Nothing Lost

by John Gregory Dunne

  “So I’ve heard.”

  I looked at the Courthouse Square cameras set up at either end of the jury box. Technicians with earphones linking them to a mobile unit outside were trying to synchronize their movements. “Is Poppy going to be here?”

  “You know Poppy. Last in, first out.” The edge in his voice was almost but not quite imperceptible.

  As if via a conjuror’s trick, Patsy Feiffer suddenly materialized at J.J.’s side, bustling with efficiency, her dusty rose courtroom suit perfectly complemented by a cream-colored blouse. Ostentatiously not acknowledging my presence, she began to ask J.J. a question about the demographic analysis of the jury pool.

  “You used to pick the first twelve that came out of the box, J.J.,” I said. “Having a confidence problem?”

  J.J. hesitated for a moment, then said, “You know my number two, Patsy Feiffer, Patsy worked with your friend Maurice.”

  Patsy Feiffer stared at me as if I were unclean, which I suppose by her lights I was. I had been fired by the A.G. and I was a homosexual. It was the second time that morning that what some would call my sexual irregularity had been questioned, this time implicitly.

  “I’ve seen you around the courthouse in Cap City. Always on the run. I’m told you’re J.J.’s eyes and ears.” After a moment I added, “Or someone’s.”

  Her expression did not change. “J.J., Judge Tracy’s here, she’s going to want to meet counsel in chambers before court opens.”

  J.J. nodded, and when he seemed disinclined to respond further, Patsy Feiffer disappeared as if the conjuror had waved his wand a second time.

  “That wasn’t necessary, Max,” J.J. said.

  “It was fun though, wasn’t it?”

  “Patsy forgets everything except a grudge.”

  “Forewarned.”

  “Where’s your boss?”

  He was trying to see if he could rankle me, but Teresa was my boss, and I had signed on knowing she would be. “Taking care of some business.”

  In fact, I did not know where she was. We had checked in to the Motel DeLuxor the day before, and I could see the look of distaste as she surveyed the gloomy rooms that would be our headquarters for the duration of the trial. I found the Motel DeLuxor invigorating, or to be more accurate, I found the prospect of what I hoped might be a vacation from Stanley invigorating. The grudging largesse of Alice Todt had allowed us to take over more rooms than we had originally planned. We had computers with passwords (“Northampton” was hers, “Lemberg” was mine, for the Galician railhead where the Kleinbaums began to evolve into Klein and then Cline), and e-mail and a fax and a printer and a shredder, all those things that in my pre-Teresa life as a defense attorney I found at Kinko’s. We had a secretary to answer the telephones we had installed independent of the motel switchboard (the calls to my office in Cap City were referred to the DeLuxor), an answering machine, a legal typist on call, and a retired deputy sheriff from Albion County to serve both as part-time driver and nighttime security. It was not that our files were at risk, but with the interest in the case high, Teresa thought it best to have a line of defense against the curious, or the malicious. That morning, she had woken me at six and said she was going jogging, and would meet me at the courthouse. I think she only wanted to be alone, to get her thoughts in order, like an officer in the trenches before he led his troops over the top in a hopeless and unwinnable battle.

  “Tracy hates tardy lawyers.”

  “I do remember that, J.J.”

  Ellen Tracy. Another knot in the skein.

  She had not become a lawyer until she was forty, and she ran a tight no-nonsense courtroom. Alice Todt was right. She did have a mustache. She was tiny and she wore huge white square glasses that drew attention to the shadow of hair clearly visible on her upper lip. She had been brought up poor in a hamlet called Dead Center, because it was in fact the dead center of the state of South Midland. When she was sixteen, she married a hitchhiker passing through Dead Center, and forty-three years later, they were still together, the former hitchhiker now a mid-level construction manager in the state Department of Roads. They had a son and a daughter, both now over forty, and when the children married, Ellen Tracy, who had never graduated from high school, took a GED and applied to SMU Law School, where she finished in the top ten percent of her class. For seven years, she was a prosecutor in Kiowa County, then spent the three years before her appointment to the bench in the Kiowa public defender’s office. She had seen everything, was not swayed by sentiment, and with her abundance of hard-earned common sense easily climbed the judicial ladder to senior-judge status. She ruled, she moved to the next order of business, always decisively, never ratcheted by doubt. Any decision was better than indecision. She did not tolerate delay, showboating, or imprecision in examination; a contempt citation was something she would promise once, and order without hesitation a second time. When she was assigned the Parlance trials, she immediately ruled that the difficulty in finding an impartial jury in a jurisdiction as small as Loomis County, where everyone seemed to know or be related to everyone else, mandated that the jurors and their alternates be selected from the larger pool available in Kiowa County. A panel of potential jurors would be bused to Regent, and those finally chosen would not be sequestered until the start of deliberations, although, Judge Tracy suggested, people used to the bright lights of Kiowa might consider having the freedom of Regent a form of sequestration.

  For Ellen Tracy, that passed as humor.

  “You’re late, counsel,” Ellen Tracy said when Teresa knocked on her door and entered the judge’s chambers. Teresa was carrying her briefcase and a large orange-and-white shopping bag with cord handles. A not auspicious start.

  “I apologize, Your Honor. There was a demonstration outside the . . .”

  Ellen Tracy interrupted. “Then you should have made allowances for it, Miss Kean. This is not New York, it’s not Washington, where I think you are used to practicing. Here you run on my schedule, and my schedule is meeting in chambers if necessary at eight-thirty, court opens at nine, it ends at four.” She ran the words on together, one long sentence without pausing for punctuation. Stop. Breathe. And then the example she expected the attorneys to follow, always somewhat self-serving. “I got here at six-thirty.” Having driven herself down from Kiowa, listening to a Great Book on tape. I don’t think Tracy had actually read a book in forty years, but she was famous throughout the legal community for having listened to most of the prominent works of modern literature on the high-end audio system in her Land Rover as she dashed around to the various state circuit courts, and she was not above sneaking in a quote or two without attribution if she thought it appropriate to a situation at hand. Happy families are all alike, she might say without a trace of irony, or Isn’t it pretty to think so, and only the better-read members of the state bar would know that the obiter dictum was a literary reference. Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled, she once said to a callow young attorney who was appearing against me, and it was meant as a rebuke as much to me as it was to him. I knew she had not thought that up herself, and I finally found the remark in a book of quotations. It would have been madness to suggest to her that I was not aware of her affinity for Samuel Johnson; that I found it was victory enough.

  Teresa was still in her sights, a target of opportunity. She pointed to the shopping bag at Teresa’s feet. “Are you planning a shopping expedition at the end of the court day, Miss Kean? Are you going to take her to the mall, Mr. Cline?”

  “I’m not sure there is a mall in Regent, Your Honor.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Mr. Cline.”

  “I beg the judge’s pardon.”

  A smirk creased Patsy Feiffer’s lips. Tracy was on her in a flash, fresh prey. “You, what’s your name?”

  “Patsy Feiffer, Your Honor.” Her voice was tremulous. “Appearing with . . .”

  Judge Tracy cut her off. “I know who you’re appearing wit
h. Your given name is actually Patsy?” Incredulity was just another arrow in Tracy’s quiver. “Your parents had the effrontery to christen you Patsy? Patsy must have stuck in the minister’s throat.”

  “My given name is Patience, Your Honor.”

  Judge Tracy considered the name. “Patience.” Her head rocked back and forth. “Well, Miss Feiffer, you smirk in my courtroom and I will lose whatever patience I have allotted to give you, and that is not much.”

  J.J. tented his fingers and stared at Judge Tracy expressionlessly. Even had he been so inclined, which I doubt, he would not have come to Patsy Feiffer’s defense. This was a rite of fire, he had seen it before, as had I, it was something to survive. Like a lioness marking her territory, Tracy was staking out the perimeters of her authority, and woe unto anyone who violated her space.

  “Now, Miss Kean, back to your shopping trip.”

  Teresa was rustling around inside the bag. She pulled a straw boater from it, and two large white campaign buttons. The Poppy Power boater, the Poppy Power buttons. J.J.’s eyes flickered, and he inhaled and exhaled quickly.

  “If it pleases, Your Honor . . .”

  “It pleases.”

  “Congresswoman McClure, Your Honor, was passing these . . .” Teresa seemed to search for the right word, but I suspect she had it at her fingertips. “. . . artifacts . . .” She let the word hang there. “. . . artifacts out on the steps of the courthouse. When the bus from Capital City with the jury panel arrived, her staff gave these hats and pins to them as they got off the bus. And it appears that a Mr. Erskine, who works for Congresswoman McClure, I think as chief of staff, although I think Mr. McClure here is more able than I to define his proper job designation . . .”

  I have to admit that I had doubted Teresa’s ability to persevere in the adversary culture of the courts, but she was good, she was very good, she had rocked both J.J. and Judge Tracy back on their heels, and she made it seem as if it was one of the most distasteful things she had ever been forced to do.

  “Mr. McClure . . .”

  “Mr. Erskine is the congresswoman’s chief of staff, Judge.” He made it sound as if Poppy were the congressional representative of his district, a distant figure whose hand he had shaken once or twice at campaign events he had been forced to attend.

  “And Mr. Erskine did what?”

  “The marshals who escorted my client from the Correction Center this morning told me that Mr. Erskine had tried to give them these artifacts.” Teresa waved her hand vaguely toward the boater and the buttons on Judge Tracy’s desk. “But they of course are officers of the court, and they refused.” No one spoke. “I would hate to think that the jury panel has been contaminated,” Teresa said hesitantly after a moment.

  Tracy did not hesitate. “I don’t need some New York lawyer to tell me how to do my job, counsel.”

  “I apologize, Your Honor.”

  “You have exhausted your quota of apologies this morning, is that understood?”

  “It is, Judge.”

  Tracy ran her tongue over the furze of mustache. “All right. I’ll have the bailiffs go into the jury room and remove anyone who is wearing either this . . . this hat or one of these pins.” With a ballpoint pen, she moved first the boater and then the pin to the edge of her desk. “I hope we have enough left to sit a jury. In the meantime, I’m imposing a gag order on these proceedings that is absolute and unequivocal. No speeches outside the courtroom. No appearances on television. No interviews or comments. Any objection?”

  The four of us shook our heads.

  “Any deviation from this gag order is grounds for contempt, and I will remand to custody that person or those persons who violate it. Understood?”

  The four of us nodded.

  “Now Mr. McClure.”

  “Judge.”

  “You are in sort of a special category here.”

  J.J. tested the ice. “In what way, Your Honor?”

  “Your reputation for charm precedes you, Mr. McClure. I hate charm. Do we understand each other?”

  The ice was too thin. “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “I’m going to bar Congresswoman McClure from the courtroom. Any objection?”

  J.J. tapped his thumbs together. “If Your Honor so orders.”

  “I do.”

  I knew another shoe was going to drop.

  “I suppose I can’t include Congresswoman McClure in this gag order, but . . .” She had our attention. “. . . if she intrudes on these proceedings by word or deed . . .” She nodded crisply in the direction of the boater. “. . . while in the jurisdiction of this court, I can hold you in contempt, Mr. McClure.”

  J.J. shot forward in his chair. “I’m not sure you can do that, Judge.”

  “Try me, counsel. You can appeal this decision, of course, but I have a good record with the appellate division in this state. If you so desire, I’ll bring the court reporter in and we can put this in the record.”

  J.J. pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger and held it for a moment before speaking. “That won’t be necessary, Your Honor.”

  Tracy looked at each of us in turn. “Okay. Let’s go to court.”

  We rose and headed for the door.

  “Miss Kean.”

  Teresa turned. “Your Honor . . .”

  “Welcome to South Midland.” Tracy was putting on her robe. Even in high heels she was scarcely five feet tall. “And the court wishes to thank you for bringing this matter to its attention.”

  So that was it. I don’t know what J.J. said to Poppy, but there was clearly no reason for her to stick around if her presence would compromise the case against Duane Lajoie, not to mention complicating her ambition for higher office, whatever that office might be. She released a pro forma statement about greasing the wheels of justice, a Willie Erskine special, then went back to Cap City and from there to Washington and what the statement called the nation’s first order of business, holding the line against the poison of collectivism. Her banishment was a contentious topic on The Courthouse Square Nightly Wrap-up (“Viewers are encouraged to e-mail their remarks and comments to alicia@cswrap.com”), where the response encouraged Alicia Barbara to mention Poppy at the top of the show three nights running. Tracy threw Alice Todt out of the courtroom, and after two days of jury selection, she swore in twelve jurors—five women and seven men; two of the women and one male juror were black—and four alternates, all four women, two of them black. She told them she liked things to move along quickly and that the proceedings should not last longer than two weeks. It was a Thursday morning and unexpectedly she delayed opening statements until the following Monday, giving everyone a free four-day weekend. The jurors returned to their homes with instructions to be back in Regent by Sunday evening, and the press decamped to Chicago, Washington, New York, and points in between. The recess she ordered allowed Judge Tracy to drive halfway across the state to Dead Center so that she could preside over the fiftieth anniversary of its incorporation as a municipality in Central County.

  Ellen Tracy never understood how the mundane decisions she made that day affected the way things turned out.

  By the time Ellen Tracy filed a formal complaint with the state bar association recommending that disbarment proceedings be initiated against Teresa Kean, LLC, and James Joseph McClure, formerly chief deputy attorney general in the Office of the Attorney General of South Midland, the play was long finished.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT PAGES 1–188

  IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF LOOMIS COUNTY,

  SOUTH MIDLAND

  THE STATE OF SOUTH MIDLAND

  (CASE NOS. 2391, 2392, 2393, 2685),

  PLAINTIFF, vs. DUANE LAJOIE, DEFENDANT.

  Proceedings heard before Hon. ELLEN TRACY, Judge, at

  Regent, Loomis County, South Midland on March 14.

  THE COURT: Mr. McClure, you may begin.

  MR. MCCLURE: Thank you, Your Honor. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my name is Jam
es J. McClure. I am the chief deputy in the homicide division of the Attorney General’s office up there in Cap City, which as you know is so ably run by the A.G., that’s our shorthand for attorney general, Mr. Jerrold Wormwold. I’m going to be prosecuting this matter, along with my co-prosecutor, Patience Feiffer, you see her over there at the prosecution’s table with all those files and law books stacked in front of her. Where to begin? I think the best place to begin is for you to take a good look at the defendant, Mr. Duane Lajoie, whose current address is the Capital City Correction Center. Look at him. Look at him closely. Look at the way he avoids your eyes—

  MS. KEAN: Objection.

  THE COURT: Sustained. Move on, counsel.

  MR. MCCLURE: This story begins not with the defendant, but with the good man he is accused of so wantonly murdering and disfiguring. His name was Edgar Parlance, and he was a man like so many of us, trying to make do. He was a black man, an African American, an American, and to the defendant that was enough to maim and dismember and kill him. You are going to hear things, good people of the jury, that will make you sick to your stomachs, hear those things in the most brutal and specific detail, and you will see photographs of this good man, Edgar Parlance, that will make you turn away in horror. It is no wonder that Duane Lajoie would not look at you earlier, he knows what you are going to see, he was responsible for what you are going to see, and see him now, brazen, looking at you finally with that terrible smile, he seems to think that the crimes with which he is charged are funny, and not, as they are, an affront to man and the God we worship.

  It was Thanksgiving season. The season for giving thanks. Edgar Parlance was walking that early morning out near Loomis Falls, as he often did. Edgar Parlance was a walker. There was scarcely a foot of ground in Regent that he had not explored. When the weather was kind, Edgar Parlance liked to sleep out by the falls under the stars. . . .

  THE COURT: Miss Kean.