by Craig Smith
I went down flat, the breath in me gone. She had laid into me just behind my arm, catching a rib and muscle. I heard Will hissing his approval and saw his feet give a little dance in his high heel shoes. I scrambled back, working toward the corner of the room, and the next blow I took was a light back-handed brush across the face that blacked me out and left me looking to catch my focus again.
That gave Missy the chance to cock the bat behind her for a full swing, and when I saw her face, all the sorrow and fear had drained out of her. Nothing but rage was left in those mean eyes.
I thought to anticipate the swing, duck under it if I could, but as it came, a gunshot sounded, and she whirled about with a wild yelp, collapsing beside me with a curse.
I looked at Will Booker, but his bloodied face was as astonished as my own. The next shot knocked him to the floor.
I looked toward the front of the house and saw Max Dunn standing in the middle of Missy Worth’s living room. His big Colt .45 smoking.
MAX PUT THE TIP OF HIS gun under Will’s chin and whispered as sweetly as a lover might:
‘Now we play ol’ Nat’s game by my rules, William.’
Booker’s eyes darted toward me to see if I would stop it. He will find more sympathy in hell.
‘Tammy Merriweather...’ Max whispered. ‘Tell me where she is or prepare to die!’
‘Car.’
I went outside, my breath coming with difficulty. The pain in my rib cage was sharp. I was pretty sure Missy had broken some bones, but I made it to the street and crossed to a brown Toyota. I found the keys in the ignition and went to the back of the car. Pulling the lid up, I saw the bound and gagged form of Tammy Merriweather. She was pale, filthy, and nearly naked. As quiet as death.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ I whispered, thinking it was over, that both of Merriweather’s daughters had been sacrificed for the folly of their father. Then I saw her eyelids fluttered open. She had a pair of smoky blues that were as pretty as any I had ever seen.
‘You’re safe,’ I said.
Part VIII The Daughters oeateig p tr eyf Job
And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job…
Job 42: 15
Chapter 96
Wednesday 11:20 p.m., December 6.
‘A SIMPLE TRIAL,’ LEN Griswold said in a conversational tone as he addressed the jury some nine months later. ‘No question about what transpired. All of it is just as the prosecution has so eloquently described it to you.’
Here the great lawyer gave Pat Garrat and Steve Massey a congenial smile for the jury to witness. ‘No long debates about forensics or pathology.’ He hesitated, then tipped his head as he confided to his twelve new-best-friends, ‘Not from our table, at least.’ An affable chuckle from all. ‘No. None of the trappings of a murder trial you have all been led to expect from the newspapers. No alibi, no time frames to fit things into, no question of opportunity or motive of the kind any of us can understand. No third man with one arm or any wild lawyerly inventions to distract you! No surprises at all, I’m afraid.’ He took a moment to gather them into his hand and focus their attention. ‘We are here to try a man for his life, and we have only one question to ask, one simple answer to find. Was William Booker in possession of the knowledge of right and wrong? WAS HE SANE WHEN HE COMMITTED THESE HORRENDOUS CRIMES?’
Griswold stepped toward the jury. He was a tall man with silver hair that he kept long.
He had dazzling turquoise eyes, broad shoulders and the confidence of a man unused to losing –ever. He wore a white buckskin jacket, pants to match, and cowboy boots that folks could see had been in a stirrup. He had a voice as gentle and reproving as God’s own must be.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I mean to astonish you!’ He waited, his eyes taking in each juror, slowly and solemnly, just the hint of a wry smile breaking over at the very end of his silence.
‘Yes... I’m going to be absolutely honest!’
Another long pause to let the laughter die down. He wanted people to know that he was serious. Life and death serious.
‘I don’t know the answer to the question! I don’t know if Will was sane. Neither does Ms Garrat. My expert witnesses, with their combined psychiatric experience totalling over one hundred years, don’t know the answer. The prosecution’s psychiatrists don’t know it either.’ A moment for assumptions to be made, questions to form. ‘And you, friends, even you don’t know and won’t know... can never know the answer! Oh, you’ll make the call. I’m quite confident of that. But what you decide, the verdict you deliver, will be a judgement. Nothing more.
‘I can see it in your faces already. You don’t want to believe me! When this is finished, when all the facts and opinions are expressed, you want to know that you’ve made the right decision!’
He pointed at Will Booker, who was reading his Bible and had not looked up since the judge had appeared and he had been obliged to stand.
‘But in this country we don’t put to death people who don’t understand what they’ve done. Is this an act? Maybe it is. Maybe Will here is purely as evil as the prosecution contends, maybe hisds,his reading of scripture and his ceaseless prayers for the victims are just an act for his gullible-but-kindly lawyer, a piece of show for the good people of the jury who will decide his fate. Folks, I asked Will to put his Bible away during our proceedings here. I said to him, ‘Will, no one is going to believe you can read King James all day long! There are preachers I know who can’t read that version of the Good Book for longer than ten minutes at a stretch!’ And he said to me, “Go in there without my God, Mr Griswold? I can’t do that.” Can’t, friends.’
Griswold held his hands out to either side and lifted his eyebrows. They could believe Will or not.
‘Maybe you have powers to see into the human heart which I don’t possess,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe you can feel certain this is all just an act. Take your justice and know you’ve done the right thing. God bless you, if you can! But friends... if it’s not an act... well, I won’t kid you. You’ve got some hard work ahead of you.’
Chapter 97
Friday 1:10 p.m., December 8.
WHEN GRISWOLD WALKED back to the defence table, he patted Will on the shoulder. Will looked up, smiled, and then resumed his reading.
For the rest of the day and continuing through Thursday and Friday morning, Steve Massey and Pat Garrat presented the bleak outlines of Booker’s crimes using a series of witnesses, everyone from police officers and detectives to the coroner. Crimes were detailed, photographs of bodies viewed, weapons displayed, the sheer volume of human loss tallied. And even then the greater part of it entered the record by stipulation, uncontested fact. Throughout the ordeal and this part is harrowing for any jury, Len Griswold was true to his word, posing only the occasional question on cross – always with the aim of showing Will Booker as being something other than a rational being.
By the lunch break Friday, our physical case was outlined. We brought our psychological expert to the stand. Had Will Booker understood the difference between right and wrong? Certainly. The proof of it was in every action he took. These were outlined in review with thoughtful assessment of every choice Booker had exhibited. On his cross Griswold asked the psychiatrist if he had ever spoken to Will Booker. The expert answered that he had, that he met with Booker several times. On Griswold’s follow up, the psychiatrist admitted that Will Booker had refused to look up from his Bible to answer any of his questions.
‘Thank you!’ Griswold answered. ‘I have no further questions.’
AT THAT POINT WE WERE ready to introduce the survivors of Will Booker’s mayhem.
I met Missy Worth at the prosecutor’s office shortly after one. She was wearing a cheap quilted coat against the cold. The shoes had road miles, the pearls at her earlobes were the dime store variety, but she was trying. For Missy Worth, she was all dressed up. A pretty decent makeup job, a charcoal sweater and black pants, a touch of perfume, even some minor successes with weight l
oss. She smiled at me timidly, almost embarrassed it seemed to be out of her jeans.
‘How do I look, sweet cheeks?’
Credible, I thought. ‘Beautiful,’ I said.
We went through a couple things I wanted her to keep in minarisaid.1emd, then I told her what was going to happen. How she would be called, where she would wait, the whole process, down to her hand on the Good Book. ‘...and don’t give the judge the finger, no matter how mad he makes you!’
This was our running joke, and she gave me a grin. ‘I won’t let him see it if I do,’ she answered.
I think by the time we were out the door and walking across the plaza I was more nervous than Missy. Then we saw Clint Doolittle. Missy’s step hitched. She swore solemnly.
Doo was wearing his standard t-shirt and denim but had tossed on a thin leather vest to keep off the frost. Everyone else wore coats. With his bare arms swinging and one hand full of the Bible, he was standing on the courthouse steps. People were returning to the trial after their lunch break, and Doo was shouting like a prophet, ‘REPENT, SINNERS!’ He held the Bible high in the air, repeating his cry several times. Then he launched into a series of abominations that most of us partake in as a matter of course.
‘Did you know about this?’ Missy asked me.
‘He’s stayed away until now.’ I looked at the collected media waiting for us. ‘I expect he couldn’t resist the cameras.’
‘He doesn’t care about the cameras. He’s here for me.’
‘That’s one view of it,’ I offered.
‘Tell Garrat she ought to bring his doctors up on criminal charges.’
‘She’s already considering it,’ I answered.
Will Booker’s shot to Doo’s forehead at point-blank range had failed to penetrate.
Twelve hours after taking it, Doolittle woke up with the mother of all headaches and a flock of Merriweather’s devotees praying him back to this side. He was so touched by the gesture and so moved by the miracle of being alive that he took up a new calling then and there, but no one knew it until five surgeries later when his jaw was finally working again and he could hit the streets: a born-again-preacher-on-a-Harley, and no soul safe.
He liked to rant against liquor and dope and sex-outside-the-sacred-union-of-marriage.
He loved nothing so much as to hit the campuses all over the Midwest, chastising the fornicators, the blaspheme-ors, the drink-ors, the adulter-ors and the whoremong-ors. Lump on his forehead and all, Doo was a preacher who lived for confrontation. He had told me himself that recently some frats down in Attica decided it might be fun to hassle an ex-bad-ass-biker-turned-preacher because his Christian beliefs wouldn’t let him take a swing. He told me in all seriousness it was a mistake that came of their not reading the Good Book cover-to-cover. Doo preached his Jesus like a man on fire, but he kept the bookmark on Joshua at the walls of Jericho.
The good news, he told me, was that two of the five who went to the hospital ended up ‘coming on over to the Lord’s side.’
As we got closer, Doo continued to avoid looking at us. I began to hope we were going to be spared a direct assault. In retrospect I admit my optimism was reckless. The moment Missy Worth passed in front of him and the cameras lit up on her, Doo pointed at her and shouted at the top of his lungs, ‘THERE SHE GOES, FOLKS! THE WHORE OF BABYLON!’
‘Keep walking,’ I whispered, taking Missy’s elbow and hanging on.
‘I’m going to kill him,’ she whispered back.
‘Wait till later,’ I said. ‘I’ll help.’
‘JEZEBEL! FORNICATOR! BLASPHEM-OR!’
The shouts followed us all the way into the courthouse. The blessing of it was that Missy Worth didn’t even notice the TV cameras.
Chapter 98
Friday 2:17 p.m., December 8.
STEVE MASSEY TOOK Missy Worth’s opening testimony, walking her through her perjury ten years ago. He was brutal, completely lacking in sympathy and careful to leave nothing for Griswold to pick at.
When he had finished, Garrat took Missy the rest of the way. The murders of her friends.
Forced to do it? No, it was just talk, she said. He beat you? No, he never touched me. Threats?
He didn’t make any direct threats. ‘He just wanted... he said he wanted to let us go free... but Lisa was a problem...’
I had heard it all before, like lines spoken at a play rehearsal, but it was different in the courtroom. The flat inflections, the exhaustion that her face always assumed as she told of her own role no longer seemed empty of emotion. Before the jury she really was a victim. That fact read in every juror’s face.
‘So it was a bargain?’
‘Yes.’
‘First Lisa, then Kathy, then your own sister?’
‘Yes.’
‘Each a separate deal with new promises given and every one of them taken as gospel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Didn’t you understand that he was lying to you?’ Garrat asked her.
Missy did not look at Will Booker, nor did the accused bring his eyes from his Bible, except once or twice, it seemed, when he tracked Garrat as she moved about the courtroom.
‘No.’
‘You believed him?’
The line we had struggled with came like a piece of spontaneity: ‘I wanted to believe him.’
‘State is finished with this witness,’ Garrat announced.
GRISWOLD STOOD FOR the cross examination. We had prepared Missy Worth for a full discussion of her immunity, a brutal exposure of her past. Lots of questions about psychiatric facilities she had visited, and of course her perjury ten years ago. Not once had we thought Griswold might coddle this witness.
‘You dug four graves in all, Missy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew the last was yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you lay down in it?’
‘Yes.’
Griswold hesitated. ‘Did you ask for your life?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did Will say?’
‘He wanted to trust me but he couldn’t.’ Her eyes had tears suddenly, but her chin didn’t drop.
‘And you promised him that he could trust you; you would not tell anyone who had taken you?’
‘I wanted to live!’ Defensive, some fight in her for the first time.
‘I would have made the same promise, Missy. Any of us would have.’ He nodded at the jury, including them. They too would kill for the sake of their own lives. ‘I just want you to clarify for me, if you will, what took place at that point.’
‘I said I wouldn’t tell. I swore it on my soul.’ She looked defiantly at Will Booker now.
Everyone did.
Will Booker simply turned the page of his battered King James.
‘A terrible night for you?’ Griswold asked.
Missy looked at Griswold as if he had caused it. ‘You have no idea.’
‘You remember it vividly?’
‘Yes!’ This was shouted with all the fury I had seen in the woman when she had broken two of my ribs.
‘Now let me see if I have this straight. You promised several times not to identify him.
He kept saying he wanted to trust you, but he couldn’t?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You asked for your life one last time?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he said…?’
‘He said, “You know, I think I believe you, Missy. Just so you believe me...” and then he shot me!’ Loud, angry, and as bitter as yesterday. She was off script but still telling the truth.
‘He said I believe you and then he shot you? That’s what you’re telling us?’
‘Three times! He shot me three times!’
A lesser lawyer would have blurted out the obvious: that it hardly made sense for Will to say he believed her promises and then to shoot her in the same breath. A protest would have naturally followed with some heat, and the judge would have told the jurors to disregard
the comment. That was the one thing, of course, they could not have done. I saw Garrat tightening up, ready to leap, but Griswold simply turned and looked at his client. It was a confused look, the kind a parent offers a wayward child, full of questions and not a clue as to why he would behave so... irrationally. Now the lawyer looked at the jury, his eyebrows lifting. Could anyone make sense of it?
And then finally, still mystified, ‘No further questions.’
Chapter 99
Tuesday 9:15 a.m., December 13.