Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction (22 page)

Men in their forties don’t have much patience. We see too many heart attacks in our age bracket. I stand up, unwilling to inflict the bench on my butt any longer.

“Shane hired an investigator to try to turn something up, didn’t he?” This is pure speculation, but not out of the realm of possibility. Shane, like Chet, doesn’t seem the type to leave much to chance if he can avoid it.

Leigh brushes her hair away from her neck. Though it is gloriously mild, doubtless she has begun to feel warmer since this conversation began.

“Art told me after we married that he thought Daddy had done something,” she confesses.

“He said somebody was looking into his business. Naturally, he assumed it was Daddy, but he was never able to confirm it.”

I glance up at the mountain, fearful that someone is suddenly going to come walking out of it. Turning back to Leigh I say, “A pretty logical assumption, don’t you think? After your sisters left the church and the state, I imagine he was paranoid about his favorite daughter.

And after you married Art, his worst suspicions were confirmed.” She looks down at the ground. There is something she hasn’t told me, but it may be too difficult. All her life she has been dominated by middleaged men. She may have had her fill of us.

“What about Art?” I ask.

“Was he worried about your father?”

Leigh wipes her eyes.

“Not physically,” she said.

“Three months after we were married, he told me I had been brainwashed by Daddy. He said Christian Life was fine for people afraid to live in the real world. He said our family groups were essentially spies, part of the thought police that Daddy used to control our behavior.”

I watch the park ranger’s truck drive slowly toward us. If he sees Leigh crying, he may stop.

“He never took Christian Life seriously, did he?” I ask.

“He said he did,” Leigh says, her voice bitter, “but I didn’t believe him.” She turns to watch as the ranger creeps slowly past us. He waves. I wave back. It is too lovely a day to go looking for trouble. I don’t know what the pay is, but I wouldn’t mind the job, cruising around the parks in perfect weather, hoping to catch couples making it in the backseat.

Leigh, I see, has some of her father in her. There is an unrevealed vein of anger at Art I haven’t tapped into yet.

“You wanted to believe him,” I say, encouraging her.

“That’s pretty obvious.”

She wets her lips, and her voice becomes high with indignation.

“My husband was a con artist of the first order. He could make you think black was white before you knew it. Of course I wanted him to believe in Jesus Christ. What was wrong with that?”

Am I the one being conned? She sounds so convincing my reaction is to doubt her. Still, I ask, “Did he make you doubt your faith?”

Leigh’s voice takes on an accusing tone.

“He could ridicule something without you even realizing that’s what he was doing. Before I knew it, I had begun to question the book of Genesis.”

Her look of astonished anger seems genuine. I try to put myself in her place. Despite her exquisite beauty, she has never lived in the world like a normal woman.

My supposition until now has been that anyone who looks like this can’t be naive. I realize I have been applying the same standards to Leigh that I apply to Sarah and to Rainey, but their situation is not even remotely similar. If Sarah and Rainey did not want to take the Bible literally, there is no one on earth who could talk them into it.

“You had to realize at some point Art was calling into question everything you and your father had lived for,” I say, not quite asking a question. What better motive for murder? If her actions weren’t a crime, they would be easy to justify. A jury made up of Christian Life members would probably acquit her in five minutes or at least would keep her out of jail.

Leigh looks pained as she admits, “It wasn’t as easy to see that as you think. For the first time in my life, I guess, thanks to my husband, I began to rebel against my father. Art was subtle about it at first. It was only right before he died that he really began to criticize Christian Life.”

I watch as the ranger drives back by. He waves again.

What a tough job.

“Was Art open about it?” I ask, wondering how much of it was getting back to Shane.

“No,” Leigh explains.

“You’d have to have known Art. In public he was charming and would give a million excuses for us not being up there more. In private, he made fun of my father.”

The prosecutor’s office would have a field day with this information. It is as damaging to Leigh as it is to her father. It hits me that it is not out of the realm of possibility that Leigh and her father could have planned this murder together. They certainly had a motive. Perhaps at the last moment someone is going to step forward to support Leigh’s alibi that she was at the church the entire time.

“Where has your mother been in all of this?” I ask, struck by how little Pearl Norman figures in her account.

Leigh shrugs as if the answer is obvious.

“Mother’s been out of the loop for as long as I can remember.”

I’m put off by her apparent callousness, but I think I can understand. She’s been looped for years, is what she means. You learn to maneuver around a parent like that and pretend things are normal. Two cars come roaring toward us. I know there is more that she needs to tell me, but it will have to wait, as an ancient Volkswagen and an equally old Dodge Dart swing in next to the Blazer. Six teenagers equally divided between boys and girls spill out and come toward us. They look like punks to me, though Sarah is constantly telling me I judge kids too harshly. The guys instantly begin to give Leigh the eye. Their girls, dressed in jeans, pale in comparison.

Though the age differences are clearly obvious (Leigh looks older than twenty-three), one of the guys can’t resist saying to her, “Hey, why don’t you drop this old fart and come with us?”

My manhood is threatened, but I can’t very well fight a kid, especially not one this big. Though I am an inch under six feet, this boy goes at least six feet two inches and looks in a lot better shape. My first and last fight in the last thirty years (less than a year ago) cost me a tooth. I am too young for a full set of dentures, so I mutter, “She doesn’t want to spend the afternoon changing your diapers.”

Naturally, this gets everyone’s attention, and I’m quickly surrounded by three kids whose ages barely add up to my own. Wonderful. In the course of twenty seconds I’ve gone from being a lawyer who has finally conducted a decent interview to becoming a hopeless jerk.

“I think pops wants his ass kicked,” the smallest kid says, clenching his fists.

I could probably whip him if I got lucky. Leigh looks frightened, though it seems extremely unlikely that she is in any danger of being harmed or raped. The three girls who came with the boys are plainly unhappy with the turn of events, even though they are silent. Their expressions range from disgust to jealousy. I wish one of them would announce that she will be organizing a sexual boycott if there is trouble, but the silence grows as I rack my brain for a suitable reply. Finally, I come to my senses and allow us all to save face.

“I’m not looking for trouble,” I say.

“All I’m trying to do is take this woman back to Christian Life, where I picked her up an hour ago.”

I have said the magic words. The least attractive of the girls, a dumpy blonde in denim overalls with hair the texture of straw, says, apropos of nothing, to her surprisingly sexy neighbor on her left, “I got an aunt who goes there. She says the minister’s really cool.”

Without missing a beat, Leigh says, her voice strong and confident, “He’s my father.” She doesn’t add that she suspects he is a murderer or that she is believed to have shot her husband through the heart. Nor does she add that one of her lawyers thinks the other one may somehow be involved. I would be willing to bet my false tooth that none of these kids has ever heard of Leigh. My bias against this motley crew is so strong it is next to impossible for me to concede they know much beyond each other’s names. Most information among the young, unless it is gossip, is baggage whose weight they consider excessive. The group parts like the Red Sea, and my client leads me to the safety of the Blazer.

Whatever closeness Leigh and I achieved (and I have at least the illusion that she has confided in me) vanishes We return to her parents’ house like a couple on their first real date, which didn’t quite work out. I feel I was near some information that would explain her to me. My remaining questions go ignored as she insists upon returning to the Christian Life compound. Instead, she protests mildly, “Why’d you say something smart to that boy? They could have hurt us.”

I look over at her to see if she is serious. I am so frustrated I’m about to burst. The last hour has convinced me she is covering up for her father in some manner, but I don’t know how to get it out of her. I can’t remember the last time I felt this irritated with a client.

“Was I supposed to kiss his ass?” I say crudely.

“I suppose I should have told him to be my guest.”

Shocked by my reaction, she seems to cower against the door.

“Men are such bullies,” she complains.

“You don’t sound any different than those boys.”

“You’re forgetting I backed down,” I remind her.

Bullies, are we? Is she talking about her father or Art or both? As we hit the traffic near town, I try again.

“What did Art bully you into doing?”

I look away from the road to see her reaction. For an instant I see anguish in her eyes, but she says nothing.

What was it? I know there is something she wants to tell me but can’t. I blurt out, “I think you know your father killed Art but you won’t admit it.”

In her eyes is the dumb fear you see in an animal’s face when it realizes it is trapped.

“Daddy didn’t kill Art!” she says shrilly.

I don’t believe her. I stop the Blazer in front of her parents’ house and get right in her face.

“You’re going to have to choose, Leigh. I know you think Chet can get you off. But with the way the evidence is stacking up now, that isn’t going to happen. I know how much you admire your father, and except for one horrible moment, he may be the most wonderful man in the world. But you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. Unless his alibi is rock solid, we’re going to have to go after your father.”

Leigh shakes her head and pushes her way out of the Blazer. As she runs around the front of the vehicle, I see her mother coming toward me down the walk. As before, she has the florid complexion of someone who has been drinking. Seeing the look on her daughter’s face, she pleads, “Where have you been? What’s wrong?”

Leigh stops on the grass between the curb and the sidewalk.

“Nothing, Mother,” she says stubbornly.

“Just go back in the house.”

mrs. Norman looks at her daughter and then at me.

“What happened?”

There is no doubt in my mind whose side Pearl Nor man will come down on. From the beginning, she has struck me as the kind of woman who would call her child a liar before she would believe an allegation of sexual abuse by her husband. Afraid Leigh will recite our conversation to her word for word, I say, “You understand my relationship with your daughter is confidential, mrs. Norman.”

Pearl Norman blinks away the technicality.

“Leigh is my daughter, Mr. Page.”

“And she is my client,” I say firmly, watching her face flush. Where was she during the murder? I’ll find that out, too, but the truth is, I can’t imagine Pearl Nor man firing a gun any more than I can imagine my own mother doing it. She seems too helpless, too dependent on men to be able to kill one of us.

“If you want to help Leigh’s case, you won’t pry.”

It is as if Barney life had cussed out Aunt Bee. Her lips quiver, and ninety-proof tears begin to gush as if a dam had burst. She turns and rushes back into the house with Leigh following closely behind. She is as protective of her mother as she is of her father. Damn. An other conversation like this one, and I’ll be watching this case from the back of the courtroom. I drive off as frustrated as a teenager who didn’t even get a goodnight kiss. With this weather I can’t bring myself to return to the office just yet and decide to make the afternoon a total waste by looking for Jason’s spiritual development center.

If I can get mrs. Chestnut’s money back for her, maybe she will adopt me and I can forget all this non sense about making a living. I have not been able to bring myself to return her call, but while I was in San Francisco, Julia said she had called with the address of Jason’s school: 10000 Damell Road. Since it is the only address in the last five years I’ve been able to remember without having to look it up, I consider it a good omen and head west again. In five minutes I see the sign, but instead of spiritual development, it promises Personality Enhancement in freshly painted letters.

Maybe Jason has begun to doubt his own abilities and has begun to settle for more modest goals.

I can hear dogs barking as soon as I get out of the car. I enter a rectangular wooden building and am met by a smiling young man behind a desk who asks if I am here to pick up Clarence.

I clear my throat and look around the room. It has the hosed-down look of a vet’s office, but I can hear opera music in the background. I am hardly a fan (the golden oldies on Cool [KOLL] 95 are my speed); nevertheless, I hear the familiar Toreador song and realize I’m hum ming along with it. Maybe this is the key to my own spiritual development. I am tempted to confess to being Clarence’s master if it will give me the opportunity to escape. Somehow, I am having difficulty asking for Jason. All of a sudden I feel as if I am here to get my hair done.

“No,” I stammer, “I’m just here to talk to, uh, Jason for a minute. Is he free?”

The young man, who has the smile of someone enjoying a drug high, looks at his watch.

“You’re in luck,” he says, beaming at me.

“He’s just finishing a class right now.”

Three p.m. right on the money. School’s out. I hear excited howls over the music. Why should this class be any different? Time to boogie.