Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  “Probably best to just move on,” he said.

  He was baiting me. I decided it wasn’t fishing season.

  “It’s cold out here,” I said. “Thanks for the help on this thing.”

  “No problem.”

  We sloshed off in opposite directions.

  I thought she was a reporter. I stifled a groan, braked hard, and rolled down the window. “Howsabout you get out of my driveway,” I said, as I reached up over the visor and pushed the “Open” button. The clank of the gate seemed to startle her. She collected herself and walked over to my side. Standard-issue young professional woman. Tiny little thing. Tortoiseshell headband. Medium-length brown hair parted down the middle, wire-rim glasses, and a Midwestern seriousness of expression to give Grant Wood hives.

  I’ll say this for her, she kept it short and sweet. “I’m Angela St. Jean,” she said. “I’m with the Innocence Project, and I’d like to talk to you about Lamar Hudson.”

  I checked the street, thinkin’ maybe this was some sort of media ruse. That some TV crew in clown makeup was about to jump out of the Morrisons’ hedge and start filming like maniacs. But no. The only thing in sight was her little red Toyota Celica, fifty feet up the west wall, half in, half out of the street.

  I checked the clock on the dash. 3:16 P.M. I was due at Rebecca’s for dinner. We were gonna celebrate her reinstatement and the public apology on the front page of today’s Seattle Times. Whoop it up a little, but mostly we needed to talk about what to do next. About how it looked like, despite all the unanswered questions, we were pretty much gonna have to get on with our lives and assume that whoever had put this together had accomplished whatever it was they were trying to do. I didn’t like the idea one bit, but Gabe was still driving Rebecca to and from work and bunking in her guest room at night, a situation we couldn’t keep up forever. Something had to give here. We just needed to work out the whats and whens.

  “Better pull your car into the drive,” I said. “I’ll let you in the front door.”

  I put my car into the garage and walked back through the house. She and her briefcase were waiting on the front steps when I pulled open the door. I directed her into the front parlor. Over by the two-story fireplace and the Architectural Digest furniture—you know, all upscale home–like and cozy.

  “So what can I do for you?” I asked as I took a seat across a hideous French provincial coffee table from her.

  “As you may know, the Innocence Project has been looking into the matter of whether or not Lamar Hudson was capable of assisting in his own defense. We feel—”

  “No sense preaching to the choir, Ms. St. Jean,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, Lamar Hudson wasn’t capable of mowing lawns, let alone assisting in his own defense.”

  “We believe Mr. Hudson deserved a new trial.”

  “Deserved?”

  “Yes. Past tense. We have evidence that links Mr. Hudson to the crime for which he is presently incarcerated.”

  Took me a minute to put it together. “And nobody connected to Mr. Hudson’s defense, either then or now, has ever seen whatever it is before?”

  “The prosecution is saying it’s been there all along, but since Mr. Hudson repeatedly confessed and then pled guilty to the crime in open court, there was no reason to introduce other evidence, so they had no legal obligation to do so.”

  “I’ve heard crazier things,” I said.

  She opened her briefcase and pulled out a legal document. “This is an order from the Ninth Circuit Court granting Mr. Hudson a new trial. They granted it yesterday and then rescinded it this morning, when the results of the forensic analysis were made public.”

  “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

  “Have you ever met Mr. Hudson?” she asked.

  “Just seen him on the tube,” I said.

  “I have. Half a dozen times over in Walla Walla. He’s the mentally challenged, totally unsophisticated black sheep of a fifth-generation oyster-farming family from the Willapa Valley. He has an IQ of eighty.” She leaned forward. “Lamar Hudson was going home, Mr. Waterman. Other than his confession, there was absolutely no evidence of any kind that linked him to Tracy Harrington’s murder. There’s no appeal court in this land that would still support that Jim Crow conviction of his. Especially not here in la-la-liberal land. A month from now he would have been back on the street.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. “They say timing is everything,” I tried.

  She made a wry face. “Except that now, after the evidence just happened to go missing for no reason anyone has been able to figure out and then almost magically reappeared, suddenly there’s new evidence. I only know what everybody else knows, sir. What I’ve been reading in the papers. But, you know, regarding the suspension and reinstatement of Dr. Duvall, it almost looks to us as if that whole charade was designed to keep Mr. Hudson in jail.”

  The booth was small and white; the guard was big and black. The Highlands was Seattle’s oldest gated community. Political movers and shakers like my old man needed to be at the center of the action, so we’d always lived in the city. The Highlands was the opposite. These folks had money for so long some of them couldn’t tell you where it came from. So, back in 1907, a bunch of local swells got together and bought a mountain overlooking Puget Sound. They built their own roads and private utilities, built perfect parks and bucolic walking trails, and then put up a fortified guard gate to keep out the riffraff. The American way at its finest.

  I’d called ahead and made an appointment. It was either that or jump the fence somewhere out on their private golf course and take the Lewis and Clark approach; took me under two seconds to conclude that trekking over hill and dale held scant appeal.

  I leaned out the window and watched his thick fingers pound the keyboard. He seemed surprised to find me on the guest list. He pulled a little handheld GPS from a shelf and fingered in the Harringtons’ code, and a map appeared. He handed it to me.

  “You can leave it at the Harrington house, or you can bring it back here on your way out.”

  I thanked him, dropped it into drive, and started down the road. Good thing I had the GPS map. No street signs. No house numbers. No mailboxes. No nothing. Just follow the yellow arrow. Interesting, and I suspected not coincidental, how you could come to visit a Highlands resident and leave without ever knowing their address.

  The Harringtons’ house had a turret. Having a turret is like being monomial. Like Cher or Elvis. Looked like somebody’d dismantled an Irish castle, flown it across the pond, and put it back together, throwing in a five-car garage and what these kind of folks probably called a carriage house for good measure.

  The brass door knocker was some kind of spaniel. I gave it three good ones. The booms echoed through the cavernous interior.

  Somehow I was expecting a prissy maid to answer the door, but, to my surprise, I found myself staring eye to eye with a guy dressed in an old-fashioned chauffeur’s livery, shiny knee-high boots and all. He’d apparently put on a little weight, so it was hard not to notice the bulge under his left arm. I told him who I was and that I had an appointment. He told me to wait, took the GPS from my hand, then walked off down the hall and disappeared from view.

  I’d never been comfortable dealing with domestic help. My old man’s worst nightmare was prying ears around the house, so we never had any. If something terribly domestic needed to be done, either his sisters came over and took care of it, or he hired day labor. Drivers? Sure. Bodyguards? Lots of them. But butlers and maids? No way. I’d had to deal with them only when I was at other people’s houses, and somehow I never felt as if I’d mastered just the right tone and attitude. Always felt a bit awkward to me.

  Wasn’t long before the driver was back. He led me down a short hallway and directed me into a large sitting room on the south side of the house. The exterior wall of the room was half a mile of French doors, looking out onto a professionally manicured garden. Half a dozen crow
s were squawking it up and frolicking in a cherub-encrusted birdbath out at the middle of the lawn.

  Patricia Harrington was wearing a gold evening dress at ten thirty in the morning. She was sitting in an overstuffed chair, facing in my direction as I walked across the three acres of carpet. I felt like I was about to have an audience with the queen . . . or, at the very least, Helen Mirren.

  “I wondered if you’d be big like your father,” she said as I approached.

  I smiled. “Not quite that big,” I said.

  She looked over to her left. “Sidney,” she called. “Bring Mr. Waterman a chair, will you please?”

  That’s when I noticed the man puttering around over in the corner by the art deco bar. Midfifties, spare and elegant in a Fred Astaire sort of way. If the silver mustache had been a bit longer, he’d have been a dead ringer for the Monopoly man. Even from a distance, I could tell he was one of those people who’d never been fat. Picked on as kids for being skinny, they get their revenge in middle age when everybody else is growing beer guts and big asses, and they’re the same weight they were in high school. When he walked over and grabbed a red wing chair, I saw that he was wearing a tuxedo. His smooth, unhurried movements gave the impression he had most likely slept in it.

  I watched as he dragged the chair over the carpet to my side.

  “My husband, Sidney Crossfield,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  He gave me a limp-fish hand. I pumped it up and down a couple of times and let it swim back into his pocket. We both said something highly intelligent like “Pleased to meet you” and let it go at that.

  He gave the impression of a man disappointed by life. That somehow, whatever he had planned for himself hadn’t quite worked out, so he’d hunkered down with Mrs. Harrington and her trillions, awaiting the final curtain call . . . in the style to which he was accustomed, of course.

  I sat down in the chair. Sidney headed back over to the bar.

  “My secretary said you had a matter to discuss with me.”

  I’d run this moment through my rehearsal circuit several times on the way over. If ever I needed to be careful with my words, this was it. Didn’t matter who my father had been or how much cash he’d left me; offending Patricia Harrington was completely out of the question. Be like giving the Pope a wet willie. One call from her, and I’d be getting parking tickets in my own driveway.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t more specific with your secretary,” I said. “But what I’m here about is a painful and difficult matter, so I thought discretion might be in order.”

  Her face turned to stone. “Tracy.”

  “More specifically, Lamar Hudson.”

  She stiffened in the chair, folded her bejeweled hands in her lap, and looked at me with a pair of the chilliest blue eyes I’d ever seen.

  “What about Mr. Hudson?”

  Sidney had mixed himself a cocktail and was slaloming through the furniture, working his way back in our direction. He moved like he was on an escalator.

  “Were you aware of the fact that the Innocence Project had recently managed to get Mr. Hudson a new trial?” I asked.

  “They notified us when they first started to look into the matter,” she said.

  “They told us victim notification was part of their protocol,” Sidney added.

  “Then you were also aware that, in legal circles, there’s always been quite a bit of heated debate as to whether Mr. Hudson got all the due process he was entitled to.”

  “The boy confessed,” Sidney Crossfield whined.

  “Strange as it seems, lots of people confess to things they didn’t do,” I said.

  “Makes absolutely no sense to me at all,” Crossfield huffed. “Why in God’s name would anyone—”

  I jumped in. “Skilled interrogators can make a person’s life so miserable for so long, some people will say anything to get them to leave them alone. It happens a lot more often than you’d imagine.”

  “The jury certainly seemed to have no doubt,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  She had a point. The jury had taken only two hours to put Lamar Hudson away forever.

  “And as you said . . . he confessed.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Then I’m afraid I’m a bit at sea as to why you’ve come here, Mr. Waterman.”

  “As it turns out . . . his confession was the only evidence of his guilt.” I paused for effect. “If it turns out that Mr. Hudson is, as most legal scholars think . . . if he wasn’t competent to assist in his own defense, then his confession isn’t valid, and I’m told that without anything forensic to connect him to the crime, Mr. Hudson was about to be released from the penitentiary.”

  Sidney sounded like he was offended. “They assured us we’d be notified prior to Mr. Hudson’s status being altered.”

  “You haven’t heard anything because the appeals court rescinded Mr. Hudson’s order for a new trial the very next day.”

  “Why would they do that?” he wanted to know.

  I told them about what I’d found in the storage locker, leaving Ibrahim’s name out of it. Just referring to him as a city employee. Halfway through the story, Sidney got up and fixed himself another drink. By the time he got back, I was finishing up.

  “And now, suddenly, new evidence has come to light. Evidence that connects Mr. Hudson to Tracy’s death.”

  “What sort of evidence?” Crossfield wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why didn’t it come out in court?” Patricia asked.

  “Prosecutor says they didn’t need it to get a conviction, so they didn’t bother.”

  “That animal got off easy,” Crossfield spat. “They should have taken him out and put him down like a lame horse.”

  I decided not to go into my spiel about a kinder, gentler America and instead asked, “During the trial . . .” They both stiffened. I could still recall the pictures in the newspaper. Patricia Harrington and Sidney Crossfield sitting alone in the front row of the courtroom, ramrod straight, dressed to the nines, security guards keeping the media at bay.

  The press lapped it up. Front-page news for days before the trial. Mercifully, the court proceedings were over in a couple of days, and the family was able to slip back to The Highlands and away from the public eye.

  “Not even his attorney seemed to have much interest in his defense,” Patricia Harrington said.

  “His mother spoke on his behalf,” Crossfield said. “Dreadful woman.”

  “According to the social workers whom they called as defense witnesses, Mr. Hudson didn’t have a friend in the world,” Patricia Harrington added.

  “He’d already spent major portions of his youth behind bars,” Crossfield added. “They should have left him there.”

  I kept at it. Asked them everything I could think of that might shed some light on the situation, but I came up dry. All they seemed to know was that somebody had killed and mutilated their daughter and that the miscreant had gotten what he deserved. I was about to give up the ghost when a female voice from the hall tugged at my attention.

  “Mama,” it called.

  “In here,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  A woman in her forties entered the room. Dressed nicely, but conservatively, in a blue-and-white patterned dress and a pair of red high heels. Her resemblance to Patricia Harrington was unmistakable. Same even features and wide-set eyes.

  “Oh,” she said when she caught sight of me. “I’m sorry . . .”

  I stood up, like my mother taught me to. Old habits die hard.

  “Mr. Waterman. My daughter Jessica.”

  She walked across the room and shook my hand. Good firm handshake.

  “Jessica is chair of the Political Science Department at Seattle University.”

  Didn’t take Dr. Ruth to hear the maternal pride in Patricia Harrington’s voice.

  “Mr. Waterman came to talk about Lamar Hudson,” Crossfield said.

  She didn’t say anything, but the muscles alo
ng the side of her jaw suddenly rippled like snakes. I could feel the tension level in the room move up a notch or three. While it wasn’t unusual for a tragedy such as theirs to drive wedges into an otherwise close-knit family, it felt like the animosity floating in the room was something far more tangible than simply collective grief.

  “I’ve got a department meeting and then a graduate seminar at one,” she said after an awkward moment. “Nice to have met you, Mr. Waterman.” She looked over at her mother. “I’m going to take the Rover.”

  “Will you be home for dinner?”

  She shook her carefully coiffed head. “I’m having dinner with Cindy Holmes and her new husband. I’ll be home about nine.” She nodded goodbye to me and then turned and strode from the room. The tension lingered in the air like artillery smoke.

  I didn’t want to quit, so I asked, “Does your son Charles live here also?”

  “Charles has special needs,” Patricia Harrington said. “He requires full-time care.” The stone face and icy tone of voice made it clear she wasn’t particularly comfortable with the subject of Charles Harrington, so I didn’t bother to ask what Charles’s problem was and precisely where he was being cared for. Seemed like that might be pushing it. To my surprise, Patricia Harrington spoke directly to her husband. Like I’d walked in on the middle of a long-standing disagreement.

  “He’s stagnating out there, Sidney.”

  “Charlie’s doing the best he can,” Crossfield said.

  “He needs some therapy. Some direction. Everyone needs some direction.”

  “He’s in the best place he can be,” Sidney said.

  “Out there in the woods. Doing nothing. Stagnating. We should have listened to Dr. Thorpe. He thought Charles was on the verge of a breakthrough when . . . when you . . .” She stopped herself. “There must be something more we can do.”

  I suddenly felt like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation, so I got to my feet. “Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “I wish it could have been under more pleasant circumstances.”

  “Thompson will see you out,” Patricia Harrington said.