In this state, people drive a hundred miles to buy a pack of cigarettes at two in the morning.
That was the beginning.
Or the beginning of the end.
At any rate, it was the only thing she put down about the trip where she saw the twister west of Quantum and east of Higginson. I suppose you could say, if you believed in such things as signs or premonitions, that the twister west of Quantum and east of Higginson was a warning, an augury, bad weather ahead.
Or as it happened in this case, behind.
Jim Hogg.
Jim Hogg County, she had said suddenly one night.
It had come up during one of those interminable discussions we would have at the end of the day when we were sick of preparing the case we would present on behalf of Duane Lajoie.
And would talk about anything that came into our minds.
The town of Randado, she said. Population fifteen. My father said it sounded like the perfect place for witness protection. Nothing but chaparral and mesquite. Ninety percent of the county is of Mexican descent.
How did he ever hear about it?
I saw an item in the Times. The National Briefing. Maybe a paragraph. No more. Wire service. Some local case. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Follow the money right into Randado, Jim Hogg County. The local sheriff bugged the newsroom of the weekly newspaper. You know where he put the bug? In the Mr. Coffee machine. He didn’t figure the machine would melt the bug.
The rat would have to speak Spanish, I said. As always, I was being practical.
So send a Spanish-speaking rat, Teresa had said.
Max is devious.
No Enigma needed there. I hadn’t realized how much of an impression I had made on her. No, that’s not true. I know I had, as she had made a similar impression on me. What I hadn’t realized was how she tried to sort it out behind the RECIPES password. Although what she was actually trying to sort out was not so much me and our relationship, as herself. Computer therapy, Stanley had called it.
Absolutely.
I thought I was vetting him [she wrote], but of course he was vetting me as well. He had decided to do the case even before I walked into his office in the Law Building (there was something so creepy and Central European about that place, it was like the headquarters of the secret police, no one ever quite met your eyes, the men in the elevators all had dirty suits and oily hair and ties that had food stains), pending his opinion of whether I was an idiot or not. Max has a way of dividing the world into idiots, or most people, and those he reluctantly identifies as not idiots, a number he claimed he could count on seven of his ten fingers. I apparently passed, although I think it was touch and go for a while. I took the liberty, he said after we felt each other out, neither of us giving away much, of checking for any outstanding warrants against Alice Faith Todt.
In other words it had never occurred to him that I wouldn’t ask him to be my co-counsel. He was already on the case. Behind his head, I could see a huge elephant balloon floating by his window, like one from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, part of a two-day Midwestern Republican Conference a block away at the Rhino Carlton-Plaza where I was staying. It gave me a moment to gather my thoughts.
Carlyle, I said carefully.
The warrants identify her as Alice Faith Todt.
That was Max’s way of telling me there were warrants.
How many? I said. Or recall that I said. So much has happened that I am no longer sure of anything I said that far back. Or even that it matters. But I do know this. One of the first things Daddy taught me when I went to work in his law office was that unless you know the answer already, you never ask “Why?” It is a defensive question, and a defense counsel always has to be on the offensive. “Why” will come out soon enough. Asking Max why he had checked to see if Carlyle had any outstanding warrants would probably have meant he would have struck me from his magnificent seven.
Three, he said. A bad check and an illicit credit card in Osceola County, a DUI in Loomis County. All three would have run through Juvenile Court. But she never showed up for any court appearance. Went to New York City and made her fortune. She could be arrested, if she plans to be here, as I suppose she will, and if she wants to get a coffee-table book out of it, with a sty in her eye and all. She’d probably just get probation, a little community service, but you never know. People might like to make an example of a little rich girl who thinks she’s better than the law. J.J.’s run it through the computer, bet on it.
Allie Vasquez was the reason I could bet on it, of course. I didn’t know then that it was Max who had hired her when he was running the Homicide Bureau in the A.G.’s office, or that she was a night school law student of his. J.J. was her boss now. And then some. It seemed the definition of split loyalties.
J.J. used to work for me, Max said. He knows how it’s done. Max was not really vain, but he did like to point out that J.J. had once been his number two and, implicitly, that had it not been for Gerry Wormwold, J.J. still would be. He doesn’t want to embarrass Alice Todt, he said, but she starts blowing Carlyle smoke and getting her face all over the tube from the courthouse steps, schmoozing with Alicia Barbara, say, he’ll try to neutralize her, and the best way he can do that is, and it will pain him to have to do it (Max was milking the moment), probably on those same courthouse steps, probably with that same Alicia Barbara, J.J.’s tight with her, is to say that she forged a two-hundred-dollar check at Food Treasure on the account of someone called Waylon Madden. Bought two liter bottles of Diet Pepsi, two bags of Fritos, and an economy-size package of Butterfinger Bits. Total $11.27. She took the balance in cash. One hundred eighty-eight dollars and seventy-three cents.
It was as if he were reciting the figures to a jury.
There’s an additional little problem with Waylon, Max said, and this is where J.J. will really bust her chops if he can.
Is the problem with Waylon Madden that he was already dead when she went to Food Giant?
Food Treasure, Max corrected. He seemed a little disappointed that I was up to speed on Waylon Madden.
Right. He drove his car into a train with some other guy.
Kile Purdy, I said. Kile was driving. It was his car, actually. A 1986 Crown Vic. Lowered. Chrome mufflers. He hit a Burlington Northern grain train in Albion. They were both drunk.
Max’s expression did not change as I ticked off the details of the final moments of Waylon Madden and Kile Purdy. My answer to the Diet Pepsi, the Fritos, and the economy-size bag of Butterfinger Bits. On points, the sparring between us was even.
They spooned the two of them out of the Crown Vic, Max said after a moment. Alice Todt was so twisted out of shape she headed off to the Food Treasure with Waylon’s check.
I watched the elephant balloon bobbing up and down outside Max’s window, while on the street below a brass band was playing what I later learned was the SMU Rhino fight song over and over.
No big deal, Max said. She makes restitution to Food Treasure. Publicly. On her website. You pay for your mistakes, she says. It makes you a better person, she says. A stronger person, she says. I bet she tips a waiter two hundred bucks at dinner.
He didn’t know Carlyle. She claimed she never carried cash. She always had an assistant around to pay the bills and take care of the tips, ten percent, not a penny more. Your business is Carlyle, she told the people who worked for her. The people who worked for her watched her cash outlays, or they didn’t work for her long. She had grown up poor, and she was never going to be poor again. I am sure she thought of me as an employee, and I suppose I was. Except I made sure that her check had cleared before I took up the business of Carlyle.
Food Treasure funds a Reading Lab program statewide, Max said. It’s their good work. She gives the Reading Lab ten computers. In memory of Edgar Parlance. The credit card beef will just disappear, she’s Carlyle, it was an honor to have her use my Visa card, dude, she just borrowed it, man. The DUI nobody gives a shit about, they can’t even get a Mothers A
gainst Drunk Driving campaign going in this state, the neutralizer is neutralized, and now we’ve just got Duane Lajoie to deal with.
And Edgar Parlance.
He’s dead, Max said. He’s not our concern.
That was a stupid goddamn thing to say.
As it turned out.
CHAPTER THREE
Now I had an associate [Teresa wrote, a later journal entry] , but the question was who was the associate, Max or me. The last few years I had spent not in a courtroom but on public forums or testifying before congressional committees or matching wits on those ideological gong shows with people like Poppy McClure or Lorna Dun or Mark Berquist, the youngest member of the Senate and pride of South Carolina, already being promoted as a future Republican candidate for president, in 2012, say, or 2016. It wasn’t the life or death you have before a judge and jury, acquittal or prison, it wasn’t even smart, it was just bitchery on parade, thirty minutes less commercials. Take Lorna Dun, of course always called Lorna Doone. She was the anchor of a nightly half hour, seven to seven-thirty, called Fixed Bayonets, and the name tells it all. It had the highest rating of any news discussion show on cable, mainly because of her. She was blond, she was always called beautiful by men, never women, she wore vinyl miniskirts, had a voice that would cut metal, and would say anything, especially if it was hurtful, innocence or irrelevance no defense. At Harvard she had been president of the Crimson, and in her column had outed the football captain, a black tight end and Rhodes Scholar candidate from Baton Rouge named Gaylord Gaines, “Lordy” everywhere on campus except in Lorna Dun’s column in the Crimson, where he was always called “Gay” Gaines. She also gave out the name and address of the gym where he worked out in the Roxbury ghetto, a place called Buff & Buns. The private life of a public person was not put in a blind trust, Lorna liked to say, and if a football captain preferred to work out at Buff & Buns, his fans in the Harvard community had a right to know. Right to know was a big item with people like Lorna, except when someone claimed the right to know about them. I never had much trouble with her (or with Poppy McClure, who occasionally filled in as host of Fixed Bayonets). I had a quick tongue and I was able to keep my private life more or less private, at least until Jack Broderick died in my bedroom.
What I am trying to say is that for all my alleged confidence I wondered if I had been away too long, if I had become nothing more than an aging media bunny who could only cut it on Fixed Bayonets and not on a capital murder case with a defendant even my co-counsel thought should go to the electric chair. I hated to think what my father would have said about my failure to check out Carlyle’s outstandings. It was almost the first thing he had me do when I passed the New York State bar exam and came to work for Kean & Kean. What’s he got that will stick to him, Daddy would say in that staccato machine-gun voice of his, the big stuff will take care of itself, but the little stuff you miss now will come back to haunt you, Teresa. He would never admit it, but I think he liked having me there, liked teaching me the ropes.
He could be surprisingly indirect. Sometimes we’d take the afternoon off and slip into the multiplex near the office on Twelfth Street, usually to see a gangster movie or a newspaper movie or a courtroom movie. With a box of popcorn in his hand, he’d talk out loud to the screen, pointing out errors of procedure. It was like a postgraduate course in criminal law. Now what’s wrong with that scene? he would say. I thought it worked, I whispered, because I always whispered in a movie theater, even if it was empty. As a movie it works, but I’m talking real life, Teresa, he would say patiently, loud enough that I hunched down in my seat so no one would know he was talking to me. But he did. Look, De Niro throws the wise guy into the trunk of the car, slams it shut, then bang, bang, bang, he shoots the bad guy through the trunk door, what do you think is going to happen? At that point I didn’t care, but I didn’t say it, I was just trying to be invisible. What’s going to happen, he said, is the car’s going to blow up, because the wise guy is in the trunk, and the trunk sits right on top of the gas tank, a bullet hits the tank, no more wise guy, no more car, no more De Niro, no more movie. I had to admit it made sense. And after a while I began to like these afternoons at the Twelfth Street multiplex, and began to pick up things before he did. The point of the exercise was not to be a smartass about some Hollywood movie, but to learn how to think fast on your feet, to look for the opening that will help you out. Mr. Director, there are two bodies on the front seat of that car, they have each been shot in the back of the head, but the car is a two-door coupe; where does the hit man hide until he shoots them in the back of the head and how does he crawl out of the back seat past the victims whose brains are now splashed all over the windshield and messing up the seat leather, you better get yourself a four-door sedan and reshoot the scene.
Very good, Teresa, my father would say, and offer me some popcorn, but it’s too expensive to reshoot the scene just because some hotshot from Yale Law School says so.
It was his way of expressing approval, I thought at the time. But now I can’t help wondering if those afternoons at the movies were more than just a time-out, if instead they weren’t his own unique way of introducing me to, and preparing me for, the kind of life my real father had led, secrets that Daddy was sure that I would one day unravel on my own. I can’t believe it was unconscious. He lived in the present, and his empathy for introspection or the subconscious was almost nonexistent. At trial he loved to shred the pretensions of expert psychiatric witnesses. What he liked to do was lay in things, markings, he called them, markings that he could return to in order to show a trail of connections. All you have to do is tell the jury a story, Teresa, remember to keep it simple, a Mob hitter would know better than to shoot someone stuffed in the trunk of a car. And if this marking ultimately led me via the circuitous way the mind worked to dwell on his relationship with Jacob King, I suspect all he would have said was, It’s a good story, honey; follow the trail, go with it.
CHAPTER FOUR
I suggested that we drive down to Regent before we interviewed Duane Lajoie at the Correctional Center. We should talk to some people in Loomis County, I said, and see if we can get a better handle on our client than we have now. Allie had told me he was threatening to gut Bryant Gover for dealing him out, not an immediate or likely eventuality since the Department of Corrections had placed Gover in the maximum-security wing at Durango Avenue, on the other side of town. Max, Teresa said (we had progressed by now from Mr. Cline and Ms. Kean to professional intimacy), perps are always threatening to gut snitches. True enough. In my night-school-professor mode I had this impulse to instruct her, although in point of fact she and her father had tried many more murder cases in New York than I had in South Midland, murder here not being the cottage industry it was there.
Edgar Parlance, she said as she rose to leave. That jail time he did in Colorado.
Twenty years ago in the Canon City state pen. Did the crime, served the time.
Isn’t four years a heavy stretch for stealing a car?
In this part of the world, stealing a car is like rustling cattle used to be.
She persisted. No time off for time served?
No.
No good time?
He ought to be happy he wasn’t hung.
A smart answer I would come to regret. She did not seem to fret. I checked all the prison databases, I said, turning to efficiency. He doesn’t turn up again. Cross-indexed him with both Gover and Lajoie. No match. Anyplace.
Two other Parlances, Teresa said. A quick smile. So she had done her own computer search. I don’t know why I would have thought she would not have. Other than my compulsive hostility to strangers. Which is essentially everyone. Fred and Cato, she said. Cato had a lethal injection in Arkansas in ’91. Fred’s a hundred and one years old, in a state hospital in Au Train, Michigan. Cato was Haitian, Fred’s Caucasian.
It was the same information I had.
As long as we’re going down there, let’s close that circle, she said. C
an you get a court order so we can examine the place where he lived?
I nodded. In the not too distant past, this is what I had babycakes do for me.
I walked her to the elevator, and then down to the lobby. It had been years since I had been subordinate in a courtroom, and I was uncertain as to how I would react to being overruled. As we chatted desultorily, the small talk like a smoke screen, I speculated about the nature of her relationship with her father. This is not to suggest anything deviant, but I sensed a dependency, a need to please his memory, and I half wondered if I had been tapped to be his proxy in South Midland. It was one of the many things I got wrong about Teresa.
The sidewalks were a dozen deep with spectators. A block away, by the front entrance to the Rhino Carlton-Plaza, the elephant balloon had docked alongside the equally large balloon of the USM rhinoceros, both now floating to the hotel’s sixth floor. The banners hanging from every lightpost said, RHINO LAND WELCOMES MIDWESTERN REPUBLICANS. I could not recall the rhino balloon ever parading for a convention of state Democrats.
It was a turnout made for Poppy McClure.
She was sitting on the ragtop of a vintage Chrysler convertible at the head of the motorcade snaking its way toward the hotel. Beside her sat Clifton Snow, the aging movie-star president of the National Rifle Association, a huge Poppy Power campaign button pinned to his jacket. Poppy’s gift for the exorbitant gesture never faltered. Of course she had snagged Clifton Snow to make the keynote address to the Midwestern Republicans. They would share the front pages and lead the local news, even if he upstaged her with his movie-star smile and the rugged good looks that would not have been misplaced on Mount Rushmore. Confetti streamed from the windows above and the sun glinted on the highlights of the silvery hairpiece cemented to his skull. A testament to Elmer’s glue, I thought. He waved slowly to the crowds lining both sides of the street. He seemed to move in perpetual slow motion, the hand slowly rising, the craggy smile slowly enveloping his face. I tried to remember who said that movies were truth at twenty-four frames a second. His normal speed seemed to be sixteen frames a second.
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