Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (11 page)

After lunch with Clan and two other lawyers in the building, I walk the four short blocks to the courthouse to look at the prosecutor’s file on Chapman. When I ask for Kerr Bowman, I am told that Jill Marymount would like to see me.

The Queen Bee herself. This is awfully early in the case to be having

tea with the prosecutor, but not all work the same y way. Some are like generals and won’t get their hands dirty until the actual battle, relying on subordinates to do the work;

others, like Jill, have a reputation for interviewing their potential witnesses from the very beginning. An ironclad argument can be made that a prosecutor in as large an office as Blackwell County doesn’t have the time to do her own pretrial investigation. Basically an administrator, she is being paid to exercise her professional judgment, not run up mileage on her car for her expense account. We’ve had prosecutors in Blackwell County who almost never tried cases once they were elected. But Jill’s approach allows you to get a feel for a case you wouldn’t have unless you got your hands dirty. You get ideas about motivation you’d otherwise miss, and you obtain a real sense about credibility of witnesses.

After a moment Jill comes for me herself, even though I could have found her office. She is dressed more informally than I expected. She is wearing a light blue plaid skirt and could be headed for a barbecue after work. Her simple red top is sleeveless, and she is wearing flats. I realize I was expecting full battle armor. Bare-armed she looks more feminine than usual.

She smiles as if we’re old enemies, though we’ve never tried a case against one another.

“Gideon, I hear you’re in solo practice,” she says, letting me know she’s aware I was fired. She offers fingers and a palm that are cool and dry.

As we walk side by side to her office, I say, “Thanks for the help on the bond. I was about to ensure that my client stay locked up for the duration of the trial.”

As we turn into her office, she demurs, “Your client isn’t a martyr, and I didn’t see any point in making him one.”

If you only knew, I think. The last time I was in the Blackwell County prosecuting attorney’s office the walls were covered with diplomas and awards. Today, children’s themes provide the most unusual motif I ‘we ever seen in a lawyer’s quarters. It is as if I have wandered into a museum of child poverty. There are literally dozens of black-and-white photographs of children in extreme conditions:

reproductions of Walter Evans photographs, sallow beanpole kids standing in front of Appalachian shacks; children from the Delta, black toddlers playing in front of a housing project; pictures of modern urban teenagers receiving some kind of group drug therapy; a white girl who can’t be more than junior high age but is surely in her last month of pregnancy; Down’s Syndrome children smiling into the camera, perhaps taken at the Blackwell Human Development Center, for all I know; a Native American teenager, his long black hair silken and shiny even behind the metal bars of what must be an adult jail; Third World nightmares, all manner of starving children with enormous eyes and distended stomachs. On an adjacent wall are pictures of children of affluence. American, Japanese, and European teenagers in designer clothes simply facing the camera, the girls carefully made up, their arms and hands gleaming with jewelry; some of them, mostly the boys, are seated behind the wheel of sports cars, mounted on snow skis, driving boats the size of tanks. The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty is effective. I cut my eyes back and forth between the walls. From behind her desk Jill watches patiently as I take these in. The wall opposite her desk is her constituency, the pictures shriek. I think about what Amy said. Kids can’t vote.

“Great photographs,” I say sincerely, noticing the expensive matting behind one picture that shows a child with AIDS or perhaps simply starving.

“These ought to be in a museum.”

She goes to the wall with the rich kids and adjusts a frame that has begun to tilt to the left.

“Some of them were. When people learn of my interest in children, they send them to me.”

There is a knock at the door, and Kerr Bowman enters, carrying a file. Men working for women. It is still a rare sight in the South—especially in the law business. Kerr smiles at me as if I were best man at his wedding.

“Hi, Gideon,” he says and pumps my hand for the second time in twenty-four hours.

“Nice to see you again!” Maybe he is running for something, too. All this friendliness is beginning to make me want to gag.

“Would you like to sit down at my workbench?” Jill says, ignoring Kerr’s glad-handing. Kerr, her expression implies, is like a gorgeous but brainless secretary, nice to look at but not to be taken seriously.

For the first time I notice her desk. A “workbench” it isn’t. I sit down at one of the loveliest pieces of furniture I ‘we ever seen. Most lawyers’ desks are as functional and ugly as the floor of a public men’s room. This looks like a French antique from the seventeenth century. The ornamentation on the sides is so delicate I can’t imagine how she got it in here without breaking it. This is a desk a king’s mistress would bend over when writing her lover. As I sit down across from her, I run my fingers over the surface. I’m not much on decorating, but I love wood.

“This is exquisite,” I acknowledge.

This woman, I’m starting to realize, is a cut above the usual occupant in this office.

“Thank you,” Jill says simply, and takes the file Kerr had handed her. She looks down at it.

“I don’t know how much you know about the death of the child. Have you seen a picture of her?”

“Not yet,” I admit. I should have asked for one from the mother, but I may not have wanted to see it.

Jill hands me a five-by-seven-inch black-and-white.

“The back says it was taken a couple of years ago.”

I take the picture and study it. I don’t know what I was expecting, a freak maybe. But Pam, though not pretty by a long shot, is not hideous either. My guess is that she was in restraints at the time this picture was made. Her shoulders are square to the camera, but since it is mostly of her head I can’t be sure. Her brown hair, with bangs almost to her eyebrows, is combed. She seems to be grimacing rather than smiling. Her teeth are her worst feature.

As strapped as the state is, I guess I shouldn’t expect to encounter the work of an orthodontist. Since I know she is retarded, I think from the picture it is obvious. But I’m not sure I would know otherwise. Fourteen is not the most attractive age for any kid, and there were plenty of round-faced girls this slow-looking in Sarah’s high school yearbook. There is no resemblance at all to Olivia. What I want is a picture of Pam after she was dead, to see if her face is swollen or bruised from blows she might have inflicted on herself before shock was applied. That is the photograph I want the jury to see, so it will understand why shock was necessary.

This is no autopsy report. The decision to treat the death as a crime obviously has come in the last few days. The body had been cremated. A statement signed by Travis Beavers, M.D.” the doc who pronounced Pam dead, concludes:

“Apparent fibrillary contraction of heart secondary to electric shock.” There are straightforward statements from Andy and the others present about the accident. I learn Olivia and the social worker were watching behind a oneway mirror. The damage comes from a statement by a psychologist by the name of Warren Holditch, who is identified as a member of the staff at the Bonaventure Clinic, a psychological consulting and testing group in Blackwell County.

Holditch, a Ph.D.” rips Andy a new one with each sentence.

I scan it hurriedly, but even a cursory reading tells me Andy is in trouble. I ask Jill for a duplicate of the file, and she tells me I am looking at my own copy. Evidently, she is waiting for a reaction from me, but until I have studied the report of Holditch and done some research of my own, she won’t get a peep out of me. I smile and tell her thank you and get up to leave.

Jill is studying me as if I were one of the photographs on her wall.”

“You’re not going to be able to blackmail this office this time around,” she says, her voice sweet and innocent like that of a child announcing she is ready to be tucked into bed.

I stand up straight and pretend to look at one of the pictures on the wall to give myself time to think of an appropriate comeback. I know she is referring to the Hart Anderson case. I want to stick it to her in the worst way, but down the road I will have to deal with her office many times, and I manage to bite my tongue. I turn back to her and say brusquely, pretending anger I don’t feel, “Of all people, you ought to be aware there was more than one side to the way the Hart Anderson case got dealt down. You were in this office then.”

She doesn’t blink.

“Don’t waste your time asking for a deal, Gideon. You won’t get one.”

I leave her office then but manage not to slam her door. A tough bitch if there ever was one. Why had I ever thought of her as a schoolteacher?

julia, dressed today like a circus clown, in green polka-dotted pants and a ruffled orange collar like crepe paper around a lime top, greets me loudly as soon as I enter the reception area.

“Last night on TV I saw you and that black dude who fried that poor kid,” she says, her tone almost respectful for the first time.

“None of the dudes on our floor who call themselves attorneys have ever even been in a commercial.

The phone’s been ringing off the wall for you, and it’s not even nine o’clock.”

I rest the box of junk I have picked up from Mays & Burton on the edge of the reception desk as I pick up my messages.

As crude as she is, Julia at least is honest. The receptionist at Mays & Burton, a young woman I had considered a friend, just treated me a few minutes ago as if I had joined a leper colony instead of having taken a client they never would have represented in the first place.

“Good for business, huh?” I say, fishing out four messages from my slot. Three are from women and one is from a guy at the county jail. Nothing beats free advertising.

She nods, unwrapping a stick of Juicy Fruit.

“Yeah,” she advises, and begins to work the gum vigorously as if it were a piece of candle wax.

“Listen, if you’re gonna be on TV, you gotta get some decent suits. Those pants yesterday were so shiny you could of signaled a cruise ship into dock with ‘em.”

From one clothes horse to another, I think, glancing down at her to see if she is serious. She smiles magnanimously, as if she had given me a sure tip on the ninth race at Oaklawn in Hot Springs.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say.

“Maybe there’ll be enough money for both of us.”

A puzzled look comes over her face, making her mouth look like the dot at the bottom of a question mark.

“That woman’s here to see you,” she says, pointing with her pencil to the corner of the waiting room.

I follow her eraser. A slightly built young woman is eyeing me anxiously, “You’re Mr. Gideon Page,” she says, rising and coming toward me. She is in her late twenties, attired in baggy jeans, flip-flops that most people wear only around the house, and a black T-shirt that obscurely reads in script, “Let Being Be!”

Buoyed by the prospects of new clients and the absence of hostility from Julia, I want to say something really atrocious like “the one and only,” but manage instead, “And you are… ?”

“Mona Moneyhart,” she says, staring up at me with pale blue eyes the size of dinner plates. “My husband is suing for divorce. Can I talk to you right now? I have a summons.”

I mouth to Julia to hold my calls. Let being be? What the hell does that mean? Maybe this is how young, rich society matrons dress these days. Her last name sounds promising anyway.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, picking up my load.

“You want to follow me back to my office? We can talk there.”

Like a proud parent, Julia smiles happily as if she is seeing us go off on a first date. “Would you like some coffee, Ms.

Moneyhart?” she chirps.

I can’t believe my ears and don’t dare turn around. Julia offering to get coffee? Am I in the right office building?

“No, thanks,” my potential client says in a barely audible voice and then asks me shyly, “Would you like for me to get you some?”

“I’m fine,” I say, noticing Mrs. Moneyhart is no taller than a large child. How bad could she have been? And why divorce her? It might be easier to wait until she vanishes entirely.

“Thank you, Julia,” I call over my shoulder.

In my office she flips on my light switch for me and clears a spot on my desk. I’m tempted to ask her to fluff up my chair and take off my shoes.

“Have a seat,” I tell her, “while I read this.” This will be my first divorce case ever. At Mays & Burton the firm specialized in personal injury cases, and at the Public De fender’s Office, of course, we just had purely criminal cases, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants. I didn’t take domestic relations in law school; now, I wish I had. What courses did I take? Did I really go? I leaf through the complaint and summons and then force myself to go through it carefully. It looks straightforward enough: her husband wants custody of their three children, possession of the house, temporary child support, attorney’s fees, and court costs. Three children?

How can this woman have had one? Her pelvis is so narrow I can’t imagine how she could have given birth to even a credit card.

“I got the summons last week,” Mrs. Moneyhart says, still on her feet. She has edged around my desk and is hovering over me.

I put the papers down on my desk.

“I can read this better if you’ll just relax a little and sit down.”

Nervously patting her stringy brown hair, which is tied by a red ribbon behind her head, Mrs. Moneyhart whimpers apologetically in a wispy tone, “Sorry.” She sighs and flops back to the chair.

“I know you’re upset,” I say, wondering how to calm down this woman. She is beginning to get on my nerves.

Perched on the edge of her chair, Mrs. Moneyhart begins to cry.

“He wants a divorce because he thinks that I deliberately burned rats in the oven! That’s not fair!”