by Jay Brandon
“Me neither,” he said.
He stepped out onto the porch, feeling regretful but somehow relieved. But his feelings changed as soon as he began to walk away. He turned back and frowned.
“Does this seem right?” he asked.
He didn’t pursue his arguments, he just let his face speak, wondering if she was having the same thoughts. Does this seem right? Me leaving, both of us being alone?
Laura looked at him a long time, not melting. When she spoke, her voice wasn’t very friendly. “Would you do me a favor? Would you move your car some place, please? I’ve got neighbors.”
For a long time they just talked. Jordan talked about still feeling the burden of his father’s expectations, about disliking the practice of law but not being able to leave it, partly because he couldn’t make as much money at anything else, partly because he was good at what he did but had never accomplished what he thought he was capable of doing. Laura talked about the contrary burden of having no expectations. “You don’t realize how far in the world I’ve risen,” she said. Jordan wanted to ask about her childhood but was afraid to return to the subject of her father, so he asked about everything else he could think of. He knew her well, he knew her attitudes; the questions were just filling in details.
“And when you came back, was everything changed?”
“No, only me. I wanted to cry at how familiar it all was, but it was as if I was just visiting. For a long time I was waiting to leave again.”
“Are you still?”
She regarded him. Who are you, trying to ferret out my secrets, stranger? “Only on weekends.”
It grew late, until they stopped paying attention to time. When Jordan went to the bathroom, he passed through her dim bedroom. He saw more shelves, keepsakes, a four- poster bed. The bathroom was very feminine and old-fashioned, bottles with gracefully curving necks sitting on a mirrored tray, a wicker shelf holding powder and potpourri. He looked around the bathroom, a strange place with which he might become familiar. He wondered if he would get to know the room well, if he would impose his masculinity on the white surroundings.
When he emerged, Laura was waiting and went in after him. Jordan stayed in the bedroom, barefoot, having discarded his shoes some time earlier when she did. Laura had turned on one old-fashioned lamp in the bedroom with a wonderfully dim bulb. When she came out of the bathroom and saw him waiting for her, she looked at him with the same suspicion he’d seen cross her face before, but the suspicion could have been of herself.
“Should I leave?” he asked, not seriously.
“Yes,” she said.
She stood without moving while he crossed the room. He kissed her cheek and her eyelid before she lifted her mouth. But when she kissed him, she folded her arms in front of her chest, and after a moment, she thumped her fist against his chest with surprising force. Jordan held her, feeling her sigh. Her arms went around him slowly, starting with her hands on his waist, drifting softly up his back. He stretched his fingers along the backs of her shoulders, kneading gently. His tongue touched her lip. Her hands descended again.
Her blouse slipped down her arms before he was sure he’d gotten all the buttons. He stroked the round firmness of her stomach. Her breasts were against his shirt. When he stepped back so he could see, he smiled slightly. “You wear a one-piece bathing suit.”
Her chest, which had seemed pale, was darker in the dimness. The tan line went across the tops of her breasts. The breasts were pale, so that the reddish nipples looked dark, but her stomach was pale, too, as much of it as he could see. “Shh,” Laura said. “Don’t comment.”
She put her hand inside his shirt, touching the top button. She stared at the button as if it were something she’d never encountered, until Jordan unbuttoned it himself. He started to finish the job, but she brushed his hand away and undid the rest of the buttons herself, stepping close to him, so that when she pulled open his shirt, her breasts brushed his chest. He pulled her closer. His hand slipped inside her waistband, but at the same time his mouth found hers and he marveled again at her lips. She seemed to be speaking to him in murmurs too soft and too important to be heard.
“Laura.” He said it again because he liked the sound of it. “Laura.” She murmured in reply.
She had been busy with her hands, his pants began to fall. He found the button of her skirt and opened the waistband so wide that it fell down around his hands. They had to step aside out of the tangle of clothes. Laura looked down, lightly touched his thighs, looked up at him with her seriousness finally beginning to give way. Jordan’s hands kept searching for new smooth skin to delight in.
When they moved toward the bed, he cleared his throat and said, “I keep thinking what you said about what disappointments your old lovers were. It’s intimidating.”
She laughed. “I won’t hurt you.”
In the four-poster bed, she didn’t make an athletic contest of it, but he remained aware of her strength. When she stretched she seemed as tall as he. Her legs might have been able to pin him if she’d tried. Her legs were wonderful, smooth and firm and supple. Laura liked to move, she didn’t lie still for long. Some undeterminable time later, as she turned, she cried out suddenly. “Ah. Ah! Wait, wait.” Jordan tried to hold her. “What is it, are you—”
“It’s all right, it’ll—ah!”
“God, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, it’s not your fault. I just turned the wrong way.”
She reached to massage her leg. Jordan helped. “Guess I should have warmed up,” she said ruefully.
“I thought we had.”
They laughed, holding each other so that he could feel her breasts shaking, laughing comfortably and for longer than the mild witticism deserved. Laura fell against him, hair in the hollow of his collarbone.
After a while Jordan said, “When you first screamed, I thought, God, I’ve never heard a woman so passionate.”
Laura chuckled again. “Passion and pain, darling, they’re so close.”
She began stroking his chest. He kissed her shoulders and her breasts; she reached for him. When she cried out again some time later, when they both did, there was no pain in the sound. Jordan held her for a long time in the dark after Laura had turned off the lamp, until he expected the windows to be lightening. He touched her, remembering the sight of her body, her face inside the bar and in the dash-lights of the car, her mouth when it spoke and when it touched his. It was amazing that he had found her.
She stayed in his thoughts all night. In his dreams she lay wakefully beside him, studying him.
8
“Good morning.”
“God, didn’t you sleep?”
“I slept like the dead,” Jordan said. “Then when the sun came up, I was resurrected.”
Laura put her hand over her eyes. “When the sun came up? What time is it?” She looked at the clock, looked uncertainly at Jordan standing across the bedroom from her, holding one of her books. “What have you been doing to entertain yourself?”
“For a long time I just looked at you.”
“My God.” She pushed her hair back.
“You looked beautiful so many different ways as the light changed.”
She put her face back in the pillow. “At least your vision’s lousy,” she said. “I can be thankful for that”
“Then I started snooping through your things,” Jordan said. Laura reemerged. He bent to kiss her. Her kiss had recognition in it but not much enthusiasm.
“What’s that, my yearbook? You were desperate for entertainment.”
“You went to school with Deputy Delmore?”
“Yeah. Ol’ Tommy. Class treasurer. We knew he was too straight to steal.”
“And Evelyn Riegert, the nurse at the hospital. Isn’t this her? Her name was Busby then.”
“Yeah. Me and T. J. and Evelyn, we were about the only three too dumb to get out.”
The old class photos made Jordan feel out of place by re
minding him that these people had histories to which he’d always be an outsider. “For my best friend,” was written across Evelyn Busby’s photo in a flowing graceful script. “Stay as sweet as you are.”
“Were you sweet then?”
“She was being satirical,” Laura said.
“Is she reliable? I may need her for a witness.”
“Oh, yes, you can count on whatever Evelyn tells you.” Jordan hovered uncertainly over her. Laura looked up at him with a gentle smile but showed no inclination to get out of bed. “I have a couple of errands before I go to court,” Jordan said. “Is there some place we could have breakfast?”
Laura shook her head. “Let’s take it a little more slowly before we start being seen having breakfast together.”
“I forgot your reputation.” He touched the sheet she was holding to her chest. “You’re modest this morning.”
“Sorry if in broad daylight I’m not the wild wanton you’re used to.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and kissed her, meaning it to be light and quick, but she put her arm around his neck and nestled against him. She said softly, “You’re a sweet
man, Jordan. Men don’t even like to hear that, do they?”
“I – ”
“Shh. Don’t say something stupid. I’ll see you in court.”
He carried her last touch with him as he walked down her street to where he’d moved his car during the night. As he drove, he felt that soft weight on the back of his neck, that touch on his cheek. He found he was driving at random and had to think about where he was going.
Jordan was sitting quietly in the spectator seats of the courtroom when he saw her enter from the office. Without thinking, he rose and put out his hand to help her even though he was twenty feet away, because Laura was walking with a cane. She saw Jordan and rolled her eyes.
Emilio, from his bailiffs desk, said, “What happened to you?”
“It’s just a little sprain,” she said irritably as if she’d explained too many times already. “I just stepped off a curb the wrong way.”
Jordan laughed. Laura grimaced at him. He had forgotten what it was like to share intimate looks with a woman in public.
“You!” came an angry voice. “You’re crazy.”
Mike Arriendez was stalking toward him, crushing a sheaf of papers in his outstretched hand.
“It’s just a motion,” Jordan said mildly.
“It’s a sacrilege!”
“Look, I just filed it today, I don’t know when we’ll take it up. We can talk—”
“No, we’ll settle this today.” Arriendez’s face was flushed redder than brown.
When he turned away, Jordan called after him, “I hope you’re not going to have an ex parte communication with the judge.”
“I’m going to talk to Cindy,” the DA said tightly. “You can follow me if you like.”
Jordan didn’t. He shrugged at Laura, who was looking at him wonderingly. Emilio was looking back and forth between the two of them.
“Mr. Marshall, you filed a motion this morning?”
“Your Honor, my case is not on your docket this morning, my client isn’t present, and I’m not ready to present evidence on the motion,” Jordan said.
“We’re only taking it up in chambers, Mr. Marshall.” The judge was in his shirtsleeves, black tie pulled tight. The office felt congested with the two lawyers standing before the desk and Laura transcribing on her machine. Her face was blank; she looked at the far wall. Judge Waverly looked even more predatory than usual in the narrow space, as if he could reach out and choke one of them at any moment. “I’ll allow you to summarize the evidence you expect to present. The district attorney is anxious to have the matter settled, and given the nature of the motion, the court agrees. Now, you are asking for an order that would permit you to exhume two bodies?”
The phrasing made Jordan feel grubby. “To allow additional autopsy studies, Your Honor. I’ve consulted an outside medical examiner who feels further study of the bodies of Jennifer Fecklewhite and Kevin Wainwright might reveal further cause of death information.”
“Might?” the judge said mildly.
“No!” Mike Arriendez almost shouted, no longer able to remain quiet.
“The State opposes the motion?” asked the judge.
“Vigorously, Your Honor. Those two victims of this man’s client deserve to rest in peace. Thinking of the horror those children’s parents would feel when they hear that we’re going to dig them up and pry their coffins open and spill their remains out onto another table—”
“Jesus,” Jordan said, then more loudly, “Your Honor, I’m sure the procedure would be done with dignity. If the original autopsies had been complete —”
“What exactly would you expect further autopsy to prove?”
“In Jenny’s case, Your Honor, the doctor I consulted noticed a deep mark on her face that he thinks could be matched to the murder weapon. So we could conclusively —”
“Weapon?” Judge Waverly asked with mild surprise. “You have a weapon with which to compare this mark on the victim’s face?”
The DA waited for the answer, too. Jordan saw that the prosecutor had trapped him. In order to argue the motion, Jordan had to reveal, before trial, whatever pitiful shreds of defense he had. “No, Your Honor,” he said miserably.
But he continued arguing. As he did, he watched the judge. Jordan’s appeal was emotional, not legal. Didn’t Waverly want to know definitively who had killed his girl friend? Hadn’t he cared about the girl? The judge’s face was less stony than usual. He waited with obvious concern to hear evidence Jordan didn’t have to give him.
“At any rate, it would be irrelevant to this case,” Arriendez said firmly, interrupting Jordan’s plea.
The judge looked at Jordan sympathetically. “He’s right, Mr. Marshall. As for exhuming the victim in the case in which your client is charged — ?”
He reoffered Jordan the floor. But Jordan had lost steam. He talked about the incompleteness of the autopsy on Kevin Wainwright, but he was anticipating the prosecutor’s argument, and he had no answer for it.
Arriendez unkindly let Jordan speak without interruption until he had wound down to nothing before the prosecutor responded. His anger was under control again. His words were clipped and hard. “Pure speculation,” the DA said. “The defense has no evidence of any ‘event’ occurring in the hospital to cause Kevin Wainwright’s death, nor any proof that an additional autopsy would even uncover such an event. For example, an air bubble in a blood line would only result in the kind of heart failure that’s already documented in the completed autopsy report, isn’t that so, Mr. Marshall?”
“That’s my understanding,” Jordan admitted.
“For the court to authorize this grisly exploration — ” Arriendez began, regaining his fervor.
“All right,” the judge said calmly. “The court doesn’t require argument. The motion is denied.”
Jordan, looking into the dark eyes, saw something in their depths, some knowledge, a mind working over a problem not at all legal in nature. He and the judge stared at each other for a long moment.
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
Laura caught up to him in the courtroom, almost falling as she grabbed his arm and pulled him around. Jordan reached to help her and she stiffened, standing tall, the cane dangling from her hand. “Are you intent on having everyone in this town hate you?” she said angrily.
Not you, Laura. “No, but it doesn’t matter if they do. At first I was just pushing back because that’s what I do when I get pushed,” Jordan said sadly. “But then I found out something about myself I didn’t know: I don’t like seeing someone get jerked around. I never thought I minded that, but I do. Poor stupid Wayne, he may be innocent of the girl’s murder, but no one cares about that, they’re going to get him for it anyway. Because they’re not willing to look at what’s really going on. And here I am, Laura, and what am I going to d
o? I didn’t want the case, but it’s mine. I’m not going to just stand by and let it happen. That was my plan, but now I find out I can’t do it.” His voice turned abruptly bitter. “And I hate it a lot more than you do.”
Laura was taken aback. She studied Jordan, her face softening a little, but her eyes still angry. “You don’t know what in the world you’re talking about. Aren’t you the one who told me everyone charged with a crime is guilty?”
“Hell, Laura, we’re all guilty, aren’t we? But that doesn’t mean we have to live in prison.”
She looked startled. Jordan shared her surprise. He wanted to share with her, he wanted to change the subject, but the place and the timing were all wrong. He had to just shake his head and walk out, feeling torn in every direction.
A week later he parked a block from her house and walked down Flowing Springs Boulevard, the late afternoon almost pleasant when he passed under the shade of oak trees. Labor Day had passed and with it the worst of the summer’s heat, though even when the sun went down the air was nothing like autumn. But something about the street softened the air. A sweet scent teased him. Jordan felt like he was in a movie, walking along a picture-perfect small town street, past houses with wide front porches, screen doors, and open windows, such a place as he had never believed existed. Occasionally a house even had a white picket fence.
He passed one where the scent of flowers or a flowering tree was stronger and stopped to examine the garden.
“Come through the gate if you want a better look,” said an unexpected voice. “I don’t keep the prize-winners close to the street where kids and dogs can trample them.”
“Hello, ma’am,” Jordan said to the plump old woman sitting complacently on the porch as he took her suggestion. “It must take a lot of water to have a garden this pretty in this climate.” “Mrs. Johnson,” said the woman, with a sort of stern smile.