I wait as long as I can to see if she will reveal more without my having to humiliate her by asking questions.
The things women do for men! I think of the performance of those female impersonators. True, they were paid, but I had the impression they would have danced for nothing.
“You must have loved him a lot to do that for him,” I say, coaxing her to continue.
Fiercely, she says, “You have no idea! I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
Woogie, now her protector, glances up from her feet at me as if to say that I should not even look as if I intend to hurt this woman. I have no desire to add to her already considerable distress, but my job is to represent her, not act as her therapist.
“It must have taken a lot of trust,” I sympathize. Art must have been quite the salesman.
As wretched as I feel, I notice I am becoming slightly horny. She must have looked magnificent. What was Art going to do with it? If he had no qualms about serving as a middleman, did he intend to market his own wife’s private video? Surely not. Yet people have done worse things. If Leigh killed him over this, a jury might be understanding. Talk about justifiable homicide.
Leigh wipes her eyes.
“When we first got married, I was so repressed that I wouldn’t let him see me naked.
We made love in the dark for the first month.”
God only knows the guilt she must be feeling. I sip my coffee. It doesn’t seem so strong anymore. No knowing what Shane had told his daughters about the human body. For two thousand years preachers have said that lust is evil. With my experience so far, a good case can be made in their favor. What a battle was being waged! Did Shane, I wonder, have any idea?
“You must have had a pretty strict upbringing.”
Leigh smiles wanly.
“My sisters had it worse.” Her own coffee is untouched. Caffeine is probably the last thing she needs.
“They never even saw a PG movie until they turned eighteen. By the time I was their age, I had seen a couple. But I never was allowed to watch MTV until I was married, and the first time I saw it I was terribly embarrassed.”
I try to imagine the journey she has made since she met Art her last semester in college. Her sisters re belled, so why shouldn’t she? How difficult it must be to try to keep your child from being exposed to lust in an age when toothpaste and sex are marketed together.
I think of that ad with the woman running her tongue back and forth over her teeth. Umnumn, good. So much for “Brusha, brusha, brusha. New Ipana toothpaste.” To make sure I understand, I ask, “Was it Art who filmed you?”
Leigh, even now, blushes.
“I wouldn’t have let some body else do it. What I wanted to tell you is that the film disappeared during the time I went back up to the church and then came home and discovered Art’s body.
I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it.”
Her voice has taken on a slightly hesitant tone as if she is doubtful I will believe her. I don’t know what to believe. The implication is that Art’s killer has the tape.
But how could he or she know Leigh had performed a nude dance on tape unless he or she was there? I doubt if the windows were open while this was going on.
“Art could have moved the tape after you left, which means it might still be in the house and the police never found it.”
She nods.
“It’s possible, but I was only gone forty-five minutes.”
I am buying into this story, I realize. It may be a total crock, designed at the eleventh hour.
“Why have you waited until now to tell this?”
Leigh begins to cry again.
“If this comes out, it will kill my father,” she says, her lower lip trembling.
Trying to think, I choke down some coffee. Is it possible Art called Shane back and told him what he had done with his daughter, and Shane came to the house and killed him? Surely this has crossed her mind.
“It could have been your father. He might have called back, and Art, in anger or hubris, might have told him.”
Her features collapse, and it dawns on me that she believes her father murdered her husband.
“Art treated Daddy with such contempt!”
If this is what happened, I have to take her down this path as far as possible, so she can’t talk herself out of it later.
“Had they argued?” I ask, as if I were talking to her for the first time. Perhaps, in a sense, I am.
Leigh brushes her hair from her face. She has it pulled back in a ponytail, but some of it has begun to escape. If she has gotten any sleep tonight, I can’t tell it by the way she looks. Her normally beautiful skin looks puffy and loose under her eyes. Her voice becomes anguished.
“Art argued with Daddy in a way nobody else dared. Just the week before he died, he told Daddy that anyone who believed the earth was only six thousand years old was an utter fool. That the scientific evidence against the Bible being literal truth was overwhelming.
He said the New Testament merely represents the efforts of some of the followers of Jesus to convince others that He was the son of God, and is no more hard evidence of the Resurrection than a man preaching on a street corner.”
I had prepared myself for much more, but Leigh has spoken in such hushed tones I realize that even this little snit of Art’s must have seemed like someone daring to urinate on a shrine. Art had done no more, as far as I can tell, than espouse, albeit in a forceful way, the view of mainline Christianity. Yet, perhaps to Shane, and obviously to his daughter, he sounded like the antiChrist. Doubtless, Shane had heard much harsher attacks on his brand of Christianity even from within the Bible Belt itself. Still, his daughter’s soul was at stake.
“How did you react?” I ask.
“I take it you were there.”
Leigh’s face flushes, the memory of it too much.
“Daddy had stopped by the house to ask me to come to church to hear one of our missionaries. Art was so rude I thought I was going to faint” Poor Leigh. Rudeness, not false dogma, is the ultimate sin in the South.
“Did you agree with Art?” I ask.
Leigh betrays her feelings by stammering, “Art … knew so much. He read all the time.”
It is Leigh who has betrayed her father. Could his murder of her husband have been directed at her rather than having been on her behalf? I have given up trying to understand my own motives and assume everything I do is selfish these days. I want Sarah back, not for her sake but for my own. The fact is, she seems happier than she has for months. Just because fundamentalism may not serve her for a lifetime doesn’t mean it isn’t meeting some need right now.
“I can understand if Art was trying to persuade you to believe something a little different,” I say gently, “than what you were raised with. It happens to all of us.”
Leigh’s face is full of sorrow.
“Daddy realizes I’m losing my faith, and it is just about to kill him.”
The irony is that my own daughter has traveled in the opposite direction. I tap my empty cup on the kitchen table I’ve loved so well since Rosa and I bought it at an antique sale in Hot Springs. It is oak, weighs a ton, and will outlast us all.
Leigh, exhausted now or perhaps just sad, rests her head on her knuckles. Shane has her body back but not her mind. Yet, if she is acquitted, she may never leave again. After all, the maiden voyage was a disaster. This is one woman I would like to know in five years. I feel a wave of tenderness as I look down on her tousled hair.
From this angle she reminds me so much of Sarah. But I don’t dare comfort her. Even as smelly and gross as I am now, anything I do could be misinterpreted. And as lonely as I feel, I would be quick to misinterpret a gesture from her. Once I slept with a key witness in a big case and almost screwed it up royally. This one is hard enough without doing that. I smile at my own ego. Any shudder I might produce in a woman right now would be from horror, not ecstasy.