Too tired to cook, I drink and think about Shane Nor man. Do what you have to do, he said. What would I have said if it were Sarah who was charged and I was innocent? I don’t have as much to lose as Shane Nor man. His life requires that his inner and outer selves match up in a way mine do not. Yet, for all I know, preachers carry guilt inside them like everyone else, and it is only their flock that assumes that hypocrisy bur dens their consciences more than the rest of us. Do I believe he is innocent? I sip at my beer. I don’t know. I still have problems getting past the taboo of believing a minister would kill another human being. Yet, historically, the church has been as bloodthirsty as the rest of society, if not more so. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of Jews, religious zealots on both sides during the Civil War, white-supremacist religious groups, all stand as monuments to a barely restrained ecclesiastical violence. I think of the hatred I see in some of the faces of those people who oppose abortion on religious grounds. If that is Christian love in their faces, give me a secular humanist anytime. It is the look on Chet’s face that convinces me that Norman is lying.
I get out a legal pad and begin to think about what should be in an opening argument.
At nine Sarah calls, but it is not a satisfactory conversation. My supply of restraint is wearing thin, and the alcohol doesn’t help.
“When do you think you’ll be coming home?” I ask, unable to wait her out even a few seconds.
“I don’t know. Dad,” she says, not bothering to conceal her own irritation.
“I have to decide on what terms I want to live in the world.”
What utter crap! I can’t talk any further without exploding
“I’m going to bed,” I say shortly, and hang up, furious at everybody I’ve ever known connected with religion. It is not as if Sarah had been forced to live in some brothel. She has had it pretty damn easy. Like about ninety-nine percent of the kids I know, she’s spoiled rotten.
I call Rainey and unload my feelings on her.
“I sup pose it’s just a matter of time before she will begin quoting the Bible to the effect that she has no mother or father except Christian Life. What about family values?” I complain.
“Don’t these so-called families have anybody in them with any sense?”
“They are talking to her,” Rainey says, sounding a little shaken for the first time.
“They don’t force anyone to do anything.”
“Well, I’m gonna go to the Prosecutor’s Office when this trial is over,” I yell at her, “and charge somebody with kidnapping.”
“Which will guarantee that she won’t talk to you for years,” Rainey says right back.
“Life is too short for that kind of resentment.”
“Well, it’s not getting any longer this way,” I reply stubbornly. Miserable, I hang up and go to bed.
10
I am at the airport waiting for Jessie St. vrain to get off the plane, when I hear my name paged over the PA.
system. It must be Chet. No one else knows I’m here.
“You didn’t have to come pick me up!” Jessie exclaims as she emerges from a stream of United passengers. She unnerves me by having cut her hair even shorter than it was last week. With the trial to begin tomorrow, it is not too late to suggest a wig. Of course, she would be highly offended.
“Southern hospitality,” I say, smiling.
“How was the flight?” Jessie is wearing loose-fitting brown pants under a green suede jacket. Her brown shoes look like the kind elves wear in animated cartoons. I hope she has something more appropriate in her bag. Her story is going to be hard enough for a jury to swallow without her looking like Peter Pan.
“Tricky winds out of Denver,” she replies, grimacing, as she matches me stride for stride.
“If we had been lower, I think we would have bounced into a mountain.”
I shudder and hear my name again. Chet could have sent Daffy to get her. He and Jessie would have made a nice pair.
“Isn’t that you,” she asks, nudging me, “being paged?”
“I get the joke,” I say weakly, wondering what other people in the airport think of this woman. She seems equally curious, staring boldly at my fellow Arkansans, who look pretty normal to me.
“Shoes, see?”
“I was just kidding!” she practically shouts, crowding me into the wall.
Chet’s message says to drop off Jessie at the Excelsior Hotel and meet him inside the courthouse at the east entrance. This can mean only one thing: the prosecutor is willing to cut a deal. We still have no idea of Leigh’s whereabouts, unless in the last half hour something has happened I don’t know about. When I arrive twenty minutes later, Chet is pacing around the rotunda as if he were sweating out the jury’s decision.
“Jill called from her office ten minutes after you left,” he says, his voice excited for the only time since I’ve known him.
“She wants to talk.”
Flattered that he has waited for me, I feel obligated to point out the obvious, “It would help if we had a client to run this by.”
Chet punches the button to take us to the third floor.
Six months ago he would have taken the steps two at a time.
“She’s bound to show up sometime. Did St. vrain make it in?”
I nod as the elevator opens.
“She’s a little weird.”
Chet grins.
“That’s what you keep telling me. Maybe we won’t need her.” As we ride up and walk around the corner to the prosecutor’s office, it sinks in how much Chet wants to avoid this trial. His zest for trial work is such that he almost hates to cut a deal and browbeats the prosecutors until they are practically begging him to take probation. These stories are surely exaggerated, but they prove a point: Chet isn’t afraid to go for an outright acquittal. Yet, why shouldn’t he want to plead out this case? He isn’t prepared, he is sick, and his loyalties are clearly divided.
“Jill must be having some problems,” I whisper as we enter the suite of offices that house Blackwell County’s chief legal officer. Chet winks, as if this turn of events is too good to risk commenting on.
Jill Marymount has proved to be a decent prosecutor in her tenure in office. She can grab headlines with the best of them, but underneath all the hype is a solid record. Unlike some prosecutors after their election, she tries cases regularly instead of relying on assistants. I had thought she had political ambitions, but the rumors have died down that she wants to run for attorney general They will be revived if she knocks off Chet Bracken. Jill sweeps through the door to the reception area, reminding me of the actress Loretta Young. She is wearing a dress instead of the suit she will don tomorrow, and she shows a mouthful of perfect teeth as if we were fans waiting for autographs. Chet, who is used to being courted in these situations, is unusually gracious, betraying his own eagerness.
Temporarily old pals instead of old enemies, we come close to slapping each other’s backs as she escorts us to her office. Once there, she offers us coffee and serves it herself. It seems a miracle that she hasn’t heard that Leigh has disappeared, which is a tribute to the tightness of Christian Lifers in Blackwell County. From be hind her desk she says lightly, “Two against one, no fair, guys.”
I steal a look at Chet, who is slouched in his chair. To be prattling on like this, Jill must have a hole in her case we can drive a truck through. But where is it? I can’t see it. Chet might know, but I have no idea.
Maybe it is simply her fear of the religious fundamentalists who will be on the jury and who will surely be manipulated by someone as skilled as Chet. Jill could wind up with a goose egg and have a killer on the loose in the swankiest part of Blackwell County. Chet acknowledges the truth of her remark by saying, “When Gideon and I were growing up in the Delta, we used to say, quite innocently, “Two against one, nigger fun.” ” Jill swallows hard as if she were a child forced to swallow a tablespoon of milk of magnesia. I don’t recall the innocence of that remark, but it was a common schoolboy lament. She says, “I didn’t know you were from the same town.”