That’s How I Roll: A Novel (16 page)

There was no real possibility of compromise. The DA was an expert in such things, but no matter how he tested those waters, they came up foul. So he not only had to charge the Beast with murder, he had to make it stick.

Sure, he was a politician, and he didn’t want to chance losing an election. But this was worse. A whole lot worse. When you dealt with the Beast on any matter, win-or-lose always came down to live-or-die. Either he’d owe you a debt, or you’d owe him a death.

If the DA lost
any
murder trial, that would cost him some prestige. But if the Beast walked out of the courtroom without shackles on his wrists, the DA knew it was only a matter of time before dirt would be shoveled over his own coffin.

t’s not a question of believing you, Esau. I know you wouldn’t lie. But juries are funny—you just never know how they’re going to act.”

“But—”

“Let me finish, now, son. It’s not as cut-and-dried as you seem to think. See, we don’t really have that ‘forensics’ stuff juries expect to see today. All that damn TV, it’s polluted their minds. Sure, we have the pistol, we have the bullet, and we can prove that your father …”

I hadn’t said anything, but he must have felt some of the rage coming off me when he used that word. The Beast wasn’t my father. He wasn’t anybody’s father.

“… that the defendant”—he switched words so smoothly that I knew he must have had a lot of practice—“shot the … victim. But there was that butcher knife out in plain view, and everyone in the house had left some prints on it. Even you.

“So what it comes down to is one person’s word against another’s. And that’s never a choice you want to leave up to a jury.”

“There isn’t a person in this town that wouldn’t take my word over his,” I told him.

“I’m not saying that isn’t true. But Lord knows your sister had good reason to hate that man. You, too, truth be told. And everybody in this town knows that, too.”

When a silver-tongued man says something blunt, you’d best listen. The DA was warning me what was going to come out at the trial—what would be all the motivation I would ever have needed to hate the Beast. Even enough to lie under oath.

I visualized a horde of savage termites attacking our house, boring their way in so deep that the wood was going to collapse in on itself.

I reached desperately for my balance like a man grabbing for a handhold while tumbling down a quarry wall. I clawed my hands
until they caught. Then I hauled myself up, hand over hand. A man doesn’t need legs for that.

That’s when I started talking. And I didn’t stop until I’d blocked those termites with my sworn promise that the DA would never lose that trial.

I promised him that by the time they held that trial Tory-boy would be a witness, too. Nobody would doubt anything a child like Tory-boy said—they’d know he couldn’t make up a lie if he wanted to.

I even told the DA he could test it for himself. Give me a couple of months to work with my baby brother. Then he could ask Tory-boy anything he wanted. If he didn’t like the answers, he could make whatever deal with the Beast he wanted to.

The DA, he was an important man. Not just a lawyer, the prosecutor over the whole county. But when I looked into his eyes, I saw just what I expected to see.

I think maybe that was the first time I realized the full truth about how having your place in the world was the only thing that could keep you safe.

For as long as people needed you, you were safe from them.

For that long, and no longer.

he DA had Tory-boy tested. They let me be there while they did it—they knew they couldn’t leave him in a room with a bunch of strangers and expect much more out of him than throwing a fit. And even at his age, nobody wanted to be around Tory-boy when he went off.

The social workers and the psychologists wrote reports. They all said the same thing. They sometimes used different terms, but “developmentally delayed” was their clear favorite.

That just means slow, not stupid. No reason in the world why Tory-boy couldn’t do the same things other children did, he’d just always be a little behind his years, and he’d never catch up.

Although he tested out to have a mental age of about five, Tory-boy was almost nine at the time. So first they had to hold this little trial—I think they called it a “hearing” because there was no jury there—to see if he’d be allowed to testify at all.

The judge was real clear about that—it wasn’t the age of the witness that mattered; it was whether he knew the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. And whether he knew it was wrong to tell a lie.

Some children were so young that, no matter how smart they might turn out to be later in life, they couldn’t do those things. A two-year-old, you wouldn’t expect he could do that.

But a five-year-old, he could. So, even if Tory-boy was behind other kids his own age, he might be allowed to testify. That’s what we were all there to find out.

The Beast’s lawyers only had a couple of hours to break Tory-boy. They’d’ve had a better chance of digging a mine shaft with their bare hands.

Two hours, when I’d had every other hour of his life to teach him what he needed to know. Passing school tests wasn’t my concern; I just had to teach my little brother how to answer the kind of questions that I knew were going to be asked. The DA gave me some transcripts to study first, so it was even easier.

It wasn’t about memorizing. I had Tory-boy’s total, absolute trust. If I told him he had seen something happen, he
had
seen something happen.

He looked so magnificent in court, sitting up straight, handsome and proud. What he was proud of was that he knew the answers I’d taught him—I was the only person in the world he’d ever wanted to please.

“A lie is when you say something that isn’t true,” he spoke right up, clear and confident.

One of the Beast’s lawyers—the older one—tried to trip up Tory-boy by asking a long, complicated question. But Tory-boy was ready for him. He remembered what I’d taught him to say, and he’d die before any old man in a suit could make him say different.

“Well, then,” the Beast’s lawyer asked, “how do you know when something isn’t true?”

“A truth is what is real. If something really happened, and you say what really happened, you’re telling the truth.”

The lawyer kept trying, but you could see Tory-boy had taken all the heart out of him. Finally, the judge stepped in and took over.

“Do you know the difference between a truth and a lie, son?” he asked Tory-boy.

“A truth is right. A lie is wrong.”

“What happens if you tell a lie?”

“Telling a lie is a sin,” Tory-boy recited, letter-perfect. “If you tell lies, you burn in Hell.”

“Seems clear enough to me, counsel,” the judge said to the Beast’s lawyer. “There’s plenty twice his age who don’t know as much as this boy does.”

“But, Your Honor—”

“Enough!” the judge snapped at him. “You’re asking the same questions over and over. We are finished with this witness.” I took that as a signal to roll over to where Tory-boy had been sitting and pick him up. I was almost eighteen then, but Tory-boy was damn near my size. If it wasn’t for all those years rolling myself around, all those exercises I did with Tory-boy, I doubt I could have carried him away like I did.

We sat right next to each other in the back of the courtroom, just waiting to see what would happen next.

“I’ll hear oral argument,” the judge said.

“With all respect, this is
res ipsa
, Your Honor,” the DA said. “The standard has not only been met, it’s been satisfied with room to spare.”

“The only
‘res ipsa’
here is that the boy is retarded,” the Beast’s lawyer fired back. “There’s no dispute about that. In the
Morrison
case, this state’s highest court held that—”

“This court is quite familiar with
Morrison
,” the judge said. You could tell he was insulted, like this outsider was questioning if he was retarded himself. “As you undoubtedly know, counsel,
Morrison
referred to a child found to be so profoundly retarded that he
was unable to do anything more than babble a few simple words, with no regard to their actual meaning.

“Furthermore,
Morrison
was a civil case, concerning charges of sexual abuse brought against the owner and several employees of a private care facility. The matter before this court is distinguishable on several grounds.”

“I certainly was not implying—”

“Sir,” the judge said, using that word without a drop of respect in it, “this court has made a finding. I trust you are familiar with your appellate remedies. If you believe you can get past the threshold of outright frivolousness, I assume you will act accordingly.”

When the judge cracked his gavel down, you could see where he wished he could have cracked it.

We waited until everyone had filed out of the room. As the DA passed me, he moved his head just enough to let me know that, next time I told him I could make something happen, he wouldn’t doubt me, not ever.

Not ever
again
, is what he meant.

he trial itself came almost a year after that hearing, so I had plenty of time to teach Tory-boy some new things. The DA told me what questions the Beast’s attorneys would be likely to ask, and I worked my little brother until he had it down perfect.

“Most capital cases try for delay,” the DA told me. “
This
delay is going to help the defendant right into the Death House.”

You don’t get a performance like that from a child out of fear. Just the opposite, in fact. If Tory-boy hadn’t wanted to please me more than anything in the world, he could never have managed the task.

Lord, how his face would light up every time I told him what a fine boy he was!

hen the State called Tory-boy as a witness, they let me wheel him up to the stand. I couldn’t stay there with him, but they let me move my chair over to one side, so Tory-boy would know I was still there.

The Beast’s lawyer raised all kinds of holy hell about that. He said I was going to be a witness, too, so I shouldn’t be allowed to stay anywhere in the courtroom at all.