Late one afternoon I thought I might inherit another case when Suki showed up to do the garden. He looked at the front lawn, strewn with coffee cups and crushed Coke cans, cigarette butts in the bushes. For a moment I thought there might be blood in the street. He just stood there like a stick in his tan long-sleeved shirt and pith helmet, shoulders hunched forward, and shook his head.
It’s true that you would have to know the man in order to realize that for Suki this was a display of raw emotion; think rattlesnake with the rattles removed. Nonetheless, one of the sound guys was sitting in a folding chair not ten feet from Suki’s trailer, and he was laughing-toying with death.
Suki dropped the ramp on the back of the trailer and was getting a rake and a bag to get all the trash off the lawn. That’s when he saw it. One of the cameramen had migrated with some of his equipment-a camera, a tripod, and cables-into a corner of the front yard, probably angling for a picture through one of my windows. In doing so the guy had snapped a limb off a small tree, a miniature Japanese maple. God help him. Suki wanted him out. And the fool resisted. The next thing I knew, my gardener was going at one of the legs on the camera’s tripod with a large, curved pruning saw, a thing about eighteen inches long, sprouting glinting teeth like Jaws.
Confronted by Asian fury, they not only moved the camera, they moved themselves across the street and behind one of the vans. The tripod, which like Captain Ahab was now missing the better part of one leg, Suki calmly tossed into the street. It was followed a second later by the missing appendage. Through all this the gardener never said a word.
What was more amazing was that after days resting on their haunches outside waiting for something to film, not one of the news guys got a picture, not a single frame of the helmeted, saw-wielding ninja as he drove them out of the yard. They stayed huddled behind the van while Suki picked up the trash, mowed the lawn, and pruned some bushes. They didn’t come out until the truck with the trailer, and the crazy guy driving it, left.
The day the trial started, the gypsy caravan camped in front of my house pulled up stakes and disappeared. Having missed the only pictures worth taking, they motored their movable feast back across the bridge to catch the rock-throwing Renaissance faire taking shape out in front of the courthouse.
I drink tea, Earl Grey, and scan the coroner’s report, prepping for Monday’s testimony. Across the room I have the television on, but with the sound muted. It is a much more peaceful way to catch cable news, without all the frenetic screaming. If somebody blows up a city, I can turn up the sound. Otherwise I’m not missing a thing.
This morning the screen is filled with election news, the presidential primaries, flashes of smiling faces, handshaking, and toothy grins, the political postmortems. Two Republicans and one Democrat are down and out, folding up their tents and tossing in the towel. But the real day of reckoning is just around the bend. The final state primary elections or caucuses. When that party ends, you’ll need a dump truck to pick up all the bunting, banners, buttons, and body parts left over from the fallen candidates. If it isn’t decided by then, within weeks-at most a month-the two principal party candidates, the nominees, will be the only ones left standing.
Then hostilities will begin in earnest, partisan warfare, politics as blood sport, all that matters is that our side wins, at every level, all the marbles-executive, legislative, and judicial.
When it’s over, all the eminent talking heads will wax eloquent, telling us that now, with a new president elected, America and Americans, Democrat and Republican, will once again return to the great tradition of unity, binding up their differences to work together for the common good.
It might have sounded comforting coming from a network anchor a quarter of a century ago or more, but to hear it today is to wonder what weed the speaker is smoking and where he got it. In case you haven’t noticed, the toxin of partisan politics that was once trapped inside the asylum on the Potomac and bottled up in a few other political hot spots around the country has suddenly been pumped, undiluted, into the national vein.
Cable news, much of it political and almost all of that partisan; talk radio, some of it virulent; the graceless decline of network news, until it stood undisguised, naked and seemingly unashamed in its ideological partiality; and major metropolitan newspapers, too many of which have given up the ghost of objectivity in their reporting to become obvious and open house organs for political parties-these were the forces that pushed the plunger on the syringe.
Having been flushed from our lives of political indolence, we suddenly discover that it is no longer possible to cast a vote and run for the sidelines. So we choose up sides, pin on labels-conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican-and become emotionally invested in the only thing that is important: winning.
And of course the contest, as always, is all or nothing, a tug-of-war to see if we can rip the nation down the middle.
I watch the silent happy-warrior faces on the screen and wonder. In the age of e-mail and the Internet blogger, how long can we survive before those at the polar lunatic edges drag us all to a future where differences in politics and social ideology are settled Beirut style?
The phone rings. I reach over on the side table and answer it. It’s Harry.
“I didn’t call,” I say. “I didn’t think you’d be up yet.”
“Houston, we’ve got a problem,” says Harry. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” The line goes dead. Harry must be calling from his cell phone in the car.
We huddle over my kitchen table, and Harry tells me about the state’s two witnesses, Carl’s friends from skinhead heaven, Charlie Gross and Walter Henoch. Actually, the problem pertains to only one of them, but it’s big enough to go nuclear if we play it wrong.
The bad news came in a sealed envelope from the prosecutor that was delivered to our office yesterday afternoon. If Harry hadn’t gone back there, we wouldn’t have seen it until Monday morning.
Gross and Henoch were the two confidants that Carl decided to go backslapping with at a bar where the three of them entertained each other with funny stories of how they might drag Scarborough from his hotel room out to a shooting range in the desert and pin him to a target. They also discussed the ease with which they could kidnap Scarborough. All these alcohol-fueled plots and plans were of course facilitated by the fact that Carl worked at the hotel and presumably had access to the victim. The author had been kicking up dust his whole way across the country, and because racial discord was his theme, he’d drawn the attention of groups that Gross and Henoch ran with, in particular the Aryan Posse.
Ordinarily Harry would be digging for dirt on the two witnesses, Henoch and Gross, looking to see if they have criminal records or charges pending that the cops might have traded away to get their cooperation, their statements against our client.