Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction (11 page)

I watch Norman’s face as he fights for control of his emotions. I wish Leigh had showed herself capable of having them. I say what I’m thinking.

“You’re convinced Leigh shot him, aren’t you?”

Norman stands up from his chair and goes over to the window.

“I know she’s lying because I called her at her house that morning about ten. Art answered the phone and said she was at the church, but I heard her voice in the background.”

I suck on the lemon drop in my mouth while Norman gazes out the window. I wonder if he, like Dan, is mentally undressing the women in the Adcock Building.

Surely not. Chet hadn’t told me Norman called Leigh. I wonder if he even knew. “Tell me what you know about Wallace,” I encourage him.

“He sounds like he got his hooks pretty good into Leigh.”

Norman turns from the window and comes back to his seat.

“If you had known my daughter before she met Art, you would understand how different she is.”

For the next fifteen minutes he paints a picture of Leigh that is very sympathetic to somebody who thinks his own daughter is wonderful. From almost the moment Leigh was born, she was a “daddy’s girl.” After two girls (Alicia and Mary Patricia, now married and living out of state). Pearl was hoping for a boy, and, in truth, so was he; but when Leigh was born, he somehow bonded with her in a way he hadn’t with his two older daughters. Maybe it was because Pearl paid her less attention, or that Leigh was more an extrovert like him, but whatever the reason, his youngest daughter took to Christian Life like nobody else.

“Preachers’ kids can be a pain in the ass….” (the word “ass” sounds queer coming from Norman), and Alicia and Mary Patricia rebelled in many little ways, but Leigh never did. As far as he knew, Alicia doesn’t attend any church, and Mary Patricia, he says, his face clouded with disapproval, has become a Unitarian or something absurd like that. Until she married Wallace, Leigh was a delight. Every spare minute was spent at Christian Life. She had been to Thailand, Mexico, Haiti, Taiwan, and El Salvador with him and loved every minute of it.

“I tried to make her feel guilty about how she separated herself from us,” he says without apology, “but nothing worked. She was obsessed with him.”

It occurs to me that Norman’s parenting techniques are more sophisticated than my own. The difference is that he thinks he is entirely correct. Sarah accuses me of manipulating her if I even look at her hard.

“How did she meet Wallace?” I ask, watching the time. Knowing how much I like to talk about Sarah, I try to move him along. We could be here all morning and never get her out of college. It is easy for me to identify with Norman.

He worries as much as I do. I probably bore people talking about Sarah. Strip away the religious gloss, and he and I have a lot in common.

At the mention of his dead son-in-law’s name, Norman frowns.

“I sent Leigh to Harding to keep her away from men like Art, and he found her anyway.”

I nod, resisting my desire for a third lemon drop.

“How?” I ask, curious. Located in a small town north of Blackwell County, Harding is a strict Church of Christ school with as many rules as the game of bridge.

Norman sighs and crosses his legs.

“Art was originally from Crossett. He had been invited by a friend who taught in the business school to deliver a couple of lectures on opportunities in international business and saw Leigh in the student center. He didn’t stop pursuing her until they were married a year after she graduated, and, believe me, that took some doing. The man quit a successful career with Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and started his own business down here.”

I lean back in my chair, intrigued by this story. Crossett, a mill town in southern Arkansas that owes its soul to the Georgia Pacific company, is a long way from the Big Cave.

“I take it Art began coming to Christian Life.”

“Religiously,” Norman says, without a trace of irony.

“I had gotten Leigh a job with the church after her graduation, and he joined as soon as he moved back to Arkansas. What a con artist! Within a month after the wedding, he had stopped all but minimal Sunday attendance and within three months so had Leigh.”

There is a mixture of anger and sadness in Norman’s voice as it trails off.

“Art fooled me as badly as he did Leigh. The only problem I had with him was the age difference, and it didn’t bother me the way it bothered her mother. The man could charm the pants off a snake though, and I was convinced he was sincere. If he hadn’t been killed, I mink he would have had Leigh moved to New York inside another six months.”

I rub my tongue over my sugar-coated teeth, marveling at Wallace’s persistence. When he was killed, they hadn’t been married quite a year.

“Do you know of any enemies,” I ask, realizing for the first time I’m talking to one, “that Wallace could have had?”

Norman gives me a bleak smile.

“Other than myself, you mean?” He laughs, but the sound coming from his throat is not a merry one.

“He could have had a million.

Who knows? He could have been running drugs into the country with all the overseas contacts he had.”

I smile to take the sting out of my words.

“So could you.” I sit up straight in my chair and feel my back pro test. How do people stand surgery on their spines? It hurts mine just to sit erect.

“My point is,” I say quickly, “we’ve got to come up with something specific if Leigh’s to have a chance. Self-defense would be okay, but there was no sign of a struggle, and besides, she already gave the cops and everyone else a different story.

I suspect you probably made some calls about Art before he married your daughter. What did people say about him?”

Norman licks his lips. He has refused my offer of coffee or a soft drink, so if he wants something, he’ll have to ask.

“That he was ethical, smart, a whiz at numbers,” Norman admits.

“I was told by one guy Art Wallace had a great future at Chase.”

I pull our investigator’s report from its envelope.

Wallace was areal chamber of commerce poster boy.

Sure, he made bad loans, but back then Chase was practically begging the Third World to take their money. At any rate, there is no evidence that some foreign operative tracked him to Blackwell County and snuffed him because at some point Chase wanted its money back.

My recollection is they finally said to hell with it and wrote off billions.

“Do the police know you called Leigh around ten that morning?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light. Talk about the proverbial nail in your coffin.

“You said you heard her in the background. Was she crying, laughing, or what? Maybe it wasn’t Leigh.”

Norman seems to be staring at my diplomas as he considers my questions. I feel selfconscious, since I have been out of law school less than five years.

Bracken must have hyped me. Finally, he says, “It was Leigh. I’d know her voice anywhere. She has this giggle when she’s excited …”

His voice dies, and I guess aloud what I’ve suspected.

“You think she was in bed with him?” My question sounds crude. I know how I would feel. This guy is her father, and a Holy Roller at that. Your child’s sexuality is taboo, but surely he has thought the same thing: that Leigh went home to get it on and somehow things turned bad. If this were Sarah, I wouldn’t want to be thinking about it either. Yet, the cops found nothing: no drugs, no gun, no weirdness of any kind. Still, she could have put anything she didn’t want the cops to see in the car and dropped it off somewhere on the way to Christian Life when she went back at eleven-thirty. If Leigh did kill her husband, though, why was she giggling an hour before his death? Norman must think this information will incriminate her. It might save her life.

“She obviously was close by,” Norman says finally.

“It was the kind of laugh she had when she was caught being bad as a child. I’ve confronted her, but she denies she was there. It’s ridiculous for her to say that!” He adds, “I haven’t lied to the police about this. They just didn’t ask the right question.”

I have a mental picture of Leigh, and it is a hot one.

She and Art making it to beat the band, when the old man calls. She might have been blowing him while he was talking to her father, and this prompted the hysteria. (My mind goes back to phone calls Rosa and I received when we were having sex. Coitus interruptus we called it. Hi, what’s going on? My husband is eating me, but aside from that, nothing much.) Poor Shane. He can’t even pretend his daughter isn’t lying. Would I lie to protect Sarah from a murder charge? Surely so. But Bracken says Norman doesn’t do things that way.

“Why were you calling her?” I ask, trying to shake the idea of Leigh’s naked body from my mind.

Norman’s face flushes.

“I was checking up on her.

She had promised to come hear the missionary from Guatemala we had been supporting, and I didn’t see her Acura in its usual parking place when I was coming from one of our morning Bible study classes, so, damn it, I called her.”

I lean back in my chair and study the lock on the main drawer in my desk. Norman is obviously embarrassed he is having to acknowledge he harassed his daughter, and I give him a moment to compose himself.

I can imagine myself doing the same thing. It must have been maddening to watch her slip away from him.

“What did you say to him after you heard Leigh’s voice?”

Norman sighs and ducks his head like a ten-year-old.

“I called him a son of a bitch. He just laughed and hung up.”

Norman is such an obvious murder suspect I want to laugh out loud. Why didn’t Chet clue me in? Norman must have an ironclad alibi. Surely Chet has checked it out. I push my drawer in and out. It catches on all the junk I have crammed into it.

“What could have happened afterward,” I propose, “is that Leigh felt guilty and they had an argument, and he made fun of you and Christian Life, and she shot him. Is that possible?”

Norman shifts uneasily in the chair as if his bladder is sending him signals of distress. He swallows with some difficulty.

“It’s possible,” he agrees.

“Have you told diet this?” I ask, knowing he hasn’t.

Damn clients. They hire you to help them and then never tell you the truth.

Norman wags his head.

“I kept hoping someone would verify her story, and either Chet hasn’t been around much or I haven’t been around.”

Weak but understandable. With this information, Nor man thinks he has been holding the key to the prison door. Now that time is running out, he is finally spilling his guts. But why tell me instead of Chet? I wonder if he is beginning to lose confidence in Chet. I am. Pissed, I lecture him, “There’s no way we can help you and Leigh if you don’t tell us the whole story, no matter how bad it makes either of you look. Do you under stand that?”

Norman gives me a sickly smile. He is not used to being talked to like this, but he takes it.

“Of course you’re right,” he says, clearing his throat.

“Tell me something. Is Chet all right? He said he’s in remission, but he looks bad to me.”

I have just preached a sermon on honesty, but it doesn’t work both ways.

“I guess he’s okay,” I say breezily.

“He hasn’t complained to me.”

Norman looks behind me at my diplomas.

“He says you’re really good.”

I shrug, but inwardly I am ridiculously pleased.

Bracken’s good opinion is worth a lot. Yet he couldn’t very well say that he had hired a guy who, outside of a couple of cases, hadn’t particularly distinguished him self. Also, I doubt if he told Norman I was at least his third choice. There is some dishonesty here, but this is no time for true confessions.

“We’re only as good as our last case,” I say, trying to seem modest. Actually, I don’t believe this. If you only take die easy ones, your “won and lost” record is meaningless. At the Public Defender’s we measured our success by how much time our clients actually did in comparison with what they could have pulled when they were originally charged.

Only if you are a Chet Bracken does it make sense to look at your record of outright acquittals or dismissals.

The problem with this case is that the Chet Bracken of six months ago doesn’t exist any longer. How could Chet not have gotten from Norman that he called Leigh the morning of her husband’s death? He must really be slipping fast. What else don’t I know about this case?

We talk a few more minutes, but I do not get anything else useful. I walk Norman to the elevators, realizing he hasn’t mentioned his wife even once, and head for Dan’s office. Poor guy. I have to feel something for him, too. If Pearl truly has been a hooch hound their entire married life, no wonder he’s been so strict with the girls. Keep ‘em down on the farm as long as possible.

Dan is on the phone but hangs up as I come in.

“I’m thinking of having liposuction,” he says, “but it costs a fortune. I should have become a doctor. You don’t really believe that crap about doctors asking their nurses to be present when they examine their female patients?”

I close his door and take a seat. Dan’s office is gross.

The air smells like the alley behind the Layman Building that receives the exhaust fumes from a Chinese restaurant that has just opened on the first floor. Boxes, files, law reviews, bar association magazines, books, and food compete for space in Dan’s office on a no-holds-barred basis. My files are admittedly disorganized, but anything that enters Dan’s office has less chance of being found than a ship sailing into the Bermuda Triangle.

“You’re not serious about liposuction?”

I ask, somewhat alarmed. Dying is the only way Dan is going to lose weight, and even that might not do it.

He’s joked he wants to be buried with a box of Hostess cupcakes and a case of root beer.

“They say the pain is terrible,” Dan says gloomily.

“Jesus, I can’t even stand to have Brenda cut my toenails.”

The thought of Dan’s prissy society wife agreeing to perform such a mundane task makes me smile.

“Get this,” I tell him.

“Bracken hasn’t told Norman that he’s about to croak.”