Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction (36 page)

“He sounded so forlorn.”

I bet he did. Shane is running scared. Chet might not have been able to bring himself to argue that his pastor was a suspect, but I sure as hell can.

“Fathers are good at that,” I mutter, searching for my pen. After a certain age, guilt is the only weapon we have left.

“Leigh, I’ve got to argue in court that he may have been the one to kill Art.”

As I feared, her spine stiffens as if an electrical current were passing through it.

“I can’t do that.”

“We have to,” I argue.

“You don’t have a chance at an acquittal right now.”

“What about the man Art cheated?” she pleads.

“Art was afraid of him.”

I have begun to doodle aimlessly on the pad but stop myself.

“I’ll argue that, but there was no forced entry, so it’s weak. I’m going to call as a witness the investigator from San Francisco to give the jury an excuse to acquit if they want to, but it’s a long shot.” Leigh is not averse to lying, I remember, but then most people aren’t if the stakes are high enough. I have told a few myself.

Leigh’s right hand flies to her mouth and she mumbles “I’ll probably have to admit Art filmed me naked.”

I almost snap my pen in frustration. It is as if we are back to square one.

“This isn’t going to be pretty!” I yelp at her.

“Unless you want to sit there smiling while you receive a life sentence, you’re going to have to accept the fact that you’ve got to be prepared to tell the truth, no matter how painful.”

Leigh bites her full lower lip in anguish.

“It will destroy my father!”

I lean forward with my elbows on my knees.

“Not if he’s the man you think he is,” I argue.

“You won’t be the one arguing to the jury that your father may have come over while you went to the church; I will. He’ll blame me, not you.”

Leigh swallows hard.

“But what if he’s innocent?”

“He’ll forgive you,” I promise her.

“He’s not on trial.

There’s no evidence to convict him. If someone saw him or knew something, they would have come forward by now.”

Her voice hushed, Leigh asks, “Why do you think Mr. Bracken killed himself?”

Wearily, I lean back against the sofa, knowing I may never understand what was in Chet’s mind when he pulled the trigger. It is possible that his only motive was to spare Wynona and Trey (and himself) the final weeks of agony. He had said the cancer was all over him. He didn’t want to die knowing he hadn’t prepared for his last case. Yet, maybe he had made a promise he couldn’t bring himself to keep. Would he have told Wynona the truth? It is not difficult to believe that under the pressure he must have been feeling he simply broke at the prospect of covering up the biggest deception in his life.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“He told me his body was riddled with cancer. For many people that is reason enough.”

Leigh winces as the thought occurs to her.

“Daddy will bury him, won’t he?”

I look at the scores of books neatly lined up on Rainey’s bookshelves. With all the wisdom they supposedly contain, they can’t answer a single question on this case.

“I’m sure he will,” I say, watching for her reaction. My mind has run wild with theories that I can’t begin to confirm.

“It has occurred to me that possibly Chet knew about your father’s involvement and gave him a promise he realized he couldn’t deliver.”

Leigh, who has been rubbing Rainey’s hardwood floor with her tennis shoes like a child, jerks her head up with instant understanding.

“You think Mr. Bracken knew Daddy killed Art but had told him that he could get me off?”

Mr. Bracken again, I note. Chet, who was famous for getting to know his clients better than they knew them selves, never warmed up to Leigh.

“Possibly.”

Leigh’s face becomes stiff with fear. “Why wouldn’t Mr. Bracken tell somebody that Daddy had killed Art?”

Her eyes are enormous. It is as if she realizes for the first time her situation.

“Shame,” I suggest.

“If your father told Chet he was guilty in the context of an attorney-client relationship, Chet should never have agreed to represent you, because he was ethically fore closed from using information that could have exonerated you. But his ego was so enormous by this time, he thought he could get anyone off. He didn’t count on his cancer flaring up again. Don’t you see? Nothing can prevent me from arguing your father is a suspect.”

Leigh takes a deep breath, as if she needs help to absorb what I am saying.

“Maybe if Daddy really did kill Art,” she ponders, “he’ll confess now.”

I write the word “denial” on my pad. If Shane is like most people, he will shut his eyes and hope that a jury could not possibly bring back a conviction. After all, Leigh is innocent, and the case is circumstantial. He doesn’t realize that accusing someone is half the battle.

Regardless of the presumption of innocence, juries start off every trial believing that a prosecutor wouldn’t have charged someone who is innocent. However, if Norman is the Christian he says he is, guilt will turn him inside out. Even if he can rationalize killing Art, he could never let his daughter go to jail for a crime she didn’t commit. And yet, as a way to punish Leigh, perhaps he could. She had turned away from the church, had let herself be debased by lust.

“Don’t count on it,” I say, wondering if it’s worth confronting him again.

“Preachers are more comfortable judging than being judged.”

Though, as I say this, I have the fantasy that the moment the jury comes back with a guilty verdict, he will stand up and confess that he killed Art. If Leigh is ac quitted, he keeps his mouth shut. If Chet went to his grave with that secret, so could Shane.

Leigh nods sadly, as if this quip contained pearls of wisdom. She seems dazed by the day’s events. Join the club, I feel like telling her. Suddenly, Jessie St. vrain and her body mike float into my brain out of nowhere.

“Maybe you should talk to your father, after all. I think I know where I can get a microphone and tape recorder this afternoon you can conceal under your clothes.”

Leigh visibly flinches.

“I couldn’t tape my own father,” she pleads.

“It wouldn’t be right.”

I think of Jessie cooling her heels at the Excelsior.

She’s probably at the bar taping a conversation with some guy right now.

“We wouldn’t necessarily have to use it in court,” I explain, “but if he says something that implicates himself or Chet, I could confront him with it before the trial. This way he’d be more likely to confess what happened.”

Leigh leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. I wonder if she is praying. Finally, she says, looking down at her lap, “I need to pick up some clothes there anyway.”

I suppress a smile. Only a woman would think of her wardrobe when she was on trial for murder.

“We don’t want to tip him off,” I say, looking for Rainey’s phone book to call the Excelsior.

“You might want to begin by asking him why Chet killed himself. Your father might say something about him before he would implicate himself. Don’t accuse your father, but give him the opportunity to talk. You may not get anything, but it’s worth trying.”

Leigh spreads her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“I’m not going to know what to do.”

As I dial the Excelsior’s number, I smile and say, “I know just the person to teach you.”

Twenty minutes later, in Jessie’s hotel room, I intro duce the two women to each other. If they were from opposite sides of the planet, they couldn’t be more different. In her borrowed tight sweats and sunglasses, Leigh, with her voluptuous body and striking ebony hair, looks like a Hollywood starlet not trying very hard to appear incognito; Jessie, in baggy jeans and a newly purchased Razorback sweatshirt, grins like a twelve year-old boy playing hooky from school. After they have sized up each other like rivals for the lead in a high school play, Jessie winks at me.

“Get out of here for a few minutes, Gideon, while I show Leigh how to wear this thing.” She opens her hand and shows me the equipment. I marvel at the tiny microphone.

“The way you’re built,” she says to Leigh admiringly, patting her own flat bosom, “you could hide an entire recording studio in there.”

Leigh giggles and turns crimson. As far as I am aware, Jessie knows nothing about the video Leigh made. Not even for an instant can I imagine Leigh taking off her clothes before a camera. Her sensuality is essentially unconscious and must be coaxed. Art, I think, not for the first time, must have been quite a guy.

“I’ll go down to the lobby and call my office.”

“You do that,” Jessie says, escorting me to the door.

“We’ll be fine.”

Standing alone in front of the elevators, I feel slightly cheated and wonder again about Jessie’s sexuality. For all I really know, she could be a man. Damn. If I lived in California, I’d be too confused to get out of bed.

From the lobby I call Julia and am told a half-dozen re porters have called. So has Shane Norman. Good.

Shane, my man, I think, we are about to set the hook for you.

“Have you heard the rumor going around,” Julia says, not lowering her voice at all, “that you shot Chet Bracken in your front yard?”

I rub my head. I might as well hire a sound truck and broadcast it all over Blackwell County or simply let Julia ride around in the back of a pickup and talk in a normal voice.

“I’ve heard it,” I whisper. At the next phone, with his back to me, is a guy in a dark suit and sunglasses who is either almost asleep or doing more listening than talking.

“Do you believe it?” I ask sarcastically.

This is the wrong question to ask Julia.

“I dunno,” she booms in my ear.

“What I can’t figure is why you’d pick your front yard. I know you’re the kind of guy who shits in his own nest, but that’s ridiculous.”

“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” I say, exhausted by this conversation.

“Is Dan in his office?”

“Naw, he’s off trying a million-dollar lawsuit,” Julia says, snorting at her little joke.

“Of course he’s here.

He’s too fat to go anywhere. Speaking of heavyweights, there’s this enormous Oriental man wearing a black shroud who insists on waiting for you. I can barely understand him. He’s sitting here crying his eyes out. Poor thing.”

The motel manager. I tell Julia to put him in the empty office across the hall and have him pick up the phone.

“Mr. Page, I’m so sad. So sad. My wife she not coming back. Please help me. I can’t wait no more.”

I don’t even know this guy’s name.

“You’ll be seeing my assistant, Mr. Bailey. He’ll take care of you.” I tell him how to switch me back to Julia.

Julia comes on the line and snaps, “You’ve got to help this poor man. I mean it.”

I’m moving right after this trial. I don’t care if I have to open an office on the sidewalk.

“Do you mind buzzing Dan ? I’ll ask him to see him.”

“I’m paid to keep you guys happy,” she says, and puts me on hold.

Finally, Dan comes on the line and says, “How’s it going, buddy?”

“You want to sit at the counsel table with me tomorrow and make some notes?” I ask.

“We’re gonna be flying by the seat of our pants.”

“Sure,” Dan says loyally.

“I’ve got an uncontested at ten, but I can postpone it. Want me to come over tonight to go over the case?”

Good old Dan. I think he’d amputate his right arm to help me. Too bad he can’t cut off his stomach. Paranoid about the man next to me (he hasn’t said a word in a minute), I don’t go into what’s happening above me in Room 542. Without asking for details, Dan also agrees to pretend to be my assistant and interview the motel manager, and we set a time for him to come to the house, and then I take the elevator back to the fifth floor.

Upstairs, Leigh and Jessie are fast becoming friends.

“Leigh’d be great undercover,” Jessie says dryly, “up to a point.”

She is studying Leigh with unconcealed admiration. I ask, “And what point is that?”

Jessie nudges Leigh in the ribs.

“I don’t get many requests to take off my shirt in my line of work,” she says.

“I suspect Leigh would.”

Leigh giggles unexpectedly, and for the first time since I’ve known her, I get a glimpse of the woman inside the stiff, frozen mask. I have mistaken fear for haughtiness. Jessie tells a story about an arson investigation she conducted in Southern California involving a building owned by a nude sunbathers’ association.

“I

swear to God the owner talked to me buck naked. She looked so comfortable I would have joined her if I hadn’t been wired for sound.”

Jessie, even as she entertains us, remains sensitive to Leigh, who must have confided in her while I was downstairs.

“He won’t suspect a thing if you just act natural,” she says, patting Leigh on the shoulder as we talk to her about the conversation she will have with Shane. I tell her to call him and suggest they meet in his office. If her mother is there, Shane won’t implicate himself.

When Leigh calls and reaches him at the church, I notice a flicker of uncertainty on her face. I wonder if this idea will backfire. Shane has spent a lifetime dominating her. The possibility that she may put him on the defensive seems remote. Jessie, to her everlasting credit, invites Leigh to spend the night in her room after I tell her that I was followed to Rainey’s. I do not trust my old friend Kim Keogh or her cameraman not to reveal where Leigh is staying. As Leigh and I leave the room together to drive to the Delta Inn to get her car I make her promise to come by my house after she has talked to her father and picked up her clothes from her parents house. I advise her not to go back to Rainey’s.

Sarah can run over there for her clothes.

“We have a lot of work to do tonight,” I tell her.

She nods, but I can tell she is already thinking about meeting her father. I wonder how I would feel if I suspected my father had murdered my spouse. My father’s own suicide in a mental hospital when I was fourteen left me with questions that will never be answered. As we hit the freeway traffic, I am forced to admit to my self that Leigh may be conning me. Yet she seemed so innocent in the hotel room with Jessie that I was convinced for a moment I was representing a person incapable of murder. Maybe the jury will think so, too.