Local Rules

by Jay Brandon

  One of Briggs’s thick eyebrows twitched. He turned away and looked at the ground for the first time. “She was stretched out here, full length, like she’d fallen back, but her hands weren’t flung out, they were folded on her chest.”

  “Ready for burial.”

  Briggs looked back over his shoulder. “Yeah.”

  “What killed her?”

  “Fist.” Briggs clenched his own for demonstration. It looked to be the size of Jordan’s head. “And this root helped.”

  He still knew the very one, a gnarled cypress root the thickness of a baseball bat lifted up from the ground. “Maybe broke her neck when she fell back across it. I don’t know, you’d have to ask the doctor.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You’ve read my report,” Briggs said truculently.

  “Yes, but we’re here now. It’s so much more vivid.”

  The officer shrugged. “Boot prints all around. Some tennis shoe prints. Nothing complete, though. Ground’s too rocky. And no tellin’ who’d been here before.”

  Jordan nodded. “Did you arrest Wayne Orkney?”

  “No.”

  “But you already knew he was in custody when you got the call about the body here in the park.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jordan hesitated. “Did you know Miss Fecklewhite?”

  Officer Briggs’s eyes squinted momentarily as he won­dered what the question meant, but he answered simply. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” Jordan echoed. “Did you like her?”

  Briggs nodded sadly. “Everybody did.”

  “Can’t you afford an investigator?” Laura Stefone said.

  “I thought you wanted me to get the right slant on things,” Jordan cajoled. They were standing on the court­house steps, where Jordan had been waiting for her. She looked off over his head and put her hands on her hips as if exasperated.

  “But you’ve probably got to rush off home,” Jordan said. “Do—? Are you married?”

  She made a face as if to an invisible friend beside her. “No.”

  “Me neither,” Jordan said.

  Laura nodded. “You’re divorced.” Jordan looked down at his hand, thinking he was still wearing the ring, but it was long gone; even the mark it had left on his finger was gone. He frowned. He didn’t like being so easily pegged.

  “I guess everybody’s divorced.”

  “Not me,” Laura said.

  Her self-satisfaction was annoying, too. Jordan snapped, “It must be terrible to go through life unloved.”

  Laura laughed, walking past him. “I guess it would be.” As she led the way to his car, she said, “I was in San Antonio last weekend. I saw the Dance Theater of Harlem. Did you see them? I didn’t see you there.”

  “No, I didn’t hear about that.”

  “You really missed something,” she said. “They stretch the possibilities. You should have gone. How often do you think they come to Texas?”

  Jordan rolled down the windows as they half-circled the plaza and headed out of town. Laura’s hair blew back. She closed her eyes. In her lap her hands stretched. Jordan looked at her long, unmarked fingers.

  “Where were they?” he asked.

  “The Carver Cultural Center. Great old theater.”

  Jordan frowned. “Yeah, but kind of a tough neighbor­hood. When I was in the DA’s office, half my cases came from within a few blocks of there. I hope you didn’t go alone.”

  Laura spoke ironically at his concern. “No, I had a friend with me.”

  “She like dancing, too?”

  “No, but he endured it for my sake.”

  Jordan fell quiet. In only a few blocks they passed the edge of town, and the countryside unscrolled before them. The horizon was far, far away, the view of it unimpeded. The trees that stapled the ground to the bedrock were mostly mesquites, low twisted shapes with few leaves, like wire sculptures of trees.

  “So you’re a big dance aficionada?” Jordan asked idly.

  “Real dancing,” Laura Stefone emphasized. “I don’t get to see it very often. Have to go to Houston or Dallas some­times. What passes for dancing now is like— well, you know the road show of Cats that came to the Majestic Theater? Now, that’s the kind of commercial thing that by compari­son—”

  “Sorry, I didn’t see that either.”

  Laura cocked an eye at him. “Why do you live in the big city, Mr. Marshall?”

  “Hey, I take advantage of the cultural opportunities. I subscribe to the full cable package, not just the basic. And every December—”

  “What?”

  I go to my daughter’s preschool Christmas pageant, he’d started to say.

  “What?”

  “I think you could call me by my first name by now, couldn’t you, since you feel so free to criticize?”

  Laura thought it over. “I don’t know if I could.”

  “It’s easy, it’s just like a last name anyway.”

  “That’s true.” She didn’t extend a reciprocal invitation.

  Jordan took his foot off the gas and let the car drift to the shoulder of the road. The shoulder extended indefinitely. When the car stopped, dust closed over it like a giant clutch­ing hand.

  “What’s the matter?” Laura asked, concerned by Jordan’s puzzled expression.

  He got out of the car and she followed. It was after five o’clock, but thanks to daylight saving time, the landscape would be popping and sizzling until nine o’clock that night. Jordan looked back the way they’d come, still frowning.

  “Green Hills,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  He extended his arms to encompass a small portion of the flat landscape that extended for miles in every direction. “Where are the hills?”

  Laura shrugged ironically. “Where’s the green?” she re­sponded. “The first mayor gave it that name in 1882. He thought it was more alluring than what the trail drivers had called it, which was Mule Droppings. He hoped to lure new settlers here and the railroad. Worked great, you can see.”

  Jordan nodded bemusedly at the explanation. “So even here in the gruff, honest heartland, nothing is what it seems.”

  Laura laughed shortly. “Everything’s exactly what it seems. We’ve just got different names for it Have you driven down Flowing Springs Boulevard?”

  “No, I’ve missed that.”

  “Yeah, it’s easy to miss. They’ve got the birdbath closed for repairs.”

  Her words were joking, but her tone was almost angry. Jordan wondered if he had done something to offend her again. Back in the car, he asked, “So you’re a student of local history?”

  Laura shook her head. “You’d be surprised all the things you hear in court testimony.”

  Jordan whistled. “You mean court reporters listen? That’s scary.”

  The Fecklewhites were a joint anomaly. Oh, they fit their house perfectly, they were just as ramshackle. What Jordan couldn’t picture was Ed and Joan Fecklewhite as the parents of the golden girl.

  Laura Stefone had wanted to wait on the porch, but Jor­dan had insisted she come inside. “You give me legitimacy, you make me look less like a vulture.” So Laura had intro­duced him, but after that she stayed in the background, arms folded.

  “Like to sit down?” Ed Fecklewhite offered. He was a balding man wearing a once-white undershirt that showed off his paunch. Mrs. Fecklewhite—Joan—gestured to the couch. Jordan studied her more closely. She had a sunken quality that made it hard to picture her youthful. She might have been pretty once, with effort, but she could not have been striking. Both the Fecklewhites were only in their late forties at most but seemed already old, as if they’d decided, Why fight it?

  “Thank you. I hate to intrude on you, Mr. and Mrs. Fecklewhite, I really do, and I’ll keep it as brief as possible. Do you know where Je—your daughter had been that day or who she’d been with?”

  Ed Fecklewhite was slow to respond, but his wife shook her head quickly. “It was summer, Jenny was on her own. I
asked her to be home by three to take care of the younger kids when they got out of day camp, so when I called and she wasn’t here, I knew something was wrong, because Jenny wasn’t never late, not without phoning me. Ed works over in Kenedy, he’s pretty much out of reach during the day”—her husband looked a litde startled at appearing in her narrative; it took him a moment to nod—“so I knew she hadn’t called him. I work at the Food Mart here in town, and after I’d called home, people started cornin’ in and we started hearin’ about what had happened, about Wayne jum­pin’ on Kevin, so I thought maybe she’d gone to the hospi­tal. That’s what I thought, that if Jenny wasn’t where she was supposed to be, it was because somebody else was in trouble. Even when the police officer walked into the store, even when he came up to me, I figured it was something to do with Kevin.”

  Her mouth stopped and twisted on itself as if a key had been turned in it. Jordan asked quickly, “So you didn’t know she was going to be at the park?” Joan Fecklewhite shook her head quickly, her husband more slowly.

  That was all he could think they could contribute toward the solution to their daughter’s murder. But he didn’t expect to be coming back, he wanted to get all the hard questions out of the way in this interview. “How long had she been seeing Kevin Wainwright?”

  The Fecklewhites glanced at each other. “That fall?” Ed offered.

  His wife nodded. “Just that year, her junior year,” she amplified. “Kevin was already graduated, but they had a homecoming football game in—Was it October?—that he asked her to go to with him. We thought it was kind of funny, but then they kept going out.”

  “Did Jenny date anyone else?”

  “At first she did, but not after a while.”

  “Had she ever been out with Wayne Orkney?”

  He seemed to have slipped the name past them without the Fecklewhites being consumed by sudden rage or termi­nating the interview. They looked more puzzled by the ques­tion than angry. “Just doubling with Kevin,” Joan said.

  “Wayne never called her or showed up here or asked her out?”

  They looked at him as if this hadn’t crossed their minds before. “Not that I know of. Ed?”

  The husband said, “I never saw ’em together except with Kevin.”

  “Maybe Wayne could’ve talked to her after school or this summer. We both work,” Joan Fecklewhite said with a touch of pleading. “And we trusted Jenny so much, we knew we didn’t have to worry about her.” Her eyes moistened again; her husband looked uncomfortable.

  “Did you approve of her going out with Kevin?”

  It was Ed Fecklewhite who spoke up, stubbornly, as if at the end of an argument. “Kevin was all right.”

  “We certainly didn’t tell her not to,” Joan Fecklewhite said, patting her husband’s hand. “But we thought sure she’d meet somebody she liked better, maybe after she went off to school. We hoped she didn’t get too serious about Kevin in the meantime.”

  “Do you know if she was interested in anybody else or whether anybody was asking Jenny out?”

  Jordan heard Laura Stefone rustle behind him. Ed Fecklewhite glanced up over Jordan’s shoulder. But Mrs. Fecklewhite just smiled at the question. “Our phone rang all the time,” she said, “and Jenny was usually the one who answered it School projects and volunteering and girl friends. She didn’t tell us about anybody else.” She gave a slight emphasis to “us” as if she knew she had already lost her role as her daughter’s primary confidante.

  There was a bang so sharp and sudden it made Jordan think someone had fired a gun. When he turned, he saw that the sound had been of the screen door swinging shut. Laura Stefone was no longer backing him up. She was gone.

  Jordan cleared his throat. This was the point where, as a prosecutor, he would lean toward the victims and reassure them not to worry, that he’d do everything in his power to satisfy their craving for justice. He still wasn’t sure in his role of defense lawyer how to end such an interview. But as he rose, he thought of a variation of his old closing. “I’ve only talked to a few people, but they’ve given me a real sense of how extraordinary your daughter was. I’m very, very sorry.”

  Joan Fecklewhite gave him a smile that was small, sad, grateful, embarrassed. Her husband’s lower lip became more prominent Jordan hurried through the good-byes. The Fecklewhites didn’t rise to see him out, so on the porch he found himself alone. Laura wasn’t in the car or by it. That wide, flat land­scape seemed to have swallowed her. She must have kept walking with the same force that had carried her out the door, perhaps annoyed at Jordan’s prying.

  But when he approached the car, passing the comer of the house, he saw her. Laura was kneeling in the dirt of what might have been intended as a garden, but it was even more of a failure than Mrs. McElroy’s. Laura’s shoulders were hunched inward. Her hair almost trailed along her arms, shielding her face. When she heard Jordan, she rose quickly, holding a handful of the dirt. She let it trickle out of her hand, creating a thin curtain.

  “God, this place is an eyesore,” she said harshly, though she wasn’t looking at it. “We should’ve gotten together some volunteers and come out here one Saturday with some paint.”

  “Why not now?” Jordan asked.

  When Laura turned and looked at him, he saw that the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. Trying to cheer up the Fecklewhites’ drab lives now would be a waste of time.

  In the car, they didn’t speak for a mile. Jordan had been reminded by the sound of her movement when he’d asked about other love interests of the dead girl’s that Laura was not his partner; she had an interest of her own to protect.

  “I felt a sense of relief back there,” he finally said.

  “I’m sure you were happy to get that over with,” Laura said. She was staring out the side window.

  “No, I mean their relief. I know, I know they’re very sad over their daughter, but I felt, too, like there was a little bit of relief that it was over, that they didn’t have the responsi­bility for her any more. They don’t have to see if all that promise is going to work out or if she would have ...” He trailed off. Laura’s silence seemed hostile. “But what do I know?” he added.

  “There is that,” she said flatly.

  Jordan dropped her off at the edge of the plaza, which was deserted now. “I’ll wait until you get to your car,” he said.

  “Nobody here’s going to hurt me,” Laura said. “Go on.”

  She waved him away and he drove off. Once his car was out of sight, Laura looked up at the courthouse. She saw the lowered blind in the judge’s window, saw one of its slats raised. She looked up at it for a long moment before turning away.

  Jordan had more parents to do, Kevin Wainwright’s, and he thought he’d better get it over with the same day. He had Kevin’s home address from the police report. No one answered the phone, but when he drove by, he found Swin Wainwright, Kevin’s father, in his side yard breaking an en­gine out of a Chevrolet. He found, too, the anger he’d been expecting at the Fecklewhites.

  “I’d like to talk to you and Mrs. Wainwright together if I could. Is she— ?”

  “She’s dead,” Swin Wainwright said. “Eight years.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  Swin Wainwright shrugged sullenly as if it wasn’t Jordan’s fault, but he would take a swing at him if he brought it up again. Mr. Wainwright appeared a man of more than vigor­ous middle age. He wore a navy blue work shirt with his name over the pocket and the sleeves rolled up, exposing his thin, sinewy arms. He was grease streaked and abraded, but he didn’t seem to notice anything of physical discomfort, including the heat. Apparently he wasn’t familiar with the phrase “shade-tree mechanic,” because his block and tackle were set up in the barren, blazing miniplain beside his tract house. A cigarette lay on the fender of the car he was work­ing on, burning down to ash. Between the cigarette and the sun, Jordan felt certain they were both going to be scorched by grease fire before the talk was done.

  “Ju
dge Waverly appointed me to represent Wayne Ork­ney, so I have to — ”

  “Poor stupid idiot,” Mr. Wainwright said bitterly. “I hope they fry him. But he’s not the one that killed Kevin. That girl killed him.”

  Jordan was taken aback. “Jenny Fecklewhite?”

  “Yeah. First she jerked his life out from under him, then she killed him. What business’d he have with her? Every­body knew anything knew she was just playing with him. What for? She could’ve had anybody, man or boy in this town, what’d she want with Kevin? Not for her my boy’d still be alive, he could’ve gone somewhere, done something. He could’ve joined the navy, he could’ve seen Australia. But no, he had to stay around here making a fool of himself,

  being the prom king”—he spat—“because he thought he could get into the prom queen’s panties. And that’s all he spent his time trying to do.

  “She wasn’t his first girl friend, you know. He’d had girl friends ever since he knew there was such a thing. Some­times two at a time. Because they weren’t so all-fired impor­tant to him, you know, they didn’t rule his life. If he had to get tough with ’em, he got tough, or if he didn’t think it was worth the trouble, he’d walk away. He’d never had a girl throw him crazy before like that one did. You could see her thinking, that little minx face, it was writ all over her. ‘What can I do to him he’s never had done before? How can I make ’im think something that’s never crossed his mind before?’ ”

  “You think she pursued him?”

  Mr. Wainwright gave him a disgusted sidelong look as he took a wrench to a bolt. “Not any normal way. But she kept ’im on her string. Had ’im actin’ ways he’d never acted be­fore. Sneaking around, hangin’ around the high school so he could see if anybody else talked to her. They kicked him out of there half a dozen times. I told him, ‘Stay away, do something else with yourself.’ But why would he listen to me? And the really sad part—what’d you say your name was?”

  “Jordan Ma—”

  “The really sad part, Mr. Jordan, was that it would’ve all been over soon anyway. Everybody knew she was gonna drop Kevin sooner or later. Him actin’ jealous was bringin’ it on sooner, probably. It would’ve been all over and he could’ve had his heart broken and gone on with his life. Instead he —”