The Other Shoe (29 page)

Just a few days previous Henry Brusett had passed hours in this closet of a room, but it was no longer familiar to him. The lawyer was in it. She sat on the bench among stacks of documents she'd made, and she was writing on a legal pad in her lap, and she was, as he'd remembered her, unafraid of him. She shook his hand, and when he felt her measuring him through his grip, he tried politely to slip free.

“How've you been feeling, Henry?”

“Fine.”

“You're getting your meds, I take it. Makes quite a difference for you, doesn't it?”

“It's to where I need 'em anymore,” he said. “Which is, I know it puts everybody to extra trouble.”

“Sit,” she said, and she nodded at the small bare patch she'd left on the bunk beside her.

“I couldn't read anything in this light,” he apologized. “Not without my cheaters. Do you mind if I stand?”

“I want you as comfortable as you can be.” She was mild and practical. Probably kind.

Henry Brusett pressed his spine to the wall and knitted his hands to keep them occupied and still. His fused neck kept his eyes up, his gaze aimed at the top of the lawyer's head, which was divided by a wide part. She wore a child's dime-store barrettes.

“It's just another day or two,” she said, “at most. Can you hang on that long? One way or another, I think we're close to getting you out of here. When you see the judge, we'll ask for an OR again, and what I'd like to do is have you talk a bit—or testify—about your health. I'll have you explain your medical condition, and why it's not a real good idea to have you in here. Why you're not a flight risk. I'm sorry I didn't get here earlier—we do have so much to talk about, but I thought, well, I thought we'd better wait until you were stabilized on your meds again. Before we talked.”

“Don't worry about that.”

“No, I really should have been in, but I kept thinking I'd get you out of here, and then we wouldn't have to . . . they can't hear us, by the way. They can see us on the monitor, theoretically, but they can't hear us. This makes me, and I mean this
instantly
makes me claustrophobic. Every single time I come in here. How anyone stands this I . . . but we really do need to talk because for once it seems like there may be quite a bit I can do for you. I think we may actually have the upper hand—unless I'm missing something. These people aren't really the kind to hide the ball, so I don't think . . . I wanted you to have a chance to get more—what? Collected, I guess.” Her voice hurried on like a tire sent rolling down a hill. “I'm sorry. I should have been in a lot earlier, and I am sorry, but I have been working on getting you out of here. I really have, and by hook or by crook we should be pretty close to getting you back home. I hope.”

She seemed to think he was anxious to start learning the specifics of his fate, and from her guilty tone he could tell that she was just as happy to be talking to his chest. He was all but standing on her and very impressed to see that she could write one thing while saying another. Henry Brusett had trouble enough expressing even a single stream of thought. “Thanks,” he said. “For that. But I hope you didn't waste too much time on it—or, what I mean to say—don't bother. You can just forget about that bail.” He knew of a valley in British Columbia that the Mounties were said to ignore. He could go state to state, province to province, and only rarely touch pavement in his travels, but he knew he'd make a sluggish fugitive. “I set foot out of here, and I'm gone. I know that. I've got a good idea how that'd end up, too.”

“Henry, it doesn't need to be that way. This may not be as bad as you're thinking. It may not be nearly that bad. You'll have to trust me.”

“There's a real good chance I'd run,” he said. “I don't have the cash or the legs for it, but I think I might still try and scoot if they
gave me the chance.” More than anything else, he wished to be absent, and it was pleasant to think of himself wild-eyed and aloof in some woods—young again, whole again for being hunted.

“All right,” said the lawyer, “let's talk about our long-term goal, then. Let's just concentrate on getting you out of here once and for all. Which is quite realistic, I'm thinking.”

Goal. His lawyer was not a true believer in her own optimism, and Henry Brusett suspected it entirely. She had talked a better game, so far, than she'd played. He did not wish to owe her any gratitude, or to have anyone on or at his side. “What do they want me to do?”

“That's just exactly my point. This is exactly what I'm trying to tell you. I don't think they're in any shape to tell you what to do. It may not seem like it, but you're sort of in a position to dictate terms here. In a way.”

He had never dictated anything to anyone and was now almost too weary to speak at all. Never had he been so tired. “How do you go about just admitting that you . . . ”

“Whoa,” she said. “Let me talk first, okay? Then you can get off your chest whatever you think you need to get off your chest.” She held her fingers splayed and to the side of her face. “You'd better not pick an option until you know what your options are. Doesn't that make sense? Let me talk first. And then, then maybe you'll have a better idea of what you want to say. Or if you want to say anything at all.”

“I already know the honorable way,” he told her. “I know the honorable way to go, but I'm not sure I'm up for it. This is bad in here. There's too many of us, and they never do turn the lights off. But you want to do the right thing, if you can.”

“The right thing? I guarantee you, Henry, it's not exactly a universal impulse, and I'm no expert myself, so I'll leave that to you and your conscience, which, since you actually seem to have one—that could be complicated. There's a few different ways this can go, all right?
Tomorrow, we've got your arraignment in the district court, and the judge is going to ask you at some point, ‘Guilty or not guilty?' What we need to decide is how you want to answer him.”

The lawyer made a chart with bold headings on her notepad, and as she jotted notes into the columns, notes Henry Brusett could not decipher, she was saying, “So what happens if you were to just tell 'em you're guilty? Say you came into court and just spit it out, ‘I'm guilty,' well then the judge keeps asking questions, or he'd have me walk you through some questions, because he has to be sure you really did, deliberately, intentionally kill somebody—or this specific somebody—and he wants to hear you say so on the record. He'd want to hear it in sufficient detail. Once you've satisfied him on those points, the elements, then he enters a judgment of guilt, and then he can do about anything he wants to do with you. The state owns you then. You'd belong to the Department of Corrections for a long, long time. And those people, they're boobs, Henry. They've got their ‘programs,' and their ‘facilities,' and so on and so on, and it's all just a cash cow for incompetents. They've never made anyone a better man, as far as I know. That would also be up to you. Personally, I think the few people I've ever seen fixed in any way—rehabilitated—it's always been a do-it-yourself project. You can't hire it done, you can't have it forced down your throat.”

“Is it true you can still get hung in Montana?”

Her chin rocked back and in, and she instantly calculated, “No. Well—yes, technically. But this is not a death penalty case. They'd have to do a bunch of different things to make it one, and they haven't. Oh, no, this isn't even close to a death penalty kind of thing. So we can take that right off the table.”

“Yeah? I thought I might finally get all the kinks pulled out of me. What happens if I say I'm not guilty?”

“I ask the court to set it for jury trial. Which is, in my estimation, the best way to go right now.”

“That would be a lot of trouble.”

“I'm not saying we'd necessarily go to trial. We'd ask for one. In fact, that's fairly standard at this stage of things. This is where all those rights you keep hearing about really start to matter a little bit. What we do is use those to try and get you some reasonable result. Or, I should say, the best result available.”

“Reasonable? You think we can get there from where we're at?”

“Again, I'll leave that up to you, Mr. Brusett. It wouldn't be easy, I didn't say that.” The lawyer seemed a tough little gal, and only trying to help.

“Don't leave anything up to me. If you do, we're off to a bad start. Everything that's been left in my hands is, well, you can see.”

“I'm very confident. I am very, very sure you'll make a good decision. But I want you to make a smart one, too.”

There was some strange tension in his cheeks; he was smiling. He remembered that he was to give her no cause for alarm, and he said, “You ever been over to Playfair in Spokane? You strike me as somebody who might like to get a bet down on a horse.”

“If—” she said. “Say you actually did kill that guy. And you meant to. Then that means you're guilty, of course, but it doesn't mean you have to say so. Also, there would be several scenarios where you would
not
be guilty. If you just got messed up while you were trying to help him. Say there was an accident, or somebody else—say you came along after he was hurt. You tried to help. Or what if you did do something? You hurt him? Killed him? That's not necessarily murder, either, not if it was an accident, or if you thought you had to protect yourself. If you meant to protect yourself or even to protect someone else. That's a defense to murder. Problem is, if you raise that particular defense, then you might have to prove it. Prove you really needed to do it, then you wind up talking about how and why you killed somebody, which is always a dicey topic to get started on. Who knows how someone else,
somebody who's looking at the incident long after the fact and a long way from the heat of the moment, who knows how they'd see it? Fear can be hard to explain.”

“I'm sure it is,” he said. “Anyway, who cares what I'm scared of?”

In another quarter of the jail, Tubby's highest falsetto suddenly sounded above a deep, industrial banging, “Get your fucking hands off me . . . I will, I swear . . . get . . . get . . . I swear to God . . . I . . . said . . . get
off.”

“Please, please, please . . . oh . . .
pleeease.”

More banging, which ceased, and then the distant television, as ever, droning into every metal crevice of the jail. Some laughter, live laughter from the cell.

“Nat,” said the lawyer, having recognized the lesser voice. “I'll bet he's a pain to be with back here, isn't he? I hope he's not constantly getting into more trouble because a guy like that can generate more work than you'd ever . . . Look, Henry, unless you let me do something about this bond, you'll be in here until we get this taken care of, and things do tend to drag on sometimes in the system. There are times, and this could be one of those, when delay can work to our advantage. The longer it goes, I think, the better off you are. Look, there's some loony people, there really are. I see some unbelievable folks. There's people, and I have to admit it—even though they're my clients and it's usually my job to prevent it if I can—some people I just can't wait to see safely locked up again. One thing I know is—you're not one of those guys. Okay? Sometimes I just have to believe that about somebody. I know this poor kid is dead, and I'm pretty sure it's quite a tragedy, too. But it's not anything you can fix now. It's my whole idea that you don't fix one tragedy with another—that makes no sense to me—and what I'm telling you is the poor kid's dead but not one single officer of the law or of the court, including me, knows how he got that way. As I see it, unless that changes, unless there's more to this than meets the eye—or
unless somebody chimes in with some new evidence—you should walk away from this thing eventually. Just pretty much walk away. I don't see a conviction. You'll do what you need to do, but I think there is a way past this if you choose to take it. Which wouldn't be the worst thing that ever happened.” Now she was also talking to herself, he thought, trying to convince herself of something.

“What's a guy supposed to say, anyway?”

“Tomorrow, if you follow my advice, we'll enter a ‘not guilty' and ask for you to be let out of jail pending trial. And, by the way, if we don't get you out, would you please see Karen when she comes in for visiting hours? It's kind of mean to keep her away, don't you think? She just needs to see you with her own eyes, and I don't think that's too much to ask. As long as they're not trying to prevent it, there's no reason at all why you shouldn't see her. She's come around to ask me about it several times, and I don't know what to tell her.”

“You think I do?”

“You don't have to say anything if you don't want to. She only needs to see that you're all right.”

“I think she'll take your word for it, won't she? Let her know I'm okay, would you? I'm sure there's things incubating back here. Nobody should be exposed to this stuff if they don't have to be.”

“All right.” The lawyer had him sign two papers, which she read to him but which he could not force himself to hear. She collected all the rest of her documents, bundle by bundle, and she laid them in her briefcase. They'd served little purpose here. “It doesn't seem like we're necessarily getting anywhere at the moment. So let me just say what
I
want to happen. I'd like it if you took my advice and you let me enter a ‘not guilty' for you tomorrow. They've got the burden of production, burden of proof, all of that. That's right where we're at as far as I'm concerned, and what I'd like to do—for now—is go ahead and put the state to its burdens.”