by Martin Clark
“I’m too damp to stay much longer,” she said suddenly. Her voice was trembling.
Evers looked at her. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“Yes. No need to lie. This is too weird. It just happened all of a sudden. I was fine and now I’m really uncomfortable, almost ill. Some of it’s the pot—I’m not used to it.”
Evers got out of his chair and stood in front of Pauletta. He unfolded one of the blankets and laid it on the ground.
“Come here.”
“Why?” Pauletta didn’t move. She was wearing an expensive, long raincoat, and part of her hair, in the front, was soaked and flat, stuck against her forehead.
Evers reached down and took her hand. He sat down on the blanket and guided Pauletta toward him so she sat down between his legs, her back to his chest. Evers wrapped the other blanket around them both. He put his chin on her shoulder, his arms around her. “Don’t worry. It fucked me up the first time, too. And it’s strange out here right now.”
Pascal looked at Evers and Pauletta. He got off the ground and into the seat Evers had been sitting in. “I approve, brother.”
“You don’t know everything, Pascal,” Evers said.
“We’ll see,” he answered.
“The two of you are so bizarre. Crazy. Evers especially.”
Evers shifted behind her, moved his legs and tugged the blanket down farther over their faces so it blocked more of the rain. It was dark underneath the blanket, like sitting in a soaked cloth cave. “I’m getting cold, too,” he said.
Pauletta’s mind jumped from thought to thought, omitting a few bridges and niceties. “I perhaps am sitting in dark isolated woods with two madmen, one of whom is a murderer.”
“Whatever,” Pascal said.
“Don’t worry,” Evers said, and kissed Pauletta on the neck. Her skin felt warm on his lips. She leaned back against him and closed her eyes.
“We need to make our wishes.” Pascal seemed relaxed and stoned. Every so often he would stick out his tongue, tilt back his head and swallow a mouthful of rain.
“Who goes first? I think we should …” Evers quit talking. He thought he’d heard something, a voice or a step or a noise, and he squeezed Pauletta’s shoulder. Pascal had turned in the same direction and straightened up in his chair.
“You hear something?” asked Pascal.
“Where?” Pauletta sat up and looked through the rain.
“Across the stream, on the other side.” Evers pointed. He pushed the front of the blanket up with the palm of his hand.
“Beside the big tree, the one closest to the water.” Pascal pointed, too.
Pauletta kept looking. She was cold. The rain was hitting her in the face and turning into explosions on her cheeks. The drops were large, poured thick and dense out of the sky. “I don’t see anything.”
“Right there straight in front of us,” Pascal said, “looking at us—what is that? It’s sort of bright, like it’s electrical.” He talked in a normal voice.
Pauletta blinked. The rain was beating down on her at an angle, blowing into her eyes, coming in waves of transparent, pounding confusion that thumped and pecked her skin. “I can’t see anything. There’s nothing out there. I can’t see shit.”
“Hello.” Pascal stood up. “Rudy? Hello?”
“Pauletta, look. It’s no more than thirty yards away. Like a white blur. Right there.”
“You and your brother have a different kind of vision than I do, Judge Wheeling. I see rain and trees.”
“It’s as bright as day, Pauletta,” Pascal said.
“There’s nothing out there. You two are either crazy or liars. I’ve seen enough of this. I don’t know how I let you talk me into this shit. It’s a glorified parlor game with two fools. Let’s go.” Pauletta’s head was clearing.
“You really don’t see anything?”
“I see you and Pascal. I see rain and woods. Nothing else. I guess in your bizarre, labyrinthine, stupid and incomprehensible world order, this is another trip that has some meaning for you two. It’s way too strange for me. And I resent being jerked around.”
Pascal looked down at Pauletta, then crouched beside her. His hair was soaking wet. She could see his eyes, wide and earnest. “Evers didn’t want to come. I brought you just because I like you and I know Evers does, and I wanted you to enjoy the shrine. I swear we didn’t mean any harm. We’re not trying to be crazy or prove anything or fuck with you. We’ll take you back, and I’ll cook us something to eat and get you some dry clothes. I’ll even get the space heater out of the closet and warm you up. Okay?” He touched her arm. “Okay?”
“Thanks. Thank you, Pascal. I’m sorry I didn’t see anything. Maybe on a better day.” She unfolded Evers’ arms and got up.
“I told you it was a poor idea,” said Evers. He looked at the shape across the water, then reached down near his feet and picked up a cold stone with pointed, irregular edges. He threw the rock toward the creek, and it left his hand and raced into the heavens and heavy sky, disappeared.
“What’re you doing?” wondered Pascal.
Evers heard a noise, very quick and sharp, above his head, and he looked up. Pascal also looked up. They heard the noise again, and this time, right after the sound, a tree limb snapped and fell toward the ground. The limb was large, about the size of a man’s thigh where it broke off from the trunk, and a smaller branch brushed Pauletta’s shoulder before the whole tangle landed in the wet leaves and moss.
“Are you okay?” asked Evers.
“I guess.” The chair she’d been sitting in was nearly invisible beneath the tree branch.
“Let’s go,” said Pascal.
“No argument from me.”
The two men and Pauletta walked out of the woods and did not look back. Evers put his arm around her. “I’m sorry about all of this. I really am. Everything recently has just been a fairly bad quagmire. Thanks for sticking with me.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll try to make it up to you,” Evers promised, and Pauletta flickered a weak smile that faded almost as soon as it started. They were in sight of the car.
“You can be very decent at times,” she said, “when you’re not acting in character.”
“Why do women like men so much when they’re not themselves?” Evers asked. “I’ve never understood that. Women love aberrations, don’t they?”
“What brought that up? You just ramble and chatter sometimes.”
“I thought you might be able to help me with that. I’ve always wondered about it.”
“You appreciate small things when you have to go through a lot of shit to get them. A sprinkle of water in the desert makes you very grateful.”
Pascal opened the door to his car. “See there, Evers. Now you know.”
“I hope we aren’t stuck,” Evers said. “There’s a lot of mud.”
“We won’t be.”
The car started and moved across the ground without any problem.
“So what did it look like to you?” Evers asked.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Pascal said. He had both hands on the steering wheel and was traveling slowly through the field. The windshield wipers were on high, slapping down clear spreads of water over and over again. “You tell me. What did you think? Tell me first.”
“Well, nothing really. Nothing … identifiable. Sort of like Abe Lincoln’s head, going up and down, like it was on a Slinky. Up and down.”
Pauletta started laughing. “I’m sure that’s exactly what it was, Judge Wheeling. Why would you think that’s out of the ordinary?”
He ignored her. “So what did you think it was, Pascal?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, it looked like—to me, anyway—like Ruth Esther, very bright and lovely.”
Pauletta laughed some more. “That’s great—postmodern visions. Everyone gets to see what he wants to see. I like that. A little dope, some rain, a thimble of frozen pus in the woods and you get Jackson Pollock and
Robert Motherwell to paint your path for you.”
Pascal put a cigarette in his mouth and pushed in the lighter. “And you didn’t see anything, right?” He looked up in the rearview mirror.
“Sorry,” Pauletta answered back.
“You’ve really changed your tune quickly, haven’t you?” Evers said. “You were all revved up about the shrine a few minutes ago.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“What do you mean?” Pauletta pressed Evers.
“Just forget it, okay? Maybe now we can spend a little time figuring out the more practical aspects of Pascal’s defense.”
TEN
PASCAL INSISTED ON HAVING HIS CASE HANDLED BY A PUBLIC defender. Evers offered him the money to hire a private lawyer, but he refused. “How much did you pay Ike White to forget to ask the right question?” Pascal finally said. “Besides, I’ve got good facts, and you and Pauletta will be holding my hand every step of the way.”
Evers and Pauletta both agreed that Pascal’s lawyer seemed competent. He was a fifty-year-old, jolly, rumpled southerner who went to college at Amherst and law school at Boston University. His name was Adam Wampler, and as far as Evers could tell, he did everything he could for Pascal, although he was as bewildered as everyone else about the confession. Pauletta would help him at the trial; she’d also done the research for the confession issue, and had written a memorandum and copied all the relevant cases.
Wampler and Pauletta had buried the motion to suppress the confession among a number of other requests and motions, many of them routine. The lawyers had deliberately been low-key and had camouflaged their intentions as much as possible. Wampler had told the district attorney that there “wasn’t much to” any of the fifteen motions that took up almost an inch of Pascal’s court file. To confuse the genuine issues as much as possible, Pauletta had included motions and briefs that challenged the legality of the search of Pascal’s car and one that suggested the case should be dismissed because the police officers had been “rude, unpleasant and overbearing.” Adam Wampler loved the last one and chuckled when he read it. Like Pauletta, he did not, in general, care for the police.
The lawyers and judge had agreed to arrive at court an hour before the jury was due to report, to deal with all the motions Wampler and Pauletta had filed. When Pascal and the lawyers got to the top floor of the Durham Judicial Center, Evers didn’t stay with his brother. There was no one in the jury room, it wouldn’t be used until time for deliberations, and Evers went in and sat in a wooden chair with a three-slatted back and thought about the trial. There was nothing else to think about. The sun was shining in Durham, and Evers could see out of the window.
He felt sorry for Pascal and his waiting. Waiting for uncertainty and little else, for his chance to be considered by people who didn’t know him but would judge him anyway, and who probably would judge him on things they were never meant to consider—his posture or his looks, or their impressions of Wampler and Pauletta, or someone’s half-baked recollection of courtroom myths and bromides overheard ten years ago in an uncle’s toolshed. You might, it occurred to Evers, more easily win the favor of a juror, or two jurors, or even three, by entertaining them with the first seven pages of a 1981 Eldorado owner’s manual and ignoring the facts and facets of Pascal Wheeling’s life. You very well might. “‘Do your best’ sort of sums it up, doesn’t it?” Evers said aloud.
After she and Wampler had met with the district attorney, Pauletta came into the jury room and found Evers sitting in the wooden chair with his feet resting on the seat of another chair. His hands were laced behind his head, elbows out, like a prisoner on a forced march.
“Adam in here?”
“No.” Evers didn’t move.
“Who were you talking to?”
“To whom was I talking, you mean? I was talking to myself. I said that we’d do our best for Pascal, but that something else, something we never touched on, might decide the case.”
“Like what?” Pauletta asked.
“A lot of things.”
“Such as?”
“That’s just it. Anything—his race, your race, mine, the wind, a TV show, bad hearing, a hair out of place, nothing at all, shirt selection, breakfast cereal—”
“I can see that you’re prepared to add a lot of substance to our effort.”
“I’m nervous, to be honest,” Evers said.
“Well, don’t be. It’s on our heads. It’s our case, our client, our responsibility.”
“I know that. He’s my brother, though.”
“Try not to talk to yourself when you testify.”
“Thinking is talking to yourself, isn’t it?”
“Don’t think out loud.” Pauletta was tense.
“Stalin and Churchill, allies at Yalta, return home to wrap up the war.” Evers rocked back in his chair.
She looked at him and didn’t say anything else.
Granger Hands was the district attorney in Durham. He was a well-dressed man, handsome, average height, with no hint of a North Carolina accent. He was civilized, frank and aggressive, in Evers’ estimation. He was also quite skilled in court, but overworked.
Pascal’s judge was a man named Moses Pendleton. Pendleton was fat, pallid and bald, with small square teeth that could fairly be characterized as stained, though they were not quite yellow. He bit his lip from time to time, and the exposed, discolored teeth caused him to look like a field mouse or a hamster. Evers imagined him reared on his haunches, paws clutching a flat seed, white-bellied and bubble-eyed. Still, Pendleton struck Evers as fair and evenhanded, just not very bright.
As a professional courtesy, Pendleton had agreed to allow Evers to sit in on the motions hearing, although he wouldn’t be allowed to speak or argue. Evers was still sitting in the jury room when Adam, Pauletta and Pascal came in, about ten minutes after Pauletta had left him sitting there brooding.
“We ready to go?” Evers took his feet out of the chair and started to get up.
“Not yet,” said Pauletta.
“We have a decision to make,” Adam said. He took several steps into the room and was standing behind Pauletta and beside Pascal.
“What decision?” Evers asked.
“Adam suggests that we go ahead and show our cards now, see what the D.A. will offer. He thinks Hands will be objective.” Pauletta’s tone was professional and open-ended. “Show him our evidence, see what he comes back with.”
Adam looked at Evers. “He doesn’t want to lose a murder case with an election just around the corner. Plus, these aren’t local people, and the case hasn’t received that much attention for a murder, given it’s a judge’s wife and his brother. Granger doesn’t want to look like a fool; he’d rather get something than nothing, so I think we should tell him what we have. He doesn’t have time to react anyway. What can he do between now and nine-thirty? We don’t have anything to lose.”
“Get a continuance?” asked Evers.
“Not with Pendleton. Especially since we filed our motions more than a month ago.”
“What do you think?” Evers asked his brother.
“Whatever.”
“Let’s try it then,” Evers suggested. “What do you think, Pauletta?”
“I think it’s a bad idea. I think we have a sure winner, and we go to trial and drop it on them. Why give Hands time to prepare his witnesses and do some research? Maybe he’ll get a continuance and more time to prepare.”
“But what can he change by preparing?” Adam countered. “The wrong name is on the confession, and Pascal was legally drunk moments afterward. None of that will change. And without the confession there’s no case. Nothing. He’ll know that and make a decent offer, maybe even dismiss this. Pendleton could make the wrong call on us. He’s not all that courageous.” Adam made his points quietly.
“Loggins and Greenfield will get a quick tutorial, and all sorts of things could happen,” Pauletta said. “The original confession might disappear.
I don’t trust the state. Let’s have a hearing and argue the motion. Or reserve our right to challenge the confession and do it in trial with the jury excused. It doesn’t make sense to call the enemy camp and tell them you are going to attack an hour in advance, even if you have a flamethrower and they have slingshots.”
“What do you think, Pascal?” Evers asked again.
“Whatever you decide.” Pascal seemed nervous and uneasy. He was wearing a dark suit and looked very pale.
“Go get Mr. Hands,” said Evers, and Pauletta shook her head.
Adam went outside and came back with Granger Hands, who greeted everyone and was cordial and polite. He sat down at the table beside Evers.
“What can I do for you folks?” he asked.
“We had hoped to discuss a compromise,” Adam said. He was still standing, along with Pauletta.
“Always glad to listen.” Hands sounded sincere.
“I think that you have some problems with your case, Granger. We wanted to let you know in advance, try to save you a little embarrassment and, of course, help Mr. Wheeling. Maybe work out a plea agreement.”
Hands scratched his head theatrically and then put his hands in his pockets. “I’ve got a dead woman, a confession, a credit card receipt that puts Mr. Wheeling’s car in the area, carpet fibers—good slides and lab stuff that juries love—and a reason for Mr. Wheeling to kill his beloved brother’s evil wife. Am I missing something, Adam? Miss Qwai? I’m not a great lawyer, but I think I can do okay with this one.” He looked at everyone except Pascal.
“Suppose you didn’t have a confession?” Adam asked. “Then what?”
“Suppose I didn’t, but I do.”