The Sign of the Book (18 page)

I was almost a model prisoner. The sheriff asked what had happened and the deputy told him he had brought me in for contempt, trespassing, menacing, and half a dozen other possible charges. The sheriff nodded and said, “Thank you, sir. It always helps to know why we have people in our hotel here. Did he give you any idea how long you're to be a guest of our county?” I told him it seemed to be open-ended, probably till I had a change of heart. The sheriff said, “Any idea when that might be?” and I said, “Sometime between tomorrow morning and whenever hell freezes over.” The two of us laughed while Lennie stood apart and found it all unhappily unamusing. The sheriff said, “Goddammit, Lennie, get them handcuffs off this man,” and I was taken, uncuffed, back to the cellblock, which consisted of half a dozen cells and one big barred room, the bull pen.

Three of the cells were occupied: two Indians and a mean-looking white guy, all of them, I later learned, being held for drunk-and-disorderly. I was put across from the bull pen, away from the others, where we could all look across and see each other. There's not much privacy in jail. The cell consisted of a four-by-eight barred room with a bed and a toilet. I figured the doors were opened during the middle of the day and the men were allowed to stretch themselves in the relative expanse of the bull pen. I sat on my cot and stared at the wall.

Parley came in within the hour. We met upstairs in the conference room.

“Janeway, did I have a mental lapse in there or did you really call the judge a moron?”

“I called him stupid. There's a difference. A moron can't help what he does. A stupid man can, but does it anyway. That's what makes him stupid.”

“Look, I'm trying to get you out of here, but unless you crawl up there and kiss his ass in open court, it's gonna take some serious finagling. At least I think you got his attention about the kid.”

“Then my living has not been in vain. What's happening?”

“We called the guardian ad litem, who's having the kids picked up today. He's going to talk to them away from the grandparents. Even if Jerry can't talk, the little ones might know what happened to him.”

“That's a start. If that doesn't work, I may have another ace up my sleeve.”

He closed his eyes. “Dare I ask?”

“There's a fellow I know at
The Denver Post.
I did him a few favors when I was a cop. He specializes in tearjerkers and knows how to write 'em. I think he'd love this story. Former Denver cop jailed by Podunk County judge, who won't give kids an even break. I think he'd walk all the way out here for that. I'd be disappointed if it didn't make page one, under the fold. Streamed across the top if I get lucky. Read by everybody in the state and rewritten for every local newscast.”

“You really are crazy.”

“Tell the judge you're trying to talk me out of going to my very good friends in the Denver press. Tell him I'm a wild hair, hard to control.”

“I think he already knows that.”

I looked at him across the table. “A tyrant can survive for years in his own dark world, Parley, but he can't live long in the sunshine. And I think this one knows that.”

I pondered the mess I had created and it still felt right. “You need to call Erin.”

“Already did. Caught her at home and gave her a full account.”

“And what was the word from she-who-must-be-obeyed, the prisoner asked in fear and trembling.”

“She sighed mightily. I think you actually might've done her proud, which only goes to show she's as crazy as you are. She did tell me to bail you out.”

“No way, Parley. Not yet.”

The morning dragged by. I sat in the cell and marked time, a room away from where Laura Marshall also sat marking time. I stared at the wall and counted to ten.

At noon, more or less, the sheriff came in and let the two Indians out. “You boys behave yourselves or next time you're goin' to court.”

He stopped at my cell. “How you doin'?”

“Lovely.”

“I gotta be gone till tommorrow. You and Lennie try to be good to each other.”

“If he comes near me, I'll rip his heart out.”

He leaned close, looking for some sign I was kidding.

“Sheriff, I think you're a decent man. But Lennie would rape his own mother and then tell her what a lousy lay she is. Tell him to stay away from me.”

“Freeman's gone till Friday. Lennie'll have to bring you your food.”

“If he brings me anything, he'll wear it out of here.”

 

Lennie came in at three o'clock. I could see he had been told something because he did a cell check or a head count, proving he could count to two, without ever coming near my side of the jail. He opened the other prisoner's cell door and said, “Okay, Brady, get the hell out of here. Sheriff's orders. If it was up to me, you'd sit here for another week.” I heard them shuffling down the hall together.

The jail was on the east side of the building, so darkness came fast and early. I sat and stewed, alone. By five the whole cellblock was in deep shadow. I assumed there was a light somewhere, which Lennie had apparently decided I could do without, and in fact I was just as happy without it. Now I could lie back on my cot and pass the hours in my vacuum, dreaming of happier times and better places. Occasionally thoughts darker and more worldly forced their way into my space, but I met them all knowing that, hell, tomorrow was another day.

I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, the darkness was everywhere, the silence deafening, and I knew someone was standing out in the cellblock.

Guess who.

I couldn't hear him, couldn't see him, but I knew he was there.

“Hi, Lennie,” I said. “You come in here to play mind games?”

Nothing moved.

“I like mind games,” I said. “It's hard matching wits with a half-wit, but I'll see if I can crawl down in the slime, somewhere near your level.”

There in that darkness, seconds were eternal. The clock ticked in my head.

“You are laughable,” I said. “You are all the Keystone Kops rolled into one sad little twisted man. A sorry, strutting, self-important fool.”

I told him other things between tickings of the clock and he never fired back.

“You're a goofball. Everybody here knows it.

“You are beneath contempt,” I said.

“You drag that noble word
asshole
down to new depths. Next to you an asshole is an icon. You are the apex of assholery, Lennie. You even understand what I'm saying?”

Under all that bluster, I had him figured for a coward. I told him so and dared him to prove me wrong.

“I know you're ignorant,” I said. “That's a given. You make lousy decisions and then hide behind your badge, and that's the worst kind of cop.

“You couldn't find your ass with both hands and the Hubble telescope.

“You're a cockroach, Lennie.

“A maggot.

“Whichever's worse, that's you.”

This went on for a while: me talking to the darkness; him out there listening.

Listening…

…till suddenly, at some point, I knew he had slithered away.

The next face I saw was the sheriff's. I could see the morning sun on the trees through the jailhouse window and I sat up on the bed, amazed I had slept so well. The outer door clanged open and he unlocked my cell. “Get up, Janeway, your lawyer's here.”

We walked up the steps together. “What'd you say to Lennie last night?”

“Me? I never saw the guy after it got dark.”

“He's actin' funny, like he doesn't want to come near you. I thought you two might've had some words.”

“Damn, I thought we were getting along just fine.”

“You hungry yet?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“I'll bring you some grub, if there's time.”

Parley was waiting, as usual, in the conference room. As soon as the sheriff left us, he said, “You ready to get out of here?”

“What have I got to do?”

He told me. At six-thirty this morning, the judge had called him at home. After a visit late yesterday afternoon with the guardian ad litem and a Social Services caseworker, the kids had been taken to Denver and were in safe hands. The grandparents had already left town and the grandfather had suddenly declined to press charges. “You can walk out of this if you'll just apologize and eat some crow,” Parley said. “I think he's motivated to dispose of it.”

“And the kids are okay?”

“Yep. I talked to the social worker myself, just before they left. They won't be coming back here again. So what do you say?”

“Sure, I'll apologize.”

“Make it good. If we don't get this done this morning, you may sit in here till sometime next month. He's willing to see you at eight-thirty.”

“Then by all means.”

“I'll come for you in an hour. And Cliff, please, be contrite. This isn't according to Hoyle and it'll be hard for you to choke down, but he wants it on the record, in open court. You okay with that?”

“Sure. I'll eat everything he puts on my plate.”

Lennie was nowhere in sight in the jail. I had a pretty good breakfast, the sheriff released me in the care of my attorney, and we walked together across the parking lot to the courthouse entrance. The judge was already on his bench. The only people in the courtroom at that hour were Himself, his reporter, Parley, and me.

“The prisoner will face the bar,” he said.

I stood before him and the lecture began. I had shown crass indifference to Himself personally, to his position, to the Court and the Law. I had been insulting, degrading, disrespectful, contemptuous, and foul. I deserved to be jailed and to sit there for however long it took until I realized the error of my ways. But he had bigger fish to fry. “Have you had enough time yet to reflect upon what you said?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

He shook his head. Not good enough. “Do you
beg
the Court's forgiveness?”

“Yes, I do. Yes, sir, Your Honor.”

“Do you realize how out of line you were in both your choice of words and in the tone of your voice?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Then
say so
!”

“I was wrong. I know that now. I was disrespectful and insulting, I got swept up in the moment and said things that never should have been said. For any insult I may have given the Court or Your Honor personally, I am truly, deeply sorry, and I humbly beg the Court's pardon.”

He looked down as if he didn't believe a word of it. But he had run out of groveling exercises to put me through, and all that remained was his decision.

“Fine reduced to one hundred dollars,” he said. “Get the hell out of here.”

It was now midmorning, the arraignment was just three hours away, and Parley and I had a short telephone conference call with Erin to plot strategy and deal with the likelihoods of the day. At the arraignment, Laura would enter her plea and would request bail. This was a formality: the judge wasn't about to grant it, and Erin had chosen to push for the earliest trial date she could get. Now she was convinced that the prosecution would be going to trial with a weak case. “I don't think they know how weak it actually is, and I don't want to give them time to find out. We don't want our client to sit in jail any longer than she has to.”

First, she said, there should be no more talk of the books to anyone. “They may bring out their own book expert from somewhere, but that'll be costly. If it doesn't seem to be an issue to us whether they're valuable or not, maybe they won't. Unless we can tie those three book guys to Bobby, and put them in the area on that day, the books only cloud the case. At some point, probably after Cliff gets back from Burbank, we'll have to make that call, maybe list them as witnesses, and get them subpoenaed.”

After the arraignment, Parley would file our motion to suppress evidence. This would be based on our contention that the deputy had acted unlawfully from the beginning; that Laura's verbal confession was illegally obtained, and evidence from the house had been improperly seized. “I smell blood,” Erin said.

Parley and I went upstairs and sat in the conference room waiting for our client to go over some last-minute details before arraignment. The sheriff brought Laura into the room and left us, and we talked through the lunch hour. Laura listened intently to Parley's account of my adventure with the in-laws and the judge, and now the room was quiet except for the periodic hissing of the radiator. She was suddenly giddy over the kids and there was a feeling of hope on her side of the table. Parley's next words brought her down to earth. “It won't be enough to show that there was this two- or three-minute gap from the time you heard the shot to when you got up the meadow to the house and found Bobby dead on the floor. Even if we accept the theory that Jerry might've done it—”

“
I
don't accept that.”

“You did readily enough, before Janeway talked to you.”

“Please,” she said, looking away from him. “Let's not start this again.”

Her roving eyes stopped on me. “Listen to the man, Mrs. Marshall,” I said. “That was the deal, remember.”

“He still thinks it was Jerry.”

“I think it's a strong possibility,” Parley said. “I haven't seen any facts to counter that theory.”

“There could've been somebody there.”

“Sure, it coulda been the Godfather or the ghost of Alferd E. Packer, but it's up to you now to tell me who it was.”

“I don't know.” She shook her head. “I don't know.”

“So you want us to build a defense based on the premise that some unknown party, neither you nor Jerry, did this. Even allowing for the fifteen minutes you were walking, that's not much time for a third party to have been there and shot Bobby and got away before you could see him.”

“But it could have happened.”

“Anything's possible, but right now we've got nothing to hang that on. I may have asked you this before, but tell me again. Did Bobby associate with any unsavory people?”

“Well, sure, there were some women…”

“Any specific women you can think of? I'm not talking about hookers, Laura, I mean women of the town, people who might be the cause of a jealous rage by a third party.”

“I can't think of any.”

“Did he gamble?”

“Not that I know.”

“Did he owe any big debts?”

“I don't think so. In recent years, I haven't known much about his business.”

“Did he have any enemies?”

She shrugged.

“Can you think of anybody else who might want to harm Bobby, or any reason that someone unknown might want to?”

“No,” she said softly.

“Nobody?”

“No.”

“Then it's back to you and Jerry.”

A silence settled over the room.

“We know he didn't kill himself,” Parley said. “Either of those shots would have been instantly lethal, so he couldn't likely have fired the second one, could he?”

“I'm not helping you much.”

“No, and you didn't help yourself when you had Jerry bathe and then burned his clothes.”

“I told you why I did that.”

“Why doesn't matter. What does matter is that any evidence from the shooting that was on his hands or in his clothes may be long gone now.”

“I was stupid. It never occurred to me that I was destroying evidence which might've proved his innocence.”

“Or the other way around. And if you did prove his innocence, where does that leave you?”

“As the only suspect,” she said.

Almost a minute passed while we sat and Parley drummed his fingers on the table. “I've got to tell you something, miss,” he said. “Your friend Erin might have a few ideas, but if she does, she's more than just a good attorney, she's a damn genius. As it stands now, you have only one defense.”

“Jerry did it,” she said glumly.

“No, you
thought
Jerry did it. That was your first reaction, that explains everything. People will
understand
that, Laura, it gives you at least a fighting chance, so that's got to be your defense. You thought what anybody would think under the circumstances, and you reacted and did what any mother would do. You tell 'em exactly what happened, tell the truth, then describe what you thought and what you did. You came up the hill and into the house, and there was Jerry with the gun in his hand.”

“For Christ's sake, I
can't
say that.”

“You'd better say it and forget about Christ, say it for your own sake.”

She watched him drum his fingers. “What if I said…”

“What? What if you said what?”

“Can't I say I thought someone else might have been there?”

“No, you can't, because you
didn't
think that. You never gave that a thought till much later, it never crossed your mind in that room on that day. You've already told both your attorneys and Janeway here what you were thinking, and we can't put on testimony that we know to be false. Now do you understand what I've been trying to tell you from the first day? How what you say to us limits what we can do?”

He leaned over and engaged her with his eyes. “Get used to this fact, Laura. We can't defend both of you. It's impossible.”

“What would happen to Jerry? If I did tell what happened, what would they do to him?”

“Nothing compared with what they'd do to you.”

“Could I be involved… have a say… in what kind of treatment he gets?”

“I'm not the one to ask about that. My only job here is to help Erin get you acquitted. I'm not a social worker or a child psychologist. I'm not Jerry's lawyer, I'm your lawyer, and my job is to defend you in court.”

“Damn, I just hate this.”

“I know you do. But think what happens if you go to prison. What happens to Jerry then? Whatever that is, you won't have a damn thing to say about it, ever. By the time you get out, he'll be a middle-aged man and you'll be lucky if he even remembers you. You've got at least a decent chance to beat this, Laura, and that's my honest opinion. Get this legal crap behind you. Stop fighting us at every turn. Let us do our jobs.”

They hemmed and hawed some more, but this was the story she would take into court. She was not a stupid woman and she saw that now.

Parley pushed back his chair. “Cliff?”

“Yeah, I've got a few questions… if that's okay.”

I didn't have any notes: all the time they had been talking I had silently been ticking off questions on my fingers, my own crude way of putting things in order. “Mrs. Marshall,” I said, “where were the guns kept?”

“Bobby kept two rifles and the shotgun in a cabinet behind his desk. The handgun in a holster over his chair.”

“None of them under lock and key?”

“No. They were much too easy to get at.”

“Did anyone know about the handgun?”

“Other than me, sure, all the kids have seen it at one time or another. I told Bobby I didn't like having it in the house. I hate guns. We used to fight about it… when we still cared enough to fight. When we moved into separate bedrooms, I just gave up. What he had in his room was his own business.”

“Then you never went in there at all.”

“Well, you know… there were occasions. Bobby wasn't a neat man, and there were times when things just had to be picked up. I couldn't stand to live like that.”

“So you went in the room, what? Once a week?”

“Less than that. He left the door open when he wasn't there, and when I could see green mold growing across his desk… maybe I shouldn't exaggerate, but he was so annoying. When it got too bad, I went in and straightened it up.”

“Did you ever see his gun when you went in the room?”

“You couldn't really miss it. It was always in that holster.”

“In plain view?”

“As you got close to the desk, you couldn't miss it. You couldn't see it from the door, or out in the hall.”

“He never took the gun with him when he went out?”

“He had another one in his truck.”

“But this gun in the bedroom might've been seen by anybody who came calling.”

“Sure, if anybody ever did. We didn't entertain or have casual callers.”

“Have you ever heard Bobby say anything about a man called Preacher? Tall, skinny guy, his real name's Kevin Simms.”

“I never knew his name. But, yeah, now that you mention it, someone like that did come up to see him occasionally.”

“What about?”

“I have no idea.”

“What about two brothers named Willie and Wally Keeler? They may just be grunts. Muscles with beards.”

“I never saw those two guys,” Laura said. “I know the tall one, or some very tall man, came up to the house a few times to see Bobby.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, gosh, I don't know. Quite a while back. Maybe as much as a year ago.”

“And you never found out even in a general way what it was about?”

“Never cared, never gave it another thought till you asked me just now.”

“Did he either leave or pick up anything while he was there?”

She shook her head. “I don't know.”

“Did you hear anything that was said? Anything at all?”

She shook her head. “I just wasn't interested. I'm sorry, I'm no help at all. God, I feel so stupid. Is this important?”

“We don't know what it is yet, Mrs. Marshall.”

“I wish you'd call me Laura.”

“When he came up there—how long did he stay?”

“Less than an hour. They went into Bobby's room and talked, then he left.”

“And Bobby never mentioned it, what they might've been talking about?”

“Like I said, we weren't sharing much by then.”

“That's fine. Just a few more questions.”

She was on edge now, as if she had failed some crucial test and dreaded the next one. I told her it was okay, she had done well, but she looked doubtful.

“When you burned Jerry's clothes, had you been using the fireplace that day?”

“No, none of the fireplaces. I had the furnace on to warm the house.”

“So you lit the fire only to burn Jerry's things.”

“That's right.”

“What exactly did you put in the fire?”

“Oh, gosh. His shirt was drenched with blood, and his pants. I think that's all.”

“Underwear?”

“I didn't see any blood there, so I put those things through the wash.”

“What about his shoes?”

“They seemed fine.”

“Are those the shoes he's wearing now?”

“They were his everyday shoes. I suppose he's still wearing them.”

“What about the fire? How long did you let it burn?”

“I poured coal oil all over his things, then doused and lit 'em again when the fire died down. I didn't want to leave any trace.”

“And that's when you called the sheriff.”

“When the fire was pretty well done and I had aired the place out.”