Crack-Up (16 page)

I said to the Miranda reader, “Must be hell for you, singing the national anthem.
 
Or do you have a card for that too?”

“Wise-ass,” the Miranda reader said, tucking his card away in a breast pocket.
 
“We
have
to read from the card, so your defense attorney can’t say you didn’t hear it right.”
 
He slung my charcoal gray suit jacket over the handcuffs to hide them.

The door to my seclusion room buzzed open.
 
The officers flanked me.
 
One gripped me by the elbow and nudged me forward.
 
We shared the elevator with an old black janitor and his dust broom.
 
He stared sideways at the officers, floor after floor, never taking his rheumy eyes off them, except to glance at me for about a millisecond.
 
Bad memories age better than Ray Charles records
, I thought.
 
I tried to think about anything but jail.

“Hey, Missuh Ward?” said the officer to my left, not the Miranda reader, but the other one.
 
“You ’member me biny chance?
 
From befuh?”
 
His rural accent—rural
North Carolina
, maybe—was so thick that if he’d been the one reading me my Miranda warning off a little yellow card it wouldn’t have counted anyway.

I looked him up and down.
 
Raft
, his name tag said.
 
Tall, broad-shouldered, and big-tummied.
 
His narrow-set, button green eyes belonged on a smaller man.
 
His dumb gaze fit perfectly.

“No,” I said.
 
“Don’t remember you.”

“Well ah shore ’member you,” he said.
 
His leather equipment belt squeaked and jangled as he laughed.
 
“From the fust time you come t’our jail.
 
Threeve our boys still on medical leave!
 
An use wearin’ flex cuffs!
 
Behind yo back!”

“Sorry,” I said after a short, deciphering delay.
 
“I wasn’t in my right mind.
 
I mistook you boys for Mormon missionaries.
 
Armed missionaries, who weren’t taking no for an answer.”

“Ah see,” Raft said, nodding thoughtfully.
 
“So thaz why use kep yellin’ out, ‘Thur’s only two testaments!
 
Thur’s only two, ah tell ya!’
 
Where the hell you learn a kick luck that, boy?”

“
West Point
,” I said.

“Wez Point,” he said.
 
“Sheeee-it.”

On the ground floor, we passed through a corridor of glass panes with a view of an outdoor courtyard.
 
The Miranda reader checked his reflection in the window glass, tilting his black cap just so.
 
I soon learned why.

Through the story-tall windows of the lobby, I saw a press mob milling on the steps outside.
 
The officers took me through the front doors—Had they never heard of a back alleyway?—and under the scorching afternoon sun.

Microphones sprouted above the heads of the mob like wheat in a field, swaying in the breeze.
 
Flashbulbs blinked like a storm of mutant fireflies with faulty circadian rhythms.
 
Shouts rang in my ears like one loud, incoherent voice.
 
I hadn’t seen a press mob this size since one of my Rock star clients got arraigned for bestiality with a rooster.
 
I felt shame—red hot, face flushing shame—though I didn’t know exactly why, and I felt the urge to cover my face with my suit jacket, but resisted.
 
Off and on, I could hear Officer Raft singing.
 
It was the Bad Boys theme song from that TV show, Cops.

“Why did you kill him?” shouted some wild-eyed, red-haired reporter, her mouth inches from my right ear.
 
It was a blessing that I couldn’t make out more of what was being said—because too much at once was being said—as I waded through the mob toward a police cruiser parked at the curb.

“Are you a murderer?” shouted a deep, stentorian male voice.

I couldn’t help but search for the owner of that voice—it reminded me too much of Darth Vader’s.
 
Not finding him anywhere, I considered the individual faces of the media.

How the hell
, I wondered,
do they manage to look rabid and bored at the same time
?

“Do you have a statement?” shouted several voices nearly at once—or else the same voice over and over again rapidly.

I realized I didn’t know what to say to the world at large, but felt I ought to say something.
 
“John Helms was a great American,” I said into a microphone thrust in front of my face.
 
Deputy Raft opened one of the cruiser’s rear doors then pressed a meaty hand down on the top of my head, as if I didn’t really want to climb inside the vehicle.

The hell I didn’t!

On the ride to jail, I thought about what I’d said to the media . . .
 
No, I didn’t actually believe that John Helms had been a great American.
 
The scene had overwhelmed me.
 
I’d been caught up in the drama.

But I always had liked John—a bastard, yes, but a magnetic bastard, and charming when he chose to be.
 
I smiled remembering John . . . until I recalled the day he’d died . . . In my mentally diseased state, I’d placed magical significance on seeing John’s first reaction to my own surprise appearance.
 
His reaction would reveal to me whether John really meant to kill me.

But he’d been standing at the top of a staircase—and I at the very bottom—when we’d first encountered each other that fateful day.
 
I couldn’t read his initial reaction one way or another.
 
Then John had bounded down the stairs, greeting me with a smile, and offered his hand.
 
He asked me why I’d come.

I insisted on a private conversation, behind closed doors.
 
We had ours in John’s oak-paneled study.
 
He asked about the bags I carried—the ones filled with the touristy trinkets I’d bought at the gift shop near the metro station.

“They’re for you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Well what do you know,” John said, pulling the items out of the bags one by one.
 
An ashtray, a bottle opener, an American flag Tee shirt, a Lincoln Memorial kitchen magnet,
University
of
Maryland
boxer shorts, and so on.
 
“The perfect gift for the man who has everything . . . worthless crap.”

That had been when John’s smile had disappeared, and he’d studied me intently, told me I looked odd, smelled odd, asked me what was wrong.
 
That was the moment Darth spoke up . . .

Officer Raft stayed with me through my booking procedure at the jail.
 
I remember the sound of my cell door clamoring shut behind me.
 
My cell mate I found to be a pale senior citizen with thinning silver hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
 
The man sat on a slender cot, his back to the wall, hugging his two shins.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I’m Reverend Sam Rutherford.
 
But I’d prefer it if you’d just call me, ‘Sam.’ ”
 
Loose skin beneath his jaw quivered like a turkey’s neck as he spoke.

“You’re a minister?”

“Presbyterian.”

I fell onto my own cot against the opposite wall.
 
To my sore body, it felt like an oversized place mat.
 
“My name’s, ‘Argus.’
 
‘Argus Ward.’ ”

“I know,” he said, "you put three deputies in the hospital.”

“I believe so.”

“They say you’re crazy.”

“From time to time.”

“They put us together on purpose.
 
They want you to beat me up.
 
The deputies, I mean.”

“Why?”

“Because they can’t get away with it themselves.”

I sat up.
 
“What are you in for, Reverend Sam?”

“Just ‘Sam,’ please.
 
I won’t be a reverend much longer anyway.
 
Now that they’ve turned the boys against me.”

My breath snagged on a sudden realization.
 
I felt a queasy stir in my stomach, and I thought,
It’s not bad enough being trapped in this sewer, I have to be leashed to the king rat
!

“Don’t talk to me,” I told the pedophile, my voice low and guttural.
 
“Don’t talk to me ever again.
 
Don’t step within arm’s length of my bunk, and when you shit, your ass better be hovering three inches above the toilet seat.
 
Otherwise, I promise you, I’ll make the deputies very happy.”

Hugging his shins all the tighter, Reverend Rat peeked over at an exposed, stainless steel toilet against the back wall of the cell, midway between our two bunks.
 
I dropped back down on my mattress, stretched out, and stared up at the cement ceiling.
 
Then I contemplated, not for the first time, who had destroyed my life—my flawed, but sweet and only half-completed little life.

I knew I wasn’t paranoid anymore when I eliminated all the silly suspicions that had crossed my mind back in the psychiatric ward and yet couldn’t come up with a single authentic candidate.

Chapter 16

“Ward!” said the deputy standing in front of the door to my cell as it slid open.
 
“Your liar’s here.”
 
That’s what it sounded like, anyway, but it only took a moment to realize the deputy was actually saying my
lawyer
, Harry Talbot, had arrived.

Harry was my personal attorney as well as a fellow member of the Washington Golf and Country Club.
 
His girth and lack of conditioning always left him wheezy out on the links, but his Duke-educated brain never ran out of oxygen.
 
He’d agreed to lead my search for a criminal defense team.
 
I stood and stretched.

I checked my appearance in the murky stainless steel mirror over the toilet, the one that couldn’t be broken into shards in case I ever felt like slitting my wrists or slicing a deputy or my cellmate, Reverend Sam, to ribbons.
 
The jailhouse shampoo had left my half-gray and half-brown hair the color of a used Brillo pad.
 
My orange jumpsuit was baggy, and my winter complexion wasn’t at all flattered by it.

I left the cell without glancing at my cellmate.
 
Reverend Sam hadn’t dared to speak since I’d first threatened him silent.

“This is the man I was telling you about,” Harry said after greeting me inside one of the meeting rooms for defense attorneys and their jailed clients.
 
He indicated a short, slight man with well-tamed waves of bright red hair, a mustache, and freckle-paved skin.
 
The pointy tips of a pair of cowboy boots poked out from the bottom of his off-white linen suit.
 
His left hand gripped a black leather briefcase.
 
His right he extended to me.

“Lester Cravey.
 
Call me ‘Les.’ ”

“The Texan,” I said, shaking hands.
 
Nearly everyone in DC is from someplace else.

“Born and raised,” Les said.
 
“Sorry you weren’t.”