Nothing Lost

by John Gregory Dunne

  Don’t overtrain.

  You know who you sound like? Wright Ingersoll at Yale. He taught criminal law. Forget he never tried a criminal case. He wrote a textbook about cross-examination. The Art of Cross-Examination, I think it was called. My father loved to read it out loud and laugh. The artist follows that line of questioning, he’d say, then his client better book a room at Sing Sing. Anyway. I think the Rhino’s probably less enticing than the DeLuxor. And I won’t have the diversions of Capital City to distract me.

  She smiled.

  A heartbreaking smile as I remember.

  But then of course I now know, as does most of the sentient tabloid world, that she found a more dangerous diversion in Regent than she ever would have in Cap City.

  If you need company, you can always catch up with Carlyle’s shoot, I said. She and Merle Orvis are real tight, I hear.

  Peas in a pod, she said. I got a message from Marty Buick. Carlyle wonders if she can sue Judge Tracy for removing her from the courtroom.

  Maybe we should have done this pro bono, I said. She smiled, and I told her I would check in periodically and see her back in Regent on Saturday.

  My mistake.

  I could not have guessed that Stanley’s orthopedic adventures were helping to shape the narrative.

  She had been perusing the menu at Auntie Pasto’s when J.J. passed by the table.

  “Do you usually have dinner at four-thirty, counselor? Or is this a late lunch?”

  Teresa put the menu down. Except for a waitress shaping her inch-long false fingernails, the restaurant was empty. “I didn’t expect to see you still here, Mr. McClure.”

  “Taking care of odds and ends. I’ll be leaving in a while. I’m hoping that if I wait long enough, Exaltación won’t feel she has to make me dinner. She has many household skills, but cooking isn’t one of them. She’d much prefer watching Jeopardy! and trying to learn English. It’s amazingly effective, you know. Who is Thomas Jefferson? ‘Señora McClure, Tomás Jefferson, did he have a negrita?’ ‘Liberal slander,’ Poppy said. I don’t think it penetrated. What is Yankee Stadium? ‘Señora McClure, why is Luis Gehrig in his beisbol suit the happiest man in the world if he is crying?’ Poppy let me handle that one.”

  He rested his hands on the chair opposite.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McClure. Sit down.”

  J.J. looked at the menu. “They spell ravioli R-A-V-O-L-A.”

  “I noticed that. I thought it might be a specialty of the house, but ravioli is what it is.”

  “I hope you won’t think this is improper . . .”

  “Not until I’ve heard it.”

  “. . . there’s a place called Catfish Cove in Albion. Fresh catfish right out of the Albion River. Sizzled in hot oil. Dunk, two, three, four, and out. It’s about as close to a delicacy as you are going to find in South Midland.”

  “I’m sure it is, but I don’t think it’s a good idea, Mr. McClure.”

  “Not one word about the proceedings we are both involved with.”

  Teresa watched the waitress stick her emery board into her beehive hairdo and move slowly toward the table. Her name tag identified her as Raymonda. “Snagged my nail,” she said to neither of them in particular. “Ravola’s the special, we got two orders left, it’s filled with cream cheese, it’s our big favorite usually.”

  I don’t think it was the ravola that did it. Or the emery board sticking out of Raymonda’s beehive. Those are just picturesque details, freezing the moment. But no one really does anything because of the piquant, as much as writers would have you believe it’s what pushes people over the line. Teresa was simply attracted to risk in the way a moth is attracted to light. I don’t try to scan the tea leaves for reasons. People do what they do.

  “I think I’ll have the catfish,” Teresa said, getting up from the table.

  J.J. didn’t mention to Teresa that Albion was seventy-five miles away. I don’t think it occurred to him. For J.J., it was a drive around the block.

  They never did have catfish.

  It turned out Catfish Cove had burned to the ground a few weeks before. The sizzling oil had caught fire, and by the time the Tri-County volunteer fire company arrived, there was nothing left but cinders and smoke.

  They had dinner at the Best Western at the I-60 turnoff.

  Three-star accommodations, the South Midland TourBook said. Offering amenities and a degree of sophistication.

  They split the dinner bill. Down the middle. Twenty-four fifty-seven each.

  We can stay, he said.

  She nodded.

  It was as simple as that. They were not heedless of possible consequences. It was not a suicidal impulse. Caution was for other people. They were just running a yellow light, as each of them always had. Without slowing down.

  A yellow light, each thought, was not a red light.

  My father was a gangster. My mother was a movie star.

  Pushme, Jamie, pushmepushmepushme. . . .

  CHAPTER SIX

  Over the next three days, they drove nearly two thousand miles. I looked at the speedometer, she told me later, holding steady, not quivering, ninety-five, a hundred. Over a hundred. That’s when I stopped looking. I wondered what would happen if he lost control. She had imagined the headlines. PROSECUTOR AND DEFENSE ATTORNEY KILLED IN CAR CRASH. QUESTIONS ARISE.

  They headed west.

  Always talking.

  About the years before Catfish Cove. A summing up of two lives, of compromises made, of secrets kept and promises unkept. Some episodes were edited, some in ciphers easily and silently broken. The usefulness of Allie Vasquez. “Useful” was a precise and appropriate way to describe Allie. Nothing further needed to be added. Useful to J.J., useful to Teresa and me.

  Allie will know before we get back to Regent, J.J. said as they passed into Parker County. It’s what she does. It’s why I put up with her. And if she knows, Max knows.

  Teresa had tried not to think of Allie Vasquez. Allie was part of J.J.’s former life, the way Budd Doheny had been part of hers. And Camillo, the Chicago policeman in Todi. And the husband she had gone to Nantucket with.

  Somebody else, J.J. said.

  Who? Teresa said.

  Just somebody. Somebody always knows. Somebody out there. A Lotto shot. The winning ticket bought in a Wal-Mart in Ottumwa. It happens. You can’t worry about it.

  She remembered that he accepted the inevitability of it with a stoicism she found both comforting and a little frightening.

  You deal with it, he had said after six or seven miles.

  In the distance Teresa could see a water tower with the word HAMLET lettered on it. The town where J.J. grew up. The town where he had found his father dead in the barn.

  The town she supposed was the true north of his life.

  When I was a kid, J.J. said, someone climbed that water tower one night, and painted LINDA KRONHOLM PUTS OUT on it.

  Did she?

  Yes.

  She wondered whatever had happened to Linda Kronholm. As if he were reading her mind, J.J. said, She’s a county supervisor now.

  On the edge of Hamlet, they stopped by a chain-link fence circling a high school football field. The yard markers had faded and the metal goalposts needed paint. There were sagging wooden grandstands on either side of the field. A scoreboard identified the site as MCCLURE FIELD, HOME OF THE PARKER COUNTY PACKERS—Spring Practice April 15.

  Up on the hill where the school is, that’s where we lived, J.J. said. The pond’s been drained. There’s a swimming pool in the gym. They wanted to name it the Walter McClure Memorial Pool, and I said no.

  Still west.

  Past cattle and a few herds of buffalo.

  The Midlandia Motor Hotel and Campground in Lower Meridian. Budget accommodations, according to the South Midland TourBook. Slightly older-style décor. Coin laundry. Communal grilling. PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BUFFALO.

  J.J. had mentioned Charley Buckles. And Gordon Sunday. Gas Station Gordy. The mo
st famous murderer in South Midland history until her client. Duane Lajoie. Our client. They were following Gordy Sunday’s route, J.J. said. J.J. knew the name of the Rawlings sporting goods salesman Gordon Sunday had killed while he was asleep in his car at the gas station in Boudreaux.

  And the names of the husband and wife shot dead at the Sunoco station they ran in Fort Shaw.

  A strange hegira, I wanted to tell Teresa, but did not. A pilgrimage along the Gordon Sunday Trail.

  They traveled light, buying toothpaste and toothbrushes and mouthwash and razors and combs and shampoo and bottled water and six-packs of Midlandia Lager at service-station convenience stores.

  I suppose condoms.

  A couple of wool shirts at a general store in a town called Viking when it turned cold on Saturday. The jean jacket with the fake fleece collar she was wearing when she walked into the DeLuxor early Sunday afternoon.

  She checked for messages on her cell phone, usually calling from the ladies’ room when they stopped for gas. There were urgent messages from Martha Buick. Carlyle says she wants someone else to handle her money, Martha Buick said. Another message: Who the hell is Ralph Cannon, Sr.? A third: Why don’t you answer?

  Call me, was the message I left three times on Teresa’s machine. She had never given me her cell-phone number.

  J.J. was calling in too, from gas station pay phones. He had turned off his beeper and his cell. I don’t want to hear the phone ring, he had said. I don’t want to hear the beeper beep. Two sounds from the real world they would have to return to. At the general store in Viking, he said Poppy had left a message that she was appearing on Fixed Bayonets discussing judicial tyranny with Lorna Dun, and no, she would not mention Judge Tracy. Allie had also called. Friday afternoon and that morning. And Patsy Feiffer. Twice. Patsy said there had been stock footage of him on The Courthouse Square Nightly Wrap-up. Kean, too. That’s how she referred to you, J.J. said. As “Kean.” It seemed to amuse him. Is there anything you want me to do, Patsy asked in her second call. No, J.J. had said to Teresa, answering her unasked question. She’s not smart enough. She doesn’t do connections.

  Cando lay ahead. Teresa remembered that she had pronounced it “can dough” when she saw the highway cutoff sign. It’s “can do,” J.J. had corrected. We keep things simple out here. It was the territorial motto before we became a state. Can Do. Then North Midland put it on its state flag. Which meant it couldn’t be our state motto. People from here call North Midland the No Can Do state.

  I remembered thinking he loved this place, Teresa told me a long time later.

  Give J.J. that.

  West of Cando, J.J. said, When you were in Washington. The sentence trailed off. Teresa waited for him to continue. In a far field, she could see a bull trying to mount a cow. When he began again, his tone was casual. In Washington, he repeated. Another pause, and then: Did you ever hear anything about Poppy?

  All the time, Teresa had said.

  About Poppy and Lorna Dun.

  No, Teresa said quickly. And then: Not really.

  They drove on, eyes fixed on the road that stretched in front of them, a taut black hawser disappearing into the horizon.

  Saturday afternoon, they saw a twister in the far distance, black and then milky when the sun caught it, moving like a huge reticulated vertical snake.

  We can head for Higginson, J.J. said. He searched the horizon, but did not slow down. Or we can go back to Quantum.

  He had one of those expensive extras on the dashboard that told you where you were, where you were going, and where you had been, along with the mileage. Thirty-eight miles to Higginson, he said, forty-one back to Quantum.

  Can’t we just stop? Teresa said.

  Not unless we find a root cellar out there in the fields, J.J. said. His voice was calm. He was still doing ninety. And if we find one, it’ll be locked, and it will take too long to break in with the jack and the tire iron. And I don’t carry a rifle in my go-to-court car. There’s a handgun in the glove compartment, but it’s just a little pissy-ant thing, and anyway, I don’t see any root cellars around. So Higginson or Quantum?

  Teresa remembered being frightened. Of the twister and the little pissy-ant handgun she had not known was in the glove compartment. It had not occurred to her that J.J. was so familiar with guns. As was I. Even Jewish boys got hunting licenses in South Midland before their voices changed.

  Either one’s a pretty safe bet, J.J. said. She remembered that he seemed unconcerned, remembered his saying Higginson had been flattened in ’77, Quantum in ’93, and twisters never hit the same place twice. Higginson’s closer now, he said. Thirty-three miles, a Sunday picnic ride.

  The tall grass bent under the high wind, then snapped back. It reminded her of an ocean swell. She remembered he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. She remembered his saying that seat belts were Eastern.

  The tornado finally set down without incident just across the Wyoming line.

  That night in the Step Right Inn, at the junction between Higginson and Higgins, Teresa asked if was true that tornadoes never hit the same place twice.

  I don’t know, J.J. said. It seemed logical. Like lightning. You were worried. I didn’t want you worried.

  It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making.

  They were up before dawn Sunday morning. Complimentary instant coffee at the Motel 6 food center, with sugar substitute and creamer that did not dissolve, a bag of nachos and a can of apple juice.

  They drove east toward the sun, which was trying to break through the gray cloud cover of late winter. Their other life lay dead ahead, Duane Lajoie and the harsh fact of felony murder. They had not spoken in miles, each lost in thought. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both. She remembered the lines somewhere between Fort Shaw and Buffalo Creek, remembered an aging failed former Broadway star doing a one-man show of Robert Frost’s poetry when she was at Smith. He had bad makeup and a bad white hairpiece and a suit that was several sizes too big, all supposed to make him look like Frost, and the croaking voice he affected to imitate Frost was inaudible. She did not think Frost would have thought Buffalo Creek the road not taken.

  She remembered she had gone to the reading with Chipper, later to be husband number one. Chipper had said he loved poetry, he really did. Chipper said he wished he had taken a poetry course at Amherst. Who are your favorites? Chipper had said. Chipper said he was not familiar with Robert Lowell. Chipper said the Bob Frost surrogate was really one hell of an actor. A little light on his feet, maybe, but hell, he’s an actor.

  It occurred to Teresa that for four days she had been assaulted by her past.

  Teresa, J.J. said softly. His voice was like a caress. He was wearing sunglasses and the last of the clean white T-shirts he had bought at a mini-mart in Parker County two days before. It seemed like years. Years of sharing.

  Yes.

  Nothing, J.J. said. Just Teresa. Teresa Kean.

  And miles to go before we sleep.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  MONDAY

  “We’re late,” Ellen Tracy said at nine minutes past nine. “In my court, nine o’clock means nine o’clock, everyone in their places and ready to go. No paper shuffling, no ‘May it please the court.’ ” Her weekend reign as the grand marshal of the anniversary celebration in Dead Center had not made her courtroom demeanor any less intimidating. I tried not to think of her reaction if she discovered how opposing counsel had spent their recess. “Mr. McClure, you may begin.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.” J.J. looked as if he had spent the weekend getting a haircut and a manicure. He was wearing a severe dark blue suit, white shirt, and a blue tie with tiny replicas of the scales of justice worked into the fabric. Only his soft black running shoes suggested the casual, and they were polished to a high sheen. I hated to use the word sangfroid, especially under the circumstances, but it described J.J. perfectly. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my name i
s James 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. . . .”

  “Max, don’t say a word,” Teresa had said when she walked into our tiny offices at the DeLuxor early Sunday afternoon. She was in the jeans and the jean jacket she had bought somewhere on the roadside hundreds of miles to the west. She looked like the wild thing that I had half suspected was at Teresa’s core, but had never seen, buried as it was under layers, years, of public propriety. The dress she had been wearing when she ran into J.J. at Auntie Pasto’s four days before was stuffed at the bottom of a plastic shopping bag under a half-dozen bottles of water, like the detritus of a former incarnation. “Don’t say reckless. Don’t say irresponsible. Don’t say willful. Especially don’t say willful. I hate willful. The goddamn nuns used to say it. And don’t ask if we talked about what we’re here for. We didn’t. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “Hello to you, too, Teresa.”

  She opened a bottle of water and drained it in one long swig. Then she arced the bottle into a wastebasket, removed her jean jacket, sat at her computer, and typed in her password. She was wearing a V-neck T-shirt, a man’s size, too big, with a spot of something like ketchup just under the vee. Her arms were folded, and her right hand nervously scratched her left breast as she waited for the document to come up. I do not think women are erotic, but looking at Teresa at that moment I was willing to reconsider the prejudice. She pointed to the monitor and I looked over her shoulder at the notes she had made for her opening statement before she had succumbed to her wanderlust. I did not tell her I was so sure she would not return in time that I had written my own opening statement.

  Hers was better.

  “We counterpunch, Max,” she said. “Hope for an opening. It’s the only way we’re going to keep Duane Lajoie out of the electric chair.”