Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction

by Grif Stockley

  “An acquaintance gave me your name, Mr. Page,” she says, smiling pleasantly at me. This is the kind of woman who takes a cruise every summer and whose major interest on board is the stock-market report.

  Money has a way of announcing itself, even to me.

  “Good,” I say hopefully, glad to hear my name is getting around.

  “What can I do for you?”

  A timid smile comes to her lips.

  “I signed up Bernard Junior for spiritual development classes,” she says, her voice delicate and shy, “and I’ve been extremely disappointed with the results.”

  Sometimes, I think I’m losing my hearing. This is one of them. What on earth? Bernard Junior must be hooked up with a correspondence course with one of those New Age groups in California. Maybe Dan can enroll, too.

  “Is that a grandson?” I ask.

  “Absolutely not,” she says, looking me in the eye, daring me to laugh.

  “Bernard Junior is a pit bull.”

  I fight to retain control of myself. This is a gag Dan and Julia are pulling. The potential for spiritual development in the humans who frequent this office is almost nil. Pit bulls may have a little better chance, but not much. Still, I can’t risk not taking this woman seriously.

  She could be loaded.

  “I wasn’t aware anyone in Blackwell County,” I say, not believing I’m saying this with a straight face, “gave, uh, pets classes in spiritual development.”

  “Oh yes!” mrs. Chestnut says firmly.

  “And it’s not for just any animal. Canines only. And then only dogs over five pounds.”

  No chihuahuas need apply. She is serious. There is too much dignity in her voice, even if she is totally and certifiably mentally ill, for this to be a lie.

  “Who does this?” I ask. Somehow, I don’t see this presumably capitalistic endeavor as a part of corporate America.

  “I’ve seen ads for obedience school but never for spiritual development.” Each time I say the words I realize I am close to hysteria. I wish I had the nerve to ask if I could record this interview so someone would believe it.

  “Purely word of mouth, no advertising,” mrs. Chestnut says. Carefully groomed, with every hair in place, she is attractive for someone surely in her seventies.

  “Not every dog is accepted.”

  Woogie probably couldn’t get in. He meets the weight limit, but beyond that, I doubt if there’s much to work with. Undoubtedly, I’m a bad influence on him. I can’t bring myself to take any notes.

  “Did Bernard Junior make any progress at all?”

  mrs. Chestnut shrugs dejectedly.

  “At first he seemed to,” she says, “but after about the third week he was back to his old self, scratching and licking his privates, that sort of business.” With this revelation, mrs. Chestnut wrinkles her nose at the thought of Bernard Junior’s backsliding.

  “It was as if he just didn’t seem to think it was worth it.”

  I know the feeling. If virtue is its own reward, we need new door prizes. I try to sit as erect as mrs. Chest nut, but no dice. My spine could be stretched on a rack for a week but it would still look as if I were slouching.

  She seems to be reluctant to tell me who fleeced her, so I ask, “Were you told what the classes consisted of, or was that a trade secret, kind of like the formula for Coca-Cola?”

  “Oh dear me, no!” mrs. Chestnut informs me, a frown of disapproval crossing her face.

  “We were allowed to observe the first hour. Unfortunately, Bernard Junior went to sleep during the introductory lecture, but we were told that was to be expected at first.”

  As if I were talking to a normal person, I hear myself sympathizing, “I’ve nodded off at a lecture or two my self.” Unfortunately for my clients, law school was one big snooze, which, come to think of it, was full of Bernard Juniors.

  mrs. Chestnut complains, “I spent five hundred dollars; and to watch him now, you’d swear he didn’t get a thing out of it. The instructor said sometimes he even kept Bernard Junior in during the exercise period, but I can’t see that helped him.”

  Five hundred dollars! That would buy a lot of Puppy Chow. The think method. Right here in River City.

  “How many were in a class?” I get the feeling that Bernard Junior might have been the only one to pay tuition.

  “Just five at a time,” mrs. Chestnut says.

  “Small classes for small minds, Mr. Von Jason said.”

  Not in the presence of Bernard Junior, I hope. That would crush a spirit, no matter how many classes he attended. I can’t bring myself to talk about fees.

  “Would you like for me to make a phone call and see if I can get your money back?” I’m not putting anything down on paper. As soon as I do, it will probably start showing up on billboards all over Blackwell County as the most elaborate pre-April Fool joke ever played.

  Eagerly, mrs. Chestnut digs in her purse and hands me a business card. In script it says:

  Canine Spiritual Development By Appointment Only Jason 683-9888

  Keeping a somber expression in place (this could be me someday sitting across the desk, I have decided), I dial the number and push the button on the speaker phone so mrs. Chestnut can hear. A male voice, cultured yet friendly, instructs that Jason is busy teaching a class but not to worry: he will call as soon as possible.

  I manage to leave my name and number without giggling.

  “That was Jason’s voice!” mrs. Chestnut says excitedly.

  “He’s always talking in the third person.”

  Why am I not surprised?

  “Why don’t you call me tomorrow?” I say, standing to indicate the interview is over.

  mrs. Chestnut looks disappointed but asks, “How much do I owe you?”

  I shake my head.

  “If I can get your money back with a phone call, there won’t be a charge.” What am I saying?

  I should have told her my fee was two thousand dollars just to get rid of her.

  I walk her to the elevators. In the hall she says, “I know you think this is silly, but Bernard Junior is really my best friend. Nobody wants to listen to an old woman. My children are so busy, and all my friends talk about is their illnesses and their children’s divorces, which seem endless, and it seemed the least I could do for Bernard Junior. After all, we send our own children to Sunday school when they’re practically babies, and Bernard Junior is smarter man a lot of children his age.

  Would you like me to bring him next time?”

  The door opens, and I say hastily, “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” All I need is a pit bull attacking clients.

  “I’ll call you when I hear something.”

  In the reception area in front of a handful of clients waiting for other lawyers, Julia asks loudly, “What’d she want? Unlike your other clients, she seemed harm less enough.”

  How reassuring Julia is. You’d make an ideal prison matron, I think, but do not say.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call,” I lie, fleeing to my office.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  Back in my office, I pick up Jason’s card and marvel at the human animal’s capacity for self-deception. Have I been kidding myself about Chet? Like more than a few successful lawyers, he has a reputation for doing whatever it takes to win a case. But maybe he is too near the end to care. Death is supposedly good for concentrating one’s mind. In his case, however, it seems to be having the opposite effect. When I get him on the phone, he professes not to be surprised that Shane hasn’t told him everything.

  “Now that we’re coming down the home stretch,” he says, his voice calm, even a little flat, “Shane’s having to admit to himself that Leigh probably killed her husband. Memories, don’t you find, always improve dramatically the last couple of weeks before a trial? He’s only human. If it were my daughter, I’d forget a few things myself.”

  Though my own thoughts aren’t radically different, I am frustrated by his failure to react mor
e strongly to the information I’ve given him.

  “You realize, of course, that Shane had as much reason to kill Wallace as Leigh did?” I regurgitate Dan’s theory without assigning him credit.

  In a slightly patronizing tone, Chet responds, “So you think Pastor Norman decided on a little frontier justice after he and An had their chat?”

  Irritated by his manner but beginning to feel foolish, I push my feet against the edge of my desk and practically ram my chair through the wall. I know this theory is farfetched, but what else do we have? A jury won’t acquit Leigh because she is a preacher’s daughter.

  “All I’m doing is suggesting that you check his alibi,” I say as evenly as possible.

  “You probably already have.”

  Chet answers quickly, but without any inflection, “He was at the church.”

  I wonder how much medication he is taking. His voice reminds me of mental patients I have represented.

  No affect. Maybe he is just trying to calm me down.

  You don’t yell at an excited child to get him quiet.

  “I

  assume he can prove that,” I say, knowing how strident I sound.

  “Shane Norman is not a murderer,” Chet replies, his voice firm for the first time.

  “Surely you’ve figured that out.”

  Every instinct I have about this case agrees with him, but lawyers are supposed to be more than fortune tellers.

  “This isn’t “What’s My Line?” ” I yelp, my patience running out.

  “Either he’s got a solid alibi or he doesn’t. Let me check it out, okay? I’ll …”

  “You’ll do no such thing!” Chet says, cutting me off.

  “You’ll embarrass the hell out of me if you go charging up there. I’ll look into it again.”

  I can’t believe what I am hearing. When has Bracken ever worried about being embarrassed? One of the reasons he’s been so successful is that he’s never had the slightest qualms about whose cage he’s had to rattle in order to defend a client. If he is worried about how Norman is going to view this, he has no business trying to represent his daughter. I feel my sense of deference drying up in a hurry.

  “That’s fine with me, but don’t you think you ought to tell Norman how sick you are?” I ask, deliberately baiting him.

  “I’d want to know if I were the client.”

  “I’m all right,” he says abruptly.

  “Do me a favor, okay? Let’s not get too carried away. Just because we don’t have rabbits popping up out of a hat doesn’t mean you have to feel you’ve got to stage a mutiny. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you’re still the understudy. If you can’t live with that, I’ll get somebody else.”

  Chastened by his tone, I back off. Both Sarah and Rainey tell me that I have a tendency to overreact. Patience, it is pointed out, isn’t one of my virtues. I remind myself that Bracken knows a hell of a lot more about this business than I do. If I were handling this case by myself, with only two weeks to the trial, I’d be running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I have forgotten how cool Bracken can be under pressure. If I could shut up, I might learn something.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, hoping I sound appropriately meek.

  “It’s just that I kind of feel like we’re out on a sailboat on a hot day waiting for a breeze, and about out of drinking water.”

  “Well, second-guessing me at every opportunity,” Chet mutters, “isn’t going to make that feeling go away.”

  He suggests that in the next couple of days I reinterview the witnesses who saw Leigh on the day of the murder and see if he and his investigator have missed anything, then meet him on Wednesday afternoon at the crime scene. Mollified, I hang up, wondering how close I came to blowing it. Probably not very. Aggressiveness is not a sin in Chet’s book. At least it didn’t used to be.

  Though I feel more comfortable, I can’t shake the sense that something is out of kilter. Not only does there seem to be no movement in this case, I can’t see a theory developing that will generate any forward motion down the line. I am like a seminarian who keeps having heretical thoughts. My mind keeps drifting back to Shane Norman. Could Chet be protecting him some how? It makes no sense that he would, but still I wonder I’d like to free-lance a little in this case, but I don’t dare. If Chet got even a whiff of what I was doing, I’d be gone quicker than a wad of spit on the Fourth of July. So what is going on with Chet? It could be that the painkillers are slowing him down, or maybe he’s so damn preoccupied with dying that he isn’t thinking straight. For most lawyers that wouldn’t be an unreasonable explanation, certainly not for me. However, the mystique of Chet Bracken is such that I expect him to shrug off a little thing like death. Maybe I’m the one with the problem.

  As I am about to leave for the day, Julia buzzes me.

  “I forgot to tell you,” she says, “that Mr. Blessing called while you were at lunch. He said to tell you he’s on the seventh floor at St. Thomas. He’ll come see you when he gets out” Blessing? I rub my eyes and finally remember: the guy whose hair blew off and ran down the street.

  “That’s the psycho ward.”

  “He’s nutty as a fruitcake,” Julia says regretfully.

  “Such a good-looking guy, too. There’s always some thing wrong with men.”

  “How’d he sound?”

  “Crying like a baby. He said not to come by.”

  “Thanks, Julia,” I say and hang up. Poor guy. I turn off the light in my office, wondering if a normal person would lose it this badly because his wig blew off. I head for the elevators. Who is normal? Nobody I know.

  Mr. Hector Tyndall may be in his early seventies, but I’m not sure I’d want to go one on one with him in any athletic contest. Besides having less of a gut and a firmer handshake that I do, in his den, where we are sitting, are literally dozens of athletic trophies in a number of sports dating back from over fifty years ago to almost the present: swimming, track, siding, tennis, golf, even pistol shooting. Not a team player, this old geezer, completely bald and split-high like a center on a basketball team, has enough metal in this room to start his own mint.

  “I came in third in the hundred-yard dash in the whole country in my age group five years ago,” he brags.

  I sip at the glass of bottled water he has offered me (“The real secret to a healthy body is keeping the bowels open I drink eight full glasses of water a day just like they tell you, and that keeps things moving on through”). After talking to church ladies all morning, I find Tyndall a breath of fresh air. Even if his story about seeing Leigh drive by in the direction of her house the morning of the murder at nine-thirty is un shakable, I’d rather waste my time with him than the two ladies who swear they didn’t see or talk to Leigh between nine and eleven-thirty. I thought they were going to cry when I questioned them. Tyndall is dogmatic about what he saw, but at least he’s interesting. He’s a former distance man in high school, and I have to respect the guy. After a sluggish winter I can’t run the length of a football field now without puffing.

  “I didn’t know they had competition in that age bracket.”

  Tyndall tips back his glass.

  “That’s what’s great about this country,” he says.

  “If you have the money to travel, you can find someone to compete against your whole life.”

  Not a philosophy to warm the heart, but along with his water, it obviously has kept him going.

  “How can you be so sure about the time Leigh drove past?” I ask, leaning back in the recliner. Along the way, Tyndall has made some money. Not only is this neighborhood rich, Tyndall’s home is lovely. Though he is on the side of the street away from the view of the Arkansas River, he does have a swimming pool, and I figure his house must be in the half-million-dollar range.

  “Because I jog the same time every day,” he says, his pale blue eyes staring at me without hostility. Talking to lawyers isn’t everybody’s idea of fun. The old ladies were defensive and upset by my questioning
; Tyndall seems to enjoy it. According to Chet, he is a widower;

  I wonder if he gets lonely.

  “I stretch out before and after. Once I hurt my arch and couldn’t run for three months. I’ve stretched out ever since. Leigh and Art lived east of here a few doors down. I remember that day, because it was odd she didn’t wave, and she was always friendly, even to an old fart like me. I’ll be honest. A woman that good-looking you look forward to seeing even at my age. I didn’t think anything of it until the cops asked if I had seen anybody drive by that morning. Since I spend my time in here or out back by the pool, I didn’t see anybody but her that morning. I was in the front, cooling down from my run, and that’s what I told ‘em.”

  There is no moving this bunch. Even without her father’s story, it is clear Leigh is lying her ass off by claiming that she was at the church between nine and eleven-thirty.

  “Did you know Art?”

  “Hardly at all,” Tyndall says.

  “He jogged some in the afternoons. I saw him in church occasionally.”

  “No kidding,” I say, dumbfounded by the number of people who attend Christian Life. Tyndall doesn’t seem the type, but then neither does Chet Bracken or Rainey.

  “I didn’t realize you were a member.”

  Tyndall grins, showing a set of dingy teeth that look to be his.

  “They take old people.”

  Until recently, that’s mostly who I figured went to church. I wonder if he knows any gossip, but to his credit, he discourages me by saying he really doesn’t know much about anyone there except a group he sees regularly, which I take to be his “family.” I thank him and leave, but not before giving him a card and asking him to call me if he happens to remember anything else about that morning. He flips it on the table beside his chair as if I were not the first person to make this request, but to get rid of me he says he will.