Gods Go Begging (11 page)

“Ah, the Robin Hood of the Old West,” announced Dr. Wooden with a childish grin. “I myself went to Auburn. It is a school of great traditions. Since time immemorial they have hung a brown paper bag in front of the admissions office, and if your skin was lighter than that bag, you just couldn’t get in, no matter how good your grades were.” Dr. Wooden closed his eyes to better remember the happiest days of his life. “Before I lost all of my hair, I had the most beautiful three-finger wave you ever done seen.”

“Where did you go?” scowled Bernard as he turned to face Eddy, “a fucking Jap school?”

“As a matter of pertinent fact,” said Eddy Kazuso Oasa without changing expression, “I attended college at picturesque Peru State up in Nebraska. As you might expect, the student body is mostly Peruvian, though there are a few Bolivians and an Ecuadorian or two. At Peru State llamas and alpacas are allowed free run of the campus. and the dormitories. There is a full-scale replica of Macchu Picchu on the campus quad. Japanese students go to school there, then go down to Peru and get elected president. In fact, it will be my turn to be president of Peru in the year two thousand and four. I’m just working as an investigator for fun until I can get my hands on the keys to the presidential palace down in Lima. I can’t wait.”

Bernard stood up suddenly.

“I’m gettin’ the fuck out of here,” he announced. “I don’t want to be around you fucking mud people and all your bullshit universities.”

Jesse rose from his chair and stood in front of Bernard, blocking his pathway to the door.

“You’re gonna hear me out, Bernard. If you move one more inch I’ll send the doctor and Eddy outside and they’ll close the door behind them. It’ll be just you and me. Ten minutes from now, everybody—every black, brown, yellow, and red man on the mainline—will know that their favorite prisoner, mr. supreme, got his ass kicked, one on one, by his own lawyer. Believe me, Bernard, it will be my pleasure.”

Bernard and his lawyer were face to face, their noses still almost touching. Bernard’s face was glowing a beet red around a clenched set of tan, pitted teeth. His eye had swollen shut. Bernard felt the heat in his own face and was proud of the feverish, crimson blush. Blood in the face was the mark of a true white man. No one else could blush like this, not Hindus or Mexicans or Jews.

Bernard Skelley looked down into Jesse Pasadoble’s face and despised it. It was so goddamn brown… so inhuman. But the son of a bitch didn’t seem to be afraid. Bernard considered punching that face—a quick left jab, then a right. But something held him back, kept him from the risk. Why, Bernard wondered sadly to himself, did that traitor Max Schmelling have to go and lose to that black monkey Joe Louis? The whole American South had once gathered around their radios to pray for Max Schmelling. His father had wept with each telling of this tragic story. Every real human being had suffered so much from that defeat. Then there had been those other losers Henry Cooper, Ingemar Johansson, and Jerry Cooney.

“If you hear me out,” continued Jesse in a calmer voice, “we’ll be gone in ten minutes and you can go back to your cell with all of your personal bullshit intact.”

Bernard slowly lowered his body back down to the chair behind him. Jesse nodded toward the doctor.

“Mr. Skelley,” said the doctor in a professorial monotone, “on the test that I administered a few weeks ago, you got thirty-one correct answers out of a possible one hundred. Your lawyer got ninety-seven correct out of the same one hundred questions.”

“I missed three?” exclaimed Jesse. “I demand a recount.”

“It is my strong suggestion, therefore,” continued the doctor. “that you let your lawyer handle your case. You have to fight with your best weapon, Mr. Skelley. You know his reputation. I’m sure that some of your friends in the jail have told you about Mr. Pasadoble. Think of it as your using him to get out of jail. Can you do that? Can you use him, Bernard?”

A small smile began to cross Bernard Skelley’s lips. Even a clouded mind like his realized that this day could be salvaged. After all, he wasn’t paying anything for the services of Jesse Pasadoble. The smile grew wider. He could easily think of his brown lawyer as a slave. This whole building was filled with niggers in black robes and judges with tits. His slave lawyer would know how to handle those kinds of people. He could use him.

“Defend me!” he said suddenly. “Y‘all do what I say, now, y’hear? I order you to defend me.”

Bernard turned his head toward the wall and spat. A huge wad of speckled spit stuck to the wall, defying gravity. Proud of his work, Bernard turned toward his lawyer and grinned a wide, broken-toothed grin of disdain.

“No doubt about it,” said Jesse in a low voice, “the lower your IQ, the more you need to floss. Now, here is how we’re going to work this. There will be no more of these useless interviews. I will write out my questions to you on a sheet of paper. I will put a signed court order on the outside of the envelope telling the sheriff’s department that they are not to read the contents of the writings, though they may perform a cursory tactile search for contraband.

“You will read the questions and answer them as well as you can. If you have a problem with spelling, just sound out the words or try chewing on your tongue.”

Bernard’s broken capillaries were glowing with rage.

“If you want to avoid life in prison, answer the questions, no matter how much you may hate doing it. In other words, Bernard, if you ever want to run out to the outhouse again and flog your log to a crumpled picture of Betty and Veronica, answer the questions. If you ever want to drink cheap whiskey for courage and wear that dear white sheet again, answer the fucking questions. Eddy here will pick up each envelope and bring it to me. He and I will work on the case. I don’t want any phone calls from you—”

“You sure don’t have to worry about that,” interrupted Bernard.

“I’m the one talking now,” hissed Jesse through tightly clenched teeth. “You’re charged with over a hundred counts of molesting one Minnie Skelley, your own niece. When asked who it was that was molesting her, she pointed to a photograph of you in a photo spread of eight people. You could get up to eight hundred years if you’re found guilty.”

Jesse pulled a photograph from his binder. It was a full frontal photo of the supreme being with his shirt removed. There was the eagle. With her tiny index finger, little Minnie had reached out and touched the right wing.

“At least it’s not life,” Eddy said. He laughed. Dr. Wooden smiled, then quickly reassumed his professional demeanor.

“Eddy will interview everyone in your family, including little Minnie. I don’t want to hear from anyone you know unless it’s about the case,” continued Jesse. “I will not see you again until we are in a trial court picking a jury. Anything I have to say to you will be in those envelopes. Do you understand that?”

Bernard said nothing.

“Do you understand me?”

“I’m just using you,” said Bernard as he jumped to his feet. “The white race doesn’t need any of you.” He leered at the three men. “Pretty soon we’re gonna take our country back.”

“I think there’s a big Apache fellow down in cellblock C-3,” said Jesse. “Why don’t you go down there and tell it to him? And while you’re at it, tell him your charges. All the boys down on the mainline would love to know that you’re charged with having short eyes, with dancing that old ballet rose. Besides, you idiots need everybody. Other than inbreeding and rifle racks, no redneck has ever invented anything. Bernard, if someone like you ran the world,” shouted Jesse, who had moved back to a position just in front of Mr. Supreme, “we would still be five hundred years away from inventing the wheel.”

“From now on,” sneered Bernard, “you will address me as Sergeant Skelley.”

“I know about sergeants,” said Jesse softly but with great intensity, “and you’re no sergeant.”

Bernard stepped angrily out into the hallway and walked silently toward post eight. The two huge deputies saw him and ran to intercept him.

“You don’t have to go so soon, do you?” Jesse called out in a mocking voice. “You forgot to take a copy of your IQ test with you. You didn’t do too badly, Bernard. The job-evaluation index says that you could get a good job as the personal valet to an out-of-work busboy.” Jesse watched as his cursing client was escorted to the bars that separated post eight from the mainline. “Y‘all come back now, y’hear?” he shouted to the departing figure of Bernard Skelley. Once again projectiles and curses filled the air between the bays. Back in the interview room, both Eddy and the doctor were sadly shaking their heads.

“You shouldn’t let him get to you, Jesse. I always feel so disappointed when I allow myself to fall to his level,” said the doctor as he packed his briefcase to leave. Eddy, who was still seated, nodded his agreement. Even he had succumbed to his own anger. He reached out to touch Jesse’s arm.

“Carolina says you’re not sleeping, that you’re drinking again,” said Eddy. There was a look of concern in his face. “She called last night and we talked for a while.”

“What the hell does she know about me?” retorted Jesse angrily. “I haven’t seen her in weeks. What I do is none of her business. It’s over between us.”

Jesse fell silent. He knew that these two men cared about him. He knew that Carolina cared even more.

“We rise above Bernard Skelley by working the case,” said Jesse in a barely controlled voice. “We don’t have to like him in order to work the case. There’s no way I could ever like someone like that and I sure as hell won’t pretend otherwise. I can’t believe it, doc! Ten years ago you told me that I was going to explode if I didn’t let my emotions out, and now you’re saying that I’m too goddamn emotional. I wish you shrinks would make up your minds.”

“Your pendulum,” said the doctor with a sigh, “has got to swing to the middle, Jesse. Ten years ago you barely spoke to anyone. You never smiled. You were almost as hateful as Bernard. This is not Vietnam, Jesse. Life is not a war.”

“It’s not?” answered Jesse, a look of surprise on his face. “Don’t we live in a free-fire zone? There are seventy-five wars going on in this world right now, and only one of them matches the homicide rate in this country. Didn’t Skelley call himself a soldier? Listen, doc, I can’t stand the bastard, but I will do something that he and his kind could never do. I will stand up for him in a court of law, and I will do my best. Besides, I think I deserve a little anger. It’s certainly not like it used to be. I’m not like I used to be.”

Jesse’s voice dropped as he remembered how it had once been. There had been years of silence and rage. He had transformed every disagreement into a battle, every act of intimacy into an invasion. Then he thought of Carolina. She made him want to succeed, but once again he had failed. Healthy, genuine love had presented itself and Jesse had been paralyzed by it.

“You’re not like you used to be,” said the doctor, “but you’re a long way from where you could be. You’ve gone from hurting people to helping people, but you still can’t do anything for yourself.”

“Now, I’m going to have the sheriff bring up Calvin Thibault.” Jesse extended his hand to the doctor, who reached out with his own. “Thanks for coming, doc.” He had heard the doctor’s words but did not acknowledge them.

“That’s that double killing up on Potrero Hill, isn’t it?” said the doctor with a note of sadness. “What a shame that was. Such a terrible shame. My wife knew those two women. She used to bring home some of their famous spaghetti sauce. Best I’ve ever had. Such a shame. You’ve got a hard row to hoe on that one, Jesse. But call me if you need me. I can do a profile on the Biscuit Boy.”

“The Biscuit Boy?”

“That’s young Mr. Thibault’s street name,” said Dr. Wooden. “I don’t know where it comes from but I first heard the name up at Juvenile Hall. He was always getting picked up for truancy.”

When the doctor was gone, Jesse returned to the interview table with his investigator. The tape machine was already set up and ready to go. Next to it was young Calvin’s confession on cassette tape. Jesse and Eddy sighed deeply in the calm interim between storms. Down the now darkened and silent hallway, Sykes and Porter had thrown Bernard back into his isolation cell and were now moving to C-block to secure their next prisoner.

“Thibault!” The jailer was rousing the young man from his sleep. “Goddamn it, Biscuit Boy, this ain’t Juvenile Hall!” The deep voice reverberated down the hallway. “You can’t cry in here! You’re an adult now. You’re in adult jail. You done killed two women who never did you no harm. Time for crying is long past. Now, get your little raggedy ass up and go see your lawyer.”

Calvin struggled to stand on his feet but the warped space around his bed kept sucking him back in. Calvin stretched, trying to break his gravitational bonds. He moved his lips and tongue, smacking them in order to stun them back to life. They had been numbed into senseless clay by their very first taste of dead time. Finally, he was able to pull himself up by grabbing the bunk just above his own. The occupant of the upper bunk cursed fitfully, then rolled over. Calvin yawned and eventually stepped cautiously away from his mattress for an hour or so of extravehicular activity.

Jesse and Eddy waited in silence, the taint of Bernard’s presence still hovering in the room. Then the lawyer opened a binder to a certain page, closed the binder, and leaned toward his investigator.

“The little girl Minnie Skelley said in her taped statement that the thing she remembers most about each episode of touching and of digital penetration was the eagle that flew above her head. She said that she saw that eagle every night for two years. It’s strange that she would say in the same taped statement that she was only molested one night a week. She indicated in her second statement that the actual acts of rape did not begin until just a few months ago. Minnie could not see an eagle during the rapes but she says it was the same man who molested her. Why couldn’t she see the eagle during the rapes? ”

Jesse was silent and sat with his eyes closed as he thought about the seeming discrepancies. Had she seen her assailant every night? Had he left her in peace six nights of the week? Had there been only manual molestation on those six nights? Was the little girl having nightmares?