by Jay Brandon
“But —” Wayne said, but then his guardian, the angry deputy, appeared, producing an unheralded first in the deputy’s career: Jordan was glad to see him. He didn’t want to answer any more of his client’s questions.
“I’ll come see you later,” he said to Wayne.
The courtroom was gradually clearing in little talkative clumps, the way people leave church. Mike Arriendez remained, leaning back on his table. “Very dramatic,” he said.
“Thanks. Now if you can find that ring, you’ll have a case against the real murderer, and you can leave my boy alone.”
“Thanks,” Arriendez replied in turn and walked away at a pace that showed no inclination to launch a major investigation.
Helen Evers was inside the bar. “Can we talk now?” she asked, pen poised over notepad.
“It’s not a very good time.”
In my life, Jordan meant. He slumped into his chair, shaky from the ebb and flow of adrenalin. He’d had a perfect case until he’d tested it in front of the whole town and it had collapsed.
So where was the damned ring?
The bailiff returned, grinning. “Thanks for clearing me, man.”
“No problem. You know all the rings in town, don’t you, Emilio? Where’s the one I’m looking for?”
It was a rhetorical question. Jordan began slowly gathering up his materials. He had to do something. He couldn’t think exactly what.
Atop his files was a small cardboard box he didn’t recognize. When he shook it, it rattled like a Cracker Jacks box. He turned it over and found an address label. Mercy Hospital. Oh, yes. It was the box Evelyn Riegert had given him, Kevin Wainwright’s leftover belongings. Idly, Jordan broke open the flap. The contents of the box spilled out onto the table in front of him. A cheap watch that might have an inscription. Should have been returned to the boy’s father. Three dollar bills and some change, a wallet.
But no one was looking at those things. All three of them — Helen Evers, Emilio, Jordan —were staring at the gold ring that had gone skittering across the table. Jordan gathered it up, almost afraid to touch it, and held it in the palm of his hand.
“There it is,” he said reverently.
“That’s it, all right,” Emilio agreed casually. “How’d it get in there?”
“These are Kevin’s things from the hospital,” Jordan explained.
“Yeah, I know,” Emilio said. “But that’s not Kevin’s ring.”
“Now how do you know that, Emilio? Maybe he’d just — ”
Emilio was shaking his head sagely. “Kevin never wore a ring. His daddy lost a finger in an engine because his ring got caught on a fan blade. You remember that, Helen, or were you too young?”
“I remember,” the reporter said tonelessly, staring at the ring in Jordan’s palm.
“No, Kevin wouldn’t wear a ring,” Emilio continued knowingly. “They scared him. Ever’body knew that. That one, that’s Wayne’s ring. Pretty, isn’t it?”
It was the tackiest thing Jordan had ever seen. The face of the ring was a jagged chunk of raw gold, as if it had just been panned out of a stream. The sharp points and ridges looked lethal. Its crevices were crusted by something black. The ring seemed to sink more heavily into Jordan’s palm at the bailiff’s remark.
Jordan didn’t have to ask for explanation. “Remember when Wayne came back from Mexico with it?” Emilio was asking Helen Evers. “That time him and Kevin went to Nuevo Laredo. He was showing it off to everybody, remember?”
“Uh-huh,” the reporter said. “How did it get in with Kevin’s things?”
They all mused over the possibilities. But Emilio was thinking about something else. “I think Mike’ll want to see that ring.”
“Maybe Wayne slipped it onto Kevin’s finger in the ambulance,” Helen suggested, “knowing, you know, that it might be incriminating.”
“Oh, Mike’ll definitely want that ring,” Emilio said.
“I think I’ll just—” Jordan gathered up the things and put them back in the box, but when he reached for his open briefcase, the bailiffs hand clamped on his wrist with a grip that surprised Jordan.
“No, I’ll take it now,” Emilio said.
“This is mine, Emilio, she brought it in response to my subpoena.”
“We’ll let the judge decide,” Emilio said easily. He was not in the habit of being intimidated by lawyers. He took the box and walked away with it.
“You be careful with that,” Jordan called.
Of course, there’d been no chance of keeping the ring secret, not with a law officer and a newspaper reporter standing right at his shoulder when the discovery was made.
“Maybe now Wayne will confess,” Helen Evers said helpfully.
A long, slow time passed, during which Jordan would have said that he was thinking, but in fact he just sat like a lump, stunned at the thoroughness with which he’d destroyed his own case. He had insisted on bringing the other murder into the case, then he had provided the evidence that would allow the prosecution to prove that Wayne was guilty of that one, too. Brilliant work if he’d been on the other side. Jordan felt too stupid to do any more thinking.
Some part of his brain must have been doing its job, though, because when he resurfaced, it was with an idea clenched firmly in his teeth.
He made a couple of phone calls, then he went to pay his client the promised visit in the jail. In the small jail conference room he found Wayne animated by a new spirit—his mother’s spirit.
“ ’Course it’s my ring!” Wayne almost screamed. “Everybody knows that! You’da known it if you’d ever talked to me!”
“Talk to me now, Wayne. Tell me how—”
“Jesus, what’m I doing?” Wayne said to himself. He stood like a man all alone, hand to his face, eyes scraping the walls of the room. “I must’ve been crazy.” He brought Jordan back into the conversation. “To let you talk me out of takin’ that thirty-year offer. What do you think this jury’s gonna give me? Can they give me anything more than life?”
“It’s not that bad, Wayne, it’s — ”
“Not? Where’s the good part?”
“I couldn’t get you to talk to me, Wayne,” Jordan said nervously. “If you’d—”
Wayne whirled on him. Jordan thought he was seeing the last face that Kevin Wainwright had seen. The veins were standing out in Wayne’s neck. His face was dark, his hands clenching spasmodically. Here was almost the creature the witnesses had described. “Why should I’ve talked to you? I didn’t know you, you were just some lawyer they run in on me. The stupid part was when I did start to trust you. Like a baby, lookin’ around for somebody to be on my side and thinkin’ — ”
“I am on your side, Wayne.”
Wayne stilled him with a glare. “Why?”
Because I have to be, Jordan thought. Because the judge assigned me to you.
“Because I don’t want them to run over you, Wayne. Because I want to do what’s right for you.” The only change in Wayne was that his lip curled. His fist was still clenched.
“Because your mother’ll kill me if I don’t,” Jordan said. Wayne’s shoulders started to shake ever so slightly. He burst out with a belated chuckle, then he was crying. “Oh man,” he started saying. “Oh man, oh man, oh man.” Standing there straight and slight, hands going limp, the shakes moving from his shoulders down his chest. Jordan went and put an arm around him self-consciously.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’ll be okay.” Hoping Wayne didn’t ask him to explain how. Jordan felt more strongly than ever the weight of this defense. His perspective abruptly shifted. He saw the situation as someone else could have seen it all along: this wounded boy depending on him because he had no other choice, and Jordan more concerned with his own life, his reputation, looking for nothing but a good way out. “Let’s talk about it,” he said. “About your ring.”
A long talk with Wayne sent Jordan back to the Pizza Hut for a second interview. By evening he knew a little
more than he’d known that morning, but he still didn’t seem to be on the road to solving the central problem of his case, which was clearing Wayne of the murder with which he was charged — Kevin’s murder. When Jordan grew tired of thinking and of being alone, he let the Bonneville do what it wanted. The houses turned familiar.
Laura answered the door at once and stood with her hands on her hips as if he were late. “I didn’t expect to see you,” she said stonily.
“Where else would I go? Do you want to hear what I was thinking?”
“Is that what you call what you do? Well, get in here, we don’t have to put on a show for the whole neighborhood.” He walked in, dropped his jacket on the sofa, and was unconsciously comforted by the smell of her house, the subtle fragrance of her houseplants or the peculiar dust produced by old furniture and books, maybe blended with a scent of Laura herself, not perfume but her shampoo, the lotion she used on her skin.
Jordan said, “It all fit so well. Judge Waverly was in love with Jenny — ”
“I told you that was garbage,” Laura said. She had changed out of her court uniform into casual slacks and a knit striped top with three-quarter-length sleeves. Her hair had been freed and she’d done something to make herself look fresh as morning again.
“Yes, but the facts told me otherwise,” Jordan continued. “Anyway, there he is, older man, young girl, situation that just cries out for jealousy to rear its ugly head. He was possessive of her, it must have galled him to see her running around with a young idiot like Kevin.”
“He wouldn’t have cared about that.”
“Okay, you know everybody better than I do, but I know how men think. Anyway, I’d already talked to my medical expert, I knew that Jenny’s murder probably wasn’t even intentional, probably just a result of the kind of sudden spat that lovers have. Plus I knew about the ring, and I’d seen a heavy ring on the judge’s hand one day. Then when you told me that court had ended early the day Jenny was killed, I knew he’d been free to meet her. Maybe in the park.”
Laura was shaking her head. “Took somebody real smart to come up with as dumb an idea as that.”
“Thank you.”
He understood suddenly how furious Laura was; she showed it abruptly. “I’ve never seen someone with such gall!” She tilted her head upward as if condemning Jordan to the gods. “You drive in here out of nowhere and think you understand anything about anyone when you don’t know the first thing about anybody on this planet, let alone people who—” Her reddened face seemed suddenly to stopper her voice. She recovered quickly. She looked as if she would slap Jordan. “How could you think such a stupid—”
He yelled louder than she had. “Because I’m an IDIOT!” It was probably the only thing that could have diminished Laura’s anger: the sight of Jordan’s equal rage directed at the same target. “You’re right, I don’t know anything! So who put me in charge? Was it my idea? Did I ask for this? Everybody’s treated me like a moron since I got dragged into your courthouse, and that’s how I’ve been acting! Because I don’t know anything and nobody will tell me anything. If I—”
He had exhausted himself. Laura still sounded belligerent. “If you knew anything, you’d know the judge could no more hurt that girl than you could—”
“Well, it was a good theory.”
“These ain’t theories, these are real people.”
Laura’s face was a study. She was angry, no question about that, and sad. When her anger diminished, her shoulders began to slump. Jordan was suddenly very glad to see her. He’d forgotten why he’d come to see her. The reason was no reason: He’d just had to see her. Being in her house was like coming home.
“Now I know you’re not really mad any more,” he told her, “because you only say ain’t when you’re straining for effect.”
“Oh, what do you know?”
“I know a lot, darling.” He wanted to brush one stray strand of hair back from her cheek. “I know the noises you make when you sleep—”
“Shut up,” she said, but he saw her eyes change. He’d almost surprised one of those abrupt laughs out of her. Laura tossed her head, shaking the stray hair back off her face.
“I know how you turn your head ever so slightly when you’re working, like you’re a radar turning toward whoever’s speaking. And I know what you think of some of those people even though you try to keep your face blank as a mannequin’s. I know what you eat for breakfast out in public, and I know what you really like for breakfast, which is Rice Krispies with a little syrup poured over them.”
Laura smiled ever so slightly at hearing herself described. Jordan had been smiling, too, but as he continued, he lost the smile and only stared at her as if, even while describing her in minute detail, he realized he had never seen her before. He was standing stock still in the middle of the room, and he felt a chill in his shoulders as if someone were pointing a gun at him.
“I know what you look like when you close your eyes and let the shower water pour over your face.”
“When did—?”
“I know which of your clothes fit you best and your favorite color. And where you got that little scar on the side of your knee that doesn’t even show except when you get a tan. I know —Have you ever noticed this? — how you start to make a gesture with your hand sometimes but you stop yourself. Then a second later you go ahead and do it as if you’re saying, Oh, what the hell. I know the place you have in this town, the way you know everything about it but don’t really quite fit in yourself. I know how you’ve never really felt at home here, and you feel like your real home is somewhere else, but you can’t tear yourself away from this one- horse backwater because…” Jordan was speaking more and more slowly. It seemed unnecessary to speak at all, because surely Laura knew everything he was thinking. But what he finally said was a surprise even to him. “I love you,” he said.
Laura’s slight smile blossomed. “Well don’t say it like it’s an irritating skin disease.”
But that was how it felt. It was like a lump he’d just discovered. When he realized that he loved Laura, he also realized he’d never been in love before. He understood for the first time what love was: an invasion. He was afraid to move for fear he might injure her. Her welfare took precedence over his own. Jordan had felt a different version of the same emotion the first time they’d put his daughter into his arms in the hospital. Afraid to hold her until he did, thereafter he hadn’t wanted to let her go, not to a nurse, not to his wife. “Careful,” he’d said as he’d finally handed the baby back at Marcia’s insistence. “Careful.” His hands had hovered under the baby.
He wanted to hold Laura so carefully that no one else could reach her, nothing could hurt her. At the same time, he was afraid to touch her.
She came to him very slowly, smile turning questioning. He touched her cheek. It felt just as he’d remembered. She held his hand in place there, closing her eyes.
Why was she so short? Jordan realized it was because he was wearing shoes and Laura wasn’t. He kicked his off, which was better, but picking her up was better yet. He could encompass her then, all of her, she was all there in his arms. They kissed softly as children. They celebrated. Everything seemed new. Jordan loved Laura’s smile, her hesitation, her house, her breast. His joy was so world-filling it seemed that she loved him, too. But that didn’t matter as much as holding her did, as getting to know her even more completely.
A long time later he realized that night had fallen and that Laura might be hungry, but he couldn’t stand the thought of sharing her. He asked, “Is there some place in town that delivers pizza?”
Laura laughed. “Where d’you think you are, son, Chicago?”
“I don’t know.”
She laughed again. “I can make us something.”
She rose from the bed and picked up a short robe from its foot, but Jordan took her wrist and shook his head. Laura rolled her eyes and let the robe fall. “I hope all the shades are down,” she sa
id.
She started out of the bedroom, Jordan following, but only got as far as the doorway, which was where he caught up, wanting to stroke the skin of her shoulders and legs again. Laura turned, a little startled by his touch, but put her arms around his neck and held up her face to be kissed. Jordan just wanted to look at her, though. Laura’s expression turned slightly alarmed. “I look a wreck, don’t I?”
“Haven’t you had enough compliments for one day?”
“There’s no such thing as enough,” she said. Then she made a sound that in a younger girl would be called a squeal as Jordan gave her a knowing look, bent to nuzzle her neck, and lifted her to him.
It was Laura who reintroduced reality later in the kitchen. Jordan by that time felt a little embarrassed at sitting naked in a kitchen chair, but the sight of Laura moving confidently as a nudist around the kitchen, peering into cabinets, bending to check the refrigerator’s crisper, more than made up for any discomfort of his.
“I do have pizza,” she said, “but I hate to turn on the oven.” She glanced at Jordan. “I wouldn’t want you to risk injury.”
“That’s why I love you, you’re so considerate.”
“I guess a chef’s salad? That’s what I call it when I dump all the leftovers from the fridge into a bowl and pour blue cheese over it.”
“Sounds great.”
When she brought the bowl to the table, she handed Jordan a napkin, which made them both laugh; seeing her laugh made him want to kiss her again.
“So Wayne did kill Jenny,” Laura said. Not to Jordan’s surprise, she had heard about the discovery of the ring before Jordan got to her house.
“Who cares?” he said. “Sorry, I know, a lot of people care. That’s not what I mean, I mean—let’s forget it for a while.”
“It’s a hard time to do that. The judge only gave you until tomorrow morning, and look how much of your time you’ve already wasted.” She smiled in acknowledgment of his expression, but she was serious about her questions. “What are you going to do?”