I walk her to the elevators. In the hall she says, “I know you think this is silly, but Bernard Junior is really my best friend. Nobody wants to listen to an old woman. My children are so busy, and all my friends talk about is their illnesses and their children’s divorces, which seem endless, and it seemed the least I could do for Bernard Junior. After all, we send our own children to Sunday school when they’re practically babies, and Bernard Junior is smarter man a lot of children his age.
Would you like me to bring him next time?”
The door opens, and I say hastily, “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” All I need is a pit bull attacking clients.
“I’ll call you when I hear something.”
In the reception area in front of a handful of clients waiting for other lawyers, Julia asks loudly, “What’d she want? Unlike your other clients, she seemed harm less enough.”
How reassuring Julia is. You’d make an ideal prison matron, I think, but do not say.
“I’ve got to make a phone call,” I lie, fleeing to my office.
“I’ll tell you later.”
Back in my office, I pick up Jason’s card and marvel at the human animal’s capacity for self-deception. Have I been kidding myself about Chet? Like more than a few successful lawyers, he has a reputation for doing whatever it takes to win a case. But maybe he is too near the end to care. Death is supposedly good for concentrating one’s mind. In his case, however, it seems to be having the opposite effect. When I get him on the phone, he professes not to be surprised that Shane hasn’t told him everything.
“Now that we’re coming down the home stretch,” he says, his voice calm, even a little flat, “Shane’s having to admit to himself that Leigh probably killed her husband. Memories, don’t you find, always improve dramatically the last couple of weeks before a trial? He’s only human. If it were my daughter, I’d forget a few things myself.”
Though my own thoughts aren’t radically different, I am frustrated by his failure to react more strongly to the information I’ve given him.
“You realize, of course, that Shane had as much reason to kill Wallace as Leigh did?” I regurgitate Dan’s theory without assigning him credit.
In a slightly patronizing tone, Chet responds, “So you think Pastor Norman decided on a little frontier justice after he and An had their chat?”
Irritated by his manner but beginning to feel foolish, I push my feet against the edge of my desk and practically ram my chair through the wall. I know this theory is farfetched, but what else do we have? A jury won’t acquit Leigh because she is a preacher’s daughter.
“All I’m doing is suggesting that you check his alibi,” I say as evenly as possible.
“You probably already have.”
Chet answers quickly, but without any inflection, “He was at the church.”
I wonder how much medication he is taking. His voice reminds me of mental patients I have represented.
No affect. Maybe he is just trying to calm me down.
You don’t yell at an excited child to get him quiet.
“I assume he can prove that,” I say, knowing how strident I sound.
“Shane Norman is not a murderer,” Chet replies, his voice firm for the first time.
“Surely you’ve figured that out.”
Every instinct I have about this case agrees with him, but lawyers are supposed to be more than fortune tellers.
“This isn’t “What’s My Line?” ” I yelp, my patience running out.
“Either he’s got a solid alibi or he doesn’t. Let me check it out, okay? I’ll …”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Chet says, cutting me off.
“You’ll embarrass the hell out of me if you go charging up there. I’ll look into it again.”
I can’t believe what I am hearing. When has Bracken ever worried about being embarrassed? One of the reasons he’s been so successful is that he’s never had the slightest qualms about whose cage he’s had to rattle in order to defend a client. If he is worried about how Norman is going to view this, he has no business trying to represent his daughter. I feel my sense of deference drying up in a hurry.
“That’s fine with me, but don’t you think you ought to tell Norman how sick you are?” I ask, deliberately baiting him.
“I’d want to know if I were the client.”
“I’m all right,” he says abruptly.
“Do me a favor, okay? Let’s not get too carried away. Just because we don’t have rabbits popping up out of a hat doesn’t mean you have to feel you’ve got to stage a mutiny. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you’re still the understudy. If you can’t live with that, I’ll get somebody else.”
Chastened by his tone, I back off. Both Sarah and Rainey tell me that I have a tendency to overreact. Patience, it is pointed out, isn’t one of my virtues. I remind myself that Bracken knows a hell of a lot more about this business than I do. If I were handling this case by myself, with only two weeks to the trial, I’d be running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I have forgotten how cool Bracken can be under pressure. If I could shut up, I might learn something.
“I’m sorry,” I say, hoping I sound appropriately meek.
“It’s just that I kind of feel like we’re out on a sailboat on a hot day waiting for a breeze, and about out of drinking water.”
“Well, second-guessing me at every opportunity,” Chet mutters, “isn’t going to make that feeling go away.”
He suggests that in the next couple of days I reinterview the witnesses who saw Leigh on the day of the murder and see if he and his investigator have missed anything, then meet him on Wednesday afternoon at the crime scene. Mollified, I hang up, wondering how close I came to blowing it. Probably not very. Aggressiveness is not a sin in Chet’s book. At least it didn’t used to be.
Though I feel more comfortable, I can’t shake the sense that something is out of kilter. Not only does there seem to be no movement in this case, I can’t see a theory developing that will generate any forward motion down the line. I am like a seminarian who keeps having heretical thoughts. My mind keeps drifting back to Shane Norman. Could Chet be protecting him some how? It makes no sense that he would, but still I wonder I’d like to free-lance a little in this case, but I don’t dare. If Chet got even a whiff of what I was doing, I’d be gone quicker than a wad of spit on the Fourth of July. So what is going on with Chet? It could be that the painkillers are slowing him down, or maybe he’s so damn preoccupied with dying that he isn’t thinking straight. For most lawyers that wouldn’t be an unreasonable explanation, certainly not for me. However, the mystique of Chet Bracken is such that I expect him to shrug off a little thing like death. Maybe I’m the one with the problem.
As I am about to leave for the day, Julia buzzes me.
“I forgot to tell you,” she says, “that Mr. Blessing called while you were at lunch. He said to tell you he’s on the seventh floor at St. Thomas. He’ll come see you when he gets out” Blessing? I rub my eyes and finally remember: the guy whose hair blew off and ran down the street.
“That’s the psycho ward.”
“He’s nutty as a fruitcake,” Julia says regretfully.
“Such a good-looking guy, too. There’s always some thing wrong with men.”
“How’d he sound?”
“Crying like a baby. He said not to come by.”
“Thanks, Julia,” I say and hang up. Poor guy. I turn off the light in my office, wondering if a normal person would lose it this badly because his wig blew off. I head for the elevators. Who is normal? Nobody I know.
5
Mr. Hector Tyndall may be in his early seventies, but I’m not sure I’d want to go one on one with him in any athletic contest. Besides having less of a gut and a firmer handshake that I do, in his den, where we are sitting, are literally dozens of athletic trophies in a number of sports dating back from over fifty years ago to almost the present: swimming, track, siding, tennis, golf, even pistol shooting. Not a team player, this old geezer, completely bald and split-high like a center on a basketball team, has enough metal in this room to start his own mint.