Proof of Intent (14 page)

“Where's the snakehead part?”

“That's what I was getting at. Miles's daddy one time he had him a vision. That passage in the Bible about drinking poison and taking up serpents? You familiar with that?”

“You're talking about snake handling.”

Leon Prouty nodded. “Miles's daddy, man, he got him a bunch of rattlesnakes, started using them in the service. Hollering and preaching and waving these goddamn snakes around, jack, it must of been some crazy shit. This would of been when Miles was ten, twelve years old. So anyway, one day his daddy's going at it, fire and brimstone, kissing them snakes on the lips and everything, and that snake just—SHOOMP!” Leon mimicked a striking snake with his hand. “Sumbitch bit him right on the goddamn nose. The way I heard it told, he kept preaching and everybody's beating tambourines and singing and hollering. Big old test of faith, see? Because the faithful, according to the scripture, they can take up snakes and drink poison and it won't do nothing to them.

“Well pretty soon his face goes to swelling up. He's still waving them snakes around, preaching the Word, lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, blahdy blahdy blah, and everybody's singing and hollering. And old Miles, man, he's sitting right there on the front row watching it. Watching when his daddy falls down on the floor, all them snakes crawlin' around on his ass and everything?

“And do they take him to the hospital? Shit no! This bunch of crackers—
my
people!—they just keep slapping the tambourines and singing: Oh,
hell
yeah, they're mighty in the faith, ain't they? Miles's daddy, his head's blowed up like a balloon. Lips start turning black, ears swoled up, tongue sticking out. Oh, but he's mighty, mighty in his faith!” Leon Prouty pantomimed clapping and rocking, waving his hands in the air, his tongue sticking out and his eyes rolled back in his head.

He kept up this horrible eye-rolling performance until finally I said, “So what happened?”

The performance abruptly stopped. “What you think, Mr. Sloan? He died.”

My eyes widened a little. “Right there in front of Miles?”

“Sure.”

“My God. No wonder the guy writes such gruesome stories.”

“So that's why they call us snakeheads. Church is still there, still the center of Snaketown. Ain't nobody taking up by-God serpents in there, though.”

“Miles must feel terrible guilt about that. Terrible shame.”

“Shame!” Leon Prouty looked at me quizzically. “Man, his daddy's a hero over in Snaketown. Took his faith right to the grave.”

“You still go to church?”

“
Hell
, no. I don't believe none of that propaganda no more. But when I was a kid, old Miles use to show up every now and then. He'd only come to church when he was drunk.” Leon laughed. “All us kids loved it. He'd get to confessing what a sinner he was, some terrible thing he'd did back in the day, bawling and crying like a baby. He'd come up for the altar call, lay there on the floor howling like a sick dog, ‘Oh, I'm coming home to Jesus.' Then he'd head out the door, and you wouldn't see him again for like a year.”

“What terrible thing had he done?”

“How should I remember? It was a long time ago.” Leon shrugged. “Anyway, I got to get back to work.”

“Doing what? Holding up your shovel?”

Leon raised his head back so he could look down at me in a vaguely threatening manner. “I don't
have
to tell you nothing.”

“Did you see that guy or not? The one with the black car?”

“It was a black Lincoln Continental, early-sixties model, the type with the suicide doors. I told you that already.”

“What else? What else did you see?”

“Asked and answered, Counselor.” Leon smirked at me. “Come back when you willing to get serious about my situation.”

I drove back to the office feeling irritated. Was Leon for real or not? I just couldn't tell. But my irritation deepened into a distinct sense of unease as I saw the TV trucks: There were five of them parked in the street outside my office, aerials sticking up in the sky, three from local stations, plus one from Court TV and another from CNN. When you're a defense attorney, five TV trucks is never a good sign.

I hopped out of my Chrysler and here they came, heading across the parking lot like an onrushing thunderstorm, microphones extended.

“What about the book?”

“Do you know about the book?”

“What are your comments about the book?”

“Which book would that be?” I said.

They got a little quieter. The CNN reporter said, “You haven't heard? They just reissued a book that Miles published back in the seventies. They drop-shipped six hundred thousand copies of it today. Nationwide.”

I smiled blandly. “And?”

“It's called,
How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It
.”

I blinked and stood there for a moment, looking, I'm sure, like everybody's picture of somebody caught flatfooted. Things were just getting better and better.

“Oh
that
book,” I said finally, giving them my best attempt at a smile. “You may recall it says on the cover that it's a work of fiction. It has nothing to do with this case.” Then I turned and walked up the stairs to my office, trying my best not to look like someone had kicked me in the stomach.

I had never heard of the book before.

I met with Miles in the jail. He was sitting at the grimy table, hands flat on the Masonite surface, fingers splayed. He didn't speak when I entered the room, or when I asked him how he was doing.

“Okay, two things,” I said. “First, Stash Olesky laughed at me when I brought up the possibility of a plea.”

Miles continued to stare at the back of his hands.

“Did you hear me, Miles?”

He shrugged almost imperceptibly. “It was probably a bad idea anyway.”

“Any interest in telling me why the sudden suggestion that you'd take a plea?”

“I just want this whole thing over with.” His voice was soft, weary.

“I know,” I said. “But you're just going to have to keep it together. There's no other choice.”

He nodded.

I tapped my fingers on the table a couple of times. “You might have warned me about that book,” I said finally.

“Book?”

“How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It
. Apparently they're getting all cranked up to sell it by the boatload.”

Miles looked up for the first time. “Charley, I've written forty-seven novels in my life, of which thirty-three have been published. Every one of them involves murder. Honestly? They all start to run together after a while. That particular book just didn't spring to mind.”

“So tell me about it.”

“I wrote it as a paperback original for Elgin Press back in the early seventies. That was when Dan Rourke, my editor, was still at Elgin. He moved over to Padgett Press soon after that, and I followed him.” He blew out his breath disconsolately. “I have to tell you, I don't even remember the book all that well. It's pretty much like the title says: It's about this guy who kills his wife.”

“Why does he kill her?” I said.

He hesitated. “Basically? For the money.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great.”

“What can I say?” Miles said. “I invent murders for a living. There's just no way to make that convenient in a situation like this.” He leaned forward. “I assume they can't admit it into evidence?”

“That's not the issue,” I said.

“Then what is?”

“You're a smart guy,” I said. “You tell me.”

He studied me with his sad gray eyes, then leaned slowly back in his chair again, a humorless smile appearing on his lips. “Public opinion.”

“You get the gold star,” I said.

They talk about the court of public opinion. There's no getting away from it these days: A high-profile case gets on TV, and it's contaminated forever. You can change venue, you can excuse nine-tenths of the jury pool, you can make the jury suffer under a draconian sequestration regime. But the truth is that if a case turns into a media feeding frenzy, you're just going to be stuck with a certain number of jurors whose judgment will be affected by things they read in the papers or hear on the radio or see on the idiot box. Any lawyer who says it ain't so is kidding himself.

How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It
. I'm no humorist, but given about fifteen minutes, I could have written enough jokes for every talk-show monologue on TV that night. “Did you hear about that famous writer in Michigan who killed his wife?” Jay Leno raises his eyebrows, looks at the camera. “
Allegedly
. . .” And then the crowd dies laughing.

How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It
. Ten words. Ten words, and everybody in America would know the guilty bastard did it. Didn't matter that the book would probably never be admitted as evidence at trial, didn't matter that it was a work of fiction, didn't matter that the crime in the book would most likely have no resemblance to the real crime at hand. Those ten words would infect the air, and there'd be no getting rid of the stink.

As it happened, my meeting with Miles preceded an appointment for Lisa and me to go to the prosecutor's office, where we would cull through their documents and examine their proposed exhibit list.

Stash Olesky was waiting for me in his conference room, a grim look on his face, the list of documents in his hand.

“Let me see it,” I said.

He handed me the list. At the top, Proposed Exhibit 1, there it was: “
How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It, a novel by Miles Dane
.”

“You knew about this already, didn't you?”

Stash looked away.

“All this time, I knew you guys had something else hiding back there, but I couldn't figure out what it was.”

“I'm disclosing it in a timely fashion,” Stash said, his face taut. “That's all I'm obliged to do.”

“Well, you're dreaming if you think it's going to be admitted at trial,” I said. “Not even a judge as biased and prosecution-friendly as Evola is dumb enough to think he can let a work of fiction into a court of law and not get dinged on appeal.”

“You haven't read the book yet,” Stash said.

I figured that was just gamesmanship on his part. But still, there was something in his voice, a note of calm self-assurance, that made me nervous.

That afternoon I had to go down to Detroit to handle a case in Recorder's Court. When I got back into the office late that evening, Lisa was standing next to Mrs. Fenton's desk. In her hand she held a shiny new paperback. “I stood in line at Borders for an hour and a half.” Lisa looked like she had just been force-fed a piece of three-day-old fish. “I've been reading it all afternoon.”

I studied her face. “Don't tell me it's
that
bad.”

“Worse.”

“It's a work of fiction, Lisa. They can't admit it into evidence.”

“Listen.” Lisa opened the book and said, “Page one.” Then she began to read.

“
Last night I decided to kill my wife
.

“
I had been considering the matter for a long time, of course, but now I am finally resolved. If this sounds heartless, do not abandon me yet. She is a vile, heartless creature—a monster, in truth—and deserves what I am about to give her. Oh, naturally I tell people how marvelous our love is, how deep the river, how wide the sea, how strong the current. And she plays her part in public. People, after all, are fools. They will believe anything. But the truth is, I fear and hate her, and she despises me. But as I say, please do not abandon me yet. Once you know her as I do, you shall cheer for me as I beat her to death
.”

I sat down heavily. “Ouch.”

“It gets worse.”

“Evola can't allow it to be admitted. He just can't.”

“Oh, yes he can. And he will.”

I studied her face. Lisa looked pretty sure of herself. “Why?”

Lisa pulled out a volume of Michigan's criminal statutes, opened it, tossed it on the desk in front of me. “It's all right there,” she said.

I glanced at the book. “I've read the statute. What's in there that I'm not seeing?”

“Michigan law says there are five conditions you have to meet in order to convict on first-degree murder, right? Condition three is the trickiest one.” She picked up the book and read from it. “ ‘Third, that this intent to kill was premeditated, that is, thought out beforehand.' ”

“Which has what to do with this?”

She tossed me the book. “I've stuck bookmarks in there in a few places, underlined various passages. Check it out.”

I opened the book and began to read the parts she had marked. When I was done, I set the book delicately on my desk, much like you might treat a bomb, and then I looked up at the ceiling. A numb, cold feeling had settled on the base of my neck.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Oh. My. God.”

“I better go to New York,” Lisa said. “Don't you think?”

I breathed out heavily. “Yeah,” I said. “Get on the phone to Shearman & Pound.”

On the way to take Lisa to the airport down in Detroit, I stopped off at the jail and requested a meeting with Miles. He had asked me to bring him a battery-operated radio, a couple of books, some wool socks, a few other odds and ends.

Lisa and I went in and sat down with him in the interview room.

“How about some music?” Miles said. “Every kid in here has a radio, and they're all playing this goddamn rap music from dawn till dusk.”

Lisa turned on the radio. There was something wrong with it and after a good deal of fiddling it became clear that it only picked up one signal—a Canadian station with a French-speaking announcer, as it happened.