The Other Shoe (25 page)

She arrived at the jail smelling of gasoline. The building was bermed and squat and appeared to have weathered a dirty sandstorm. She rang a buzzer three times to ask into it. Eventually a voice like tin roofing flipping in the wind told her to state her name and business. “I am Karen Brusett, or
Mrs
. Brusett, I should say. I'm here to see him. My husband, who's in there, I believe.”

“It's not visiting day.”

“I need to see somebody. To find out if he's okay.”

“He's okay.”

“Because he's got some problems,” she said.

“I'm sure he does. He's okay.” The crummy speaker popped between every word.

“Does he get his, uh . . . he has some medications he needs. Does he get those? The ones I brought down before?”

“How should I know?”

“Could you check? It's real, real important. Could you just let me in the lobby there? It says, ‘Press buzzer for entry.' And I did that.”

The monitor spit another burst of static and went dead. She saw a camera leering from under the eave, and suddenly she could not think
what to do with her hands to seem natural. She felt she'd waited a long while before she rang the buzzer again. Required again to state her name and business, she said, “It's me. I'm the same person.”

“Step to the microphone, please, and state your name and business.”

She said again that she was Karen Brusett, but now it was beginning to feel like a fabrication. She said again that she had come to see about her husband. “I need to find out if he's getting his medicine.”

“We'll look into it.”

“Who are you?” She asked the grated wall.

“Visiting hours are on Tuesday and Thursday—for authorized visitors—if he puts you on his list and you're approved. Two thirty to five, and it's first come, first served for the visiting room.” The crackling in the monitor died again. Karen Brusett turned to the camera and raised her palms to it in surrender. She fingered the clasp of her necklace. She paced a bit to think, and then she went into the courthouse and stopped at the treasurer's office to ask a large woman with a jeweled poodle broach where a person should go to see about trouble.

“What kind of trouble, dear?”

“Bad.”

“Oh. Well, not here. We wouldn't handle that kind of thing. License plates is what we're—have you tried the police?”

“They won't let me in.”

“Won't . . . are you a
victim
?” The clerk wore reading glasses on a tether and was, Karen saw, afraid of her.

“Me? No, I
wish
. It's—my husband's in . . . some trouble. Actually, they took him to jail, and I need to find out some details.”

The treasurer's clerk sent her to the clerk of court's office, and from there she was sent to Justice Mendenhal's office, and the secretary there sent her to see the public defender. “She's down at the other end
of Main Street. Over the Photo Express. You know where the Ford garage used to be? It's past that.”

Karen Brusett decided to walk. She did not wish to smell like a mechanic when she met with this lawyer, and so she thought to give herself a good airing, and she walked the six blocks of the town's business district, a main street strung out along the river, storefronts facing a sidehill and railroad tracks, and she passed Gifts N' Things, Luigi Tang's Chinese Garden, Elk Tooth Surveying, the Buck Snort Bar and Casino. A number of shops were refaced with barn wood and were offering garbage for sale as antiques: an embossed bread pan, a threadbare teddy bear, socket sets. Much of this town had been raised in a spasm of affluence a hundred years earlier, built up of chalky brick and brooding failure, and it would have looked, she imagined, spent from its very beginning, but someone had opened a bakery now, and there were lemon tarts in its window, and Mrs. Brusett told herself that these would be her treat for later, when she was finished, and she walked on to where Main Street suddenly became Highway 200 again. An iron stair hung on the side of the Riddle Building, and, clanging, she mounted it to a door that led to gray and serpentine halls. With the direction of several hand-drawn arrows, she made her way to the lawyer's office. Karen Brusett was only aware of any confidence when she felt it leaking away. She thought of the bakery again, thought she'd better reward herself first, but here was a door with an opaque pane in it, and in gilt upon that was the name and title of Giselle B. Meany Esq., and behind it a powerful child was crying. Karen went in.

There was a woman in pink sweat pants, a dirty shirt, and the crying child on her hip; the woman examined her for a moment, and, having reached no conclusion, she called over a set of dividers to the other half of the room, “Giselle. Giselle. Somebody here to see you.”

A certificate on the wall established G.B. Meany as a member of the Montana Bar Association. The Bill of Rights was written out in phony script on a phony scroll, and next to that hung the Tulip of the Month calendar, its days X-ed away to mid-October.

“What is it?” the receptionist asked over her brat's bawling. “What can we do for you? I'm Brenda, by the way.”

“My husband got arrested, and I'd like to find out what's going on. They just kind of dragged him away.”

“Oh, he must be that . . . Giselle . . . I know how that is.
Gi-selle
. . . She gets so distracted.” Brenda's burden began to kick at her as if he wished to gallop; she jogged him hard on her hip. “
No
.
Cody. Giselle!
I have got to get him to his grandma's. Oh, you're that, Karen. My sister went to school with you. You're not what she . . . Oh. Oh, wow. So you're here about that Brusett guy?
Cody
. Whew, I hope that kind of works out okay, but, here's hoping, huh?”

The lawyer came round the divider then. “Shure,” she said through the pencil clenched in her teeth, “take awff. But pleathe . . . ” She took pencil in hand, “ . . . could you take that bottle with you? That milk starts to smell so sour after a while.”

“It's
formula
.” Brenda left with her awful offspring, and they were well down the hall before there was much quiet in their wake.

The lawyer dully watched the door. “Welfare to work. A real good program, I think. I think she'll eventually be quite the, uh, it's actually a very good program. You're Henry's? What did you say?”

“That kid still takes a bottle, huh? Man, he's kind of big for that, isn't he? I'm his wife. Henry's.”

“Oh.” A pebble dropped in a pond. “Good. Great. Because we do need to talk, and I sent you a letter, but I'm glad you came in, because we do have a lot to talk about. I'm always surprised at how many people around here don't have any kind of phone. I just thought everyone had a phone.”

“No phone, and about all we ever get in the mail is our book of the month. But, now that I've showed up, I sure hope you can fill me in a little bit, because nobody else has.”

The lawyer, intending to smile, grimaced. “Let me turn the phone off, turn the ringer off so that's not—you can't have very much peace with it on. In fact, why don't I just lock the door?” Ms. Meany turned a dead bolt and led Karen Brusett back to where clutter burst into profusion behind the dividers: law books and binders splayed everywhere on their backs, on make-do shelving. A computer breathed, its cursor blinking on a field of fine print.

The lawyer, right down to business, folded her hands before her on her desk. “Where shall we start?”

“He's in jail, I guess? I know he hasn't come home.”

“Right.”

“That's not gonna work. I don't think he can be in there very long.”

“No, I don't think so either, so I'll be needing a legal description of the land. Your land.”

“A what?” This and Karen Brusett's few minutes with the county attorney were her whole experience of lawyers—they were strange and indirect.

“It's a way they describe property,” said Ms. Meany. “You'll find it on a deed, a mortgage, something like that.”

“But what about Henry, though?”

“You're using the land as collateral, you could say, to get him out.”

“Oh. But I don't even know what that is . . . oh, like for a loan?”

“Yes. Security.”

“Collateral? Well, there's an ugly word if I ever heard one.” The room's one window, a tall, narrow window in a deep casement, overlooked the playground across the street, a small plot all in the shade
of a linden tree, and with a swing and a hobby horse mounted on a spring. Karen Brusett noticed these amenities every time she came to town. She'd never seen anyone use them.

“I'm sorry,” said the lawyer, “I didn't get your name. Your first name.”

“It's Karen.”

“I'm Giselle.”

“Okay. Look, you know I've been kinda stuck up in the woods, and this right here is one of the reasons why. When I do come to town anymore, seems like I can only understand about half of what people say. I never got very educated. Also, we don't have a TV up there. So I'm what you'd call outta the loop, but it only really hits me when I come to town and people start tryin' to talk to me. If you want me to understand you, you might have to break it down pretty simple. Sorry. But if you tell me what to do, I'll do it. You'd never know it to hear Henry say, but he's one of the better people there is. That I know of.”

“I know he is. That's my idea of him, too.”

“Can you help him out, you think?”

“I'll try. I should be able to. First thing we need to do is get him out of jail.”

“They won't even let me in to see him.”

“They have a policy about visiting.” The lawyer seemed to hold it in contempt. She had a very misshapen mouth, and should by all rights have had a lisp. “See, if they follow a certain policy, then they don't have to exercise any independent judgment, give it any thought, and that's always the popular option for cops. No thinking. They will let you visit, though, at the regular times. Just don't expect anybody to bend one of their little rules, even if it's reasonable to bend it. They won't.”

“Henry needs to take some prescriptions he has. I brought 'em down there, but I don't know if he's getting those like he should.”

“I can see about that. As soon as we're done here, in fact, I'll go down and see about it. What are they? These prescriptions?”

“Oh, it's a whole shelf of 'em. It's for his back. His back hurts a lot. And his hip, his legs, that bunged-up foot he's got. His head hurts. Then he's got this thing where he's always afraid a little bit—and if he gets around people, except for me, I guess—it just does him in. He takes some stuff for that, too. Anxiety. If he doesn't take it, it gets pretty rough for him. Real rough. He used to do without every so often, without the pills. But not anymore. He can't for very long.”

“He's too sick for jail,” agreed the lawyer. “I may need you to testify to that next week. Would you do that for me? For Henry? We need to take a run at getting him out without paying any money for it, or tangling up your property, or waiting for a title search. But I think, just in case, we'd better keep on pushing to finish that title search.”

“Ah,” said Karen Brusett, “I don't think it would even do any good if you said that a lot slower. I just want him out of jail. Sure, I'd testify to it. Whatever you said.”

“This must be pretty hard for you.”

“He's a great guy, and I'm not too bad myself. Well, maybe I am. Bad. It's me if it's anybody.”

“We need to lay some ground rules before we get into certain things.”

“I thought that was in baseball or something. You call it a ground rule?”

“You should understand a couple of things. Important things—I am Henry's lawyer.”

“I knew that. They already told me that at the courthouse.”

“Yes. But what it means is, when I talk to Henry, what he says to me is confidential, and I can't breathe a word of it to anybody. But you're not my client. I don't have that same relationship with you.”

“I'm a young person, and I been just kind of a brush monkey, so . . . there is quite a bit of fairly usual stuff that I don't understand, that you'd have to explain to me.”

The lawyer pulled her glasses off, and there were two blue dents at the top of her nose; with her eyes no longer magnified, she was not as imposing. “It's not my job to protect you. If you say something that hurts you and helps Henry, then that's how I'll use it. Understand?”

“Sure. That's all I wanted to hear. What if I said he didn't do it? Would that get him out of there?”

“Just that? His wife saying he didn't do anything? What do you think, Karen?”

“What if there was a . . . a misunderstanding?” Here was a good and useful term.

The lawyer became ominous. “This is where you might want to be a little careful. You could hurt more than help if you're not careful. Henry, I mean. Hurt his situation. As I told him, they don't really have enough evidence—right now—to prove he did anything criminal.”