Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction (13 page)

“I’ve got to make a phone call,” I lie, fleeing to my office.

“I’ll tell you later.”

Back in my office, I pick up Jason’s card and marvel at the human animal’s capacity for self-deception. Have I been kidding myself about Chet? Like more than a few successful lawyers, he has a reputation for doing whatever it takes to win a case. But maybe he is too near the end to care. Death is supposedly good for concentrating one’s mind. In his case, however, it seems to be having the opposite effect. When I get him on the phone, he professes not to be surprised that Shane hasn’t told him everything.

“Now that we’re coming down the home stretch,” he says, his voice calm, even a little flat, “Shane’s having to admit to himself that Leigh probably killed her husband. Memories, don’t you find, always improve dramatically the last couple of weeks before a trial? He’s only human. If it were my daughter, I’d forget a few things myself.”

Though my own thoughts aren’t radically different, I am frustrated by his failure to react more strongly to the information I’ve given him.

“You realize, of course, that Shane had as much reason to kill Wallace as Leigh did?” I regurgitate Dan’s theory without assigning him credit.

In a slightly patronizing tone, Chet responds, “So you think Pastor Norman decided on a little frontier justice after he and An had their chat?”

Irritated by his manner but beginning to feel foolish, I push my feet against the edge of my desk and practically ram my chair through the wall. I know this theory is farfetched, but what else do we have? A jury won’t acquit Leigh because she is a preacher’s daughter.

“All I’m doing is suggesting that you check his alibi,” I say as evenly as possible.

“You probably already have.”

Chet answers quickly, but without any inflection, “He was at the church.”

I wonder how much medication he is taking. His voice reminds me of mental patients I have represented.

No affect. Maybe he is just trying to calm me down.

You don’t yell at an excited child to get him quiet.

“I

assume he can prove that,” I say, knowing how strident I sound.

“Shane Norman is not a murderer,” Chet replies, his voice firm for the first time.

“Surely you’ve figured that out.”

Every instinct I have about this case agrees with him, but lawyers are supposed to be more than fortune tellers.

“This isn’t “What’s My Line?” ” I yelp, my patience running out.

“Either he’s got a solid alibi or he doesn’t. Let me check it out, okay? I’ll …”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Chet says, cutting me off.

“You’ll embarrass the hell out of me if you go charging up there. I’ll look into it again.”

I can’t believe what I am hearing. When has Bracken ever worried about being embarrassed? One of the reasons he’s been so successful is that he’s never had the slightest qualms about whose cage he’s had to rattle in order to defend a client. If he is worried about how Norman is going to view this, he has no business trying to represent his daughter. I feel my sense of deference drying up in a hurry.

“That’s fine with me, but don’t you think you ought to tell Norman how sick you are?” I ask, deliberately baiting him.

“I’d want to know if I were the client.”

“I’m all right,” he says abruptly.

“Do me a favor, okay? Let’s not get too carried away. Just because we don’t have rabbits popping up out of a hat doesn’t mean you have to feel you’ve got to stage a mutiny. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you’re still the understudy. If you can’t live with that, I’ll get somebody else.”

Chastened by his tone, I back off. Both Sarah and Rainey tell me that I have a tendency to overreact. Patience, it is pointed out, isn’t one of my virtues. I remind myself that Bracken knows a hell of a lot more about this business than I do. If I were handling this case by myself, with only two weeks to the trial, I’d be running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I have forgotten how cool Bracken can be under pressure. If I could shut up, I might learn something.

“I’m sorry,” I say, hoping I sound appropriately meek.

“It’s just that I kind of feel like we’re out on a sailboat on a hot day waiting for a breeze, and about out of drinking water.”

“Well, second-guessing me at every opportunity,” Chet mutters, “isn’t going to make that feeling go away.”

He suggests that in the next couple of days I reinterview the witnesses who saw Leigh on the day of the murder and see if he and his investigator have missed anything, then meet him on Wednesday afternoon at the crime scene. Mollified, I hang up, wondering how close I came to blowing it. Probably not very. Aggressiveness is not a sin in Chet’s book. At least it didn’t used to be.

Though I feel more comfortable, I can’t shake the sense that something is out of kilter. Not only does there seem to be no movement in this case, I can’t see a theory developing that will generate any forward motion down the line. I am like a seminarian who keeps having heretical thoughts. My mind keeps drifting back to Shane Norman. Could Chet be protecting him some how? It makes no sense that he would, but still I wonder I’d like to free-lance a little in this case, but I don’t dare. If Chet got even a whiff of what I was doing, I’d be gone quicker than a wad of spit on the Fourth of July. So what is going on with Chet? It could be that the painkillers are slowing him down, or maybe he’s so damn preoccupied with dying that he isn’t thinking straight. For most lawyers that wouldn’t be an unreasonable explanation, certainly not for me. However, the mystique of Chet Bracken is such that I expect him to shrug off a little thing like death. Maybe I’m the one with the problem.

As I am about to leave for the day, Julia buzzes me.

“I forgot to tell you,” she says, “that Mr. Blessing called while you were at lunch. He said to tell you he’s on the seventh floor at St. Thomas. He’ll come see you when he gets out” Blessing? I rub my eyes and finally remember: the guy whose hair blew off and ran down the street.

“That’s the psycho ward.”

“He’s nutty as a fruitcake,” Julia says regretfully.

“Such a good-looking guy, too. There’s always some thing wrong with men.”

“How’d he sound?”

“Crying like a baby. He said not to come by.”

“Thanks, Julia,” I say and hang up. Poor guy. I turn off the light in my office, wondering if a normal person would lose it this badly because his wig blew off. I head for the elevators. Who is normal? Nobody I know.

Mr. Hector Tyndall may be in his early seventies, but I’m not sure I’d want to go one on one with him in any athletic contest. Besides having less of a gut and a firmer handshake that I do, in his den, where we are sitting, are literally dozens of athletic trophies in a number of sports dating back from over fifty years ago to almost the present: swimming, track, siding, tennis, golf, even pistol shooting. Not a team player, this old geezer, completely bald and split-high like a center on a basketball team, has enough metal in this room to start his own mint.

“I came in third in the hundred-yard dash in the whole country in my age group five years ago,” he brags.

I sip at the glass of bottled water he has offered me (“The real secret to a healthy body is keeping the bowels open I drink eight full glasses of water a day just like they tell you, and that keeps things moving on through”). After talking to church ladies all morning, I find Tyndall a breath of fresh air. Even if his story about seeing Leigh drive by in the direction of her house the morning of the murder at nine-thirty is un shakable, I’d rather waste my time with him than the two ladies who swear they didn’t see or talk to Leigh between nine and eleven-thirty. I thought they were going to cry when I questioned them. Tyndall is dogmatic about what he saw, but at least he’s interesting. He’s a former distance man in high school, and I have to respect the guy. After a sluggish winter I can’t run the length of a football field now without puffing.

“I didn’t know they had competition in that age bracket.”

Tyndall tips back his glass.

“That’s what’s great about this country,” he says.

“If you have the money to travel, you can find someone to compete against your whole life.”

Not a philosophy to warm the heart, but along with his water, it obviously has kept him going.

“How can you be so sure about the time Leigh drove past?” I ask, leaning back in the recliner. Along the way, Tyndall has made some money. Not only is this neighborhood rich, Tyndall’s home is lovely. Though he is on the side of the street away from the view of the Arkansas River, he does have a swimming pool, and I figure his house must be in the half-million-dollar range.

“Because I jog the same time every day,” he says, his pale blue eyes staring at me without hostility. Talking to lawyers isn’t everybody’s idea of fun. The old ladies were defensive and upset by my questioning; Tyndall seems to enjoy it. According to Chet, he is a widower;

I wonder if he gets lonely.

“I stretch out before and after. Once I hurt my arch and couldn’t run for three months. I’ve stretched out ever since. Leigh and Art lived east of here a few doors down. I remember that day, because it was odd she didn’t wave, and she was always friendly, even to an old fart like me. I’ll be honest. A woman that good-looking you look forward to seeing even at my age. I didn’t think anything of it until the cops asked if I had seen anybody drive by that morning. Since I spend my time in here or out back by the pool, I didn’t see anybody but her that morning. I was in the front, cooling down from my run, and that’s what I told ‘em.”

There is no moving this bunch. Even without her father’s story, it is clear Leigh is lying her ass off by claiming that she was at the church between nine and eleven-thirty.

“Did you know Art?”

“Hardly at all,” Tyndall says.

“He jogged some in the afternoons. I saw him in church occasionally.”

“No kidding,” I say, dumbfounded by the number of people who attend Christian Life. Tyndall doesn’t seem the type, but then neither does Chet Bracken or Rainey.

“I didn’t realize you were a member.”

Tyndall grins, showing a set of dingy teeth that look to be his.

“They take old people.”

Until recently, that’s mostly who I figured went to church. I wonder if he knows any gossip, but to his credit, he discourages me by saying he really doesn’t know much about anyone there except a group he sees regularly, which I take to be his “family.” I thank him and leave, but not before giving him a card and asking him to call me if he happens to remember anything else about that morning. He flips it on the table beside his chair as if I were not the first person to make this request, but to get rid of me he says he will.

The only people left for me to interview are the couple next door to the Wallace house, and I park the car in front of the empty home, feeling I’m wasting my time. I’m not going to find anything new. Still, if Chet gets worse and I have to try this case, it won’t have hurt me any to have talked to the witnesses.

According to the statement they gave to the police, Ann and Bobby Wheeler overheard an argument between Art and Leigh the night before Art was killed, but it doesn’t seem like much to me. (My Rosa, true to her Latin temperament, could sound emotional just talking about taking out the garbage.) True, the subject matter was Shane Norman. Supposedly, they heard Leigh yell at Art as they were getting out of the car that she was “sick of him bad-mouthing her father.” Art had said something unintelligible while slamming the door but ended the exchange when both looked up and saw they were being watched.

On this pleasant afternoon, I am met at the door by an attractive redhead in her early thirties wearing sandals and an aqua jumper over a flowered jersey. I have called ahead, and she invites me in as if I were a neighbor down the street instead of somebody who conceivably could be grilling her on cross-examination. Her husband, a tall, distinguished-looking man who could pose as a male model, is a little cool, but the woman offers me a drink, which I regretfully decline. We sit in their living room, which has more floor space than my entire house. I sometimes forget how much money there is in Blackwell County. People who have it don’t take out ads on TV. They have talked to diet’s investigator already, and the husband especially seems to regard my visit as an unnecessary intrusion, which it probably is.

“We didn’t hear much,” the husband volunteers.

“I’m not sure it was even a fight.”

This is good news, and I dutifully make some notes.

mrs. Wheeler adds, “I never heard them argue before.”

These aren’t the kind of people who want their names in the paper except on the society pages. Who knows what they’ll say at the trial, but as long as I’m here, I might as well see what I can get out of them. I ask Ann Wheeler, “How well did you know her?”

This is the right person and question to ask.

“A lot better than my husband did,” mrs. Wheeler says, daring him to shush her.

“We became friends. Leigh was about as sweet as you could get. She sometimes came over for coffee in the mornings. Art would get jealous if she was gone an hour. He liked her right under his thumb.”

The husband places a hand on his wife’s knee as if to restrain her. I pretend not to notice.

“How’d she react to it?”

Ignoring her mate, mrs. Wheeler leans forward and says, “I think she was so used to it that it didn’t bother her; apparently her father had treated her the same way.

Leigh didn’t have it in her to rebel like she said her sisters had. I think unconsciously she married Art hoping he’d rescue her from her father. Actually, Art probably was a lot like him. To hear her describe her father, and then listen to her talk about her marriage. Art and her father could be the same man. It was almost spooky.”

Crowding her on the long couch, Mr. Wheeler whispers urgently in his wife’s ear, but she shakes her head.

“I’ve tried to talk to Leigh a half-dozen times since all this happened, but it’s like she’s been kidnapped. I didn’t say much to the police or your investigator right afterward, because I didn’t want to get involved, but this just isn’t right. Leigh couldn’t have killed Art. She just couldn’t get that angry at anybody. There was a lot of emotion in her, but it was completely repressed. Besides, she worshiped Art like he was some kind of god.