He licked wet lips. He gazed into her eyes, knowing he was being taken but not knowing how, unable to refuse the siren call of hope. He reached out, palm down, and closed his hand over hers and the canister both. “Have dinner with me,” he said.
She smiled, sunny and sweet, her hand held in his. “Sure, Binx, I’d like that.”
Desire and doubt brewed on his face. “You will?”
“Sure I will,” she said. “I’ll have dinner with you, and then I’ll go to bed with Jack.”
He grinned with relief. “Oh, that’s okay, then,” he said, and squeezed her hand tighter around the canister. “Maybe I’ll get you drunk.”
“Maybe.” Gently she removed her hand from his, leaving the canister behind. “What time?”
He smiled as that hand went into his pocket. “Right after I develop the film,” he said.
23
Ray’s cook had quit, being a decent patriotic Christian woman who couldn’t wait to prejudge him, so he arranged to have some kind of edible shit sent in from Jjeepers! for himself and his dinner guests out to his place after his evening show on Thursday, the night before the trial began. These dinner guests were Cal and Jolie and Warren, and the occasion was a combination strategy meeting and pep talk. They all had a drink before dinner, and Jolie and Warren shared a bottle of Italian white — a pretty good Orvieto — over the bland fried chicken, but generally they were light on the booze, though God knows, they all had reason enough to drink.
Warren’s primary cause for thirst was Ray’s insistence on testifying. “I’m the one they’re charging with all this bullshit,” Ray pointed out. “How’s it going to look if I don’t stand up there and throw the lie in their fucking faces?”
“Dignified,” Warren said.
“Too late for me to be dignified,” Ray told him, and conjured up a burp to prove it.
They were dining in the dining alcove, between the spread-out living room and the spread-out kitchen, a roomy hexagonal box stuck onto the golf-course side of the house, wide windows on three angles overlooking the thirteenth tee, where not that much happened after dark.
Warren wasn’t satisfied with either Ray’s answer or Ray’s burp. “You won’t keep your cool,” he said, twirling the wine in his glass, ignoring the steam-table green beans and wet roasted potatoes. “I know that about you, and you know it about yourself. You don’t like authority figures, and that courtroom’s going to be full of them, and if our fat friend Buford Delray doesn’t have the wit to pull your chain, I assure you the fella from Springfield, that state prosecutor, whatever the hell his name is—”
“Fred Heffner,” said Jolie, who was good at details. Turning to Ray, she said, “Warren’s right, you know. I figure about sixty-five percent of my time is spent keeping you away from places where the only thing you can possibly do is get yourself in trouble.”
“I’m in trouble,” Ray said, which was merely God’s own truth. Not over the Bob Golker thing, though; that was just crap. True, the discovery that Bob had not gone to California after all but had gone instead to a watery — and boozy — grave had at first shaken Ray’s confidence, made it seem as though maybe his idea wasn’t as golden as he’d been thinking. But then he saw that everybody, down to the dumbest deputy, knew that Bob had really died in a drunken accident and that the whole charade this morning had simply been the prosecution taking advantage of a heaven-sent opportunity to play some dirty pool, poison the jurors’ minds with images of Ray Jones in handcuffs. Bob’s death might complicate things a little, eventually, but there was no reason to give up the original idea.
Ray grinned to himself, a private grin. If Jolie or Warren were even to suspect what was actually going on here, they’d shit a brick. Well, Warren would shit a brick. Jolie would shit a silo.
Warren said, “Ray, I don’t need you on that stand. All the state’s got is circumstantial evidence, and not enough of that. I’m talking about Belle Hardwick here. The other thing, the Robert Wayne Golker thing, that’s a joke and even the state knows it. If they convict you on Hardwick, they’ll just fold Golker into it, and if they lose you on Hardwick, they’ll drop Golker.”
“It’s all bullshit, Warren,” Ray said, “and you know it, and I am determined to stand up and tell the world it’s so.”
“Right on, Ray,” Cal said, grinning like an idiot. Well, of course, he was an idiot, but a damn good one.
Jolie lowered a bunch of chins at the idiot. “You keep out of this.”
“Cal can have an opinion if he wants,” Ray said mildly.
Jolie transferred her chins to Ray. “Where would he keep it?”
Warren said, “Ray, the reason you pay a lot of money for a high-priced attorney is because he knows his job. So you ought to let him do his job.”
Ray swallowed chicken; it wasn’t that bad. He said, “Warren, are you threatening to quit?”
“Absolutely not,” Warren said. “Whatever damn fool thing you do, I’m in for the long haul.”
“Good.”
“But if you do a lot of damn fool things and get yourself convicted,” Warren went on, “I shall protect my own fundament by making it clear in every post-trial interview that you went down only and solely because you failed to follow my counsel.”
“Fine,” Ray said, and grinned. “Sock it to me, man. At that point, I won’t much give a shit, will I?”
“You’re saying,” Warren concluded, “that I can’t dissuade you.”
“You got that right,” Ray said. “And just to put us out of our misery quick, I want to go on the stand the very first day, tomorrow. Morning.”
Warren and Jolie smirked at one another, which Ray didn’t like one bit. Then Warren said, “Ray, let me explain a little bit what a trial is, how it works. First, the state tells us why it arrested you. It presents its case, produces its witnesses and its evidence. Then we get our turn at bat, to poke holes in their evidence, cast doubt on their witnesses, and present our own version of events. But they go first, with their witnesses. As big a fool as you are determined to be, Ray, you are still not one of their witnesses; you’re still on this side of the battle.”
“Oh,” Ray said, feeling like maybe he was a bit of a bumpkin, like everybody thought. But a smart bumpkin, he was sure of that much. “In that case,” he said, “I want to be first up when we get to the bottom half of the inning.”
Warren smiled at him. “No.”
“Damn it, Warren,” Ray said, “it’s my goddamn trial, and I can—”
“You can go to hell for yourself, boy,” Warren said, and now he glared across his cooling chicken at his fractious client and said, “You can go on the stand against my counsel and advice, if you insist, but you’ll go on there when I say so. You are not going to alter and confuse and addle my strategy. To continue with your baseball analogy, the player does not tell the coach the batting order.”
Time to back down; old Warren was getting pretty steamed. Ray could still work his own agenda, whenever he finally got to the stand. “Okay, pal,” he said. “I’ll be good, and I’ll be patient, and I’ll wait for you to point your high-price finger my way. But don’t forget I’m sitting there.”
“Hardly,” Warren said, and put his napkin on the table. “Excuse me.” He rose and left the room, dignified and self-assured and just a little pissed off.