Leigh’s body is practically rigid beside me as she listens with her left hand placed firmly over her mouth. It is as if she is stifling a scream. Jill’s explanation is so reasonable, so obvious, that it is impossible to resist a wave of depression. As I stand to make my closing, Leigh begins to weep, hardly an encouraging send-off.
I walk quickly to the jury rail to draw attention away from her. What are her tears if not an admission of guilt?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin hoarsely, and stop to clear my throat. I know I sound nervous and try desperately to relax. If I had not begun to feel Leigh was guilty, this would be easier. Starting again, my voice still scratchy, I say too loudly, “What the prosecutor wants so badly is to have you ignore the obvious conclusion that there is no evidence in this case at all there is no evidence whatever that Leigh Wallace shot her husband. There is no murder weapon, no eyewitness, no physical evidence at all. She has offered no motive except emotions that those of you on this jury feel every day. If there was a murder every time some one felt guilt and anger, there wouldn’t be a person in this courtroom.” I slap the rail in front of me and pretend to scoff, “Talk about making a virtue of necessity, and necessity being the mother of invention! The prosecutor has invented her theory because she has no facts.” I turn to Jill and point at her.
“What proof did the prosecutor offer that Leigh Wallace killed her husband? A magician couldn’t distort reality any better,” I say, and turn back to the jury.
“The prosecutor practically tells you that Leigh has been the victim in all of this and then, in the time-honored fashion, where there is no evidence to support it, she blames the victim!”
I back away from the rail to give the jury some time to digest what I have said, and lower my voice. The hoarseness is gone, and I almost believe what I am saying
“Who killed Art Wallace? Unlike the prosecutor, I don’t pretend to know beyond a reasonable doubt. It very well could have been an out-of-town hired gun.
Professional killers know how to slide back locks on doors; they know a well-placed twenty-two-caliber bullet makes someone just as dead as the bullet from a deer rifle. On the other hand, the murderer could have been anybody in Blackwell County. For all we know, it could have been Hector Tyndall. He lived only a few doors down and has admitted he was at home all morning. He knew the agony that Shane Norman was going through as a result of his son-in-law’s actions. And if you want to suspect someone who felt the emotion of anger toward the victim, you might as well add Shane Norman to the list of possibilities. He could have easily gone to his daughter’s house and invited himself in on the pretext of talking things out with his son-in-law and then shot him to death.”
I stop speaking and walk back to the podium.
“Do you see how easy it is?” I thunder, leaning against the lectern as if I were a world-weary veteran with a hundred murder trials under my belt.
“If the system wants to, it can make anybody appear guilty! Opportunity does not make someone a murderer! Motive does not make someone a murderer! Nor do the two together make a murderer in our system of justice, because, as we see, there is no end to the number of theoretical suspects in this case. As Hector Tyndall told you, it was common knowledge within Christian Life what was happening to Leigh. And if you ask every one of those people where they were the morning Art Wallace was murdered, and assuming they could remember, I’d bet my house that some of them would not tell the truth the first time they were asked….”
As I sit down, Dan whispers, “Chet would have been proud.” I wonder what he would have said. What he had that I lack is credibility. I have no idea whether the jury believed a word coming out of my mouth.
Jill gets to her feet and smirks at me as if I were the worst con artist in the world.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, turning to the jury, “Mr. Page wants you to suspend your common sense. He wants you to forget the facts of this case and pretend you are looking for a needle in a haystack. That is absurd and your common sense tells you it is. Where did the police tell us they discovered the victim’s body? On the floor in his office beside his computer, which was still on when the police came. Art Wallace didn’t bring his killer into his house and go back and sit down and start working again.
You’ve heard investigators tell you how they went over every inch of the house and there is no evidence his body was dragged or moved after the victim was shot….”
The last word. How I wish I had it, but even Chet told me that he had never finished a trial where he hadn’t wished to say something more after the prosecutor sat down. The fact that the computer was on when he was shot proves nothing. But people know that from their own experience. If his killer was somebody he knew, he could easily have brought that person back to his office and sat down at his desk to talk. Trials have to end somewhere though, and all the wishing in the world isn’t going to make anything different.
Leigh sighs heavily as the jury files out.
“What do you think?” she asks as the door shuts on the last one.
I slump in my seat, exhausted. It is six o’clock. Food will be brought in while they deliberate. Chet wouldn’t have made it. Maybe he knew he couldn’t have lasted long enough and simply couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to see the trial through.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. I glance at Dan, who is quietly gathering up the papers on the table in front of him. A bad sign.
Dan volunteers to go out for hamburgers and takes Sarah with him, leaving me to visit with Rainey as the crowd dwindles rapidly. If the jury doesn’t come back with a verdict by nine o’clock, they will be sequestered over the weekend. Rainey and I sit at the defense table and watch Leigh and her mother and father talk in the back of the courtroom. I’d like to be a fly on the wall during this conversation. Pearl looks better but not by much. Rainey smooths down her flowered spring dress and says, “If they convict her, I don’t think it will be first-degree murder.”
I rub my head, which has begun to ache. If Rainey is thinking conviction, we are in trouble.
“Good,” I say weakly, wishing for a moment that Chet had been well and had tried this case. But that feeling passes quickly.
I wanted to try this case in the worst way.
“They didn’t have any real evidence.”
Rainey smiles, but it is not reassuring. Get real, I think. Men and women commit acts of violence against each other every day. Why should Leigh and Art be any different? The jury, composed of faithful believers like herself, may well decide, as Rainey undoubtedly already has, that once the bonds of her church were loosened, there were no restraints on her behavior. I kick myself again for not questioning the strategy of seeking a jury of Bible thumpers, but then Chet’s logic hits me as I stare into Rainey’s face. He was convinced that Leigh was guilty. Maybe he knew she was. In choosing a jury, he was thinking about the length of her sentence, not the question of her guilt or innocence.
“You must be exhausted,” Rainey says, smiling sympathetically.
“I’m a little tired,” I admit.
“When I signed on for this case, I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
“Poor Gideon,” Rainey says, patting my shoulder and in the process touching me for the first time in over a month. When was the last time we even kissed? I can’t remember. It is hard to believe we used to neck like teenagers on her couch. What will become of us? I have no idea. Maybe it is true that friendship is better than love, but I’d rather have both.
Dan and Sarah come back with food from McDonald’s, reminding me of the night we waited for the verdict in the Andy Chapman case. No acquittal in that case either. Dan wanders off to visit with a friend from the sheriff’s office, leaving me alone with Sarah and Rainey. My stomach is too nervous for me to eat, and I sip at the chocolate milkshake Sarah has handed me.
Standing in the doorway of the courtroom, Sarah stares at her minister, who is still seated at the back of the courtroom with his wife and daughter.
“After all this, do you really think Pastor Norman could have killed Leigh’s husband?” she asks.
“Or were you just using him as an example of the fact that just about anyone could have done it?”
I look around to see who else might be listening and say under my breath, “I’m afraid he might have.
Though I can’t prove it, I suspect there was a lot more to this case than ever came out in the trial.”
Sarah whimpers, “He couldn’t have ever done that.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Rainey agrees.
“That’s impossible.”
“I didn’t say he did,” I respond defensively, but from the looks on their faces I may have changed their lives forever. A priest at Subiaco used to warn my Christian Doctrine class that faith for some of us would be a rudderless ship subject to the strongest wind. With my words, the storm that lately has been energizing the lives of my daughter and girlfriend may have ebbed. I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that I hoped it was so.
“The jury’s coming back!” Glider’s bailiff yells at me from across the courtroom. My heart thumping, I look down at my watch. It has only been an hour, a terrible omen. The longer they’re out, the better. I hand my cup to Sarah and wave at Leigh to come down front.
Coming toward me, she looks stricken, obviously reading the fear on my face. I try to speak, but no words come out. I can hear the comments tomorrow:
the jury was barely out an hour. Maybe the Arkansas Supreme Court will reverse because of incompetence of counsel. I wonder if I can get back into social work. As the jury files back in, I have given up pretending I can read results on the faces of jurors. I scan their faces, but they merely seem anxious to get home.
Leigh unexpectedly takes my hand and holds it as Grider silently reads the verdict form. Her fingers are rigid as she digs her nails into mine. The room is so quiet I can hear Dan’s slightly asthmatic breathing.
Thank God, Jill didn’t go for the death penalty. I hold my breath as Grider begins reading. And then, suddenly, it is all over acquittal on all charges. As Leigh cries against my shoulder, I feel as if a huge metal ball has rolled off my back. Although I am not much of a believer in an afterlife, I can’t avoid the thought that somehow Chet Bracken is also breathing a sigh of re lief.
Standing in the courtroom moments later with Rainey and Sarah, who are both bubbling with excitement, I watch Leigh’s celebration with her parents and the crowd (presumably from Christian Life) gathered around them. It is hard to escape the sobering thought that a murderer is rejoicing.
“I thought you said you used to play when you were a kid, Mr. Page,” Trey calls as he watches me bend down to pick up the third ball I have dropped.
Beads of sweat from my forehead drop into Chet’s old glove. Maybe I am imagining all those Little League games in Bear Creek. The first ball ever hit to me in areal game went between my legs. I haven’t improved with age.
“I guess I’m pretty rusty,” I say, glancing over at his mother, who is watching us from the deck. Wynona smiles gratefully at me. It has been only a week since her husband’s funeral, and it is nice to see her smile. It is glorious out here behind the house in the April sun. New life is bursting from every tree, every blade of grass. This is the kind of day that must make Chet’s death particularly hard to bear. Yet the air is so soft and the morning so clear and bright with the rich promise of a long Arkansas spring, it is impossible not to feel alive.
After a few more minutes, Wynona tells her son, “That’s enough. Trey. Let Mr. Page rest. I need to talk to him in the house.”
“What about?” Trey asks, throwing the ball up and catching it. I used to do that by the hour in Bear Creek, pretending I was Mickey Mantle.
“He just needs to help me go through a couple of things,” Wynona says gently to her son.
“You play out here by yourself.” On this warm Saturday morning she is wearing a pair of loose-fitting shorts and a man’s workshirt. Chet’s, I suppose. Good legs, I notice.
Trey waves me into the house. I’m no Brooks Robinson, his grin says, but I’ll do until the real thing comes along.
“Thanks for playing with him,” Wynona says, her voice still mechanical with grief as she leads me into the kitchen.
“It’s going to be particularly hard for him.
He and Chet were amazingly close.”
She is talking about herself, I realize, as well as her son. A plain-faced woman in her forties with a kid, her prospects for remarriage aren’t bright. Yet she found Chet, and, I assume, had been married before him.
Some women are better at finding men than others.
“I’m afraid it will,” I say bluntly, thinking of myself and Sarah.
“But he’ll survive. We all do.”
Wynona stands on tiptoes and pulls down a gray metal lockbox from behind a wooden panel above her refrigerator. From the left pocket in her shorts she extracts a key and opens the lock. On top of what appears to be several envelopes is one with my name on it.
Wynona reaches in and picks it up.
“Chet said for me to read this to you, but not to give it to you. Why don’t you go sit at the table?”
Dreading what is coming, I choose the same chair I sat in when I had breakfast with them. Wynona opens the letter, which is not sealed, and begins to read in a clear, patient voice.
Gideon:
I hate to leave you by yourself with Leigh’s trial, but there is no way I can pull this off, knowing what I do.
I feel terrible about deceiving you, but I let myself get sucked into an agreement I know now I never should have made. When Shane first asked me to represent Leigh, he didn’t tell me the truth. He knew Leigh was not her husband’s murderer. Knowing my reputation, he was convinced I could get her off. He didn’t know then I had cancer. I took the case thinking I had more time, and frankly, given the evidence Jill had, I thought I could win it, too.
Here in my final hour of life, I know better than most humans that pride is the mother of all sin. Because of what Shane had done for me, I agreed. Instead of admitting how little energy I had, I convinced myself that I could last through March in good enough shape. You know, of course, what a joke that was.
As I began to investigate the case, it became clear that Pearl Norman knew more than she was telling. Always an alcoholic, she went off the deep end and really crawled inside the bottle. Initially, I thought it was a reaction to the charge against Leigh, but gradually it dawned on me that she might have killed her son-in-law. Finally, in January, after I confronted her, she admitted she went to the house drunk and killed Art after Shane called her from his office and told her that Art had gotten Leigh to dance nude for him. Pearl knew by then about Art’s scam and somehow assumed he was going to turn Leigh into a porn star. She swears she never intended to shoot him when she went there, and I believe her. Knowing his influence on Pearl (and all of us), Shane felt totally responsible for her actions, and begged me to try the case without revealing what I knew. Leigh, of course, was in on all this as soon as Shane came up with the idea. What is most incredible to me is that the disease of hubris contracted through continued success had reached such an advanced stage that, like a damn fool, I agreed. Even as sick as I was, I believed I could pull it off.
As you know now, we went to elaborate lengths to make you believe that Shane murdered Art and that I was being brought around to make that argument, which presumably you made at the trial. Leigh hated this tactic, but Shane and I had finally convinced her that it was the surest way to an acquittal. Much of what I did was to try to keep you off the scent of Pearl.
What you cannot know is how much Pearl means to Shane and to Leigh. They love her very deeply. Both have always felt guilty about her alcoholism and her isolation in the family. Recently, Pearl has been diag nosed as having permanent liver damage. With her prognosis, Shane couldn’t bear the thought of her dying in prison.
I apologize for having deceived you. Though you will try the case without knowing all the facts, you will not be engaging in any act of fraud on the court. I would have, of course, and this is what ultimately I could not do.
What I counted on was your own ambition. You wanted to become the next Chet Bracken! It has taken me a lifetime to realize how much vanity has played in my life. I was an ugly, jug-eared runt from Phillips County who was determined to make something of my self, and I never got past that. Even after my conversion, I never brought my ego under control. But it has helped me understand you. And exploit you. I do not say any of this to hurt your feelings (you have the potential to be an outstanding lawyer) but merely to explain why I have acted as I have.
I have made my peace with God, and firmly believe in an hour I will be in a far better place. If you can bring yourself to do it after what you have learned, please look in on Wynona and Trey occasionally. They deserve far more than they have received. I am no advertisement for Christianity, but they truly are. Chet.
It is only with these last few sentences that Wynona’s voice breaks. She wipes her eyes with her wrist. Too dumbfounded to move, I watch as she shreds the letter, forces it down the drain, and turns on the faucet and the garbage disposal. Pearl Norman! If Jill had asked the right questions, would she have broken down and confessed? No wonder she was almost hysterical. As Wynona turns off the switch on the disposal, she says, “I’m sorry, Gideon. I hope you can live with this.”
Like a stroke victim who has lost the power of speech, I find I can only nod at her. I leave, but not before promising Trey I will return in a couple of weeks to take him to an Arkansas Travelers baseball game. A Cardinal farm team, the Travs haven’t been very good lately, but, who knows, maybe we will discover another Brooks Robinson.
On the winding road back east into town, my mind is a blur of images. I think back to the day Chet showed up in my office and told me that he thought Leigh was probably guilty. I was being set up from day one! I feel my face burn as I remember that I never got around to checking out Pearl’s alibi. Why did I do such a poor job of thinking about this case? The reason is obvious: I wanted to discredit Shane. He was stealing Sarah and Rainey. How pathetic of me! Chet had me eating out of his hand, and so did Leigh. I fell for every lie they fed me. Why didn’t Chet simply ram down my throat that we were going after Shane? I would have bought it. Obviously, because there was a conflict. I was supposed to figure it out gradually and insist on Shane’s culpability after they all rubbed my nose in it. I bought everything, even the taped conversation between Leigh and Shane.
They set me up every time. Leigh must almost have cracked, though, at one point. When she ran off and got drunk, she must have scared Shane and Pearl to death.
And yet, even with Chet’s suicide and Hector’s unexpected testimony, Shane never missed a line or cue. He went right on as if he had a script in front of him. How could I forget to what lengths families will go to protect each other? Driving too fast, I have to brake hard on a curve, reminding myself that accidents can happen.
Maybe Pearl didn’t intend to kill Art, just threaten him with a dramatic gesture. Poor Pearl. Those phone calls.
She wanted to confess to me, I think, but I wouldn’t listen.
Her daughter and her husband wouldn’t let her take responsibility for her life. The American Way. Why?
Easier to make excuses and keep her out of sight. Perhaps I should go to Jill with what I know, but, without a shred of proof, I’m pretty sure I will wait. Chet’s letter to me is part of the Blackwell County sewer system, and doubtless, precautions have been taken to firm up Pearl’s alibi. If she is dying, what would be the point?
As traffic halts at the entrance to the freeway that will take me home, I realize that the case, as it stands now, has generated a lot of favorable publicity. There have been a couple of nice articles that mentioned my name.
No one has yet claimed that I am Chet’s heir apparent, but it is nice all the same. I speed on the freeway, practically begging to be arrested, but there isn’t a cop in sight. Ah, the practice of law.
“Hold still!” I command my dog, who is shaking as if he is about to be electrocuted instead of being given a bath in the backyard.
“You can turn on the water!” I holler at Sarah, who is wiping beads of sweat from her forehead as she stands over the spigot with a pair of pliers. She turns the handle, and water runs from the hose onto Woogie’s back, as he begins to shiver all over again. It is sweltering, and it isn’t even June.
Sarah walks over to us and bends down to take hold of Woogie’s collar.
“What a terrible year for Pastor Norman,” she says.
“First his daughter is charged with murder and then his wife dies.”
I nod in agreement.
“I can’t imagine having to live through both events in the same year.” Unbeknownst to Sarah, I feel Pearl Norman’s death last night has lifted a weight from my back.
“Though I’m sad for him, I don’t quite feel the same way about Christian Life,” Sarah admits, holding Woogie as I soap his back.
“Since the trial, there’s been so much dissension that it doesn’t seem the same place.
There’s talk of a big group of people leaving to form a new church.”
I rub the bar of soap against Woogie’s belly. He looks at me as if I were holding a gun to his head. I grunt, “I noticed you haven’t been going much lately.” Though Sarah was angry at me again after the trial, the main casualty has been Rainey. I have seen her only a couple of times the last two months. My daughter is more forgiving. After all, I am her flesh and blood.
“Do you still believe the Bible word for word?” I ask, trying to sound casual. I rinse Woogie off and pretend to admire his fur in the glistening water and bright sunshine.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says irritably, perhaps betraying that it is a battle she can’t win.
“That’s really important to you, isn’t it?”
I reach down on the grass for the ragged yellow towel I keep beneath the sink for this occasion and begin to rub Woogie briskly.
“I guess while some people have a need to believe,” I respond, “I have a need not to, un less I can understand it.”
Sarah’s mouth puckers as if she were tasting some thing that does not agree with her. She has already forgiven me for going after Shane but wants to have the last word.
“You miss a lot that way,” she says, petting Woogie’s head to calm him.
“It’s almost over, boy.”
“Probably so,” I concede as I dry Woogie’s legs. You miss a lot of nonsense. But I do not say this. I’ve got my daughter back. Now is the time to be relatively magnanimous.
“I could never be a lawyer,” Sarah says and stands up.
She is saying this to hurt me because she knows someday I’d like to see “Page amp; Page” in the Yellow Pages.
“I know.” She has plenty of time to change her mind. Woogie, freed from the towel, squirms around on the grass on his back. He’ll show me, by God.
“Everything is always the ends justifying the means,” Sarah says unnecessarily.
“I don’t see how you can live like that.”
Our dog runs in circles and then plops down on the grass again. “There are really a lot more rules than it looks like,” I call after Sarah as she goes over to the spigot to turn it off.
She doesn’t say anything, and after turning off the water, she marches inside. I sit down on the grass and watch Woogie take a tour of the backyard. There is a lot more I could say, but I won’t. For starters, I could tell her that my ego nearly did me in, but I escaped. Not with everything. Rainey is gone. I suppose she could come back, but the last time I talked to her she said that she wanted to see if I was the only kind of man she was attracted to.
“What kind of man is that?” I asked. She didn’t smile when she said, “The kind who always does what he wants to and expects the woman to be there to fix everything.”
It is hot out here. I call Woogie, who is happily sniffing the fence that separates my property from my neighbor’s, “Let’s go inside!” He follows.