At precisely five o’clock in the morning, the phone rings, it is Chet, who sounds as wide awake as I am sleepy.
“I’ll be at your house in an hour,” he says.
“How is Leigh?”
I yawn.
“Resigned to go to trial. I still don’t know why she took off.”
Chet speaks quickly, as if he has assumed this would be the outcome all along.
“What time did you tell her to meet us?”
Woogie presses against my back.
“Seven,” I say.
“I
told her I’d pick her up.”
“Good,” he says, after I give him directions.
“I’ll be there soon.”
I get out of bed and stumble into the shower, thinking perhaps this case may go better than I’ve been thinking.
Chet’s voice sounded strong and determined. The rush that a jury trial of this magnitude brings may be enough to carry him through the couple of days it will take. Jill is afraid of him, and for good reason. Even ill he must seem invincible to her, and it is not beyond Chet to tell the jury that he is dying and wants to go to his grave knowing that an innocent woman has suffered enough.
As I shave, I begin to miss Sarah desperately. She gets almost as excited as I do the morning of a big trial.
Though she is deeply ambivalent about my profession, she usually sends me off to even a small hearing as though I were Rocky Balboa. Instead, the house is as quiet as a college dorm at six o’clock on Sunday mo ming How will I handle Sarah’s absence next year?
Given my behavior a couple of days ago (I’m getting too old to have more than a beer or two), I’m afraid I know the answer. Though normally I am a big fan of the man in the mirror, it is obvious from the multiplying spider webs around his eyes that he has definitely passed the point of no return. Sarah, come home, he whispers, in clown face. In April she will hear about scholarship money. She wants desperately to go out of state, but without some major help it will never happen.
Dressed in my new suit, I make some coffee and try to focus on the case. With Chet sounding so good, I have to resist becoming passive. The truth is, I may not do a thing during the entire trial except hand him a file folder. I assume we will get breakfast out, but still I walk around the house straightening up. Not that Chet will notice, but who knows? Wynona keeps their place like a bed-and-breakfast waiting for its first customer.
What will she do after he dies? If he is as rich as I think, maybe nothing except wait for Trey to come home from school. I see car headlights flash against the Venetian blinds in the living room and check my watch.
Six o’clock. It is not light yet, and I go to the door, remembering I haven’t turned on the porch light. I hope Chet hasn’t had to wander around.
I open the door, flip on the switch, and, in the dim light, to my horror, see him standing by the Mercedes with a pistol pressed to his temple, his jaw clenched. I scream, “No, Chet!”
An explosion rockets through the neighborhood stillness, and Chet crashes to the ground. I run down the stoop to his body but turn away as I glimpse his face.
Thank God it is still mostly dark. I am about to vomit.
I run back inside and dial 911 for an ambulance, my stomach heaving. I have begun to sweat, and after I complete the call, I throw up in the sink in the kitchen.
I can’t bring myself to go back outside. I know I am an incredible coward, but I just can’t do it. Why? Is it the horror of seeing him in death, his face torn and mutilated, or is it the possibility that he is still alive and that I should be giving him mouth to mouth resuscitation?
The stillness inside me house is terrifying as I try to imagine Chet’s last thoughts. Was he thinking about Wynona and Trey? The trial? Not surprisingly, it is still quiet outside. Since gunshots periodically ring out from “Needle Park,” the partially boarded-up housing project only three blocks away, my neighbors have doubtless chosen to interpret the noise as something familiar. My mind races frantically, until I finally realize I must call Wynona. Why did he do this? Damn him! My real question is. Why did he do this to me? But why not me?
He wanted to spare Wynona and Trey the shock of finding his body, but even as I think this, I wonder if there is more.
I calm down enough to look up his number and dial it, wondering what to say. The time it takes for her to answer the phone seems like an eternity, but my mind is blank.
“Wynona, I’ve got some terrible news!” I blurt.
“Chet just shot himself!”
“Dear God!” she gasps.
“Dear God! Is he dead?”
I imagine her lying in the spot where her husband’s body had been just aa hour ago. I can’t bring myself to tell her I don’t have enough guts to check to see if he still has a pulse.
“It looks bad,” I say.
“I’ve called an ambulance. I’ll meet you at St. Thomas.” Tears running down my face, I hang up on her, so I won’t have to say any more. Woogie, who apparently ran under my bed at the sound of the shot, slinks into the kitchen, his tail between his legs. I should be out trying to help Chet, stopping the bleeding, something. Instead, my teeth chattering, I call Rainey. My voice shakes so badly that I wonder if she can understand me.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Rainey repeats as I admit to my cowardice.
“There’s nothing you can do.”
Her voice, soothing and gentle, touches something in me, and I begin to cry again.
“I saw him do it!” I say.
“Just take a couple of deep breaths,” she says.
“You’re going to be all right.”
I realize I am panting and try to gather as much air in my lungs as possible. I hear the wail of the siren. St. Thomas is barely five minutes away.
“I’ve got to go outside,” I stammer.
“I’ll see you at St. Thomas.” Not even for a moment do I assume she won’t come.
I rush outside into the street and wave my arms as the ambulance careens around the corner toward me. Lights begin to go on all over the neighborhood. Denial can take my neighbors just so far. The door on the passenger side opens and, to my shock, the attendant is a young woman. What a job, I think. Lightheaded and dizzy, I point needlessly to the yard.
“He’s there. He shot himself!”
My neighbors on both sides of the house, Moses Gardner and Payne Littlefield, converge on me at the same time.
“You shoot him?” Moses asks bluntly. He is an occupational therapist at St. Thomas, and is in his bathrobe with a pistol in his hand.
What is he thinking? A drug deal that went wrong?
Chet’s Mercedes is visible in the lights.
“Fuck, no!” I say angrily.
“He shot himself. He was dying of cancer.”
Payne, a retired schoolteacher who can’t afford to sell his house and get away from blacks, nods.
“Damn,” he says to Moses. We watch in fascinated horror as the female tech, using the headlights of the ambulance, checks chet’s pulse with a stethoscope and then places a tube down his throat. How she sees what to do through the blood streaming everywhere seems like a miracle. She nods, and the driver, an older black male, squeezes a bag attached to the tube. Within moments they have diet’s body loaded into the ambulance.
“He ain’t gonna make it,” Payne says.
Great neighbors, I think miserably. More are standing in their yards watching the excitement. They probably think I killed one of the women I have brought home from time to time.
“You better wait for the police, Mr.
Page,” the female EMT tells me.
“They should be here any second.”
Moses nods as if that’s a load off his mind. I’m surprised he and Payne don’t have me spreadeagled against my car. Woogie, my watchdog and protector, begins barking furiously behind the screen.
“He’s still alive?”
I ask as she moves off.
Without turning around, she shakes her head and calls, “Barely.”
Payne says, “They ought to just take him to a funeral home.”
As they pull off, two squad cars roar around the corner and pull up in front of the house. I feel a numbness spread through my body. Well, at least, I think, as I go over to them, escorted by Moses and Payne, I won’t have to try the case today. Chet accomplished that much.
Since I must give an endless statement to the cops, who seem relatively satisfied that Chet’s gunshot was self-inflicted (they say the tests may be back from the crime lab before the morning is out), it is eight o’clock before I get to St. Thomas, only to find that Chet was pronounced dead fifteen minutes earlier.
“You couldn’t have done anything for him,” Rainey whispers to me in the corridor outside the emergency room after I confess how I vomited in the sink and waited inside the house until the ambulance came.
“He didn’t have a chance.”
Thank God. I was terrified that there was something I might have done to save his life. Rainey pats me on the shoulder.
“Are you okay?”
“No, but at least I’m alive,” I say, my mind replaying the moment Chet squeezed the trigger.
“Where is Leigh?”
“I left her at my house,” she says, looking at me solicitously.
“I just called her a few minutes ago. She’s okay.”
I go up to Wynona and Trey, who are in the waiting room seated beside Shane Norman and presumably other members from Christian Life. As soon as I see Shane, I begin to feel anger building inside me. Why?
He didn’t kill Chet, but suddenly I am convinced that Chet would still be alive this morning if he had never met Norman. Though I can’t put it into words and realize instantly how irrationally I am thinking, I know that Shane is somehow connected with chet’s decision to take his life. This is hardly the time for a confrontation, and I force myself to concentrate on Wynona’s face, which is a mixture of shock and disbelief. Trey, the poor kid, is crying so hard he is hiccuping. I put my arms around them both, unable to think of a single word that is appropriate. After a few moments, Wynona pulls me off to the side and whispers in a choked voice, “Did he say anything at all?”
“No,” I say, not up to admitting to her that I actually saw him pull the trigger, although I have told the police.
“I was just opening the door to come outside.”
“He left a note for me and Trey,” she gasps, “but all he says is that he loves us and that God would forgive him.”
I look down at her ravaged face, realizing she is working over in her mind the same question I am. Why did Chet choose to kill himself the morning the trial was to start? What did he know that he didn’t tell me?
I glance at Shane, who is now comforting some old lady. He is wearing the earnest, compassionate expression of the professional caregiver. With Trey right be side her, it is not the time to ask, but I murmur, “Do you think it was related to this case?”
“I just don’t understand,” she says, wiping her eyes.
“You know how much this case meant to him.”
Trey looks at me blankly, eyes red and swollen. I can’t say to him that his stepfather was notorious for having no friends, no associates, no permanent employees other than a secretary whom he reputedly replaced regularly. The truth is, I have no idea what he really thought about this case. Though finally he seemed to accept the possibility that Shane was involved in his son-in-law’s death, I can’t be certain of it. Did he kill himself because he couldn’t bring himself to accuse the man who brought him to Christianity? I don’t know. At best I was to be nothing more than an ill-prepared emergency backup. At worst I was being used in some way I can’t fathom.
“He was the best lawyer I ever saw in a courtroom,” I say. It is trite, but I know it will mean something to Trey for as long as he has a memory.
Some of the most heartfelt tributes I heard made to Rosa after her death were in situations equally awkward. I look up and see Shane coming toward me. I extend my hand, wondering if he can sense my hostility.
His bloodshot eyes suggest he had a long night, too.
Wynona and Trey drift back to the sympathetic faces around them, and Shane, dressed in the expensive blue suit I saw him preach in, demands.
“Why didn’t you call me last night when you found Leigh?”
I had expected a question about Chet and, nonplussed I stare at him. For the first time it hits home that, for the moment at least, I and I alone am Leigh’s lawyer.
“She didn’t want you to know.” My words come out sounding more prickly than I intend. Nothing will be accomplished by pissing off Shane Norman. It was Shane who retained Chet, not Leigh. I do not tell him his daughter has begun to take seriously the notion he may have killed her husband.
“You can’t represent someone if she doesn’t trust you.”
Shane draws back from me and says levelly, “You were only chet’s assistant.”
I look about the room at the group of mourners. I do not see a single other lawyer present. I keep my voice low.
“Leigh’s an adult; she can make that decision for herself.”
Shane somehow smiles as he says, “I insist that you tell me where my daughter is.”
If I didn’t feel the same way he does, I’d have less sympathy.
“I’ll tell her,” I say truthfully, “you want very much to see her.”
For the second time since I have known him, I see a glimpse of Shane’s anger. With his back to the members of his congregation, his eyes narrow and his jaw tightens.
“I wouldn’t get too high and mighty, Mr. Page.
There are ways of dealing with people like you.”
Who are people like me? I wonder. Lapsed Catholics Solo practitioners who will take any case they can get? Or fathers of confused teenagers? Clearly, this is a threat, but of what kind? I resist the temptation to ask if he is going to have me killed, too, but just barely.