'Right out of Tennessee Williams. Near as I can make out, Mama was retarded, likely bipolar, an alcohol abuser, a battered wife, and—quite possibly—abusive to her children.' Mattox took a quick swallow of coffee. 'Pretty damned clear that someone was.'
'How so?'
'I'll get to that. As far as 'who,' Dad's a genuine prospect—crazy as a bedbug, and quick to anger. Just because Mom's crazy, too, doesn't mean sticking a knife in him wasn't a rational decision.' She glanced at Lane. 'Before she killed him, Vernon Price spent a stint in a state mental hospital—long enough to be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Grandma was probably the one safe haven these boys had ever known.'
With an involuntary chill, Terri thought of the one safe haven in her childhood, her mother, so at the mercy of the sudden outbreaks of her father's drunkenness and brutality that Terri could only watch. How much worse if Rennell's only hope of safety was to wish both parents dead.
'For Rennell,' Mattox continued, 'not even his first trimester as a fetus was safe. Mom was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning after 'falling'—she'd drunk so much she damn near died. When she was sober enough to talk, she told the ER doc she'd tried to end her pregnancy by jumping off Grandma's porch.'
Lane began taking notes. 'What about prenatal care?'
'That was it—no other record of doctors' visits. To call Rennell 'unwanted' doesn't begin to cover it.'
Lane nodded. 'Neither does 'fetal alcohol syndrome' cover all his problems, I expect. But that may be part of Rennell's deficiencies.'
'How does fetal alcohol syndrome,' Carlo asked, 'fit into our habeas petition?'
Tammy leaned forward, elbows resting on the table. 'It's part of the history we tell the court—beginning with Rennell's beginning. But fetal alcohol syndrome would have burdened him to the day Thuy Sen died—'
'Among the potential outcomes,' Lane interjected, 'are defects in cerebral development which manifest physically: widened forehead, cleft palate, harelip. None of that shows up in Rennell. But there's also what you described—impaired coordination, the awkward movements of a Frankenstein monster . . .'
'Sounds right,' Carlo affirmed. 'But what's it got to do with Thuy Sen's death?'
'Nothing, in itself—it's just evidence of brain damage. But fetal alcohol also impairs the brain's executive function, the capacity to deliberate before you act. Cut that out and Rennell becomes a creature of excitation and impulse—'
'As in using a child for sex,' Mattox said flatly. 'But outside of what he's charged with, I'm not finding much evidence of impulsive behavior, and none at all of violence. The childhood I'm beginning to construct is more like Ferdinand the Bull's—all that was scary about Rennell was what he looked like, not who he really was.'
'And who was that?' Terri asked after a moment.
'A big, clumsy kid, slow to react—same as now. Neighbors remember him staying close to Payton.' She spoke to Lane again. 'If I'm right about life before Grandma, Payton was the only sane person in the family. And Payton was just a kid himself, coping with a familial horror story.'
'If there was abuse,' Lane interposed, 'then Rennell may have become deeply fearful of anything unpredictable—especially random violence. That could have made Payton a human life raft, all Rennell had to hang on to.'
'That fits with Rennell the crack dealer,' Tammy said. 'All people recall is him being Payton's gofer, running errands. Which makes it criminal that Yancey James presented them as one and the same, a couple of thugs.'
'What about school?' Terri asked.
'I found Rennell's third-grade teacher.' Briefly, Tammy flipped a spiral notepad, reviewing notes that, to Terri, looked indecipherable. 'Sharon Brooks. 'Slow but sort of sweet' is how she described him—impairment of fine motor skills, difficulty in drawing and writing. So school was painful for him.' Tammy glanced up at Terri. 'But the reason Brooks remembers him,' she finished, 'is that he never wanted to leave when school was over.'
For an instant, Terri thought of Thuy Sen, perhaps an hour from death, fatefully lingering after school for help with math. 'Did Brooks say why?'
'She guessed there was nothing waiting for him at home—which would have been a mercy, were it true. Anyhow, he just stayed there near her desk. Eventually they developed a routine, Brooks doing her work with Rennell close by.' Tammy shook her head. 'If no one came for him, sometimes she'd drop him by the house. But usually Payton showed up to fetch him.'
'What does she say about their relationship?' Lane asked.
'That Payton would be short with him, like Rennell was more a burden than a companion.' Mattox glanced at the notepad. 'She remembers Payton being cool and wary and sort of hostile. But with Rennell he had what she calls 'this little man's sense of responsibility.' '
Terri wondered how that might have played itself out in the lives of these two young boys, and then in the death of Thuy Sen—the black hole in Terri's knowledge—followed by Payton's desperate solicitation of Jamal Harrison to kill Eddie Fleet and, at the last, of Tasha Bramwell's alibi. 'Did Brooks ever meet the parents?' she asked.
'No. The adults in Rennell's life were phantoms, she said. But she gave me this.' Reaching into an accordion folder, Mattox withdrew a piece of art paper with a child's primitive drawing: a head with a crooked mouth and shoe-button eyes, its ears sprouting sticks representing arms and legs. 'It was a present—Rennell's picture of her. She kept it in a scrapbook.'
Examining Rennell's gift, tendered in exchange for a teacher's desultory kindness, Terri felt immensely sad. Turning to Carlo, she asked, 'Remember the drawings Kit used to send to you in law school?'
Carlo studied the picture. 'Sure. Compared to this, they were Renoirs. And Kit was five or six.'
'It was like that across the board.' Mattox ran a finger down her notes. 'In the fourth grade, the school gave Rennell a battery of tests. The results were abysmal: excessive anxiety, poor ego strength, lousy coordination, rotten academics, minimal attention span, poor reality contact, substandard intellectual development, and poor impulse control.' Pausing, she frowned. 'Needless to say, they found him eligible for special ed. Somehow he never got any.'
