MS. KEAN: Thank you, Your Honor. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Teresa Kean and I am counsel for the defendant in this action, Mr. Duane Lajoie. Appearing with me as co-counsel is Max Cline. Now. You have heard the state, in the person of Mr. McClure, lay out the case it will try, and let me repeat the word “try,” try to convince you it has against my client. You notice I say “the case.” I say “the case” because the state has no idea what the facts are in this matter as they pertain to Duane Lajoie. Facts. Who. What. Where. When. In the absence of facts, the state relies on emotion. The state would like your power to reason, your ability to reason, to give way to emotion. And there is reason for emotion. The victim in this case was a good man. The crime against him was so horrible that it is almost impossible to assimilate. You would like to cast it from your minds and think good thoughts. My concern, ladies and gentlemen, is that the emotional issues, the goodness of Mr. Parlance and the ugliness of the deed done to him, will overshadow the facts as we will come to know them, the facts that do not implicate the defendant, Mr. Lajoie.
I direct your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to the spectator seats. I expect this courtroom has never been so packed. As you look at the spectator seats, you will see many familiar faces. Not people from Regent. Not people from Loomis County. Or Kiowa or Osceola counties. Not even many people from South Midland itself. No. The familiar faces are those who have talked to you, in many instances shouted at you, from your television screen. These familiar faces have told you what happened that awful night in November. The fact that they don’t know what happened is irrelevant. They have told you who is responsible. Again, they do not know. They have told you what the verdict will almost certainly be, given the facts of the case, the facts that neither they nor the prosecution know. These familiar faces who have invaded your homes have arrived at conclusions before a word of testimony is heard. Let us not pretend you are not aware of the tumult surrounding these proceedings. Have you jurors and you alternates all been on Mars since the events of last November that snuffed out the life of Edgar Parlance? Have you been on Jupiter? Uranus? I didn’t think so. So I daresay you are familiar with the phrase “plea bargain”—
MR. MCCLURE: Objection.
THE COURT: Overruled.
MS. KEAN: —with the phrase “cut a deal”—
MR. MCCLURE: Objection.
THE COURT: Let’s see where counsel is going with this, Mr. McClure.
MS. KEAN: The prosecution cut a deal with Bryant Gover because it could not make a case against Duane Lajoie, and Bryant Gover was afraid he would go to the electric chair if he did not cut a deal with—
MR. MCCLURE: I request a sidebar, Your Honor.
THE COURT: I don’t like sidebars.
MR. MCCLURE: Then I request a meeting in chambers.
THE COURT: No.
MR. MCCLURE: I would ask that the jury be excused.
THE COURT: No. But Mr. McClure, I’m going to sustain your objection. Miss Kean, you’ve taken this far enough. You can continue this line when the witness, Mr. Gover, is sworn. Agreed?
MR. MCCLURE: Yes.
MS. KEAN: Agreed.
By that Monday morning of opening statements, Teresa and J.J. had already been together for four days.
CHAPTER FOUR
The dream, she said.
You want to watch the game? my mother said. What game? I say. There’s always a game on Sunday, she says, I thought you might want to watch. No, I don’t want to watch the game, I think I should be getting back. Well, then, she says, and I look at her and she looks at me, and then I heard the shot. Correction. We heard the shot. You better go down to the barn, she says. Very quiet. Matter-of-fact. No excitement. Your father is so careless sometimes. He’s getting old, Jamie. (He’s not even sixty, he’s fifty-five, fifty-six, and she says he’s getting old.) I’ll go down and take a look, I say. And I walk out the door and out to the barn, walk, not run, as if I thought a car on the road had backfired, as if I had never heard a gunshot before. When I was a kid, I used to shoot at a fence post with that old Colt, my hands were so small I could hardly reach the trigger, and it had such kick it gave me a bone bruise in my palm. Some days when it rains I can still feel that bruise. I got to the barn and there he was, in the wheelchair, his head leaning over into the tub where he kept the scrub brushes, as if he didn’t want to splatter the blood, and here’s the thing, before he did it he ran water over the axe he used to kill the chicken we had for lunch, scrubbed it clean with a wire brush, and then hung the axe on the nail over the sink where he kept it. First things first. That was Walter.
Finish the dream.
What dream?
About your brother.
Emmett.
Yes.
His voice was a monotone.
Pushme, Jamie, pushmepushmepushmepushme, the pier jutting into the pond, blocking Walter’s view. Pushing him, holding him down, calibrating the seconds, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, all the way to fifteen, maybe twenty, twenty-five, even more, I can’t remember, Emmett’s capacity for holdinghis breath stretched to the extreme, and beyond. Then he was free, but he wasn’t gasping for air, no laughing, no againagainagain, just floating there facedown, and Walter, stretched on the rise, he’d fallen out of the wheelchair, he was grabbing tufts of grass, trying to pull himself down to the dock, it’s not your fault, Jamie, it’s not your fault, he kept on saying.
“It wasn’t. He’s right. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I held him under, Teresa. I knew what I was doing. I knew his legs had stopped kicking. He was trying to push my hand away. I had his life in my hands. It was mine to save or take away. I was like Caesar at the Colosseum. Thumb up, thumb down, the losing gladiator lives or the losing gladiator dies. Thumb down. Walter knew what I was doing.”
“Jamie, you were seven years old.”
“Almost eight, and I was drowning my brother. No. I drowned my brother. Deliberately. With malice aforethought. I wasn’t jealous of him. He wasn’t my parents’ favorite. There was none of that psychoanalytic crap. The fact is, most of the time Walter and Emily didn’t even know we were around, Emmett and me. I don’t think they knew the other was around, either. I can’t remember their ever having a conversation with each other. ‘You should get the tires rotated on the Plymouth, Emily.’ ‘I’ll get Fred to do it, Walter.’ That was the extent of it. Fred was the handyman. Fred Riggs. He drank. My mother liked him. I don’t mean they shared drinks or anything like that. God knows, not the other thing. He’d show up. Then he’d disappear. He didn’t have a phone. Fred just seemed to know when my mother needed him for some chores. The tires on the Plymouth needed rotating; there was Fred the next day, knocking on the kitchen door. ‘I think I ought to take a look at the tires on the Plymouth, Mrs. McClure.’ That’s how he pronounced it, ‘Miz.’ He wasn’t tugging a forelock. And he was never presumptuous, either. I suppose in a way he was like Edgar Parlance. Except he was white.”
“We said we wouldn’t talk about Edgar Parlance.”
“Right.” J.J. seemed lost in thought. “When she died,” he said after a moment, “Fred was the only other person at the grave. Except for the minister. He’d lost a leg, Fred. Diabetes, he said. He was living in a VA hospital someplace in Kansas.” J.J. hesitated, as if trying to decide if he should continue. “You know, Walter’s family had been in Parker County for a hundred years or more.”
“And Fred Riggs with one leg was the only person at the funeral.”
“Yes.”
“How did he get up from Kansas.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“What did she die of.”
“There was no reason not to.”
He was drifting away.
“Jamie,” Teresa said, “tell me more about Emmett.”
“What’s there to tell? He was only three. Emmett and I, we were like extras in the movies, bring on the kids, don’t be too cute, don’t look at the camera. And it wasn’t like I was trying to get Walt
er’s attention. You never knew Walter. He was the biggest pain in the ass in any room he ever wheeled himself into. I was seven, eight years old and I knew it. I think he knew it, too. And that was why he killed himself. Not because I held Emmett under. That was a factor, though. He wanted me there, too.”
Teresa was insistent. “It was an accident.”
J.J. drew the back of his fingers slowly over the her body. “A gun in your mouth is not an accident.”
“You’re angry.”
“I’ve never told anyone about the way Emmett died. I don’t share my life. So it must mean something that I told you.” Outside it had begun to rain. After a moment, he said, “Tell me about the man in Washington. The one who died at your house. Poppy says he’s the reason you’re here.”
“I thought Poppy came under the ground rules.”
It was as if he had not heard her. “Poppy said you’d never met him before. She said if there hadn’t been a White House connection nobody would’ve cared.”
“Poppy’s full of information.”
“Now you’re angry. That makes us even.”
She heard thunder, then saw a flash of lightning. “This is madness, what we’re doing.”
From the darkness, he said, “Yes. It is.”
All this Teresa told me later. Not all at once. Over days, weeks. Here and there. Giving it up reluctantly. In stops and starts. Sometimes with flashes of hostility. The attraction was something they picked up in each other. Immediately. An encoded signal giving the latitude and the longitude where their lives could intersect.
She remembered J.J. staring at her intently. “We can go back to Regent,” he had said. “Nobody the wiser. Just one more folly in two lives pockmarked by folly.”
“It’s seventy-five miles.”
“In this state, people drive a hundred miles to buy a pack of cigarettes at two in the morning. In case you ever wonder why traffic accidents are the third leading cause of death here. After cancer and heart disease. Gunshot wounds are right up there, too.”
“No. I don’t want to go back to Regent.”
“I didn’t think you did.” He touched a finger to her lips. “Do you remember the first time we met? In the lobby of the Rhino Carlton-Plaza? And you told me we’d almost run into each other years ago in the green room at C-Span in Washington.”
She kissed his finger.
“The site of an earlier folly. As I knew you knew. That’s why you mentioned it. It was your way of saying don’t mess with me. And I knew then we were so much alike. Walking on the edge. No seat belt. No safety helmet.” He hesitated. “I think, Teresa, if we had met that time in Washington, both our lives would be so different.”
Teresa drew the feathery patchwork quilt around her. “I want to tell you something.”
“You don’t have to. It’s not truth or dare.”
Through the half-open window she could hear the wail of a train whistle. “Poppy is not exactly right about the reason I’m here.” He listened. “I had never met Jack before that evening. Broderick. That was his name. Jack Broderick. He knew my mother.”
“Before she had Alzheimer’s?”
“No. My real mother. The one I never knew. The one I never met. That’s why he came back to my house that night. One of the reasons.”
J.J. waited.
“He seemed to know he was going to die sometime soon. And he wanted to tell me about my parents. It was as if telling me would allow him to die in peace. This was like his last confession. A perfect act of contrition for an imperfect life.” A cloud slipped in front of the moon, darkening the room. “My father . . .” She faltered and broke off, before beginning again. “My father was a gangster. A murderer, in fact.”
My father never knew he was my father. He was shotgunned to death before he knew my mother was pregnant. He was building a hotel in Las Vegas called King’s Playland (his name was Jacob King), and there were shortfalls and overruns. . . .
“Stop, Teresa, don’t go on.”
“No. I want you to know all of it.”
My mother was a movie star. A child movie star who was trying to cross over and become a grown-up movie star. Her name was Blue Tyler, and there was a time during her adolescent years when her name on a marquee was a guaranteeof gold. My father was killed, and my mother’s career failed for one reason or another, my father’s occupation and his rather dramatic and bloody public demise being two good reasons that fell under the moral-turpitude clause in a motion-picture contract. She worked for a while in Europe, and then she disappeared for nearly forty years until Jack found her quite by accidentin Detroit, an itinerant bag lady, one whose truest love had been a killer unimpressed by her fame and wealth and whose daughter she had borne and given up for adoption after he was murdered.
“Teresa. Teresa. Teresa.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Allie had figured it out by lunchtime Saturday.
Friday afternoon she had telephoned J.J. at home to report that Bryant Gover was on a hunger strike at Durango Avenue as a protest over some infraction of prison rules that cost him cigarette privileges. Exaltación, the latest Sonoran domestic brought up from the hacienda at Bacadéhuachi, told her that Señor McClure was not expected in Cap City for the weekend and that Señora McClure had already left for Washington in Señora McClure’s own avión. Exaltación seemed delighted to talk to someone who spoke Spanish. ¿De Sonora? she asked. De Hermosillo, Allie replied. Exaltación said she had laundry for Señor McClure, his shirts on wooden hangers as he liked them, and his underwear ironed, not just folded, and she wondered if Señora Vasquez could see that they were delivered to him in the city where he was performing as an abogado.
Let him pick up his own shirts, Allie said, I don’t make deliveries.
The Lovat Hotel in Regent said that Mr. McClure was not answering.
The next morning I ran into Allie in the elevator in the Osceola County Courthouse.
“I thought you’d be in Regent,” she said. “Working on your opening statement. Getting ready for Monday.” No conversation with her would be complete without a final dart. “Looking up the case law for your appeal when the guilty verdict comes in.”
There was no way not to explain why I was in Cap City. “Stanley had an accident.”
A skateboarding accident. Stanley had taken up skateboarding in the all-out way he did everything. He had a skateboarding instructor. He wore a blue plastic state-of-the-art helmet, with lightning bolts on it, and matching tights like the riders in the Tour de France. He wore aerodynamically designed board shoes and elbow guards and knee pads and leather gloves and plastic wristbands and yellow-tinted wraparound glasses. He jumped curbs and did three-sixties in the air. He said he wanted to compete in the X Games. Then in a time run Thursday he had come down wrong doing a victory three-sixty at the finish line and had dislocated his wrist. A Mayday message was dispatched to me in Regent, and my holiday from Stanley was cut short.
“I told Teresa I’d be back this afternoon. I’ve been trying to get hold of her. She doesn’t seem to be picking up. I haven’t been able to get through to her since I came back here Thursday.”
A look crossed Allie’s face. I had seen it there before. Blank. Eyes narrowing and unblinking. I often thought that suspiciousness beat in her like a second pulse. She attached fact to suggestion, suggestion to hint, hint to insinuation as if she were assembling a jigsaw puzzle, blindfolded, by feel. The elevator door opened. Neither of us moved to get out. The door closed.
“J.J.’s not picking up either.”
Think of a dream. Think of telling that dream to a friend, a psychiatrist, a lover, a significant other, even a stranger sitting next to you in the passenger cabin on a flight to somewhere. A dream is just shards of memory, images, flashes imperfectly remembered, and when you try to explain them, you add connective tissue to give the dream shape, to make it understandable. The house in the dream is not exactly the house where you grew up, but it could be, it’s a little larger, as houses in d
reams tend to be, unless they’re smaller, claustrophobic, and the closet where you found the thing that scared you, whatever it was, maybe it was just the dark, is not the closet where the winter coats and the mud gear were kept, but it could have been. And what scared you might not have been just the dark, or the door behind the coats that you forgot was there, the little half door that led under the eaves, and it was under the eaves behind the little half door behind the winter coats and the mud gear and the wet galoshes, the little half door with the loose pull knob and the simple rusty hook latch that didn’t catch, it was under the eaves that you saw, or thought you saw, what it was that scared you in the first place, and then you woke up.
Think of this as connective tissue.
Galoshes and mud gear, a loose doorknob and a rusty hook latch.
Teresa’s memories.
Sporadic, like summer lightning.
Thursday.
The day Judge Tracy swore in the jury and then declared a four-day recess until the following Monday, opening arguments at 9 a.m.
Early that afternoon I got Stanley’s call summoning me back to Cap City. Doctors at University Hospital had put a cast on his wrist, and he was feeling beleaguered.
I asked Teresa if she wanted to come up to Cap City with me. You can spend the weekend in the relative comfort of the Rhino, I said. Everything you need is available in my office, and what’s not you can log in on the computer.
Will you introduce me to Stanley? Teresa said.
Not a chance, I said.
Then I’ll be fine here, Teresa said.
You can’t stand it here. You called it limbo’s waiting room.
I’ll work on the statement. Read the record again. Visit the scene of the crime again, bring myself up to speed.
Nothing Lost Page 27