The Dreams of Ada (46 page)

Court resumed. Wyatt called Dr. Bruce Weems, a physics instructor at East Central for eleven years. End the day with another professor, for the jury’s benefit, Wyatt figured. Dr. Weems, consulting a book of astronomy charts, testified that on April 28, 1984, sunset had occurred in Ada at 6:43
P.M
.

The significance was that on Fontenot’s tape he said they had kidnapped Denice when it was “almost dark.” By 8:30
P.M
. it would have been long dark.

On cross-examination, Bill Peterson noted that at sunset the sky is not yet dark. Weems agreed, to the extent that “twilight lasts for several minutes after it’s set.”

The professor was excused. It was 3:30. George Butner approached the bench. He told the judge that he was sorry, but that his stomach had gotten worse. He did not think he would be able to continue.

Judge Powers was understanding. He announced to the court that Mr. Butner was not feeling well—because of something he ate, perhaps—and therefore they were going to recess for the day. Mr. Butner’s wife was a nurse, the judge said, so he would be in good hands, and hopefully would be ready to resume at nine the next morning.

Butner thanked the judge for his sympathy.

While the case was progressing in court, Richard Kerner was continuing his investigation. Jannette Roberts had told him that Karl had gotten a haircut in April before going to apply for a job at Wendy’s; that at the interview, he’d been told his hair needed to be shorter still, and he had gotten a second haircut. Kerner hoped to prove this was true through the employment records at Wendy’s.

Kerner ascertained that Karl’s first check from Wendy’s was received on May 20. But his first employment application could not be located. The investigator tracked down and interviewed four former managers of Wendy’s, which apparently had rapid turnover. All four remembered Fontenot. But none could recall the exact date he was interviewed and had his hair cut short. “It was believed,” Kerner reported to Wyatt, “that Captain Dennis Smith received the Wendy’s application and employment paperwork on Fontenot a long time ago.”

Thursday morning, as the defense began in the courtroom, Kerner went to the gas station where Jim Moyer worked. He wanted to show him the pictures of the truck Jason Lurch’s nephew used to drive. Kerner did not think Moyer would even talk to him, after it had come out in court that he had secretly recorded their previous conversation.

Moyer looked at the pictures closely. He said one detail was the same. He was studying a second detail when a car drove up. Moyer had to go and pump gas. When he returned to Kerner, the interruption had apparently given him time for second thoughts. He looked at the pictures again, and said he did not want to say if it looked like the truck he had seen at McAnally’s or not. He didn’t say it was not the truck; he just said he did not want to say. To the investigator, this seemed to indicate that it might well be the right truck, that Moyer just did not want to get involved again. Otherwise, Kerner reasoned, he could simply have said it wasn’t the truck, and be done with it.

Frustrated, Kerner showed the pictures to Jack Paschall. As expected, Paschall said it might be the truck he had seen at J.P.’s and it might not be.

The investigator still could not find Karen Wise.

He hung about Wyatt’s office that morning; he could not return to Yukon, because he did not know when he would be needed to testify. While the attorneys were in court, Jason Lurch called in. He talked to Kerner. Lurch said he had been going through his records, and that he had been wrong about what he’d said the other night. He was not living and working in Ada in April of ’84, he said. He was living in Oklahoma City; he did not move into the Brook Mobile Home Park in Ada until July. And therefore he would not have been at J.P.’s that night.

Lurch asked the investigator to come on out to his house, to look at his records, his rent receipts.

Kerner was instantly suspicious. Lurch was a scary guy. This could be some kind of trap. The investigator did not care to be alone with Jason Lurch again on his desolate home turf. Especially now that he was changing his story. In Kerner’s view, rent receipts from Oklahoma City would prove nothing; the city was only a ninety-mile drive from Ada; he could have come down any time. He was still suspicious of Lurch for attending all five scattered days of the hearing.

He could not come out today, the investigator told Lurch; Lurch should bring the rent receipts with him when he came to testify.

Informed of this conversation, that Lurch was changing his story, Don Wyatt was not surprised. He instructed Kerner to pick up Lurch the next morning and bring him into town. He told the investigator to wire his car; to tape their conversation without Lurch’s knowledge. He told Kerner to go over Lurch’s story while the tape was running—to get Lurch to recall what he had told them the other night: that he might have been with his nephew at J.P.’s.

Kerner was not thrilled with the assignment. He made that clear. But he agreed to do it.

Winifred Harrell offered him the use of her revolver. Kerner declined. “I don’t like guns,” he said.

He had carried a pistol for twenty years in the military; he chose not to do so in civilian life.

In all his experience, Kerner had never been still investigating a case while the trial was on—let alone while the defense was already on. He had never heard of a case where the D.A.’s investigator was reading someone else his rights five days into a trial. He’d been involved in many bizarre cases, but none like this; this one, he felt, defied description.

At 8 the next morning, Gordon Calhoun and Jannette Roberts met again in Wyatt’s office, as planned. Jannette had her photo album with her. In it were pictures of Calhoun, hand-dated “Memorial Day, 1984.” In them he was wearing a T-shirt and cutoff jeans—the same outfit he was wearing in those dated April 16.

The handwriting on the Memorial Day pictures looked faded, unlike those dated April. “I wrote these outdoors, with a scratchy pen. By Blue River,” Jannette said.

Calhoun studied the pictures. He told Wyatt he could not say for sure when any of the pictures had been taken. He went to the courthouse and told Bill Peterson the same thing.

Since he could not be sure, both sides agreed to release Calhoun from recall, so he could go home to California, where his college semester had begun.

If, as he had feared, Calhoun had given the jury the impression that he was sure the Fontenot pictures were dated falsely, that impression would be allowed to remain.

Richard Kerner, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and a tie, bent into his car. His microcassette recorder was in his breast pocket. It was a good recorder—but one of its special features might, this morning, get him into big trouble.

The recorder used thirty-minute tapes. When the tape came to the end, the recorder issued a warning—a buzzing sound. If he was secretly taping Jason Lurch, and the buzzer went off, things might get sticky in a hurry.

He was supposed to pick up Lurch at the village store at 8
A.M
. He drove out the highway, pulled up beside the store. Lurch wasn’t there. He went inside, drank a cup of coffee, waited. Lurch didn’t show.

He looked at his watch. It was 8:15. He did not want to walk the lonely road to Lurch’s house; the cowboy made him nervous. He stalled, wrestled with his willpower. Finally he left the store and walked in the crisp morning air the few hundred yards down the road.

There were no other houses nearby, just a decrepit schoolhouse. Lurch’s place, set fifteen feet down an incline, was a graying white-frame, ratty-looking. With trepidation, Kerner knocked on the door.

Lurch was in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Kerner waited just inside the house till the cowboy was ready, keeping the door open behind him. They got into the car. As he eased himself behind the wheel, the investigator reached inside his jacket, as if for a cigarette, and depressed the button that set the tape turning.

Kerner got the conversation going: about the rent receipts; Lurch, it turned out, had none. About where Lurch had been living at the time; Oklahoma City, Lurch said. Kerner tried to edge the talk to what Lurch had told the lawyers on Monday night. But the transition was difficult; he could not get Lurch to repeat that first story.

The tape was running silently. The hum of the car engine covered any minute whirring sound. The flat pastureland passed outside the windows.

Kerner tried again. More minutes passed. The investigator could hear in his mind the buzzer going off at the end of the tape. It would sound like Big Ben. With each passing mile he felt more frustrated. He could not get Lurch to repeat what he had told the lawyers: that he had been living at the Brook Trailer Park at the time; that he might have been at J.P.’s with his nephew that night.

It had not escaped Kerner’s notice that the Brook was where Mildred Gandy had, at one time, said she saw Denice Haraway, two days after the disappearance. It might be true even though she’d taken it back and wouldn’t testify.

Jason Lurch sat quietly. Kerner looked at his watch. Seventeen minutes had run out of the thirty on the tape running silently in his pocket.

He tried again for another minute, without success. Then he reached into his jacket, inconspicuously, as Lurch watched the landscape, the ranches, go by on the outskirts of Ada; and he switched off the recorder.

He swung the Mercury into the parking lot behind the law office. Wyatt’s Charger was not there; he would already be in court.

Kerner had a Polaroid camera with him. He asked Lurch if he could take his picture. The cowboy said okay. Kerner clicked the shutter, with the red brick of the law office as background.

He escorted Lurch inside, left him there in the company of the receptionist and several women assistants. When Kerner left, there were no men in the building except Jason Lurch. The ladies did not appreciate this. Ever so slowly, they began to grow frightened.

Kerner had work to do. He drove down Arlington to Country Club Road, turned right, and drove out to the Brook Trailer Park. With the help of the manager, he checked rent records from 1984. The records showed that Lurch had not moved into the trailer park until July—just as he now maintained.

Kerner was not impressed. He himself had been commuting between Oklahoma City and Ada for days now: a ninety-minute drive.

The investigator drove to the courthouse, the Polaroid of Lurch in his pocket. He could be called to testify at any time.

DAY TEN

Tricia dropped the kids off at school, then went to the courthouse. She sat in a wooden chair in the corridor, wearing a maternity blouse and skirt, waiting her turn to testify. If she hadn’t been called by mid-afternoon, Maxine would get the kids from school.

Twenty feet away, in the courtroom, Ward and Fontenot sat at the defense table, waiting for the judge to enter. “My heart is up in my throat again,” Tommy said.

The first witness was Jannette Blood Roberts, thirty-nine, attractive in a world-weary way, as if she had seen it all. Jannette conceded that she had had drug problems in the past; she said that was all behind her now.

Wyatt showed her the Polaroids of Karl and Tommy. She said they had been taken on April 16 and on April 22, 1984—just as they were marked. She said she herself had dated them at the time. She smiled at the picture of her daughter next to the huge Easter basket; it was the first big Easter basket Jessica ever had.

She had no doubt about the dates, she said; the composite drawings could not be Tommy and Karl, she said, because they both had short hair at the time. Questioned by Butner, she said she had found the pictures in a trunk in her home, in the presence of Richard Kerner, and when she pulled them out they were already dated. She said that prior to that moment she had never talked to Don Wyatt, about pictures or anything else.

On cross-examination, Chris Ross hit hard at her record of two felony convictions. She said she had forged a prescription for diet pills, and had done six years at a state prison. After that, she said, she had become assistant manager of Taco Tico, a fast-food Mexican place, and was trying to turn her life around.

The cross-examination was tough. Mrs. Roberts seemed loose and natural in her replies. When Ross asked if five adults and three children really were living in her small apartment at the time, as she had testified, she shot back, “You bet. I’m very poor.”

She had been shown the composite drawings on October 12, when Detectives Smith and Baskin came to see her. “I never thought it looked like them from the beginning,” she said.

When Tommy came home from work on October 12, she said, she and her husband, Mike, had urged Tommy to talk to the police. They’d thought: “What could it hurt?”

Morning recess. Butner felt that Jannette had done very well on the stand. But he was getting worried about presenting the Lurch scenario, now that the trailer park records showed Lurch did not move there till July. Perhaps, Butner thought, trying to show too much would be a mistake. They did not have to offer the jury an alternate suspect.

They had the testimony about the haircuts, he reasoned, and the pictures of Tommy and Karl with short hair; Kerner would back up Jannette about the pictures already being dated when she fished them out of the trunk. They would have the alibi witnesses. Why not leave it at that? Reasonable doubt…

Winifred Harrell came to the courthouse, to watch a bit of the trial. She was upset. She had heard, through the town grapevine, that two of the jurors had been indicating they would hold out for a conviction “till hell freezes over.”

One of the two was Mary Floyd, the retired schoolteacher, whom the family had wanted off the jury because she did not like Tommy as a kid. She’d been kept on because her daughter was going to be a defense witness, was going to say that the composite drawings were Randy Rogers and Bob Sparcino. But that line of defense had been dropped—and they had been left with Mrs. Floyd anyway.