The Other Shoe (22 page)

All eyes on Henry Brusett, everyone inhaling his stench, and the judge had more information to offer than Henry could possibly take in, but he perfectly understood him to say, “A term of imprisonment of not less than ten, nor more than a hundred years.”

Henry Brusett happened then to think of his son, Davey, who might very well still be in prison himself. Deer Lodge, he thought, must be the scene of many family reunions. “All right,” he said. “Let's get it over with.”

“Not now,” said the judge. “Not here. Your case is bound over to district court. But I'm appointing Ms. Meany to represent you, and after you've had a chance to talk to her, I'll set your bail.”

“That's all right, Judge,” said Hoot Meyers from behind. “The state will recommend a ten-thousand-dollar bail, with whatever release orders the court sees fit to impose.”

“On a deliberate homicide, Mr. Meyers? Seriously?”

“Seriously. He's not going anywhere.”

The woman came forward then, Henry Brusett's attorney, and she made to shake his hand until she saw how near his groin it was strapped. “Giselle,” she told him. “I'm Giselle, okay?” And to no one in particular she said, “Does he have to be trussed up like this? Is this necessary?”

“I don't even have the keys with me.” The jailer made as if to search her belt for any sign of them. “The keys to this exact set of restraints. So I guess he's kind of stuck with 'em until we can get him back to the jail.”

“April,” the judge directed, for that was apparently the jailer's name, “take Ms. Meany and her client back to the jury room and wait outside the door. It's fine, there's only one door to it, and he's welcome to try the window if he wants. It's a long fall. They have to have their privacy.”

“I'm ready to just cooperate, if I could.” Henry Brusett's pain took the shape of his several injuries, and, oddly, of a tree—a large trunk with many branches. “There's no reason to drag this out.” He felt his attorney's hand clutch his elbow, found himself being directed by April the jailer and Ms. Meany out of the office, down the hall, through the big courtroom with its rows of pews and its smell of carpet shampoo, and the lawyer showed him into the jury room, a stifling thing with one long table, many chairs, and a single window that occupied nearly all its west wall. April called to them through the door, “I'm supposed to be off work in twenty-six minutes, so kinda step it up in there, would you please?”

The lawyer drew him into a far corner of the room before she asked if she might call him Henry. As a killer, he had noticed, he seemed to command a new level of courtesy. There was in this room a library of leather-bound ledgers dating from Prohibition, an incomplete but vast history of Conrad County's transgressors. Toiling dust. Henry Brusett, still in his chains. Ms. Meany positioned him so that he couldn't back away, and she told him, “They don't have much of a case, Henry. If they can't come up with a lot more than what the county attorney had in his affidavit, then I don't, I can't see how they'd get a conviction. They have to prove this charge now, and I don't think they can do it.”

“Is that what they think?”

“Who knows?” Ms. Meany's eyes were direct and of a yellow cast. “But it does seem like kind of a bluff to me. What they're charging you with right now.”

“I'd like to get it over with.” He feared the woman meant to believe in him.

“You're upset. You've been through some upsetting things, and it's not a good time for you to be making any important decisions. Anyway, Judge Mendenhal can't hear your plea. You can't do that until your arraignment in district court when Judge Samara comes to town, and I doubt if that's what we'll do even then—enter any kind of plea just yet. This won't be simple, Henry. It's just not a simple thing, and there's nothing anyone can do to make it that way. But we can get you through it.”

“A fact,” he said, “is still kind of a fact. For me. I am really, really sorry about the way I smell. You don't have to stand so close.”

“They do not have a good case. That's the point I want to emphasize, and that's a point I want you to consider before you make any important decisions, before you talk to anyone. Even me, Henry. About anything. Right now you shouldn't do much more than pass the time of day, and even then you'd better stick to weather chat. We'll talk eventually. You and I. Pretty soon. We'll decide what details we want to get into—but later, all right? For now we'll just concern ourselves with getting you out of jail.”

“They'd let me out?”

His lawyer knew from papers already filed by the prosecution that he had a wife, and that, the lawyer said, meant he had ties to the community—a good thing. Did he have other warrants outstanding? No. A criminal history? None. Any troubles with his neighbors—restraining orders, public squabbles going on? No, no neighbors. Did he have a job? He was ashamed to say he didn't. How much could he scrape together to pay a bondsman? Maybe six hundred dollars, the bare remains of his life's savings.

“Well,” she said, “you're practically a knight in shining armor, Henry. And Meyers seems to think you're okay. And it's such a skimpy little case—I think we can get you out of here. Today, maybe.”

“And I'd go home? They'd just let me go?” He had not expected to have his freedom any time soon, but from the moment its star rose in the east he was transfixed.

“Sure. Well, maybe. You've got a lot of factors going for you.” Ms. Meany was a small woman lugging an insupportable will around, and she flung this at him, pressed him into a corner with it. Perhaps she wanted him at a disadvantage, or maybe she hadn't noticed how he shrank from her, or maybe she didn't know how to back away—she stood between Henry and all the rest of the room. “Promise me, no rash decisions. And no talking to anybody. Please? Can you do that for me?”

“What happens if they let me out, and I hightail it?”

“You wouldn't do that.” She was innocent only in her faith in him. “But if you did, they'd catch you and drag you back here. They'd probably hit you with a bill for the transport, too, and you'd wind up paying for a lot of gas and overtime. Then you'd be absolutely stuck in jail until your case was finished. But you wouldn't try and run, would you? There wouldn't be any point in running. Right?”

“Well, if you can get me out, that'd be real good. I can just about see myself stuck on a wall in that jail. It's loud in there. Maybe louder than I can take.”

So she took him back before the judge, and Ms. Meany spoke of his reliability; his lawyer went on at length about his absolute lack of any criminal record, his physical condition and its challenges, and she asked that her client be released on his own recognizance; the county attorney did not oppose her request. The judge, however, set bond at fifty thousand dollars, saying, “They've got you accused of doing something pretty bad here, Mr. Brusett, and I can't see just sending you home on the promise that you wouldn't do it again. It's public safety I have to think about, as I'm sure you can appreciate.”

April the jailer hied Henry back to jail as fast as she could make him mince down the stairs in his shackles, and Ms. Meany kept pace alongside, explaining, “What-an-asshole—well, anyway, do you own any vehicles worth five thousand? Five thousand to a bondsman, and you can get out of here. But the five thousand would be gone—or, you wouldn't have anything worth fifty thousand or so? Do a property bond? You'd have to own it free and clear. In fact, that would probably be the only way. I just don't see why he couldn't set a reasonable bond, take in
all
the factors. But, do you have anything?”

“Maybe the place,” said Henry, “our land.”

“Okay. We'll have to have a title search done before you can put that up. Maybe an appraisal.”

“How long does that take?”

“It can take weeks. It's a real low priority for those folks down at the title company. They've never sat in jail, so it's hard for them to understand how it might be a little urgent.”

“Weeks, huh?”

“We might get Judge Samara to lower the bond at arraignment, but I doubt it. I'll think of something, maybe—and would you please get those chains off him now? I'll be seeing you pretty soon, Henry. We'll be talking soon, all right?”

The Conrad County Law and Order Complex was built as a bunker and did not appear very large from outside, but inside there were dozens of enclosures, each room specific to some small purpose. April the jailer left him in one of these to change into his orange jumper, and when Henry emerged from it, she was gone. His cousin had come on shift. “Of anybody,” said Tubby Ginnings, “you're the last guy I ever thought I'd see in here. Nobody's heard a peep out of you for . . . ever, just about, and now look. Geez, Henry. You ever had your fingerprints done? It makes kind of a mess, but we gotta do it.” He was ideal to
his calling, Tubby—night shift at the county jail—thirty years old and already thinking nightly of that adequate pension.

“Has Karen come around? She bring some prescriptions by?”

“She did, but the sheriff has to authorize those, tell us we can give 'em to you.”

“Is he here?”

“You kidding? He goes home to take his little nap at lunch, and usually he don't come back.”

“You can see my name right there on the bottles. They're prescriptions. Can you call him? There's a couple of those I can't do without. Pain pills.”

“Sure,” said Tubby. “I'll try. Now, when you get back there, there's a guy named Leonard, and he's on his way to Washington, or Mississippi, or our pen, or somewhere—eventually. There's a bunch of places that want that guy. You know that three-strikes thing? Well, he must have about three dozen. At least he'll never see the light of day, but right now he's waiting on an appeal—or his lawyers are—and for some reason that makes him my customer. He tries to be kind of a badass in there. Sometimes.”

“There's no empty cells?” Henry Brusett needed a shower.

“It's not a Super 8.”

“How about that holding cell? That first cell they had me in? That'd work fine for me.”

“We could actually get in trouble if we left you in there too long. That's isolation. The holding cell? Whattaya? Relax, nobody'll hurt you in here. I run a pretty nice jail, cuz. Just keep an eye out for that Leonard, and you should be fine. Most guys prefer the barracks cell. It's gin rummy to a zillion points in there, and that's where the TV is.”

“No,” said Henry involuntarily.

“Come on,” said Tubby. “It's not that bad. Here, you get two blankets—one of these can go away if you get in some trouble, not that I'd think you would—and your towel, itty-bitty bar of your own personal soap, your slippers—and, believe me, I wash these real good. I go through a gallon of Clorox a month, man. You're not a smoker, are you? We give 'em one smoke a day, but it's a lot more treat than the non-smokers ever get. One smoke a day, no exercise, and three squares. We had a woman once, a welfare cheat, she did thirty days and gained about thirty pounds. Boy, was her old man pissed when she came out. It's starch that does it to 'em. But that'd be about the worst that could happen to you. Blow up a little bit and get fat. You'll see.”

“There's gotta be someplace you can put me by myself. What do you have to do to get into solitary? What would I have to do to go in there?”

“Solitary? Noooh. Come on, it ain't Alcatraz, either. What we do have is a woman, and a lunatic, and a juvenile, so that's three cells right there. All that leaves us is the barracks. You'll be okay. They're good guys, most of 'em. They're just doin' time.”

“See about those prescriptions, would you, please? Just . . . please, and now you've seen me beg, Tubby, and I'll probably keep beggin', too, till you get me that stuff. I'd rather not be a nuisance if I don't have to be.”

“When did this happen to you? When'd you get this way? You were highly regarded, cuz; I remember it well—highly regarded in your day. Bull of the woods, weren't you?”

The bunks were ranked all along one wall and positioned against it so that those prisoners who owned lower bunks could make personal cubicles of them with their extra blankets, and Henry Brusett staked himself to such a homestead within ten seconds of entering the barracks cell. The other prisoners were asleep or pretending to be, and, working quietly, he used both of his blankets and his towel in the
building of a soft-walled crypt, and he lay in it, on his plastic mattress, and there was nothing left to do but sweat in his manufactured dark. He did not think it likely that Tubby would trouble himself or his boss to secure a weak man's comfort, but Henry waited with the big ache growing, and he listened very hard for his cousin's return, and as he waited and as the evening progressed, the barracks cell came to life again, and he lay on a mattress an inch thick, and he listened, his knees traveling slowly up toward his chest.

W
HEN
G
ISELLE
M
EANY
went out as a newly minted Juris Doctor to look for work as an attorney, she found herself forced in every interview to admit that, though she'd graduated summa cum laude, she also came with a ten-year-old daughter in tow, and she was raising the girl alone and intended to raise her properly. Because Sheila had seen little enough of her mother during law school, her mom could not now conscientiously commit to work more than fifty hours a week. She tried to stress, though, how strongly she felt that she could meet all her obligations—to everyone—that she was intensely organized and, if anything, almost too responsible. She had managed against all odds to be a very diligent and very exacting law student, and she expected she would make the same kind of lawyer. Her intellect and a sample of her expertise were on display in a recent law review, where she'd written
The Interplay of Federal and Montana State Taxation Provisions Governing Like-Kind Exchange in Real Estate Transactions
, the whole point of which was to demonstrate that she was capable of learning boring but useful things and learning them well.