Nothing Lost (5 page)

All too well.

“And I say, ‘If it'd been Riley dragged down three flights of stairs, sneezing out her teeth like they were enameled snot, would you re-admit Jocko to the program, treat his anger issues?' That did it. Strong gets in my face, waving his finger under my nose, and he says, ‘Just one minute, young lady,' and I say, ‘Forget “young lady,” I'm a state investigator. I carry a badge, I carry a gun, and I have the power to arrest.' Leo says this interview's over and the flack says this could cost Jocko the Outland Trophy.”

“That explains it then,” J.J. said.

“Explains what?”

“Cassady's got the A.G. on the horn before you hit your car, and the Worm brings me in for a heart-to-heart, he says, actual words, you're off the reservation.”

“My name is Vasquez, not Geronimo.”

“Very good, Allie. Very, very good.”

“He wants to fire me.”

“No. He wants me to fire you.”

“So I guess I'm not your sandwich babe anymore.”

J.J. made her wait for a moment. “I told him I wanted to hear your version,” he said finally. “And I've got to say it's a good deal more colorful than I was led to believe.”

“That means you don't believe it.”

“No. It means the truth is in the details. The Gatorade and the Outland Trophy. And Leo Cassady threatening Ms. Barnes with a courtroom environment. You can't make that up.” He paused, taking her in. “This is all on tape?”

Allie nodded.

“You make a duplicate?”

She nodded again. Of course. Allie would have made sure she was covered in case the Worm made a move against her. She always covered her back. And her flanks. Minority thinking. “Give it to me, and I'll give it to the A.G.”

“That should make his day.” She looked at J.J. “Is Poppy really going to run against him?”

He tried to maintain a professional posture. As ridiculous as he knew he sounded. “This office is not influenced by the career ambitions of the state's elected representatives.”

“You go right on believing that, J.J.”

There was a knock at the conference room door, and Harvey Niland, his number two chair, entered, followed by Patsy Feiffer dragging a wheeled evidence trunk behind her. Harvey was nearing retirement. How I do not want to end up, J.J. thought. Harvey Niland at sixty. Looking tired, thinking tired. For ten years, Harvey had waited to be appointed to the bench, but every year the Committee on Judicial Appointments had passed him by, always listing him as “Qualified,” its lowest recommendation. The only qualification needed for “Qualified” was still to be breathing.

“You were so good on
News at One,
” Patsy Feiffer said, hefting the evidence trunk onto the conference table. She was blond and limber, and whatever the season wore mix-and-match pastels, even on the most frigid winter days when the wind cut to the bone and the snow stung the face. She never missed an opportunity to compliment him. “That's so right about not keeping score at a murder trial. I mean, it's not a game, is it, J.J.?”

J.J. looked over at Allie. His face was a mask. “Allie and I were talking about you, Patsy.” He wore his bad cold smile. His take-no-prisoners smile, Allie called it. Patsy glanced quickly at Allie, acknowledging her presence for the first time with the briefest of nods, then expectantly back at J.J., waiting to hear why she had been under discussion. “Allie doesn't like you,” he said pleasantly. “She thinks you're a babycake.” Patsy appeared stricken. Allie was impassive. Harvey Niland seemed not present, as if counting the days to his retirement. J.J. bored ahead. “Pampered. Entitled.” Nothing I had actually said, Allie recalled later. But in the ballpark. “Lady Bountiful.” The kind of frontal attack that was his courtroom trademark. “Always high-hatting her.”

Patsy tried to gather a response. “I don't really see why you and . . .” She pointed at Allie as if she could not bear to say her name.

“Try ‘Allie,' ” J.J. interrupted. “Short for Altagracia. Allie. Vasquez.” Then cutting each word off as if with a knife, he said, “And I really don't see why you don't have a response ready.” His voice lowered dangerously. “In a courtroom, you have to be prepared for every surprise. It never goes the way you want it to go. If you don't answer, if you look as if you're going to cry, as you do right now, then you're lost, throw in the towel. ‘Your Honor, the prosecution asks for a directed verdict of not guilty by reason of prosecutorial incompetence.' ” J.J. tented his fingers. “I assume you want to try cases . . .”

Patsy nodded blankly.

“Then give me an answer.” He raised his voice. “Now.”

“I don't see any justification for this . . .” Patsy began.

“Justification?” His voice was contemptuous. “You think a lion needs justification to take down a zebra? His justification is he's hungry. His justification is he can.” He was in her face. “You say, ‘BFD.' You ever hear Allie say that? ‘Big fucking deal.' You probably didn't know what it meant. Or you say, ‘Of course she doesn't, I'm a lawyer, she's not, she takes night courses at an unaccredited law school from a homo who was fired from this office.' You say, ‘Of course she doesn't, she's an envious bitch.' You say, ‘Of course she doesn't, she knows you want to get in my pants.' ”

Patsy seemed near tears. J.J. leaned close to her. “It doesn't matter what you say,” he said quietly. “Just say something. The more outrageous the better. And if you're in trial and the judge says you're out of order, skirting contempt, BFD, you got the jury's attention back. You're the lion. The lioness. Belching after you eat the zebra.” He reached down and patted her hand. “You just learned more about criminal court behavior than you picked up in three years of law school. Don't forget that.” He sat back in his chair. “And Allie thinks you're just swell. Right, Allie?”

“Just swell,” Allie said.

“Good.” A big smile. “Harvey, you awake?”

Harvey Niland removed a file from the Toledo evidence trunk. “Tadeusz Lynch.”

“He arrived from Durango Avenue yet?”

“He's in the holding tank.”

“You got him dressed? I don't want him showing up in his orange jumpsuit.”

“He's shaky, J.J.”

“Of course he's shaky. He's going to rat out Toledo.”

“Patsy thinks we should ask for a continuance.” Typical Harvey. His idea, but he laid it off on Patsy in case it got shot down.

J.J. turned to Patsy. She seemed to have regained some of her composure. “Why?”

“I think he needs a little prepping.”

“His resolve needs stiffening, you mean? He wants to be clear on what he gets for turning rat? How big a chunk of cheese he's looking at?”

Patsy nodded.

“Let me tell you a story,” J.J. said after a moment. “Three years ago. Ellen Tracy's court downstairs. I'm examining my witness. One Wendell Z. I have successfully established that Z stands for just that. Z. He is Mr. Z. So I ask Mr. Z—Wendell—what exactly the accused, one Luscious Odelle, said to him immediately prior to committing the three counts of homicide that had brought us to Judge Tracy's court. Wendell answers, and I quote, within reasonable parameters of accuracy, and believing that my memory still has most of its pixels: Wendell says, ‘Luscious say Nadine messing around with Antoyne. Luscious say he mean to take care of Nadine. Then he mean to take care of Antoyne.' So I ask Wendell if Luscious mentioned how he meant to take care of Nadine. ‘With his blade,' Wendell said. I asked Wendell what Luscious meant to do with the blade in question, which had already been entered as a prosecution exhibit, and Wendell says, ‘Luscious say he going to hit Nadine upside the head, and then he going to take that blade . . .' ” J.J. paused to see if he had everyone's attention. “ ‘. . . he going to take that blade and cut out her pussy.' That did it. Four bells. Defcon 2. Ellen Tracy leans so far over the bench her size-six triple-A's clear the floor . . .”

“J.J.,” Patsy Feiffer said, “is this relevant to the Toledo trial?”

J.J. ignored her. “ ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,' Tracy says. “ ‘In this courtroom, we refer to the sexual organs by their clinical terms. In this case, the vagina. Understood?' ”

“J.J.,” Patsy insisted.

“In due time, Patsy. ‘Wendell,' I say, ‘you heard Her Honor's admonition.' And he just stares at me, ‘admonition' not being a word common to the purviews where the Z family operates. So I spell out what Tracy had said, and I say, ‘You understand, right?' Wendell nods, and I resume my line of questioning. ‘Wendell,' I say, ‘under the strictures laid down by the court, please continue your account of what happened the afternoon in question. ‘Well, Luscious be mad,' Wendell said, ‘because Nadine messing around with Antoyne . . .' ”

“J.J., we have a motion to frame,” Patsy Feiffer said.

“For the last time, Patsy,” J.J. said, “shut up and let me finish. Understood?”

Patsy nodded unhappily.

“ ‘Luscious go looking for Nadine,' Wendell says. ‘And when Luscious found Nadine?' I say. ‘He hit her upside the head,' Wendell says. I now have his full attention. Wendell is on the program. ‘What happened then?' I say. And Wendell says, ‘Luscious grabs Nadine . . .' Then he breaks off. He's looking for help. ‘Judge,' he says finally, ‘what's that word you say I got to use instead of “pussy”?' ”

Allie laughed.

“I don't find that amusing,” Patsy Feiffer said, without looking at Allie.

“You think it's suggestive and could be construed as sexual harassment?” J.J. said.

Patsy did not reply.

“You think it's an inappropriate story to tell in the middle of a murder trial?”

“Yes.”

“You would prefer full focus on
The People
v.
Toledo.
”

“Yes.”

“Full attention on his motion for a continuance?”

“Yes.”

“So we can stiffen Tadeusz Lynch's backbone?”

“Yes.”

“And make sure his story rhymes?”

“Yes.”

“You don't think Murray Lubin would welcome that motion? You don't think he'd love a continuance so he could gin up his own line on Mr. Lynch?” J.J. let the question sink in. “Give Murray two more days and he would rip Lynch's heart out.” Patsy started to speak, then stopped. “We don't give him that chance. We put Lynch on first thing. He places the murder weapon in Bobby Toledo's hand. Murray maybe gives him a bloody nose, but that's all, nothing we can't handle, Tadeusz is back in leg irons and on the bus home to Durango Avenue before the afternoon break.” J.J. looked from Patsy to Harvey. “Any objections?” Neither spoke. “Didn't think so. See you in court.”

Patsy closed the evidence trunk and wrestled it to the floor. When she opened the door, J.J. said, “Patsy, could you get me a bottle of water and put it under my chair.” Patsy hesitated, her back stiffening. She did not turn around. “And make sure it's cold.”

Patsy maneuvered the wheels of the trunk over the door saddle and let the door slam behind her.

After a moment, Allie said, “What did that story about Wendell X . . .”

“Z . . .”

“. . . have to do with the Toledo case?”

“Nothing. I just thought the tension level needed to be lowered a bit.”

“Good thinking. It really did the trick for Patsy.”

“Sarcasm's not your long suit.”

“I thought you were giving yourself time to figure out why a continuance motion was a crappy idea. Say something. Isn't that what you told Patsy?”

J.J. rose and slipped his jacket on. “On the money.” He stared at her for a moment. “Max Cline might turn you into a pretty good lawyer.”

“When Max told that story, Wendell's name was X. Mustafa X.”

J.J. smiled. “It's a courthouse classic. I was betting Patsy had never heard it. And Harvey's brain-dead.”

“You're a real shit.”

“Agreed.”

MAX

Allie gave me chapter and verse later, after a class in cross-examination in my role as mentor-savant to the less than privileged, the not quite Caucasian, and the first-language-anything-but-English minorities who were my students at Osceola Community.

“Why was he so beastly to what's-her-name?”

“Patsy.”

“Softening her up?”

Allie shrugged.

“So that she's
soooo
surprised when she winds up in the kip with him?”

Another shrug.

“That his MO with you?”

“MOs don't work with me, Max. Just a good stiff dick.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The warden's office at the state penitentiary on Durango Avenue overlooked the visitors' parking lot. On the wall opposite the warden's desk, there were monitors showing each cellblock, and in the death-row holding cell a ceiling camera recorded what promised to be the last hours of Percy Darrow's life.

“Who do you think designed the electric chair?” Charley Buckles said.

“A matter of some dispute, Charley,” J.J. McClure said. “Thomas Alva Edison was in the running. A direct-current man. George Westinghouse favored alternating. AC and DC. Each trying to corner the electricity market. Capitalism at work. Edison juiced a horse to make the case for DC. A prison electrician wired up the actual piece of furniture. He used AC. A fellow named Kemmler was the first to sit in it. His girlfriend had run into the business end of his axe. He needed a couple of jolts, but it worked. The newspapers said he'd been Westinghoused.”

“You been reading up, J.J.,” Charley Buckles said disapprovingly. Charley Buckles was the Osceola County medical examiner. And had been for as long as anyone could remember.

“Observing the courtesies of the occasion, Charley.”

“Edison thought it would only take four seconds. He got that one wrong. Took four minutes.” Edison's fallibility seemed to please Charley Buckles. “Two thousand volts for the first four seconds in this state, a thousand volts for the next seven, then two hundred and eight volts for two minutes. Depending on body weight. Eight amps should take care of Percy.”

“After which you take out your stethoscope and do the honors.”

“They were never quite sure the hot squat would take care of business,” Charley Buckles said. His interest in the way people died was inexhaustible. “That's why they mandated immediate autopsies. To finish the job, so to speak.” He laughed heavily and leaned toward J.J. Even when he whispered, his voice was like gravel. “I did the post on that Parlance fellow. The pathologist down there in Regent thought it was a little beyond his capabilities. He does mostly highway and hunting accidents. Farmers who get sliced and diced falling into combines they can't afford that their widows end up handing over to the bank, the odd suicide swinging in the barn, that sort of thing, nothing of the homicide variety.” He paused. “Your dad ever have a homicide out there in Parker County?”

J.J. shook his head. Charley, why bring up suicides in a barn? J.J. thought of his father and the old single-action Colt he had put in his mouth and triggered with his thumb in the tack room. It was as if his face had never existed. He wondered if swinging from a beam in the barn would have been easier to take. Would he have cut him down or waited for the sheriff?

No, he would have left him up. Maintained the integrity of the crime scene.

“Good man, Walter,” Charley Buckles said, nodding his head slowly, as if processing what he seemed to have momentarily forgotten, the way Walter McClure had died. He plunged on. “One thing I did not want to do was drive all the goddamn way down to Regent. I can hardly fit behind the wheel of my automobile anymore. I get the wheel pushing in my stomach and it makes me sleepy.” His eyes closed for a moment, and then he snapped awake. “Well, I thought I'd seen just about everything in the homicide line. I'd have to say those two young gentlemen did not like Parlance much. The skinning you know about. He was alive when they did it. Cut out his tongue so he couldn't scream. Shot off his fingers, stomped his chest with their cowboy boots. He must've been some tough bird. It was the hollow-point that took him out for good.” He appraised J.J. “You ain't going to do this one, are you?”

Plead ignorance. “It's up to the A.G.”

“Fat chance,” Charley Buckles grunted. “He's looking at a primary against your wife, she decides to run. The last thing he wants is you on a case that brings Jamaal Jefferson and the president of the You-nited States to Regent.”

J.J. wondered how Charley Buckles, who spent all his working life with the recently dead, had such perfect pitch for the politics of his home state.

“You know why I went into the pathology line after I finished medical school?”

A Charley Buckles perennial. It was easier to pretend it was the first time he had heard it. And it moved him away from the Parlance trial. “Why, Charley?”

“Because your mistakes can't kill people,” Charley Buckles said, swallowing a tobacco laugh. “They're already dead.”

“Funny, Charley.”

“J.J.,” Charley Buckles said. “One thing I always wondered. Why the initials? What's the matter with James?”

“My family called me Jamie,” J.J. said after a moment. There was something about Charley Buckles that invited unintended confidences. It might have been his ridiculous name. Or his medicine-ball shape.

“I think I see the problem,” Charley Buckles said, clearing his throat, a sound like the rumble of thunder. His face was beet red, and his breathing came in quick spurts heavy with phlegm and nicotine. “People named Jamie don't generally ask for the death penalty.”

J.J. nodded. As if to himself, he said, “It's a frivolous name.” A sudden sharp memory. Emmett called him Jamie even as he was drowning. Death was much on his mind this evening.

“And riding the lightning is a most unfrivolous penalty,” Charley Buckles said, his words lost inside a wheezy laugh. Another change of direction. “Listen. I saw Poppy outside when I got here. Signing autographs, enjoying the hell out of herself.”

“She says she's representing the mother and father.”

“They're lucky they died, you ask me.”

An unexpected take. “Lucky, Charley?”

“Hell, J.J., they would've been in the victim business.” He hawked some phlegm and left it in the blue bandanna he used as a handkerchief. “Selling T-shirts. NO MERCY FOR PERCY or some such. It's a funny goddamn kind of famous, waiting for somebody like Percy Darrow to die. If they was still alive, they'd wake up tomorrow, wishing he was still around, wondering what the hell they're going to do with the rest of their lives. Nobody on the TV wanting to talk to them. No cameras. No notebooks. They'd end up missing that son of a bitch.”

Charley Buckles still had the capacity to surprise.

“That Poppy.” Charley Buckles had switched gears again. “I see her on that fat one's show. Rosie something. And that blonde, what's-her-name, married to the bald guy with no eyebrows, her show. She's going to be on
Nightline
tonight, I hear.” Another snort. “That fellow Poppel will have his hands full with her.”

“Koppel,” Harold Pugh said. “Not Poppel.” Harold Pugh had slipped back into his office, as always unnoticed, after yet another trip to ensure that the wiring attached to the electric chair would not short out when the governor's office ordered the execution to proceed. Practice makes perfect, the warden had said. You can't over prepare. Harold is a compendium of the obvious, J.J. thought. In the A.G.'s office, the warden, as elusive and recessive as a piece of ectoplasm, was known as The Shadow. That night's scheduled execution was the biggest event in Harold Pugh's twenty-five years of silent and uncomplaining service in the Department of Corrections. It was an effort for him not to show his resentment that Poppy McClure would be talking to Ted Koppel in the parking lot while he was attending to the needs of Percy Darrow's last meal and waiting for the governor's message that all appeals had been exhausted. “And the reason he's here is because it's the first execution in this state since 1959, not because . . .”

Harold Pugh caught J.J.'s eye and left the sentence dangling. He had made his point. No reason to mention Poppy. It was he who would ask Percy Darrow if he had any last words, he who would order the switch pulled, he who would announce to the media that the sentence had been carried out and the will of the people observed. But it would be Poppy McClure on
Nightline,
not he. He would not have occasion to tell Mr. Koppel about the two Big Macs, the six-pack of Pepsi, and the bag of jelly beans Percy Darrow had ordered for his last meal, or about his demeanor as he sat in the electric chair, a leather hood covering his head and face.

“I bet Big Macs are the last meal of choice,” Charley Buckles said, his breathing still labored. “I mean, around the country.”

“I didn't think it would be sweetbreads,” J.J. said. Every time he was with Charley Buckles he felt like a straight man.

“It could be a hell of an ad campaign,” Charley Buckles said. “You get Ronald McDonald. And he says, ‘To all my friends on death row, think McDonald's.' ”

“I don't think that's appropriate,” Harold Pugh said.

“Shit, what is?” Charley Buckles said. “Gordy Sunday had cheese steak.” Gordon Sunday was the last man executed in the state's electric chair. “I was there. Representing the Osceola County coroner's office. They called us coroners those days. A good word. Now it's medical examiner. And even that's too much for some people.” He wheezed a cough. “They say M.E.” He elongated the two letters: EMMMM EEEEE. “J.J., I want you to promise that when I die, my obituary says that I was the coroner in this county for forty-two years, not some damn M.E.”

“I'll take care of it, Charley.” His beeper rang. It was Gerry Wormwold's callback number. The A.G. had wanted to attend Darrow's execution himself, but his advisors had counseled that a potential gubernatorial candidate should keep himself aloof from the proceedings and use his office instead as a pulpit to accuse the anti-death-penalty protestors who had gathered outside of “cynically manipulating the system.” It was an attempt at even-handedness that his handlers thought might assist him in getting past his nickname. And so around the state at 4-H Club meetings and Rhino booster lunches, the A.G. did not miss an opportunity to toss in the phrase “cynically manipulating the system.”

J.J. dialed Wormwold's number.

“J.J., what's the delay?”

“No delay, General. The governor hasn't called yet.”

“You think that Democrat son of a bitch Kennedy is stalling?”

“I think he's waiting for the Twelfth Circuit to finish writing its decision.”

“They'll turn it down, right?”

“Unless hell freezes over. Then the governor's office has to make sure copies get in the hands of all the involved parties.”

“I know what has to be done,” Wormwold said irritably. He paused for a second. “I just got off the phone with Niland. Murray Lubin wants to deal.”

I called that one right, J.J. thought. It was in the wind. “I'll put together a package.”

“Toledo does time.”

“No problem.”

“Heavy duty.”

“A touch.”

Wormwold hesitated. “Write it up and run it past me in the morning.” J.J. was sure the A.G. had little interest in the Toledo case. He had something else on his mind, and he was having trouble getting to it. “Your wife's outside over there.” There it was. Poppy was getting airtime and he wasn't. He and Harold Pugh should compare notes. “Talking to all those TV boys.” Wormwold paused as if wondering if he should continue. He plunged on. “I know she's your wife, but . . .” His voice trailed off. He was not ready to come right out and say that Poppy was cynically manipulating the system. As of course she was. Better to leave it hanging.

“I'm giving the Parlance case to Maurice Dodd,” the A.G. said disagreeably after waiting an unseemly number of seconds for a response. “You've got a full plate.”

Surprise, surprise. “Maurice could use the exposure.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing at all, General.”

“It's a slam dunk.”

“As long as he doesn't bounce it off the rim,” J.J. said. Wormwold started to speak, then hung up without another word. Blowing a layup was always a possibility with Maurice Dodd. Maurice the Uncontaminated. Maurice the Incorruptible. Maurice the Inflexible. Harvey Niland with attitude. A more effective gauleiter than trial lawyer, J.J. had said more than once about Maurice Dodd. Among other things.

Maurice Dodd was equally charitable about J.J.

Poppy McClure's husband, he would say.

On the holding-cell monitor, J.J. watched Percy Darrow sitting on a bunk, wearing only Jockey shorts and a T-shirt. His head had been shaved, his legs, even his eyebrows and his pubic hair. It would give the wrong impression to the witnesses if his eyebrows or the hair around his testicles caught fire when the electricity jolted him. He had his hand inside his shorts, and seemed to be masturbating. Not something Jesus would do, but why not. One last spasm. Like the two loads he left on the James twins. J.J. had read the execution procedures Harold Pugh had written. Percy Darrow's Big Macs would be laced with Dulcolax to ensure that he would evacuate his bowels before he was led the fifteen steps from the holding cell to the execution chamber. He would be given a clean white shirt and freshly laundered jeans, with both pant legs split up the side to make it easier to roll them up and attach the restraining straps. He would wear a rubber diaper because the first jolt of electricity would loosen his sphincter. Clockwork was what Harold Pugh was after, and to that end he and his guard commander had drilled the seven-man tie-down team as if they were Riverdancers. Thirty-five seconds from entry into the chamber until ready-to-go was Harold Pugh's timetable. There was a right-leg man to do the right-leg strap, a left-leg man to do the left-leg strap, a right-arm man and a left-arm man to do the same with the upper limbs, a guard to stick a gag into Percy Darrow's mouth, a guard to stick the leather hood over his head, and a guard to screw the head electrode with its circular sponge down on top of his skull. Three guards pushed outlet buttons, but only one of the buttons was connected to the electrical source, so as to keep the identity of the real executioner unknown.

His cell phone rang. Poppy from the parking lot. Looking for electric-chair chat that would surely end up on
Nightline.
No way. He had asked her not to come to Durango Avenue, but asking her to avoid press coverage was like asking the sun not to rise.