Religious Conviction g-3 Read online

  Religious Conviction

  ( Gideon - 3 )

  Grif Stockley

  Grif Stockley

  Religious Conviction

  1

  “Chet bracken is here to see me?” I ask in disbelief.

  Stuffed on a big lunch, I come awake and sit upright in my chair and stare at my telephone as if I expect it to pop up a picture of Blackwell County’s one true whiz bang hotshot criminal attorney, Chester Theodore Bracken, an ugly, short man with jug ears the size of satellite dishes and a paunch he doesn’t bother to hide.

  Bracken is the guy you call if you shoot Mother Teresa in a room full of nuns as she is being blessed by the Pope. Oddly enough. Bracken has showed up in my life unannounced once before. He had just picked up a client in the Hart Anderson murder case and rumbled through my office at the Public Defender’s that day like a flash flood, intimidating me with his reputation and overbearing manner. It doesn’t seem to have made much difference that I’m in private practice now. Why doesn’t he just use the telephone like everybody else?

  “He’s not Jesus Christ, for God’s sake!” barks Julia, our floor secretary and receptionist, her tone up to her usual snotty standards.

  “Are you gonna see him, or do you want me to say you’re too busy crapping in your pants?”

  If Julia weren’t right so often, she’d still be intolerable. As a relative of the owner of the building, she dresses and talks as she pleases. Today the magenta sweater covering her breast implants is so tight her nipples look like rivets that have popped out of their holes from metal fatigue. At some perverse level, the lawyers on our floor like Julia and have grown attached to her, as one would a dog with a nasty growl. She can be a bitch, but she’s our bitch. I look down at the blank legal pad in front of me. I had set aside this morning to work on a brief to the Arkansas Supreme Court, but what the hell, it’s a loser anyway-a cocaine deal with the search being the main issue. If the money is right, the temptation is overwhelming to bag the client before he can slither out the door down to someone else’s office.

  “I’ll be right out.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Julia mutters.

  “This guy looks pretty scruffy to me.”

  “Wonderful, Julia!” I exclaim.

  “Why don’t you put down the phone and just yell it in his face?” Yet I know what she means. Outside of a courtroom, Bracken is a ratty dresser-cowboy boots the color of musca dine wine, ties that strain against his bulging neck like sprung mousetraps, and belt buckles that double as beer bottle openers. Still, I’d cut off my left arm to get the results he does for his clients. My friend Dan Bailey, a veteran Chet Bracken watcher, retells the story that Bracken is so prepared he can tell you what his clients ate for breakfast the day they got themselves into trouble.

  In the reception room Bracken’s appearance is, in fact, alarming. Scruffy isn’t the word. His suit, a cow patty gray, hangs on him; he looks like the family runt who has acquired a wardrobe of hand-me-downs. If he has been trying to lose weight, he should consider a career change as a barker for Weight Watchers. Otherwise he looks like a candidate for a bone-marrow transplant.

  Immediately, I think he must have AIDS and realize I haven’t seen him around in two or three months. Despite the ghost he has become, Chet is a presence in Blackwell County legal circles, whether he is sighted or not.

  “Mr. Bracken,” I say with a forced, uneasy jocularity, “to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” I would feel awkward calling him by his first name. We are not friends or equals, merely colleagues in a suspicious profession. A couple in the waiting room stare at Bracken and me as if I am greeting royalty.

  Bracken pushes up from his chair and says, “Page, you got a few minutes?” No handshake. No smile. He may not look like the Chet Bracken of three months ago, but he is acting the same.

  “Come on back,” I say, determined not to let myself be overwhelmed by him.

  Seated in one of my chairs (the first time he came to my office at the PD’s he stood the entire time), he asks, “Page, you know anything about the Wallace murder?”

  “Only a little,” I say. Leigh Wallace is a knockout brunette in her early twenties and the daughter of the minister of one of the largest nondenominational churches in the South who is on trial this month for the murder of her wealthy businessman husband at their swank home overlooking the Arkansas River.

  “You got any interest in helping on the case?”

  Bracken grunts so quickly I wonder if I have heard him.

  I can’t believe he is asking me. Bracken has always been a one-man band, paying investigators and law clerks on a case-by-case basis.

  “What do you need?” I ask, trying not to sound suspicious. While Bracken is the best criminal defense attorney Blackwell County has to offer, his reputation is clouded by rumors of violent paybacks when he feels a witness has lied to him on the stand. (One informant supposedly ended up with broken kneecaps.) Yet, since nothing has ever been documented, the stories may be mere jealousy. We like winners in Arkansas, but we like to hate them, too.

  “Right now I need your word that what I’m about to tell you will go no further than this room,” he says, his voice earnest and low, “whether you come in with me on this case or not.”

  My curiosity raised by the hint of pleading in his tone, I nod and say, “Of course,” noticing that the lines around Bracken’s mouth look drawn so tightly they appear to be sewn on his face.

  “I’m dying of cancer,” he says hoarsely.

  “I’m on some painkillers, but I’m not going in for all the experimental crap and pretend I’ve got a chance.”

  Bracken’s words send a chill through me that leaves me clammy. My wife, Rosa, died of breast cancer less than four years ago at the age of thirty-nine, and I’ve become spooked by the disease. It hasn’t been a year since my girlfriend was in St. Thomas for a breast biopsy that ultimately proved benign but not before her surgeon (the same sawbones who mutilated Rosa) told us to expect the worst. Even though my experience with Bracken is that he is an obnoxious son of a bitch, I can not imagine this intensely driven man dead. He can’t be more than forty.

  “I’m sorry,” I barely murmur. What is there to say?

  Ignoring my sympathy, he says, “Anyway, I’ve got the Wallace case coming up, and I need somebody, if I don’t feel up to it, who can talk to a jury the way I heard you did in that case with the nigger psychologist.”

  I feel my stomach muscles knot into a mass as if a tumor of my own is being formed. Bracken obviously has no idea I was married to a woman who was partly black. Rosa was a native of the northern coast of Colombia, and her bloodlines melded Indian, Spanish, and Negro ancestries. So, despite my eastern Arkansas up bringing, the word “nigger” is no longer in my vocabulary At the same time I’m elated by his reference to the Chapman case. Bracken sets the standard by which all criminal defense attorneys in Blackwell County are measured. I feel as I did when I was seven and brought my father a note from Mrs. Harrod that I was the best reader in her second-grade class at Mulberry Elementary

  “When is the trial date?” I ask, trying to conceal the excitement I’m beginning to feel.

  “It begins on the twenty-fourth,” he says, unfurling on his knees abnormally long fingers, which I realize now have been clenched.

  “I asked a couple of other guys, but they had a conflict.”

  My ego shrivels like the skin of a helium-filled balloon suddenly pierced by a needle.

  “What’s the pay?” I ask, masking my disappointment with a question lawyers understand. Bracken commands fees the rest of us usually only dream about. Perversely, I think that with the money he is saving on medical bills he can afford to be doubly
generous. My gall surprises even me. Here I am willing to haggle over money, and this guy’s life is boiling away faster than a pan of water being heated by a flamethrower. Still, it’s easier than talking about the pain he must be feeling.

  “I’ll give you a thousand a week,” he says, slouched in the chair like an insolent teenager, “but it’s gonna be nothing but asses and elbows from here on in.”

  I make a dollar sign on the pad in front of me. He’s probably picking up thirty on this case at an absolute minimum. I’ll be doing a lot more than waiting to see if he can’t answer the bell.

  “I’ll need two a week,” I say, trying to sound casual, “to make it worth my while.

  No telling what I’ll have to turn down.”

  For the first time Bracken visibly winces, either in pain or at the way I’m trying to hold him up.

  “Okay,” he says, his face a web of tiny creases, “but I want my money’s worth. I’m doing this one on the house.”

  I drop my Bic on my legal pad in amazement. One of the sayings about Chet Bracken is that he wouldn’t know a pro bono case if one bit him on the leg.

  “Leigh Wallace should be loaded,” I point out, “especially now.”

  Bracken says, his ears raising slightly, “I’m doing this one for her father. I’m a baptized member of his church.”

  Chet Bracken a Bible thumper? The thought of it is astonishing. There isn’t a nonrational bone in his body, and Christian Life is hard-core fundamentalism. He really must be dying. Yet even my girlfriend has recently dumbfounded me by telling me she has started attending Christian Life. It must be something in the water.

  “I didn’t know that,” I say, sounding stupider by the second.

  Bracken nods and says without a trace of irony, “You should try it. Page. Money isn’t everything.”

  Feeling a little crass, I shift my pad an inch to the left.

  “I’m a Catholic,” I mumble. Actually, this is bull shit. I’ve hardly darkened the door of a church since the Mass I was made to attend the morning I graduated from Subiaco Academy, a Catholic parochial school an hour from Fort Smith in the western part of the state.

  Rosa’s death hasn’t helped me answer any questions I have about religion. All the preaching in the world can’t explain why a woman who had so much life in her had to die in agony before her daughter was even out of junior high school.

  Bracken places his hands together as if we are all one happy family and asks, “Are you sure you have the time to do this case?”

  I hear anxiety in his voice. I wonder how much he has done to prepare. Bracken has the reputation of being a control freak. One story has it that on occasion he bribes the Blackwell County courthouse custodian to keep the temperature five degrees cooler than normal during a trial. There won’t be any doubt about who will be the boss. I look down at my calendar for the rest of March. An ugly custody trial, a few appointments for new clients, a couple of DWI’s, and three uncontested divorces. Pretty unspectacular.

  “I’ve got a few things,” I admit, “but only one case that will chew up a whole day.” As with almost every lawyer I know in solo practice who hasn’t been at it a good while, it’s either feast or famine.

  “What’s the story?” I add quickly, before he changes his mind.

  Bracken reaches inside his coat for his wallet, revealing a pink shirt and a tie that looks like a slightly surreal sunflower field. I wonder what kind of cancer he has. He hasn’t even cleared his throat.

  “Damn it to hell, that’s a good question,” he says irritably as he peels off four five-hundred-dollar bills.

  “I’ve hardly gotten a word out of our client. It’s a weird case, Page. Every time I try to talk to Leigh, she clams up. Usually, I can’t get a defendant to shut up they give me so much garbage I can’t get her to talk. Frankly, I don’t get it.”

  I look on in astonishment. I’ve heard of people carrying large sums of cash around, but he must have ten thousand on him. If he keels over in the street, there’ll be a riot.

  “Maybe she shot him in self-defense,” I say, recalling Leigh’s picture in the paper. Some beautiful women photograph terribly; Leigh Wallace could model for any magazine in the country. She looks like that curly-headed Spanish-looking brunette who’s always in the Avon catalogs Julia keeps at the front desk. Leigh has glittering dark eyes, a thin nose, a generous mouth, and the kind of figure that ties up traffic for blocks.

  Seeing her picture the day after she was charged, I regretted my not-always-adhered-to vow to date only women close to my age. But look what it got Art Wallace, who, like myself, was in his mid-forties.

  “I’d settle for self-defense,” Bracken says, handing me the bills, “but the cops say there was no sign of a struggle, and I can’t get a thing out of her. The cops nailed her on all the inconsistencies they’ve caught her in and because there was no sign of a forced entry. It.

  appears she has gone to some length to establish her father’s church as an alibi, but a neighbor saw her drive by at the same time she was supposed to be in a meeting. Hell, I don’t know; I haven’t felt like doing much work lately.”

  Bracken must be going crazy. A notorious workaholic, he bugged me night and day during the Perry Sarver case until he got the prosecutor to dismiss the charges against his client. Some lawyers, the mediocre ones, only go all out the last month before a trial.

  Bracken knows only one speed. I can’t imagine he hasn’t browbeaten his client to tell him her life story.

  Cancer, however, isn’t a disease that respects the work ethic. Once Rosa started going down, she didn’t feel like doing much either. The depression was as bad as the pain. What an ego this son of a bitch has. He ought to be home in bed and probably has no idea he is de pressed.

  “Were they getting along okay?”

  “Depends on who you talk to,” Bracken says gloomily

  “She says they were, but a couple of neighbors say different. They heard her yelling the night before he was killed. She says it was nothing.”

  “I can’t remember the weapon,” I say, trying unsuccessfully to remember the article about the murder. It doesn’t do me any good to read: I can’t remember a word the next day, much less months later.

  Distracted, Bracken nods as if he is on automatic pilot.

  “Three slugs in his chest and heart with a twenty two-caliber pistol. Leigh claimed she didn’t know anything about a gun. The cops figure she could have done a lot of things with it from dumping it in the river to hiding it in her father’s church.”

  “What about Wallace?” I ask, realizing Bracken doesn’t have much gas left in him for this conversation.

  “Any enemies or unhappy friends?”

  While Bracken reaches down to pull out a folder from his briefcase, I wonder what I’d do in his situation. Probably be on the phone to every quack in the country. He must have found an honest doctor who told him not to waste his time. Not a popular position in a society where you are supposed to fight on until the last blast of radiation. Hell, maybe I’d be going to church, too. But not Christian Life. All that right-wing stuff on abortion and men being the boss gives me the creeps, not to mention the nonsense about the world being created in seven days. I still can’t believe Rainey, who is as liberated as any woman I know, is involved out there.

  It doesn’t make any sense to me, but neither does dying at the age of thirty-nine. Bracken reads for a moment, then says, “I’ve had an investigator check him out, but nothing has turned up so far. Wallace made his money by functioning as a middleman between wholesalers and manufacturers all over the country. He had an office in his home. Perfectly legitimate.”

  I look past Bracken out the window at the mild March sunshine striking gold on the concrete ledge. His last spring. Yet there is not an ounce of self-pity or regret in his voice. Maybe religion has reconciled him to leaving much too early. Who will miss him? Criminals.

  Lawyers like myself, who dropped by the courtroom to watch him try a case. His
family, I suppose, of whom I know nothing. So what if religion is a crutch? For all I know, that’s all he’s got left.

  “So what do you think this is all about?” I ask, watching Bracken scan his investigator’s report as if something new might have magically appeared in it.

  “Page, I wish I knew,” he says.

  “Make a copy of the file, get it back to me tomorrow, and we can talk. I’ll telephone Leigh and tell her that you’ll be working with me. Maybe she’ll talk to you.”

  I take the file from him, shaken by how little confidence he has left in him. Normally, his arrogance is as much a trademark as his jug ears. I’d be cocky too if I got his results, but that is all gone now. His brusqueness almost seems a smoke screen to hide the lack of progress he has made. I’m amazed that Bracken managed to get her out on bond. Yet maybe it wasn’t that hard. I re call reading that members of Christian Life flooded the court with affidavits to the effect that Leigh Wallace was no threat to flee the court’s jurisdiction. Old hands around the courthouse said there had never been any thing like it in Blackwell County. The power of Shane Norman, I guess. There are many influential members in Christian Life, and not a few of them were contributors to Judge Shellnut’s reelection campaign for municipal court judge. Still, he set bond at $500,000, which didn’t faze Christian Life in the slightest.

  Twenty-four hours later Leigh was out, living with her parents in the Christian Life compound in western Blackwell County. After the case was bound over from municipal to circuit court for trial after the probable cause hearing, Chet didn’t even bother asking for a reduction of the bond.

  Bracken stands, looking relieved and tired at the same time, and surprises me by offering his hand. His palm is surprisingly soft as I feel his long fingers curl around my knuckles.

  “Leigh and an old lady from the church she brought home for lunch discovered Wallace’s body, but once the cops got around to checking out Leigh’s alibi, it didn’t hold up, as you’ll see from the file,” he says, nodding at the folder on my desk.