Cadillac, Oklahoma

by Louise Farmer Smith

  “I don’t think you can do that. I assume you’ve already sent the body to the coroner. His report will be part of the public record. You better wait and see what comes back.”

  “Yeah.” Jake was a little embarrassed now that he’d told Willard this. But goddammit. Things looked clear. That mother was too irresponsible to have rid the world of the beast who may have been raping that girl for years. So the girl, who the neighbor said, had raised those younger kids, just took the job on herself.

  Neither man said anything for a moment and Jake wondered what the old guy was thinking. Then the lawyer broke the silence. “I looked at that will after we talked at noon. The grandmother left some trinkets and a little over two thousand dollars. That’s not going to pay for a defense.”

  Hillary O’Brian, who used to cover school board meetings and Girl Scout cookie sales for The Courier was ambitious enough to have steadily watched the court docket and broke the story of a fourteen-year-old girl being arrested in a murder case. The defendant’s name was not printed in the paper because she was a minor, but the forensic findings in the blood on the tights were detailed. The blood type was B positive, and DNA testing found semen that belonged to the father.

  The town was electrified by the lurid details and some quickly made up their minds. O’Brian’s articles printed comments from interviews with various citizens: “No fourteen-year-old child should be tried as an adult.” “The teenagers in this town are out of control.” “This was probably a Mexican family.” “Thank heaven we have capital punishment in this state.” “If this girl gets executed, I’m moving to New Mexico.” “Men are beasts.”

  A week after their first meeting, Jake saw Sloane again at the café. He walked over and sat down in the booth where Sloane was eating supper. Sloane gave him a nod.

  “I’ve arrested Jamie-Gwen.”

  Sloane nodded again.

  “I want you to defend her. Pro bono.”

  “All right.”

  His mission accomplished, Jake knew he could stand up, but he didn’t. They sat quietly for a minute before Jake said, “Maybe sometime I could buy you a beer. Or whatever you drink. Sometime at your conven—”

  “How about now?” Sloane unfolded his long thin body from the booth, and the men adjourned to Antoine’s, the only classy bar in town. Jake went to the bar and brought back two single malt scotches. The racket from a table full of Cadillac’s wealthy, young drinkers, the Gavin McCalls included, drove Sloane and Jake across the crowded room to a quiet corner, where they sat in leather armchairs.

  “Got anyone particular in your life?” Sloane asked.

  “Shit,” said Jake, “You get right down to it.”

  “I’m old. I can’t waste time.”

  “Naw, no one. My prospects in life right now are not all that attractive to women.”

  Neither man with anyone to go home to, they talked on in the slow way men can who take a sip when they need to think about what they’re going to say. Sloane’s granddaddy had fought in the First World War, “the war to end all war, they called it,” Sloane said. There was no need for Jake to say anything about how impossible that idea seemed now.

  Judianne McCall left the loud table and stood now, alone at the bar. Jake watched her, a tiny redhead whose flying hair hung about her like a cloud emblazoned by sunset. Jake gazed at her until she left the bar. Then Jake turned back to Sloane who raised his wiry, white eyebrows.

  The court’s crowded docket allowed six months to pass after Jake arrested Jamie-Gwen Wainwright, whom the judge had allowed to wait at home. The intensity of public chatter, argument and speculation had only increased, pushing aside coverage of the town green story. Jake avoided O’Brian, the reporter. The fact is, he avoided anyone who wanted to talk about the coming trial.

  The Courier reported that Judge Garner would hear arguments by the defense for a change of venue, but no one except the defense wanted that. Not the prosecutor, not the judge, and certainly not the public. A television news team had already made reservations at the Ramada Inn on the edge of town.

  Sure enough there was a problem assembling a jury of nine Cadillac citizens who had not already made up their minds about Jamie-Gwen. It took eleven days of sifting through droves of people called to jury duty, and after the group was impounded, one man, liked by both the prosecution and the defense because he had been out of the country, had a heart attack. So one of the alternates would now have a vote when the jury retired to make up their minds.

  During this period Jake and Sloane met several nights a week in the room back of the sheriff’s office at the police station, where Jake kept a bottle. Both were uneasy about the way the jury turned out. “Too many men. Too many old people,” Sloane said. “All the candidates between 30 and 60 found ways to shirk.”

  Jake nodded. Even though the judge had explained that elderly people were not compelled to serve, eight of the jury members were over 70, and the other four and one of the alternates looked like high school kids, although Jake knew they had to be at least 18. What he and Sloane wanted were some wise, seasoned, seekers of justice who could come to common ground and vote not guilty. This group, the gray hairs and the cell phone junkies, would not even speak the same language.

  “What do you know about that other alternate?” Jake asked.

  Sloane shrugged. “Schoolteacher. Church of God. Can’t tell. Sometimes you can watch a juror, see if they’re nodding or wincing.”

  “Did you know my father, Richard Hale?” Jake had wanted to ask this ever since he’d got to know Sloane.

  “I certainly did. I was wondering if you were Richard’s boy. You look like him. Richard Hale was a man who could stand toe to toe, outgunned, in public meetings, and speak his mind.”

  “Yeah, that got him in trouble.” Jake tried to laugh. “Folks said he was a socialist.”

  “Of course they did. He was trying to organize his fellow workers at the brickworks. Anyone with sympathy for the working man was suspected of being a pinko. Folks like to forget the ’50’s, the communist witch hunts, the university professors who lost their jobs. McCarthyism streamed like a poison into this state. Your dad was very young then, a man with the courage of his convictions. What happened to him when he ran for the state legislature was a crime.”

  “Yeah, about that.” Jake frowned. “When I was a teenager, I asked him how come he lost his job as foreman at the brickworks. He just said, politics.”

  “Yeah. What a mess. It was the fear of unions by the electric company and other—” Sloane paused now, maybe trying to remember. Jake waited. Sloane’s silence wasn’t like the eerie emptiness of Jamie-Gwen. Sloane was still present in friendly kind of quiet. Then, as suddenly as he had hushed, he went on. “All the big corporations were afraid of unions. Because of the loud propaganda they put out, unions became connected with communism in the minds of the public and the minds of workers themselves. The offense mounted against your dad was so virulent, it was a wonder he wasn’t strung up. After the election you couldn’t find a man in town who would admit to voting for him, although the vote count showed that more than a few did.”

  Jake’s chest rose as he took this in. He remembered his dad, dead now of lung cancer, as remote. Strong, sure, but so quiet as to seem unavailable to his only kid. But this picture of a fighter for the working man, a guy with the stones to run for the legislature, this was worth everything.

  “Yeah, your dad was the sort of candidate who didn’t just want to be someone, he wanted to do something.”

  His cell phone set on vibrate, Jake sat in the back of the courtroom to hear the opening arguments. The prosecutor, Leroy Flowers, rose first and calmly presented the evidence of a revenge killing. A slender, well-made man whose white hair and expensive-looking gray summer suit gave him more sobriety than he deserved in Jake’s opinion.

  “The defendant, though young, acted with malice aforethought,” Flowers began in a clear voice, educated, yet familiar as an Oklahoman. “This means that ther
e was clear intent as witnessed by the neighbor who saw the defendant standing in the yard after the alleged rape and before she returned to the house to take out and load her sleeping father’s rifle and shoot him in the heart.

  “Malice aforethought is a time-honored legal term which distinguishes between those crimes of passion which can occur in the heat of the moment, and those which are calculated and cold-blooded, those in which a weapon is procured and loaded. In this case for revenge of a real or imagined offense.

  “As to the defendant’s age, a fourteen-year-old girl is much more mature than a boy of the same age. We all have witnessed girls who are more mature physically, more mature emotionally and more mature socially. Think of Jamie-Gwen Wainwright as a woman because she acted as a woman, taking justice into her own hands. Making a plan and carrying it out. She didn’t go to the authorities and report abuse. She didn’t allow the wheels of justice to begin turning to protect her. No. She decided, after thinking it over in the moonlight in the side yard of her house, that she would murder her father.

  “She had the motive. She believed she had been abused. She had the means: her father’s shotgun which he kept in the closet of his bedroom. And she had the opportunity. Her victim was asleep. Helpless. Completely vulnerable to his vengeful daughter.”

  Jake’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he had to leave. It looked like the alarm had gone off again at the gas company. He would ask Sloane tonight what he’d said and how things went.

  Sloane walked down from his big house, so his car wouldn’t be recognized. Jake opened the back door to the police station for him.

  “Why don’t we just meet at the Busy Bee,” Sloane asked before he sat down.

  After a pause, Jake said, “I guess we could.”

  “But we’re not doing that, are we,” Sloane said.

  “I know. I was the arresting officer,” Jake said. “I will be called as a witness tomorrow morning. I will just say my piece, On the night of, et cetera. But you are the lawyer for the defense. I guess our colluding is a little strange. But is it illegal?”

  “In the past, when I’ve wondered if something was legal, I’d ask myself, ‘Would you want to read about this in The Courier?’”

  “We’re meeting because we both sympathize with this girl,” Jake said.

  “But that’s not going to help her, is it,” Sloane said. “Besides, we’re meeting because we share a sense of the irony of this case. Let’s knock it off.”

  Jake heaved a sigh. “Okay. But before you go, tell me what you said this morning in your opening argument.”

  “I always try to nip in the bud whatever the prosecutor has said in his opening statement. So when I got up, I said, Jamie-Gwen may be mature for her age, but it wasn’t the maturity of a Jezebel; it was the maturity of the oldest daughter who sees early on that she must assert herself to care for and defend the younger children.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that because that, is the kernel of my defense. Everyone I’ve talked to at her school and in the neighborhood believes she had been abused for years. Isn’t that interesting? Not one of them reached out to her, not her teacher who saw her fading and listless, not the school nurse who saw her bruises, not the neighbors who looked the other way. I’m pretty sure that Jamie-Gwen wasn’t defending herself. She’d already lost that battle with her father on the floor or in the bed or wherever he liked to jump her.”

  “Right,” Jake said. “She was defending her family, her younger sister and her little brothers.”

  “Yes, they all show signs of being beaten, according to the school nurse who I will call as a witness. I’ve hired a psychologist as well. This wasn’t so much revenge as it was a girl looking ahead, knowing that those little ones had about as much as they could take from that violent man.”

  “So you’re not going to claim she didn’t do it?”

  “There’s a bind with that defense. If I claim she didn’t do it, what do I do with the evidence of rape? It’s his semen on those tights. The jury is going to see a direct cause and effect between the rape and the murder. That can’t be avoided, although the prosecution will soft-pedal the rape. But the rape is a cause, not only for the shooting. It’s a cause for sympathy from the jury. The burden on me is to create enough sympathy to beat a charge of first degree murder. If the jury doesn’t want to go so far as to convict this girl of a capital offence, then she gets off.”

  Sloane stood up. “This trial isn’t going to last forever.” The men shook hands.

  Jake knew that instead of going himself, he should have sent one of his deputies to the gas company, so he could have heard Sloane Willard’s opening remarks and been able to see the man in action or maybe not doing well. The guy was old, maybe rusty. His mind did wander. Maybe Jake should have let the judge give the case to one of the young public defenders instead of stepping in like he knew what was best. It was too late now.

  “State your name and title,” Leroy Flowers, the District Attorney, told Jake on June 15, the first day of testimony.

  “Jake Hale. Ellis County Sheriff.” From the witness stand he faced Jamie-Gwen’s pale, bony presence, sitting crooked behind the defense desk, her tangled hair falling over her face.

  “You were the arresting officer?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you see when you arrived at the Wainwright residence?”

  “The body of Arnold Wainwright was in bed with a gunshot wound to his chest.”

  “Who else was in the room when you arrived?”

  “Only Jamie-Gwen Wainwright.”

  “And where was she in the room?”

  “She was standing in a corner near the body.”

  “And did you get a confession from her?”

  “No.”

  “I mean did she confess to anything in regard to what had happened that night?”

  “She murmured that she had cleaned the fingerprints off the rifle.”

  “And did you discover that this was true.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How did you discover that this was true?”

  “I dusted for fingerprints as soon as I got back to the police station.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  Jake was surprised and relieved that Flowers wanted so little information from him, but he was glad to get back on the job. There had been a runaway reported that morning from the Ellis County Detention Home, and there was a break-in at a liquor store to investigate as well as the usual traffic accidents and domestic disputes, so he missed the rest of the prosecution’s case, which took nearly three weeks. Everyone said Flowers was taking his time, marshaling evidence, emphasizing that this girl was a loner, regarded as “weird” by her teachers and fellow students. He returned again and again to her confession about the fingerprints but hardly mentioned the evidence of rape.

  Jake followed the story on television and in the paper. He and Sloane were avoiding each other by mutual agreement, and Jake missed Sloane’s support.

  O’Brian reported daily on the trial. One of the most irritating stories for Jake involved an interview with Mrs. Wainwright, the mother of the defendant, who stressed how important it was to be a stay-at-home mom who always insisted on tooth brushing and proper grammar. “The important thing is that I was home in case any of my children needed me. I gave up my successful career in the entertainment industry. Caring for my little ones has been my life.”

  “The Hell you say!” Jake crumpled up the paper.

  The temperature in Cadillac stayed in the 90s during the day and the air conditioning proved inadequate to cooling the crowded courtroom. Jake was having trouble sleeping. His house near the K-Mart was air-conditioned by a rattling box in the window that he had long ago grown used to. Something else was keeping him awake. The cuckle burr stuck in his brain was the vision of Jamie-Gwen as he had seen her the night of the shooting. The dead man was covered by a quilt drawn up to his chin to cover the hole in his chest.
And there was his daughter standing in the dim light of a floor lamp. Silent and empty. Any other child would have been hiding under the bed or running to her mother. How could she stand so close? Why would she?

  Jake waited until 6:00 a.m. to call Sloane, who he knew was an early riser. “She didn’t do it,” he said as soon as Sloane answered.

  “Slow down. I haven’t had my coffee. What have you got?”

  “The only thing she confessed to was cleaning the fingerprints off the gun. Right? She wouldn’t answer anything else. So why did she volunteer this incriminating information? And the school nurse and the doctor testified that Jamie-Gwen showed the symptoms of someone who had been sexually abused for years, right? And the neighbor woman watched her in the yard, but didn’t stay at the window long enough to see her go in. See? So maybe Jamie-Gwen, heard the shot and rushed in?”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “If Jamie-Gwen had been abused by her father before and maybe often, what was so different about that night that would make her shoot him?”

  “Go on.”

  “I think it was the little sister.”

  “Who shot him? Good grief, Jake, how’m I going to prove that.”

  “You don’t need to. Jamie-Gwen is tall. Those tights are small.”

  “Those things are stretchy, Jake. What on earth possessed you to come up with this?”

  “It was her standing there, Sloane, standing not three feet from the bed. Why would she even want to be in the room with the body of a man she probably loathed, if not for me to see. To be there for me to arrest, so I’d be sure to get her instead of her little sister who the old guy had turned his attentions to for the first time that night.”

  “So you think the older girl went outside to try to figure out what to do about her sister being raped? Why couldn’t Jamie-Gwen have gone in and shot him herself?”

  “It’s a long shot. I know. But I think if she’d done it herself, she wouldn’t have been standing there in the bedroom.”

  “Jesus, Jake. It’s too late. This younger sister has been part of the story—Jamie-Gwen’s defending the little ones. It’s dangerous for any lawyer, especially a defense lawyer, to change tactics after he’s begun his argument. The jury’s going to say, huh? What’s wrong with this old man?”