”
He saw why she’d smiled, after she let him through the gate in the counter and set him at an empty desk with a very short stack of newsprint. The newspaper was a weekly, eight pages per issue. He wasn’t going to have to scour a mass of data to find any coverage of Wayne’s beating of Kevin Wainwright. The Register’s first issue after the beating stood out. That day’s headline screamed, “LOCAL GIRL MURDERED.” Crime was more rampant in the little town than Jordan would have imagined. He skipped that story, which with pictures and sidebars consumed the whole front page and much of the second. By page three the paper returned to normal, reporting a farm to be auctioned off, crop prices, the formation of a civic betterment group, weather, a dance to be held at the VFW hall, and wire report box scores. Nothing about Wayne. Well, it hadn’t been much of a story, only a fistfight on the street no one had known yet would be called murder, but an arrest had been made. Jordan would have thought that newsworthy, given the paucity of other news for the week.
He turned back to the first paper the young woman at the counter had given him, the one that supposedly carried Jordan’s name. It was the only edition of the Register that had come out since the one he’d just perused; another would be due tomorrow. “Accused Killer Arraigned,” Jordan read again, then skimmed the article looking for his own name. “An attorney of San Antonio, Jordan Marshall, was appointed to represent Orkney on the attempted murder accusation.” Not much ad value there, obviously something the reporter had just copied from court documents later.
“Is this your byline ... Helen? You should have been there in person, then you could have mentioned my sexy appearance during the arraignment”
“I will in the next story.”
“No, I mean—” But before he could explain his unorthodox dress at the arraignment, Jordan was struck by an incongruity. “Accused Killer," the headline had called Wayne. But this was last week’s paper. At the arraignment Wayne hadn’t been accused of killing Kevin; Kevin had still been alive. The reporter must have been psychic.
He went back and read the opening paragraph of the latest story more closely. “Wayne Orkney, formally charged in the beating of Kevin Wainwright and the prime suspect in the murder of Jenny Fecklewhite, made his first court appearance on Friday ...”
Jenny Fecklewhite? Jordan touched his tongue to his dry lips, put aside the latest issue of the Register, and pulled the earlier edition back in front of him. The headline seemed to have grown: LOCAL GIRL MURDERED. From the corner of his eye he saw Helen Evers watching him, saw that she knew he had made the connection. Then he was devouring the story.
There had been two beatings in Green Hills that day, one of them fatal. After Wayne’s arrest for his very public assault on Kevin, police officers had found a body in a nearby park called—the cheerful name already sounded sinister with familiarity to Jordan—Pleasant Grove. The body, that of a local high school girl, showed the marks of blows and was dead from a smashed skull. It appeared to police that Wayne Orkney, set off by an unknown motive, possibly jealousy, had gone on a murderous rampage, first beating the girl to death in the park, then racing back into town to try to do the same thing to his old friend Kevin Wainwright
There was a picture of a body under a sheet surrounded by trees and cops. Jordan read for details. He was accustomed to newspaper stories that lacked the clinical details of police reports and autopsy summaries, but that had more immediacy than dry official memos. This story, though, in spite of its sensationalistic headline, had an odd delicacy about it. The dead girl, “Jenny Fecklewhite, 17, had been seen in her usual haunts earlier in the day, chatting with friends, giving no hint of apprehension of danger.” People had seen Wayne Orkney and Kevin Wainwright earlier, too, in a pizza restaurant. They’d been having an animated discussion, but no one had overheard it and it hadn’t ended in violence. Kevin had driven away, then Wayne. Somewhere between the pizza place and Pleasant Grove something had happened to turn Wayne homicidal.
The rest was speculation from witnesses and police officers. Jordan turned to one of the sidebar stories, headlined “Jenny ‘Best of Us.’ ” Even before he began reading, Jordan had a tingle of understanding, like ice cracking under pressure. He was about to know why everyone in the courthouse hated Wayne Orkney even though they didn’t care much about the man he had killed.
Jenny Fecklewhite. The names didn’t fit together. And they didn’t fit the high school yearbook photo that ran with the story that showed a lovely blonde girl with high cheekbones, a bright smile, and a look about her eyes that said she knew something wicked about the photographer. Jordan studied the photo. Even through the gram and the dots of the newsprint the girl’s eyes sparkled. She was a girl who belonged on a float in a parade representing the hope of the future.
The story confirmed his impression. “If Green Hills had a golden girl,” the story begain, “Jennifer Fecklewhite was it. Everyone knew her as Jenny, and everyone knew her. When news of her death raced through Green Hills on Saturday, everyone who heard was shocked, saddened, and personally bereaved. Whether she was remembered for capturing first place in the Southern Region Scholastic Speech Contest with no previous training, for her award-winning clarinet playing with the Franklin D. Roosevelt high School Band, or simply for the per
sonality that madeher everyone’s friend, Jenny was remembered as, in the words of Mayor Harley Stephenson, ‘the best of us, the best Green Hills had to offer the world.’”
Jesus. If the story was accurate, everyone loved Jenny, no one had a bad word to say about her, and her murderer, by implication, deserved to be dropped down the deepest hole in Texas and have hungry rats poured in after him. Some of Jenny Fecklewhite’s accomplishments were ordinary enough—Honor Society, head cheerleader—but she was also captured in a couple of anecdotes that were out of the ordinary. “I remember I got Jenny to baby-sit my son Howard one afternoon,” the local postmistress remembered. “Howie was five and he’d been having trouble in kindergarten with the alphabet. He couldn’t even get started for some reason. By the time Jenny brought him back that afternoon, he could say it from A to G and knew how to spell his own name for the first time.” Jordan could read the woman’s tears through the lines of newsprint. “Jenny’d spent the whole afternoon taking Howie around town showing him things that started with the letters, and especially his name, so he finally understood what the letters meant. She didn’t just write them for him, they went looking for letters, like a treasure hunt. And after that she kept coming back for Howie and taking him out until he knew the whole thing rock solid. Jenny wouldn’t take pay for it, she said she enjoyed it. She was something, wasn’t she?”
Jordan clicked his tongue.
“I could have filled the whole edition with stories like that,” the reporter said. She was still halfway across the room at the counter, but she knew exactly where Jordan was in her story.
“This is beautifully written, you should submit this for awards.”
The woman sniffed. “It’s nothing special You just think it is because it’s about her.”
Her eyes were slick. “Was she a friend of yours?” Jordan asked gently.
“She was everybody’s friend. But she was more than that. Like the mayor said, if there was anybody in this town obviously going places, it was Jenny.”