Another thing that didn’t look good for me was my brother Tanner and the fact that I’d borrowed Tanner’s gun three whole days before I used it to shoot Kyle with. My lawyer called it “our elephant in the kitchen.” Before Tilden Snow got to be my lawyer, I admitted in my statement that I took the gun out of Tanner’s refrigerator and brought it home with me. “That gun implies premeditation, Charmain, which is why Goodenough’s going for first-degree homicide.” He (I mean Tilden Snow) couldn’t stop trying to get me to say something that wasn’t true about that gun. “Charmain, go back to that time frame. I want you to let me know when I say something that correlates to your motivation.” I swear that’s the way he talks; sometimes even the judge looks at him like he’s nuts.
But when Mr. Snow says, “Okay, go back,” I say I’m not going anywhere. He doesn’t listen any more than Kyle did. “Maybe you took the gun because you didn’t want your brother Tanner to get in trouble with it.”
I say, “No, I didn’t.”
“Maybe you took the gun because there’d been crime in the isolated rural area you lived in and you felt afraid to be in the house with Kyle gone.”
I say, “All I wanted was to be in the house with Kyle gone.”
He jumps on this. “So maybe you felt afraid to be in the house with Kyle and wanted that gun for self-defense.”
I shake my head.
He sighs. “Maybe you weren’t even aware you took the gun.”
I say, “Now, Mr. Snow-”
“Tilden.”
“How could I not know I took it? That thing weighs a ton.”
He never did ask me to tell him why I did take the gun out of Tanner’s refrigerator. But he made that a rule from the very start. The day we met, he said, “Charmain, don’t answer any questions I don’t ask you. Don’t tell me anything I don’t tell you I want to know. Do you understand?”
I shrug. “Sure.” And that was the end of honest communication. That’s what the marriage counselor I got for me and Kyle two years ago said good relationships was based on. Honest communication. But that marriage counselor was a moron, plus started hitting on me every time Kyle went to the toilet (which was pretty often and the reason why good money got sniffed straight up his nose). All I hope is, that moron’s marriage-counseling business has already gone bust. It can’t be real good for business when one of your patients shoots her husband in the head and sets fire to him. I told Mawmaw back when I quit the marriage counselor, “That man didn’t respect me any more than Kyle did.”
That’s when she said the thing that was haunting me from right then till a year later when I pulled the trigger on Kyle. She took my hands in hers that were like tree bark they were so rough, and none of the paraffin wax dips I give her could do a thing for them. She said, “Charmain, you listen to me. Since I was eleven years old I been cleaning out other people’s toilets and the only way I can stand it is, I get the respect of the folks I work for and if I don’t, I don’t work for them no more. Listen to me, you got to earn respect. But when you do earn it, you make sure they give it to you. They can’t make you turn any which way they want to. You got to learn that, honey. You’re my only hope that thirty-five years on my knees with a scrub brush wasn’t just a gob of spit in a week of rain. You got to learn that.”
I said, “Mawmaw, I’m trying.”
She said, “I know, baby. You’re my hope. Because the Savior knows your brother Tanner is nothing but your daddy born again to torment me.”
My lawyer felt about the same way about Tanner as Mawmaw. He said Tanner looked bad for us. First of all, he had a record of crime and violence that Mr. Goodenough could use to show a bad family background or bad genes or whatever. Second of all, Tanner had told the police he’d advised me to shoot Kyle and had said he’d be glad to shoot Kyle himself if I didn’t want to. After he blabbed this total lie at the police station (and Tanner would always say any wild thing he could think of to get attention), for a little while the police got the idea in their heads that Tanner had shot Kyle. They kept trying to get me to admit I was just pretending I was the one had killed Kyle, instead of my brother. They accused me of lying to protect him because he had a record and I didn’t. The police chief came to the hospital after my suicide attempt, questioning me about that.
I go, “I’m sorry. But I am not a liar. And I wouldn’t lie for my brother about something like this.”
The police chief, a nice man, with a little smile like life was one big joke, said, “Wouldn’t you lie to protect him, Mrs. Markell? Isn’t that a Luby family trait? I remember when your brother shot ya’ll’s cousin Crawder Luby in the chest at point-blank range following an argument over a girl in the parking lot of Lucille’s Steak House.”
I say, “Tanner was never charged with shooting Crawder.”
“That’s exactly right. Tanner drove Crawder to Piedmont Hospital and tossed him out in front of the emergency entrance. Now, when we came to interview your cousin Crawder, he claimed he had no idea who’d shot him. That’s why we never could charge Tanner with that crime because his cousin that he shot stood by him. So, yes, Charmain, I think you Lubys will lie to protect each other.”
“Well, I won’t,” I said.
Pretty soon they had to believe me because it turned out Tanner was off with Crawder the day I shot Kyle. They’d gone deep-sea fishing off of Wrightsville Beach and had run out of gas and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. That’s why Tanner’d given me his Mercury Cougar to keep till he came back. At least I thought it was his. Now I see he was hiding it out.
So then the police believed I shot Kyle and wanted to know why. Was it for money? Was there another man in my life? But by then Mawmaw had got Tilden Snow III to represent me and every time I’d open my mouth he’d say, “Don’t answer that, Charmain.” Mawmaw got him because she knew he and his daddy and grandpa were all lawyers, and they knew her from back when she was the White Tornado in their house. He took my case on what he called pro bono.
According to my cousin Crawder, Tilden Snow III only did it because it was a good way for him to make his name as big as his Daddy’s, since newspaper and TV people were crawling all over us at my trial. That was a little bit because they said I don’t look like your regular-type killer, plus had been a Teen for Christ, even if some big snoots in town called my family white trash, and Mrs. Markell didn’t think I was good enough to marry her son Kyle since he’d been a big basketball star in high school and started out that way in college and scored eleven points at the NCAA tournament Sweet Sixteen game. He could of kept on playing too if he hadn’t got caught using cocaine.
But the other thing was two people in Creekside besides me had murdered somebody this same year and it’s not that big a place. So we were getting a reputation. A Mexican man used rat poison on his wife, which folks thought was a accident at first because that part of town did have rats you couldn’t kill with a pitchfork unless you hit them with a sledgehammer first. But then they found the rat poison in his wife’s Maalox. Then Lucas Beebee (who was crazy and everybody in town knew it) used a chain saw on a Jehovah’s Witness and put her toes and ears in a flower arrangement on his mother’s dining room table. A friend of the victim was there for the Beebee Easter buffet and recognized this woman’s earbobs in the ears and called the police. So Kyle’s murder was number three in a year and instead of Creekside, North Carolina, which is our real name, they started calling us “ Homicide, U.S.A. ” for a joke.