Mislaid (22 page)

De facto, the pretrial hearings were exclusive affairs, conducted over afternoon cocktails at the country club. As an experienced criminal defense attorney with a high caseload, Byrdie’s
lawyer led with a motion to dismiss. “I don’t have time for a trial, but I can’t negotiate with a mandatory minimum sentence,” he said.

“Well, I can’t dismiss out of hand,” the judge replied. “It’s bad enough that I’m trying it. Calling it off would be blatant nepotism. The press would have my ass in a sling.”

“I don’t want to go to trial. It’s too big a risk.”

“But you said it yourself. I got zero latitude.”

“A year and a day suspended and he retains his civil rights?”

“Who are you working for, anyway?” the judge asked. “Do I have to explain myself?”

“You see a chance?”

“Look. You’re forgetting that a different boy confessed. Now, you can’t talk about that in court, but you and me know it. And on the other side, what’s the prosecution got? Some pieces of paper and a little high yellow girl. That’s what indicted Byrdie. How hard would it be to stop her from testifying? And if she does get on the stand, who’s saying she didn’t steal that LSD from the other boy, or sleep with him for it? Go to trial! Ask her about it. There won’t be a trial to speak of, not one worthy of mention.”

“To me, that sounds too much like a sensational case all over the papers.”

“So I’ll put a gag order on it. I’ll venue this in a little courtroom with, I don’t know, maybe six spots for the public? We’ll get a few friends in there early on, and there won’t be room for any gentlemen of the press. The only question mark is can we trust Lee and Trip to get up that early in the morning.” He drained his third martini.

Soon after that, the prosecutor called a press conference to present the results of the Thetan House sting to the waiting world.

He worked hard to prepare his talk. It was a tour de force of dialectics in which hundreds of task force members contributed
details to a picture that assembled itself in his mind alone, so that all the credit was his. The villain: R. Byrd Fleming, wealthy degenerate. The prosecutor knew Byrdie didn’t have money. Byrdie
was
money. He was “old money,” and the prosecutor was the kind of suburbanite whose wife blows his salary hunting a quarter horse sidesaddle in a blue veil and chirps (Lee’s term for a fake riding habit, chaps plus skirt—he was not a famous poet for nothing!). Byrdie was money incarnate, and the prosecutor looked up to him as slightly glamorous and decadent in spite of himself. That’s what he thought the First Families of Virginia were: aristocrats. Not a passel of redneck landlords who think their serfs have cooties. He expected the reporters covering the case to feel as he did, since at that time it was still mostly rich people who owned newspapers.

But the press conference was canceled at the last minute. The gag order came through, and he had to stand up in front of the reporters and say the case had been affected by unanticipated developments. He looked helpless and unhappy and refused further comment.

During the winter, Karen saw Byrdie a couple of times on campus. She glanced at him and thought, Asshole! It made her feel brave.

Byrdie saw Karen only once. She was kicking a vending machine that refused to turn loose the bottommost soda she’d just paid for. He thought, I should go give her thirty-five cents now. Then he thought, No contact with the witness. Could be construed as pressuring. Plenty of time for that later.

Byrdie saw Temple several times—Temple was always conspicuous—and thought, When this all blows over, I will try to get that jacket back.

Temple saw Karen every day and Byrdie not at all. He had other worries. While pretending to study in the library, he had
struck up an acquaintanceship with a zaftig junior girl who clearly thought he was very sweet. She was majoring in international relations and learning Chinese, a language she claimed had no verb tenses. She seemed sincerely perturbed that he would waste his time on Russian. “Russia is doomed to irrelevance. The Soviet Union is breaking up. God, Temple, why are you doing this to yourself?” He went to see his adviser and came back unhappy. Jefferson scholars were not supposed to struggle this way. Indecision, okay, but existential crises? Where was the accomplished kid they’d recruited? Did he need a semester off?

Karen remarked that he had started learning Russian because of a girl, and now he wanted to switch to Chinese because of a girl. “You’re like in Plato’s symposium,” she said. “You fall in love with any fat, ugly person who knows more than you do.”

“Plato was justifying pederasty,” Temple said. “You should read Xenophon’s symposium. That’ll open your eyes.”

“Give me a break, Mister Know-It-All,” Karen said.

“I’m the opposite of Plato,” Temple insisted. “If Plato was right, I’d be craving sex with my Russian professor. Maybe it’s not the worst idea. I need an A.”

Karen lay back on the bed, wriggling and caressing her body, and moaned, “Comrade Moody,
nyet
!
Nyet! Pravda!
Take A! I must give you A!”

He lay down on top of her. “My blond feeble goosefat whore,” he sighed.

“Don’t you James Joyce me!” she said. But it was too late.

The trial was set to start on the eighth of March. The weather was pretty and sunny, with soft carpets of crocus blooming everywhere.

Jury selection was brisk and efficient. Finding jurors sympathetic to handsome white students is not rocket science. Almost
no one but middle-class retirees came to jury duty anyway. The defense felt safe on that score.

For the CA it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. White jurors might favor Byrdie, but they were also more likely to disapprove of drugs. His case hinged on how Karen presented herself. The jurors would regard drug use by an upper-class boy as sowing wild oats. Seeing that the wild oats had been sown on a black girl who looked white and too young would shake their faith in Byrdie’s probity. He felt they would believe Karen’s testimony no matter what. All the physical evidence was on her side: the notes, the drugs. So the more pathetic she came across, the better for the prosecution. Her unfitness would rub off on Byrdie. The jurors would send him to jail to teach him to pick on someone his own size.

The defense was pursuing the same strategy, while expecting a different outcome. If Karen was not credible, the prosecution had no case. So the strategy of the defense team, including the judge, was to make her nervous.

The venue was a tiny courtroom where the judge and jury took up nearly half the space. It was usually used for things like traffic infractions and divorce decrees. It was not the judge’s usual circuit court, but he had insisted on a small room to reduce threats to security. The courthouse had no guards at the outside doors. Reporters and hostile frat boys were wandering around at random. Byrdie’s brothers were out in force to support him, and other frats had joined the cause in solidarity. Hip flasks were making the rounds. The bailiff told Karen gently that the judge would rather violate protocol than have her get “lynched,” so he brought her in after the courtroom filled and sat her down by the door. She hunched there looking miserable.

Opposite the judge sat the lawyers, the court reporter, Byrdie, Lee, Trip, a few of Byrdie’s frat brothers to pack the house, the
bailiff, and Karen. The room was wider than it was deep. Everyone in it was wearing a suit, except Karen in a gray rayon dress with a white lace collar. It was brand new and too large. It made her look like a thirteen-year-old Mennonite.

Outside in the hallway, the press, fraternity brothers, and assorted curious spectators were lurking with Meg, Dee, and Temple, who had arrived much too late to get inside.

“Why’s the docket say
Virginia v. Fleming
?” Meg asked.

“I guess the frat boy’s last name is Fleming,” Temple said.

“Tell me what he looks like,” she said, rather unsteadily.

“Like imagine Paul Newman in a Cheech and Chong movie. He’s almost as tall as I am”—a fact Temple could readily verify, since he was wearing Byrdie’s clothes. Meg pulled her watch cap low over her brow. Raising her sunglasses, she stepped up to the double doors and applied her eye to the very narrow gap between them. She could see the back of Karen’s head. She maneuvered and contorted until a security guard asked her to step back. She felt a little ill. But she couldn’t run away from Karen. She clutched Temple’s sleeve.

Inside, the frat brothers glared at Karen evilly. Mike whispered “Bitch.”

Irritated by the noise, Lee turned to get a look at the star witness. And that was that. He stood up and said, “Your Honor, I request a recess.”

The judge said, “Mr. Fleming, let me remind you that you can fake being an attorney in a letter to the IRS, but here in a court of law you need to have passed the bar. So sit down, before I cite you in contempt.”

Lee sat down and whispered urgently, “Byrdie.”

Byrdie leaned toward him, and Lee pulled out his wallet. Hidden deep inside it under the tattered business cards of plumbers
through the ages was a family portrait snapshot from 1975. He pointed at the little girl.

“Holy shit,” Byrdie said. He stood up and said, “Your Honor, we have a holy shit situation.”

“Sit down! You’re on trial!”

Byrdie sat down. The formalities began. The charges were read. They were very serious. Byrdie didn’t seem to be listening. He swayed and seemed on the verge of leaping up, like he was having an out-of-body experience and fixing to levitate.

Lee sat next to him, looking at the picture, still as a statue. And then, because the room was so small he could almost reach out and touch her anyway, he turned around and handed it to Karen.

Karen looked at it for a second, drew it close to her face, and said “Oh.” She let it fall to her lap and her mouth remained a little round O. She pressed her hands against her cheeks. Then she turned around and yelled “Mom!”

The CA paused in his opening statement and the door to the hallway began to rattle.

“This is a little much,” the judge said. “Don’t make me use my gavel.”

Karen leaped to her feet and grabbed the door handle. She was about to run out, but the bailiff held both her arms.

“Don’t you restrain her,” Byrdie’s lawyer said. “She’s not on trial here.” The bailiff let her go and she opened the door.

“She’s my witness!” the CA said. The bailiff grabbed her arm and shoved the door shut.

“Miss Brown, please, could you tell us what you want?” the judge asked.

Karen was blotchy, with tears on the tip of her nose. She pointed at Lee and screamed “Mom!”

“Is Mom here?” Byrdie said excitedly, leaning toward her.

“Are you feeling ill, Miss Brown?” the judge asked.

“I need to leave, right now!” Karen said.

The door rattled.

“You need your mother to come in here?”

A flash of intellection hit Karen. She realized that whatever was going on, it might be the sort of thing policemen and courthouses only complicate. She said, “No, thanks.”

At this point Meg had done the math.
Virginia v. Fleming,
her self-sufficient child screaming for her. She slipped away from the door and down the hall. She needed time to think.

“Have her mother come in,” the judge said. The door opened and Dee squeezed into the room. The bailiff struggled to force the door shut behind her. “You’re her mother?” he asked.

“I’m her aunt,” Dee said. “It’s hot in here! Karen, baby, you all right?”

“I’m just fine,” Karen said, sitting down. “Come sit with me.” She patted her own chair.

“If I could have a minute alone with you,” Lee said to the judge, “that would be really helpful.”

“That would be entirely out of order,” the judge said, glancing at the CA.

“Then fuck it. This girl is my daughter and I’ve been looking for her for thirteen years. Her mother ran off with her, and there’s a warrant for her arrest, and she’s out there in your hallway.”

The judge was silent, then said, “How do you know that’s your daughter? She was six.”

“She was three. But, Mickey, sweetheart, you know that’s your mom in the picture.”

Karen nodded and cried.

Byrdie stepped over the back of his chair and squeezed in between her and Dee, which was not easy. He hugged her and
patted her head. Karen looked up at him, sobbing, and Byrdie began to cry tears of joy. Lee wept silently. Trip’s eyes were moist. The jury was rapt. They had expected nothing like this.

Even the judge was moved and said, “Well, is this any way to reunite a family?” He shooed the jurors toward their door and glared at the frat boys and the prosecution. “Can we get these people some privacy?”

“Hey,” Byrdie called out, looking up. “Before we get rid of them, can we go back to my trial for a second? Because now I know why I carried her all the way to Dabney and left her that note. I didn’t even go through her pockets! If I had, I would have found the drugs that dweeb put in there and none of this would have happened!” He paused to digest his own statement, forced to admit its incompatibility with the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution. “So now I’m glad—so glad—” Byrdie was succumbing to the sentimentality that permeated the room like a fog. “You know, I didn’t tell you guys, but I saved her from being, you know . . .” He looked at his frat brothers meaningfully. “I can prove it. I still have her T-shirt where you dickwads wrote ‘Sex Receptacle.’”

He didn’t mention the swastika, not thinking it germane to the case, or that the T-shirt fit him, being an old undershirt of Temple’s, and that he’d worn it several times since to masturbate.

Through her tears, Karen said to Lee, “Could you please forgive my mom? If you don’t, she’ll run away to Chihuahua.”

He said, “I hereby drop the charges.”

Karen punched Dee’s arm and said, “Go make Temple catch Mom before she gets in the car!”

Dee tried to do as Karen suggested, but when the bailiff cracked the door, the population of the hallway surged in, with Temple in the lead. He saw Karen cuddling with the Thetan hegemon, and Lee and Trip hovering over them. He pulled his
mother out into the hallway to hear what he felt must be an interesting explanation.