Nothing Lost (13 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Carlyle called Martha Buick.

Marty Buick called Teresa Kean in Sagaponack.

I haven't been in a courtroom in five years, Teresa Kean said. I haven't done a murder trial in nearly eight.

She wants you. No one else. You.

Marty, I've been doing victims' rights. I can't just up and defend a murderer. And not just any murderer.

Oh. How about a rapist?

Give it a rest.

Tell me what you're going to do.

I've got options.

Which are?

The civil side. Taxes.

Depreciation. Book-value depletion. 8-Ks. Offshore partnerships. Asset redeployment. Monetization.

Okay, so you know all the terms.

I run my own company.

The only reason you're calling me is because she fired you.

And she hired me back.

And this is the sort of thing you'd do to keep her?

Yes.

So you don't get fired again.

I'm her agent.

You're my friend.

It'll bring you back into the world, Teresa.

I haven't left the world. I like it out here.

Last week you told me you were thinking of screwing the guy who plowed the driveway. The same guy who mows our lawn in the summer and bags the leaves in the fall.

Well, I didn't. He can keep on mowing your lawn.

The week before it was the bag boy at the market. He was thirteen.

He was six feet five. How was I to know he was only thirteen?

His voice hasn't changed.

All right. I should've noticed. Anyway. I'm working on the book. It's going well.

How far along are you?

Outlining. Making notes. I'll probably start writing next week.

What're you going to call it? Not Just Another Lawyer's Memoir?

Teresa hung up. A moment later she dialed Martha Buick's private number. Marty, she said, why does she want me?

Because you told her that when she was twenty no one was going to remember her.

Tell her I'll talk to her.

The picture was a mug shot, Teresa Kean told Max Cline. Full face, right and left profiles.

What an awful picture, Carlyle had said. I mean, maybe you could Sytex it.

Alex said the guy who shot it shouldn't be allowed to hold a camera, Carlyle had said.

“Duane” is so my mother, Carlyle said. Why couldn't she call him Matthew? Or Jason? Or Bret?

At least she didn't call him Mohandas, Carlyle said. Like that Gandhi guy who wore the dress. You know. The one that Donna Karan copied.

It might be cool, Carlyle said after some consideration.

I suppose then I'd have to meet this guy, Carlyle said then. Duane.

Alex said maybe we would work in a shoot, Carlyle said.

A coffee-table book, Carlyle said. Me at my brother's trial. Black and white, no color. Black and white gives it a mood. Full-page bleed into the gutter, sprockets for reality. Grease-pencil cropping instructions. I mean, like you are fucking
there.

Maybe I could have a sty in my eye, Carlyle said. Like to show the strain at the trial, my life's not all that shallow glamour shit.

Alex said don't give up the motion-picture rights, Carlyle said.

Shehnaz Das is such a lame name, Carlyle said.

“Alex is the photographer?”

“Quintero.”

“Is she really that awful?”

“She's interesting in a way.”

Nothing more volunteered. I realize now that why Carlyle was interesting to Teresa at that point was still only an instinct, a shimmer, perhaps even a sense of foreboding. It took me a long time to pick up what it was, and even now I am not sure I ever did. An educated guess is the closest I can come. With, God help me, some input from Stanley.

“Carlyle says Duane has a girlfriend,” Teresa said.

“Then she's checking in with the folks back home?”

“Almost daily.”

Of course she would. There was nothing more satisfying than the return of the native. I hoped her interest level would be as transitory as that of any other self-absorbed teen. If not I suspected we would have a hard time keeping her on a leash. A suspicion that unfortunately proved all too prescient.

“Carlyle says she's seventeen, she's fat, and she has zits. She also has a son she claims is Duane's. Carlyle says it's not.”

“The girlfriend's name is Merle Orvis.” I took an envelope from my desk and slid it across to her. Inside was a set of color Xeroxes, copies of Polaroid snapshots Merle Orvis had tried to send to Duane Lajoie at the Capital City Correctional Center, where he was undergoing psychiatric observation. The hacks at the CCCC had confiscated the pictures and sent them to the A.G.'s office. Allie had passed me copies. “She's actually eighteen, she is fat, she does have zits, and the kid is almost three. He's called Boy. He's also half black. Which lets Duane off the hook.”

Teresa examined the pictures. Merle Orvis naked on a sheet doing herself with her finger. With a dildo. With a banana. There was a small boy lying naked on the corner of the sheet, which seemed to have some shit on it. Teresa replaced the snapshots in the envelope and handed them back. “How did you come by these?”

“A friend.”

“A useful friend to have.” She didn't press it further. When the time came, I would tell her about Allie, but at that point in the preliminaries we both understood it was not yet a done deal, we were still feeling each other out, it might still go south. She also refrained from asking who took the pictures. Considering what I now know about Teresa, it would be surprising if the unexpected exposure to this primitive home pornography had not bared some residual uneasiness about the disposition of the film and video library maintained by her late second ex-husband.

That was later. And not the course I was on that morning. That morning I was in my former prosecutor mode. “Are you doing this for the money?”

It was as if I asked her what time it was. “No.”

“I've heard five hundred K.”

“Less the ten I gave to Earle Lincoln.”

“That's more than Earle's seen in a lifetime. Or will ever see.”

“Less expenses. That leaves about four hundred.”

“What were you planning to offer me?”

“What do you want? Half? More?”

It was as if money was of no interest to her. There was something deep down that I did not yet understand, something I am now quite sure that Teresa did not understand either. Something it took me a long time to dig out. I stalled. “If it wasn't for the death penalty, this wouldn't be such a big deal.”

“Right.”

I tried again. “You think Alice Todt would hire you if her brother Duane was only up for rape or armed robbery or vehicular homicide?”

“No.”

I felt as if I were talking to myself. And could not stop. “Not a chance. No coffee-table book in that. Who needs a case like this? It takes so much time it destroys your private practice . . .” Her eyes seemed fixed on the two copies of John Grisham in my aluminum bookcases. So much for the exigency and profitability of my private practice. I plunged on. “. . . he's going to be found guilty anyway, we both know that, so then there's a penalty phase, death or LWOPP, that's another chunk of time, you have to explain away his sheet, you have checked his sheet, haven't you?”

She would not be insulted. “Yes, Mr. Cline, I have checked his sheet.”

“Arson, assault . . .” There was something about her. I was blustering.

She picked up the litany. “Dealing. Pimping. Burglary . . .”

I persisted, though she had obviously studied Duane Lajoie's copious rap sheet as assiduously as I had. “Auto theft in Oklahoma. Hijacked an eighteen-wheeler, that takes doing.”

“He rolled it over on Interstate 35, that didn't.”

“And landed it on top of a VW van.”

“Full of German tourists.” Her voice was mild. “I wonder what they were doing in Oklahoma.” She caught the look of surprise on my face. “The German tour group. They were from Düsseldorf.”

The seemingly nonresponsive comment from a totally different direction was something I would come to expect from Teresa. I don't think it was entirely conscious—notice the qualification of “entirely”—but it served the useful purpose of deflecting hostility and lowering the temperature. J.J. had the same ability. It might have been one of the things that put them on the same wavelength. Not that there weren't others. That said, it was disconcerting in her at first until I got used to it. And even later, after I learned how to translate. I thought I knew her, but I was never truly fluent in her many internal languages.

I considered the Düsseldorfers. “I don't think they were figuring on spending the next three or four months mending their bones in the Okmulgee County Hospital in Henryetta.”

She was of course by now off the Germans. “Why do you steal an eighteen-wheeler?”

This at least was familiar ground. “Because it was something to steal.”

“A whim.”

“He did thirteen months in McAlester. That's a tough joint for a whim.”

She shrugged. “Most prisons are.”

We stared at each other across the desk, a couple of chess players plotting the next move.

“Look,” I said finally. “A successful defense on this one means LWOPP, you don't get it, then there's an automatic appeal, you get fired, the new appellate attorney, some pro bono guy from a civil firm downtown who wears hundred-dollar suspenders says you gave your client incompetent representation, and that and that alone is why Duane Lajoie got the death penalty.”

That cool look. As if I was telling her something she didn't already know. “Right.”

“For that little fuck. He's been in deep shit since seventh, eighth grade. At Johnny Page Junior High School in Kiowa. You know who Johnny Page is?”

She looked as if she did not care who Johnny Page was, but was too polite to yawn.

“A Rhino wide receiver and punt returner. All-American. Heisman finalist. That's who they name high schools after in this state.”

That almost-smile of hers I would come to know so well. She was letting me ramble. “Eighth grade your boy shows up two days. That's it. Two days. Not even two whole days. The first day he hits an English teacher, a woman, she wants him to take a reading test, so he belts her and gets suspended for the rest of the term. Then the first day of the winter term, back to school, Welcome back, Kotter. Except there's this gang bang in a stairwell. Duane, four buddies, and a retard ninth-grader. Black. Tits like watermelons. They stuck a broomstick up her vagina. They're juveniles, so the court record is sealed, but I've still got friends over there, and I got a copy of the transcript. Granted my knowledge of what women want is not encyclopedic, but I'd bet most women would hesitate to put a broomstick at the top of the charts when it comes to foreign objects they would like introduced into their person. It was consensual, they all say. The juvie judge, he says there are inconsistencies in the retard's story, he finds for the defendants. My own feeling is a broomstick might lead to inconsistencies, but what do I know. Duane gets thrown out of school again, big deal, that's all he wanted anyway. Never went to school again.”

She did not take her eyes off me, even as she eased the skin on her face back toward her ears. It was that thing I had often seen women of a certain age do, a subliminal sense that a wrinkle might be taking shape, push it away until lotions and potions and balms could be applied and the telltale signs of encroaching years momentarily arrested.

“You know,” I said slowly, “I never did a gang bang when I was a prosecutor. There was one question I always wanted to ask the fourth guy or the fifth or sixth or seventh guy who popped his wad in her. I wanted to get right in his face, nose to nose, and I wanted to say What was it like being last in line? A little gooey? A little slippery?”

Teresa reached over the side of her chair and picked up her bag. It was black and braided, probably a thousand dollars' worth of leather.

“Am I boring you?”

“No. Just looking for some moisturizer.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I'm going to stay awhile. I like watching the way your mind works. You know all the reasons you don't want to do this, and I want to hear them all, but I know—even if you make the most convincing case for not doing it, and so far your reasons are on the money—” She concentrated on unscrewing the cap on the small plastic jar of Visible Difference, then looked up. “But end of day, you're going to do it.”

She was a quick study. She didn't back off. And of course she was right. I knew it was bad business ever to let the personal intervene in such a situation, but I knew it was a relationship that would work. I chose my words carefully. “I may have . . .”

My voice trailed off. She completed the sentence. “A foot in the door.” When I hesitated, she said, “The foot that wants to kick the A.G.”

I gave in. The nod said yes.

“And the foot outside the door?”

“I want to know why . . .” I hesitated as I never would have if I had been prosecuting. “I want to know why . . .
you . . .
are involved in this.”

It was a logical thing to wonder. She had already been semi-anointed by the fame accruing even to those residing at the county line of the national political landscape, and been granted a visa into the green rooms of people in the loop. She was the voice of victims' rights, a not-inconsiderable portfolio for chatterers in the know. Then she agreed to defend Edgar Parlance's accused murderer. Her green room visa was canceled. She had sold out, her thirty pieces of silver a cashier's check for $500,000. Drawn on the ready reserves of a teenager. A teenager who had done a fashion shoot on Riker's Island. Yo, Carlyle.

It took a long time for me to find the answer to my question. There was never anything definitive. Her life was like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces spread all over the table. Occasionally she would say things, and I would add the new pieces to those already on the table, joining them together if they fit. I knew she had come to detest Washington, its self-regard and the indifference that people in the loop had for perceptions other than their own, but there were other more amiable places for her to go than Cap City. This was deliberate, she wanted to find out something, and it took a long time before I could intuit what it was.