Light from a Distant Star (40 page)

F
INALLY, IT WAS HERE
, N
ELLIE’S DAY TO MOUNT THE WITNESS
stand and save Max Devaney. She had a bad cold and her glasses were crooked on her runny nose. The little hinge pin had fallen out as they were leaving the house. Her father had stuck a strand of picture wire through the hinge, but the glasses were so wobbly she had to hold them straight. They arrived at nine, expecting to go straight into the courtroom. Instead, their witness advocate escorted them to a small, overheated conference room off the main corridor. Her mother fanned herself with a gardening magazine from the dog-eared stack on the wobbly table. A matchbook cover would do the trick, her father declared, leaning to look at the leg. But who even carries matches anymore, he said to no one in particular.

Miss Chapley, a petite woman with round, rosy cheeks, had been filing her nails. It was giving Nellie the chills. Seeing her shiver again, Miss Chapley said she shouldn’t be nervous. Nellie said she wasn’t. Filing faster, she said Judge Vasquez was very patient, especially with children. Nellie told her she was thirteen. She looked surprised. Her godchild was thirteen, she said, as if Nellie must be mistaken. An interesting age, her father was quick to add,
whatever that meant
. Miss Chapley said her godchild was turning into just the biggest social butterfly, eyeliner, girlfriends, parties every weekend. Silence around the table, everyone surely thinking what a loser Nellie was, squinting through her cockeyed glasses and breathing through her mouth because her nose was so stuffed up. Not just a loser but a pariah in her own family. The Australian letters had ruined her life. Selfish, Ruth had called her, a pathological liar and a sneak, and no one had said a
word in her defense. Suspected of everything, trusted with nothing, she knew how Max must be feeling.

Her mother asked if she could open the door, the heat was too much. It had to stay closed, Miss Chapley said. Her father suggested opening a window. He could try, Miss Chapley allowed, but it had been painted shut. He banged on the window frame a few times with the heels of his hands then fished something from his pocket. Miss Chapley glanced up from her nails with the shiny blade’s first score down the painted sash.

“Is that a knife?” she gasped.

“Swiss Army,” he grunted, working to free the other sash.

“My God!” Miss Chapley sprang for the door.

“Ben! We just went through security!” her mother said. “You can’t bring a knife into the courthouse.”

Miss Chapley hurried back in with a court officer, who smiled seeing Nellie’s sheepish father. They’d been Eagle Scouts together. The court officer’s son was in Ruth’s class. Apologizing, her father unhooked the tiny knife from his key chain and handed it over. Nellie imagined Ruth’s laughter as she described him smuggling a concealed weapon into the murder trial, but then she remembered: not only wasn’t her sister speaking to her but refused to be in the same room with her. Together, the grunting men managed to open the window a few inches. Miss Chapley resumed work on her nails. Holding her glasses straight, Nellie flipped through a boating magazine, the file’s steady rasp deep in her bones. She considered asking if nail files weren’t also a security breach, but she couldn’t risk any more of her parents’ annoyance. Especially her mother’s.

Charlie’s testimony on the trial’s opening day had been in the paper. Recycling, he answered when asked his occupation. Someone chuckled, and he looked out into the courtroom and said, “Well, what the hell would you call it?” The judge reprimanded him. “Just wandered in one day,” Charlie said of his first meeting Max Devaney. “Asked if I had any work, odd jobs, whatever needed doing. A lot needs doing, I told him, but there’s nothing to pay you with. Bad enough nobody wanting old things anymore, now nobody wants old bucks like me around, either.” More chuckles. Inspired by his appreciative forum,
Charlie complained about all the town’s restrictions, their fees and outrageous fines just about putting him out of business, which was really their goal, his property being so valuable right in the heart of town, but the judge nudged him back on track. “Patiently,” the paper said.

“So having Mr. Devaney willing to work for room and board was helpful then, wasn’t it?” District Attorney Cowie continued.

“I paid him some. When I could. He was okay with it.” Charlie revealed details Nellie hadn’t known. Toward the end Max had been cooking for the two of them. He’d started painting the dining room, the plan being to move Charlie’s bed downstairs. Some nights they even watched television together, though Charlie said Max wasn’t one to sit still for long, unless it was something he liked to watch. “Crime stuff, mostly, and horror, like those Halloween movies. Myself, I couldn’t watch ’em, though,” Charlie added. “Way too much blood and gore.”

“That’s what the defendant preferred, though, right? More violent, the—” Cowie was cut off by Eggleston Jay Wright’s objection. Judge Vasquez called both men to the bench. The rest of Cowie’s questions concerned Dolly, whom Charlie said he’d never met or heard mentioned. And, yes, Max had gone out a few nights, and from the way he got all spiffed up, Charlie figured it had to do with a woman, but he never asked and Max never said. Closemouthed as he was.

After that, her mother hid the newspaper. If she could have, she would have removed every paper from every front step in town. Further details came from Brianna Hall. Two of Dolly’s friends, both dancers, she said, had testified about seeing Max Devaney in the club. The first time he just sat watching. The next time he tried to pay Dolly to sit with him. She refused and he lost his temper. After that, she was really scared of him. She told them how he used to show up at her place all the time. He knew she couldn’t do much about it because of his close ties to her landlady’s family. Hearing that, Nellie felt bad for her mother, the legacy of her father’s junk still darkening her days.

There was a lot Nellie would learn later. When it was too late—or didn’t matter, depending on your point of view. The child he’d left behind was about her age. For the boy’s sake, his wife said, common law, she admitted uneasily, a plain, thin-faced woman explaining how she’d tried to make it work, both of them having been so young, along with
her guilt that he’d gone to jail for having done something only wrong in the eyes of the law and her family, as well as his, who never forgave him for the brother’s death, leaving him only additionally marked, killer and deviant. Everywhere they went, scorned. So she kept taking him back after each time he just up and disappeared, until it just got too hard, the effect of such terrible rage on the boy. The night she finally said it, the night he came in bloodied from yet another fight, she told him to go, and he didn’t say a word, just put his big, cut hands on her shoulders and shook her until her legs gave out, which probably saved her life, him being so dead inside, anyway.

But for Nellie, Max Devaney’s history began the day he stepped from the glare into the dark heat of Charlie’s barn and sniffed at the pot roast. So her facts were pure, uncluttered by memory or misunderstanding. He existed only as she knew him, in a child’s view, its own complete and unassailable reality.

The stern, frizzy haired judge was leaning so close Nellie was sure she could hear her stomach growling. It had been a mortifying entrance into the oak-paneled courtroom. Not wanting to keep holding her glasses straight, she’d taken them off, so certain details were blurry. Like the steps leading up to the witness box. She’d gashed her knee in the stumble, but assured the judge she was fine. The baliff peeled open a Band-Aid and Nellie pressed it over the cut. With her glasses back on she couldn’t help grinning at the first face she saw. Max stared back from the defense table, expressionless. With his bushy hair cut and the ruddiness faded from his pitted cheeks, he seemed smaller. He was wearing a dark, pin-striped jacket and faded blue pants from the Salvation Army store. With the rest of the court’s fifty dollars, Eggleston Jay Wright had also bought the tan shoes there. Buttoned to the neck and tieless, the limp white shirt was Max’s own. He’d keep on looking for the money, Charlie had promised Eggleston when he came for the shirt.

After she was sworn in, the judge asked a few questions. Was she comfortable? Was she nervous? Did she understand the difference between a lie and the truth? Yes, no, yes, which set her foot tapping. She
was
nervous, so with her first untruth she tried to smile as District Attorney Cowie walked toward her. From this height they were almost
eye level. He seemed more threatening than in their first meeting. Of the five men and seven women in the jury, there wasn’t a single smile among them. Most of the seats in the courtroom were taken. Her parents were right behind the prosecutor’s table. She wondered if it was like sports where you sat on your team’s side. She didn’t recognize anyone on Max’s side.

“Hello, Nellie,” Mr. Cowie said. “Hope that knee’s not hurting too much.”

“It’s okay. Thank you, sir.”

“That’s good. Well, anyway, I’m going to ask you a few questions that probably seem real obvious, but it’s just to get it all in the record here.”

She nodded, and he asked her full name and age, her address and who else lived there besides her.

“And Lazlo Larouche,” she quickly added, after naming family members. “He’s our tenant,” she explained when Mr. Cowie asked what Lazlo’s relation was to them.

“And where exactly does Mr. Larouche live?”

“In the apartment, in the back of our house.”

“Yes, that’s right, and before Mr. Larouche, who else lived in that apartment?”

“Dolly did.” Her nose had started running again.

“Do you mean Dolly Bedelia?”

She nodded, and the judge reminded her to answer aloud so everyone could hear her.

“Yes. Dolly Bedelia. She lived there after Lazlo.” And as soon as she said it, she knew by the buzz of confusion how every word counted. Eggleston Jay Wright might be in a daze, but neither the judge nor Mr. Cowie were taking anything for granted. With the order of tenancy clarified, Mr. Cowie’s questions mostly concerned Dolly. He described her as a struggling young dancer still naively hoping for her break into show business. Most of his questions began with statements. She knew she was only supposed to answer the questions, so she wasn’t sure how to handle the other parts.

Now Mr. Cowie was asking where she’d first met Max Devaney. In Charlie’s junkyard, she told him, explaining, before he could ask, that
Charlie was her grandfather. Not only was she feeling more confident, but she liked being the center of attention, everyone hanging on her every word. On her mother’s side, she added, smiling out at her. Her mother’s smile back was uneasy, but she didn’t have to worry. Nellie could tell she had a knack for this. Testifying was like hand-to-hand combat, all about instinct and reflex, and thanks to Major Fairbairn, she was well practiced. Maybe she’d be a lawyer, she thought, which would please her father. Maybe this was what the major’s book had been preparing her for. Defending the weak, the unjustly accused.

“Now, the next time you were in Max Devaney’s presence something quite terrifying took place, didn’t it, something that—”

“You mean the dog?” she interrupted, her thoughts agile as jabs.
Heel of the hand, full force, fingers to the eyes. Strike
.

“Yes, the dog that Max Devaney killed in front of you and your little brother. Will you tell us exactly how the dog was killed?”
Killed. Killed
. Just saying it, the word, his counterthrust. “Nellie, exactly how did Max Devaney
kill
the dog?”

Attorney Wright was on his feet, objecting. “This has no relevance to the matter at hand.”

Judge Vasquez called both men up to speak to her. Their conversation fizzed in whispers. “Pattern of violence … rage,” she heard Mr. Cowie say. Returning to his seat, Attorney Wright made a big show of shaking his head. Brio. She liked that.

“Anyway,” Mr. Cowie said. “I’d like you to tell us exactly how Mr. Devaney killed that dog.”

“With a hammer.”

“And exactly where did Mr. Devaney hit the dog with the hammer?”

“In the head.”

“Ooh.” He winced. “Mr. Devaney must’ve been awfully angry to—”

“You left out a part,” she interrupted. Straightening her glasses, she looked out at Max. Still no expression. Nothing. Unafraid because he had faith in her, faith in the truth. “About the dog attacking my brother. Henry, I mean. He bit him, like, took this chunk out of his arm.” She even squeezed her forearm for emphasis. “Henry was down,
flat down on his back and the dog still kept tryna bite him and Henry was screaming and Max just picked him up and
threw
him against the barn! The dog I mean, but even that didn’t stop him, so that’s when he hit him, when he started back after Henry, he took his hammer, I’m not sure if he had it in his hand or maybe picked it up, but he hit him with it.”

“So, Max Devaney
killed
the dog by
smashing
his head in with the hammer?”

“He didn’t smash his head in, he just hit him. Like, boom!” she said with a sharp strike of her hand.