Besides which she’s the best investigator I have. Even if she is doubling for Max. She doesn’t even bother to deny it anymore.
Back to Maurice Dodd. And Bryant Gover. And Duane Lajoie.
“I will bear witness as those two animals are strapped into our electric chair,” Maurice told the Times reporter, “and I won’t lose a wink of sleep over it.” To the Times, this made him a “typical flinty Midwesterner.” J.J. wondered if he knew any typical Midwesterners. Let alone flinty ones. “Rigid” was the word he would use to describe Maurice Dodd. Obdurate. Infrangible. Unadaptable. Adamantine. That had a good sound to it. Adamantine. Not a Times word. Too many syllables. Maurice’s soft side, according to the Times, was that he cultivated roses in his solar-heated backyard greenhouse, where even his wife, Ana, was forbidden entry. In the solitude of his greenhouse, he prepared opening statements, summations, and rebuttals, and tested them “before a jury of tea roses, white Pascalis, and buff-colored Chanelles.”
It was the kind of cute factoid the media loved.
J.J. did not believe it for a second.
Maurice the Adamantine. Maurice the Unadaptable. They were like the names of medieval popes. Except Maurice Dodd did not like Catholics all that much. Only slightly more than he liked Jews. No wonder he was such a favorite of the Worm’s. Patsy Feiffer now trailed Maurice around the courthouse, looking like a mix-and-match pastel cocker spaniel. Maurice had selected Patsy to be his second chair. Time for that girl to move up, he had told J.J. She’s too smart to keep on doing scutwork. Imagine being patronized by Maurice Dodd, J.J. thought. He did not tell Maurice that Patsy was doing scutwork because that was all she was good at. Such airs, Allie said. She acts like she’s Sandra Day O’Connor all of a sudden. Waiting for the White House to call. You think Maurice is banging her, J.J.? Slapping that stump across her tiny tits? Maybe in that utility closet, you remember the one. On the fifth floor.
Someday, Allie, you are going to go too far.
Don’t count on it, J.J.
In his new grandeur, Maurice Dodd had vehemently objected to Ellen Tracy’s decision to let Courthouse Square cover the trial live. Cameras in the courtroom will turn the proceedings into “a circus sideshow, O.J. in Loomis County,” he told the Cap City Herald. J.J. was sure that what really bothered him was not the cameras but the kick in the slats he had received from Alicia Barbara when she wondered why a journeyman prosecutor was in charge of the case. He should have jollied her up, J.J. thought. She was a lesbian, however, and sexual deviation was another category on Maurice Dodd’s Does Not Fly list. A pervert, he had called her. That was also how he had referred to Max Cline when Max was his boss. As good a reason as any for Max to tell him the fragging story. A couple of things to remember about Alicia Barbara, other than that she was gay. The accent on her last name was on the second syllable, Bar-bare-a, and she took pains to correct your ass if you pronounced it Barbara, as in Santa Barbara. She also wanted in the worst way to get off cable and onto network, and she figured the only way she could do it, considering the not-too-well-kept secret of her sexual orientation, was to be the hard-charging bitch of the airwaves. She worked non-stop, was mean as a snake, tapped off-the-wall and sometimes surprisingly reliable sources, and was probably less inaccurate than anyone else J.J. ever met on the beat, which he guessed fell into the category of left-handed compliment. Maurice Dodd’s objection over allowing Courthouse Square into the courtroom made an implicit point that J.J. thought did not need to be made: He was as dumb as a post, as well as adamantine, and the proof of it was that he had antagonized Tracy from the get-go, not something you want to do with a trial judge, however open-and-shut the case may appear to be. “My name is Tracy, not Ito, Mr. Dodd,” Ellen told him in open court, as reported in both the Cap City Herald and the Kiowa Times-Ledger, “and it would be your advantage to remember that.”
“I beg the court’s pardon” is what Maurice should have said, but he didn’t, because he was too thick to realize that a judge might not wish, even inferentially, to be compared with Lance Ito. The antagonism of the judge would more than counteract the sympathy he received from his empty sleeve. “No bargains, no deals,” he told The New York Times. Another dumb thing. “We’ll do what we have to do” is what he should have said. But then Maurice isn’t asking your advice, is he? J.J. said to himself. The fact was, he didn’t think the case against Gover and Lajoie was all that hot. There were no witnesses, the gun that had blown a hole in the back of Edgar Parlance’s head hadn’t been found, nor the pliers that ripped out his tongue and peeled the skin from his thighs. J.J. ran over all the arguments in his mind. Never publicly. He would never do anything that would seem to undercut Maurice Dodd. Who was looking for any reason to complain to the Worm. No word. No gesture. It’s going well, he told Poppy when she called. Maurice is doing a bang-up job. “Bang-up” was not a word he normally used. He’s putting his ducks in a row. Putting his ducks in a row, Allie had said in elaborate disbelief.
There’re too many pieces missing, Allie said. He needs to cut a deal. Zip it, J.J. said. Have one of them roll over on the other, Allie continued as if he had not spoken. Take the dime. I said zip it, J.J. repeated. Still, he thought, it’s a case I’d rather prosecute than defend. A jury would be looking to convict, especially with all the press coverage, and with the jurors’ chance for their fifteen minutes of celebrity, all those long thoughts and softball questions on the steps of the Loomis County Courthouse. But Allie was right. It would have been easier to prosecute if one of the accused flipped and testified against his partner. LWOPP for the flipper, the death penalty for the other. The likeliest to rat was Gover, since it was Lajoie’s pickup with its FUCK THE TELEPHONE COMPANY bumper sticker that the witness had seen making tracks down County Road 21 outside of Regent the night of the murder. Gover was a sweetheart, a hyperactive slow learner who would use whatever weapon he could get his hands on—hammer, pencil, knife—to beat up and injure other children in school. He had done one-to-three for road rage after he got drunk, beat up his girlfriend, threw her and her daughter (not by him) out of the car, and drove off. Then he had decided to pound on her again, backed up full speed, and ran over the little girl. She was fifteen months old.
A tragic accident was the defense his court-appointed lawyer put forward.
Involuntary manslaughter the jury ruled.
Three years.
IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF LOOMIS COUNTY,
SOUTH MIDLAND
AGREEMENT
The State of South Midland agrees not to pursue the death penalty at the sentencing of Bryant William Gover. The State will not present any evidence of any aggravating circumstances in connection with Mr. Gover’s sentencing.
All other pending charges against Mr. Gover will be dismissed without prejudice and will not be refiled except in the event of noncompliance with this agreement.
Mr. Gover will agree to testify against Duane NMI Lajoie when requested to do so by the State. He will give complete and truthful testimony and answer all prosecution inquiries to the best of his ability.
Bryant William Gover will be sentenced for the killing after the sentencing of Duane NMI Lajoie.
For the safety of the Defendant and as soon as is practicable, the State of South Midland will assist and make all reasonable efforts to have Mr. Gover transferred to an institution in another state.
Maurice Dodd was defensive about the plea deal he gave Bryant Gover. LWOPP was “no bargain,” he told the Kiowa Times-Ledger. “Life without possibility of parole is a life without sunlight, a life without hope,” he told the Cap City Herald. “If that’s your idea of a deal, it’s not mine,” he told Alicia Barbara. “Are we a little testy?” she had retorted live on Courthouse Square. “Mr. Gover’s testimony is going to strap Duane Lajoie into the electric chair, and I will be there to applaud,” Maurice told Channel 3, Channel 8, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and The New York Times.
Except he would not be there to applaud.
Dodd
Death Raises Stakes in Lajoie Trial
By ALICIA BARBARA
WEB POSTED 16:42 CDT
Capital City, SM (Courthouse Square)—South Midland Attorney General Jerrold (“Gerry”) Wormwold will be the principal speaker Friday at the funeral of Maurice Dodd, the career prosecutor in the Attorney General’s office who died suddenly yesterday of anaphylactic shock after being stung by a bee.
Dodd, 57, was scheduled to present the state’s case against Duane Lajoie, the ex-convict accused of murdering Edgar Parlance in a grisly dismemberment killing that riveted the nation last Thanksgiving weekend.
Dodd was an avid gardener, in spite of having lost an arm in the Vietnam War, and cultivated roses in a backyard greenhouse at his home here.
His wife, Ana, said he had never been allergic to bee stings prior to this incident.
Anaphylactic shock closes the air passages and can cause cardiovascular collapse if not treated immediately with antitoxins. When Dodd did not appear for dinner, his wife went to the greenhouse, where she found her husband lying unconscious.
Paramedics said Dodd was dead on arrival at University Hospital.
The chief witness against Lajoie is expected to be Bryant Gover, who was with him the night of the Parlance murder. In a plea deal negotiated by Dodd, Gover will escape the death penalty in return for his testimony. Sources close to the case say that Gover will claim that Lajoie was solely responsible for the murder and threatened to kill him if he did not participate.
Gover’s provisional sentence of life without the possibility of parole—or LWOPP, as it is known in legal circles—is contingent on his not recanting the story he told Dodd and co-prosecutor Patsy Feiffer. If he recants, the state can ask the judge to reopen the penalty phase of his case.
Final sentencing will be delayed until the conclusion of the Lajoie trial to ensure that Gover satisfies the terms of his sentencing agreement.
Wormwold has not indicated whom he will appoint to replace Dodd as lead prosecutor. The most likely candidate is Deputy Attorney General J.J. McClure. McClure’s wife, Congresswoman Sonora (“Poppy”) McClure, is expected to challenge Wormwold for the Republican gubernatorial nomination this summer.
The rivalry between the two prospective political candidates complicates Wormwold’s choice, since he passed over prosecutor McClure when the case was first filed.
Wormwold denied that political considerations influenced his choice of Dodd.
“We’ll do what we have to do,” J.J. McClure told Alicia Barbara on the Courthouse Square Nightly Wrap-up, when she asked what facts not currently known he might present in the state’s case against Duane Lajoie.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
There is always a moment when, even if doubt is not entirely laid away, you go with your instinct.
A moment usually inconsequential, except that it remains glued to your memory.
This was that moment with Teresa.
That day early in February when we first met.
Remember earlier when I said I had lost four front teeth playing rugby back in my days in the A.G.’s office. Establishing my butch credentials. I had a bridge made, and after it was installed I discovered I could use the bridge to some effect with strangers, or when I was examining or cross-examining witnesses. I would snap it out with my tongue, balance it on my lower lip, and after a moment or so push it back into place. I wanted to see how people reacted to the gap in my mouth, whether they looked away or went off message on whatever story they were trying to spin.
Of course I did it to Teresa.
She did not take her eyes off me.
I waited.
“Bad dentistry?” she said finally. “Or a stagnant genetic pool?”
“I think he should fry,” I said.
“You don’t equivocate.”
“He skinned somebody alive. That takes work. You really have to mean it. It’s not like you lose your temper and clip somebody. It’s not like you stick up a 7-Eleven or jack a car and get scared and start blasting. It’s not like you knock up someone, you’ve already got a wife, maybe two, you never got divorced, what’s the big deal about bigamy, you think whacking the new girl will solve the problem. It’s not even you want to see what it feels like, or if it gives you wood.” I was trying too hard, and she knew it, but she played along, taking in every word, as if committing them to memory. Slow down. “Skinning someone alive is hard work. These two weren’t vascular surgeons, they didn’t go to fucking medical school.” I was over the top again. “You slice the skin around the thighs with a box cutter or whatever they used, then you pull it away with pliers, you work up a pretty good sweat. Edgar Parlance en brochette, is that what they had in mind? The world will be a better place without Duane Lajoie.”
“Then you don’t want to get involved?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You just want to make your feelings known.”
“Look. I was a prosecutor for sixteen years. The last case I did was an eighty-six-year-old woman who wrapped her twin sister’s head in a plastic garbage bag. The sister was incontinent. She peed in the bed they shared. Nobody wanted to do it. ‘The old lady’s going to cool, cut her some slack, nobody likes to have someone piss on their leg.’ The slack I cut her was twenty-five-to-life. Meaning she would’ve been one hundred and eleven if she served the full ticket. She died in the ambulance taking her from the courthouse to the prison ward at Osceola County Hospital.”
She was not interested. “Why’d you get fired?”
“I didn’t get fired.”
“Excuse me, you quit.” She waited. “Why?”
“I was looking for new opportunities. New situations. A chance to meet new people.”
“You don’t have an attitude deficit, do you?”
“Never been accused of it, no.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Then I came highly recommended?”
“Recommended.”
“By whom?”
She ignored the question. “In my job, my last job . . .”
“The one you quit.”
“Resigned.”
“ ‘After eight fulfilling years.’ That was in your statement.”
The noncommittal stare.
“I found it on the Net. After you called.” My way of telling Teresa Kean that I had a few cards of my own. “You’re a big ticket on the Net. A lot of hits. The hundred best this, the fifty best that. Women of the bar. Best person to sit next to at another boring Washington dinner party. That’s a recommendation to put in your personnel folder. Margaret Dudley’s best pal. I guess you never sat home alone with a BLT and a Bud Lite.”
“You guess wrong.”
“So you had those eight fulfilling years, and you wanted to explore new opportunities too, right?”
She did not bite. All business. “When I had that job, I naturally had occasion to talk to lawyers all over the country.”
“And my name came up.”
“You had a problem with the attorney general.”
“I didn’t have a problem with the Worm. The Worm had a problem with me.”
“Because you’re gay.”
“Queer. Gay’s a comfortable word straight people use. It makes them feel a little less uncomfortable about something they would never admit makes them uncomfortable.”
“You have any other opinions you want to share?”
“The Godfather.”
“Whose godfather?”
“Marlon Brando. Vito Corleone. Al Pacino. Michael Corleone. That Godfather. Sentimental crap. A Mafia Gone with the Wind.”
She waited to see where this would lead.
“Vito and Michael,” I said. “Tragic gumbahs. An oxymoron.”
A beat. “That’s original.”
“Fredo and Sonny, on the other hand, they’re the genuine articles. One’s a fink, the other’s a psychopath.”
Teresa Kean’s gaze was guarded, wary. You could almost hear the tumblers in he
r brain clicking, searching for the combination. She was dressed with the kind of simplicity that only a great deal of money could buy. The same with her makeup. No jewelry. Her hair was pulled back, tinted auburny, except for a hint of gray at both temples. Vain, but not too. Pretty, but not threateningly so. “And that, I guess,” she said finally, “brings us back to Bryant Gover and Duane Lajoie.”
She had insisted on seeing me in my office in the Law Building across the street from the Capital City Courthouse. The Law Building is not an edifice that immediately summons the phrase “the majesty of the law.” Eight stories of dirty white brick, some of which have popped out and shattered on the setback balconies; one effect is to make the balcony look like a stale wedding cake under attack by rodents. There is a 24-hour Kinko’s in the lobby, the three rickety elevators are prone to getting stuck between the floors, sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for five hours, and the building directory lists a doubtful assemblage of bail bondsmen, PIs, steno services, bucket shops, knockdown tax consultants, ambulance chasers, has-beens and never-will-bes. Murray Lubin and I were the best lawyers in the building, in the sense that we got the more difficult court-assigned cases. This was because the judges in Superior Court, most of them politically connected apparatchiks, at the least recognized a degree of professional competence, and, in the interest of what they liked to call justice, nominated us to defend the indefensible. The real lawyers in Capital City, in other words those not sentenced to the ghetto of the criminal courts, resided in the semi-skyscrapers on Rhino Plaza, four blocks farther downtown, in the AgriCorp Building and the Continental Corn Tower, offices with thirty partners and paneled conference rooms and a law library with the leather-bound decisions of the South Midland Supreme Court, as if those decisions were worth collecting, offices with paralegals and notary publics and crosscut shredders and clients absent tattoos and needle tracks on their arms, clients who only wanted to circumvent the tax statutes and the realty laws. My office in the Law Building was the nondescript workstation of a single practitioner, with access to the public men’s room and a secretary I shared with three other attorneys on the same corridor. For the common touch, I kept two dog-eared John Grisham paperbacks, neither of which I had actually read, prominently displayed in the metal bookshelves, each flecked with Post-its that seemed to vouch for my legal bona fides; this was a venue where Grisham carried more legal weight than Benjamin Cardozo, my fellow Jew. The only thing of value, besides myself, was a partner’s desk, circa 1850, that I had found at a rummage sale, listed at forty dollars. Its provenance, no less suspect than anything else in this part of the world, was that it had come across the plains in a Conestoga wagon, and then been badly burned in an Indian raid. For a few hundred dollars I had it refinished and releathered, and I had developed a genuine affection for it. A law school acquaintance now specializing in wills and inter vivos trusts in the Continental Corn Tower had offered to “take it off my hands for six thou,” his too-casual words betraying the hustler’s intent, but I had already had it appraised for twice that. I think he had convinced himself that I would jump at the deal because he thought I could use the money in my downscaled post-A.G. phase and in the environment where I now practiced. I did not actually tell him to fuck off, but that was the subtext, and it was clearly understood.
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