by Martin Clark
It was a few minutes after eight when he left the hotel, and he was supposed to meet with his lawyer at ten-thirty to go over his testimony and prepare for the deposition. He and Christy were scheduled to be questioned at one. He drove to a Waffle House and ate breakfast, kidded with the waitress, drank three cups of coffee and read the “Extra” section of a Roanoke Times someone had discarded in his booth. “You in sales?” the waitress inquired at one point as she was warming his coffee and plucking two cream containers from her apron. Joel looked up from his plate and said, “For today, at least, I am.” She grinned and asked if he wanted anything else.
He wandered out of the restaurant and started driving. He traveled on Route 220 to the Rocky Mount exit for Smith Mountain Lake, through the speed trap in Boone’s Mill and past the roadside attractions with beer and gas and whatnots and crude wooden sculptures carved by a man using a chainsaw. He took the road toward the lake, following a single lane into the countryside. A woman in cutoff jeans and a bathing-suit top was mowing her lawn, bouncing along on a faded Snapper Comet, contrails of dust blowing from the blades when the metal scalped the ground or she hit a bare spot. Joel caught up with a family towing a boat and slowed, was stuck behind them for several miles before he was able to get around. He turned right on a gravel road not far from Hales Ford Bridge and headed into the woods. When he checked his watch, it was ten o’clock.
The house at the end of the road belonged to Roanoke First Baptist, donated by a childless widower named Albert Glenn. The church used the place for retreats and seminars, and Joel assumed no one would be there on a Monday in late August. He walked to the dock and turned a chair so he could face the water. Before he sat down, three bream darted between the pilings near the front of the dock, and a nice-size bass swam into view soon after, in no hurry at all, close enough to the surface that Joel saw a flash of silver when the fish rolled for deeper water. The sky was clear, the summer sluggishness and haze chased out of the air by a freakishly cool midnight shower, and the lake was at rest, a blue-brown tarp that stretched for miles without a wrinkle or swell.
Joel had come here to take inventory, to reflect on his situation . . . and to squander the morning. He and Martha used to visit the house on Friday nights, then eat Saturday biscuits-and-gravy breakfast at the marina and laze around the property. They’d fish off the dock with kernels of corn, float on the lake in black inner tubes, cut pink roses from the unkempt bushes near the porch and cook chicken and vegetables outside on the grill. Joel would pull out his reading glasses in the evening and give his sermon a final tweak, and Martha would pour herself half a glass of white wine and sit beside him while he edited. If he took too long or read too many passages to her, she’d blow in his ear or pinch his knee or pop his arm with her fist and call him Billy Sunday. Sometimes they’d have sex, and sometimes they’d take a blanket to the dock and listen to the radio, and sometimes they’d sit on the screened-in porch and swap stories and fit together the cardboard pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When the lake was busy, they could hear laughs and shouts and boats ripping by until the sun set, and more nights than not, someone would shoot fireworks and burn the horizon with shimmering spreads of red, white and green.
And now he was alone at the very same place, stained by his mistakes, dressed in his best preacher’s suit and a cheap purple shirt, his hair moussed and combed into a slippery joke. He closed his eyes and hung his head, imagined himself as the protagonist in a series of still photographs, each picture snapped from a more distant perspective than the last. Initially the camera was close to him, and the shot showed him from the waist up, captured his face and trunk and cut off everything else. The next view was farther away, perhaps taken from the end of the dock, included every bit of him along with a slice of background—bushes and water and riprap and the overhang of a willow tree. Then he was just a slight outline, photographed from the opposite side of the lake, and there was even less of him in the following frame, and the camera withdrew more and more until he disappeared, became a speck in a panorama that had the lake the size of a bottle cap. He knew the Lord could read his heart and understand that his intentions were pure.
He left his chair, walked to the gravel road, scooped up a handful of stones and returned to the dock. He piled the stones on a wooden slat in the walkway and tossed them into the water one at a time, waiting between throws for the concentric rings to disappear and the wound in the lake to heal. He thought about The Wizard of Oz, how it used to be aired only a single time each year. The King family would gather in the living room for the ritual, his parents on the sofa, he and Sophie on the floor. Their dad would twist the dial on the rotary antenna, and the picture would wane and strengthen while the control stuttered toward due north. They’d have a pallet of pillows and quilts and a quart of chocolate milk in the fridge, and the mean old witch always scared the heck out of Sophie, gave her bad dreams for a week. Now the movie was available on video and broadcast haphazardly on atheist Ted Turner’s stations, in color from beginning to end.
Her mother would tell the ladies at her bridge club the next day that Christina had looked and acted “darling” at the deposition. She arrived at the eighth-floor offices of Gentry, Locke, Rakes and Moore twenty minutes early, about the time Joel was finishing off the final gravel from the pile on the dock. Henry Clay Hanes had posted a paralegal in the lobby of the law firm, and she greeted Christy and her parents and escorted them into a conference room where Hanes and his associate Oliver were waiting. When Christy entered the room, Hanes clapped his hands—they made a short, muffled sound as they struck—and shuffled his feet in an impromptu jig. He kept his hands clasped while his feet skidded on the carpet, and his grin was so deep that it exposed the wire arc of a bridge in his back teeth. “You look like a million bucks, Christy,” he said. “Perfect. Thank you.”
She was wearing a navy blue suit from Banana Republic, the pants stylish but not fitted, the jacket long enough to cover most of her rear. She had on simple shoes that matched the outfit and no jewelry except a watch with a silver band. There was a suggestion of color on her lips and that was it—the byzantine shades she usually painted around her eyes were absent, her skin blank and unadorned. Her hair was tight against her head, tied in a ponytail, and she looked at the floor and the walls and her hands far more than she looked at the other people in the room. Everyone was delighted— a diffident, vulnerable, beautiful child had arrived to tell her story.
Joel appeared at ten minutes past one and was quickly hauled into his lawyer’s office.
“Where in the Sam Hill have you been?” Roland demanded, glaring at Joel. “It’s already past one. You were supposed to be here hours ago.” He had another lawyer with him, and the new lawyer glared, too.
“I’m sorry to be tardy.”
“ ‘Sorry’? ‘Tardy’? I don’t think that’s quite good enough. I called the hotel, and they said you left at eight. It takes you five hours to make it six miles?”
Joel chucked the huge Bible onto Roland’s desk. “I apologize. I needed to gather my thoughts, and time kind of slipped away from me.”
“This is a damned disaster, Mr. King. I’ve got to take you in there cold, completely unprepared. Henry Clay Hanes will eat us alive.”
“We’ve talked on the phone and you’ve investigated the case, right? Hey, the truth’s the truth, so what is there to prepare?”
“Did Mr. Ashe discuss any of this with you, prep you at all?”
“Who? Who’s Mr. Ashe?”
“Your lawyer! The guy you hired? Remember him? From D.C.? He’s talked to me three or four times, helped arrange your travel here. Ring any bells?”
Joel was truly flummoxed for a moment. He finally realized Roland was referring to Sa’ad or the “local counsel” Sa’ad was going to hire—probably Sa’ad with a cell phone and fake accent and bogus stationery. Or maybe he really did have an associate in this part of the world. Who knew? “Oh, right, Mr. Ashe. Sure. I thought you said ‘Lash.’ But
no, Mr. Ashe really didn’t give me much instruction. He’s more of a big-picture man.” Another layer between Sa’ad and any nettlesome trouble, Joel noted. Mr. Ashe almost certainly would be a will-o’-the-wisp if anyone ever attempted to locate him.
“I said Ashe.”
“Anyway, I’ve fired him, so please don’t have anything else to do with him, okay? Or anyone else. No contact, no more information. I’m very serious about this. He’s off the case completely. From now on, everything stays between us. I’ve put that in writing.” Joel handed Roland a sheet of hotel stationery containing his handwritten directions and signature.
“I’m glad you’ve been spending your time wisely, Mr. King,” Roland said. “This is oh-so-important right now.”
A secretary poked her head inside the office and told Roland that Henry Clay Hanes was impatient and ready to begin.
“Right, right, right,” Roland said. “Tell him he can leave for all I care. We’ll be there in a minute.”
“What are you wearing?” asked the other lawyer.
“Who are you?” Joel was polite.
“I’m Allan White—I’m assisting Mr. Roland with this case. You look like Lex Luthor or something. Or Liberace or the King of the Gypsies. What’s with the getup? I know Brian told you to dress conservatively.”
“I thought I did. I have on a nice suit and a tie. This kind of shirt is very stylish.”
“You look like a third world pimp, Mr. King.”
“You think so?” Joel asked.
The secretary reappeared at the door. “Mr. Hanes says it’s twenty after, and he’s going to call Judge Weckstein and ask for sanctions if we don’t get started. He’s really being pushy.”
“We’re coming. Tell him we’re on the way.” Brian Roland stood and looked down at Joel. “Listen. Say as little as possible. Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when you can. Don’t answer questions you aren’t asked, and don’t volunteer anything. Always let Hanes complete his question before you respond. Understand?”
“I do.” Joel felt sorry for Roland. He seemed to be a capable lawyer and, under normal circumstances, a considerate man. A picture of a child in soccer clothes was near Joel’s Bible, a ten- or eleven-year-old boy kneeling in front of a net.
“What are you going to say when you’re asked about having sexual relations with Christina Darden?” Roland asked. He was picking up papers and folders from his desk.
“I’ll have to tell the truth and admit it. Sorry about that.”
“Well, keep it at a minimum and act contrite.”
“No problem.”
“Follow me,” Roland said. “Try not to get lost between here and the conference room.”
Christy was to be questioned first. She sat at the end of an oblong mahogany table with Hanes at her elbow and a court reporter to their left. Hanes and Brian Roland began by arguing over the seating arrangements, Hanes insisting that there be an empty chair between his client and Roland, and Roland proclaiming that he’d sit wherever he pleased. They went round and round on the subject for ten minutes, wagging fingers and threatening this and that and reciting sections from the Code of Virginia. The court reporter tapped everything into her machine, her fingers starting and stopping in rhythm with the lawyers’ harangues. Finally it was decided that Hanes could remove a chair—the chair next to Christy—to create some personal space for his client, and Brian Roland would occupy the next seat in line while asking his questions. “Just make sure you keep your chair where it is and don’t crowd Miss Darden,” Hanes warned Roland when they’d concluded their bickering. “I don’t want you trying to intimidate this girl. She’s been through enough already.”
“Tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Hanes. Let’s adjourn, and I’ll get the UN secretary general on the phone and he can send some peacekeeping troops over to guard your precious three feet of inviolate space. Would that satisfy you?”
Christy was a virtuoso. Despite being spoiled and undisciplined, she was a terrifically bright girl. She seemed able to anticipate many of Roland’s questions and never had a problem with her answers. It became obvious that Hanes had given her two main talking points: how Joel had betrayed her, and how she was reluctant to trust anyone because of what had happened. She cried when she described the sex, sniffed, and wiped her nose and red-rimmed eyes with a tissue while she told how Joel had penetrated her “with his thing.”
“I’m sorry to press you on this,” Roland said, “but I have to ask you to clarify that. What do you mean by ‘thing’?”
“His . . . thing. His penis,” she said meekly. “You know.”
“I’m not trying to embarrass you. I just have to make sure,” Roland said. He was quiet and tentative, struggling to strike the appropriate tone.
She testified that she and Joel had engaged in intercourse on two separate occasions, each time in his office at the church. The first time she was “sort of overwhelmed and in awe,” and she “kinda wanted to and kinda like didn’t, probably more no than yes.” But Joel never raped her—her mother was simply upset and alarmed when she’d reported as much to the police— and she still considered Preacher Joel her friend. She refused to face him until the conclusion of her testimony, and after meeting his eyes she sobbed and said she was trying not to hold a grudge. Hanes consoled her and poured her a glass of water from a silver metal pitcher. She took two timid swallows, then exited the room with her lawyer’s big paternal arm encircling her, his monogrammed cuff and striking gold watch apparent to everyone still sitting at the table, his hands remarkably large and ruddy for a desk worker’s.
The court reporter had Joel raise his right hand and swear to tell the truth, and he began his turn by asking everyone to join him in prayer, unleashed his giant Bible and rifled through a flurry of gilded pages.
“Pray?” asked Henry Clay Hanes.
“Yes, I’d like to pray.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Roland said. “Let’s just get started.”
“Fine with me if he prays,” Hanes said. “Technically, he’s my witness and it’s my choice. Have at it, Preacher.” He was holding a thick, expensive pen, and he laid it on the table, then took off his glasses and placed them next to the pen.
“Do you want this on the record?” the court reporter asked.
“Of course. Absolutely,” Hanes answered.
“Reverend King, as your attorney and the church’s attorney, I’m strongly encouraging you to dispense with the prayer. In fact, I’m instructing you to do so.” Roland’s voice was strained. He was sitting beside Joel, the two of them having swapped positions with Christy and Hanes at the head of the table.
“He can do it if he wants,” Hanes replied, happy to get a preview of Joel and his demeanor before they concentrated on business. “He’s my witness.”
“He’s my client, Mr. Hanes. I don’t know how you do things in Richmond, but here you don’t tell my client what to do.” He stared at Joel. “Let me see you outside, please.”
“There’s no need,” Joel said. “Let’s bow our heads.”
“Joel, I’m insisting you shut your mouth and take a break.” Roland was angry, almost yelled. He gripped Joel’s elbow.
Joel ignored him and launched into a long-winded, meandering prayer that wandered from scripture to scripture and notion to notion but, to Roland’s relief, dwelled mostly on Joel’s innocence and the unfairness of his legal woes. He concluded by asking the Lord to forgive Henry Clay Hanes, “for he knows not what he is doing.”
“Thank you, Mr. King. I appreciate your generosity where I’m concerned.” Hanes took hold of his elaborate pen.
“Reverend King. I prefer to be called Reverend King.” Joel made certain he sounded pompous.
Hanes put on his glasses. “Then Reverend King it will be.”
Hanes was skilled at his trade. Joel thought it remarkable that the same man who had been so bombastic and childish earlier in his sandbox squabble over chairs could be so intuitive and effective. Hanes stalked and nipped a
nd worked at his own speed, reversed course occasionally and repeated the same question three or four times if Joel was the slightest bit evasive. There was no bluster in his method, nothing at all threatening, just a methodical, unflappable doggedness that never subsided and seemed almost physically smothering.
It took Hanes half an hour to get to the first sexual event. He was quiet for a moment, looked Joel square in the eye and didn’t utter a word. He tapped his pen across his meaty palm, waited exactly three counts between strikes: Pop—one, two, three. Pop—one, two, three. Pop—one, two, three. Joel felt an adrenaline pang sting his stomach, noticed his hands were pinching the edge of the table.
“Now, Reverend King, did there come a day, while meeting with Miss Darden in your church office, that you and Miss Darden engaged in sexual contact?”
Joel considered making Hanes explain the term, but decided against it, didn’t see any need to prolong the process and get bludgeoned with five more questions. “Yes.”
“This sexual encounter occurred within the confines of Roanoke First Baptist Church?”
“That’s correct,” Joel answered.
“And you were meeting with Miss Darden in your capacity as her minister?”
“True.”
“You were counseling her?”
“Right,” Joel said. He glimpsed a contemptuous look the court reporter sent his way.