CHAPTER THREE
Now I had an associate [
Teresa wrote, a later journal entry
]
,
but the question was who was the associate, Max or me. The last few years I had spent not in a courtroom but on public forums or testifying before congressional committees or matching wits on those ideological gong shows with people like Poppy McClure or Lorna Dun or Mark Berquist, the youngest member of the Senate and pride of South Carolina, already being promoted as a future Republican candidate for president, in 2012, say, or 2016. It wasn't the life or death you have before a judge and jury, acquittal or prison, it wasn't even smart, it was just bitchery on parade, thirty minutes less commercials. Take Lorna Dun, of course always called Lorna Doone. She was the anchor of a nightly half hour, seven to seven-thirty, called
Fixed Bayonets,
and the name tells it all. It had the highest rating of any news discussion show on cable, mainly because of her. She was blond, she was always called beautiful by men, never women, she wore vinyl miniskirts, had a voice that would cut metal, and would say anything, especially if it was hurtful, innocence or irrelevance no defense. At Harvard she had been president of the
Crimson,
and in her column had outed the football captain, a black tight end and Rhodes Scholar candidate from Baton Rouge named Gaylord Gaines, “Lordy” everywhere on campus except in Lorna Dun's column in the
Crimson,
where he was always called “Gay” Gaines. She also gave out the name and address of the gym where he worked out in the Roxbury ghetto, a place called Buff & Buns. The private life of a public person was not put in a blind trust, Lorna liked to say, and if a football captain preferred to work out at Buff & Buns, his fans in the Harvard community had a right to know. Right to know was a big item with people like Lorna, except when someone claimed the right to know about them. I never had much trouble with her (or with Poppy McClure, who occasionally filled in as host of
Fixed Bayonets
). I had a quick tongue and I was able to keep my private life more or less private, at least until Jack Broderick died in my bedroom.
What I am trying to say is that for all my alleged confidence I wondered if I had been away too long, if I had become nothing more than an aging media bunny who could only cut it on
Fixed Bayonets
and not on a capital murder case with a defendant even my co-counsel thought should go to the electric chair. I hated to think what my father would have said about my failure to check out Carlyle's outstandings. It was almost the first thing he had me do when I passed the New York State bar exam and came to work for Kean & Kean. What's he got that will stick to him, Daddy would say in that staccato machine-gun voice of his, the big stuff will take care of itself, but the little stuff you miss now will come back to haunt you, Teresa. He would never admit it, but I think he liked having me there, liked teaching me the ropes.
He could be surprisingly indirect. Sometimes we'd take the afternoon off and slip into the multiplex near the office on Twelfth Street, usually to see a gangster movie or a newspaper movie or a courtroom movie. With a box of popcorn in his hand, he'd talk out loud to the screen, pointing out errors of procedure. It was like a postgraduate course in criminal law. Now what's wrong with that scene? he would say. I thought it worked, I whispered, because I always whispered in a movie theater, even if it was empty. As a movie it works, but I'm talking real life, Teresa, he would say patiently, loud enough that I hunched down in my seat so no one would know he was talking to me. But he did. Look, De Niro throws the wise guy into the trunk of the car, slams it shut, then
bang, bang, bang,
he shoots the bad guy through the trunk door, what do you think is going to happen? At that point I didn't care, but I didn't say it, I was just trying to be invisible. What's going to happen, he said, is the car's going to blow up, because the wise guy is in the trunk, and the trunk sits right on top of the gas tank, a bullet hits the tank, no more wise guy, no more car, no more De Niro, no more movie. I had to admit it made sense. And after a while I began to like these afternoons at the Twelfth Street multiplex, and began to pick up things before he did. The point of the exercise was not to be a smartass about some Hollywood movie, but to learn how to think fast on your feet, to look for the opening that will help you out. Mr. Director, there are two bodies on the front seat of that car, they have each been shot in the back of the head, but the car is a two-door coupe; where does the hit man hide until he shoots them in the back of the head and how does he crawl out of the back seat past the victims whose brains are now splashed all over the windshield and messing up the seat leather, you better get yourself a four-door sedan and reshoot the scene.
Very good, Teresa, my father would say, and offer me some popcorn, but it's too expensive to reshoot the scene just because some hotshot from Yale Law School says so.
It was his way of expressing approval, I thought at the time. But now I can't help wondering if those afternoons at the movies were more than just a time-out, if instead they weren't his own unique way of introducing me to, and preparing me for, the kind of life my real father had led, secrets that Daddy was sure that I would one day unravel on my own. I can't believe it was unconscious. He lived in the present, and his empathy for introspection or the subconscious was almost nonexistent. At trial he loved to shred the pretensions of expert psychiatric witnesses. What he liked to do was lay in things, markings, he called them, markings that he could return to in order to show a trail of connections. All you have to do is tell the jury a story, Teresa, remember to keep it simple, a Mob hitter would know better than to shoot someone stuffed in the trunk of a car. And if this marking ultimately led me via the circuitous way the mind worked to dwell on his relationship with Jacob King, I suspect all he would have said was, It's a good story, honey; follow the trail, go with it.
CHAPTER FOUR
I suggested that we drive down to Regent before we interviewed Duane Lajoie at the Correctional Center. We should talk to some people in Loomis County, I said, and see if we can get a better handle on our client than we have now. Allie had told me he was threatening to gut Bryant Gover for dealing him out, not an immediate or likely eventuality since the Department of Corrections had placed Gover in the maximum-security wing at Durango Avenue, on the other side of town. Max, Teresa said (we had progressed by now from Mr. Cline and Ms. Kean to professional intimacy), perps are always threatening to gut snitches. True enough. In my night-school-professor mode I had this impulse to instruct her, although in point of fact she and her father had tried many more murder cases in New York than I had in South Midland, murder here not being the cottage industry it was there.
Edgar Parlance, she said as she rose to leave. That jail time he did in Colorado.
Twenty years ago in the Canon City state pen. Did the crime, served the time.
Isn't four years a heavy stretch for stealing a car?
In this part of the world, stealing a car is like rustling cattle used to be.
She persisted. No time off for time served?
No.
No good time?
He ought to be happy he wasn't hung.
A smart answer I would come to regret. She did not seem to fret. I checked all the prison databases, I said, turning to efficiency. He doesn't turn up again. Cross-indexed him with both Gover and Lajoie. No match. Anyplace.
Two other Parlances, Teresa said. A quick smile. So she had done her own computer search. I don't know why I would have thought she would not have. Other than my compulsive hostility to strangers. Which is essentially everyone. Fred and Cato, she said. Cato had a lethal injection in Arkansas in '91. Fred's a hundred and one years old, in a state hospital in Au Train, Michigan. Cato was Haitian, Fred's Caucasian.
It was the same information I had.
As long as we're going down there, let's close that circle, she said. Can you get a court order so we can examine the place where he lived?
I nodded. In the not too distant past, this is what I had babycakes do for me.
I walked her to the elevator, and then down to the lobby. It had been years since I had been subordinate in a courtroom, and I was uncertain as to how I would react to being overruled. As we chatted desultorily, the small talk like a smoke screen, I speculated about the nature of her relationship with her father. This is not to suggest anything deviant, but I sensed a dependency, a need to please his memory, and I half wondered if I had been tapped to be his proxy in South Midland. It was one of the many things I got wrong about Teresa.
The sidewalks were a dozen deep with spectators. A block away, by the front entrance to the Rhino Carlton-Plaza, the elephant balloon had docked alongside the equally large balloon of the USM rhinoceros, both now floating to the hotel's sixth floor. The banners hanging from every lightpost said, RHINO LAND WELCOMES MIDWESTERN REPUBLICANS. I could not recall the rhino balloon ever parading for a convention of state Democrats.
It was a turnout made for Poppy McClure.
She was sitting on the ragtop of a vintage Chrysler convertible at the head of the motorcade snaking its way toward the hotel. Beside her sat Clifton Snow, the aging movie-star president of the National Rifle Association, a huge Poppy Power campaign button pinned to his jacket. Poppy's gift for the exorbitant gesture never faltered. Of course she had snagged Clifton Snow to make the keynote address to the Midwestern Republicans. They would share the front pages and lead the local news, even if he upstaged her with his movie-star smile and the rugged good looks that would not have been misplaced on Mount Rushmore. Confetti streamed from the windows above and the sun glinted on the highlights of the silvery hairpiece cemented to his skull. A testament to Elmer's glue, I thought. He waved slowly to the crowds lining both sides of the street. He seemed to move in perpetual slow motion, the hand slowly rising, the craggy smile slowly enveloping his face. I tried to remember who said that movies were truth at twenty-four frames a second. His normal speed seemed to be sixteen frames a second.
Teresa looked for a moment, then turned and gave a little smile before striding into the throng. A few steps away, I saw her stop and rummage in her bag. A moment later she had a cigarette in her mouth. She lit it and inhaled deeply. I found it gratifying that she was a secret smoker. Then she was swallowed up by the crowd.
Stanley on the private line. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Are you going to do it?”
“I told you this morning I was.”
“You said, âDepending.' ”
I didn't answer.
“Are you shrugging?”
Again no response.
“How much are you getting paid.”
“None of your business.”
“All right then. Did you pop out your bridge?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She wondered if I was the product of a stagnant genetic pool.”
“I like that.” Stanley had an exaggerated way of talking in private that he knew I found intensely irritating. “I really like that.”
I wish I hadn't told him.
“Listen. About tonight.” He was lecturing at the university law school. “Erotic Psychopathology in the Criminal Mind” was the title he had attached to his talk. The criminal was Stanley's subject, and the way in which prisons were what he called cathedrals of crime. Prison aristocracies intrigued him, the world of men without women where the weak belonged to the strong and any member, any orifice, might offer sexual release. “Bum bandit” was the phase he used to describe the cellblock sexual imperialist, and he studied the bum bandits and the punks and all the subcategories in between with the eye of an anthropologist. “The dean suggested dinner afterward. Why not come along?” And dish about Teresa Kean was what I suspected he had in mind. “The university lawyer's joining us.”
“Leo Cassady?”
“He said he knew you.”
“He fired me, Stanley.”
“Not fired, Max. Laid off. Downsized. Budgetary cuts.”
“Fired, Stanley.”
“Be boring, Max,” Stanley said as he hung up.
It was the way so many of our conversations seemed to end.
I think a respite from Stanley was another reason I was so willing to involve myself with Teresa Kean and the Lajoie defense.
CHAPTER FIVE
In fact, Teresa had met Clifton Snow.
She had moderated a seminar on the Second Amendment at Georgetown Law School where he had been a participant one cold winter night two years earlier, maybe three, maybe more, she had lost track of time, another endless evening of spirited specious debate, Snow versus a representative from People for the American Way, also an actor whose name she had forgotten as well as the series he had starred in, then Q&A, biscotti, cheap chardonnay, false smiles, and we must get together sometime, no addresses or telephone numbers exchanged. The right to bear arms, burning the flag,
Roe
v.
Wade,
stem-cell research, and that hardy perennial, the Vietnam War, remembered most passionately by those who did not choose to fight in itâwhatever the issue, Teresa Kean could be counted on to end the evening on time and not let the proceedings get out of hand, at least until the event in Baltimore after Jack Broderick died in her bedroom.
Teresa shouldered her way to the curb so she could cross to the hotel, but her way was blocked by an enormous young man waving a placard that said, I'LL GIVE UP MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT. In spite of the cold he was only wearing a T-shirt and jeans. His breath was frosted and he was stomping a booted foot, shouting, “Clif-ee, Clif-ee, Clif-ee,” trying to get Snow's attention. From the Chrysler, Clifton Snow acknowledged the sign by forming his left hand into a gun, pulling the trigger twice, then blowing away imaginary smoke. Beside him, Poppy McClure waved and clapped.
Teresa wondered if Poppy had recognized her. Wondered what the social amenities were when she was defending an alleged murderer Poppy's husband was trying to electrocute. She would let the amenities work themselves out.
The huge young man suddenly turned and brought his placard down as if it were a tollgate. Thick clumps of chest and back hair curled over the neck of his ripped and dirty white T-shirt, on which was printed the slogan GUNS, GUTS, AND GLORY ARE WHAT MADE AMERICA GREAT. A true believer. “Back on the sidewalk, lady.”
She tried to be reasonable. What she wanted was a long soak in a hot bath, not a street fight with a steroid cretin. “I just want to get across to my hotel.”
“There's no âjust,' lady, you wait like everyone else.” Teresa had never seen anyone quite so big. A cohort of equally muscular companions, all wearing guts-and-glory T-shirts, now surrounded him. To their loud and ribald applause, he jabbed the placard at Teresa as if it were a lance. “You think you're from New York or someplace like that?” Another poke. “Back on the fucking sidewalk.”
Teresa stumbled back, scraping the heel of one Ferragamo pump on the curb. The cohort jeered, a display of surplus testosterone that ratcheted her adrenaline up a notch. In a fury, she sprang forward, grabbed the head of the lance, and shoved it aside. “You pea-brained Gargantua,” she hissed, “get out of my way.” The brutish young man hesitated, the tollgate lance wavered. The thought occurred to Teresa that this might be the first time his authority had ever been questioned, his size the only credential he had ever needed to certify his lummox power. In the split second before he could respond, she swept past him and darted across the street, behind the Chrysler, behind Poppy and Clifton Snow, and into the hotel. She felt exhilarated. Gargantua. Where had that come from. Of course. Her father. When he was a boy, he had once told her, he ditched St. Cyril's one day and went into the city to see the Barnum & Bailey Circus at the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue. Specifically to see Gargantua, the great ape, who guzzled Coca-Cola by the case, then peed in his hands, and threw his urine through the bars of his cage at the audience who had gathered there just for that experience. A brain the size of a chestnut, Teresa. Mrs. Gargantua was the very fetching M'Toto, he said. Twice a day, afternoon and evening performances, they would pledge their troth, M'Toto's hairy face framed by a virginal white veil. Which was entirely appropriate. Because Gargantua, Teresa, did not seem to have much interest in his lady ape. Or any lady apes. King of the primates, perhaps, but queen of the May. More interested in Tarzan, Brendan Kean had said, than in his saucy little M.
She had never anticipated that Gargantua might be useful in Capital City, South Midland. Another debt owed to Brendan Kean.
It's like Washington here, Teresa thought with a chill as her eyes wandered over the jammed lobby of the Rhino Carlton-Plaza. Washington transported to Midlandia. Washington on one of its more unpleasant command-performance evenings. The Annual Dinner of the White House Correspondents Association at the Hilton, say. The din was like the noise of an open spillway. Midwestern Republicans clutched and greeted each other as if they had not been in hourly cell-phone communication or seen each other in Washington, Des Moines, or Manchester the previous week. There were huge posters of Dixon McCall everywhere. The president lecturing his colleagues at the G-8 meeting in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake was the real America, Dixon McCall had told them.
The Real America
was the Republican campaign theme, and the posters reflected it. Dixon McCall at Grand Coulee. Dedicating the World War II Memorial on the Mall. Escorting the pope to the Grand Canyon. Clear-cutting timber in the Cascade Range. Hanging from an oil derrick at Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Branding cattle at his Oklahoma ranch. Speaking at Edgar Parlance's funeral. Everyplace Teresa looked she saw a familiar face. Faces she thought she had left behind. Faces that came with familiar stories that were the currency of Georgetown dinner parties she was no longer compelled to attend. The wind-bag pundits elaborately pretending they did not notice the attention they attracted from the county chairmen and national committeemen. Over there Mark Berquist bear-hugging Gerry Wormwold, laying down a possible marker for the future White House run the pundits, the county chairmen, and the national committeemen all were predicting he would make. In the anteroom off the lobby Lorna Dun with a camera crew from
Fixed Bayonets,
setting up an interview with Clifton Snow. Lorna Dun and Mark Berquist. Familiar faces with a familiar story too often told. Sex and politics. Politics without sex was a non-story in dinnertime Georgetown. Lorna Dun and Mark Berquist had once been involved. Until Mark Berquist dumped Lorna Dun when he was appointed to complete the term of the ninety-three-year-old junior senator from South Carolina after he collapsed while chairing a hearing of the Foreign Relations Committee on Saudi Arabia. Dumped for the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the governor who had appointed him to fill out the term of the deceased former senator. He needed a wife who was a constituent, Mark Berquist told Lorna Dun. What Mark Berquist meant was that he did not want a wife who at that juncture of his political career was better known than he. What Mark Berquist also meant was that he might be able to find occasional quality time for Lorna Dun. What Lorna Dun did to Mark Berquist was to aim a garden hose through a dog door at his house in Cleveland Park, flooding his first-floor library and ruining his signed first edition of the speeches of John C. Calhoun. What Lorna Dun then did to Mark Berquist was call the governor of South Carolina and tell him that his daughter's intended had suggested that she and he continue the relationship that antedated his engagement to the governor's daughter. What the governor of South Carolina did was call Mark Berquist and tell him to get that woman out of his life.
Teresa knew all the stories.
Like Lorna Dun, she knew she had become one. Bared to the essentials, a dead man jumping her bones. Still on top of her when EMS came. Scout's honor. A reliable source on the Metro desk. A story chewed over along with the rack of lamb and the gratinéed potatoes. Washed down with the Sterling Vineyards 1997 cabernet sauvignon.
She paused by a booth that was selling campaign paraphernalia. Poppy McClure was the big-ticket item. Poppy Power buttons and Poppy Power straw boaters with a red, white, and blue band. A Poppy Power video with vintage Poppy sound bites. The EPA was the American gestapo. The wage-earning American male was an endangered species. Ayatollahs of unity. Stealth agents of the global national force.
There was once a story about Poppy. Out there in the ozone. It never made it all the way to the gratinéed potatoes. Poppy and . . .
Oh, yes.
She never believed it.
“What are you going to buy, Teresa?” Willie Erskine placed a Poppy Power boater on her head. “The Real America becomes you.”
Teresa removed the boater and put it back on the counter. She had known Willie Erskine since he was a Republican staff AA with Mark Berquist on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sharing an apartment on Dupont Circle with other true-believer AAs, including Lorna Dun. Foot soldiers preparing for the transition in Havana, mischief in the Middle East, and anything that would shift the tectonic plates in Pyongyang. Taking out whomever, whenever. What's up? What's going down? The word is. Yesterday's news. Today's bulletin. When Mark Berquist was appointed to the Senate, Willie Erskine had expected to be named to his staff, but Mark Berquist had informed him that politics was too important for friendship. It was then that Willie Erksine had attached himself to Poppy McClure. “Hello, Willie.”
“Shame on you doing what you're doing here, Teresa. We always thought you were one of us.”
Teresa smiled. Her Gioconda imitation.
“Did you ever expect to see Lorna and Mark in the same room together, greeting each other so benignly?”
“I never gave it much thought.”
“His child bride is with issue again. Three times in four years. Bare-foot and pregnant. An old South Carolina tradition. It leaves so many evenings free for our future president and leader of the free world.”
He was milking the moment, like a bad actor in a touring company, treating her elaborate disinterest as if it were applause.
“One hears the senator might be flossing his teeth with Lorna's pubic hair again.”
“You're a toxic waste site, Willie.”
“How sweet of you to say so.” He paused, flicking an imaginary piece of lint from his lapel. “I was so sorry to hear about Mr. . . . Broderick, was it?”
Teresa moved toward the elevator.
“Oh, there's someone you must meet, Teresa.”
“Another time, Willie.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. “Teresa Kean, J.J. McClure.”
Size them up immediately, her father always said. First impressions are best. Make them prove you're wrong. You can always amend later. Big fish, small pond was her immediate reaction. “Mr. McClure, I was going to call you.”
“I've been expecting your call, counselor.”
“Perhaps tomorrow.”
“I'm rather backed up tomorrow.”
“I'm sure.”
“Max Cline should help you over the jumps.”
Then he knew about Max already. Word traveled fast. Word always did. And not just in zip code 20007. “If needed.”
“You feel you're up to the job, then?”
So that was the way it was going to be. “We almost met once.”
A slight hesitation. He was not expecting the unexpected. “We did?”
“In Washington. Your wife was on C-Span. With Brian Lamb. You were in the green room. I was scheduled to tape Brian's next show. I was late getting there. Or maybe it was the next day. Anyway we didn't meet. In the green room.”
Not a flicker. “It's nice to meet you finally, Ms. Kean.”
“And nice to meet you, Mr. McClure.”
She awoke with a start. The digital clock on the bedside table said 9:37. Good God, she had slept all night. No. She was still dressed and sprawled diagonally across the bed. She must have fallen asleep. Her eyes focused on the Poppy Power button and the Poppy Power boater on the chaise opposite the bed. Jesus, I couldn't have bought them. Steady. Wake up. No. They were in her room when she came upstairs. Keep-sakes to all the Midwestern Republicans from the Poppy McClure Reelection Campaign. Or was it Poppy McClure for Governor? She did not know and did not care. She wondered why Poppy needed Mr. McClure. Nothing more than a good-looking walker. She kicked off the Ferragamo pump that that had fallen from her foot, unbuttoned her blouse, arched her bottom, shimmied out of her skirt, and kicked it to the floor. In the corridor outside, Midwestern Republicans seemed to be partying loudly. The dinner must have ended. She knew what Clifton Snow had said in his keynote address. The same thing he had said at Georgetown Law. The same thing he had said in meeting rooms and convention halls and hotel dining rooms across the country. The Speech. With local references. We have more in common with the valiant red men after whom the great city of Kiowa is named than we have with the cultural shock troops of today's liberal establishment. The Real America. Those wise old dead white guys who invented this county. Clif Snow can say “wise old dead white guys” because Clif Snow marched with Jimmy Baldwin and Dr. King. Freedom is our fortune and honor is our saving grace.
He could have sent a tape.
Outside her door a down-home country guitar was now playing “Bye Bye Love.” Badly. Country music and Republicans. The anthem of the red states. More the curse of Lee Atwater in her opinion. She considered masturbating. When in doubt, masturbate, Marty Buick used to say at Smith. Click off, clear the mind. She wished the guitar player in the corridor would segue into “Let It Be Me,” however badly he played it. The perfect background music for what she had in mind.
Never leave me lonely. Tell me you love me only.
Her hand slipped beneath the elastic band of her panty hose. No. That was self-indulgent. I'm forty-something years old. How many somethings is my business. And it's a mortal sin. That never stopped her when she was a little girl. Only now. At forty-something. God, I'll be going to mass next. And confession. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, I had impure actions one hundred and forty-two times. Impure actions. I still know all the confessional euphemisms. They were like swimming or bicycle riding, something you never forget. The only one she could never bring herself to say was self-abuse. Where was the abuse? You tell me, Father. And you can also tell me, Father, how often you spank the monkey. A term she picked up from Budd Doheny. She supposed the reason he was on her mind was the fat girl in the pictures Max Cline had shown her. Merle Orvis. Doing herself with the banana and the dildo.