“I’ll give you a thousand a week,” he says, slouched in the chair like an insolent teenager, “but it’s gonna be nothing but asses and elbows from here on in.”
I make a dollar sign on the pad in front of me. He’s probably picking up thirty on this case at an absolute minimum. I’ll be doing a lot more than waiting to see if he can’t answer the bell.
“I’ll need two a week,” I say, trying to sound casual, “to make it worth my while.
No telling what I’ll have to turn down.”
For the first time Bracken visibly winces, either in pain or at the way I’m trying to hold him up.
“Okay,” he says, his face a web of tiny creases, “but I want my money’s worth. I’m doing this one on the house.”
I drop my Bic on my legal pad in amazement. One of the sayings about Chet Bracken is that he wouldn’t know a pro bono case if one bit him on the leg.
“Leigh Wallace should be loaded,” I point out, “especially now.”
Bracken says, his ears raising slightly, “I’m doing this one for her father. I’m a baptized member of his church.”
Chet Bracken a Bible thumper? The thought of it is astonishing. There isn’t a nonrational bone in his body, and Christian Life is hard-core fundamentalism. He really must be dying. Yet even my girlfriend has recently dumbfounded me by telling me she has started attending Christian Life. It must be something in the water.
“I didn’t know that,” I say, sounding stupider by the second.
Bracken nods and says without a trace of irony, “You should try it. Page. Money isn’t everything.”
Feeling a little crass, I shift my pad an inch to the left.
“I’m a Catholic,” I mumble. Actually, this is bull shit. I’ve hardly darkened the door of a church since the Mass I was made to attend the morning I graduated from Subiaco Academy, a Catholic parochial school an hour from Fort Smith in the western part of the state.
Rosa’s death hasn’t helped me answer any questions I have about religion. All the preaching in the world can’t explain why a woman who had so much life in her had to die in agony before her daughter was even out of junior high school.
Bracken places his hands together as if we are all one happy family and asks, “Are you sure you have the time to do this case?”
I hear anxiety in his voice. I wonder how much he has done to prepare. Bracken has the reputation of being a control freak. One story has it that on occasion he bribes the Blackwell County courthouse custodian to keep the temperature five degrees cooler than normal during a trial. There won’t be any doubt about who will be the boss. I look down at my calendar for the rest of March. An ugly custody trial, a few appointments for new clients, a couple of DWI’s, and three uncontested divorces. Pretty unspectacular.
“I’ve got a few things,” I admit, “but only one case that will chew up a whole day.” As with almost every lawyer I know in solo practice who hasn’t been at it a good while, it’s either feast or famine.
“What’s the story?” I add quickly, before he changes his mind.
Bracken reaches inside his coat for his wallet, revealing a pink shirt and a tie that looks like a slightly surreal sunflower field. I wonder what kind of cancer he has. He hasn’t even cleared his throat.
“Damn it to hell, that’s a good question,” he says irritably as he peels off four five-hundred-dollar bills.
“I’ve hardly gotten a word out of our client. It’s a weird case, Page. Every time I try to talk to Leigh, she clams up. Usually, I can’t get a defendant to shut up they give me so much garbage I can’t get her to talk. Frankly, I don’t get it.”
I look on in astonishment. I’ve heard of people carrying large sums of cash around, but he must have ten thousand on him. If he keels over in the street, there’ll be a riot.
“Maybe she shot him in self-defense,” I say, recalling Leigh’s picture in the paper. Some beautiful women photograph terribly; Leigh Wallace could model for any magazine in the country. She looks like that curly-headed Spanish-looking brunette who’s always in the Avon catalogs Julia keeps at the front desk. Leigh has glittering dark eyes, a thin nose, a generous mouth, and the kind of figure that ties up traffic for blocks.
Seeing her picture the day after she was charged, I regretted my not-always-adhered-to vow to date only women close to my age. But look what it got Art Wallace, who, like myself, was in his mid-forties.
“I’d settle for self-defense,” Bracken says, handing me the bills, “but the cops say there was no sign of a struggle, and I can’t get a thing out of her. The cops nailed her on all the inconsistencies they’ve caught her in and because there was no sign of a forced entry. It.
appears she has gone to some length to establish her father’s church as an alibi, but a neighbor saw her drive by at the same time she was supposed to be in a meeting. Hell, I don’t know; I haven’t felt like doing much work lately.”
Bracken must be going crazy. A notorious workaholic, he bugged me night and day during the Perry Sarver case until he got the prosecutor to dismiss the charges against his client. Some lawyers, the mediocre ones, only go all out the last month before a trial.
Bracken knows only one speed. I can’t imagine he hasn’t browbeaten his client to tell him her life story.
Cancer, however, isn’t a disease that respects the work ethic. Once Rosa started going down, she didn’t feel like doing much either. The depression was as bad as the pain. What an ego this son of a bitch has. He ought to be home in bed and probably has no idea he is de pressed.
“Were they getting along okay?”
“Depends on who you talk to,” Bracken says gloomily
“She says they were, but a couple of neighbors say different. They heard her yelling the night before he was killed. She says it was nothing.”
“I can’t remember the weapon,” I say, trying unsuccessfully to remember the article about the murder. It doesn’t do me any good to read: I can’t remember a word the next day, much less months later.
Distracted, Bracken nods as if he is on automatic pilot.
“Three slugs in his chest and heart with a twenty two-caliber pistol. Leigh claimed she didn’t know anything about a gun. The cops figure she could have done a lot of things with it from dumping it in the river to hiding it in her father’s church.”
“What about Wallace?” I ask, realizing Bracken doesn’t have much gas left in him for this conversation.
“Any enemies or unhappy friends?”
While Bracken reaches down to pull out a folder from his briefcase, I wonder what I’d do in his situation. Probably be on the phone to every quack in the country. He must have found an honest doctor who told him not to waste his time. Not a popular position in a society where you are supposed to fight on until the last blast of radiation. Hell, maybe I’d be going to church, too. But not Christian Life. All that right-wing stuff on abortion and men being the boss gives me the creeps, not to mention the nonsense about the world being created in seven days. I still can’t believe Rainey, who is as liberated as any woman I know, is involved out there.
It doesn’t make any sense to me, but neither does dying at the age of thirty-nine. Bracken reads for a moment, then says, “I’ve had an investigator check him out, but nothing has turned up so far. Wallace made his money by functioning as a middleman between wholesalers and manufacturers all over the country. He had an office in his home. Perfectly legitimate.”
I look past Bracken out the window at the mild March sunshine striking gold on the concrete ledge. His last spring. Yet there is not an ounce of self-pity or regret in his voice. Maybe religion has reconciled him to leaving much too early. Who will miss him? Criminals.
Lawyers like myself, who dropped by the courtroom to watch him try a case. His family, I suppose, of whom I know nothing. So what if religion is a crutch? For all I know, that’s all he’s got left.
“So what do you think this is all about?” I ask, watching Bracken scan his investigator’s report as if something new might have magically appeared in it.