than usual.”
I listen, and hear the sound of a pickup turning the corner.
The sons of bitches. They are watching the house. I feel the hair on my neck standing up like cat’s fur.
“I don’t think it’s anything,” I lie, not wanting to alarm her. They are watching to see if Charlene shows up here.
“Sit down and I’ll tell you what I think is going on.”
For the next fifteen minutes, as I listen for more activity, I tell Sarah everything that is going on in the trial.
“Just to be on the safe side,” I say, “why don’t you and Woogie sleep back in my bed tonight and I’ll sleep on the couch in the den where I can keep an eye on things?”
Sarah’s eyes are round with fear and disapproval.
“Call the police!”
Ah, the police. I can’t tell my daughter I may not be able to trust them either. Candor has its limits. Exhausted, I rub my eyes, though it is only nine o’clock.
“Babe, nobody is doing anything illegal.”
Sarah begins to twist her hair again.
“They’ll hurt her,” she says, her voice almost a sob, “just like they hurt you.”
Not if they can’t find her. I watch as Woogie sidles into the kitchen and rubs against Sarah’s legs. Some watchdog he is. The phone rings, scaring me. I get up and answer it.
“Is this Mr. Page?” Charlene Newman asks.
“Where are you?” I ask, barely able to keep my voice under control. Sarah is watching me as if I were taking a call from the President. If anything happens to Charlene, she will never forgive me.
“I’ve been trying to get you all day.”
“I’m at a service station on Lehigh and Third.”
She is downtown, not far from the bus station. I can hear cars passing in the background.
“I think they’re looking for you.” “A friend warned me,” she says, her voice low and frightened
Though I do not want to say it, with Sarah two feet away from me, I have no choice.
“For your own safety, I think you shouldn’t testify. It’s not necessarily going to do my client any good. Have you got enough money to get back to Hot Springs?”
There is silence for a moment, and I think she is going to hang up. Finally she says, her hillbilly voice cracking in my ear, “I owe Leon, you hear me? I owe that son of a bitch.
You get me a place to stay tonight and a bus ticket to California after the trial, and I’ll testify if you want. I don’t really care what happens to your client. I just owe Leon for all he done to me.”
I look at Sarah. Her face is a stone mask of disapproval.
If I thought I had a chance in the case, I’d tell her to walk back to the bus station. Instead, I give her Rainey’s address and tell her to call a cab.
“Call me when you get there.”
Afterlhangup, Sarah screams, “You can’t involve Rainey in this! She’s got enough to worry about!”
I dial Rainey’s number.
“This’ll take her mind off her self,” I say, hoping she won’t go through the roof. When she answers, I say, unable to keep a smile off my face, “I’ve got a little favor to ask you….”
When I get off the phone with Rainey (as I suspected, she had no problems 1 didn’t quite tell her everything), Sarah is slamming doors all over the house. “You’re horrible!” she screams at me when I track her down in her room. “All you do is manipulate people just so you can win a case! You don’t care what happens to the others just as long as you get your client off!”
I stand under her doorway watching her glower at me from her bed where she is seated, her knees drawn up under her chin like two iron bars. Beside her, Woogie cowers as if this lecture were intended for him.
“That’s what I’m paid to do,” I say, already beginning to worry that Charlene is being followed. Rainey is supposed to call me the moment she gets there.
Like a child throwing a tantrum, Sarah kicks out angrily at me as I start to sit down beside her.
“You’re not paid to use people, and that’s what you’re doing and don’t pretend you aren’t! You’re using this woman; you’re using Rainey!
You’d use me if you thought it would help!”
I lean against her chest of drawers. Ugly beyond belief (it looks like a project from high school shop with its knobs and handles of different sizes and uneven brown stain), it was mine when I was growing up in eastern Arkansas, and I can’t seem to throw it out.
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say automatically, but I wonder. This case has begun to seem like a war in which no prisoners will be taken.
“I’m sorry, Sarah. The dirty work usually gets done at the office.”
She throws a pillow at me and begins to cry.
“No, you’re not! You like this! You should have seen your face when you called Rainey! You get off on it!”
I lay her pillow beside her and retreat from her room to wait alone in the kitchen for Rainey’s call. I sit down and begin to go over my questions for my Mississippi expert.
There is no sense in lying to her. A part of me loves this crap. In thirty minutes the phone rings.
“She made it,” Rainey says, a little breathless.
“Gideon, she’s just a child!” “I know,” I say, a little breathless, too. I want absolution, but now is not the time to ask for it. Maybe I’m right though.
Rainey hasn’t mentioned her lump tonight.
“Can you see that she gets down to the courthouse tomorrow morning?” I ask.
Rainey sighs.
“I guess,” she says.
After a few minutes I get off the phone but decide not to chew this bone with my daughter any longer tonight. Sarah will forgive me. She always does.
The morning, at least, starts out all right. Though he is clearly not happy about it, Andy has decided to attend the rest of his trial. Before I went to bed, I had tried to call him, but either he wasn’t answering or Morris had taken him out for his last night on the town. Dressed defiantly in his Moby Dick suit, he glares at me as we enter the courtroom as if he is about to testify against me at an ethics hearing to revoke my license.
Morris, who looks as if he spent the night drinking to blot out the nightmare he is having to pay for, whispers across me to his brother, “You keep looking this mean, and there won’t be enough left of you for a barbecue sandwich.”
Having already notified the judge that my client has decided to play the game by its normal rules, I am content to let Morris scold his brother, since I’m afraid Andy will change his mind if I start in on him. Andy responds with a curt nod, and I will be satisfied if we can get through the rest of the trial without his coming out of his chair at me. I would pay part of my fee to know what finally changed his mind.
The rest of Jill’s witnesses roll by quickly. Dr. Beavers, the emergency-room GP on duty who pronounced Pam dead, substantially repeats his testimony from the probably cause hearing. Stubbornly, on crossexamination, he won’t admit that he can’t say to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Pam’s death was caused by the cattle prod.
“Everything I know about this situation convinces me she died as a result of the electric shock,” he says smugly as though he were a world-famous pathologist instead of a small-town primary care physician.
“For all you know, she could have had a heart attack unrelated to the electric shock since there was no autopsy, isn’t that correct?” I ask, knowing the question is pointless. It’s not as if the jury doesn’t have any common sense.
“It doesn’t seem like much of a possibility to me,” Dr.
Beavers says, his tone implying that I have asked him a question similar to one about the chances of my being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“But I suppose it could have happened.”
Jill’s last witness is David Spath. If I had any lingering hopes that Andy’s former administrator would
