“No, punkin. Just someone I went to school with.”
“She looks like somebody on TV.”
She probably does. Livy is a living archetype of American good looks: not a Mary Tyler Moore but a warmer, more accessible Grace Kelly. A Southern Grace Kelly.
“I didn’t think she looked like a movie star,” Caitlin announces.
“What do you think she looks like?” I ask, not sure I want to hear the answer.
“A self-important B-I-T-C-H.”
“Hey,” Annie complains. “What’s that spell?”
“Witch,” says Caitlin, tickling her under the arms, which triggers explosive giggles. “The Masters intuition never fails,” she adds, looking up at me. “You’ve got it bad for her, don’t you?”
“What? Hell, no.”
“Daddy said a bad word!” Annie cries.
“Daddy told a fib,” says Caitlin. “And that’s worse.”
“I think I need a drink.”
The ticket agent announces that first class will begin boarding immediately.
“First love?” Caitlin asks in a casual voice as we move through the mass of passengers funneling toward the gate.
“It’s a long story.”
She nods, her eyes knowing. “If short stuff here goes to sleep on the plane, that’s a story I wouldn’t mind hearing.”
Perfect.
Airplanes work like a sedative on Annie. After drinking a Sprite and eating a bag of honey-roasted peanuts, she curls up next to Caitlin and zonks out. At Caitlin’s suggestion, I move her across the aisle to my seat and, when she begins to snore again, move back across the aisle beside Caitlin.
“You’re going to make me drag it out of you?” she says.
I say nothing for a moment. Certain relationships do not lend themselves to conversational description. Emotions are by nature amorphous. When confined to words, our longings and passions, our rebellions and humiliations often seem melodramatic, trivial, or even pathetic. But if Caitlin is going to help me destroy Leo Marston, she needs to know the history.
“Every high school class has a Livy Marston,” I begin. “But Livy was special. Everyone who ever met her knew that.”
“Marston? She said her name was Sutter.”
“Her maiden name was Marston.”
“Marston… Marston. The guy you asked me to check out? The D.A. when Payton was killed? Judge Marston?”
“He’s Livy’s father.”
“God, it’s so incestuous down here.”
“Like Boston?”
“Worse.”
Caitlin calls the flight attendant and orders a gimlet, but this is beyond the resources of the galley. There seems to be a nationwide shortage of Rose’s Lime Juice. She orders a martini instead.
“So,” she says, “what made her so special?”
“How many people were in your graduating class?”
“About three hundred.”
“Mine had thirty-two. And most of those had been together since nursery school. It was like an extended family. We watched each other grow up for fourteen years. And those thirty-two people did some extraordinary things.”
“Such as?”
“Well, there’s high school, and then there’s life. Out of thirty-two people we had six doctors, ten lawyers, a photographer who won the Pulitzer last year-”
“And you,” she finishes. “Best-selling novelist and legal eagle.”
“Every class thinks it’s special, of course. But in a town as small as Natchez, and a school as small as St. Stephens, you have to have something like a genetic accident to get a class like ours. Our football team had eighteen people on it. Everyone played both ways. And we were ranked in the top ten in the state in the rankings of public schools. That’s ranked against schools like yours, with seventy players on the squad. Our baseball team was the first single-A team in the history of Mississippi to win the overall state title.”
She rolls her eyes. “So you were big-time in Mississippi sports. Let’s call CNN.”
“Sports means a lot in high school.”
“What about academics?”
“Second-highest SATs in the state.”
“When do we get to Miss Perfect?”
“Livy was the center of all that. The star everyone revolved around. Homecoming queen, head cheerleader, valedictorian… you name it, she was it.”
Caitlin groans. “Gag me with a soup ladle.”
“If you plop most high school queens down at a major university, they’ll disappear like daisies at a flower show. Not Livy. She was head cheerleader at Virginia, president of the Tri-Delts, and made law review at the UVA law school.”
“She sounds schizophrenic.”
“She probably is. She was born to a man who wanted sons, in a decade when the cultural dynamic of the fifties was still alive and kicking in the South. She was a brilliant and beautiful girl with a mother who thought in terms of her marrying well and a father who wanted her to be president. She killed a ten-point buck when she was eleven years old, just to prove she could do anything a boy could.”
“Spare me the body count. I suppose she graduated, won the Nobel prize, and raised two-point-five perfect kids?”
I can’t help but laugh at the animosity Livy has inspired in Caitlin; it can only be based on the degree to which Livy has intimidated her. “Actually, she sold out.”
Caitlin cringes in mock horror. “Not the head cheerleader of the law review?”
“She took the biggest offer right out of law school and never looked back. Chased money and power all the way.”
“Who did she marry?”
“This is the part I like. She had this Howard Roark fixation. You know, the architect from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead? She wanted the absolute alpha male, an artist-logician who wouldn’t take any shit off her or compromise once in his life.”
“Did she find him?”
“She married an entertainment lawyer in Atlanta. He represents athletes and rap singers.”
“There is justice,” Caitlin says, laughing. “Though I guess he made a lot more money than a Houston prosecutor.”
“Twenty times more, at least.”
“Why did you stay in the D.A.’s office so long? I thought most lawyers only did that for a couple of years to prep themselves for private defense work.”
“That’s true. Most people who stay are very different from me. Zealots, moralists. Jesuits, I call them. Military types who like to punish criminals. My boss was a lot like that.”
“So, why did you stay?”
“I was accomplishing something. I felt I was a moral counterweight to those people. Some liberals even said I had an overdeveloped sense of justice. And that may be true. I convicted a lot of killers, and I don’t apologize for it. I believe evil should be held accountable.”
“Whoa, that was Evil with a capital E.”
“It’s out there. Take my word for it.”
“An overdeveloped sense of justice. Is that why you’re investigating the Payton case?”
