Nothing Lost (20 page)

Better to punch the message button. “You have two unplayed messages,” the computer voice said. “One, eight-oh-nine a.m.”

“It's like the fucking Ponderosa down here,” Carlyle's voice said. “I thought it was going to be some kind of dude ranch, but they got pigs and chickens and that shit. Not even any trail mix. No wonder Hoss Cartwright died. The smell got him. Listen, get me and Alex suites at that hotel up there, will you? And bed-and-breakfast places for . . .” Her voice trailed off as she talked to someone in the background. “Alex, how many people we got with us?” There seemed to be an argument. “That's too fucking many, Alex, that's all I'm saying. You're paying for yours, right?” Then back to Teresa. “Yo, Teresa? I want to see what's-his-name, Duane, you know, my bro . . .”

Teresa pressed the discard-message button and began brushing her hair. The computer-generated voice said, “Second message: eight-thirteen a.m.”

“Teresa . . .” Martha Buick's voice, talking too fast. “It's Marty. You're not there. I guess you must be at the health club. Listen, I just heard from Carlyle. Has she called?” You know she's called, Marty, she called you as soon as she left the message for me. “She wants to see Duane, I mean meet Duane, since she's never actually met him . . .”

Teresa hung up.

She felt her breasts again. No tangible growths or bumps or cysts. Nothing to excavate her from the case upon which she was about to embark.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

VERBATIM AUDIOTAPE TRANSCRIPT
DATE: 5/8
VENUE: CAPITAL CITY CORRECTION CENTER,
CAPITAL CITY, SOUTH MIDLAND

 

PRESENT: Duane Lajoie, South Midland Dept. of Corrections No. 914609CCCC (hereinafter called DL); Teresa Kean, Atty-at-Law (hereinafter called TK), counsel for Prisoner No. 914609CCCC; and Max Cline, Atty-at-Law (hereinafter called MC), also counsel for Prisoner No. 914609CCCC. The record will reflect that Duane Lajoie was wearing the orange jumpsuit that is standard attire for inmates at the Correction Center and was in arm and leg restraints because of an incident with a Correction Officer as reported to prisoner's counsel by George Hennican, Warden.

TK: Mr. Lajoie . . . is it Laj-wah or La-joe-a?

DL: You're my lawyer, you can't even get my fucking name straight, what good are you, for fuck sake, women are pussy, they're not lawyers, it's La-zhoe-a, and you there, the other one, I heard about you, big-deal prosecutor, there's people he put in here, pussy, he gave them time because they wouldn't cop his dick, he's a Jew fag is what he is. . . .

MC: Good morning, Mr. Lajoie—

DL: Fuck you.

TK: Mr. Lajoie, may I call you Duane?

DL: I didn't even know I had a fucking sister, then she finds you, she's paying you a million, it says on the TV, shit, she gave that million to me, I wouldn't be in the shit I'm in now, fuck her, long gone, over the hill to grandmother's house, except I never had no grand-mother, I never had nothing my whole life, I see my lawyers, they put me in leg irons like I'm guilty or something, what kind of impression does that give—

TK: Mr. Lajoie.

DL: I thought you were going to call me Duane. That's Doo-ane, not Dwane, Doo, that's what my friends call me, you can call me Doo-ane.

MC: About the leg irons. The warden said you stuck a correction officer—

DL: They ever find the fucking shank? No.

MC: Actually they did. It was the wire holding the straw together on a broom in a utility closet.

DL: It was only a fucking puncture then, man. And how do they know it was me—

TK: You've had previous incidents with this correction officer, Clarence Detroit—

DL: What kind of fucking name is Clarence anyway? You ever know anyone named Clarence wasn't a nigger? And Detroit? The capital city of Nig Nog from what I hear. Never been there, never going to go.

TK: These incidents—

DL: Every time he sees me, Clarence Dee-troit, he goes, “
Bzzzz,
that's what the electric chair sounds like, it's the last sound Percy Darrow heard, it's the last you're going to hear,
Bzzzz,
I'd pull that switch and hear the sweetest sound this side of heaven,
Bzzzz,
I'll have it with chitlins and greens.
Bzzzz.
” I'm going to tell that Dee-troit nigger something, I ain't going to no electric chair, fuck him and his
Bzzzz.

MC: So that's why you shanked him.

TK: Let's move past Clarence Detroit. I don't think he's really part of our charter.

DL: What's a charter?

TK: In this instance, Edgar Parlance.

DL: I didn't know that motherfucker.

MC: You never met?

DL: I don't hang with niggers.

MC: Never met him?

DL: How many times I got to say no?

TK: Then it was Bryant Gover who knew him.

DL: I'll gut that—

MC: So we've heard.

TK: You and Bryant Gover were friends.

DL: He never was no friend.

TK: But you knew him.

DL: I only know him for a week. I just met him. He killed that nigger and now he's trying to blame me. I was just along for the ride, he's a fucking animal, he said he'd kill me I didn't go along, he had this .38 Detective Special, it makes a hole in you like a fucking cannon, he likes to off people, that's what he likes to do, then he snitches me out, he doesn't want to hear no fucking
Bzzzz,
I got friends up at Durango Avenue, they'll fucking take care of him.

MC: How'd you meet?

DL: How come you ask all the questions? You getting paid the million or is she? Who's in charge here?

TK: Duane, how did you and Bryant Gover meet? We have to establish a time line. Did you just run into each other? Were you just hanging out?

DL: What do you mean “hanging out”? You mean “doing a little weed”? That kind of pussy stuff people like you do? You know what they do in here? The fat girlfriend comes in here on visitors' day with little plastic bags of smack or shit in her panties or her brassiere, or maybe she stashes it in her brat's shitty diapers, that's the best place, no hack's going to go fishing through a whiny kid's crappy Pamper, and she flushes the stuff down the crapper. And the guys in the sewer plant, they know it's coming, and they swim through the shit and piss like fucking scuba divers and fish out the skag or the crack or the crystal meth, whatever it is. It smells a little rank, but, fuck, it gets you up, it gets the job done. I'd like a piece of that action, I'd be a fucking rich man in here, my so-called sister wouldn't have to put up no million.

MC: Waste management in the cathedral of crime.

DL: What's that, some kind of faggot joke?

TK: Duane, we were talking about you and Bryant, how you met.

DL: He cold-cocked someone with a pool cue. I mean, that's what kind of violent person he is, a stranger, someone he didn't even know. It's like what he did to Wonder.

MC: Who's Wonder?

DL: It's fucking nobody. Some guy. Another guy.

TK: Let's concentrate on Gover and the pool cue. When you met. Who did he hit with a pool cue? Where?

DL: You know Feathers.

MC: The keno joint in Chippewa County.

DL: What're you, some kind of geography teacher, or something?

TK: You were at Feathers. And?

DL: This dude was flashing a picture of Merle.

TK: Merle Orvis?

DL: Has that cunt been talking to you?

MC: What kind of picture?

DL: I told her to keep her mouth shut.

TK: The photograph—

DL: She was giving him a blow job.

MC: Wonder?

DL: Forget Wonder, he's—

TK: Who, then?

DL: Who what?

TK: Who was she fellating?

DL: What's fellating . . .

MC: It's a lawyer's word for blow job.

DL: I got to remember that. Is that classier than sucking off?

MC: Judges think it is.

DL: Well, that's the only fucking thing she knows how to do, fel-lat-ing, and she's no good at that.

TK: Let's get back to the pool cue. At Feathers.

DL: So this guy, Ty or Ray or something like that, he's showing this picture of him and Merle around the bar, her fel-lat-ing him like, and I hit him with a beer bottle, and he comes at me, him and some other guy, he's got these like huge arms, like fire hydrants, I'm holding my own, I don't need nobody, and all of a sudden, they both go down, Bryant's broken the fucking pool cue on the back of their heads, he can't pass up hitting somebody, that's what kind of person he is, he doesn't even know Ty and the other guy, and we get out of there, we get in my pickup, and shit, we are gone, we go to Merle's, we do some stuff, she gives him a blow job.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The rest was more of the same.

It gives you an idea of what Teresa and I had to work with, and how even if he were innocent, which he wasn't, how difficult it would be to sell his story to a jury. We might be able to prove, although it was unlikely, that he did not cut or peel or shoot or stomp, but the fact was that he had been there, and the best spin we could put on it was to show that he was an unwilling participant, in fear of his life.

An old story that never worked.

His teeth were chipped and broken and looked as if they had never entertained a toothbrush. The space between his two front teeth was the same space that was the trademark of his half sister. All the time he was talking he was breathing his homemade buck fumes in our faces, Windex and raisins picked from prison rice pudding and fermented together. Another premium product in the inmate economy.

Bzzzz.

I had to admit it did have a nice sound.

Punctuation. A period at the end of the sentence.

We weren't surprised by his riffs and free association and stream of consciousness, if he indeed had ever been what is generally conceived of as conscious. So there is no point in printing out the whole transcript. A taste of it is like a swallow of buck. Nor would there have been any point in telling Duane that the mother who left him at St. Fintan of Cloneagh's Foundling Hospital in Halloween County had once been a keno waitress and part-time hooker at that same Feathers in Chippewa County, had married her first husband Bruiser Todt there when she was seventeen and already pregnant by someone other than the Bruiser. Pregnant with the half sister who was paying for his defense.

Coincidence as destiny.

Duane Lajoie, Bryant Gover, and Merle Orvis. For two weeks— or, to be exact, twelve days—they were the three musketeers of Loomis County, rolling over the back roads at such high rates of speed in Duane's old Ford 4x4 that the pickup received four speeding summonses, twice when Bryant Gover was driving, once when Merle Orvis was at the wheel, with Boy on her lap sucking a breast.

All for one and one for all until they began ratting each other out.

Each summons had mentioned the FUCK THE TELEPHONE COMPANY bumper sticker that Clyde Ray had seen on County Road 21 the night Edgar Parlance was murdered. Freeing Brutus Mayes from having to do much Dick Tracy sleuthing. There was only one pickup in Loomis County with that particular signature, and it was registered to Duane Lajoie, Wuthering Heights Mobile Home Park.

Merle Orvis's trailer.

Somehow Teresa and I were able to piece together a narrative from the gospel according to Duane. Which, as it turned out, was really not that much different from the gospel according to Bryant.

Except when, at the meaningful moments, the roles were reversed.

It was as if they were pitching the same movie with two different leading men.

Bryant had camped out in the back of Duane's pickup. They shoplifted groceries at the Food Treasure and skipped out of Domino's and KFC without paying and sang karaoke at the Bunkhouse and took turns fucking Merle Orvis. The bed of the pickup, according to the sheriff's impoundment papers, was a landfill of crushed six-packs and discarded fast-food containers and dirty laundry and cigarette butts and roaches and used condoms, each item like an artifact discovered on an archaeological dig. The underclass—a migrant civilization deliberately forgotten.

Another story in this saga.

So. Here is Duane's story. The short version.

Bryant was driving. On the road out by the falls. It was after midnight. There were no other cars. Duane was drunk. Two liters of malt liquor and a pint of apple brandy. He was pretending to be asleep against the passenger door. He was afraid of Bryant. Bryant was equally drunk and had already puked in the cab. His vomit was all over the steering wheel, the dashboard, the windshield, and Duane's trousers. Bryant said he would cut Duane if he didn't stop complaining. Bryant spotted a man walking by the side of the road. The man turns and puts out his thumb. He was colored. Bryant shakes Duane and says let's have some fun with the nigger. He guns the pickup and steers it straight at him. The man jumps away. Bryant turns and chases the hitchhiker into the field off the road. He was playing with him, man, Duane Lajoie said. Blocking the nigger off and knocking him down, I thought the fucking truck would get stuck in the mud, I tried to get him to stop, he wouldn't do it, he was having too much fun, now he wasn't even trying to hit him, you ever seen that bullfight movie, the fucking cow gets all tired and shit, he can't move, and then the bullfighter takes the knife and shit and sticks him, that's what Bryant was doing, he was playing with him, and finally the nigger just went down on his knees and then he rolls over and he's just lying there, man, he could hardly breathe, it was fucking awful, I felt really sorry for that nigger. And Bryant gets out of the truck, he takes a tire iron out of the toolbox and he goes over and he hits the nigger and what I'm doing is I'm trying to slide into the driver's seat so I can get the fuck out of there, but Bryant's got the keys and he comes after me, and he says he'll kill me if I don't help him, and then this nigger gets up, I never seen anything like it, he comes at me, like it was me who hit him, not Bryant, and Bryant hits him again, and puts him down, and then he gets some pliers out of the toolbox and he's got this box cutter and he gives me the tire iron and says if he moves hit him, you don't move, I'll skin you, and he starts slicing the nigger's pants and he slices a piece of skin and he takes the pliers and pulls this piece of skin off like it's a strip of bacon, you know what I mean, you buy a quarter pound of bacon, you peel the strips off, that's like what he was doing, then this nigger just gets up, I just want out of there, man, and Bryant says deck him, I drop the tire iron and Bryant picks it up and drops him, then comes after me, he is going to brain me for sure, and the nigger gets up again, I never seen anybody that tough, he's got pieces of skin flopping all over the place, and Bryant hits him again, and he goes down, and Bryant stomps him with his boots and shit, and then he starts to pull his tongue out with the pliers, and the nigger still tries to get up, and that's when Bryant shoots him with that .38 he always carried, it tore the back of his head off, he checks the nigger out to see if he's dead, then he takes this knife, it's a huge fucker, it's like one of those swords the soldiers wear in those movies before they had guns, when it was just bows and arrows and swords and shit, and he cuts something on the nigger's chest, he says to me kick some dirt over him, and I say no, and he says I'll put you down there with him, I'll cut your tongue out, and so I kick some dirt on him, we're about ten miles from the fucking road, nobody's going to see him, but I want to keep my tongue, and that Bryant's crazy, and when I'm doing that dirt he gets back in the truck, he's going to leave without me, he's going to leave me out in that field there to take the fall for offing that nigger, so I chase after him, I'm hanging on to the fucking tailgate and finally I pull myself on board, I'm lying in the back with all this shit, and he stops, Bryant, he gets out of the truck, I thought the fucker was going to shoot me, and he says we got to get rid of all this shit. So we finally get back on the road, it seems like hours, Bryant must've chased him halfway to Nebraska, I thought we'd get stuck before we ever hit the road, but then we do, and we head for the falls, and Bryant says we can get rid of the stuff there, they'll never find it, he wanted to keep the .38, he said that fucker had got him out of a lot of tight spots, and I say fine, you ought to keep it, they ever get to him and he's carrying that dude, they'll pin killing that nigger on him, and not on me, and that's how it happened, it was Bryant, it was Bryant's idea, it was Bryant that did it, then the fucker snitched me out.

It was implausibly plausible.

Or plausibly implausible.

Not that it mattered either way.

Divers found the .38-caliber DS-II Detective Special, the Tennessee Toothpick, the box cutter, the pliers, and the tire iron underneath Loomis Falls. There were no fingerprints on any of the weapons. Each appeared to have been wiped clean before being thrown into the falls, and the water apparently removed anything else incriminating that might have remained. In the attempt to retrieve the weapons, one of the divers drowned, and the Worm was trying to find some interpretation of the state penal code that would allow him to charge Duane Lajoie with the diver's wrongful death.

“You get everything you wanted?” Warden Hennican said at the guard station controlling Duane Lajoie's cellblock. He had that hard little smile of contained outrage that career bureaucrats in the Department of Corrections automatically seemed to cultivate. In a warehouse of criminals, moral superiority, however superfluous or spurious, was an additional weapon. “I'll tell you something, Mr. Cline . . .” He ignored Teresa, it was as if she was not there. “. . . you used to send people here, that was before you began defending the people who are sent here, but I like to believe you've still got a bit of the old you when you were a prosecutor, and so it's the old you I'm talking to, if I make myself clear—”

“Goodbye, Warden,” Teresa interrupted. She picked up her attaché case.

“. . . that man is a troublemaker . . .”

“People in prison tend to be,” Teresa said. She moved to the door.

We walked silently through a series of security checkpoints. At each stop, a corrections officer examined Teresa's attaché case. It was as if she might have been slipped something between checks. Finally, for a moment before the gate was open, we were alone. “What did you think?” Teresa said quietly. “About our client?”

“I think he should've cut a deal before Gover got his. He wouldn't be looking at the
Bzzzz
if he had. What do you think?”

She waited a moment before she spoke. I knew what she was going to say. It was on my mind, too. “I think a lot about Edgar Parlance.”

The gate to the prison exterior swung open.

You saw what happened.

Lorna Dun was there with her camera crew and Alicia Barbara with hers, each of them shouting questions at Teresa and me. Poppy McClure was not there, but Teresa saw Willie Erskine cheerleading a crowd of demonstrators who were waving placards scrawled with red-meat slogans, KILL THE BASTARD or A BULLET BEHIND HIS EAR. It was just another mini-riot that the Cap City police did not expend too much energy trying to put down, viewing it in the same good humor with which they viewed the downtown wreckage after the Rhinos beat the Cornhuskers or the Vols. Teresa slowly pushed her way to my car, with me in my rugby mode acting as her blocker,
I have no comment, please, no comment, I'll have a statement on behalf of my client at the appropriate time, please, no comment.
As we reached the car, she was hit in the side of the face and crushed against the SUV by a KILL THE BASTARD sign, and as she righted herself she found herself staring into a Nikon held by Alex Quintero, who managed to squeeze off half a roll of film before she found safety in the front seat. It was only then that we saw Carlyle. She grabbed Alex by the arm and led him to a scrum between two groups of demonstrators.

“Who knew we were coming here today?” I said, pushing the SUV through the throng draped over the hood, with some satisfaction making Alex Quintero jump out of the way, the satisfaction diminishing when I realized it was the kind of shot he was looking for.

“Does it matter?” Teresa said.