Nothing Lost (24 page)

CHAPTER ONE

MONDAY

“We're late,” Ellen Tracy said at nine minutes past nine. “In my court, nine o'clock means nine o'clock, everyone in their places and ready to go. No paper shuffling, no ‘May it please the court.' ” Her weekend reign as the grand marshal of the anniversary celebration in Dead Center had not made her courtroom demeanor any less intimidating. I tried not to think of her reaction if she discovered how opposing counsel had spent their recess. “Mr. McClure, you may begin.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.” J.J. looked as if he had spent the weekend getting a haircut and a manicure. He was wearing a severe dark blue suit, white shirt, and a blue tie with tiny replicas of the scales of justice worked into the fabric. Only his soft black running shoes suggested the casual, and they were polished to a high sheen. I hated to use the word
sangfroid,
especially under the circumstances, but it described J.J. perfectly. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my name is James J. McClure. I am the chief deputy in the homicide division of the Attorney General's office up there in Cap City, which as you know is so ably run by the A.G., that's our shorthand for attorney general, Mr. Jerrold Wormwold. I'm going to be prosecuting this matter. . . .”

“Max, don't say a word,” Teresa had said when she walked into our tiny offices at the DeLuxor early Sunday afternoon. She was in the jeans and the jean jacket she had bought somewhere on the roadside hundreds of miles to the west. She looked like the wild thing that I had half suspected was at Teresa's core, but had never seen, buried as it was under layers, years, of public propriety. The dress she had been wearing when she ran into J.J. at Auntie Pasto's four days before was stuffed at the bottom of a plastic shopping bag under a half-dozen bottles of water, like the detritus of a former incarnation. “Don't say reckless. Don't say irresponsible. Don't say willful. Especially don't say willful. I hate willful. The goddamn nuns used to say it. And don't ask if we talked about what we're here for. We didn't. Is there anything else you want to know?”

“Hello to you, too, Teresa.”

She opened a bottle of water and drained it in one long swig. Then she arced the bottle into a wastebasket, removed her jean jacket, sat at her computer, and typed in her password. She was wearing a V-neck T-shirt, a man's size, too big, with a spot of something like ketchup just under the vee. Her arms were folded, and her right hand nervously scratched her left breast as she waited for the document to come up. I do not think women are erotic, but looking at Teresa at that moment I was willing to reconsider the prejudice. She pointed to the monitor and I looked over her shoulder at the notes she had made for her opening statement before she had succumbed to her wanderlust. I did not tell her I was so sure she would not return in time that I had written my own opening statement.

Hers was better.

“We counterpunch, Max,” she said. “Hope for an opening. It's the only way we're going to keep Duane Lajoie out of the electric chair.”

One thing I knew about J.J. McClure.

He didn't give many openings. Whatever had happened outside the courtroom would not affect what happened inside. He would still try to beat Teresa Kean's brains out.

This is something else I knew.

Teresa would not give him an inch either.

Judge Tracy demanded speed, and the first witnesses were called before lunch Monday, immediately after Teresa finished her opening statement. A woman juror asked for a restroom break, and the judge said she would have to wait until the lunch recess at twelve-thirty. In other words, she would run the proceedings her way, bladder discipline was the order for all involved. The witnesses were the lesser investigators and forensic specialists who laid the foundation and applied the mortar, establishing that violations of pertinent clauses in the state penal code had been perpetrated by a person or persons then unknown. J.J.'s questions were direct, uncomplicated, and pro forma. When did the Loomis County Sheriff's Department receive the first call of a possible incident? Was the call logged? Was there an audio recording? Where was the body of the victim discovered, what was the state of the victim's person, what was the approximate time of the victim's death, when was the identity of the victim confirmed?

I watched Teresa and J.J. closely. It was as if they were strangers who shared only the contagious dislike of each other that prevails in the adversarial system. The basic facts from the witness box were not in dispute, only the odd detail, a mistake about time or the caliber of a weapon or the depth and exact nature of a wound, and she and J.J. felt each other out, gauging how the other would react, jabbing like prizefighters, seeing if blood could be drawn. As theater, it was not bad, but at that moment there were only two members of the audience who understood the play. I was one, and Allie Vasquez the other; Allie, as J.J.'s chief investigator, was sitting at the prosecution table next to Patsy Feiffer, who acted as if she were not there. The principal actors were playing their parts to the hilt, like the road company hams who would occasionally visit Kiowa or Cap City in bus-and-truck revivals of Broadway musicals, recalling enchanted evenings and hills alive with the sound of music. Teresa was dramatically exasperated when she would object that answers supplied by the witnesses J.J. had called, lacked either specificity or foundation, and J.J. was genially contemptuous in his responses.

“Perhaps counsel is a little trial-rusty,” he said after one objection, “since it's been half dozen years since the last time she defended a criminal—”

“Objection.”

“Excuse me, Your Honor, alleged criminal.”

Ellen Tracy whacked her gavel. “Counsel, Mr. McClure. You're acting like lawyers on TV. You're not auditioning. Don't waste the time of this court with your prefabricated bickering.” Another whack of the gavel. “You may continue, Mr. McClure.”

So Tracy got the performance aspect, too. Good instincts.

Duane Lajoie sat next to me at the defense table. He never looked at a witness, never shook his head, never sighed heavily. He just drew penises and vaginas on a scratch pad, showing them to me and then to Teresa, and a sketch of Ellen Tracy with a Hitler mustache not unlike her real one. It had not occurred to me that he might be so observant.

The morning's only moment of levity came just before lunch when J.J. allowed Patsy Feiffer to examine Brutus Mayes. He was as trim as a 350-pound man could be, his arms bursting like tree trunks out of his short-sleeved dark brown uniform shirt, his Sam Browne belt and shoulder strap highly polished, his equally polished holster empty, since only marshals were allowed to wear guns in court.

Patsy Feiffer's first question was long and rambling.

Teresa was on her feet.

“Sit down, counsel,” Ellen Tracy said before she could speak. “I'll handle this. Miss Feiffer, that's not a question, it's a speech.”

“I'll repeat the question, Your Honor.” She did. Hesitantly.

“Miss Feiffer,” Judge Tracy said. “That's not a question. It's four questions. You only get to ask one at a time.”

She tried again.

“Miss Feiffer, where is the foundation to that question?” And so it continued. What appeared to be a sweat stain started down the crease of Patsy Feiffer's jacket. Brutus Mayes tried to help her out, and was cut short. “Sheriff, this is not the National Football League. In this courtroom, I call the plays.”

At last it was over. “Mr. Cline,” Judge Tracy said.

I was down to handle the cross. Patsy Feiffer had made that unnecessary. “We have no questions of the witness at this time, Your Honor. We reserve the right to recall.”

“Granted,” Ellen Tracy said. “We're running late. I'm going to take it out of the lunch break. Forty-five minutes not an hour, everybody back here and ready to go at one-forty-four, understood?”

Romantic dramatist that I had become since the weekend, a totally unaccustomed role for the hardheaded realist I thought I was, I wondered if Teresa and J.J. would acknowledge each other as they exited the courtroom. They did not. J.J. brushed by, talking to Patsy, while Teresa waited until Duane Lajoie was led away to the holding cell, then engaged me about the witness list, and who would cross-examine whom, decisions we had in fact already made. We both knew that the only witness of any consequence was Bryant Gover, who was scheduled for Thursday morning. Until then there was nothing we could do except try to score debating points against the secondary witnesses. We could ask Clyde Ray what he had actually been doing on County Road 21 when he spotted Duane Lajoie's pickup at two-forty-seven in the morning, and we could ask Merle Orvis the exact nature of her sexual relationship with Bryant Gover, but we would just be marking time.

It was only Allie Vasquez who had anything to say to us after the morning session, and as always with Allie, there was a mocking insolence just beneath the surface. “Professor Cline,” she said. It was how the more problematic of my students at Osceola Community College referred to me, as if they thought the undeserved honorific might flatter me into inflating their grades, thus making it easier for them to inflict themselves on the state bar. That kind of flattery was foreign to Allie. Imperfectly veiled mockery was her chosen method of address. “Putting your classroom lessons into practice, I see.”

“Ms. Vasquez,” I said. I would play along. “I don't think you've met—”

Allie interrupted. “I'm Altagracia Vasquez,” she said to Teresa. I had never heard Allie use her full first name before, and only knew it myself because it was on the student list sent me by the college registrar.

“Teresa Kean,” Teresa said. Each waited for the other to speak again.

“I have to go,” Allie said finally.

“I imagine we'll see each other,” Teresa said. “In court.”

“I imagine.”

In that brief exchange they had managed to size each other up, each recognizing a wary adversary not without a danger quotient. I knew that Allie did not care about J.J., or about Teresa as a rival for his affection, in Allie's case an attraction that had only been physical, but J.J., and to a lesser extent me, offered her and her daughter passports out of what she regarded as the negligible circumstances to which she felt them sentenced. This was a passport application that she would not allow to be compromised, and this was, I realize now, why she was able to function as a double agent with such unerring equanimity. One of us, either J.J. or me, might ultimately be more useful than the other.

Outside the courthouse, Teresa and I picked our way through the gaggle of reporters and cameramen hurling questions and snapping our pictures. We kept moving, not even bothering to say “no comment.” I saw another group gathered around J.J., who deflected questions with an expressive gesture or a quip, always pretending to put a gag in his mouth when any reporter veered toward the morning session and the effectiveness of the presentation. Patsy Feiffer stood at his side, her face frozen into a rictus smile, like a royal princess at the trooping of the colors. I knew J.J. too well to think he had bothered to take her to task for the shortcomings of her examination of Brutus Mayes. He knew she was Gerry Wormwold's person, and I expect he was reasonably certain that Ellen Tracy, who ate ill-prepared young attorneys alive, would feast on her. Poppy was another subject of general interest. Yes, he had been in touch with Poppy. What had they talked about? Tax reform, J.J. replied. There was general laughter. What else? The cherry blossoms are in bloom, J.J. said.

At the edge of the fray, Alex Quintero recorded the scene, his assistants reloading his cameras, the star photographer photographing the proletarian photographers at their labors. Alice Todt and Jocko Cannon hovered behind him. Alice Todt's makeup people had applied the sty she wanted on her left eye (after the right eye had been rejected, the right side of her face being what she thought the better side), and she was wearing an oversize lumberman's shirt, not tucked in, but hanging loose over black jeans torn at the knees. Jocko Cannon's arm was draped over Alice's shoulder, suggesting a broader definition of his community-service bodyguard activities than had been contemplated. He was wearing a Miami Dolphins ocean-green home-uniform jersey, number 99 (the number negotiated by his agents in the contract he had signed), with just the name JOCKO on the back, not his last name (another contractual stipulation). Jocko was the name with commercial possibilities, not Cannon. Merle Orvis crouched nearby as if on a catapult, ignored except when an order was shouted, watching everything, a runner always available to fetch and carry. The only person who seemed to be missing was Boy. I wondered into whose custody he had been delivered, and whether his sitter had to offer a breast to keep him quiet. To Alex Quintero and Alice Todt, Boy was a prop, and until he was needed, he was to be consigned to the property master, along with the Rollerblades and the lowered Impala and the 1969 Harley.

Merle Orvis opened a bottle of water, passed it to Jocko, who swallowed half and passed the rest to Alice.

“How's Duane holding up?” Alice Todt asked.

“He's been helpful,” I said. I had torn the sexually explicit drawings from his scratch pad and stuffed them in my pocket.

“Is he fucking smart enough to be helpful?”

Teresa stared at Alice for a moment, as if trying to deconstruct the question. Since the weekend, her concentration on the dangers inherent in her own situation, while still trying to present a viable defense in court, had led her to misread, at least momentarily, the degree of Alice Todt's self-absorption. To Alice, Duane Lajoie was only the most valuable of her props. The five hundred thousand dollars she was paying for his defense she saw now as an investment in the broader future she could have when she could no longer sustain being a teen nymphet, a possibility she had never previously considered. When the jury returned its verdict, she would be ready for her close-up.