All the Devil's Creatures (29 page)

The disheveled court-appointed defense lawyer looked up at the bench immobile and silent. Tasha thought he could not have broadcast his disinterest more clearly had he lay down and taken a nap. One of the Tatum twins at the table beside him did doze. The other leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. They wore matching orange jumpsuits.

“Continue, Ms. Carter.”

Like Tasha, the judge was young, elected to his first term the year before, and from an established local family. Like her, he returned after procuring respectable degrees in big cities, having traded in the opportunity to make a name-brand career at a white shoe firm. Tasha imagined they might run against each other for a seat on the Court of Criminal Appeals someday. For now, Tasha saw any such ambitions on the part of the judge as to her advantage, strong law-and-order credentials being a prerequisite for judicial advancement.

Tasha stood alone at her table. She shifted her feet. “Wayne and Duane Tatum have both pled not guilty. It’s the State’s position, given the DNA evidence, that at least one of them is lying. Now, we further believe that the other evidence in this case will establish that
both
Wayne and Duane are guilty. But in any event, one of the defendants may decide it is in his interest to come forward, to offer testimony as to what happened that night—”

“The hell we will!”

Duane, the long-haired twin, had half-risen from his seat, his shackled wrists on the table before him. He snarled like a pit bull. His face glowed red. A vein pulsed above his left eye just visible through his greasy locks like some parasitic thing ripping at his brain from the inside.

“Order! Counselor, control your client.”

Alert at last, the defense lawyer rose and placed a hand on Duane’s shoulder, pushing him down and hissing into his ear. Duane acquiesced, though the vein still throbbed.

Sparing the commotion a passing glance, Tasha kept her tone dry as she addressed the judge. “As I was saying, this poses an obvious conflict for any attorney representing both defendants.”

The judge looked to the defense lawyer. “What say you, counselor?”

Having just settled back into his seat, adjusting his lapels, the lawyer stood. He had bloodshot eyes. Tasha could smell the reek of cigarette smoke and last night’s booze from across the room. He said, “There will be no conflict if you take my clients one at a time, judge. They may look alike, but they’re two different people. And the State won’t be able to prove that they were together when the crime was committed, or even that they knew of the other’s whereabouts. They’re twin brothers, for Pete’s sake. They stand together, and I’ll stand with them both.”

The judge stared down at the defense lawyer and sighed. “I’m not inclined to put this county through the time and expense of a bifurcated trial.” He turned to Tasha. “Ms. Carter, why did
you
bring this motion to disqualify the defendants’ counsel? Isn’t it up to the defendants to raise the conflict, if one exists?”

Tasha relished the softball. “Your honor, under Supreme Court precedent, a conflict of interest such as exists here constitutes
per se
ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of the Sixth Amendment. Counsel has provided no evidence that the defendants have knowingly waived their constitutional rights. Moreover, given the conflict, counsel’s continuing to represent both defendants would be a breach of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. As an officer of the court, I have a duty to bring this issue to this court’s attention.”

The Tatum’s’ lawyer glared at her across the courtroom but did not object to her implied impugning of his ethics. Tasha gathered that he had been in trouble with the Bar before. She thought:
If he cares how the judge rules on this at all, it’s just because he wanted double the fees.

“Alright Ms. Carter. Having considered the briefing of the parties and the arguments presented today, I’m granting the State’s motion. As much as I hate to spend taxpayer dollars on another defense attorney, that’s the way it’s going to be. We’re going to have one trial, and everybody gets his own lawyer.”

The judge banged his gavel. The twins’ lawyer rose as the judge exited the courtroom and then left with barely a glance at his clients. Tasha smiled to herself as she gathered her papers; the judge’s ruling just made her job of breaking the Tatum twins a good bit easier.

And they would break, if not both then Wayne at least. She could see it in his dumb, frightened eyes. And that would be enough. She supposed that the old fool Sheriff and poor Bobby still fretted over Jimmy Lee Monroe, over Wayne’s invocation of that piece of trash. But the DA had made it clear: that was a trail the investigation would not follow. And why should it? The creep was dead. He had tried to kill her uncle and now he was dead. What good could come of digging deeper?

Put the Tatum twins away. Make a name. Move on to bigger things.
Tasha grinned to herself on the elevator ride up to her office. Hargrave, and by extension Robert Duchamp, would be pleased.

M
arisol’s call after the party had not been frantic. It had come in the wee hours of Sunday morning, as Geoff lay awake considering his meeting with the Prince, the dandy’s words playing through his mind:
The evidence you seek is at that refinery—in a separate, secret facility perhaps hidden beneath the lake. Your young lady Dalia Bordelon found a way in. It’s your charge, Mr. Waltz, to retrace her steps in order to save this world.

At least three-fourths bullshit, Geoff did not doubt. But as he drifted into sleep he thought of Dalia, thought of what she had found—something worth killing for. Something invaluable to the Prince but that for some reason he could not obtain on his own. So he expects Geoff to do the work for him.

Despite it all, despite his previous desire to dispose of his lawsuit against Texronco for a down and dirty settlement and wash his hands of the poor abused ecological disaster of a lake and its long-suffering denizens, Geoff found himself to his own amazement ready to oblige the Prince. Not to save the world. Again, bullshit. But to avenge Dalia’s death. And Eileen’s, who, for all tension between them in recent years, had been the last person alive who had truly known him.

Geoff’s newfound determination did not solve his fundamental problem—he had no idea how to rediscover what Dalia had found (
a clone? A mutant?
), which Marisol had held so briefly. Maybe a spark of truth existed within T-Jacques’s delusions. But the trombone player’s irrationality, his refusal or inability to bring any sort of scientific thinking to whatever Dalia had told him, made him useless to the quest. And anyway he wasn’t talking.

Maybe Marisol would uncover something tonight. Geoff dozed and at last he thought of Willie Kincaid, of the old man who had brought Geoff into this only to stop a faceless corporation from polluting his beloved fishing waters. So that he might share those waters with his grandson, Joey. And in that half-dream state Geoff came to understand that this too spurred him forward …

He paddled the canoe alone through the maze of cypress trees and the infinite bayou verdant but soundless as if devoid of all animal life, as if some final holocaust had destroyed the fish and insects, the water fowl and the tree dwelling creatures leaving only this lost silence, and he seemed to paddle for days and the smells were not of growing things but of antiseptic death, like a morgue just cleaned following a bloody weekend, and at last he came upon a fishing shack built on stilts above a marshy island and Janie called down from that shack, “You’re not even close, silly-boo” and she laughed and smiled and waved but seemed also sad and he could not bring the boat near, the shack only retreated, and then the chilling dusk fell and he looked down in the dark water and saw Joey Kincaid floating beneath the surface and he feared the boy was dead but when he reached into the murk (so cold, ungodly cold for that place) to pull him up the boy’s eyes opened and his voice pierced the water in an inhuman, mechanical scream—

Marisol’s call jerked him awake. Her tone was as subdued and dispassionate as when Geoff had first interviewed her on Tony’s recommendation. As when they met T-Jacques Rubell in New Orleans and he first told them of a grand conspiracy involving the ex-Congressman.

She said, “Hi Waltz. I think I’ve flipped Kathleen Duchamp.”

•

Geoff stood at the window in Marisol’s office on Industrial Boulevard, leaning against the wall, peering through vinyl blinds down to the ugly streetscape below—taquerias and bail bondsmen and pawn shops and the brutalistic silhouette of the county jail looming over it all. Leaning utility poles punctured cracked sidewalks.

Kathleen Duchamp sat across from Marisol at a large but cheap desk, utilitarian and aged. The congressman’s wife had arrived at her appointed time that Monday morning. She had told Marisol on Saturday night that she needed time to digest the materials the detective had discovered in her husband’s safe, to decide if she was ready to abandon thirty years of marriage, a life built as a political wife. Then she had shown up with a look both hard and at peace, an expression that told Geoff the decision had not been so hard after all.

Earlier, on his drive over to Marisol’s office, he had heard on the radio that the Reverend Mose Carter had gone home that morning. His old stature had grown dusty but now seemed renewed for a generation unborn during the decades of great struggle, of his great accomplishments. Geoff did not know whether to think things were coming to a head, or just beginning to unspool.

Kathleen Duchamp did not weep. She did not dab her eyes with a handkerchief like some translucent-skinned belle, aged and wronged, in the office of her divorce attorney on her husband’s own dime. She spoke with a fierce anger. But also anxiety. Almost terror. She smoked but seemed out of practice, coughing as she tapped ash into a chipped glass ashtray Marisol had pulled from a desk drawer.

She had brought her husband’s ledger books. Marisol asked if she had the canister.

Kathleen looked disgusted. “That cylinder of goo? I had the maid flush it and throw out the container.”

“What?” Marisol looked angry and incredulous. “That could have been our best evidence, our only evidence of what you husband’s people were up to, what they were willing to kill …”

Geoff held up a calming hand. “You say it held some kind of goo? Describe it.”

“Clear, oily, viscous. Smelled like sickness and petroleum.”

Geoff imagined the fetus Marisol had described could have decomposed (
broken down?
) after a couple of weeks at room temperature. Still …

He kept his tone dispassionate, scientific, as he addressed Kathleen Duchamp. “Were there any bones in the liquid? Any signs of, I guess you’d say, life form?”

She winced. “Good lord no. Just goo.”

Marisol said, “No. I know what I saw. A—”

“Never mind,” Geoff said to Marisol, though he kept his eyes on Kathleen.

A creature. Maybe human. Maybe not quite.
That’s what Marisol had described. For the first time Geoff wondered if she had exaggerated what she saw—unintentionally, an embellishment born of fear; she had almost died in that pod. Regardless, he was increasingly certain that the only way to learn the truth about any facility beneath the refinery, any rogue science that might go on there, was to find a way in himself.

He turned back to Kathleen. “Start at the beginning. Tell us all you know about your husband’s business.”

•

“Robert could never have won an election in that district without me. Or my father, rather. When the congressman who had held that house seat since the New Deal finally retired twenty-five years ago, everybody thought the race to succeed him would be a foregone conclusion, just as if the old man were still running. Back then, the assumption was still that whoever won the Democratic primary would win the general election. And the old congressman’s son was running as his father’s anointed heir. No contest. But the blacks didn’t see it that way. In the decade after the Voting Rights Act, they’d won places on the school board, commissioners court, even in the state legislature. Now they wanted that U.S. House seat.”

Geoff could see that Marisol grew impatient. But he also figured there could be some strains of relevant truth in Kathleen’s venomous discharge. He humored her.

“So your husband ran a race-baiting campaign and became the first Republican to represent an East Texas district in Congress since Reconstruction.”

She eyed him through cigarette smoke. “The black candidate was a young school board member named Jerome Carter.” And then Kathleen must have noticed Geoff’s eyebrows because she said: “Yes, Carter. Reverend Carter’s nephew. The blacks saw Jerome as a hero of the civil rights movement in his own right, more of a firebrand than his uncle. He fought like hell to desegregate the schools. Faced death threats and vandalism at his home. And he didn’t feel overly tied to the message of non-violence. He once threatened to blow up the white high school. A temple of injustice, he called it.” She exhaled a thin stream of smoke straight up to the ceiling from the corner of her mouth. “And Tasha, the baby of the family. Working for ol’ Ben Hargrave. She really turned out to be a traitorous little bitch, I’d say.”

Geoff folded his arms over his chest as Marisol said, “Mrs. Duchamp, what does this have to do with your husband’s involvement with the murders?”

Kathleen glared at her like a librarian preparing to scold a bored and incurious pupil who dared to deface a book. “Since I am here solely due to your impertinence in invading my home, I think the least you can do is hear me out, Ms. Solis.”

Geoff left the window and sat with elbows on knees upon an a clean but worn sofa set at a right angle to the desk and facing chair. “My colleague means that you don’t have much time to come clean with us, Ms. Duchamp.”

“Or else?” Kathleen lit one cigarette off the butt of another and set her face into a hard proud mask that did not hide the fear that still haunted her eyes. “Anyway, Jerome won the Democratic nomination for the House seat. He was set to become the first black elected to Congress from the rural South. Again, since Reconstruction. The blacks had gone to the polls in droves, of course. And it turned out the Congressman’s son had made some enemies as a spoiled brat in high school. That kept white turnout down in the primary.