Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (12 page)

And you wouldn't want Sawyer to bounce you. He had the lean nasty look of certain southern deputy sheriffs, his black T-shirt revealed a weight lifter's biceps and shoulders, and he was tattooed on both arms: a blue-and-red spitting dragon on one, an anchor and the word "Rosie" on the other. Warren wondered if he had done time like the dead Dink and the vanished Ronzini. Whenever he traveled up to Huntsville to visit one of his clients, he noticed how many inmates had their life stories inscribed on their arms and chests. Virgil Freer had flexed a naked dancing girl on his left deltoid.

Warren chatted idly with Johnnie Faye, but images of Charm kept invading his mind like mosquitoes swarming through a torn screen. In the bottom half of the fourth inning, Johnnie Faye asked him if they should be talking about the case.

"This isn't exactly the right time and place," Warren said, as cordially as he could. "But why don't you tell me about yourself?" He could see her eyes flicker with appreciation; he had opened the door to everyone's favorite subject. "Scoot told me you were a beauty queen," he prompted.

"One of the high points of my life." She smiled. "Tried to take Texas women with me into the twentieth century."

She had been brought up in Odem, she said, a little town west of Corpus Christi, with her beloved twin brother, Garrett, her older brother, Clinton, and a younger sister, Jerene, who still lived in Odem and was married to a pharmacist. Daddy was a part-time Baptist preacher who ran the filling station there. A sign outside read: ED'S EXXON

AND HOUSE OF PRAYER.
JESUS IS COMING SOON!
COLD

BEER TO GO. It was the kind of small town where you dialed a wrong number and talked for fifteen minutes anyway. When she got out of high school along came Vietnam, which, in Johnnie Faye's book, we should never have got involved with in the first place. That was not so much a political opinion as a personal one engendered by tragedy: her brother Clinton had been blown up by a mine at Da Nang, sent home to Texas in a body bag. And now the goddam gooks were
here,
buying up everything from shrimp boats to convenience stores, and their black-haired deadpan kids were nailing down all the scholarships that real Murkin kids couldn't get anymore.

"
I
wanted to go to college," she told Warren, "but I couldn't afford it. Biggest regret I've got."

She pumped gas until she'd saved enough money to move to Corpus Christi, where she waitressed at an International House of Pancakes, fooled around with boys, survived a coat-hanger abortion, wasted time. By then she'd realized Corpus was a backwater, best epitomized by a guy who came into the coffee shop and asked for a piece of pie and when she asked what kind, said, "Tater pie, gal! What the hell you think pie's made of?"

She considered herself an authority on guitar picking and rattlesnake killing but not much else. For a few semesters she took night courses at Del Mar College. She wanted to make something of her life. Then she met a couple of local women who were burning their bras on Ocean Drive and holding parking lot rallies about women's rights. One of them was a lesbian. Johnnie Faye tried it. Didn't hate it, but preferred men. She burned her bra outside the pancake house. ("Made no difference," she confided to headquarters in Dallas and was called SPIT, Society for Protesting Injustice in Texas. "I guess I needed friends."

In the fifth inning, with two out, the Mets scratched together a run on a walk, an error, a bloop single. The mosquitoes came back, swarming, stinging. Was Charm with her New York lawyer? What was she doing at this precise instant? Warren sifted through his memory of her words, frowning.

"We'll win," Johnnie Faye said. "Don't you fret about it." She turned to Sawyer. "You eavesdropping on my autobiography, Frankie, or you watching the ball game?"

"Which y'all want me to be doin'?" Sawyer drawled.

"Whatever pleases you, big boy." She patted the dragon tattoo on his biceps, then continued her tale.

A few women from Dallas SPIT came down to Corpus Christi to give a pep talk. Johnnie Faye was twenty-one years old, but with presence, a ripe body, a sweetness in her lips not quite extinguished by the downpour of experience yet to come. The annual Miss Texas Pageant was coming up in Austin, and before that there would be local qualifying contests all over the state. The SPIT women were militant and imaginative. They asked, "Can you sing, honey?"

She gave them a colorful rendition of one of her favorites: "Bobby Joe, Your Wife Is Cheatin' on Us Again."

They bought her a modestly cut black one-piece bathing suit, an expensive white glitter gown, a push-up bra from Frederick's of Hollywood. One of the women, a hairdresser, dyed Johnnie Faye's hair to a pale gold color and stationed her under a sunlamp.

Johnnie Faye won Miss Corpus Christi, and with the title came a prize of $1500. The only reason the judges hesitated, they explained, was that they thought her a bit too sexy, "and maybe too assertive."

With that in mind, the women tutored her. Before the Miss Texas Pageant she dieted, did three hours of exercise every day in a gym. She practiced demure, took singing lessons, read
Seventeen.

There was one problem: in the local gym she met a curly-haired young fiddler with a country music band — his name was Bubba Rutherford. He reminded her a lot of poor Clinton. She hopped into bed with Bubba and decided she loved him more than her current boyfriend. Bubba promised her the world, and two weeks later she married him at the Corpus city hall.

Up in Austin she lived in a household with SPIT women but spent her nights with Bubba in his RV at a nearby trailer park. Her SPIT friends, when they found out, warned her to shut up about it. All Miss Texas contestants had to be single.

After the preliminary rounds the pageant officials again instructed her to tone down her personality, be more dainty, and lose a few more pounds. Most of the other contestants were on speed to keep their weight down; others were bulimic, pigging out and then stuffing their fingers down their throats to vomit it back. "They lifted their boobs with duct tape and sprayed their derrieres with Pro-Grip. They were a bunch of flakes and hysterics. I felt sorry for them."

Johnnie Faye made it to the final eight, and in the talent portion of the finals, when she sang in her down-home voice "He's Gone, and He Took Everything but the Blame," she won the second-place silver trophy.

If she had won the gold, the plan was to keep buttoned up until the Miss America pageant. But that wasn't the case, so she stood at the microphone, flashed her white teeth at the TV cameras, and said, "Folks, I'm about to tell you now what this contest is all about…" The pageant officials tried to cut her off but the TV people loved it. She went on to describe the daily lives of her vitamin-deficient, anorexic, duct-taped, emotionally battered fellow contestants. The response was so enthusiastic that she veered from the prepared script and revealed to the world that she was really Mrs. Bubba Rutherford, but she'd had to keep that under her hat: "Virginal meat is the only kind the male chauvinist pigs will let you show off in this circus."

The SPIT women carried her out of the auditorium in triumph.

She was stripped of her runner-up title, which she had expected, and picked up some modeling offers from a Houston advertising agency, which she hadn't expected. Soon she became bored with SPIT and bored with Bubba. Forever wasn't nearly as long as they'd planned on.

"So I got a divorce and stayed on here. Meanwhile my brother Garrett showed up and moved in with me. I supported him. He had nightmares and he was a junkie. The war did that to him. I used to tell him, 'Garrett, you did what you had to do. You can't be sorry for wasting those yellow fuckers — they deserved it.' But he went off one weekend with some of his so-called buddies and o.d.'d on heroin. I loved that kid, and that was the worst thing ever happened to me, even worse than when my daddy passed away. I was dancing by then and I was worn out. Found a backer for Ecstasy a few years down the pike, and the rest is history. You want to hear that part too?"

Scoot had excused himself and left in the sixth inning. Now, in the eighth, the Mets had nibbled away at the Astros' lead and tied the score.

The buzzing refused to leave Warren's head; he kept having visions of Charm and her New York lover. And to try to exorcise them, he cheered even more vigorously than before for the Astros. Johnnie Faye told him how she redecorated and restaffed the club, married a guy who turned out to be a no-good drug dealer — "got caught delivering twenty keys, so I divorced him." The game went into the tenth. Strawberry clubbed a home run for the Mets and in their half of the inning the Astros couldn't get the ball out of the infield.

"I still go down to Odem three times a year to see my mama, and I'm loyal to anyone's loyal to me. That's my creed," Johnnie Faye concluded.

They filed up the ramp toward the exit. At the hot dog concession, Johnnie Faye dug her heels into concrete and leveled a finger at his chest. "Good buddy, I've got a beef, and it's also my creed to speak what's on my mind. Since the fucking seventh inning you haven't heard a word I said. I'm divulging my entire life story, which you asked for, and you're sitting there worrying whether some peckerhead's gonna get ball four or strike three!"

"That's not it," Warren said.

"Then what is? You're supposed to be my lawyer along with Mr. Shepard. He told me to talk to you and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, which I did. But I don't know if I want a lawyer who can't bother to listen. I won't raise any more sand, but you owe me an explanation."

Warren took a shaky breath and said, "My wife just told me she's having an affair. She might leave me. That's what was on my mind. Not the game."

Johnnie Faye's face bloomed like a pink rose. The darkness left her bicolored eyes. "You should have told me that before, Warren," she said, while the crowd ebbed around her. Her voice softened: "Nothing in this world I don't know about what goes on between men and women. I've been around that block so many times I could write a guidebook."

She hauled Frank Sawyer close to her and kissed him on his bony cheek.

"You go on back to the club, honey. I'm taking my new friend to a bar and listen to
his
story. The lawyer man needs help."

She gave Sawyer a push, then slipped her arm through Warren's. "You give her half a chance, there's a kind of woman will tear your heart out and stomp the sucker flat. Is your wife like that?"

"No," Warren said, "she's not."

"Then maybe I can help you." She propelled him toward the parking lot.

In the Astrodome Sports Bar, over their third round of bourbon on the rocks, Johnnie Faye laid a hand on his arm.

"Good lawyer buddy, are you ready to listen?" Nearly midnight after a hard day, and Warren nodded wearily.

"No matter what she tells you to the contrary, what a woman wants in a man is for him to take command. I personally never found one I'd let boss me around for more than five minutes, but I certainly don't give up trying. Maybe, like you say, your wife loves you. I like to think that's true — you're a good-looking fellow, and you're intelligent, and you've got what I call quality. But your little wife is confused. Life's confusing enough and people don't make it any clearer the way they carry on. Aside from life, you're the main reason for her confusion, not this other dude. Why?
Because you ain't been in command!
That's what it's all about, believe me. So you got to set up now and growl. Not like a puppy dog. You ever watch those
National Geographic
specials? I love 'em. You see these lions over there in Africa, and the females go out and do the killing so they can all eat, and then the male lion comes up and lets out a growl —
grrrr
— soft, but believe me, they get the message, and they all back off so he can dive in and get the best cut of dinner. But he's got to growl first, to let 'em know he's still king of the beasts. You get all doe-eyed and sad, your wife'll feel sorry for you a while, but sooner or later she'll say, 'Don't cry on me, Warren baby, you might rust my spurs.' Got to give her a little sweetness too, but mostly you got to give her the feeling that you're in charge, just like you'd do in the jungle or in a courtroom. Understand? The good Lord is like a judge, sittin' high up there, and the good Lord hates a muddle the way a judge hates a hung jury. The good Lord says, 'Mr. Man, Mr. Lawyer, you can walk, you can run, or you can lie down, but don't ever wobble.'"

Warren, drunk, listened to the parade of metaphor. Be a lion. Growl. Be a lawyer. Be in command. Please the good Lord, the biggest judge of all.

Could you take marital advice from a woman who had possibly arranged to murder her lover's wife and the man who had done the killing for her, and then pulled the trigger on another lover?

You probably could if you were drunk enough. And down enough. And feeling sorry for yourself.

That last barb upset him. There were men and women sleeping in alleys, people in hospitals with I.V.s in their veins, kids starving over in Africa and overdosing right here and being stabbed with cigarettes in houses from coast to coast. And he was bleeding inside because a woman didn't love him anymore.

But I'm inside this skin, and it's all I've got, and it hurts.

"I have to go, Johnnie Faye," he said finally, throwing down some cash on the bar and rising from the wobbly stool. "I have work to do tomorrow."

Warren arrived at the house of the late Dan Ho Trunh
at nine o'clock in the morning, hung over from drinking in the Astrodome Sports Bar. Charm had been asleep when he got back home at 1 A.M. In the darkness he slid silently into the bed, keeping to his side, listening for a while to her steady, quiet breathing. She seemed at peace. All her words rushed back at him like blows. He crushed the edges of the pillow with his fingers and pain pressed against his eyelids. None of this is true. I'll wake up in the morning and it will all be gone.

He was awakened by a polluting sadness. He dressed and went through his morning rituals and left the house without even looking at his wife.