THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  “So you do know the girl?”

  “She’s the best friend of my best friend’s daughter.” He ran an exasperated hand through his hair. “I don’t know what’s going on here. None of this makes any sense.”

  “Well if you have two witnesses who can account for your whereabouts yesterday morning at all times—and I mean all times, without a single second unaccounted for—then that will help. But these are very serious charges, and I have to say that the case against you seems very strong and would play well to a jury.”

  “How’s that possible? There’s no evidence. There can’t be. Whatever they have is completely fabricated.”

  “They have the girl’s testimony. On tape. I just finished watching it, and it’s pretty damning.”

  “Kate said this happened?” Hunt was stunned. “She says I… did that?”

  Jennings nodded. “Yes. It’s the basis for the complaint.”

  He blinked dumbly, trying to figure out why the girl would lie, what would make her say something so completely untrue. He’d naively assumed that the accusation had come from somewhere else and that Kate would be his main alibi, that as soon as the police talked to the girl she’d tell them that none of it had happened and they’d let him go and all would be right with the world. But obviously they’d talked to her before coming to arrest him, and he thought now that maybe she had come to them. Maybe she’d told her parents this lie and then they’d gone directly to the police.

  But why?

  “Can I see that tape?” Hunt asked.

  “Of course.” Jennings stood, withdrew a videocassette from its box. “But it doesn’t look good.” He walked to the front of the room, turned on the television and popped the tape into the machine.

  It was almost in black-and-white, the color was so washed out, but the image was clear, the sound audible, and in the bottom right-hand corner was yesterday’s date. Kate was seated at a small blue plastic table in a well-lit room. There was a large pad of paper in front of her and an assortment of pens, but she did not touch any of them. On the other side of the small table, crammed into an equally small chair, was an adult woman wearing a knee-length skirt. Only the bottom half of the woman was visible. The camera remained trained on Kate. She was not behaving like herself. She seemed solemn—traumatized, Beth would probably say—and Hunt suddenly had a very bad feeling about this.

  There were no introductions, no explanations. The two were talking freely, referencing subjects they’d obviously visited before. This was apparently the middle of a much longer conversation, and the tape had been wound to this point because this was where the important information was located, this was the crux of the case.

  Hunt realized that they were talking about a game of basketball he and Joel had played with Lilly and Kate. The woman subtly changed the topic of conversation. “And what was that other game you said Mr. Jackson liked to play with you?”

  “Made me play.”

  “Made you play.”

  Kate shrugged.

  “You told me before.”

  “He made me play ‘Lollipop,’” Kate said.

  “What is ‘Lollipop’?”

  She squirmed uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”

  “You can tell me, Kate.”

  She shook her head.

  “The only way we’ll be able to stop it is if you’re honest and tell us the truth.”

  She looked down at her hands, fidgeting in her lap. “He pulls down his pants and tells me to pretend his peepee is a lollipop. He wants me to lick it.”

  “It’s a lie!” Hunt shouted. “That never happened!”

  He kicked over the chair, stomping blindly around the room, hitting a wall with his fist. He knew now what was meant when people said they wanted to tear out their hair. The world had gone crazy, and his frustration level was so great that he was unable to express it in any way that didn’t involve lashing out destructively.

  “… white stuff came out,” Kate was saying on the tape.

  “Turn that off!” Hunt ordered.

  The lawyer pressed the power button on the television and then ejected the videocassette. “Now you see what we’re up against.”

  “I’ve never even been alone with her! Not once!”

  “I believe you,” Jennings said.

  Hunt took a deep breath. “She’s a good kid, Kate. She really is. I don’t know how they got her to say those lies or who put her up to it, but… it’s not true!” He sat back down. “But she believes it,” he said quietly. “Even I can see that. They brainwashed her somehow and she thinks it really happened.”

  “Yes.” The lawyer patted his shoulder. “So long as you understand that, we can move forward. When I have clients who protest their innocence, half the battle is usually getting them to see how their case looks from the outside, how it will appear to a jury. You know already, which means that we can discuss strategy. What I’m going to do right now is get a statement from you, a point-by-point rebuttal to all accusations. I’D talk to your witnesses, then I’ll come back, sort through what the DA has, what we have, and map out our legal strategy. My hope is that this will never have to go to trial. There’s a bail hearing set for this afternoon, and I believe we’ll be able to make bail. Once that first hurdle’s cleared, I’ll be meeting with the DA and we’ll compare notes. I’ve worked with him before, he’s a good guy. If what you’ve told me is true and all of your alibis pan out, we may be able to get the case dismissed.”

  “And if we can’t?”

  Jennings took out a portable tape recorder and a tablet of yellow legal-sized writing paper. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  They spent the next forty-five minutes going over Hunt’s side of the story, his recollection of names and dates, his refutation of all allegations. Finally, the attorney shut off the tape recorder, put away his pen and flipped back the pages of the legal tablet. “I think we have enough here to go on.” He started clearing the table, putting away his papers. “It’s nearly lunchtime, so if I’m going to get anything done before the bail hearing, I’d better go now. Keep going over everything in your mind and think about any discrepancies, any inconsistencies in the case against you, anything important that you might have forgotten to tell me. Sometimes details don’t come when you want them to, sometimes pressure frightens them away.”

  Jennings closed his briefcase. He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Jackson. We’ll be working very closely together for the next few days, maybe the next few weeks, so feel free to call me Ray. I’ll be checking in with you at least twice a day, and I’ve arranged for a visitor’s schedule. Your wife will be by to see you shortly after I leave, and she’ll come again this evening. I will be there for your bail hearing, and possibly again later if something new comes up. If you don’t hear from me, don’t panic. I won’t have forgotten you, I will still be working on your case. Jail and lack of communication do funny things to a man’s mind, so just be aware that even though you’re temporarily out of the loop and aren’t aware of every little detail, wheels are still turning.”

  After he left, Hunt was led back to the holding cell by a guard. He felt better upon returning. Part of a lawyer’s job, he knew, was to keep up the spirits of a client, to bolster the client’s confidence, but Jennings’s optimism seemed authentic, his analysis of the situation realistic, and from talking to the man, Hunt was convinced that he was an intelligent and highly capable attorney. Besides, if he had buoyed up Hunt’s spirits so effectively, he was probably damn good at the rest of his job as well.

  The bail hearing did not go his way. Because of the severity of the charges and Hunt’s loose ties to the community, the judge refused to buy any of Jennings’s arguments. She said that she considered Hunt a flight risk, and did not simply set bail high but denied it completely. Maybe this was his own prejudice showing, but Hunt had the feeling that if the judge had been a man instead of a woman, things might have gone differently. He was pretty sure that in the judge’
s eyes, he was guilty, a predatory pedophile, and he hoped to Christ that he got another judge if he went on trial.

  If he went on trial.

  For child molestation.

  How could this be? He remembered a line from Albert Brooks’s movie Lost in America: “We’re in hell. When did we enter hell?”

  Shortly after he was returned to the county facility, transferred out of the holding block and assigned his own jail cell, a guard unlocked the barred door, slapped some cuffs on him and, nightstick in hand, led him downstairs to a visiting room that really did look like one of those in a movie. There was a long expanse of bulletproof glass with little sections partitioned off for individual prisoners to meet with their lawyers or loved ones. He was led down the length of the room, past occupied and empty chairs to a small space at the end.

  “You have a visitor,” the guard intoned.

  Hunt sat down.

  It was the insurance agent.

  He was waiting in the cubicle on the other side of the safety glass, and he picked up the intercom phone and gestured for Hunt to do the same. He looked different than he had before, not quite so nondescript. Maybe it was the harsh lighting, maybe it was just the setting, but he seemed a little harder than before, a little more assertive, less the ingratiating salesman and more the cutthroat businessman. There was a sharper cast to his features, and Hunt thought that the detective hat—

  Fedora? Hamburg? Homburg?

  —looked less silly, seemed to go more with his appearance. He was also wearing what looked like a trench coat, though it was a sunny day and quite warm. He was trying to cultivate an image, no doubt, something cinematic that he believed was impressive, but Hunt also thought that there was a less benign reason for the wardrobe, and he found himself thinking that the insurance agent really did have sort of an old-timey look about him, as though he belonged to another era.

  Hunt stood up for a second, looked down the line of inmates and their visitors. He saw wives, sons, parents. Lawyers. But of course no insurance agents. Why the hell would an insurance agent visit someone in jail?

  He sat down, looked at the man on the other side of the glass. Why indeed?

  Against his better judgment, Hunt picked up the phone.

  “How are you today, Mr. Jackson?”

  “What do you mean, how am I? I’m in jail. I’m accused of a crime I didn’t commit.”

  The agent shook his head in mock sympathy. “Mr. Jackson, Mr. Jackson. I’m not one for I-told-you-so’s, but may I point out that if you had availed yourself of our offer of deluxe personal injury coverage with the legal insurance rider, I daresay this incident would not be happening to you right now.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Yes it is.”

  The man smiled in a way that was supposed to be sympathetic but was definitely not, and Hunt suddenly realized that this visit was not one of courtesy. He was being sent a message. The agent was behind these shocking charges. Or his company was. They’d done this to blackmail him into accepting their insurance, to flex their muscles and show him that he’d better play ball. What other reason could there be? If the agent was not involved somehow, he would not even know Hunt was here.

  But how had it happened? What were the logistics? Could they have bribed the Giffords into lying? They definitely could not have bribed or intimidated Kate. From everything he could tell, the girl was bluntly honest and totally incorruptible. Besides, he’d seen that videotape. Kate thought he really had done those things.

  So how had they convinced—no, brainwashed—the entire family into believing that he had forced Kate into giving him oral sex?

  There was no rational explanation, no reason he could come up with that made any logical sense.

  The man was still smiling, and the sight chilled Hunt to the bone. Whatever was happening here, he was in way over his head. He thought of the guest room, the noises, the figure glimpsed in the mirror. There was an entire world of which, until recently, he’d been blissfully unaware. A world of shadows and substance, as Rod Serling used to say, and although he had never believed any of that mumbo-jumbo before, he did now, and it scared the hell out of him.

  But he refused to show fear, refused to give the insurance agent the satisfaction. He sat there stone-faced, phone in hand, for several moments longer, and when the agent didn’t say anything more, Hunt made as if to hang up.

  “Wait!” the man cried, and Hunt was grateful to hear an edge of desperation in the tinny voice.

  Once again, he put the phone to his ear.

  “I’m here to offer you another chance,” the agent said smoothly, and once again he was the ingratiating if overly earnest salesman.

  “You want me to sign up again?”

  “I’m afraid you’re no longer eligible for legal insurance. No, the reason I’m here is to offer you protection against conviction. Again, you will be required to purchase a personal injury policy. Then, for a nominal fee that will be added on to your base premium you will be issued a supplemental policy that will insure you against any adverse judgment in a court of law.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “I think the coverage is pretty self-explanatory.”

  “You mean I won’t get convicted?”

  “Indeed, you won’t. This is as far as it will go. You have been charged with this crime, but the charges will be dismissed or you will be found innocent, depending on the type of coverage you choose.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it is not. As I told you before, we are a reputable firm with an outstanding reputation, and our policies, some of which are very targeted and precise, always insure our customers for exactly what the terms specify.”

  He stared at Hunt, and against his will, Hunt felt the stirrings of hope inside him. Hope was a dangerous emotion that more often than not led men into foolishness and peril, made them risk their lives and lose their wives and part with fortunes that they never recovered. He knew he was too close to this, was unable to look at his situation objectively, but he tried to analyze the offer and could not find any downside. Was this some sort of Faustian bargain? Was he being tricked into selling his soul when he purchased insurance? He didn’t think so, but he would read the entire policy very carefully before he signed anything.

  “How much extra would it be?” he asked.

  The agent reached down below the level of the countertop and withdrew a calculator and an actuarial table from his briefcase on the floor. “Twenty dollars a month for personal injury, an extra ten for conviction. Combined, that’s three hundred and sixty a year you’d be paying for peace of mind.” He gestured around the visitors’ room, but his motion took in the building beyond the walls. “You’d never see the inside of this place again.”

  “And it takes effect immediately?”

  “Upon signing.” The agent paused. “Of course, you do have to qualify.”

  There was a catch.

  “What does that entail?” Hunt asked.

  He shrugged. “You answer a few questions.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Hunt thought hard, tried to see the offer from all angles. He had no idea how to estimate the efficacy of the unknowable, how to judge the merits of a promise that by any conventional yardstick was impossible to fulfill. But it was possible, he knew that now, and he needed a means by which to decide what was right and what was wrong.

  What would his lawyer say? He wished Jennings were here right now. This was not exactly an ordinary legal question, in fact was so far out in left field that it was in another ballpark completely, but he trusted the attorney to look after his best interests, and he would like to have the impartial opinion of an experienced man.

  As if reading his mind, the agent said softly, “I need your decision now. It’s a onetime offer. Take it or leave it. I don’t have time to wait.”

  He wished Beth were here.

  “Mr. Jackson?”

>   “I’ll take it.”

  The agent was all business. He took a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, clicked it. “All right. There are just a few questions I need to ask, some important information we need so we can determine whether or not you qualify for this coverage. You ready?”

  Hunt nodded.

  “Number one: how big is your wife’s pussy?”

  Hunt stared at him. This had to be a joke. But the agent gave no sign that this was anything other than a legitimate query.

  Anger coursed through him. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “We will ask the questions, Mr. Jackson. You will answer them.”

  “I’m not answering questions like that.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “Next question.”

  “You still haven’t answered the first one. How big is your wife’s pussy?”

  “Next question!”

  “Come on. Is she tight down there, or do you have to strap a board to your ass to keep from falling in?” The agent snickered.

  Hunt slammed down the phone. Looking through the window, he saw the insurance agent squint comically at a pinprick-sized hole he formed by the close convergence of his thumb and forefinger—then expand the hole until he needed two hands to make it and it encircled his head. He grinned.

  Hunt spit at the glass, kicked over his chair, and walked away.

  2

  Joel stood on the back patio, looking over the roofs of his neighbors’ houses at the rough pyramid shapes of the Rincon Mountains, their tan facades a hellish orange in the light of the setting sun. The temperature was dropping fast with the disappearance of daylight, but he made no move to go inside. Lilly was in there, and if he went back into the house he would be forced to have a conversation he did not want to have with his daughter. Better to stay out here until Stacy called him.

  Cowardly, he knew, but he couldn’t help it.

  Joel looked up into the sky. Night had not yet overtaken day, but both the moon and Venus were out, shining brightly despite the dwindling presence of the sun. He remembered vividly when he’d first learned that that bright star was Venus. He’d been ten, and they’d gone on a family camping trip to Mt. Lemmon, bringing Hunt along. After dinner, after the sun went down, his parents had retired to their tent, but he and Hunt had remained outside, sitting on adjacent rocks. Hunt broke out a map of the night sky he’d brought along. He turned on his flashlight, trained it on the circular piece of thin plastic, then flipped off the switch. The map glowed in the dark, and Hunt rotated the map until he recognized the positions of the celestial bodies. He pointed to a bright star rising in the west. “That’s Venus,” he declared.