“What else can I do?” Parent hanging from a frayed thread.
I have no answer.
chapter five
"He was wrong,” says Crone.
“Who?” Harry is sitting at the table, the one bolted to the floor of the small conference room near Judge Coats’s courtroom.
Crone is busy readying himself for court, running a comb through long wisps of thinning dark hair so that he doesn’t look like the mad professor. He peers into a stainless-steel mirror on the wall to make sure his tie is straight, this despite the fact that the ends are uneven. He is not what you would call a natty dresser. Even with these final acts of preening there is a certain professorial slouch in his stance and a slept-in appearance to his clothing. He doesn’t wear a suit. Instead, he opts for the less formal appearance of a corduroy sport coat over a plaid shirt, and gray Dockers, none of which he has allowed to be pressed. It is as if seamless trousers and wrinkled cloth were a badge of academic honor, a message to the world, and the jury, that he flies by some other convention. A generation ago this might have been a problem. Today half the jury pool shows up in T-shirts and jeans and has to be scanned for weapons before they are admitted to the jury commissioner’s waiting area.
“The coroner, Max Schwimmer,” says Crone. “If he’s going to testify under oath, then he should get it right. And it’s not ten percent.”
“What are you talking about?” says Harry.
“The percentage of left-handed people in the population. It’s more like fifteen, not ten.”
“I’ll be sure and make a note,” says Harry. He gives me a look out of the corner of one eye as if to say, That’s gonna save us. Harry has not warmed to Crone. There is something in the air between them, like ozone following lightning. Neither of them will bend to make the first gesture toward the other in order to dispel this miasma of ill will.
Crone is into the little things, meticulous about details, and religious when it comes to numbers. In Crone’s eye, mathematics governs the universe. To get an equation wrong is a mortal sin.
He is a man always in charge, brimming with confidence. Except for the orange jumper, on the days we don’t go to court you would swear he was running the jail. He strides the dayroom jostling and bumping shoulders with career cons whose sole concern with science is whether some street vendor stepped on their crack too many times to get high. David Crone shrinks for no one, and he seems to mingle with everyone as if there is something to be learned from each new experience in life.
I have seen him in animated conversations with droopy-eyed losers, men whose arms were covered with tattooed messages punctuated by needle tracks. Crone always seems to leave them smiling. As strange as it might seem, he has found a home here. There is no family to miss, since he’s never been married.
They call him the professor. “Professor’s buffin’ himself up again.”
Crone does a session with the weight machine every morning and is beginning to look fit, having lost that stodgy pudginess with which he started the trial. Jail has provided him with an element of discipline that his life lacked, and Crone, efficient in every aspect, has made the most of it.
He plays cards, mostly blackjack, with other prisoners in the dayroom each evening. I have interrupted some of these games to meet with him. They play for cigarettes, the con’s currency, even though Crone doesn’t smoke. They have cheated on him, resorted to elaborate signals and even used shills on the tiers above the tables to read and telegraph his hand. Still they cannot figure out how he keeps winning, the man with the gray-celled supercomputer between his ears. They could shuffle in four more decks and it might slow his counting of the cards to light speed.
This morning Aaron Tash has accompanied Harry and me to the courthouse to talk to Crone. Tash has been trying to see him for days, but I have left strict instructions that the two are not to talk except in my presence. Tash works with Crone at the university, his number two on the genetics project until Crone was placed on leave following his arrest.
Why he continues to report to Crone, who is suspended from his job, I am not sure, but I’m not anxious to have them talking through glass at the county jail on a phone that is monitored by deputies. The possibility of Crone saying something that could be construed as incriminating is too great, particularly if the issue of Kalista Jordan’s employment came up.
Tash is in his mid-forties, tall, six-four, even with his knees bent and his back hunched a little, which appears to be his normal posture. He is a wiry, sinuous man, with a graying fringe of hair surrounding a bald dome. He is the antithesis of Crone: a man whose personality, if he has one, is cool and reserved to the point of being glacial.
He appears entirely committed to Crone and his cause. Still, he is a university employee and, I assume, anxious to retain favor with the powers that be. For all I know, he could be eying Crone’s job. There is no telling what he might be induced to do if the regents sensed they could be on the hook financially for Jordan’s death. After all, they were on notice of her complaint for harassment.
Tash is carrying a thin leather briefcase under one arm. Whatever its contents, it took the guard less than three seconds to check and clear it on entering the jail.
This morning they don’t take us into the small consultation chamber with its inch-thick acrylic partition, but into a larger meeting room with a stainless-steel table bolted to the floor and plastic garden chairs. The smaller room isn’t large enough for the three of us.
Crone is not there, but I can see him through the windows down below in the dayroom, talking to some inmate, the guard waiting for them. The other man, some behemoth, has just come off the weight machine, covered with sweat and looking like some Nordic bad dream, cheekbones from a horror flick, a blond ponytail, with tattoos on both arms from the pits to the wrists. It could be worse; at least he is laughing with my client. I begin to wonder if Crone has been carrying out fiendish experiments here-Dr. Vikingstein, I presume.
He breaks it up, and followed by the guard, Crone climbs the stairs. A couple of seconds later they unlock the door for him to enter from the jail side.
As soon as he sees us all there, Crone is filled with bonhomie.
“Aaron, I see you’ve met Mr. Madriani, and Harry Hinds. Harry’s an interesting man. Personally, I think he has a way with words.”
“Oh, really. In what way?” asks Tash.
“I think Harry should be writing lyrics for music.”
This gets a snarl from my partner.
“Oh, you’ve written songs?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Tash looks sorry that he asked.
Crone is looking back into the mirror at the other end of the room. I can see him laughing in the glass.
“You have to watch what you say in here, Aaron. I am told they can read lips.” He nods toward the mirror. “How’s everything at the center?”
“People are pulling for you,” says Tash. “They know you didn’t do it.”
“Gee. Maybe they should all talk to Harry.”
Crone is misjudging Harry badly. The man has a boiling point in the vicinity of liquid oxygen and can be just as explosive.
“I’m glad for the support. It means a lot to me. Please tell them that.” Perhaps Crone has a place to return to after all.
“I will.”
“But you didn’t come all this way to tell me that?”
“No. You need to see these numbers,” says Tash. He gestures with a finger, tapping the briefcase under his arm.
Crone holds out a hand.
Tash pulls a letter-sized folder from the briefcase, and from this he draws a single sheet of paper. It appears to be the entire contents of the briefcase. He hands the page to Crone, and the two men study it, Tash looking over his shoulder. Little musings under their breath, nothing said outright as they pore over the page.