Nothing Lost

by John Gregory Dunne

  MC: Waste management in the cathedral of crime.

  DL: What’s that, some kind of faggot joke?

  TK: Duane, we were talking about you and Bryant, how you met.

  DL: He cold-cocked someone with a pool cue. I mean, that’s what kind of violent person he is, a stranger, someone he didn’t even know. It’s like what he did to Wonder.

  MC: Who’s Wonder?

  DL: It’s fucking nobody. Some guy. Another guy.

  TK: Let’s concentrate on Gover and the pool cue. When you met. Who did he hit with a pool cue? Where?

  DL: You know Feathers.

  MC: The keno joint in Chippewa County.

  DL: What’re you, some kind of geography teacher, or something?

  TK: You were at Feathers. And?

  DL: This dude was flashing a picture of Merle.

  TK: Merle Orvis?

  DL: Has that cunt been talking to you?

  MC: What kind of picture?

  DL: I told her to keep her mouth shut.

  TK: The photograph—

  DL: She was giving him a blow job.

  MC: Wonder?

  DL: Forget Wonder, he’s—

  TK: Who, then?

  DL: Who what?

  TK: Who was she fellating?

  DL: What’s fellating . . .

  MC: It’s a lawyer’s word for blow job.

  DL: I got to remember that. Is that classier than sucking off?

  MC: Judges think it is.

  DL: Well, that’s the only fucking thing she knows how to do, fel-lat-ing, and she’s no good at that.

  TK: Let’s get back to the pool cue. At Feathers.

  DL: So this guy, Ty or Ray or something like that, he’s showing this picture of him and Merle around the bar, her fel-lat-ing him like, and I hit him with a beer bottle, and he comes at me, him and some other guy, he’s got these like huge arms, like fire hydrants, I’m holding my own, I don’t need nobody, and all of a sudden, they both go down, Bryant’s broken the fucking pool cue on the back of their heads, he can’t pass up hitting somebody, that’s what kind of person he is, he doesn’t even know Ty and the other guy, and we get out of there, we get in my pickup, and shit, we are gone, we go to Merle’s, we do some stuff, she gives him a blow job.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The rest was more of the same.

  It gives you an idea of what Teresa and I had to work with, and how even if he were innocent, which he wasn’t, how difficult it would be to sell his story to a jury. We might be able to prove, although it was unlikely, that he did not cut or peel or shoot or stomp, but the fact was that he had been there, and the best spin we could put on it was to show that he was an unwilling participant, in fear of his life.

  An old story that never worked.

  His teeth were chipped and broken and looked as if they had never entertained a toothbrush. The space between his two front teeth was the same space that was the trademark of his half sister. All the time he was talking he was breathing his homemade buck fumes in our faces, Windex and raisins picked from prison rice pudding and fermented together. Another premium product in the inmate economy.

  Bzzzz.

  I had to admit it did have a nice sound.

  Punctuation. A period at the end of the sentence.

  We weren’t surprised by his riffs and free association and stream of consciousness, if he indeed had ever been what is generally conceived of as conscious. So there is no point in printing out the whole transcript. A taste of it is like a swallow of buck. Nor would there have been any point in telling Duane that the mother who left him at St. Fintan of Cloneagh’s Foundling Hospital in Halloween County had once been a keno waitress and part-time hooker at that same Feathers in Chippewa County, had married her first husband Bruiser Todt there when she was seventeen and already pregnant by someone other than the Bruiser. Pregnant with the half sister who was paying for his defense.

  Coincidence as destiny.

  Duane Lajoie, Bryant Gover, and Merle Orvis. For two weeks— or, to be exact, twelve days—they were the three musketeers of Loomis County, rolling over the back roads at such high rates of speed in Duane’s old Ford 4x4 that the pickup received four speeding summonses, twice when Bryant Gover was driving, once when Merle Orvis was at the wheel, with Boy on her lap sucking a breast.

  All for one and one for all until they began ratting each other out.

  Each summons had mentioned the FUCK THE TELEPHONE COMPANY bumper sticker that Clyde Ray had seen on County Road 21 the night Edgar Parlance was murdered. Freeing Brutus Mayes from having to do much Dick Tracy sleuthing. There was only one pickup in Loomis County with that particular signature, and it was registered to Duane Lajoie, Wuthering Heights Mobile Home Park.

  Merle Orvis’s trailer.

  Somehow Teresa and I were able to piece together a narrative from the gospel according to Duane. Which, as it turned out, was really not that much different from the gospel according to Bryant.

  Except when, at the meaningful moments, the roles were reversed.

  It was as if they were pitching the same movie with two different leading men.

  Bryant had camped out in the back of Duane’s pickup. They shoplifted groceries at the Food Treasure and skipped out of Domino’s and KFC without paying and sang karaoke at the Bunkhouse and took turns fucking Merle Orvis. The bed of the pickup, according to the sheriff’s impoundment papers, was a landfill of crushed six-packs and discarded fast-food containers and dirty laundry and cigarette butts and roaches and used condoms, each item like an artifact discovered on an archaeological dig. The underclass—a migrant civilization deliberately forgotten.

  Another story in this saga.

  So. Here is Duane’s story. The short version.

  Bryant was driving. On the road out by the falls. It was after midnight. There were no other cars. Duane was drunk. Two liters of malt liquor and a pint of apple brandy. He was pretending to be asleep against the passenger door. He was afraid of Bryant. Bryant was equally drunk and had already puked in the cab. His vomit was all over the steering wheel, the dashboard, the windshield, and Duane’s trousers. Bryant said he would cut Duane if he didn’t stop complaining. Bryant spotted a man walking by the side of the road. The man turns and puts out his thumb. He was colored. Bryant shakes Duane and says let’s have some fun with the nigger. He guns the pickup and steers it straight at him. The man jumps away. Bryant turns and chases the hitchhiker into the field off the road. He was playing with him, man, Duane Lajoie said. Blocking the nigger off and knocking him down, I thought the fucking truck would get stuck in the mud, I tried to get him to stop, he wouldn’t do it, he was having too much fun, now he wasn’t even trying to hit him, you ever seen that bullfight movie, the fucking cow gets all tired and shit, he can’t move, and then the bullfighter takes the knife and shit and sticks him, that’s what Bryant was doing, he was playing with him, and finally the nigger just went down on his knees and then he rolls over and he’s just lying there, man, he could hardly breathe, it was fucking awful, I felt really sorry for that nigger. And Bryant gets out of the truck, he takes a tire iron out of the toolbox and he goes over and he hits the nigger and what I’m doing is I’m trying to slide into the driver’s seat so I can get the fuck out of there, but Bryant’s got the keys and he comes after me, and he says he’ll kill me if I don’t help him, and then this nigger gets up, I never seen anything like it, he comes at me, like it was me who hit him, not Bryant, and Bryant hits him again, and puts him down, and then he gets some pliers out of the toolbox and he’s got this box cutter and he gives me the tire iron and says if he moves hit him, you don’t move, I’ll skin you, and he starts slicing the nigger’s pants and he slices a piece of skin and he takes the pliers and pulls this piece of skin off like it’s a strip of bacon, you know what I mean, you buy a quarter pound of bacon, you peel the strips off, that’s like what he was doing, then this nigger just gets up, I just want out of there, man, and Bryant says deck him, I drop the tire iron and Bryant pi
cks it up and drops him, then comes after me, he is going to brain me for sure, and the nigger gets up again, I never seen anybody that tough, he’s got pieces of skin flopping all over the place, and Bryant hits him again, and he goes down, and Bryant stomps him with his boots and shit, and then he starts to pull his tongue out with the pliers, and the nigger still tries to get up, and that’s when Bryant shoots him with that .38 he always carried, it tore the back of his head off, he checks the nigger out to see if he’s dead, then he takes this knife, it’s a huge fucker, it’s like one of those swords the soldiers wear in those movies before they had guns, when it was just bows and arrows and swords and shit, and he cuts something on the nigger’s chest, he says to me kick some dirt over him, and I say no, and he says I’ll put you down there with him, I’ll cut your tongue out, and so I kick some dirt on him, we’re about ten miles from the fucking road, nobody’s going to see him, but I want to keep my tongue, and that Bryant’s crazy, and when I’m doing that dirt he gets back in the truck, he’s going to leave without me, he’s going to leave me out in that field there to take the fall for offing that nigger, so I chase after him, I’m hanging on to the fucking tailgate and finally I pull myself on board, I’m lying in the back with all this shit, and he stops, Bryant, he gets out of the truck, I thought the fucker was going to shoot me, and he says we got to get rid of all this shit. So we finally get back on the road, it seems like hours, Bryant must’ve chased him halfway to Nebraska, I thought we’d get stuck before we ever hit the road, but then we do, and we head for the falls, and Bryant says we can get rid of the stuff there, they’ll never find it, he wanted to keep the .38, he said that fucker had got him out of a lot of tight spots, and I say fine, you ought to keep it, they ever get to him and he’s carrying that dude, they’ll pin killing that nigger on him, and not on me, and that’s how it happened, it was Bryant, it was Bryant’s idea, it was Bryant that did it, then the fucker snitched me out.

  It was implausibly plausible.

  Or plausibly implausible.

  Not that it mattered either way.

  Divers found the .38-caliber DS-II Detective Special, the Tennessee Toothpick, the box cutter, the pliers, and the tire iron underneath Loomis Falls. There were no fingerprints on any of the weapons. Each appeared to have been wiped clean before being thrown into the falls, and the water apparently removed anything else incriminating that might have remained. In the attempt to retrieve the weapons, one of the divers drowned, and the Worm was trying to find some interpretation of the state penal code that would allow him to charge Duane Lajoie with the diver’s wrongful death.

  “You get everything you wanted?” Warden Hennican said at the guard station controlling Duane Lajoie’s cellblock. He had that hard little smile of contained outrage that career bureaucrats in the Department of Corrections automatically seemed to cultivate. In a warehouse of criminals, moral superiority, however superfluous or spurious, was an additional weapon. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Cline . . .” He ignored Teresa, it was as if she was not there. “. . . you used to send people here, that was before you began defending the people who are sent here, but I like to believe you’ve still got a bit of the old you when you were a prosecutor, and so it’s the old you I’m talking to, if I make myself clear—”

  “Goodbye, Warden,” Teresa interrupted. She picked up her attaché case.

  “. . . that man is a troublemaker . . .”

  “People in prison tend to be,” Teresa said. She moved to the door.

  We walked silently through a series of security checkpoints. At each stop, a corrections officer examined Teresa’s attaché case. It was as if she might have been slipped something between checks. Finally, for a moment before the gate was open, we were alone. “What did you think?” Teresa said quietly. “About our client?”

  “I think he should’ve cut a deal before Gover got his. He wouldn’t be looking at the Bzzzz if he had. What do you think?”

  She waited a moment before she spoke. I knew what she was going to say. It was on my mind, too. “I think a lot about Edgar Parlance.”

  The gate to the prison exterior swung open.

  You saw what happened.

  Lorna Dun was there with her camera crew and Alicia Barbara with hers, each of them shouting questions at Teresa and me. Poppy McClure was not there, but Teresa saw Willie Erskine cheerleading a crowd of demonstrators who were waving placards scrawled with red-meat slogans, KILL THE BASTARD or A BULLET BEHIND HIS EAR. It was just another mini-riot that the Cap City police did not expend too much energy trying to put down, viewing it in the same good humor with which they viewed the downtown wreckage after the Rhinos beat the Cornhuskers or the Vols. Teresa slowly pushed her way to my car, with me in my rugby mode acting as her blocker, I have no comment, please, no comment, I’ll have a statement on behalf of my client at the appropriate time, please, no comment. As we reached the car, she was hit in the side of the face and crushed against the SUV by a KILL THE BASTARD sign, and as she righted herself she found herself staring into a Nikon held by Alex Quintero, who managed to squeeze off half a roll of film before she found safety in the front seat. It was only then that we saw Carlyle. She grabbed Alex by the arm and led him to a scrum between two groups of demonstrators.

  “Who knew we were coming here today?” I said, pushing the SUV through the throng draped over the hood, with some satisfaction making Alex Quintero jump out of the way, the satisfaction diminishing when I realized it was the kind of shot he was looking for.

  “Does it matter?” Teresa said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  About Alice Todt, aka Carlyle: Her sense of propriety was absent, and I intuited but did not act upon the danger I suspected she posed. She was after all financing the defense, such as it was. I always had difficulty calling her Carlyle, and in the aftermath find it impossible to do so.

  She and Alex Quintero did produce and publish their coffee-table book, and hired an uncredited ghost to write the text. They called the finished product Fit for Kings, from those signs on every road leading into town: REGENT—A PLACE FIT FOR KINGS—POP. 3,679. For a long time I would not open the book. Not to read it, however, was like not opening a long-locked closet because of what one feared might be found behind the door, and so I finally picked it up as I was trying to assemble this record. The book was everything I expected it would be—mendacious, meretricious, and self-servingly dishonest or evasive about the events in which Alice was a catalyst, shot against the seamier backdrops of Loomis County, not the falls or the epic, undulating prairie. Theirs was a mean, marginal Regent of trailer parks and pit-bull breeders, of karaoke bars and the Burlington Northern switching yard, of a cemetery overgrown with weeds and a dump where old tires burned around the clock. It was a place that seemed entirely populated by people wearing jeans that rode lower than the anal crack and soiled T-shirts that did not cover the belly button; by men and women with 56-inch waists, the product of bad weather, too little exercise, too much television, and too much sugar-saturated junk food; by women with black eyes and men with missing teeth and swastika tattoos.

  In the book, I found things I had chosen to forget, observations I had opted not to confront, not least about the forbidden subject of class. I remember the predatory bookers for the daytime tabloid talk shows, cruising Loomis County in stretch limos looking for anyone who had known Bryant Gover or Duane Lajoie, or better yet had fucked or sucked one or both. The talent pimps offered these gullible souls, dressed like streetwalkers, craving this last best chance for a way out of Regent, a ride to Kiowa and first-class plane fare to Chicago or New York, a night in a big city, bright lights hotel, a prix-fixe steak-house dinner, drinks not included, and an economy ticket home. Those who signed up did not understand that to the bookers they were only human debris allowing their producers to fill another mud-wrestling half hour purporting to show the underprivileged at play. When the red light on the camera dimmed, they would return to the anonymity of the vegetable counter at the Food Treas
ure, or the perils of single motherhood, or the weekly visit from the domestic-abuse counselor, with a memento matchbook from the Howard Johnson Motor Inn to show for their visit to the high life, a swizzle stick from Sullivan’s on Broadway, and an eight-by-ten glossy signed by Montel or Jerry Springer.

  Fat blustery Merle Orvis with her teardrop tattoo was on the jacket of Fit for Kings, smoking a cigarette and nursing Boy, his tiny little pecker nearly erect as he stood tippy-toed on a wood stump and hung like a monkey to his mother’s pendulous breast. It was celebrity of a sort, or at least Merle Orvis chose to think so. She called Alice Todt Carlyle, or Carl, sometimes Carly, and said that Carly was her best friend and asked Carly to be Boy’s godmother, although she did not know exactly what a godmother’s duties were, except to give presents, you know, like on birthdays. Carly said she would check with her attorneys and her financial advisors, and if there were no contractual obstacles, she would consider the request; Alex are you getting this? Alex Quintero captured it all, roll after roll. The book was a slippery New York item, a Christmas present artifact for decorated living rooms, the artist dropping in on Midlandia, and it made me fiercely protective, outsider though I was myself, of the place I called home.