I am awakened out of a fuzzy dream by the sound of the telephone ringing in the kitchen. I was dreaming I was in a boxing ring, and my opponent (some guy I don’t recognize) kept hitting me after the bell. Stiff as Sheetrock, I limp into the kitchen, remembering that Sarah said she and Chris were going to McDonald’s after Mass. Did I tell her I was driving to Hot Springs this afternoon? I can’t remember.
“Hello,” I say, clearing my throat, my raspy voice more a moan than a greeting.
“Gideon,” a female voice says, “it’s Kim Keogh. Did I wake you?”
Guilt feelings for not having called her rouse me from my lethargy. If she’s calling to give me some hell, it’s just another chicken coming home to roost. I look down at Woogie, whose own expression seems downright scornful. You deserve this call, jerk. “Well,” I say, my tongue seeking out the hole where my tooth was, “I had to get up to go to Hot Springs this after noon.” Go ahead and ream me out. I’m leaving anyway.
Her voice is soft, almost a whisper.
“Have you got a minute
Mournfully, I run my fingers over my wrecked face, yet grateful I still have one. How did my nose survive? Last night when it was being ground into the tar of the parking lot, I was certain it would be in the shape of a pretzel this morning.
She still wants to go out with me! Maybe she thinks I’ll die this time.
“Sure,” I say.
“I’ve been meaning to call you.”
There is a pause as if she is filing this lie away for future reference.
“I have a proposition for you,” she says finally.
“Want to hear it?”
This is amazing, I think. I’ve treated her like shit, and she’s going to invite me over for lunch. Maybe I can eat with a bag over my head. I’m not up to competing with the movie stars on the walls of her apartment today.
“I’m all ears,” I say, a little cocky, thinking this isn’t too far from the truth.
The left one, at least, feels the size of a small boxcar. Even as bad as I feel, I’m all for being propositioned.
“I’ve got some information that can affect your case, but if I give it to you and you can use it,” she says, her voice firm and steady, “I’ll want you to agree that when the trial is over you and Andrew Chapman will give me an exclusive interview on camera.”
I try to think what she could possibly have. I can’t imagine.
“You’re asking me,” I complain mildly, “to buy a pig in a poke.” I’m not anxious to make this kind of bargain.
Since I’ve been in private practice, I’ve tried to be friendly to all the reporters who cover the courts. Free advertising is the best kind.
“Besides, I can’t bind my client without talking to him anyway.”
Kim, not a subtle negotiator, asks, “What about you?”
After last night I’m not as eager to jump in headfirst.
“Let me talk to Andy first,” I insist.
“He’s the kind of guy who would regard this as a form of reverse blackmail if he’s not handled right.”
Kim sounds as young as Sarah.
“Are you serious?”
I shift from my right to my left leg. Even my hips are sore.
“You claim to have useful information but won’t part with it without a price,” I point out delicately.
“But I suspect most of us would regard this as a part of the American free-enterprise system.”
Her voice frosty, Kim retorts, “It’s my professional duty to try to get a story nobody else gets.”
I try flexing my knees to ease the pressure on my spine, wondering if I might need to go to a chiropractor. The media, God bless it, have perfected the maxim that the ends justify the means. Surely, if most reporters made a decent living, the general public would hate them as much as it hates lawyers.
“How come you can’t break this on your own?” I ask, changing the subject. If I hurt her feelings too much, I’ll scare her off.
“I can’t confirm it,” she admits.
“If this is just a rumor, I’ll get sued for libel.”
Ah, it might be about Olivia, I realize. I’m getting an appetite. Still searching for a painless position, I lean back against the kitchen wall.
“It’s your station they’d be interested in suing.”
Kim, perhaps sensing my interest now, asks, “You want to come over about seven if you’re back from Hot Springs?”
I look at my watch. It is only noon. I’ll have plenty of time.
“Sure,” I say, “but you’ll have to disregard my appearance. I’ve been going through a second childhood recently and have acquired a few nicks since you saw me last.”
Guessing, Kim says pleasantly, “Somebody beat the shit out of you, huh?” Her voice contains no hint of surprise, as if she expects lawyers to brawl.
Embarrassed, I admit, “Something like that.” I guess she doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out the damage middle-aged men can do to themselves.
After I hang up I immediately dial Andy’s number but get no answer. I wonder if he is at church. Do psychologists believe in God, or has Freud shamed them out of it? I’ll try to reach him later, I decide, and stumble toward the bathroom to see if I can shave without screaming.
As I reach the outskirts of the tourist town of Hot Springs, a torturous two-day stage coach drive in the 1840s but only an hour’s drive to the northwest from the house this afternoon, I think that it would be an interesting, even exciting, place to live-over a century ago. In the 1880s rival gambling interests shot it out on Central Avenue; Al Capone sedately walked the streets in the 1920s. Along Central, the main drag, illegal gambling flourished alongside still viable attractions such as Bath House Row, the Arlington Hotel, and first-class horse racing at Oaklawn Park. And all along the way, showbiz people as bizarre as Phineas Bamum’s midget, General Tom Thumb, trooped into town over the years for the purpose of entertaining luminaries as diverse as Yankee Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman and Helen Keller. How could Baptists have so much fan? It apparently got to be too much for the state, for in the 1960s, under the administration of the so-called black-sheep Rockefeller brother, Winthrop (though he had more integrity and compassion than many of us wanted), Arkansas’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, the state police conducted a series of late-night raids, confiscating slot machines by the carload, and suddenly, after a century of notoriety and excitement, Hot Springs, left with only its natural beauty and legalized horse track, became respectable and now confines itself to the normal appetites of more typical small-town corruption and tamer tourist entertainments such as I.Q. Zoo, the Alligator Farm, and the Mid-America Museum.
In ten minutes I am standing in front of the door to Charlene Newman’s apartment and am presumably separated from her by only the length of a security chain. I got her number from the telephone company, and less than two hours ago called her and told her the truth-that I am a lawyer in a criminal case in which her ex-husband is a witness and needed to drive over and talk to her in absolute confidence.
She said okay, but now that I am here, if this is Charlene Newman behind the door (my introduction of myself has elicited no response), she is having second thoughts. Perhaps it is die neighborhood that invites such caution. It is in a seedy, cheap part of the downtown area. The hallway in her apartment building is dimly lit, dirty, and is as confining as the inside of the corroding, stained gutter that runs along the outside roof. After almost a minute of dead silence, the door comes to as the chain is unhooked, and then a slender but well-built young woman dressed in faded jeans, a blue halter top, and sandals, slides through it, revealing not so much as a couch in the background.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she says, her voice pleasantly hillbilly.
With her straight dark hair the color of black shoe polish, thin lips, and an aquiline nose, Charlene Newman surely has Native American blood coursing through her veins. She leads me out of her apartment with her arms folded across her chest Indian-style, as if she were auditioning for a part in a movie that spoofs bad westerns. She is not a princess, but not a squaw either. If she would smile (assuming her teeth are good), with her high cheekbones she could be pretty.”
“What’s Leon got his self into now?” she asks. She leads me in the direction of the mountain behind the Arlington Hotel. My own jeans feel like a rubber suit in the humidity and heat.
Fall is only a week away, but it might as well be midsummer.
Though a walk might relieve some of my stiffness, I hope we aren’t going far.
Walking uphill on a wooded path past benches populated primarily by elderly retirees, many of whom are Yankees permanently escaping snow and ice, I summarize Leon’s involvement in Andy’s case, uncertain, despite the divorce, how far I can go in trying to paint Leon as a villain.
“He and his friends at the Bull Run beat me up last night pretty good,” I say, removing my sunglasses and baring the gap in my teeth. It ought to be good for something.
“All I did was sit down at the bar for a few minutes.”
A few yards off the path, Charlene points to a vacant bench, and I nod gratefully. Her voice, surely a product of the Ozarks, cracks slightly as she sighs, “When he’s had a couple, Leon’s pretty good at that.”
Though we have been walking only a few minutes, I am ready to sit. The back panels of the wooden bench, painted Astroturf green, creak as I collapse against them. Fortunately it is in the shade.
“Did he ever hit you?”
From where we are sitting, apart from a few old people with their brown canes and white heads, the predominant color is, though this is September, a lush green. The park, a sanctuary of hardy survivors, is neatly hidden from the town.
Charlene must come here to escape the bleakness of her apartment. Her unpainted lips press against teeth I still haven’t seen. Questions like this when asked by strangers are never innocent. Finally, she says, “Only when he was drinking. If I could of kept Leon from his friends, we would have done all right.”
The old phrase “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” flits through my head. I have never understood it, but somehow it seems to apply to Charlene Newman. If Hot Springs is Camelot, she seems destined to spend her life fishing for carp with the “gentlefolk” in the moat. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice to my left an old man who reminds me of how my father would have looked had he lived to be an old man. A Harry Truman look-alike, his eyes (unlike my father’s, whose soupy lenses were troubled by the paranoia that often accompanies schizophrenia) gleam with small-town self-satisfaction behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
Sure, I dropped two atomic bombs, but it was either us or them. Yet, I remind myself, I don’t need or expect a complete surrender from Charlene.
“At the probable cause hearing a few weeks ago, Leon started crying when he talked about Pam,” I say, hoping for the right note of empathy. “I think he felt guilty for turning her loose.”
Charlene squints at me as if I had asked her to do long division in her head.
“Why would he have jus’ let go of her?”
Harry, who apparently has no need at this stage of his life to be concerned with appearances, lays a forefinger against his right nostril and shoots the contents of his left onto the bench beside him, his message being, I suppose. If you don’t like it, don’t watch. Too late, I turn my head back to Charlene, but somehow not until I am reminded of the tobacco-stained brick streets freshly spotted each Saturday in my eastern Arkansas hometown of Bear Creek by fanners of both races. Poor woman. I can see the emotion in her eyes.
Like the fools most women are about men, she still cares about him. “I think your ex-husband hates blacks so much,” I say as gently as possible, “he’d do a lot of things if he thought he could get away with it, even if for a moment it meant hurting somebody he really cared about.”
Charlene’s long legs push out against the grass underneath the bench, making me fear I have offended her.
“Leon wouldn’t kill nobody,” she says, her voice stubborn, suggesting I have indicted her as well-and I have. Who wants to have married a murderer? “I don’t think Leon ever intended for a second for her to die,” I say quickly, holding her gaze to establish my own sincerity.
“I just think he let the girl go, hoping she would attack my client.”
Charlene ponders this possibility.
“How did you know,” she says, lowering her voice though we are at least a good fifteen feet from Harry, who is using a clean handkerchief to wipe the corners of his mouth, but not his nose, “Leon’s got a thing about niggers?”
Niggers. She says the word as easily as her own name.
Though not a candidate for membership in the Rainbow Coalition either, out of loyalty to my client (or is it to Rosa or even frayed values from a more idealistic time in my life?), I flinch at the word but try not to show it.
“Somebody told me,” I lie, “that he’s a member of the Trackers.”
For the first time since we’ve been seated on the bench, she won’t meet my gaze. Watching Harry stand up, she asks, slipping out of her natural twang, her voice too guarded for it to be an idle question, “Who told you that?”
Pretending indifference, I stand up and jam my hands in my pockets.
“It doesn’t matter.” For the first time it clearly occurs to me that Leon, like Yettie, knew Andy and Olivia were having an affair. As a member of the Trackers, he was enraged by it and had every reason to punish Andy.
Charlene, her voice listless, hunches her shoulders. “What do you want with me?”
I stand over her like a father reprimanding a child.
“Only to tell the truth at my client’s trial if you’re subpoenaed to testify about Leon being a member. If he admits it, you won’t even have to take the stand.”
Charlene bites her lip but doesn’t cry.
“I thought I was away from him for good.”
Marriage, I’m finding out from my divorce clients, is forever.
I look back over at Harry, who is now watching us suspiciously. I could use a good caning for upsetting this girl, his expression says.
“This won’t get him in trouble,” I say, too glibly. Lawyers tell people this all the time, when, in fact, we may be setting off an avalanche that will maim them for life.
“It’s not him,” she says, still no inflection in her voice, “I ‘m worried about.”
But it is, I think, as I watch Harry dodder toward us.
Through his thin white shirt I can see the outline of the straps of his old-fashioned ribbed undershirt, which again reminds me of my father, who fascinated me as a small boy by the painstaking way he tucked his shirt into his pants each mo ming before going off to his drugstore. All Charlene had to do was hang up, keep the chain in place, or even lie to me in a convincing manner. Humans are even worse than canines when it comes to hanging on to bad relationships.
“How long were y’all married?” I ask, curious about the amount of violence in their relationship. Maybe in private Leon was as cute as a French poodle, and she laughed her head off, but somehow I doubt it. Raised to be polite to my elders, I nod at Harry, who stares at us with the frankness that is only permitted to certain groups of our society. Disgusted, he shakes his head. Thirty years ago, he might be standing over this young woman, but he wouldn’t be making her cry.
Charlene, perhaps unnerved by such interest (or maybe just bored) stares at the ground.
“I was fourteen when he and I made it legal. I’m twenty-one now.”
Charlene, the tease. I do not ask, but I wonder how old she was when she first had sex.
“Any kids?” I ask. What other reason would a girl have for giving up her youth?
Now that Harry is past us, it is our turn to stare at him.
From the rear he is trim as Nancy Reagan and is nattily attired in white bucks and blue seersucker pants. Maybe there is a Bess at the Arlington restlessly checking her watch. Time for a massage and then, who knows? After Charlene he seems a little pumped. Her forearms resting against the bench, Charlene shakes her head.
“My mama and daddy had so many yard apes runnin’ around, I swore I wouldn’t never have a one, and I haven’t,” she says proudly.
“Good for you,” I say, wondering how she has managed it. Leon doesn’t seem the type to accept rejection well.
Though I doubt if Charlene was social chairman for the Saline County Planned Parenthood Board, I have detected a spunkier side to her than I thought existed. She may tell the truth about her husband in court yet. “He may come looking for you,” I say.
“The women at the bar may have told him I was looking for you.”
Charlene shrugs and says, more bravely than she surely feels, “I’ll worry about that when I have to.”
At exactly seven o’clock Kim Keogh, dressed in baggy jeans, a shapeless gray man’s shirt with the tail hanging out, tennis shoes, and white athletic socks, opens her door to me.
“God!” she exclaims. “Somebody didn’t just get mad-they got even, maybe a little ahead.”
Perversely, I am a little disappointed. Though I wasn’t expecting her to run down to a beauty salon this afternoon, I guess I wanted her to make more of an effort. After all, we did go to bed together, didn’t we? Instead, she has barely run a comb through her normally stunning hair and could stand some lipstick. Damn, I’m awful, I think. Presumably I’m here on business, and I want her to look as if this is our wedding day. I move on into her living room and still an urge to gather up the Sunday papers, which are scattered on the couch, and to pick up a dirty coffee cup and spoon and take them to the kitchen. The movie stars are still up on the walls.
dark, what do you think? I nearly ask aloud. Would your feelings be a little hurt by such casualness? He probably didn’t give a damn about that either.
Kim, shoving the Democrat-Gazette aside to make a space for me, doesn’t seem to be aware of the impression she is making.
“Have a seat,” she says absently. She sits down across from me on the one chair in her living room. I’m glad I’m not hungry or thirsty, since it doesn’t appear I’m about to be offered anything.
“Did you talk to your client?”
“Can’t get hold of him,” I confess, having tried three times before I gave up.
“I’m in though,” I tell her.
“And I’ll do my best to convince him this is in his best interest.”
I am afraid I will miss out on something important if I play this too cool. Kim is holding the only card available. If my only chance is Charlene Newman, I’m in deep trouble.
She is leaning forward on her knees as if she were a hungry animal trying to decide if the meat she sees is real or part of a trap.
“Why should I trust you when you wouldn’t even call me back?”
Good question. Why should she? My face warm, I begin to fold up her papers to try to stall for time.
“I’m much more trustworthy when the subject isn’t women,” I mumble.”
“Actually I’ve been involved with this other …”
She cuts me off.
“You don’t have to explain that.” Leaning back against the back of her chair, she folds her arms under her breasts.
“I’ve been given a tip that Olivia Le Master had a child taken from her several years ago because of child abuse, but since the records in juvenile court are confidential, I can’t get them.”
Another child? I touch my lower lip, measuring its puffiness. Olivia, to the best of my recollection, has never even mentioned another marriage. A lot could have happened since she had Pam. People don’t stop living their lives because of a single catastrophe.
“How do you think it’s relevant?”
I ask.
Kim, now slightly defensive that I’m not reacting more positively, says, “The word on the street is that the prosecutor would love to charge Olivia Le Master with murder but she needs more evidence. If she intentionally abused one child, wouldn’t that be relevant in showing her state of mind toward the one that died?”
I have my doubts about its admissibility. If it were admissible, it could be dynamite. Unfortunately, it might hurt Andy as much as Olivia if a jury believed he was a part of a plan to kill Pam. The one thing I know it will do is make Andy rethink the possibility of a plea bargain. Somewhere a noose is slowly being tightened around somebody’s neck: if it’s Andy’s, he’d better take the opportunity to slip his head out of it while there is still time. Simply screaming “racism” in this case won’t be enough.
“I don’t know whether a judge will admit it or not,” I say candidly.
“You can be sure Jill would try her damnedest.” As I watch Kim nod, a satisfied look on her face, I realize what she is doing does amount to blackmail. Probably Jill Marymount would find this information more useful in court than I would. As far as I’m aware, she might already know. Kim is way ahead of me, but I’m beginning to think it doesn’t take much.
“What year was this supposed to have happened?”
My inattentive hostess shrugs.
“I’m not sure, and don’t ask how I found this out. I can’t reveal anything.”
After a few more minutes during which I learn exactly nothing, I head back home, having promised my story in exchange for a rumor. What I have learned, however, is exactly how little I know about Olivia Le Master. I have assumed she was what she seemed: a woman caught in a seemingly endless nightmare that her desperate effort to end turned into a tragedy. Instead, for all I know she could be a sadistic bitch who has never blinked once in her life.
In the car on the way home I decide to verify this information before I tell Andy. I have a theory that he doesn’t know everything about Olivia either. Knowing Andy, he will discount it as gossip unless I confront him with some evidence.
As an old social worker for the Department of Human Services in Blackwell County, I have a friend who, if she will, can speed up my research.