“Even if she doesn’t go to prison,” Chet comments from the window where he is studying the pictures, “how does she put her life back together?”
I think of the tug of war between father and husband.
Depending upon how a person looks at it, either her life is over or she’s gotten a second chance. If we can some how get her off, she may never leave her father’s side again.
“Maybe being married wasn’t all that different,” I say quietly, thinking of the comments I have heard this afternoon. Despite their best intentions, how many women, I wonder, swap one form of domination for an other?
We are here to look for evidence that will help our client, but I know I am just going through the motions.
If somebody other than Leigh killed Art, surely it had to be somebody he knew well enough to invite back to his office. I can’t help thinking the evidence is somewhere outside the house, not in it; but that’s the mind of a lawyer at work, not a forensic investigator. Yet, according to the police reports nothing has turned up in the lab no exotic grass stains in the carpet, no unusual bullet pattern. Naturally, the absence of physical evidence will be used against Leigh.
Brownlee appears in the doorway.
“Come check the view,” he invites us.
Chet smiles at the cop. As a watchdog, he isn’t much.
“Go on,” he says to me, “it’s not bad.”
I follow Brownlee down a hall and through French double doors onto a deck that overlooks a swimming pool and below that the Arkansas River.
“Nice, huh?”
Brownlee says, leaning over the railing.
Real nice. We are on the second floor, I realize. They probably ate dinner on the deck when the weather was nice. Spring is here today in all its glory. The air is soft and without the soaked-cotton-ball effect of a humid Arkansas summer. Between the pool and the water is fifty yards of no-man’s-land of thick brush, containing perhaps a .22 pistol. On paper there has been a search of the area, but it looks as though Leigh would have gotten all scratched up if she had tried to hide a gun down there.
“Makes you wonder why rich people kill each other,” Brownlee says, his eyes on the drained pool beneath us.
“If they can’t get along, why don’t they just divide up the loot and move on?”
Good question. The problem is, few people really think of themselves as rich. To Brownlee and me, this looks like heaven on earth, but Wallace probably figured he was just barely ahead of the rat race. It turns out he had credit life insurance on the house, but it’s hard to believe a woman would kill her husband just to avoid a mortgage payment. No other insurance policies, no significant bank accounts. Down on the river I can barely make out a speedboat. It is growing dark, but the urge to be outdoors is irresistible.
“They don’t have any more sense than we do, just more money,” I tell Brownlee. A comforting thought, but not one I really, believe. Down deep, I’ve always had the feeling they know something I don’t.
I go back into the house and find Chet sitting in the kitchen with his head between his knees. Damn. I wanted to tell him what I learned from the neighbors, but it will have to wait.
“Are you okay?” I ask, glancing behind me to see if Brownlee is coming. This would be a hot story for a cop to spread around the station: the great Chet Bracken can’t even hold his head up. Maybe it’s just as well. I’m not so sure I would trust him any way. Why? Is it because he is sick, or because at some level I don’t think he is being straight with me? I’m not sure.
Chet looks up at me in obvious pain, but struggles to his feet.
“Yeah,” he grunts.
I still don’t know what kind of cancer he has. This doesn’t seem the time to ask. I have begun to like the man, but he doesn’t invite sympathy.
“I’ll go tell Brownlee we’re leaving.”
He nods, and two minutes later I watch his Mercedes creep away. The real question I wanted to ask remains unanswered: How good is Shane Norman’s alibi? Actually, I realize now that the question I really want to ask Chet is: Are you somehow covering up for Norman? I don’t have the guts at this point. Why? I can’t explain it. Fear, I suppose. He’s like some kind of god to lawyers of my ilk. I need to get over that, but so far I haven’t quite managed it. Besides, he’d bounce me off the case quicker than some of the checks I’ve written since I’ve been in private practice. Brownlee, bursting with vitality, watches for a moment.
“That guy may be a hotshot, but he looks like death warmed over to me.”
I can’t disagree. If he croaks before the trial, will I get this case by myself? I want it in the worst way. But there is too damn much I don’t know. The best I could do is second-degree murder and that seems like a remote possibility at this point. People will say that Chet would somehow have won it. I lie, “That’s what happens when you hit thirty, Brownlee.”
He grins. In his early twenties, he is safe from old age and death. Sure he is.
6
Thursday night. my daughter’s night to open cans, for surely what we do can’t be called cooking. Yet food is the furthest thing from her mind. I sit at the kitchen table while she checks a pan on the stove. Always the optimist, Woogie, whose culinary requirements are almost as simple, watches hopefully beside my chair.
“I feel so sorry for Pastor Norman,” she says.
“All that he is doing, and his wife is an alcoholic, too.”
I reach down to pet Woogie and decide my sympathies lie with Pearl Norman, who sounds as if she has been starved for attention ever since she married Shane and especially since Leigh was born.
“It could be that she has a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism,” I point out.
“And I suspect she feels lonely a lot of the time.”
Sarah, judgmental as only the young can be, will have none of it. She tosses an empty box in the trash.
“She doesn’t have to drink,” she says blithely.
“She has a choice.”
I feel a bump on Woogie’s head and wonder if it is a tumor. Surely not.
“It’s not that easy,” I say, finding this conversation an uphill battle. My daughter has many virtues, but at this stage of her life, tolerance is not among them. During her grandfather’s lucid periods, he knew that alcohol and schizophrenia didn’t mix well, but that didn’t stop him from drinking. I haven’t always known when to quit either. People drink for a reason It may not be a good one, but nobody promised that the species wouldn’t have its perverse moments.
“Maybe not,” Sarah replies, “but you have to admire the strength that enables Pastor Norman to endure her drinking and do so much, too.”
Woogie settles down on the floor, and I rub the arthritic knuckle on my left hand. I have my own bumps.
Shane Norman doesn’t seem the type to endure much of anything.
“Maybe,” I can’t resist saying, “she drinks because of him.”
Sarah puts her own spin on my remark.
“I can see how she might feel inadequate,” she says, putting a lid over the pan.
“It would be hard to feel you could ever do enough to help a man like that.”
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. How much of this crap will I have to endure? It’s not as if Shane Norman is on the cutting edge of anything. I complain, “What bugs me is the insistence on the literal belief in the Bible. I just don’t see how you and Rainey can swallow that.”
Sarah slowly turns the knob on the oven as if she were performing an experiment for her chemistry class.
My mind goes back to my sophomore year in high school. My biology teacher, who had a stutter, told our class after we summarily covered the theory of evolution in five minutes, “You can believe you came from mon-mon-monkeys, but the ‘h’ if I-I-I do.” We all laughed, but somehow even then it didn’t bother me to think my ancestors swung down out of trees. Sarah says, “You can’t explain the world any better. If the world was originated by the Big Bang, who or what began that? Where did that first little something that originated the universe come from? Nobody knows.