All the Devil's Creatures (33 page)

The prisoner lifted his lip in a sneer like a junkyard dog. Tasha could smell his sweat. His lawyer leaned in and whispered in his ear. Tasha hoped he would not call his bluff. He seemed too lazy to give the situation much thought.

The lawyer turned to Tasha. “What are you offering?”

“Depends on what you’re giving.” She met the prisoner’s hostile gaze. “You can save your life here Duane, I’ll guarantee you that.”

Duane’s eyes did not waver. He did not speak for a long moment. Then he said, “Yeah, Wayne killed her. Told me all about it.” His sneer became a sick grin and then the hysterical laughter returned.

The lawyer put his hand over his client’s arm and soothed him down to chuckling snorts. He said, “So we’re done? We have a deal? Life without parole?”

Fool.
Tasha looked from the lawyer to Duane and sighed deep down, imperceptibly, as she had learned to do when forced to play the good soldier. “You’ll have to give me a little more. Who was your brother working for?”

The lawyer looked at Duane and gave a little nod.

The twin said, “Working for? Ol’ Wayne wasn’t working for nobody—he was having a dang ol’ time.” Through hic-ups and chuckles, the laughter threatening to return, he said, “But it was all that cocksucker Jimmy Lee Monroe’s idea, if that’s what you mean.”

•

Second, Wayne. Tasha walked into the interview room. The tattooed twin with the shaved head waited in his orange jumpsuit. He sat at the plain table with his head in his hands, despondent. His new lawyer was a woman Tasha knew, if barely—a woman who worked alone handling divorces and custody cases for women throughout a four-county area, often
pro bono
. She drafted the occasional will, litigated the occasional custody dispute. She kept her name in the hopper for criminal case appointments to collect the meager fees. She had a reputation as a workaholic stretched too thin. She looked like a harried and distracted college professor.

Tasha sat across from the prisoner and his lawyer. “You and your brother both raped Ms. Bordelon, and you both participated in murdering her, correct?”

The lawyer glared and said, “Ms. Carter, my client has stated that he was nowhere near the crime scene that night. And he doesn’t know where his brother was, either.”

“Is that so? Where were you that night, Wayne?”

Wayne did not lift his head from his hands. He massaged the top of his stubbly head with his fingertips and stared at the table as he mumbled his answers: “I was home. At the trailer.”

“You share a trailer with your brother Duane?”

“Yes’m. And momma.”

“But you were home alone that night?”

“Momma had bingo. Duane was … I don’t know where Duane was.”

Wayne squirmed and Tasha watched. She guessed his I.Q. to be in the range of seventy—just high enough to pass a competency hearing. Maybe. Tasha had considered the issue and was happy the prisoner’s lawyer had not gone to the judge on the question.

“That’s interesting,” she said. “Duane says
he
was home alone that night. He says you killed Ms. Bordelon and told him all about it.”

Wayne looked up from the table and met Tasha’s gaze with a look of utter shock and grief. His mouth hung agape and he shook his head back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. His lawyer leaned in and whispered in his ear.

He said: “No.”

“No? Is your brother lying? Tell me about your tattoos, Wayne.”

Wayne started to stutter and the defense lawyer shushed him. She leaned forward across the table. “Now just how is that relevant, Ms. Carter?”

Tasha sat up straight and projected her best courtroom voice. “Relevant? How are your client’s racist tattoos relevant? When he’s suspected of lynching an African American woman and defiling her body with vile racist words and symbols? You really expect a jury to believe a word out of this person’s mouth?”

The lawyer flushed. She spoke some word’s into Wayne’s ear. Then she said, “What are you offering?”

“Depends on what you’re giving.” She met the prisoner’s lugubrious gaze. “You can save your life here Wayne, I’ll guarantee you that.”

Wayne’s eyes moistened but did not waver. He did not speak for a long moment. Then he said, “Yeah, Duane killed her. Told me all about it.” His frown began to quiver and then he wept.

Tasha shook her head. “No good, Wayne. We already know you killed her. And raped her. And we know you weren’t alone. Your brother turned you in. He told us all about it.” Tasha leaned forward. Snot bubbled from the crying prisoner’s nose, and Tasha fought the urge to back away. “He never loved you, Wayne.”

Wayne’s lawyer stroked his arm and spoke again into his ear.

Tasha watched them and tried to mask the contempt she felt. “You have to own up to it, Wayne. And tell us who helped you, who talked you into it. Duane and who else?”

Wayne nodded as his tears came to a slow, leaky stop. “We did it together, me and Duane. It was all Jimmy Lee’s idea.”

•

Tasha returned to her cramped courthouse office and began drafting court papers, trying to ignore the persistent nagging in her gut brought on by the sordid negotiations just concluded. She would rather have won her victory in open court and maybe scored her first (or first two) death sentences. But this way, in two short hearings, the judge could send the Tatum twins both to the state pen for life. No chance of parole. Not too shabby a result for a junior prosecutor’s first capital case, she told herself. And anyway, she had already begun sending out feelers for a ticket out of this backwoods hell hole of a town.

First Duane would change his plea to guilty. A bargain in exchange for life. Then Wayne would do the same. Their downfall was that each believed his brother would betray him.

A
s Geoff concluded his argument, he looked up from his notes to the federal judge above him. She looked interested—a good sign. He was asking her for some extraordinary relief. But this had become an extraordinary case.

“In sum, your honor, it’s looking increasingly likely that the murders of my expert consultants, Dalia Bordelon and her boss, Eileen Kim, were related to their investigation of Texronco’s facility. Robert Duchamp is in custody may ultimately be charged with those murders. If he is charged, the state courts will determine,
A
, whether Mr. Duchamp, acting through his associate the late Jimmy Lee Monroe, is guilty of those murders, and,
B
, whether he hired Monroe as a hit man for Texronco to cover up the company’s environmental malfeasance at the refinery. This court should stay the trial on the environmental matters until the state courts have concluded their work.”

Now Geoff stood up straight and looked the judge in the eyes. This is where she might very well laugh him out of court. Geoff hoped that Duchamp’s sick behavior, his association with the psychopathic Monroe (details of which played in an endless loop on the cable news—Duchamp still enough of a political celebrity to be tried in the press) and the racial strife their actions had caused would push the judge in his favor. “But, judge, the report I have submitted based on Ms. Kim and Ms. Bordelon’s work before their deaths shows unquestionable Clean Water Act violations. That’s why my clients seek a preliminary injunction requiring Texronco to stop the pollution and requiring a bond equal to the fine for non-compliance: twenty-five thousand dollars a day for each day this mess isn’t cleaned up.”

After Geoff went through the boilerplate justifying a P.I., spinning the facts as best he could, the judge said, “thanks, counselor,” and raised her eyebrows to Rick White, Texronco’s lawyer, signaling for him to state his case. He rose, red-faced in his Italian suit. Geoff could sense White’s rage—like hot copper. But the high-dollar lawyer kept his voice calm as he spoke.

“What the plaintiffs are asking for is preposterous. First, they filed the case six months ago—if they thought a preliminary injunction was necessary, they should have applied for it then. Second, Texronco has had no opportunity to examine plaintiffs’ so-called expert report or to depose whoever signed it.” He let an insinuating gaze drift to Geoff. “Who knows if it’s even legitimate.”

“Your honor, I—”

The judge quieted Geoff with a raised hand, and White continued his argument, spinning the facts (or rather, their absence)
his
way, Texronco’s way, avoiding any mention of Duchamp or Monroe. As if the case were still just about the corporation. Only business.

White continued, “An order staying this case while imposing a burdensome injunction against a good corporate citizen, all to see how some state court criminal matter plays out? When there is no hard evidence linking those alleged crimes to this case? It’s preposterous, your honor.”

And on and on, each side rebutting, the judge steering their arguments with well-placed questions like Pachinko bumpers. Whose ball, his or White’s, would reach the goal? Geoff had noticed the slight rise in her honor’s eyebrows at the mention Robert Duchamp. He leapt upon this, modifying his argument on the spot to bring up the ex-congressman and his ties to the refinery at every chance. Rick White, sensing the tide turn, howled in staged indignation—apoplexy as last resort, as if he could convince the judge that granting Geoff’s motion would bring down the American legal system.

As the lunch hour approached, the judge cut White off-mid sentence and thanked both of them for their time and their diligent preparation.

Then she ruled: “I’m going to grant the plaintiffs’ motions. We know something bad’s happening at the refinery—we just don’t know how bad. If the state hands down the indictments, we’ll see how related these matters really are. We’ll revisit the stay at that time.”

Rick White stormed from the courtroom with just a passing snarl at Geoff. And then as he turned to exit the courtroom himself, he saw his client, Willie Kincaid, in the gallery. The old man looked haunted somehow. Beside him, school day notwithstanding, sat young Joey. And the sight of the boy gave Geoff an inexplicable twinge deep in his gut as he remembered the sheriff’s delirious words:
Kincaid’s going down. And he’s taking the boy.

•

Geoff sat with Willie in a diner near the federal courthouse in a middle-sized burg some eighty miles from the lake and the town and Willie’s home. Willie ordered coffee and eggs but did not eat. Joey sipped a Coke and doodled on a napkin.

“I guess I’m not sure why you’re stopping,” Willie said. His voice was not reproachful but full of sorrow.

Looking into his tuna salad, Geoff regretted not keeping his client better in the loop. He had only given the old man a broad brushed view of his and Marisol’s expanding investigation—the Prince, Monroe, Duchamp’s party. All Willie cared about was stopping Texronco’s pollution so Joey could enjoy the lake as he had, Geoff told himself. Regardless of what went on beneath the refinery, at some secret facility as the Prince described it, the pollution Eileen and Dalia had documented that formed basis of Willie’s lawsuit was run-of-the-mill stuff for an improperly closed industrial site. Illegal, harmful—and (sadly) banal.

But the trail he and Marisol had followed had been about finding something more, about unearthing deeds so baneful that Duchamp had killed to cover them up. And to avenge those murders, for Dalia and Eileen had died in Geoff’s employ. T-Jacques had it right—their deaths were on him. So as he prosecuted Willie’s case (maybe not as zealously as he could have), he kept his extracurricular activities compartmentalized.

As his eyes moved from his food to Joey Kincaid (
Kincaid’s going down
), Geoff wondered if maybe he should have all along conflated Willie’s little pollution problem with the greater crimes coming to light. He saw not as dreams but as clear memories the images of Joey in that lake, Joey with his dead wife Janie … somehow all tied to the fearful, angry eyes of T-Jacques Rubell, of the misbegotten creature Marisol had seen in Eileen’s pod—its strange effect on her. He felt at that moment as if this young boy (
and he’s taking the boy with him
) who had haunted his dreams held all the answers he sought, if only he knew the right questions.

He opened his mouth to apologize to Willie—for underestimating him, for thinking he would not have the interest or the sophistication necessary to follow the details of what he’d been up to. To spare no detail with his client.

And then to speak to the boy, at long last.

The waitress arrived and jostled plates and refilled coffee and as she left, Geoff shook his head. He knew enough pop-psychology to understand what had happened to him, to explain the dreams.
Transference.
He thought—not for the first time since his wife’s death—that he should try counseling. Not with some quack grief therapist but with a psychiatrist, a doctor who could maybe prescribe medication for his
(delusions)
mood swings. He rubbed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, to think rationally. He had seen no evidence linking
Willie
personally
to Dalia’s murder—to whatever illicit program Dalia had stumbled onto beyond the pollution lawsuit, which Duchamp had killed to cover up. And the sheriff’s delirious warning? Geoff had spoken to Seastrunk that morning, to see how he was doing. The sheriff had no memory of invoking Willie Kincaid after his fight with Duchamp. Just meaningless words, the result of a nasty bonk to an old noggin.

But he would fill Willie in as best he could—he owed his client that much. And as he did so, with Joey seeming ever more involved in his drawing, Willie listened with an expression alternating from fear to hope, his diminutive mouth set in an ‘o’ within his scraggly beard.

When he finished, Geoff summed up his strategy: “So the best thing to do now is let the criminal case against Duchamp progress. He’ll squeal to save himself—he’ll squeal about whatever his people were up to at the refinery under the aegis of Texronco, and if there are other people involved in this—people above Duchamp—he’ll squeal about them. And the corporation will turn on him; murder investigations are bad for business. I expect a call from Rick White when he cools down with a settlement proposal on terms at least as generous as Texronco offered before.”