Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (20 page)

never wanted to be in here in the first place. For six months, I was horribly sick and almost died. Gall-bladder problem they probably didn’t diagnose right at first and lots of infection.

They had to take it out, and most of my pancreas, too.

I’m on oral insulin, but that’s all except vitamins. I’m still a little weak but I don’t need to be in here. My son got tired of waiting for me to die, and by now he’s probably wasted half of my money. Tbmmy thinks he’s a businessman—wants to sell Arkansas rice to the Japanese. Who doesn’t? Now I can’t even get a drink of water without having to ask six people if it’s okay. Would you want to live like this?” she asks and immediately begins to hum again.

“No, ma’am,” I say, and scan the room. The walls are a dull mustard color, and there is a smell of urine and disinfectant coming from her roommate’s bed. What in the world could be more depressing?

“Can you take care of yourself?”

She folds her arms across her chest and clears her throat.

“I don’t want to take care of myself. I was in one of those retirement places—decent food, alcohol, somebody to play bridge with, my own apartment, even some privacy, dam it.” Suddenly, tears come to her eyes.

“Obviously, I’m not going to live forever, but I don’t want to die in here if I can help it. Would you?”

I decide not to ask her about the sex-in-a-box business right now. It is irrelevant and of only prurient interest.

Though Clan will be disappointed if I don’t come back with details, surely he can survive without knowing the sex life of an eighty-four-year-old woman who looks a bit like the pictures I’ve seen of Gertrude Stein. I get her to sign a couple of releases so I can look at her records and talk to her doctor.

Since she has no control over her money and can’t hire her own doctor to examine her, we are at the mercy of the nursing-home physician, who, if he knows anything, surely is aware which side his bread is buttered on, but it can’t hurt to talk to him. I visit with her for another thirty minutes, and as I am picking up my briefcase to leave she clears her throat and says, dropping her voice, “There’s something else you ought to know.”

As I cram my notes into my briefcase, she begins to hum.

“Yes, ma’am?”

Mrs. Gentry looks over at her comatose roommate and says, with great dignity, “I’m still sexually active.”

I nod, unable to bring myself to tell her that I am aware of this remarkable fact.

She says,”

“They discourage that sort of thing here. In fact, they treat you like a child and make you feel dirty. You have to sneak around.” Her voice has become a whisper.

“I have a friend here whom I’ve known ever since my son admitted me. He and I were caught in kind of a compromising position a couple of weeks ago in the food pantry. I would die if that comes out in court.”

Mrs. Gentry’s spotted, wrinkled face has turned a bright red.

“I think it’s totally irrelevant,” I assure her, “and I’ll object if your son’s attorney tries to bring it up.”

Mrs. Gentry sighs, apparently relieved, but it occurs to me that the incident would be wonderful evidence that she shouldn’t be here. As I try to suggest this, however, the humming grows louder until it seems to fill the room. It sounds like “Sentimental Journey,” but I couldn’t swear to it.

Hell, I don’t blame her. A person ought to be able to screw in peace. Still, it would be nice. As I finally leave, telling her that I will see her again before the hearing, she looks at me as if she has known all along that lawyers are perverts.

Rainey scrapes the bottom of her empty yogurt cup like a chicken scratching for food. A kiddie-size cup hardly seems worth the trouble, but Rainey, as I have learned to my regret, has the self-discipline of an old-fashioned nun.

“I have some information for you,” she says and then licks the white plastic spoon.

“It’s all gossip, but since it’s about sex, you’ll pay attention.”

This reference is prompted by my disclosure that I have a date with Kim Keogh tomorrow night. We could never work out lunch, so I swallowed hard and asked her out to dinner.

Rainey and I have gotten to the point where we tell each other about our love life, or at least parts of it. It seemed strange at first, but since we have become such good friends it was probably inevitable.

“She’s probably home looking at herself in the mirror,” I say gloomily. Now that I’ve asked Kim out, I’ve started to worry that we don’t have anything in common. I scoop out an M&M from my cup and pop it onto my chocolate-and-vanilla-flavored tongue. God, if chocolate tasted any better, it’d have to be outlawed.

“What’s the deal?” I ask, remembering that I have asked her to find out what she could about Yettie Lindsey.

As if she has forgotten, Rainey stares for a moment at the traffic whizzing through the intersection of Davis and Edgemont and then back at me. She is wearing pink twill jeans and a soft, clingy aqua top. She brushes a strand of her frizzy red hair back from her temple in the humid, oppressive night air, raising her left breast in the process.

“Yettie supposedly used to have a thing for your client,” she says, “but apparently he wouldn’t give her the time of day.”

I watch as some teenage boys who don’t look old enough to shave pull up to the red light in a 280 Z and then scratch off.

“Why wouldn’t he?” I ask, thinking I know the answer.

“She’s attractive, young, and available. At least she wasn’t wearing a ring.”

Rainey snaps her spoon against the table, splintering it into two jagged pieces of plastic.

“What you mean is that she’s got a figure that would wear out the elastic in your jockey shorts.”

Somebody has given Rainey a good description of her. I dig into my yogurt. “If a woman that good-looking were to come on to me…” I say, letting my voice trail off.

My friend takes her napkin and wipes her mouth.

“It doesn’t take much to set you off,” she says.

“Maybe she just wasn’t his type.”

An M&M goes down the wrong way, and I launch into a fit of coughing after I say, “I think he’s the type who likes white women.”

Rainey watches me unsympathetically as I hack until I think I’m going into convulsions.

“That sounds so racist. I thought you were married to a black woman yourself. Is that how you choose women by color?”

Her voice is sharp, even hostile. I wonder what I have said that is so offensive to her.

“Not particularly, but some white women, for example, prefer black men,” I say, trying to defuse the subject. “It’s just a matter of taste.”

Rainey sniffs, as if this subject is far more complicated than my simple-minded statement implied.

“Anyway, he has never even asked her out once and it pissed her royally, ac cording to my sources.”

I try one M&M at a time.

“Have you heard any rumors about my client and Olivia Le Master?”

“No,” Rainey says irritably.

“You know, I might as well get on your payroll.”

I wish I could afford her. On the way to her house to drop her off, I get Rainey to promise she won’t breathe a word of what I’m about to tell her and then give her the whole story.

If I am violating any of Andy’s confidences, then so be it. I would trust her with my life. We pull up in front of her house and sit in the dark in the car until I finish.

“Do you think there’s a chance anything funny could have been going on, or was it just an accident?” I ask.

Rainey sits with her back against the door of the Blazer.

Apparently mollified that I have told her about the case, she says, “It’s all too problematical. If that aide who was holding her hadn’t let go, Pam wouldn’t have been electrocuted.”

My eyes have begun to adjust to the darkness. I respond with my latest theory, “Unless he was in on it, too.”

Rainey snorts, “You’re beginning to sound like those people who still write books about the Kennedy assassinations.”

I grin in the darkness, yet I am serious. Ever since the Hart Anderson murder, I see conspiracies everywhere.

“Well, what do you think happened, based on what I’ve told you?”

Rainey opens her door, and the dim, dirty car light comes on, causing her face to appear harsh and prematurely old.

“It sounds like a tragic accident to me, but I know I think that your client should never have shocked that child!”

Her tone is almost shrill, on the verge of being out of control. Why is she so mad? I wasn’t the one who used a cattle prod. Irritated, I shoot back, “Hindsight doesn’t take much courage. If she had been your child, wouldn’t you want somebody to try to give her as normal a life as possible?”

Rainey fairly yells, “Not that way, for God’s sake!” She pushes open the door and takes a deep breath.

“I guess I’m just tired, Gideon. I’m sorry.”

Tired myself, I take her at her word. “That’s okay,” I say.

She must be getting her period. Poor women.

“I’ll call you this weekend and let you know how my date goes.”

“Fine,” she says shortly, and I wait until I see the light in her house go on before I drive off. It is a bad sign that Rainey’s reaction is so unsympathetic to Andy. Other than being much more liberal, Rainey shares many of the characteristics of the average Blackwell County juror: a middle-aged white female who has at least one child. If she thinks that Andy is in trouble, I suspect he is. I wish I knew the guy well enough for him to level with me. But maybe he has.

Can’t a black man try to help a white female without everyone thinking that sex is involved?

I turn into my driveway and walk into my stale, hot house.

Woogie stretches but does not get up to greet me as I turn on the light.

“The dog days of summer,” I say to him. He makes a squeaking sound that I take to be assent. I drink a beer and go to bed.

kim keogh’s apartment (only two blocks south of Rainey house) is much smaller than I had imagined and quite a bit funkier, too. In fact, it appears to be hardly more than a one-room efficiency. Maybe there is a bedroom, though from the couch where I am sitting I cannot identify which door leads to it. On the wall behind me, on each wall actually, are blown-up pictures of old-time movie stars: Marilyn Monroe, dark Gable, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, William Holden, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, but also current ones like Robert Redford, Cher, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, and my favorite, Michelle Pfeiffer.

We managed to do nicely at dinner—a seafood place on the Arkansas River, where she considerately declined my invitation to order lobster and instead had catfish and salad.

She talked mostly about herself (which is fine with me, since in the back of my mind I am worried she will try to pump me about Andy’s case). Despite Rainey’s snide comment about how well she conceals her makeup, she is gorgeous—beautiful blond hair and the longest natural eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a human. She is sitting encouragingly close to me on the couch, which is so slick it seems inevitable that we slide toward each other.

“I was going to be a model,” she says, sipping on a glass of white wine while I drink beer, ‘but I wanted to do something really meaningful with my life, you know what I mean?”

“Sure.” I nod, thinking that her ambition to be a TV anchor would be judged, when the big meltdown comes, hardly to have qualified, but there is no doubt this woman takes herself quite seriously. And for all I know, she may be the next Barbara Walters.

She is wearing a jade cotton jersey dress that comes modestly below her knees. There is something touching to me about ambitious women who are in fields where they are required to rely on their looks. She has said enough for me to realize she has enormous doubts about herself, and with good reason. She seems to sense that it is only a matter of time before someone notices a few wrinkles that can’t be hidden-and asks her to start filling in on the 6 a.m. farm show. I find myself giving her a pep talk about how much she has achieved already.

“Half the women in Arkansas would switch places with you in a New York minute,” I tell her.

“You’re beautiful, poised, and talented. What else do you want, for God’s sake?” I do not add intelligent, because it is apparent she is probably below average in this department which will probably be her professional death.

For this rhetorical question, she has already thought about an answer. She crosses her legs and balances her wine against a thigh.

“I’d like to be quicker, smarter,” she admits, “I don’t really understand a lot of the stories I cover,” she says.

I sip at the Coors she has brought me. There is a sad, sweet quality about her that is touching. I feel heat rising as if someone had lit a boiler under me. Women want so badly to be taken seriously and listened to it is almost embarrassing. I have promised myself that I will not get involved quickly with the next woman, but I hear myself lying, “You’re a lot brighter than you give yourself credit for. I’ve watched you too many times cover difficult stories not to believe that.”

She pats her lovely hair self-consciously and gives me a hopeful smile.

“Are you serious?”

As I gulp at my beer, trying to cool down, I look at the pictures on the opposite wall. Humphrey Bogart, Sally Fields.

She is living in la-la land. Please don’t do this to this woman, I tell myself. She doesn’t want to go to bed on the first date, but she will if I handle her right.

“You’re your own worst critic,” I say, putting my beer on the cheap coffee table in front of the couch. All her money must go into clothes, I think. This place is just short of a dump.

“They wouldn’t have hired you if they weren’t certain you could do the job.”

She puts the wineglass to her lips and finds it empty. I pour her some more from the beaded, sweaty bottle in front of us. Over the years I’ve found that it doesn’t matter if you look like an orangutan—all you really have to do is listen.

From her bedside table she reaches over and pulls open a drawer. I watch her right breast swing free as she strains to reach a brown envelope. I’ve had better sex the first time but not with anyone less inhibited. The alcohol must have loosened her up, because, until the last hour she has been almost ploddingly serious. The bottle she brought into the bedroom is almost empty. I am expecting marijuana, but instead she pulls from the packet a handful of pictures. Incredibly, they are of her naked in various poses.