One thing I knew about J.J. McClure.
He didn’t give many openings. Whatever had happened outside the courtroom would not affect what happened inside. He would still try to beat Teresa Kean’s brains out.
This is something else I knew.
Teresa would not give him an inch either.
Judge Tracy demanded speed, and the first witnesses were called before lunch Monday, immediately after Teresa finished her opening statement. A woman juror asked for a restroom break, and the judge said she would have to wait until the lunch recess at twelve-thirty. In other words, she would run the proceedings her way, bladder discipline was the order for all involved. The witnesses were the lesser investigators and forensic specialists who laid the foundation and applied the mortar, establishing that violations of pertinent clauses in the state penal code had been perpetrated by a person or persons then unknown. J.J.’s questions were direct, uncomplicated, and pro forma. When did the Loomis County Sheriff’s Department receive the first call of a possible incident? Was the call logged? Was there an audio recording? Where was the body of the victim discovered, what was the state of the victim’s person, what was the approximate time of the victim’s death, when was the identity of the victim confirmed?
I watched Teresa and J.J. closely. It was as if they were strangers who shared only the contagious dislike of each other that prevails in the adversarial system. The basic facts from the witness box were not in dispute, only the odd detail, a mistake about time or the caliber of a weapon or the depth and exact nature of a wound, and she and J.J. felt each other out, gauging how the other would react, jabbing like prizefighters, seeing if blood could be drawn. As theater, it was not bad, but at that moment there were only two members of the audience who understood the play. I was one, and Allie Vasquez the other; Allie, as J.J.’s chief investigator, was sitting at the prosecution table next to Patsy Feiffer, who acted as if she were not there. The principal actors were playing their parts to the hilt, like the road company hams who would occasionally visit Kiowa or Cap City in bus-and-truck revivals of Broadway musicals, recalling enchanted evenings and hills alive with the sound of music. Teresa was dramatically exasperated when she would object that answers supplied by the witnesses J.J. had called, lacked either specificity or foundation, and J.J. was genially contemptuous in his responses.
“Perhaps counsel is a little trial-rusty,” he said after one objection, “since it’s been half dozen years since the last time she defended a criminal—”
“Objection.”
“Excuse me, Your Honor, alleged criminal.”
Ellen Tracy whacked her gavel. “Counsel, Mr. McClure. You’re acting like lawyers on TV. You’re not auditioning. Don’t waste the time of this court with your prefabricated bickering.” Another whack of the gavel. “You may continue, Mr. McClure.”
So Tracy got the performance aspect, too. Good instincts.
Duane Lajoie sat next to me at the defense table. He never looked at a witness, never shook his head, never sighed heavily. He just drew penises and vaginas on a scratch pad, showing them to me and then to Teresa, and a sketch of Ellen Tracy with a Hitler mustache not unlike her real one. It had not occurred to me that he might be so observant.
The morning’s only moment of levity came just before lunch when J.J. allowed Patsy Feiffer to examine Brutus Mayes. He was as trim as a 350-pound man could be, his arms bursting like tree trunks out of his short-sleeved dark brown uniform shirt, his Sam Browne belt and shoulder strap highly polished, his equally polished holster empty, since only marshals were allowed to wear guns in court.
Patsy Feiffer’s first question was long and rambling.
Teresa was on her feet.
“Sit down, counsel,” Ellen Tracy said before she could speak. “I’ll handle this. Miss Feiffer, that’s not a question, it’s a speech.”
“I’ll repeat the question, Your Honor.” She did. Hesitantly.
“Miss Feiffer,” Judge Tracy said. “That’s not a question. It’s four questions. You only get to ask one at a time.”
She tried again.
“Miss Feiffer, where is the foundation to that question?” And so it continued. What appeared to be a sweat stain started down the crease of Patsy Feiffer’s jacket. Brutus Mayes tried to help her out, and was cut short. “Sheriff, this is not the National Football League. In this courtroom, I call the plays.”
At last it was over. “Mr. Cline,” Judge Tracy said.
I was down to handle the cross. Patsy Feiffer had made that unnecessary. “We have no questions of the witness at this time, Your Honor. We reserve the right to recall.”
“Granted,” Ellen Tracy said. “We’re running late. I’m going to take it out of the lunch break. Forty-five minutes not an hour, everybody back here and ready to go at one-forty-four, understood?”
Romantic dramatist that I had become since the weekend, a totally unaccustomed role for the hardheaded realist I thought I was, I wondered if Teresa and J.J. would acknowledge each other as they exited the courtroom. They did not. J.J. brushed by, talking to Patsy, while Teresa waited until Duane Lajoie was led away to the holding cell, then engaged me about the witness list, and who would cross-examine whom, decisions we had in fact already made. We both knew that the only witness of any consequence was Bryant Gover, who was scheduled for Thursday morning. Until then there was nothing we could do except try to score debating points against the secondary witnesses. We could ask Clyde Ray what he had actually been doing on County Road 21 when he spotted Duane Lajoie’s pickup at two-forty-seven in the morning, and we could ask Merle Orvis the exact nature of her sexual relationship with Bryant Gover, but we would just be marking time.
It was only Allie Vasquez who had anything to say to us after the morning session, and as always with Allie, there was a mocking insolence just beneath the surface. “Professor Cline,” she said. It was how the more problematic of my students at Osceola Community College referred to me, as if they thought the undeserved honorific might flatter me into inflating their grades, thus making it easier for them to inflict themselves on the state bar. That kind of flattery was foreign to Allie. Imperfectly veiled mockery was her chosen method of address. “Putting your classroom lessons into practice, I see.”
“Ms. Vasquez,” I said. I would play along. “I don’t think you’ve met—”
Allie interrupted. “I’m Altagracia Vasquez,” she said to Teresa. I had never heard Allie use her full first name before, and only knew it myself because it was on the student list sent me by the college registrar.
“Teresa Kean,” Teresa said. Each waited for the other to speak again.
“I have to go,” Allie said finally.
“I imagine we’ll see each other,” Teresa said. “In court.”
“I imagine.”
In that brief exchange they had managed to size each other up, each recognizing a wary adversary not without a danger quotient. I knew that Allie did not care about J.J., or about Teresa as a rival for his affection, in Allie’s case an attraction that had only been physical, but J.J., and to a lesser extent me, offered her and her daughter passports out of what she regarded as the negligible circumstances to which she felt them sentenced. This was a passport application that she would not allow to be compromised, and this was, I realize now, why she was able to function as a double agent with such unerring equanimity. One of us, either J.J. or me, might ultimately be more useful than the other.
Outside the courthouse, Teresa and I picked our way through the gaggle of reporters and cameramen hurling questions and snapping our pictures. We kept moving, not even bothering to say “no comment.” I saw another group gathered around J.J., who deflected questions with an expressive gesture or a quip, always pretending to put a gag in his mouth when any reporter veered toward the morning session and the effectiveness of the presentation. Patsy Feiffer stood at his side, her face frozen into a rictus smile, like a royal princess at the trooping of the colors. I knew J.J. too well to think
he had bothered to take her to task for the shortcomings of her examination of Brutus Mayes. He knew she was Gerry Wormwold’s person, and I expect he was reasonably certain that Ellen Tracy, who ate ill-prepared young attorneys alive, would feast on her. Poppy was another subject of general interest. Yes, he had been in touch with Poppy. What had they talked about? Tax reform, J.J. replied. There was general laughter. What else? The cherry blossoms are in bloom, J.J. said.
At the edge of the fray, Alex Quintero recorded the scene, his assistants reloading his cameras, the star photographer photographing the proletarian photographers at their labors. Alice Todt and Jocko Cannon hovered behind him. Alice Todt’s makeup people had applied the sty she wanted on her left eye (after the right eye had been rejected, the right side of her face being what she thought the better side), and she was wearing an oversize lumberman’s shirt, not tucked in, but hanging loose over black jeans torn at the knees. Jocko Cannon’s arm was draped over Alice’s shoulder, suggesting a broader definition of his community-service bodyguard activities than had been contemplated. He was wearing a Miami Dolphins ocean-green home-uniform jersey, number 99 (the number negotiated by his agents in the contract he had signed), with just the name JOCKO on the back, not his last name (another contractual stipulation). Jocko was the name with commercial possibilities, not Cannon. Merle Orvis crouched nearby as if on a catapult, ignored except when an order was shouted, watching everything, a runner always available to fetch and carry. The only person who seemed to be missing was Boy. I wondered into whose custody he had been delivered, and whether his sitter had to offer a breast to keep him quiet. To Alex Quintero and Alice Todt, Boy was a prop, and until he was needed, he was to be consigned to the property master, along with the Rollerblades and the lowered Impala and the 1969 Harley.
Merle Orvis opened a bottle of water, passed it to Jocko, who swallowed half and passed the rest to Alice.
“How’s Duane holding up?” Alice Todt asked.
“He’s been helpful,” I said. I had torn the sexually explicit drawings from his scratch pad and stuffed them in my pocket.
“Is he fucking smart enough to be helpful?”
Teresa stared at Alice for a moment, as if trying to deconstruct the question. Since the weekend, her concentration on the dangers inherent in her own situation, while still trying to present a viable defense in court, had led her to misread, at least momentarily, the degree of Alice Todt’s self-absorption. To Alice, Duane Lajoie was only the most valuable of her props. The five hundred thousand dollars she was paying for his defense she saw now as an investment in the broader future she could have when she could no longer sustain being a teen nymphet, a possibility she had never previously considered. When the jury returned its verdict, she would be ready for her close-up.
“You like the sty?” Alice Todt said.
Teresa seemed trapped. “It looks real.”
“I fired Marty this morning,” Alice Todt said. She had an effortless ability to change gears. “I mean, my lawyer in New York did. Jocko’s dad is going to handle my money from now on. He’s so smart. He says I need to diversify more. Lessen my liability. Get higher yields. Have my money working for me. Go offshore. He wants to leverage some shit, whatever the fuck leverage is, but he’s so rich it has to be okay, cut down the tax burden. He says maybe I should buy a plane, the fucking deductions I could get, you know lease it out to people when I’m not using it. Jocko says he wants to learn how to fly—”
“I’m sure you and Marty can work it out,” Teresa said.
“She wants to fly out here,” Alice Todt said. “I mean, she’s your friend, and all. I don’t know why the fuck I should talk to her.”
“We’re due back in court in twenty-five minutes,” I told Teresa. “We should get something to eat.”
“Try the catering truck,” Alice Todt said. “I hired Auntie Pasto’s.”
Teresa leaned back against the headrest as we drove to the DeLuxor. Her eyes were closed. “I want this trial to be over, Max,” she said after a moment. “I’ve always loved the courtroom. I love the competition. I even love a pain in the ass like Tracy. I love getting around the petty tyranny. I love trusting my instincts. It’s like playing chess with someone’s life. Some pawn who otherwise isn’t worth an instant”—she snapped her fingers—“of your time. I even love knowing I’m going to lose, because I’ll go down knowing I did my best. I love the whole thing. And here it is the first morning, and I want it finished.”
She was trusting those instincts. She was not an alarmist. She only knew there was a storm ahead. She did not know where it was coming from, but she knew it was coming, she smelled it the way sailors smell foul weather two days off, and she knew that hatches would be battened down, people would drown, that survival itself was at risk.
When we walked into our office at the motel, Mrs. Idella Primrose, the local woman we had engaged as our secretary, said there had been a collect call forwarded from my Cap City number from a man who identified himself only as Tugboat. Mrs. Primrose had a worn pinched face, and she did not meet our eyes. I asked if Tugboat had said anything else. Things I wouldn’t even tell my late husband, Mrs. Primrose said. Tugboat had left a callback number, but said he could not be reached and would try to call again at dinnertime.
“You know anyone named Tugboat?” Teresa asked.
“No,” I said. “But you can bet I’m going to accept the charges if he calls again. Chances are a solid citizen named Tugboat has a sheet, done some time, and knows something he thinks I might want to know, if the proper arrangements can be made. The area code he called from is in Sunflower County. I think I know what that means.”
I picked up the telephone and dialed the number Tugboat had left. “You have reached the Sunflower Facility of the South Midland Department of Corrections,” the voice on the automated answering machine said. “For general information, press one—”
“The Sunflower supermax,” I said to Teresa. “It’s only been opened four months. Top of the line. State of the art. Privately operated under a concession from the DOC. Making it a profit center. It’s the envy of the upper Midwest. Twenty-four-hundred beds, five hundred screws with automatic weapons and open fields of fire. No windows in the cells, just slits that let in a little light. Plus death-wire electrified fences, one touch turns you into toast. It’s going to warehouse all the hard cases in four states. Kansas, Nebraska, North Midland, they’ll all pay Sunflower to take their worst guys off their hands.”
Teresa picked at the greens Mrs. Primrose had ordered from a nearby mini-mart.
“If he calls back, he’ll call at five. That’s when they have dinner. He probably won’t go to dinner—”
Teresa seemed to perk up. “Because the pay phones in every prison I’ve ever seen are out in the open and he won’t want anyone to hear what he has to say.”
“Right.”
“There’s probably a tap on the line,” Teresa said.
“Count on it,” I said.
“And people called Tugboat tend to know things like that.”
“In my experience, yes.”
“Can we find out more about him?”
I took a deep breath. There was one way to find out quickly, but I knew Teresa would not like it. “I’ll ask Allie Vasquez. She’s got sources all over the system. Give her twenty minutes, she’ll know how many teeth he has left in his head.”
Teresa considered the proposal. “Max, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she said finally. “She works for”—she searched for the right words—“for the other side.”
“Teresa,” I said. “We don’t have a case. We need all the help we can get. You don’t get it free.”
She did not reply. It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no either.
The option of checking with Duane Lajoie was one we did not consider.
In the afternoon session, there was a detailed analysis of the blood evidence by medical technicians from the state Bureau of Investigation. Some of the jurors were
having difficulty staying awake. One started to take notes and was immediately told by Judge Tracy that she did not permit jurors to take notes, and ordered a bailiff to confiscate the notebook. It was the function of jurors to listen to the evidence and weigh it carefully, she said, and if during their deliberations they needed parts of the record to be read back to them, she would so order. A juror writing, she continued, was a juror not paying attention. She was like a pedantic kindergarten teacher, I thought. I watched the courtroom clock ticking toward the end of the day and wondered what Tugboat would have to offer. I was not wearing a watch and had told Teresa not to wear hers in the courtroom. It was just another of Ellen Tracy’s idiosyncrasies: The sight of an attorney peeking at a watch guaranteed that she would ask the offender if he or she had another engagement.
Judge Tracy called it a day at four-twenty.
Again J.J. and Teresa ignored each other.
I stopped Allie as she left the courtroom and quietly asked if she could get a heads-up on a con named Tugboat at Sunflower. No other information available.
“Do I get to ask why?” she said.
“No.”
“I can’t do it, Max.”
“Okay. No harm in asking.”
“None.”
We told Idella Primrose to take the rest of the afternoon off.
At five-oh-five, the phone rang.
“Max, I’m going to tell you this just once,” Allie Vasquez said. She was on her car phone. In the background I could hear Springsteen. “His name is Albert Curwent, aka Leo Lutz, aka Tyrone Powers—like the actor, but add an s—aka Wally Korn—Korn with a k—aka Tugboat, aka Fat Albert. Nobody calls him Fat Albert to his face. He’s sensitive about his weight. He likes to hear the sound of bones breaking. The pelvis is his specialty. A stone criminal. He’s been inside somewhere seventeen of the last twenty-one years. You name the joint, he’s passed through. Sunflower’s just the latest stop. He’s looking at five LWOPPs to be served consecutively. He contracted to torch a house in KC and there were five people in it. The guy’s girlfriend, the girlfriend’s mother, and three kids. The starship Enterprise will be back before he gets out.”
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