Local Rules

by Jay Brandon

  He took a bite, heavy on the toast but also including one full glob of meat The meat had an ever so slight grittiness, a resiliency that hamburger always had, didn’t it? Jordan made a tight-lipped smile. Laura Stefone returned a broader one.

  Either what he was eating was a chunky hash with actually a very nice brown gravy or he had a hitherto unsuspected taste for dog food.

  “Thanks for ordering me the good brand,” he said.

  “We like to put our best foot forward.”

  The tiny lunchroom was filling up, and Jordan realized he knew half the patrons. Laura smiled past his shoulder at the bailiff and the clerk taking seats nearby. They glanced at Jordan quizzically, then at Laura as if she’d brought a stranger to the speakeasy. As he turned back to his food, Jordan caught a glimpse of Deputy Delmore. He had sneaked up on Jordan just as he had on the highway. Delm­ore was eating with a city police officer, both of them clink­ing with gear, both of them looking at Jordan as he bent to his food.

  “We hear Wayne wants to plead guilty,” Laura said sud­denly. She saw Jordan decide not to answer and added, “And that you won’t let him.”

  “That’s just for the time being.” If he’d had a defense, he would have kept it to himself, but the nothing he had could be shared. “I imagine it’ll end in a guilty plea one of these days,” Jordan said offhandedly.

  Laura was waiting for more. When it didn’t come, she added, “Mike Arriendez says you used to be an assistant DA in San Antonio.”

  “Yes,” Jordan said flatly.

  “But you decided defense work appealed to you more?” the court reporter gently interrogated.

  There was absolutely no reason to tell her the story. She was a complete stranger who’d already demonstrated hostil­ity, if anything, toward Jordan. But there was something about the way Laura Stefone sat opposite him, waiting, hands in her lap, that drew Jordan. Her expression was touched with sadness, as if she already knew he had a story—and the nature of the tale.

  “I was very happy in the DA’s office,” Jordan said abruptly, surprised by the harshness of his voice. “I would have stayed there forever, probably.”

  In the pause, Laura Stefone said, “But there was this case—” Jordan glanced at her sharply, attuned for ridicule, but he saw none in her expression.

  “It was a capital murder case,” he said. “Really ugly. These gang guys robbed a convenience store and killed the nineteen-year-old clerk, kind of as an afterthought—or for fun. It was one of those cases that get under your skin for some reason. But it was hard, too. I didn’t have any wit­nesses, not to the shooting. I was working on this one kid, the youngest one. I wanted him to testify, and his lawyer was helping me convince him. I got the kid indicted for capital murder, and that chance of a death sentence did it for him, put the fear of God in him.”

  Jordan stopped, wondering if his voice was too loud. Delmore and the other cop were glancing at him. Laura Stefone was watching him attentively so that he felt embarrassed at his fervor. He shrugged. “The one I really wanted was the gang leader, I was sure he’d done the shooting. The kid I had indicted finally agreed to testify against him for a re­duced sentence. I let him plead to robbery and promised him a twenty-year sentence if he testified.”

  “And?” Laura said.

  “And then I went on vacation,” Jordan said. In a last attempt to save my marriage, he could have added, but that was the story of a different failure, one he had no intention of sharing with anyone. “Just for a week. A week,” he re­peated, feeling the anger creeping over him again. “And when I got back the gang leader had agreed to testify, too, and had gotten an even lower sentence than I’d given my kid. So the whole case had gone to shit and I’m left to explain to the convenience store clerk’s parents that the guy who killed their son’s going to be walking around loose in a few years.”

  Laura said, “It was just a question of one hand not know­ing what the other was doing?”

  “Maybe,” Jordan said, realizing he was going to tell her his final speculation, the one he hadn’t shared with anyone else. “But the gang leader’d been real smart, he’d hired a lawyer who’d just happened to have been the district attor­ney’s campaign treasurer in the most recent election. And people said the DA—my boss—owed him other favors, too. I’m not saying the DA told anyone to drop the ball, but just maybe he assigned the case to someone who didn’t care about it as much as I did. Who didn’t want to go to the trouble of putting together a difficult prosecution. Maybe. Or maybe it was all just coincidence and sloppiness. But the end is the same. It just turns into a case, into backstage maneuvering, and nobody remembers that it was a crime. That there’s these two old parents looking at me with these—” He stopped abruptly.

  He felt again those sad eyes on him. When he glanced up, he saw that they were Laura Stefone’s eyes. For a mo­ment hers looked like those wells of sorrow he still saw in his worst moments.

  “So you quit,” she said.

  “So I quit.”

  “And became a defense lawyer.”

  “Criminal law is all I know, Ms. Stefone, and there’s only two sides to it. If you quit doing the one, you’ve got to do the other. But the point of this story is”—there must have been a point to the story, or rather to his having told her the story—“that I’m not some fighting young defense lawyer who got into it because I want to rescue innocents from an unfair system. I know they’re all guilty. I know Wayne’s guilty. I’m not running a crusade here. I’ve just got a small problem with the sentence your district attorney is offering. I understand what’s behind that, too.”

  Laura Stefone did, too, he was certain of that. Her asking seemed only a courtesy. “What’s that?”

  “He thinks Wayne killed Jenny Fecklewhite.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I just don’t know. And as people keep reminding me, that’s not my case. But it keeps intruding into the case I do have.”

  After another silence, as if she were helping him think, Laura said, “You’ve got a problem, all right.”

  Jordan nodded. “Even worse than the court reporter hat­ing me.”

  Laura shook her head. “I’m sure people have to get to know you a little better before they start hating you.”

  When Doris brought the check, Jordan reached for it, but Laura was quicker. “My order,” she said and laid bills on the slip of paper.

  “Thanks, Laura,” the waitress said as she gathered it up. “Come again, Bozo,” the waitress added without a glimmer of humor. But Laura laughed.

  “Can we assume I don’t have an ulterior motive and that I’m just telling you this to be helpful? Just as a hypothetical. So listen to it hypothetically and see if it makes sense.”

  “All right,” Mike Arriendez said, but his face didn’t say it. His face was an image of skepticism.

  “All right,” Jordan said, standing in front of the DA’s desk as if it were the jury box and talking as intently as if he faced a jury. “Wayne didn’t kill Jenny. You need to—”

  “He confessed to you that he didn’t do it? Aren’t you violating his attorney-client privilege by passing this on to me?”

  “It’s not just that he said he didn’t do it, it was the way the whole idea came up and his reaction to it. You think Wayne Orkney is a great actor?”

  “He’s had plenty of time to prepare how to react. Did he tell you who did do it?”

  “No,” Jordan admitted. “I don’t think he knows. I’m just telling you, because the cops will listen to you, they’d better keep digging. There’s a murderer walking around free here. It’s your town, it’s not mine, I’d think you’d be concerned.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that,” Arriendez said, and Jordan knew there was no point talking any more. The DA had that little smile that was almost habitual with him. “Just to follow up on your hypothetical, wouldn’t it be good for your case—hypothetically—if we did turn up another suspect? Not one we could prove, understand, but just suspicious
enough to divert attention from your client. Something you could bring up at trial, a diversion.”

  “I know the temptation to make things simple,” Jordan said. “You’ve got two murders, one obvious murderer, the easiest thing is to assume he did them both. But I’m telling you, it’s not that simple in Jenny’s case.”

  Arriendez terminated the interview by standing up. “Don’t worry, it’s not a closed case. Half the cops in town are still putting in overtime on it. Who knows, by the time your case comes up for trial, we’ll probably be able to prove that Wayne killed Jenny, too.”

  Jordan sighed. Halfway down the stairs, in the briefly shel­tering dimness of the landing, he stopped to think. Let it go, was what he thought. Everybody wanted Wayne in prison, Wayne wanted to plead his way there. Let it happen. Be­cause the alternative was a lot of work to no purpose. The alternative was that he had to investigate Jenny’s murder and uncover her murderer himself. With no help and no one inclined to talk to him.

  As he started down the stairs again he grimaced, realizing that he was doing it, too, doing what everyone in town did: calling the dead girl by her first name as if he knew her.

  “Good-bye, darling. I’m glad you came to see me. I love you.”

  Ashley probably didn’t hear the last sentence. She’d jerked the door handle up almost before Jordan stopped the car and was flying across the yard toward her mother, who stood in the open doorway. Maybe Ashley had muttered, “Bye, Daddy,” but what she clearly screamed lovingly was “Mommy!” She ran like a freshly released kidnapping victim.

  It was Sunday evening, the end of Jordan’s weekend with his three-year-old daughter. They’d been to two play­grounds, an amusement park, and a pizza place, but Ashley had barely cracked a smile. Now there she went, his contri­bution to the future, and she didn’t give a damn about him. We like to think our children will become our private biog­raphers. But Jordan had no future. He would live in no fond memories.

  He followed Ashley more slowly, carrying her suitcase. Marcia gave him a sympathetic look, to which Jordan re­turned a shrug. It wasn’t as if he’d lost anything, he reflected as he drove to his own silent home. Even if his marriage had continued, Ashley wouldn’t have been a big part of his life. She never had been. By the time he got home from the courthouse, it was almost her bedtime. Weekends he tried to reserve for her, but Marcia had built up so much more time with the girl that Ashley often acted as if Jordan were intruding on the day she could spend with her mother. Di­vorce had just sealed the relationship—the lack—Jordan al­ready had with Ashley. He should just let her go, stop embarrassing both of them.

  But in the middle of that night he went flying back home; that is, to Marcia’s house. He almost threw himself into the windshield with the suddenness of his braking, then ran barefoot up the dark, dewy lawn to the front door, which opened into dimness like a gap in a smile.

  “Are you all right? Where’s—”

  “Shh,” Marcia said. “She’s fine, she’s still asleep.”

  “Where did you hear it?”

  “From the window. Same window. But Jordan, this time I thought I heard somebody in the back yard, too.”

  “Are you okay?” Jordan barely touched her. Marcia stood hugging herself. She was fully dressed in T-shirt and jeans. Her skin felt cold.

  “I’m fine. Nothing happened. It was just like before, just that little scratching. I’m sorry, I panicked.”

  “That’s all right. Show me.”

  She led him into the bedroom, where a lamp burned, mak­ing a countryside of the rumpled bed. “This window?” Jor­dan asked. Marcia nodded. He parted the blinds to look out but couldn’t see anything. “Where’s the gun?” he asked. Silence made him turn.

  Marcia’s head was lowered slightly, waiting for his chastis­ing. “I don’t have it any more. Jordan, the damned thing scared me. I knew somebody’d kill me with it before I could make myself pick it up. It wasn’t— “

  “Damn, Marcia, I’m not here, and if you can’t—”

  “I know, but—”

  “All right, never mind. Maybe I’ll get you something that would just make noise.”

  She was still hugging herself. She was no longer quite so pale. The T-shirt and jeans were both tight, enough that he could see she wasn’t wearing anything under them, she had just pulled them on.

  “Let’s turn out the lights,” he said. “See if they come back.”

  Snapping off the lamp, Marcia said, “I’m sure it’s just kids, Jordan. You remember it was summer when it hap­pened before, like now.”

  “Damn kids,” Jordan said. In the dark there was only their voices, they might have been lying in bed.

  “I shouldn’t have called you,” Marcia said.

  “Yes you should. You did exactly the right thing. When­ever you need me, I’ll come, don’t ever stop to worry about me.”

  After a long wordless pause in which their breathing sounded loud, she said, “Jordan, I didn’t call you because I wanted—”

  “I know.” He walked to the doorway. “Go back to bed. You need your sleep. I’m not leaving. I’ll be in the living room. Later on I’m going to slip out and see if they’ve come back.”

  “Thanks.” Marcia sounded sleepy. “I won’t bother you again, Jordy.”

  “You’d better.” She was still standing, she wasn’t going to start undressing until he left. Jordan walked down the hall, back to the living room, where he turned out the lights, waited until his eyes grew accustomed, and peered out the window. There was nothing on the lawn but pale moonlight. He walked back down the hall and into Ashley’s bedroom. She’d kicked off the sheet. He pulled it up and let his hand rest on her chest. The girl’s heart throbbed. He brushed her hair off her face. Tears sprang to Jordan’s eyes, but it wasn’t love that made his hand tremble, it was rage. The house felt fragile. A window might shatter at any moment, a door burst open. Next time Marcia might not have time to call him. He imagined being called to the aftermath of a crime, finding them. He would go insane. He would kill anyone who hurt his child. He would track them down and strangle them.

  Later, when the house had stood dark and silent for an hour, he walked outside, all around. The windows seemed secure. It probably had just been neighborhood kids, trying to do exactly what they’d done, scare somebody. But how could Jordan sleep at home the next night, wondering? But he couldn’t spend every night on Marcia’s couch either, and he couldn’t keep Ashley with him for the rest of her life; she wouldn’t stay. It was terrible to have this portion of himself out in the world, without him close by to protect her.

  The police reports did not tell him much, except that small-town cops knew the same jargon as big-city ones. The reports reduced the tragic events to bland observations. The officer who had discovered the body, Jordan was surprised to find, was his own Deputy Delmore. Pleasant Grove Park was outside the city limits of Green Hills but inside Madera County. As a county sheriff’s deputy, Delmore occasionally patrolled the park. On the hot July afternoon he was drawn to a wooded area because of a car parked nearby; “upon investigation this officer discovered the body of a white fe­male aged approximately 17 years of age, known to this officer as Jennifer Fecklewhite.” After calling in the find, Delmore had investigated like a mad thing (knowing, Jordan surmised, that he would soon be superseded by a detective who would take over the case from Delmore, a mere patrol officer), noting in his remarks that the victim was fully clothed, though one red tennis shoe was near her foot rather than on it. “The victim’s face was marked by premortality abrasions. Signs of a struggle abounded, including crushed leaves and disturbed gravel beds.” Delmore also noted the root on which the victim’s head lay.

  Though the park was outside the city limits, no one had seemed to object when city cops involved themselves in the investigation. The first of these was one Officer H. L. Briggs, who had turned up a witness of sorts, someone who had seen Wayne’s pickup truck racing into town from the direction of Pleasant Grove Pa
rk. So officers had already been looking for Wayne for questioning when they discovered he’d been arrested at the hospital for beating up Kevin.

  So Wayne had been the best suspect in Jenny Fecklewhite’s murder from the beginning, but there were no witnesses to what had happened in the park. Jordan sympa­thized with the district attorney’s problem proving Wayne had murdered Jenny as well.

  The police department and the sheriff’s office were both housed in the jail, next door to the courthouse. When Jordan emerged into the plaza, it was after eleven on a Friday morning. He looked up at the brick courthouse, wondering if it was worthwhile to go inside. There was no one he needed to see. The one he was thinking of — was the one emerging from the courthouse door, tossing back her hair and exhaling as if it had been a rough morning. She hurried heedlessly across the street into the shade of the plaza, head down so that she was almost upon Jordan before she noticed him. When she did, she pulled up sharply. Jordan saw her think about veering aside as if she’d had trouble enough for one day.

  “Mr. Marshall,” Laura Stefone said. “Are you lying in wait for me?”

  “Can you tell me,” Jordan said quickly, taking her arm to guide her, “what the deal is with this empty pedestal? I don’t see construction going on, but it’s obviously not finished.”

  They stood looking at the pedestal with no statue, as if erected for a hero not yet born or at least not yet proclaimed.

  Laura Stefone’s voice remained cool but with an unmis­takable undertone; she enjoyed telling a story about her hometown. “City council two years ago received a bequest to build a monument and got so excited they started right in before they’d decided who—whom—the monument should honor. The deceased had wanted it raised to the Confeder­ate dead, but that didn’t go over.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Some people wanted Juan Seguin, some wanted a memo­rial to Vietnam war dead. City council realized they couldn’t do anything without offending a bunch of voters, and the thing just died. Or as they say at City Hall, debate continues. So are you here researching a history of Green Hills, Mr. Marshall?”