فصل 19 - بخش 01

19

Howie Gold shook hands with Samuels and Ralph Anderson. Then he gazed through the one-way glass at Terry Maitland, in his Golden Dragons jersey and lucky game hat. Terry’s back was straight, his head was up, and his hands were folded neatly on the table. There was no twitching, no fidgeting, no nervous sideways glances. He was not, Ralph admitted to himself, the picture of guilt.

At last Gold turned back to Samuels. ‘Speak,’ he said. As if inviting a dog to do a trick.

‘Not much to say at this point, Howard.’ Samuels’s hand went to the back of his head. He smoothed the cowlick down. It stayed put for a moment, then sprang up again. Ralph found himself remembering an Alfalfa quote he and his brother used to giggle over when they were kids: You only meet your once-in-a-lifetime friends once in a lifetime. ‘Just that it’s not a mistake, and no, we haven’t lost our fucking minds.’

‘What does Terry say?’

‘So far, nothing,’ Ralph said.

Gold swung his way, bright blue eyes glittering and slightly magnified behind the round lenses of his spectacles. ‘You misunderstand me, Anderson. Not tonight, I know he didn’t say anything to you tonight, he knows better. I mean at the initial interview. You might as well tell me, because he will.’

‘There was no initial interview,’ Ralph said. And there was no need to feel uncomfortable about that, not with the case they’d put together in just four short days, but he did, all the same. Part of it had to do with Howie Gold calling him by his last name, as if they had never bought each other drinks in the Wagon Wheel across from the county courthouse. He felt a ridiculous urge to tell Howie, Don’t look at me, look at the guy beside me. He’s the one with the pedal to the metal.

‘What? Wait. Wait just a goddam minute.’

Gold stuck his hands in his front pockets and began to rock back and forth on the balls of his feet. Ralph had seen this many times, in county and district court, and braced himself. Being cross-examined on the stand by Howie Gold was never a pleasant experience. Ralph had never held it against him, though. It was all part of the due process dance.

‘Are you telling me you arrested him in front of two thousand people without even giving him a chance to explain himself?’

Ralph said, ‘You’re a fine defense attorney, but God himself couldn’t get Maitland out from under this one. And by the way, there might have been twelve hundred people there, fifteen hundred at most. Estelle Barga Field won’t hold two thousand. The bleachers would collapse.’

Gold ignored this feeble stab at lightening the atmosphere. He was staring at Ralph as though he were some new kind of bug. ‘But you arrested him in a public place, at what one could argue was the moment of his apotheosis—’

‘His apothie-whatsis?’ Samuels asked, smiling.

Gold ignored this, as well. He was still studying Ralph. ‘You did it even though you could have put a quiet police presence around the field and then arrested him at his home, after the game was over. You did it in front of his wife and daughters, which had to be deliberate. What possessed you? What on God’s green earth possessed you?’

Ralph felt his face heating up again. ‘You really want to know, counselor?’

‘Ralph,’ Samuels said warningly. He put a restraining hand on Ralph’s arm.

Ralph shook it off. ‘I wasn’t the one who arrested him. I had a couple of officers do that, because I was afraid I might put my hands around his throat and choke him blue. Which would give a smart lawyer like you a little too much to work with.’ He stepped forward, getting into Gold’s space to make him stop the back and forth rocking. ‘He grabbed Frank Peterson and took him to Figgis Park. There he raped the kid with a tree branch, and there he killed him. Do you want to know how he killed him?’

‘Ralph, that’s privileged!’ Samuels squawked.

Ralph paid no attention. ‘Preliminary forensics suggests he tore the kid’s throat open with his teeth. He may even have swallowed some of the flesh, okay? All that got him so excited that he dropped trou and spilled his spunk all over the back of the kid’s thighs. Nastiest, vilest, most unspeakable murder any of us will ever see, God willing. He must have been building up to it for a long time. None of us who were at the scene will ever get it out of our minds. And Terry Maitland did it. Coach T did it, and not so long ago he had his hands on my son’s hands, showing him how to bunt. He just told me all about it, like it was supposed to exonerate him, or something.’

Gold was no longer staring at him like he was a bug. Now there was a kind of wonder on his face, as if he had stumbled upon an artifact left behind by some unknowable extraterrestrial race. Ralph didn’t care. He was beyond caring.

‘You’ve got a boy yourself – Tommy, right? Isn’t that why you started coaching Pop Warner with Terry, because Tommy was playing? He had his hands on your son, too. And now you’re going to defend him?’

Samuels said, ‘For Christ’s sake, shut your trap.’

Gold had stopped rocking, but he gave no ground, and he was still staring at Ralph with that expression of almost anthropological wonder. ‘Didn’t even interview him,’ he breathed. ‘Didn’t. Even. I have never … I have never …’

‘Oh, come on,’ Samuels said with forced jollity. ‘You’ve seen everything, Howie. Most of it twice.’

‘I want to conference with him now,’ Gold said briskly, ‘so turn off your audio shit and close the curtain.’

‘Fine,’ Samuels said. ‘You can have fifteen minutes, then we’ll join you. See if the coach has anything to say.’

Gold said, ‘I will have an hour, Mr Samuels.’

‘Half an hour. Then we’ll either take his confession – which could conceivably make a difference between life in McAlester and the needle – or he’s going into a cell until his arraignment on Monday. Up to you. But if you think we did this lightly, you were never more wrong in your life.’

Gold went to the door. Ralph swiped his card across the lock, listened to the clunk as the double bolts let go, then returned to the window to watch the attorney enter. Samuels tensed when Maitland rose from his seat and started toward Gold with his arms out, but the expression on Maitland’s face was one of relief, not aggression. He embraced Gold, who dropped his boxy briefcase and hugged him back.

‘Bro hug,’ Samuels said. ‘Ain’t that just the sweetest.’

Gold turned as if he had heard, and pointed to the camera with its little red light. ‘Turn it off,’ came his voice through the overhead speaker. ‘Sound as well. Then draw the curtain.’

The switches were on a wall-mounted console that also held audio and video recorders. Ralph flipped them. The red light on the camera in the corner of the interview room went out. He nodded to Samuels, who yanked the curtain. The sound it made as it covered the glass brought Ralph an unpleasant memory. On three occasions – all before Bill Samuels’s day – Ralph had attended executions at McAlester. There was a similar curtain (perhaps made by the same company!) over the long glass window between the execution chamber and the viewing room. It was pulled open when the witnesses entered the viewing room, and closed as soon as the prisoner was pronounced dead. It made that same unpleasant rasping sound.

‘I’m going across the street to Zoney’s for a soda and a burger,’ Samuels said. ‘I was too nervous to eat any dinner. Do you want anything?’

‘I could do with a coffee. No milk, one sugar.’

‘You sure? I’ve had Zoney’s coffee, and they don’t call it the Black Death for nothing.’

‘I’ll take the chance,’ Ralph said.

‘Okay. I’ll be back in fifteen. If they break early, don’t start without me.’

No chance of that. As far as Ralph was concerned, this was now Bill Samuels’s show. Let him have all the glory, if there was any to be had in a horror like this. There were chairs lining the far side of the hall. Ralph took the one next to the photocopier, which was droning softly in its sleep. He stared at the drawn curtain and wondered what Terry Maitland was saying in there, what outlandish alibi he was trying out for his Pop Warner co-coach.

Ralph found himself thinking of the big Native American woman who had picked Maitland up at Gentlemen, Please and taken him to the train station in Dubrow. I coach Prairie League basketball down at the YMCA, she’d said. Maitland used to come down and sit on the bleachers with the parents and watch the kids play. He told me he was scouting talent for City League baseball …

She had known him, and he must have known her – given her size and ethnicity, she’d be a hard woman to forget. Yet in the cab he had called her ma’am. Why was that? Because even if he knew her face from the Y, he didn’t remember her name? That was possible, but Ralph didn’t like it much. As names went, Willow Rainwater wasn’t all that forgettable, either.

‘Well, he was under stress,’ Ralph muttered, either to himself or to the drowsing photocopier. ‘Also …’

Another memory came to him, and with it a reason for Maitland’s use of ma’am that he liked better. His kid brother, Johnny, three years younger, had not been much good when it came to hide-and-seek. Many times he’d just run into his bedroom and throw the covers over his head, apparently thinking that if he couldn’t see Ralphie, Ralphie couldn’t see him. Wasn’t it possible that a man who had just committed a terrible murder might be prone to the same sort of magical thinking? If I don’t know you, you don’t know me. Mad logic, sure, but it had been a madman’s crime, and it could explain more than just Terry’s reaction to Rainwater; it could explain why he’d thought he could get away with it even though he was well-known to lots of folks in Flint City, and an actual celebrity to sports fans.

But then there was Carlton Scowcroft. If he closed his eyes, Ralph could almost see Gold underlining a key passage in Scowcroft’s statement, and preparing for his summation to the jury, perhaps stealing an idea from OJ’s attorney. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit, Johnnie Cochran had said. Gold’s version, almost as catchy, might be, Since he didn’t know, you must let him go.

It wouldn’t work, it wasn’t even close to the same, but—

According to Scowcroft, Maitland had explained the blood on his face and clothes by saying something in his nose had ruptured. It went like Old Faithful, Terry told him. Is there a doc-in-the-box anywhere around here?

Only Terry Maitland had, with the exception of four years in college, lived in Flint City all his life. He wouldn’t have needed the Quick Care billboard near Coney Ford to direct him; he wouldn’t have needed to ask in the first place. So why had he?

Samuels came back with a Coke, a burger wrapped in foil, and a go-cup of coffee, which he handed to Ralph. ‘All quiet in there?’

‘Yep. They’ve got another twenty minutes, by my watch. When they finish, I’m going to try to get him to give us a DNA swab.’

Samuels unwrapped his burger and cautiously lifted the bun for a peek. ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘It looks like something a paramedic scraped off a burn victim.’ Nevertheless, he began to eat it.

Ralph thought about mentioning Terry’s conversation with Rainwater, and Terry’s odd question about the doc-in-the-box, and didn’t. He thought about bringing up Terry’s failure to disguise himself or even to try to hide his face with sunglasses, and didn’t mention that, either. He had raised these issues before, and Samuels had swatted them aside, maintaining – and rightly – that they had no significance when stacked against the eyewitnesses and the damning forensic evidence.

The coffee was as awful as Samuels had predicted, but Ralph sipped at it anyway, and the cup was almost empty when Gold buzzed to be let out of the interview room. His expression made Ralph Anderson’s stomach contract. It wasn’t worry, anger, or the theatrical indignation some lawyers could muster up when they realized a client was in deep shit. No, this was sympathy, and it looked genuine.

‘Oy vey,’ he said. ‘You two guys are in big trouble.’