It’s a mood, she thought. It will pass.
PMS.
Except it was nearly two weeks until her next period.
Teresa sat on the bed and punched the TV remote. “Condom recall. Next on Eyewitness News after these commercial messages.” Not tonight. Another channel. Lorna Dun on Fixed Bayonets, with the latest political potpourri. She tossed her blond mane and beamed at the camera. “My next guest will be Alicia Barbara, the genius crime reporter from CourthouseSquare and feisty anchor for The Courthouse Square Nightly Wrap-up,and we will be talking to Alicia about the upcoming trial of the skel who brutally murdered Edgar Parlance, a crime that made Real America cry, and how it will affect Congresswoman Poppy McClure’s political prospects this fall. This savage, whose name I refuse to mention, will be prosecuted by Poppy’s husband, James Joseph ‘J.J.’ McClure, the head of the Homicide Bureau in the South Midland Attorney General’s office, who many call the best prosecutor in the Midwest. Poppy as you know is a regular guest on Fixed Bayonets, and she will be a frequent visitor to the courtroom where the trial will take place. What you may not know is that the savage will be defended by Teresa Kean, another frequent guest on this program, and former head of Justice for All, the victims’ rights organization. I’ll be asking Alicia why a victims’ rights lawyer would defend such a savage, and I know Alicia well enough to predict that she will not try to fob me off with that innocent-until-proven-guilty nonsense that liberal apologists for criminal behavior are always spouting. Someone close to Teresa Kean recently passed away, someone very, very close, and maybe that grief can explain her aberrational behavior in taking this case. So. Alicia Barbara. Next.”
Not next. Not ever.
M flossed his teeth with L’s pubic hair.
I must remember that, Teresa thought.
She stretched out on the bed, a naked forty-something woman whose body was beginning to show the signs of aging’s wear and tear, a naked forty-something woman in a city, in a state, where she had never been, a naked forty-something woman in a hotel room where the glasses and the towels and the ashtrays and the sheets and the lamp shades and the stationery in the desk and the notepads on the telephone table and even the bedspread she was lying on were monogrammed with tiny rhinoceroses. She felt as if she were going to be trampled by a herd of wild rhinos.
Maybe if I count them I can go to sleep, she thought.
What am I doing here?
Never leave me lonely.
Tell me you love me only.
TWO CONVERSATIONS
“Tell me what she’s like,” J.J. said.
“Smart,” Poppy said. “Tough. Like a lot of people in Washington.”
“Smarter than you?”
“No.”
“Tougher?”
“No.”
“That’s it?”
“I don’t really know her, J.J. I’d see her. That’s what you do in Washington. You see people. You don’t know them. You really don’t want to know them. Sometimes they’re useful, most times they’re not.”
“So you keep them in the bullpen.”
“That’s one way of putting it. Her father was a Mob lawyer. He defended someone named Jacob King.”
“A big someone. By all accounts.”
“Big, little, it’s the same thing.”
“And before Jacob King he was a prosecutor who sent two guys to the chair. One more than I have. Mob guys. Pandro Cohen and Giusseppe Joie. Joey Joey, he was called. Sometimes Joey Twice. I’d have to say the criminal element back in those days had more picturesque names than Percy Darrow.”
“Maybe that’s why the Mafia hired him. So he wouldn’t send so many of their people to the electric chair.”
“A possibility.”
“She worked with him.”
“The reports I get are that she was pretty good.”
“Then what else do you want to know?”
“I want to know why she left Washington, Poppy. I want to know why she took this loser case. She was a victims’ rights bureaucrat. Now she’s defending the most infamous murderer of the last ten years. There has to be some reason.”
“Someone died in her bed. Someone she apparently had never met until that night. Someone she met at a White House dinner. He had a heart attack. He was sixty-something. Dead when EMS got there. People talked about it. Then they didn’t. She wasn’t that big a player. Something else came along. If it hadn’t been for the White House, nobody would have cared.”
“You are telling me that’s why she left Washington? Because she was embarrassed?”
“You don’t believe it.”
“No.”
“Maximiliano.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s my father’s name. Maximiliano. Maximiliano Vasquez.”
“Allie, keep your eye on the ball. The Max I’m interested in is Max Cline. Not your father Maximiliano.”
“You don’t think that’s funny?”
“Think what’s funny?”
“That my grandfather named my father Maximiliano.”
“Okay. I’ll bite. Why is it funny?”
“J.J. How many Mexicans name their sons after the Emperor Maximilian?”
“What has that got to do with Max?”
“He’s got the same name as my father.”
“Max is Maximiliano Cline?”
“No. Forget it. I just thought it was interesting. Max. Maximiliano. It’d never occurred to me before.”
“Are you jerking me around, Allie?”
“I work for you, J.J.”
“Then tell me why Max tied up with this woman. With this trial.”
“Max doesn’t confide in me. What he does, he does.”
“You want to go back to the PD?”
“They wouldn’t take me.”
“Exactly.”
“Meaning.”
“Let me know what you know.”
“I always do, J.J.”
CHAPTER SIX
MAX
I like to read the profiles of newly minted CEOs in Forbes or Fortune or Business Week, the only magazines you seem to find in the waiting rooms of dentists and doctors these days, leading me, admittedly a terminal hypochondriac, to the unfortunate, if highly speculative, conclusion that the M.D.’s and D.D.S.’s spend more time worrying about their investment portfolios and sheltering strategies than they do keeping up to speed on the latest innovations in anticoagulants or PSA counts or colonoscopy procedures or the advantages and disadvantages between generic and proprietary medications. Anyway. The cover photo is usually of a man in his late forties, with the start of a weight problem, a widow’s peak or a comb-over beginning to go gray, wearing a blue suit and a frown if he wants to impart the cold distant numbers-cruncher look. Or shirtsleeves and riotously colored suspenders if he wishes to appear youthful and dynamic, the Turnbull & Asser gaiters suggesting the influence of a younger second trophy wife who probably gives good head, the first he has received since the birth of his third child by his first wife, who was more into motherhood and PTA than head, and in fact never really liked to do it. On the cover, the new CEO’s hand rests on a globe, signifying his company’s international synergy, or he is on the assembly line with the latest fiber-optic communications system, or in front of a picture window with a fleet of air-express cargo carriers in the background. The slash line is usually as peppy as the photograph, ending with an obligatory exclamation mark: UNICON’S BOB MACDONALD: “BACK OFF, UNCLE SAM!”
Inside the story relates how Bob MacDonald, the only son of an electrician and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers shop steward named Sam MacDonald of Mattoon, Illinois, and Sam’s homemaker wife, Harriet Winsted MacDonald, left Purdue with a degree in business and electrical engineering, and went to work in the Topeka plant of Harvey Engineering (later UniCon). Bob was already a family man, with his wife, Nancy, a high school sweetheart, at his side, along with daughter Rona, who was followed by Bob, Jr., and Sam, who has Down’s syndrome
, the tragedy of Bob’s life (Bob’s second wife, Lanna, is chairperson of the National Down’s Syndrome Foundation). Bob advanced rapidly up the corporate ladder on the finance side, his fiery personality and ruthless cost-cutting catching the eye of UniCon’s grand old man, Evans Harvey, who picked him out of the pack and groomed him to be his successor, supplanting Ev Harvey, Jr., who told his father he wanted to go off and do his own thing. Now here is the point. These twenty years only take three paragraphs in the profile, a fat three paragraphs, but still just three paragraphs. We have had two wives, Nancy, who seems to have evaporated into thin air, and Lanna, whose hair is tinted ash blond and who is deep into public-spiritedness, three children, Down’s syndrome, cost-cutting, plant closings, union busting, and all of a sudden Bob MacDonald, the electrician’s son out of Mattoon, Ill., and Purdue, is saying, as if he is some kind of corporate Dirty Harry, “Back off, Uncle Sam!”
What happened?
What exactly was it that caught the eye of Evans Harvey? Where did Lanna, last name LaVecchia, come from, and how quickly did she fit in or, to be more precise, take over? Why was Lanna the chairperson of the National Down’s Syndrome Foundation and not Nancy, the mother of the Down’s child? What did Sam MacDonald, the shop steward for the International Brotherhood, think of his son’s union busting? In what way was Bob MacDonald ruthless? How was his personality fiery? Who did he roll over, push aside, whose ass did he kiss? What precisely was Ev Harvey, Jr.’s, own thing, and what exactly was the cost to UniCon of sending him off to do it?
These are the questions never asked and of course never answered in Forbes and Fortune and Business Week. The questions I have about these CEOs, however, are not unlike the questions I have when I try to contemplate, try to parse, the relationship between Teresa Kean and J.J. McClure.
How did I miss it?
What was I not seeing?
And was I willfully not seeing it?
Of course Regent had a lot to do with it.
REGENT—A PLACE FIT FOR KINGS—POP. 3,679.
Regent gave it traction.
Loomis County is corn and sorghum country, along with some cattle that ranchers fatten up for the slaughterhouses in Kiowa. It’s not exactly cowboy work these ranchers do—branding, riding fence, mending wire, like Paul Newman in Hud—it’s more like stuffing geese for the foie gras, but you see them at the Bunkhouse, a karaoke bar in Regent, wearing their sunglasses and straw cowboy hats and boots and belts with big turquoise buckles, picking their guitars and singing “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” along with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings on the video. Every few minutes when Teresa and I were driving down from Cap City, the Top Forty on the car radio was interrupted by the latest crop reports and commodities prices. After the dust settled, Alicia Barbara, who rode the story all the way from CourthouseSquare and The Courthouse Square Nightly Wrap-up to a three-year two-million-dollar contract on Fox 5, invoked Willa Cather, one Sapphist to another, as it were, the toxic tyranny and social straitjacket of the small prairie town, and all that moral-of-the-story crap. The fact is, I never much liked Willa Cather and her prairie wisdom. I had to read her when she was required tenth-grade reading in South Midland’s high schools, and I never liked the archbishop, never believed Ántonia, never was interested in those obscure destinies. There was a Lady Bountiful, house-on-the-hill aspect to Cather that I couldn’t stand, the woman of quality from Red Cloud, Nebraska, casting her cold eye on the lower orders of the Great Plains. You notice she cut out for New York first chance she got.
Forget Willa Cather.
Back off, Uncle Sam.
It happened.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Clyde Ray said he did not drink coffee.
Clyde Ray said he was opposed to stimulants.
He had arranged the seating so that he was facing the picture window in the Lovat Hotel restaurant and coffee shop. It was called Auntie Pasto’s and promised “Italian Kwee Zeen.” Clyde Ray’s eyes never met Teresa’s or mine, but slowly swept back and forth, covering the Regent town square and Loomis County Courthouse across the street as if he were checking for snipers in no-man’s-land.
Clyde Ray said there were several things he wanted to make clear.
Clyde Ray said that the parts of the Bible with which he disagreed had been added by the Jews, and that Yahweh permitted polygamy, allowing him to marry, in addition to his legal wife, not only another woman, but that woman’s three daughters, including the youngest, who was rising thirteen.
Teresa did not blink. The things that Clyde Ray wanted to make clear were not on her agenda.
She asked Clyde Ray how he happened to be on County Road 21 the night Edgar Parlance was murdered. Clyde Ray said he was on Yahweh’s mission, and that Yahweh’s laws took precedence over the perverted laws of Mammon. Teresa persisted. But you did see the car. It was not a car, Clyde Ray said. Excuse me, Teresa said, it wasn’t a car? It was a pickup, I said quietly. A 1989 Ford 4x4 with a four-pin trailer-tow harness, Clyde Ray said as if by rote. He hesitated. His scan had picked up a fat woman in a lumber jacket exiting the basement door of the courthouse. She walked with the rolling gait of a sailor home from the sea, her girth making it difficult to put one leg directly in front of the other. Clyde Ray stopped talking until she climbed with effort into her van, making it on the second try, then backed out of her parking place, and drove off. There was a shotgun in the rifle rack over the steering wheel.
1989 Ford 4x4 with a four-pin trailer-tow harness, Clyde Ray repeated finally. Traveling at seventy-eight miles an hour, Clyde Ray said finally.
Not seventy-five miles an hour? Teresa said. Not eighty?
Seventy-eight miles an hour, Clyde Ray said. How can you be that precise? Teresa said. I am invested with the spirit of the Archangel Michael, Clyde Ray said. I see, Teresa said. And this Ford 4x4 with the four-pin trailer-tow harness had a bumper sticker? Teresa said. Fornicate the telephone company, Clyde Ray said. Teresa nodded, repeating as if to herself, Fornicate the telephone company. And this was at what time? she said after a moment. Two-forty-seven, Clyde Ray said. You looked at your watch? Teresa said. I am invested with the spirit of the Archangel Michael, Clyde Ray said. I’m sorry, Teresa said. I forgot. She stirred her coffee idly, watching the steam rise from the cup. Just one more question, Mr. Ray, she said after taking a sip. I’m sorry if I keep coming back to this, but I’d like to pin down exactly . . . exactly . . . what you were doing on County Road 21 at two-forty-seven a.m. last November the seventh?
I was on Yahweh’s mission.
And what was the nature of mission you were conducting for Yahweh?
The questions of an unbeliever from the mongrel world do not need to be answered by a disciple of Yahweh, Clyde Ray said.
“Do they really practice polygamy?”
“Not in any formal way. The authorities from the mongrel world tend to frown on that sort of thing.”
“What do you think he was doing out there at two-forty-seven in the morning?”
“Stealing something. Or looking for something to steal. Or bringing back something he had already stolen.”
Teresa held her coffee cup in front of her face. “That seems unequivocal.”
“When I was with the A.G., we were always looking for ways to prosecute that bunch. They have an encampment on the other side of the river. It’s easier to get into Fort Knox than to get in there. Loony stuff. Yahweh sanctions bestiality, sodomy, torture. Only you never catch them at it. They’re getting ready for Armageddon.”
“That’s not illegal.”
“The stealing is. At one time we figured, all in, a hundred and twenty grand. Cattle. Hogs. Farm machinery. Construction equipment. Not easy to steal, not easy to hide. They were like night riders. They’d slip into Kansas, Missouri, the neighboring counties, justifying everything they stole as guerrilla warfare for the greater glory of Yahweh. Here’s the beauty part. They’d fence it for ammunition, weapons, clothing, even food, stockpiling it f
or the ultimate conflict against the enemies of Yahweh. We never could get close to them. And no one ever jumped ship. They were too afraid of what might happen to them. Or their many wives. Or their even more many children. We’d hear stories about crucifixion.”
“Stories,” Teresa said.
“Seeing Duane’s car is not a story.”
“Fornicate the telephone company,” Teresa said.
Marjorie Hudnut, the town librarian and historian, said that William Clarke Quantrill had once wintered in Regent. That would have been 1863, Marjorie Hudnut said, then that summer Mr. Quantrill and his raiders rode into Kansas, into Lawrence, Kansas, actually, and they rounded up one hundred forty men and boys, tied their hands behind their backs, and I am sorry to say, they killed them all. They had a reason, Eugene Hicks said. Well, yes, I suppose, Marjorie Hudnut said. She was a tall bony woman and she did not seem quite convinced that Mr. Quantrill and his raiders had cause to murder one hundred and forty men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas, in the summer of 1863.
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