Primal Fear (21 page)

“Who was lucky enough to get you, Em?”

“Joe Stewart. Do you remember him? He graduated two years ahead of you.”

“Tall guy. On the wrestling team, wasn’t he?”

“Bowling.”

“Oh, right.”

“How about you?”

“Never got around to it. I wouldn’t want to wish me on anybody.”

She cocked her head slightly to one side and her face softened into a memory smile.

“Don’t say that,” she said. “It broke my heart when you left. I still think about you. You know how it is, somebody will bring something up, it shakes up my memories.”

“I think about you, too.”

She stopped for a moment, embarrassed suddenly by how quickly the conversation had become personal. “I’m sorry about Ma Cat,” she said. “She really fought hard, Marty. You would have been proud of her.”

“I am proud of her.”

“Good. It won’t be much longer. I’ll be right outside at the nurse’s station.”

“Thanks.”

An hour passed. He kept talking, hoping he would stir a moment of recognition from her. And then there was an almost imperceptible pressure as she tried to squeeze his hand.

“Can you hear me, Ma Cat?” he asked softly. “I love you, Ma.” He kissed the back of her fragile hand, rubbed it softly against his cheek. “Hear me, Ma? I love you.”

The pressure loosened and her hand relaxed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

When it was over and they had taken her away he sat in the room for a long while, watching them strip the bed and move the equipment out. Emily appeared in the doorway.

“I’m off duty,” she said. “Want to go over to Sandy’s and get some breakfast?”

“Sounds like a great idea.”

They walked to the city park behind the hospital and strolled along the riverbank toward Main Street.

“Bet I know what you’re thinking,” Emily said.

“You too?” Vail answered.

She nodded. “Every time I come to the park.”

“I still think about that day all the time,” Martin said. “I’ll be doing something, you know, see an old movie or some kids playing sandlot ball and it’ll remind me of him. I guess it never goes away, losing your first friend that way. First time we realize we aren’t immortal.”

“It was like we made fun of him. I mean, it wasn’t really that way, but it seemed so for a long time after.”

“You remember it that well?” Martin asked.

“Don’t you?”

Vail nodded. “Oh yeah. I can still see him out there in the river, flailing his arms, bobbing up and down. We all thought he was kidding around.”

“I just stood there laughing,” said Emily.

“We all did.”

“Then you and Art Hodges both went in after him at the same time.”

“And you ran for the cops …”

“And you and Artie were still out there when we got back, still diving for him …”

“Little Bobby Bradshaw …”

“God, when they brought him out…”

“I know, I dreamed about that. I saw that little kid all blue like that for a couple of years after.”

“His mother still works at the shoe factory. I see her now and again. She never has got over it, you know? After all these years—how long has it been?”

“Twenty-two years. I was ten, Bobby was eleven.”

“After twenty-two years she still looks down when we pass. Never speaks. Know what I think, Marty? I think I remind her. I mean, I’m sure she never forgets but I make it…”

“Valid,” Vail said. “She sees his old friends, it all comes back like a bad show. I’m sure in her own way she blames us for it.”

“Or maybe because it was Bobby instead of one of us.”

“That too.”

She reached out almost reflexively and took his hand and they stood on the bank. The river was brownish green with ash-gray foam broiling along the banks. Farther up, steam rose from its murky banks. It seemed somehow to demean Bobby Bradshaw in death, as if the river when it was healthy and pure had been a living memorial to him. Now, bubbling with poison like the witch’s cauldron in
Macbeth,
it abused his memory.

“Bobby was always the defendant,” she said. “Used to make him so mad, that he was always the bad guy.”

He looked over at her, confused by the remark, but she was staring at the polluted stream, lost in her daydream.

“And you were always so”—she lifted her chin impudently—“well spoken. Strutting up and down, preaching all that made-up law to us.”

Vail had known he wanted to be a lawyer all his life but he could not evoke the moment or time at which he first became obsessed with the goal. Her description of him playing first defender, then prosecutor, then judge, with his friends forced into the roles of defendant or juror, sitting patiently while he paced back and forth acting out his fantasy, all that seemed as if she were talking about somebody else, a boy he did not remember—an artifact from his youth. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed by the reminder, or that he didn’t want to remember; it was a void in his memory—even her reminiscence did not jar loose any visual recollection of his performances. But he didn’t tell her. He smiled and went along with it.

“Do you ever wish,” she said, and hesitated for a moment, “do you ever wish time stopped then, that we never grew up? That the river still smelled kind of earthy and fresh and the sky was still the color of bluebirds? Do you ever wish that, Marty?”

He smiled sadly and said, “Yeah. Ain’t progress a bitch.”

“You know Artie’s president of the Chamber of Commerce now.” She snickered. “Got a real bad attitude problem about it—thinks he’s important. People laugh behind his back.”

Artie, president of the Chamber of Commerce? That self-serving league of losers, a club of flawed little failures who deluded themselves into thinking greed was accomplishment and blight was achievement.

“Maybe we can get some of the old bunch together,” she said brightly. “Go out to Barney’s for dinner.”

His memories were suddenly tainted by the children of his youth, now grown to pitiful, small-minded sycophants begging greedy scavengers to bring the plague they called “progress” to the land of his adolescence. He did not want to see any of them, did not want to be ashamed for them, did not want to be reminded that they had all sprung from the same roots, roots they had corrupted by their betrayal of their homeplace.

“I’d rather not,” he said.

“Everybody’s forgotten the case by now,” she said.

“I haven’t.”

“You did a great job. Everybody says you did a great job. I mean, you were just starting out and you were up against all those big-shot lawyers from the East.”

“It wasn’t lawyers, it was money, Em. It’s always money. All those people, fighting to keep the industrial park from spreading into Pine Hill, trying to hang on to a way of life—all they had was me. No, it wasn’t the lawyers, it was the big corporations. They bought out the county politicians, the Chamber, hell, they even bought the goddamn judge. I lost the case, those people lost homes that had been in their families for a hundred years, and the predators gobbled up a little more of the town’s tradition.”

“But the town’s grown some, hasn’t it?” she said.

“It’s grown all right,” Vail said. He looked across the river at the corporate slum they called an industrial park. “Trouble is, the growth is malignant.”

She was surprised at his vehemence.

“Even animals know better than to foul their own nest,” he said.

And Emily looked up at him sadly and the memories of good times gone by faded with her smile.

“If I didn’t know better I’d swear you just had a small fugue experience,” Molly said with a smile. “You were a long way from here for about three minutes.”

“Daydreaming. Or night dreaming as the case may be,” he said. “Is that a fugue state?”

“In a way, yes. You were temporarily out of touch with reality.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “There’s a window box outside one of your windows. What say we give these guys a chance at living outside in the real sunlight?”

She watched as he poured rich, dark soil into the box, filling it about halfway up, then spreading it out evenly with the palms of his hands. He spread a second layer of topsoil into which he carefully planted six of the plants, pressing gently around the stems until they were well supported. Then he covered the earth with a thin layer of moss and dribbled water slowly across the entire surface.

“These are river flowers,” he said. “They love water. I always replant at night. Flowers die a little at night, then they spring back to life with the sunlight. We’ll see how they do. They may make it.”

“Thank you,” Molly said. “Do I water them every day?”

“In the morning,” he said with a nod. “Just that way. Kind of sprinkle the water gently over the moss. It holds the water, gives them a little drink at a time.”

He had performed each step precisely and with almost loving care, and Molly had watched entranced as this man, who was so protective of his past, revealed what she was certain was a vulnerability few people had ever been permitted to see. He broke the spell.

“Let me ask you,” he said, wiping his hands with a towel. “Knowing what we do about Aaron, do you think if he actually saw somebody killing Rushman it would have been shock enough to put him into this fugue state? I mean, he’s had a lot of shocks to his system. Wouldn’t he be pretty insulated against that kind of thing?”

She answered immediately. “No. The mind might cope with
many different types of shock, then one particular act, one visual experience, can short-circuit it. There’s no telling what his mind will absorb and what it will reject. Hopefully we can find out.”

“So the science isn’t that exact.”

“Let’s just say we know what we know. There are some gray areas. We’re dealing with the human mind, remember.”

“What I mean is, it isn’t exact the way two and two equals four is exact?”

“That’s right. All Homo sapiens react differently to different stimuli. That’s what thought is all about. If it was as absolute as mathematics, we’d all be robots.”

“That’s very interesting,” Vail said.

“It’s basic.”

“That’s what I mean. It isn’t as precise as, say, a fingerprint. A fingerprint is unequivocal. You can’t really argue about it. If it’s there, it’s there. But a mental disorder? There you have variables.”

“We’re learning,” she said. “We know the symptoms, we usually can peg the disorder itself, even tell what caused it. And, a lot of times, we can cure the patient.”

“Let’s just say Aaron did kill the bishop, that he was acting from some dark disorder. Do you really think he can be cured after doing something that… insane?”

“If I didn’t, I’d quit.”

“What got you into this business?”

“My brother’s been catatonic for almost ten years.”

“My God! What happened?”

“Vietnam happened. He came back and just gradually slipped into another country, someplace he created. I suppose subconsciously I blame myself for not getting him help, but we didn’t know. We knew he was suffering but I guess we thought he’d get over it. They’ve just recently begun to deal with the problem. In World War I, it was called shell shock. World War II, it was battle fatigue. Now it’s been identified as a form of mental trauma called posttraumatic stress syndrome.”

“How do you deal with it?”

“It depends on the individual. But I have a theory that affection, love, touching … and forgiveness … might have a lot to with it.”

“Forgiveness?”

“There’s tremendous guilt involved. I think part of that is because they were really badly treated when they came back.
They were kind of sneaked in, like unwanted children. There was a lot of alienation.”

“I defended a Vietnam vet who shot a clerk in a holdup. Didn’t kill him but it was just luck he didn’t.”

“What happened to him?”

“Three years for armed robbery and aggravated assault, he did eighteen months. The court was lenient because of the Vietnam experience. He claimed he always carried a gun—it was like a fetish with him …”

“A conditioned obsession,” she said. “Probably because it was such a critical part of his survival for so long.”

“That’s what he said. Anyway, the store owner was a Korean. They got into an argument about something stupid and Jerry lost control, started flashing back to Vietnam. The guy was Oriental and—bang—he shot him in the shoulder. Then—and here’s the part that the D.A. couldn’t swallow—he says he didn’t want to admit he went berserk, so he grabbed twenty bucks from the register to make it look like robbery. Fact is, I didn’t use that. The jury would never have bought it.”

“It was probably true.”

“I know it was true; I believed him from the start, but in court the truth sometimes can be detrimental to the health of your client. Some jurors won’t accept the fact that truth can be stranger than fiction.”

“Yours is a strange business, Mr. Vail.”

“Look who’s talking.”

The front doorbell ended the discussion.

“What time is it?” Vail asked.

“About eight.”

“Wonder who the hell that can be?”

He went downstairs and opened the front door. A disheveled Goodman was standing in the doorway.

“Want to see a movie?” he said.

TWENTY

“What happened to your hand!” Molly said.

Goodman looked down at his swollen fist and half smiled. “Well, for one thing I found out it still has a little TNT left in it,” he said.

She took the damaged hand gently and ran her fingers across the back of it.

“Is anything broken?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been numb for five years.”

“Come in the kitchen, we have to put some ice on this and get you to a doctor.”

“No doctor. Ice is okay but I have an allergy to doctors-medical doctors, that is.”

She smiled and led him to the kitchen with Vail tagging along.

“What about the tape?” Vail said.

“Let’s fix his hand first,” Molly said.

“Forget his hand. It always looks like that.”

“Well, thanks,” Goodman said, and then looked at Molly rather pitifully. “It’s very painful,” he said.

Vail rolled his eyes as Molly got out an ice tray and rolled up several cubes in a dish towel. She laid it on the back of the battered fist.

“Wow,” he groaned, closing his eyes.

“He’s faking,” Vail growled. “I know when he’s faking and that is definitely a fake.”

“How do you know?” Goodman demanded.

“I know fake when I see it. It’s one of my talents. Can we hear this saga of yours now?”

As Molly wrapped a towel around the ice pack she had jerry-rigged for Goodman’s swollen hand, Goodman slowly detailed his confrontation with Alex and Batman and the conversation afterward. His remarks were greeted with a combination of stark amazement and shock by both Vail and Molly.

“The bishop took part in it and directed it?”

“That’s what the kid said, but let’s check out the tape first.”

They went back into the office, where Martin put the tape in the machine. He sat across the room from the monitor and
pushed the play button on a remote unit connected by a long cord to the video machine. The first ten minutes was a recording of a Mass. There were two altar boys serving the bishop, neither of whom Goodman recognized. They were in their early teens and Goodman assumed they were not members of the “Altar Boys.” Perhaps the tape was a genuine study tape, Goodman thought to himself, feeling a little foolish. Then the screen went blank and a few moments later a new scene came on. It was a bedroom.

Here we go,
Goodman thought.

The girl entered the scene first. She was tiny, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her breasts mere buds, her face, despite garish black makeup around pale blue eyes, a veil of innocence. She was dressed in a shin-length summer cotton pinafore and looked about twelve years old. She did not look scared, but rather apprehensive, even a bit insolent. Somewhere off-camera a stereo was playing the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” She walked into the frame and began to dance to the music, at first with lackluster indifference. There was a ripple of applause from two or three people off-screen. Spurred by the small unseen audience, her dancing became more spirited. She spun around and the skirt billowed out to reveal a glimpse of black stocking. As her dancing became more spirited, the skirt swelled more and they could see she was wearing a trashy garter belt and black panties under the innocent dress.

At that point, a voice off-screen said, “All right, Billy, your turn,” and a tall, skinny boy wearing tight pants and a silk shirt entered the screen and began dancing with the girl. The performance became more spirited and sexy. The off-screen voice started giving directions, ordering what was a slow striptease until they both were naked. Then his directions became more specific, more sexually oriented. Eventually he ordered Peter into the scene.

Molly, Tom and Martin watched speechlessly as the off-screen director orchestrated what was ultimately a ménage à trois. Then the tape abruptly ended. The three of them sat without speaking while Vail rewound the tape. Vail turned to Molly. “Will you excuse us for just a minute, Molly,” he said.

She didn’t seem perturbed by the request.

“How about a drink?” she asked. “We could probably all use one after that.”

“Good idea,” Goodman said.

She went into the kitchen.

“Okay, where’d you get the tape, Tom?” Vail asked when she was out of the room.

“Look, what you don’t know—”

“Where’d you get the fucking tape?”

“The bishop’s bedroom. It was in the closet with the rest of his taped sermons.”

“You lifted evidence from the scene of the crime?”

“I just borrowed it.”

“Christ, they have an inventory list of those tapes.”

“I took a blank tape and switched them.”

Annoyed but impressed, Vail didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry.

“For all we know, they’ve already seen it,” he said.

“Not a chance. It would be in the evidence room. They wouldn’t leave something like that lying around.”

“If Venable finds out about this your career will end before it starts. We’ll probably both be doing paralegal work in Bolivia.”

“So …I’ll go over and switch it back.”

“I didn’t say to do that either,” Vail said. “It’s a hell of a hit. Now we’ve got to figure out what to do with it.”

Molly returned to the room carrying the drinks on a small serving tray. As she put them on the table, Vail said, “Molly, I don’t want you to discuss what you just saw with anybody, not even the Judge or Naomi unless I say so.”

“Not even Aaron?”

Vail thought for a minute, then said, “Don’t tell him you saw the tape, just tell him what Tom reported. Aaron’s not in it anyway. Do we know who the others are?”

“The tall boy is Billy Jordan,” Goodman said. “The short one is a kid named Peter. And the girl is Linda.”

“Aaron’s Linda?”

Goodman nodded.

“Jesus!” Vail said. He looked at Molly. “Bishop Richard Rushman, the Frank Capra of child porn. No wonder the kid’s screwed up!”

“So how do we handle it?” Goodman asked.

Vail did not answer. Instead, he stood up and started pacing the room. “He’s thinking,” Goodman told Molly.

“Martin, the implications here are enormous,” said Molly. “Religious and sexual disorientation are leading causes of mental
disorders. So first Reverend Shackles damns Aaron to hell. Then his father takes him into a living hell, the hole. He’s seduced by his teacher. The bishop not only perverts his sexual experiences, but tells him he’s ridding himself of the devil doing it. And his girlfriend is a sexual victim! It seems to me—”

Vail held up his hand and stopped her. He turned to Goodman. “How are we going to prove it?” he asked.

“Prove what?”

“That the ominous voice in the background belongs to Bishop Rushman? We never see the bishop. Without ironclad corroboration, the prosecution can claim that voice could belong to anybody. You said yourself Alex won’t testify.”

“My guess is that Alex is probably on his way to Alaska by now,” Goodman said dejectedly.

“How about Peter or Linda?” Vail asked.

“We’ll have to find them first—and convince them to go on the stand.”

“So it’s Aaron’s word against the unseen—and dead—director.”

“That’s right.”

“Was anyone else in the church involved?” Molly asked.

“I don’t think so,” Goodman said. “From what I can piece together from Alex, Rushman recruited these kids under the guise of proselytizing them. The altar boy thing was just a front for his private porn club. I believe Aaron met Linda when she was brought in as the ‘mascot.’ She was fourteen at the time and they all lived at Savior House.”

“Which is another reason they were afraid to blow the whistle on the bishop.”

“Possibly,” said Molly. “But I should think the real reason is humiliation and embarrassment They’d fear censure from the public more than from their peers.”

“And there’s the power of the bishop in the community,” said Vail. “A bunch of teenage runaways and ex-junkies attacking the bishop? Forget it.”

“Unless we can prove that’s Rushman’s voice on the tape,” said Goodman.

“Would you swear to a jury that the man speaking is Bishop Rushman?”

“Hell, I didn’t even know him. But we can get the voice analyzed. We can’t cover this up!”

“We’re not covering anything up, Tommy,” said Vail, still
pacing. “We’re considering what’s best for our client. We’re in the same boat those kids are in. If we introduce that tape, use it in any way to discredit Rushman, we’ll be accused of trying to destroy the so-called Saint of Lakeview Drive to save Aaron Stampler. And if the whole story comes out—that these kids were in a sex club for two years and never said anything about it—it could provide Venable with a perfect motive for the murder—jealousy—and make everyone look bad
but
Rushman.”

“You can’t ignore it.”

“I can if it’s going to help bum my client,” Vail said, whirling on Goodman and stabbing his finger toward him. “Forget your anger toward the bishop, Tommy, he’s dead and his problem died with him. Our job is to keep Aaron Stampler alive.”

“And what if Aaron brings it up?” Molly asked.

“I’ll worry about that if it happens.”

“A very hot potato,” the Judge was saying over breakfast at Butterfly’s the next morning. “If either side introduces this evidence into the trial, it is risking serious backlash from the public and the jury.”

Vail did not show the tape to either Naomi or the Judge. But he had filled them both in and Goodman had given them a complete report of his conversation with Alex. Molly had left before dawn, anxious to get back to Daisyland and further sessions with Aaron.

“What if the prosecutor finds out about it?” said Goodman.

“She doesn’t have to use it,” the Judge answered.

“Why not?” Naomi asked.

“If I were the prosecutor, I’d pass on it,” the Judge answered. “The only reason to use it would be to establish a motive for the murder. Even if Venable suspects the voice belongs to His Excellency, the tape itself isn’t proof of anything. It’s three kids screwing. She would claim the evidence is inconclusive and choose to ignore it.”

“But we could get it in discovery, right?”

“If we asked for it, yes. They would have to turn it over to us. You know, I find it difficult to believe that
somebody
doesn’t know about this except those five kids and us.”

“None of the altar boys or the girl would talk about it, they’d be afraid to and probably ashamed. Look at it from their point of view: Rushman’s one of the most powerful men in the city. Are five kids going to squeal on him? I don’t think so.”

He laid the torn slip of paper on the table and Vail stared down at it.

“This is how I got the lead. It was stuck under my windshield at Savior House.”

“So,” Vail said, “is the whistle-blower one of the group or somebody on the outside who knew about it?”

“I don’t know,” Goodman answered. “I talked to several of the kids at Savior House. The way I put it to them, I was looking for character witnesses for Aaron, kids that would stand up for him. I didn’t know about the altar boys at the time, I was just fishing. Maybe some of them do know about it. I could go back…”

“Not yet,” said Vail. “Let’s not tip our hand until we know how we’re going to use the information.”

“You mean we’re really going to protect Rushman after what he did?” Goodman said.

“That’s not the point, Thomas,” the Judge said.

“Well what the fuck
is
the point? You once said that facts don’t cease to exist just because they’re ignored,” Goodman said, an edge in his voice.

“Right, m’ boy,” the Judge answered. “I’ve also said that sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. This isn’t a philosophy debate; a boy’s life is at stake here. If Rushman was a pederast, the man on the street—or the jury—may not want to hear about it.”

“I always thought truth and justice went hand in hand,” said Goodman.

“Very noble,” said the Judge. “But naïve. Unfortunately truth has nothing to do with justice.”

“It’s perception,” Vail said. “In photography it’s called selective focus. You show the viewers only part of the picture, but the image is so strong they perceive it to be the whole truth.”

The Judge smiled rather sadly, and said, “Truth is what the jury thinks.”

That afternoon, Vail had a copy made of the tape and gave the original to Goodman, who returned to the bishop’s apartment and switched it for the blank. If Stenner and Venable discovered the tape, it would be their problem. If they did not use it, Vail would have the option.

Vail wrapped the copy in a plain brown envelope and mailed it to himself from the downtown post office. When it arrived two days later, he put it in his safe-deposit box.