Custody of the State (43 page)

Will stared Smiley in the eye.

“But it was something like that.”

The attorney continued. “You were an old high-school friend of Mary Sue's, weren't you?”

“Yeah. That's true.”

“You liked her back then?”

“Yeah. A lot of people did.”

“She was the kind of person that always liked helping people out, correct?”

“Oh, yeah. Softhearted. That was Mary Sue.”

“In sales lingo—you would call her a ‘soft touch'? An ‘easy mark'?”

“I'm not sure I understand you there.”

Will knew that Bob Smiley understood—and so did the judge, who at this point was adjusting his glasses and looking intently at the witness.

Before the agent retreated from the stand, Harry Putnam tried one more charge through the barricades.

“Is it a fact, Mr. Bob Smiley, that you signed up an insurance policy for $100,000 on the life of Joshua Fellows, with Mr. and Mrs. Fellows as beneficiaries—true or false?”

“True!” Smiley shouted out, as if it were a game show and he had finally heard the TV host call out a question he could nail with ease.

When the judge excused him, Bob Smiley scampered off the stand and walked directly out of the courtroom.

Without looking back.

59

D
OROTHY
A
TKINSON
, MSN. Nursing supervisor at Delphi Hospital. I was Mary Sue's day supervisor.”

After the preliminaries, Harry Putnam led the nurse into a series of questions that established her knowledge of Mary Sue's situation.

“Did you ever hear her despair over being able to continue handling her son's medical problems?”

“Several times.”

“Can you give us one instance?”

“Yes—about the time Joshua was admitted for tests at the hospital as an outpatient. She seemed overstressed. Upset. She complained about the pressure on her marriage. She said she was tired of trying to manage Joshua's medical problems.”

“Did she say that more than once?”

“Yes, quite a few times.”

“Did she seem desperate?”

“I would say so.”

“Did she get teary-eyed when she complained of being tired of handling Joshua's problems?”

“Yes. I believe she was crying.”

“Did she complain of having to take care of her son's health problems all by herself—with not enough help from her husband?”

“I recall her saying that her husband was busy with the farm—and that the burden on her, handling things alone, was too much.”

Harriet Bender rose slowly.

“Do you occasionally handle children who have suffered abuse at the hands of their parents?” she began.

“Unfortunately, I do.”

“And you have dealt with parents of pediatric patients—parents who have committed child abuse or neglect?”

“Sadly, that also is true.”

“Do you see any similarities between Mary Sue's emotional state and such parents?”

Will objected, expressing his disbelief that Bender would try to qualify Atkinson as a de facto expert in child abuse. But to his consternation, Judge Trainer seemed unmoved by the argument Will had advanced and calmly overruled the objection.

The nurse continued. “Yes, I would say that most of the abusive parents exhibit the same kind of frustration, despair, and exasperation as shown by Mary Sue. Those kinds of feelings often lead the unskilled parent into taking their frustrations out on the child.”

Bender, though she looked tired, seemed satisfied enough with those answers, and she sat down.

Against a strong temptation to do otherwise, Will decided to avoid any mention of Atkinson's discussion of Henry Pencup's death at the hospital banquet, where she and Mary Sue had been in the presence of Jason Bell Purdy. At least with this witness, that would be wandering in the wilderness. He needed instead to stay focused and controlled.

“Do you deal with pediatric patients—children—who have chronic health problems?”

“Quite a few.”

“And you work with the parents of such afflicted children?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Would you agree that the vast majority of parents of children with chronic serious health problems exhibit ‘frustration, despair, and exasperation' to the same degree that Mary Sue has?”

“I don't think that is a fair comparison.”

“But you are familiar with the nursing literature that indicates that caring for a chronically ill child places a tremendous emotional, physical, and financial drain on the average parent?”

“I do read the nursing journals—that is true.”

“If we assume that Joshua has MA—methylmalonic acidemia—would that qualify as a chronic disease?”

“From what I know about it, it would.”

“And Mary Sue would be expected to display the same kind of emotional fatigue that parents of other chronically ill children display?”

“Well,” the nurse responded, “that's an assumption—we don't know that Joshua has MA.”

“But he is now back in your hospital, is he not?”

“Yes.”

“He is?” the judge exclaimed, whirling toward Will.

“He was airlifted to the hospital at the directive of Mary Sue and her South Dakota doctor.”

“That is where she was—South Dakota?” the judge asked.

The attorney nodded.

“So,” Will continued, “Joshua is in your hospital, in your pediatric unit. Surely you know what the working diagnosis is, right?”

“We have the consulting report from Dr. Forrester…It was faxed to our unit—”

But before she could finish, Putnam was up, waving his arms to object. By that point, Bender seemed to have lapsed into fatigue and did not bother to rise to the occasion.

Judge Trainer cut to the chase. “Mr. Putnam, you called this witness—you opened the door to this area. And even if you hadn't, now that I know that the child is at the Delphi hospital, I certainly would have opened the door to this area of questioning myself. Please finish, Ms. Atkinson.”

“Dr. Forrester's credentials are impeccable. His report indicates MA for Joshua—that's our working diagnosis.”

Dorothy Atkinson was excused.

Now Will knew that the most important witness of the trial was about to be called.

But the judge looked at the big clock on the wall of the courtroom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it's almost noon. Let's break for lunch—till one-fifteen. Then we will take the testimony of Dr. Parker.”

The courtroom rose in a clatter of feet and chairs as the judge slipped into his chambers.

Will pressed his way through the crowd with files and notebooks under each arm. He jumped into his car and made it out to Denny's Log Cabin restaurant in time to beat the lunch crowd.

He ordered a steak sandwich and ginger ale while he made notes for his cross-examination of Dr. Parker and plotted out the argument he was planning to give at the close of the county's case.

The restaurant started filling up. Stanley Kennelworth trotted in with what appeared to be a client, smiling—until he locked gazes with Will. Then he quickly looked away.

In the noise of the crowd, Will was still grappling with his questions about Dr. Parker. And how Jason Purdy fit into the big picture. And he still had no idea about those last words of Henry Pencup—“insecure” and “unsign.” What on earth could they mean, if anything?

He was finishing up when the waitress whisked by and dropped the check on the table. After he put his credit card out, she scooped it up and was back in a second with the charge slip.

A few minutes later she came by again. “Ready for me to take this, hon?”

Will nodded, distracted by the tangle of loose ends in the case.

“Say, hon,” the waitress pointed out, “you forgot something.”

“What?”

“You forgot to sign the slip. If I tried to pass this off to my boss I'd be in a whole lot of trouble.”

Will nodded, took out his pen, and was just about to sign the slip—a contract authorizing his credit-card company to pay the sum of $7.43 to Denny's Log Cabin, which represented the value of a steak sandwich and a ginger ale. And by the terms of which Will agreed to pay that sum back to his credit-card company, with interest.

Then something opened up—a door of some kind.

Will stared at the unsigned slip.

Then he leaped to his feet and thrust it in front of the waitress.

“What if I were to
keep
this credit-card slip and not sign it—maybe even stick it in my pocket and throw it away at my house? And you agreed not to tell your boss, and I just walked out of here—what would that be?”

“That don't sound like too good an idea, hon,” she replied with a confused look on her face.

“What would that be?”

“Theft, I guess,” the waitress said sheepishly.

“Yes, it sure would be!” Will said exuberantly. “But—theft from whom?”

“My boss?” the waitress answered with a raised eyebrow.

Will was now talking excitedly under his breath, to no one in particular. “Why didn't I see it before? It wasn't ‘
insecure'
—it was ‘
unsecured,'
as in a multimillion-dollar
unsecured loan
from the Delphi bank, courtesy of poor Henry. But it never showed up on the records. Why not? Because, ladies and gentlemen, it was an
unsigned
loan—a phantom loan that didn't exist except in a private deal between Jason and Henry. Jason promised to return the several million he'd borrowed in a week or two, after he had quieted his angry subcontractors down—all in return for a huge under-the-table profit for Henry. Only one problem…”

By then, the waitress was looking around the room, wondering whether it might be wise to ask for help.

“But here's the problem… A week or two grows into several weeks, and then months, and the bank examiners start asking questions—‘Henry, your bank is short several million dollars—where is it?' Henry has a heart attack, and when he dies, Jason figures his problem is over because there's no documentation for the secret deal. But there is a problem…”

The waitress was still standing there, stunned by her customer's indistinct rambling and not knowing whether or not to just leave him to his own self-absorbed narrative.

“The problem is,” Will continued muttering to himself, “Henry wanted to tell someone the truth—anyone—because he was being accused of stealing the money himself. In truth he had made illegal loans—which is also criminal—but when you're a bank president I guess you still have your pride…”

By now the waitress was retreating toward the jukebox.

“So here is where Mary Sue comes in—of course! Jason thinks she's heard Henry spill the beans—he figures the word may leak out. He's got big political plans. Can't afford a scandal. Has to put Mary Sue away—stain her reputation—destroy her credibility. How to do it?”

The waitress was gradually edging farther away from her babbling customer.

“And then it happens. Mary Sue calls on him to help. She spoon-feeds him the actual evidence—the business about the brake fluid. Jason gets his staffer in his corporate headquarters—probably some poor girl he's promised a raise—to make the call to Social Services. Presto—child abuse.”

The waitress had now moved off to what seemed to be a safer distance—and was pointing to the still-unsigned credit-card slip in Will's hand.

“But one call to Social Services wouldn't do it. He needed something else. Proof of poisoning. Lab results…Dr. Parker…”

Finally realizing he still had not signed the slip, Will scribbled his signature on it and walked up to the waitress. Taking her hand in his, he gave her the piece of paper and then thanked her.

“I want to express my deepest appreciation for everything you've done for me…” he told the waitress sincerely.

“Listen, hon—I'm married, okay?”

“And I hope to be married too—soon,” the attorney replied.

Then he glanced at his watch, grabbed his files and notebooks, and ran out of the restaurant.

As Will drove out of the parking lot, the waitress was still staring in bewilderment at the door through which he had run.

60

D
R
. P
ARKER HAD RUN DOWN
his impressive list of credentials, to be followed by his testimony about Joshua's blood tests that had been performed at the Delphi hospital.

Prefacing these remarks, he declared firmly, “I am absolutely certain about the validity of my findings—”