Teresa never really did respond. She was not ready to admit why she chose to defend Duane Lajoie. If she even knew at that point. It was a simple reason, really. Once all the pieces were on the table.
They weren't yet.
“You're not going to answer?” I said finally.
She dropped the jar of moisturizer into her bag.
“Shit is coming down.”
“I have an umbrella.” As quietly as if she were talking about a spring shower. She stood up. She was too well bred to stretch after such a long sit, but years of exercise, I was sure with a trainer, had taught her to unkink her muscles in a ladylike way. “By the way. Carlyle's rented a big old place outside Regent. A ranch, she said. Owned by some cattle company up there.”
“Down there.”
“Down there then. She and Alex will stay there when they're in town. Plus her assistants. And his assistants. Gofers. Camera loaders. Technicians. Location scouts. Household help. Cook. The place must be huge. She suggested that . . .” It was as if it were a thought she wished not to suggest. “. . . that her legal team might like to stay there, too.”
“Over my dead body.”
She smiled. “I guess that means you're in.”
PART FIVE
CHAPTER ONE
Fast-forwardâJ.J.'s dream:
Thinking of Emmett, dreaming of him. Emmett, Emmett, Emmett. Push me, Jamie, pushmepushmepushme. It never changes. I always do what he wants, my hand on his head, counting the seconds, going the limit, stretching the limit. At the last minute, I lift my hand. Always. And he shoots to the surface, gasping for air, laughing, this hysterical kid laughter. Do it again, Jamie, doitagaindoitagaindoitagain, running the words together. Then Walter looks up. Sitting in his wheelchair on the rise that sloped down to the dock and the pond, the brakes set, that floppy white Panama hat protecting his bald head from the sun, I used to wonder if I'd get bald, and that book in his lap.
It was always the same tattered paperback. About a barrister at the Old Bailey. Not Rumpole, just some old Brit like that. Black robe and periwig, M'Lord this, M'Lord that, can you imagine that? The most important case Walter ever handled was a farmer who sodomized a neighbor's ewe. That's what he called it. A ewe. To differentiate it from a ram, I suppose. He was always such a goddamn didact. It's funny what you remember. I mean, I still remember the farmer's name. Ed Snedd. I don't know why Walter even bothered to prosecute him. He wasn't the first farmer in Parker County to fuck a sheep. Kids used to do it to learn how. No, not me. Walter didn't even win the fucking case. The ewe wouldn't testify. Ed Snedd walked. The first thing he did was he dumped a truckful of sheep dip on Walter's driveway.
The dream, she said.
I put that goddamn paperback in his coffin. In his hand.
Barrington,
Q.C., that was the book's title. It was a series. Barrington Takes Silk, that was another one. I tried to get a periwig, but the costume shops in Kiowa and Cap City didn't have any, and there wasn't time to order one. I don't know why I wanted it there, I don't think I had his best interests at heart.
The dream, she said again.
I found him. Sunday lunch with Walter and Emily. I'd make it maybe once a month or so. Actually less. Three times in the year before he died. It's a hike from Cap City to Hamlet. Two hundred fifty miles due west across that goddamn table of a plain, the speedometer nailed to ninety, not even a shiver; then the same two-fifty back. Three and a half hours there, three and a half hours home, it's a chunk out of the day when you have to be in court the next morning. No, that's not the real reason. I didn't even spend that much time in court, most everything was pleaded out. We just didn't have that much to say to each other. What do you have coming up? he'd say. That should be interesting. Don't get many hostage situations in Parker County. Keep your eye on the sparrow. He was always saying some asshole thing like that. What fucking sparrow?
The dream, she said a third time.
Always underdone roast chicken. Pink goddamn chicken. Is there anything worse than underdone chicken? Fifty-two Sundays a year. He'd go to the coop, pick the chicken out, and whack off its head with the hatchet he kept in the barn, then he'd bleed it, my mother would pluck it, and then undercook it. It was pink. Rare. Rare goddamn chicken.
You said that.
So I was there that Sunday. What do you have coming up? Don't have much conspiracy to commit securities fraud in Parker County. Keep your eye on the sparrow. The chicken was a triumph, Emily. As always. Jamie saw a sign driving down here, Emily. PROTECT BEEFâRUN OVER A CHICKEN. That's one way to protect our economy. You follow through on that, though, you could call it a violation of private property, seek redress, might even have a case unless the driver of the vehicle could prove it was an accident. I think I'll go down to the barn, Emily, rinse the blood of our lunch off the hatchet. Tends to rust, you don't rinse it off. You stay here, Jamie, entertain your mother, she loves it, you come to visit.
The dream, she repeated.
You want to watch the game, my mother said. What game? I say. There's always a game on Sunday, she says, I thought you might want to watch. No, I don't want to watch the game, I think I should be getting back. Well, then, she says, and I look at her and she looks at me, and then I heard the shot. Correction. We heard the shot. You better go down to the barn, she says. Very quiet. Matter-of-fact. No excitement. Your father is so careless sometimes. He's getting old, Jamie. (He's not even sixty, he's fifty-five, fifty-six, and she says he's getting old.) I'll go down and take a look, I say. And I walk out the door and out to the barn, walk, not run, as if I thought a car on the road had backfired, as if I had never heard a gunshot before. When I was a kid, I used to shoot at a fence-post with that old Colt, my hands were so small I could hardly reach the trigger, and it had such kick it gave me a bone bruise in my palm. Some days when it rains I can still feel that bruise. I got to the barn and there he was, in the wheelchair, his head leaning over into the tub where he kept the scrub brushes, as if he didn't want to splatter the blood, and here's the thing, before he did it he ran water over the axe he used to kill the chicken we had for lunch, scrubbed it clean with a wire brush, and then hung the axe on the nail over the sink where he kept it. First things first. That was Walter.
Finish the dream.
What dream?
About your brother.
Emmett.
Yes.
His voice was a monotone.
Pushme, Jamie, pushmepushmepushmepushme, the pier jutting into the pond, blocking Walter's view. Pushing him, holding him down, calibrating the seconds, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, all the way to fifteen, maybe twenty, twenty-five, even more, I can't remember, Emmett's capacity for holding his breath stretched to the extreme, and beyond. Then he was free, but he wasn't gasping for air, no laughing, no againagainagain, just floating there facedown, and Walter, stretched on the rise, he'd fallen out of the wheelchair, he was grabbing tufts of grass, trying to pull himself down to the dock, it's not your fault, Jamie, it's not your fault, he kept on saying.
CHAPTER TWO
From Teresa Kean's journal:
M flossed his teeth with L's pubic hair.
Teresa's journal was full of odd, quirky items like this, entries that seemed on superficial first reading to reveal only some ill humor or private sexual gratification, but as I read deeper into the journal and as my translation became more fluent, these random jottings would usually end up making a point, illuminating something or someone, and the someone was often herself. It was here that doubt would make an occasional appearance and the chilly conviction usually on display would melt a bit. It was as if she needed to get something down before she lost it, something she heard or overheard, or suddenly remembered about M or L, if those were indeed their initials, something that pinned one or the other, like a butterfly onto cork. Or perhaps not M or L at all, but an attitude of her own toward them or what they represented. I had a similar experience once when I was in the Caribbean with Stanley (my only trip ever in search of the sun). In the house we rented on a white sand beach inhabited almost exclusively by naked young men whose bums were as tanned as their shoulders and faces (Stanley's nirvana), I found a moldy copy of Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks, left I supposed by some previous weekly tenant (along with twenty-three ribbed and lubricated Trojan-Enz condoms and two tubes of K-Y jelly), and I was more absorbed by the cryptic shorthand of “Erskine Gwynn,” say, or “The war had become second-page news,” or “He has a dark future, he hates everything,” than I was by the latherings of Bain de Soleil or the silver reflectors beaming rays evenly onto the faces of the sunbathers on the beach outside our perfect six-thousand-dollar-a-week bungalow (four of Stanley's, two of mine, although I did the cooking). As I burrowed through Teresa's laptop, I sometimes had that same sense that I had reading Fitzgerald's notes that I needed an Enigma machine to decode exactly what she had on her mind.
In this state, people drive a hundred miles to buy a pack of cigarettes at two in the morning.
That was the beginning.
Or the beginning of the end.
At any rate, it was the only thing she put down about the trip where she saw the twister west of Quantum and east of Higginson. I suppose you could say, if you believed in such things as signs or premonitions, that the twister west of Quantum and east of Higginson was a warning, an augury, bad weather ahead.
Or as it happened in this case, behind.
Jim Hogg.
Jim Hogg County, she had said suddenly one night.
It had come up during one of those interminable discussions we would have at the end of the day when we were sick of preparing the case we would present on behalf of Duane Lajoie.
And would talk about anything that came into our minds.
The town of Randado, she said. Population fifteen. My father said it sounded like the perfect place for witness protection. Nothing but chaparral and mesquite. Ninety percent of the county is of Mexican descent.
How did he ever hear about it?
I saw an item in the
Times.
The National Briefing. Maybe a paragraph. No more. Wire service. Some local case. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Follow the money right into Randado, Jim Hogg County. The local sheriff bugged the newsroom of the weekly newspaper. You know where he put the bug? In the Mr. Coffee machine. He didn't figure the machine would melt the bug.
The rat would have to speak Spanish, I said. As always, I was being practical.
So send a Spanish-speaking rat, Teresa had said.
Max is devious.
No Enigma needed there. I hadn't realized how much of an impression I had made on her. No, that's not true. I know I had, as she had made a similar impression on me. What I hadn't realized was how she tried to sort it out behind the RECIPES password. Although what she was actually trying to sort out was not so much me and our relationship, as herself. Computer therapy, Stanley had called it.
Absolutely.
I thought I was vetting him [
she wrote
], but of course he was vetting me as well. He had decided to do the case even before I walked into his office in the Law Building (there was something so creepy and Central European about that place, it was like the headquarters of the secret police, no one ever quite met your eyes, the men in the elevators all had dirty suits and oily hair and ties that had food stains), pending his opinion of whether I was an idiot or not. Max has a way of dividing the world into idiots, or most people, and those he reluctantly identifies as not idiots, a number he claimed he could count on seven of his ten fingers. I apparently passed, although I think it was touch and go for a while. I took the liberty, he said after we felt each other out, neither of us giving away much, of checking for any outstanding warrants against Alice Faith Todt.
In other words it had never occurred to him that I wouldn't ask him to be my co-counsel. He was already on the case. Behind his head, I could see a huge elephant balloon floating by his window, like one from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, part of a two-day Midwestern Republican Conference a block away at the Rhino Carlton-Plaza where I was staying. It gave me a moment to gather my thoughts.
Carlyle, I said carefully.
The warrants identify her as Alice Faith Todt.
That was Max's way of telling me there were warrants.
How many? I said. Or recall that I said. So much has happened that I am no longer sure of anything I said that far back. Or even that it matters. But I do know this. One of the first things Daddy taught me when I went to work in his law office was that unless you know the answer already, you never ask “Why?” It is a defensive question, and a defense counsel always has to be on the offensive. “Why” will come out soon enough. Asking Max why he had checked to see if Carlyle had any outstanding warrants would probably have meant he would have struck me from his magnificent seven.
Three, he said. A bad check and an illicit credit card in Osceola County, a DUI in Loomis County. All three would have run through Juvenile Court. But she never showed up for any court appearance. Went to New York City and made her fortune. She could be arrested, if she plans to be here, as I suppose she will, and if she wants to get a coffee-table book out of it, with a sty in her eye and all. She'd probably just get probation, a little community service, but you never know. People might like to make an example of a little rich girl who thinks she's better than the law. J.J.'s run it through the computer, bet on it.
Allie Vasquez was the reason I could bet on it, of course. I didn't know then that it was Max who had hired her when he was running the Homicide Bureau in the A.G.'s office, or that she was a night school law student of his. J.J. was her boss now. And then some. It seemed the definition of split loyalties.
J.J. used to work for me, Max said. He knows how it's done. Max was not really vain, but he did like to point out that J.J. had once been his number two and, implicitly, that had it not been for Gerry Wormwold, J.J. still would be. He doesn't want to embarrass Alice Todt, he said, but she starts blowing Carlyle smoke and getting her face all over the tube from the courthouse steps, schmoozing with Alicia Barbara, say, he'll try to neutralize her, and the best way he can do that is, and it will pain him to have to do it (Max was milking the moment), probably on those same courthouse steps, probably with that same Alicia Barbara, J.J.'s tight with her, is to say that she forged a two-hundred-dollar check at Food Treasure on the account of someone called Waylon Madden. Bought two liter bottles of Diet Pepsi, two bags of Fritos, and an economy-size package of Butterfinger Bits. Total $11.27. She took the balance in cash. One hundred eighty-eight dollars and seventy-three cents.
It was as if he were reciting the figures to a jury.
There's an additional little problem with Waylon, Max said, and this is where J.J. will really bust her chops if he can.
Is the problem with Waylon Madden that he was already dead when she went to Food Giant?
Food Treasure, Max corrected. He seemed a little disappointed that I was up to speed on Waylon Madden.
Right. He drove his car into a train with some other guy.
Kile Purdy, I said. Kile was driving. It was his car, actually. A 1986 Crown Vic. Lowered. Chrome mufflers. He hit a Burlington Northern grain train in Albion. They were both drunk.
Max's expression did not change as I ticked off the details of the final moments of Waylon Madden and Kile Purdy. My answer to the Diet Pepsi, the Fritos, and the economy-size bag of Butterfinger Bits. On points, the sparring between us was even.
They spooned the two of them out of the Crown Vic, Max said after a moment. Alice Todt was so twisted out of shape she headed off to the Food Treasure with Waylon's check.
I watched the elephant balloon bobbing up and down outside Max's window, while on the street below a brass band was playing what I later learned was the SMU Rhino fight song over and over.
No big deal, Max said. She makes restitution to Food Treasure. Publicly. On her website. You pay for your mistakes, she says. It makes you a better person, she says. A stronger person, she says. I bet she tips a waiter two hundred bucks at dinner.
He didn't know Carlyle. She claimed she never carried cash. She always had an assistant around to pay the bills and take care of the tips, ten percent, not a penny more. Your business is Carlyle, she told the people who worked for her. The people who worked for her watched her cash outlays, or they didn't work for her long. She had grown up poor, and she was never going to be poor again. I am sure she thought of me as an employee, and I suppose I was. Except I made sure that her check had cleared before I took up the business of Carlyle.
Food Treasure funds a Reading Lab program statewide, Max said. It's their good work. She gives the Reading Lab ten computers. In memory of Edgar Parlance. The credit card beef will just disappear, she's Carlyle, it was an honor to have her use my Visa card, dude, she just borrowed it, man. The DUI nobody gives a shit about, they can't even get a Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign going in this state, the neutralizer is neutralized, and now we've just got Duane Lajoie to deal with.
And Edgar Parlance.
He's dead, Max said. He's not our concern.
That was a stupid goddamn thing to say.
As it turned out.