by Jay Brandon
“Well—” It probably wasn’t all that difficult to shine in a town like Green Hills, Jordan was thinking, where the competition was rather severely limited. “That’s nice.”
Helen Evers heard what he’d been thinking. “Screw you, big-city lawyer. Jenny could’ve competed with anybody you could think to put her up against. Like that speech contest? She didn’t even take speech in school, she just one day thought of an idea for a speech she’d like to do, so she wrote it and went and delivered it for the speech teacher, who right away entered her in the next contest coming up, down at a high school in Corpus, and Jenny not only won that contest she won first prize in the regional meet she went on to from there. She was going to state later this summer. Of course, some people say the judge helped her write the speech, but if you’d heard Jenny deliver it—”
“The judge? Judge Waverly? Why would people say that?”
Evers composed herself. She’d been in danger of falling forward off the high stool on which she was sitting. “The speech was about law,” she said more calmly. “Jenny interviewed people to make sure what she was saying was accurate. But anybody who heard her give it knew what she was saying was her own ideas.”
“She was interested in law?” Jordan glanced down at the story again: “Jenny, preparing for her senior year, had already distinguished herself at Roosevelt High. Only two months before her death she had been voted Queen of the Junior-Senior Prom, along with her escort Kevin Wainwright ...”
“Oh,” Jordan said, more like a moan than a word. When he looked up, Helen Evers was watching him expressionlessly.
“Was Kevin her boy friend?”
She shrugged; it might have been a small nod.
And Wayne was Kevin’s best friend, so he would have spent time with them, maybe double-dated, been close to Jenny Fecklewhite but perhaps not close enough. It must have been maddening to spend time that close to the golden girl but have her boy friend always in between.
Jordan glanced again at the news story of the murder, but it didn’t have the information. He’d never known a reporter, though, not to have more news about a story than what had seen print.
“Was she raped?”
“Jenny wouldn’t’ve let that happen,” Evers said harshly. “She would have fought.”
Which is maybe what had happened, a fight ending with a rock or a club to the girl’s skull. She might have left marks on her attacker, too. Wayne had shown healing scratches the first day Jordan had seen him in court. He’d assumed those had come from the fight with Kevin Wainwright. “So this Kevin Wainwright, he must have been the male best Green Hills had to offer. Why didn’t you have any sidebar stories about him?”
“Who’s this?” said an intruding voice that was short of breath but long on hostility. Bustling into the office from somewhere in back was an overweight woman with a mottled complexion and gray hair so thick it looked like a stage wig. She stopped directly in front of Jordan, glaring at him while her breath whistled in and out. Helen Evers did not snap to attention. “This is Jordan Marshall, attorney of San Antonio, who’s representing Wayne Orkney.”
Jordan had risen to his feet before the sturdy lady, who folded her arms to make her disapproval more obvious. “I can’t say I care for your taste in clients, Mr. Marshall. That’s not my business, but your taking up space in my office is. We have a newspaper to get out by tomorrow.”
“Mr. Marshall’s trying to reconstruct the crime, Mom. I let him look at our last few issues.”
“Oh, Mrs. Evers,” Jordan said, coming around the desk. “Mrs. Swanson,” the gray lady said frostily. “I got a reprieve from being married to the scoundrel who—”
“Don’t talk bad about Daddy, Mom,” the younger woman said mildly.
“I’m not going to talk to this stranger about anything. This is a news-gathering organization, Mr. Marshall. If you have research to do, we have a public library.”
“Well, thank you.” Jordan walked back through the gate in the counter slowly, saying to the reporter, “What about Kevin?”
“I didn’t do any sidebars on Kevin Wainwright because there wasn’t any material for one. Kevin was common as dirt and everybody knew it”
“Except Jenny?” Jordan asked.
“Including Jenny. She wasn’t dumb.”
“But—”
“Look—”
“Could we maybe go to lunch?” Jordan interrupted. “There’s a lot I’d like—”
Mrs. Swanson’s voice cut through again. “We don’t go out to lunch when we have a paper to get out Mr. Marshall. Helen, let’s get to work.”
“No lunch,” the young reporter said sofdy, giving Jordan a level, appraising look with no hint of flirtation in it “But I would like to interview you.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Jordan said.
So he found himself back out in the sun with a bigger load of problems than he’d realized. At this end of Green Hills, he was in the figurative shadow of the courthouse. Two blocks away at the end of the street the building’s dark brick front shrugged off sunlight. At least it would be cool.
He found the district attorney in his office. On the desk blotter in front of him was a sandwich sitting on its plastic bag and a bag of nacho cheese-flavored tortilla chips. The sandwich was obviously homemade, dripping with juice, but the chips struck Jordan oddly. “I didn’t think anybody who’d tasted real tostadas would eat those things,” he said.
Arriendez picked up a single orange triangle and ate it with visible appreciation, as if filming a television commercial “When I was in law school,” he said, “living alone, I got used to the taste of plastic about my food.”
Jordan nodded. “Or styrofoam.”
“What can I do for you?” the prosecutor said.
“The question is what you will do for me, which I imagine is not much. I’ve found out what’s really going on in this case.”
The district attorney’s face fell into such a bland, ignorant, easygoing expression it could have been represented by a happy face sticker. “Oh, is there something important? Tell me.”
“Come on. I wish you’d quit playing me for a fool. This high-offer stuff isn’t about Kevin Wainwright, it’s about Jenny Fecklewhite. Nobody cares about him, it’s her murder you want to get Wayne for. So why don’t we just wait to do anything until you indict him for both of them, and then we can wrap the whole thing up.”
“Without you putting too many more miles on your car,” Arriendez said. “All right. How many years do you think your client would take for Jenny’s murder?”
“No.” Jordan almost laughed. “You make me an offer.”
“Life,” Arriendez said flatly.
Jordan sighed. “All right. Let’s just wait. How long do you think it’ll be until the indictment on that one?”
The district attorney hesitated. “The investigation is coming along,” he said. “We want everything tight before we give some slimy defense lawyer a shot at it.”
Jordan didn’t take offense, but he hesitated. “That one’s tougher to put together, isn’t it?”
“Tougher, but not too tough.”
Jordan would have bet otherwise. “No witnesses, at least as far as the newspaper reported, and I’ll bet the newspaper reporter I met isn’t too many steps behind the cops. And in a beating death you won’t have a bullet to match to a gun or knife wounds to match to a knife. Tough case.” Jordan nodded sympathetically. “No confession. Is there?” Arriendez shook his head minutely, but Jordan’s eyes narrowed. “I may have to file a motion for discovery,” he said.
“You’re not representing anybody on that case,” the prosecutor pointed out “No one’s been charged with anything in Jenny Fecklewhite’s murder.”
“Oh, yeah. Lost my head. Okay, back to reality. What will you offer me in the one I am representing Wayne on?”
Mike Arriendez appeared to think over his answer carefully, but his answer belied that appearance. “Sixty.”
&n
bsp; “Is this local humor?” Jordan asked exasperatedly. “Or do you have local defense lawyers who actually go for this kind of thing?” Because sixty years was the exact equivalent of life imprisonment, the number the parole board used to calculate parole eligibility for an inmate with a life sentence, and life was the maximum penalty for a noncapital murder such as this one. The DA was offering Jordan’s client exactly nothing in exchange for saving the State the work of trial. “That’s the offer,” Arriendez said unemotionally.
“Be fair,” Jordan said, which he didn’t like to hear coming from his lips, because it was the same whine he’d so often heard from defense lawyers when he’d been a prosecutor himself. “This isn’t a life case. This isn’t even a thirty-year case. This kind of sudden passion barroom killing—”
“It wasn’t in a barroom.”
“Same thing. Look, I know you’ve got an outraged community to placate, but you can explain the difference between the two murders. Thirty years sounds like a lot of years to average citizens. Even twenty. Give me something I can live with.”
Arriendez bit into his sandwich and chewed carefully. He started to speak, then stopped himself.
Jordan leaned toward him. “Look, I’m just here doing penance for a speeding ticket. I’ve got no stake in Wayne. My only worry is that some writ writer will get hold of him once he’s in prison, and I’ll end up in federal court trying to explain why I let my client plead to such a ridiculous offer. So let’s just find some middle ground.”
Arriendez thought awhile longer and finally said slowly, “I’ll come down to fifty,” and immediately looked pained as if he’d made a terrible blunder.
Jordan rolled his eyes. It was still a ridiculously high offer. “All right I’ll just have to wait until you have both cases ready. I don’t want to plead him on this one and then have you come back and dump the other one on him, too. At least if we wait, he can get concurrent sentences.”
The DA shook his head. He looked more sure of himself again. “That’s not going to happen.”
“It will if I wait. You’ll have to—”
He stopped. Again he put himself in the prosecutor’s place and remembered the pleasant feeling of not having to do anything. There was no statute of limitations for murder. Arriendez could sit on Jenny Fecklewhite’s murder indefinitely, while the murder with which Wayne Orkney was already charged had to proceed through the system toward some conclusion.
Demonstrating that he understood this legal obstacle course as well as Jordan, the district attorney said, “When the judge asks you for an announcement on the case you’ve been appointed on, you’d better be ready to try it or plead.” Jordan raised his hands in small surrender, but he lingered. “This Jenny Fecklewhite, what was she like?”
Arriendez stared into the distance, into the past. “How would I know?”
“You called her Jenny.”
The DA’s gaze shortened to take in the defense lawyer. He looked angry for a long moment, then smiled slightly, reminiscently. “She was a good kid.”
“How did you know her?”
Arriendez’s eyes became less straightforward. “She was around here once in a while. The courthouse, I mean.”
“In trouble?”
Arriendez laughed. “Not Jenny. Never.”
“She was just interested in the law,” Jordan said.
“I guess.” Arriendez put a period to the conversation. “We’re all so fascinating.”
Jordan walked out of the district attorney’s offices, momentarily distracted from the unfamiliarity of his surroundings by the familiarity of chewing over a legal problem. Knowing that a second case against his client was hovering in the near distance, any good defense lawyer would wait to dispose of both cases together, so the sentences could be served concurrently. Under normal circumstances, a prosecutor would be willing to accommodate him; prosecutors wanted to get rid of cases in clusters rather than individual units, too. But in this case, the district attorney was choosing to exercise every advantage he had, which were considerable in number. Arriendez could easily prove Wayne guilty of murdering Kevin Wainwright. If he could get a life sentence for that, Wayne wouldn’t be eligible for parole for fifteen years. Then if they managed later to convince a jury that Wayne had killed Jenny Fecklewhite as well and obtained another life sentence, that sentence could be stacked atop the first one. Thirty years in prison before parole eligibility, that was effectively dead. That would be burying Wayne like a time capsule for a later generation to dig up.
But why go to the trouble? One high sentence should be enough to satisfy any prosecutor.
The sixty-year offer was a little bothersome, too. Any criminal lawyer knew sixty years was the same as a life sentence, but that wasn’t well known among the general public. Sixty years was a very calculated offer, one meant to satisfy not some public clamor, but the district attorney’s own desire. To Jordan it seemed strange for a prosecutor to demonstrate such a personal quest for revenge. Some small-town oddity. Maybe the dead girl had meant something to Arriendez as she seemed to have to others in Green Hills.
The district attorney’s offices were in a nondescript building across the street from the courthouse. The noon sun sizzled his shadow down to nothing. The shade of the trees in the plaza was inviting, and Jordan crossed the street toward them. Still musing, he let his footsteps carry him to the plaza’s most visible landmark, the monument circled by oak trees. When he reached it, Jordan found a pedestal as tall as his head, but it was untenanted. He walked all the way around the pedestal, finding no explanation. Puzzled, he turned away and noticed in the sliver of peripheral vision the dazzling sun allowed that Judge Waverly had also just entered the plaza, coming from the direction of the courthouse. The judge didn’t seem to notice the heat No, he encompassed it, as if he would ask, “Are you enjoying my day?” Even the loungers on the benches stood as the judge approached. Judge Waverly nodded to them, and they nodded back deferentially. As the judge and the woman with him resumed their progress across the plaza, the judge spotted Jordan, who approached the judge in the same respectful attitude as the idlers on the benches.
“Hello, Mr. Marshall.” They shook hands briefly but firmly. The judge’s hand was dry, almost crusty, and strong. “Have you met Laura Stefone, the court reporter in my court?”
“Not formally. Hello, Ms. Stefone.”
She nodded. In the sunlight the court reporter looked less stiff than she did in court. She was in her early to mid-thirties, but Jordan could see laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, which looked as if it would twitch easily into a smile. At the sight of him, it did not.
“I’m surprised to see you,” said the judge. “Were you coming to see me?”
Jordan noticed again how dark the judge’s eyes were. They absorbed the light and reflected nothing.
Laura Stefone’s eyes, on the other hand, were green. As tight as the expression on her face was, her eyes looked unprotected.
“No, sir, the district attorney. I heard about the upgraded charge against Wayne Orkney.”
“Yes, I suppose we’ll have to have a new arraignment. We’ll keep you notified.”
“I also wanted to know if my client was going to be charged with the other murder. With Jenny Fecklewhite’s.” For the first time in Jordan’s narrow experience, Judge Waverly looked unsure of himself. His eyes latched on Jordan's, his mouth opened, but he didn’t say the first thing he’d thought. He turned away again, saying, “You’d have to ask Mr. Arriendez about that. Don’t let us keep you from your appointment.”
Jordan let the misimpression stand. The short conversation had communicated tension even to Jordan, who didn’t know its source. Judge Waverly had been friendly in a formal way, but the court reporter was regarding Jordan as icily as everyone else in the courthouse had. Jordan watched the pair walk away, and it wasn’t until then he noticed what was odd about them on this summer’s day.
They were both wearing black.
Arriendez had been, too. It hadn’t been so noticeable on him, because he’d been eating lunch at ease in his shirtsleeves, but Jordan remembered the black suit coat hanging on the coat rack behind the district attorney’s desk.
Jordan could understand a town saddened by the death of a popular local girl. But the official mourning for her and the concomitant courthouse hostility toward his client puzzled him. There was something else he should know.
It didn’t matter, though. It wasn’t his mystery. It wasn’t his town, he’d be done with it soon. He tossed his jacket into the back seat of his car and drove away with gathering speed. It was strange the way the little town seemed so all-encompassing when he was standing in it, yet how inconsequential the highway made it. Green Hills was barely a speck on the map. Most drivers hurtled by it without ever knowing its name.
But curiosity continued to make Jordan’s skin itch as he drove. It wasn’t the case itself that nagged him, that was perfectly straightforward. It was the way no one would let him do his simple job. Transfer this case to the city, and it would disappear into the whirlpool of all the others. But in Podunkville they tried to blow it up into some earthshaking tragedy, so that even the out-of-town lawyer felt the pressure of the case’s expansion.
As he pulled farther away, he began slowing down. Cars passed him. Back in that little town, people were laughing at Jordan. Or at least whispering about him. Something happened there when he left town.
He had no particular reason to rush back to San Antonio. No appointments until the next morning, no one waiting at home. He took the next exit, looped around, and picked up speed again, feeling foolish, but also feeling a certain satisfaction at the thought of making an abrupt reappearance, catching the town unawares.
“Get the paper out?”
Helen Evers came slowly toward the counter from the back room of the newspaper office. “Sure. Can’t you hear the roar of the press?”
The sound was more like a clatter. Nonetheless, it signaled that her workday was done. “Like to get a drink?” Jordan asked.