The Sign of the Book (28 page)

“So ordered.”

“You've gone a bit pale, Deputy,” Erin said. “Would you like some water?”

“You just go to hell.” He looked at Gill, then at Miss Bailey, and finally, at last, at the judge. In a watery voice, he said, “Your Honor…”

Softly, Erin said, “May I just ask a few more questions, Your Honor?”

And the judge, in his steely voice, said, “Go on.”

Go on, fry the bastard.

“Are you people gonna sit still for this shit?”

Miss Bailey rose from her chair. “Your Honor…”

“Hey,” the judge said, motioning her down. “He rigged his own sail.”

“Did you seal up the house,” Erin said, “and
then
go back up there—”

“
No!
…No, I did not!”

“—and while you were there the second time, did you destroy every blood trace that that kid had put on the walls
after
you left them in there—”

“You…are…outta…your…fuckin'…mind.”

“All the bloody little fingerprints—”

“No, goddammit,
no
!”

“All the smears on the wall—”

“I'm not saying another word to this bitch.”

“What did you do with the bloody police tape with the fingerprints all over it?”

“You looked at the crime scene photos. You see any tape with blood on it?”

“I'm talking about the other tape, Officer Walsh. The original tape you used to seal the room before the kid got in there and messed it all up.”

“That never happened.”

“Let me suggest, Deputy, that you did return to the Marshall house. And at that time you discovered that the children had smeared blood on the walls and had even handled the police tape with their bloody hands. And let me also suggest that when you saw what they had done, you destroyed that police tape and replaced it with a fresh one, and that you also washed all the smeared blood and handprints off the walls. Isn't it true that this is in fact what you did.”

Lennie looked at the DA. “She's gone crazy. She's gone fuckin' nuts.”

Erin smiled at him, not unkindly.

Lennie looked imploringly at Miss Bailey. “What the hell are you doing to me? We're supposed to be on the same side, for Christ's sake! How can you let her do this?”

“Better now than at the trial,” Erin said. “Right, Miss Bailey?”

“I wasn't
talking
to you, goddammit! Can't you understand English?”

“Your Honor, I would once again ask that the record reflect—”

“Fuck you! Fuck you all!”

Suddenly he got up and pulled open his jacket, and for just a moment his hand came to rest on his gun. Everyone in the room tensed. Miss Bailey said, “
Jesus
Christ, Lennie, what are you doing with that gun in here?” Lennie whirled, kicked over the chair, shattered it against the wall, and stalked out. We all sat and stared at one another, and for a moment no one knew what to say.

The judge recovered first. “I want a warrant sworn out for that man's arrest,” he said to the sheriff. “Then you get out there and find him.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at the two sides. “Is there any reason why I shouldn't rule right now on the motion to suppress?”

Gill stood and said, “Well, Your Honor, I would respectfully request a continuance until Deputy Walsh is found and we have a chance to assess his bizarre behavior here today.”

“What's to assess?” Erin said. “It's clear that his entire investigation is tainted and his testimony has been full of lies from the beginning. So while they're assessing things, our client continues to sit in jail based largely on the word of a man who did everything but pull a gun on us all.”

“I'm inclined to agree,” the judge said.

“At least, let us find him, Judge,” Gill said.

“I'll give you till the middle of next week,” the judge said. “I'll be out of town till next Wednesday. If Deputy Walsh has not been produced by then and brought in here as a prisoner, unarmed, I will suppress his entire testimony.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

The judge got up and went into his chambers.

Gill cleared his throat. “I think we might be willing to look at a lesser charge. What would you say to man one?”

“She killed him in the heat of an argument,” Miss Bailey said.

“Whoever killed him might've done that,” Parley said in a soft, corrective tone.

Whoever it was had killed him, then shot him again for good measure. Miss Bailey was right about one thing: that was indeed hot blood at work. Erin smiled, gracious now, and said, “Of course we're obligated to take your offer to our client. But there's no way I could advise her to accept such a thing.”

Of course they knew that too. No one asked what the defense would suggest, but at some point Erin, in her softest voice, told them anyway: “C'mon, guys. How about dropping these charges and letting her get back to her children?”

We headed toward the Christmas season on a high note. Lennie had disappeared. The Wednesday deadline came and went; the judge threw out all of Lennie's testimony, and there was a mood of celebration at lunch that day. “Essentially this leaves them with no case,” Erin said.

She hoped that afternoon for word from the district attorney that the charges were being dropped, but it didn't come. “It's starting to look like they intend to string us along till the fat lady sings,” she said for my ears only. “I still think they've got to dismiss, but until they do I've got to prepare for trial.” In mid-December Miss Bailey was conspicuously everywhere. She personally conducted all the interviews yet again in her rugged determination to salvage their case. We saw her in the stores and hustling across the street from the saloon where Bobby Marshall occasionally drank and bought the boys a beer. I ran into Hugh Gilstrap downtown and learned that she had been out to see him twice that week. But the case was as cold as the high mountain passes, and with every passing day it got colder.

Erin spent long hours alone, reading case law and making notes, and at night she and Parley went over and over the people's case. At least once a day she went to the jail and visited with her client for an hour or more. “Mostly we go over the same stuff,” she told me. “Occasionally she remembers something new, but never very much and nothing of any value.” I asked if they had ever been able to talk about their old days, and Erin said yes, they had finally broken through that ice. “So how are you with her now?” I asked, but she shrugged and said, “I still don't know. I'm still uneasy. She's eager and I'm distant, and I guess that's how it's going to be, at least for a while.” But I could see that she wanted something, some final answer to an enigma that had been on her mind for more than ten years.

I passed my time covering the same ground Miss Bailey was raking over: I talked to people, I went over the scene, I combed through the town and called Rosemary in Social Services and wandered in the hills above Laura Marshall's house. I made out-of-state phone checks daily, trying to pin down where the Preacher and the Keeler boys might have run. I called booksellers cold: dealers in Arkansas and other places where Kevin Simms, also known as Earl Chaplin, had been known to live, and in Oklahoma, which the Keelers had once mentioned was their home base. I figured they had gone to ground. The Preacher would open a bookstore somewhere well off the beaten track; he'd sell off what stock he had and he'd dream of bigger things. Maybe somewhere, someday, he'd try another scam.

Near the end of the week the answer popped up from an ABAA bookseller, some man I had never seen or heard of in far-flung Texas. The elusive Kevin Simms had come into his bookstore yesterday, asking questions about the walk-in traffic in that part of town. “He says his name's William Carroll. He's looking at a vacant store about a block away,” the fellow said. “He talks like he's already made up his mind.” I thanked him and left him with a warning: “Don't buy any of his signed stuff, no matter how cheap he makes it. And please, whatever you do, don't tell him we had this conversation. He may be a witness in a murder investigation.”

I reported this to Erin and she made notes, taking down the fellow's name, address, and phone number. The way the case looked now, Kevin Simms and the whole issue of signed books was irrelevant. But she had a subpoena prepared for Earl Chaplin, aka Kevin Simms or William Carroll, perhaps doing business in Huntsville, Texas. She wasn't sure yet whether or how to use this. “We'll have to spring it on him fast to keep him from taking off again, and we'll need grounds for his arrest if we want to assure his appearance. And those two buffoons who worked for him: God knows where they are now.”

If they weren't with him in Texas, I had their addresses in Oklahoma and the plate number for that truck. I had found the name of their insurance company—there was no claim on file as of last week. “I can't find any evidence that they actually towed the truck in—I think they may have just left it up there, in which case it'll sit there at least till the road opens again in the spring, and maybe forever.”

“If we can keep it simple, we'll be better off,” Erin said. “They've got to prove she did it and we've got to counter whatever evidence they put on. Her confession is their big enchilada. That's it in a nutshell, and Lennie's the unshakable millstone around their necks. If they can't find him and they can't get past that, what do they do?”

They asked for a continuance, a move Erin vigorously opposed. There was a hearing in the judge's chambers and His Honor came down with unexpected grit on our side. The woman had been sitting in jail, for God's sake, separated from her children since October. Fish or cut bait.

They dropped the charges a week before Christmas.

 

Erin's law firm had given her a long leash and she wasn't expected back in the office till mid-February. “You can go on back to Denver if you want to,” she told me. “I know you've been itching to get away from here and I don't blame you. But I think I'll stay around for a few days.”

Laura had asked her to, she said: “There are some things we need to tidy up, a bunch of legal odds and ends and money matters. She's only now beginning to realize how much this thing may wind up costing her.”

And there was still the old stuff between them, all the things that Erin had avoided and now needed to face. “I didn't just come out here to get her off, I've always known that, even when I wouldn't say so. It's hard for me to make even you understand why she was so important to me in those old days. Have you ever had a friend like that?…She's just never been out of my mind. I believe there's an answer to us, somewhere in that head and heart of hers, and now I want to find out what that is, for my own peace of mind.”

Sure, I understood that. “I'll stick around too, if it's all the same to you; give you something to warm your feet on at night. And my store's doing fine; Millie says I should take off more often. Denver'll still be there when we get back.”

 

By Christmas week the streams had frozen over and the kids were out skating, building snowmen and ice forts. At one house south of town, a row of tiny igloos was going up on each side of a long driveway. The snow that year was just short of sensational. There hadn't been much recorded in Denver so far, but here in the mountains, and particularly in Paradise, there were drifts as high as a car, a wonderland for kids and even for old duffers who appreciated a good snowball fight. Back-country skiers were flooding into town.

Within a day of her release, Laura rented a house in town for herself and the kids. She planned to have her place recarpeted and remodeled so that maybe they'd be able to go up there again without those constant reminders of what had happened. But when all was said and done, she thought she would sell the place, pay her legal bills, take the kids and move somewhere out of state.

“I think I need to get a new start,” she said more than once after her release. “Paradise just has too much old baggage attached to it.”

I thought her words contained a hint, a hope that perhaps she wanted Erin to say, “Why don't you move back to Denver?” But that invitation didn't come quickly or easily, and at the moment Laura took pleasure in what she had avoided when Bobby had been alive. She pushed back her reclusive nature and was seen almost every day on the streets, wandering into shops, talking to people, walking with her children. “She's taking the pulse of the town,” Erin said, “trying to see whether people are suspicious, and how they are with her.” In the afternoons she and Erin walked the town together: Laura would come by, and Parley or I, sometimes both of us, would babysit the kids while she and Erin went out alone and tried to rediscover themselves in a free world. I never asked what they talked about: it was Erin's business, but at night, when we were alone, she volunteered glimpses of it. “We haven't talked much about the old days yet. It just doesn't come up. I think she wants to have some kind of ongoing relationship but I'm not sure yet what that might be. Today she talked again about moving back to Denver.”

Score one for the old Janeway and his hunches. But where it would go from there was anybody's guess.

For her part, Erin still didn't know what she wanted. “Maybe I still love her,” she said one night. “But I've pushed her away for so long, I denied not only her existence but her right to exist in my mind. And yet she was always there. Even after all these years I'd find myself suddenly thinking of her. I'd be in court and I'd have a momentary lapse in my concentration, like a cat had just crossed my path, and I'd stop and think about it and it was always her. Her face would come floating up out of nowhere, and sometimes I was almost certain she was back there in the crowd, watching me.”

“Do you think you could be friends again?”

“I don't know. Not like we were, I don't think. But life is strange, who knows how the ball bounces? Suddenly out of the blue she'll say something that makes me laugh, and we'll almost be like those long-lost sisters we were.”

I had still not heard her say Laura's name: it had always been “her” or “she” when we talked, “Mrs. Marshall” in court. But I didn't mention it again.

As the holiday approached, Laura was looking radiant: she had had her hair done up and had splurged on some new clothes for herself and the kids. There was almost an air of freedom about her but not quite. “She understands that murder charges are dropped without prejudice,” Parley told me one evening. “They can still refile them, and I think they intend to, somewhere down the road. They'll always have the Lennie problem to deal with. They'll need new evidence, a stronger case than they have right now. But I know they're not satisfied the way it is.”

The judge was fairly well pissed at the way the case was frittered away, Parley said. “He wants Lennie in his court.” Gill remained his usual distant self, but Parley knew after talking to Miss Bailey that he had been right, that they were trying to gather information for a case down the road. “Ann's like a lot of women I've known,” he said, “she's stubborn to a fault.”

Parley's best guess was that Lennie had left the state: “That damn fool has gone as far away as his truck will take him.” Me, I wasn't so sure of that. I had a hunch Lennie was still around, and every day I walked the streets and talked to people in gas stations and shops, the waitress in the café, the old people who sat bundled in the park on the strangely warm snowy days and watched the kids at play. I asked everyone I saw: I left Parley's phone number and asked them to call me there if they saw or heard anything.

 

We had planned an old-fashioned afternoon dinner at Parley's house on Christmas Day. Erin would cook it, Laura and the kids would come over around noon, and we'd spend the afternoon watching
It's a Wonderful Life
on video and listening to Christmas music. “This'll be the first time I've had a Christmas tree since Martha died,” Parley said. “I should always do this at Christmas; I ought to have one every year, even if there's nobody but me to enjoy it.” Erin smiled and said, “Yeah, you should,” but later, in the kitchen, she told me he never would. “There's nothing worse than trying to fake good cheer when you're really alone. A tree would drive me crazy if I were him, getting old alone, with nobody really close around me.” A little later she said, “I've been considering asking him if he'd like to move into Denver. I think I could get him a job in the firm. I know I could. We always need help, and he could work as little or much as he wanted to.”

That afternoon the three of them went for a walk while the turkey cooked. Erin had pointedly invited Parley to join them, leaving me alone to watch the kids. The big front room was full of toys, which delighted the twins even as they went through them all for the tenth time. Jerry and I sat alone watching them. Laura had bought him some new clothes and a fine-looking watch, which alternately seemed to fascinate and bore him. He and I drank eggnog, which he loved coated with cinnamon and spices, and I talked about the world that, so far, he had seen only in movies. I watched his face as I talked and I thought I saw real comprehension there. His eyes were soft and doelike, and at some point I put on
Hondo,
another of the films we had rented, and watched him as it began to play. He sat transfixed in front of the set, and when the credits came up, I said, “You like John Wayne, Jerry?” Instantly he took up a paper and began to write. I let him do this undisturbed until he had filled the page, then I asked if I might see what he had written. He handed it to me without expression, and it was line after line of John Wayne's signature, all perfect replicas as if the man's ghost had floated into the room and done it himself. I handed him another sheet and said, “Can you do Alfred Hitchcock, Jerry?” and in an instant he had scrawled Hitchcock's signature, with the little Hitchcockian fat-man caricature attached to the end of the name. “That's fine,” I said, “that's great. Let's see what you can do with a few more.” I thought of the books, which had been released by the DA and were now stacked in Parley's back bedroom; but I didn't want to get up or disturb anything, so I scanned them in my mind and softly said the names of the authors I remembered—Leonard Bernstein, Paul Whiteman, Robert Frost—and with each name I instantly got back what looked like a perfect signature on the paper. I remembered some of the Preacher's books and said the names, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. “What about Andy Warhol, Jerry?” I said, and almost before I got the name out he had scrawled Warhol's name and had added the famous tomato soup can. He had begun to go down the page, line after line of the same signature, but then I heard a laugh outside and a bump on the porch and I said, “That's enough for today,” and I reached for the paper and took it gently when he handed it to me. I folded it and put it away as the door opened and Erin came in.