Defiance and risk were another two words that she thought fit her.
Architect. Engineer. Dentist. She watched the others heading into the meeting. Most had a quick pace, bounding up the front steps. They all were feeling the same thing, she realized: a need to release that big insistent voice held fast deep within. She kicked at some loose gravel by her feet and watched a pebble nearly strike a tiny lizard, which fled instantly into a nearby tree stump.
She had lost that morning.
Lost, of course, didn’t really describe the cascade of emotions that accompanied certain court defeats. Throughout the day she’d had the sensation that she had exited some terribly dire theater, where, as in Hamlet, everyone was dead onstage at the end. It had been the denouement of an awful case. A thirteen-year-old boy-fuzzy-cheeked, his voice barely changed-had shot and killed his father with the old man’s prized Purdey shotgun. The gun was a $25,000, custom-made-in-England weapon that was supposed to be used in the rubber boot and tailored tweed pursuit of game birds on high-roller ranches and farms set aside in Texas or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It wasn’t supposed to be used for murder.
At the family’s mansion in the exclusive, gated Cocoplum section of Coral Gables, she had been distracted by an uncontrollably sobbing wife and a terrified younger sister who kept screaming over and over in a keening, high-pitched voice, like a record needle stuck in a groove. In the chaos, Susan had failed to realize that two detectives had taken the teenager into a side room and were questioning him aggressively. Far too aggressively. They’d read the juvenile killer his Miranda rights, but should have waited until some responsible adult was able to accompany him. They did not. They’d simply launched into one of the oldest tricks in the police detective’s arsenaclass="underline" “Why’d yah do it, kid? You can tell us. We’re your friends and we’re just here to help you. Your dad, he was clearly a bad guy. Let’s get it all straightened out right now, and then we can all go home…”
Right. Fat chance.
It was a fine legal line and the detectives had not just crossed it, but trampled on it.
They had seen killer. The legal system saw child.
That was the precise distinction she had been on the scene to identify and the exact problem she had been there to avoid and she had failed. Dramatically.
So a judge in circuit court that morning had tossed out the kid’s cold confession, even though one of the detectives had dutifully videotaped it. And without that confession, proving what had actually happened that deadly night beyond a reasonable doubt was going to be hard, if not impossible.
The mother wouldn’t testify against her son.
The sister wouldn’t testify against her brother.
The whole family’s fingerprints were on the Purdey shotgun.
And she knew that the high-priced criminal defense attorney engaged by the family had lined up a series of teachers, psychologists, and school friends-all of whom would happily describe in sympathetic detail the relentless terror that the dead father had brought to that house.
And then that defense attorney would tell a jury it was all an accident. Tragic. Regrettable. Sad. Terrible even. But when all was said and done, an accident.
“The father was beating the mother as he had done a hundred times before and the son tried to threaten him with the shotgun to make him stop. Defending his mother. How sweet. How noble. We’d have all done the same thing. The poor lad, he didn’t even know it was loaded, and it went off…”
A powerful argument to a deeply moved jury-who would not see the coldness in the son’s eyes, nor the glee in his voice as he described patiently hunting the father through the many rooms of the house in much the same way the father had probably used the shotgun to stalk grouse in the fields. He’d ambushed the father in the study when the mother was nowhere near.
Money can’t buy you love, Susan said to herself, echoing another song.
Especially when there’s a serial abuser involved, she thought. The dead man might have been a prominent, fabulously wealthy businessman with a big Mercedes and a powerboat tied to his private dock, on every local board, lending his name to every local good cause and needy charity-but he liked to use his fists on his family.
Fuck him.
And now the kid’s going to get away with killing him.
Fuck the kid.
And just maybe fuck me, too.
At the very least, she knew she was due a real chewing-out. At the worst, she’d be spending a couple of months handling DUI cases in traffic court.
She hated complicated crimes. She liked simple ones. Bad guy. Innocent victim. Bang. Cops make an arrest. Here’s the gun. Here’s the confession. An efficient lineup of reliable witnesses. Plenty of forensic evidence. No problems. Then she could get up in a courtroom and point her finger with all the self-righteousness of some outraged Puritan staring at an accused witch.
But even more, she hated losing, even if in losing there was some measure of justice, as there had been that day. And when she lost, especially when she’d been humiliated, she invariably felt the tug of need. Cocaine instantly replaced defeat and helped her soar back into the necessary compulsion of being a prosecutor.
When your day is done and you wanna run…
So, on this night of failure that obscured truth, she was back at the AA meeting. Susan Terry sighed, thought she’d delayed long enough, started to hum the refrain, She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie… and emerged from the shadows. “Damn it to hell,” she said out loud, still thinking of the courtroom that morning. “It was all my fault.” The words my fault made her pause, because just at that moment she saw Moth hurrying toward the front door of Redeemer One.
Moth was already speaking when Susan slipped quietly into one of the chairs near the rear of the room, hoping that no one noticed her tardy entry. It did not take her long to realize he wasn’t talking about drink or drugs.
“Hello, I’m Timothy, and now I’ve got twenty-two days without a drink…”
Soft applause. Murmured congratulations.
“And I’m more convinced than ever that my uncle didn’t kill himself. I’ve been all over his life, and there’s nothing suicidal there.”
The room grew quiet.
Moth looked around, trying to measure in the eyes of the people in the room how they would react to what he was saying. He knew he should speak carefully, render his words and phrases organized and precise. But he was unable, and feelings tumbled from him like pearls from a broken strand.
“We all know-even me, and I’m the youngest here-what has to happen in order to make that last decision. The I can’t go on any longer decision. We all know the hole you have to fall into and the one you know you can’t climb out of. We all know the mistakes that are necessary…” He emphasized the word mistakes because he knew that everyone in the meeting would understand everything that was connected to that single word. Despair. Failure. Drugs and booze. Loss and agony. He paused again. Everyone in that room had probably imagined killing themselves even if they had not precisely said the word suicide out loud. “And more than almost everyone, we know what goes into that choice.”
Moth thought that everything he said had created a slight wind in the room, like an air current, cold, direct on the face. What do I know more than anything else about my uncle? Moth asked himself. The Ed I knew hated secrets. He hated lies. He’d put them all behind him.