And later, having trailed their prey to the house on Cherokee, their telephoto lenses picked up Boy Cartwright, in for the now-missing Binx, in full hideous close-up as he gloated over this clear evidence of his wickedness.
35
They all talked it over Monday night, Ray and his defense team, after the shadow jury (and its ringer, damn the son of a bitch to hell) had been bused back to Branson, and it looked as though Ray was going to get what he wanted, after all. Warren put it this way: “The prosecution’s case was even worse than we thought. The car means nothing; we can demonstrate that half a dozen of Ray’s pals regularly borrowed that car to impress their bimbos.”
“Lady friends,” Ray said.
“Bimbos,” Warren repeated; he hated to be reversed. “There’s no direct evidence to connect Ray with the killing,” he went on, “and their circumstantial evidence is laughable. So all we have to do is be quiet and polite, and we’ll get our verdict, no problem.”
Jim Chancellor, the local lawyer who’d been helping out in the preparation of the case, said, “Warren, what about resting the defense? Right away, no witnesses at all. Just to point up how little prosecution case there is to rebut.”
“I would do that if I could, Jim,” Warren said, and nodded his heavy head in Ray’s direction, down at the end of the same conference table where late the shadow jury (and its cuckoo bird) had been in deliberation. “If Ray here would let me.”
“No way,” said Ray.
“As you see,” Warren said to Jim.
Ray said, “We’ve been over it and over it, Warren. I’m not disputing your smarts, you know that. All I’m saying is, if I don’t stand up there and look those people in the eye and tell them they’re full of shit, I’ll never be able to live with myself.”
Jolie said, “Using slightly different language, I presume.”
“Come on, Jolie,” Ray said. “I know how to talk in public, you know that.”
Warren turned back to Jim, saying, “So we won’t do the sensible thing, I’m afraid. Our principal is determined to testify.”
“Mm mm,” said Jim, expressing the most profound of misgivings.
“Agreed. And yet, here he is.” Warren turned again in Ray’s direction. “You wanted to go first,” he said. “Okay, you’ve got what you want. Tomorrow, you’ll be our first witness.”
“By God, Warren, thank you,” Ray said, grinning from ear to ear. “I feel like a kid on Christmas Day.”
“You’re welcome, Ray,” Warren said with just a hint of irony.
Jim said, “First of how many witnesses, Warren?”
“That depends how badly Ray performs,” Warren said.
“And thank you, Warren,” Ray said.
Ignoring his client, Warren told Jim, “If Ray does reasonably well, we may stop right there, while we’re still ahead. If he makes a really true mess of things, I’m afraid we’ll just have to keep calling witnesses until the jury forgets. No matter how many months it takes.”
“It’s support like that,” Ray said, “that’s kept me going all these years.”
36
The tiny container of Mace that Sara kept in her shoulder bag was about the size and shape of a lipstick, which made it very convenient to carry but a little tricky to find in the dark in the middle of the night, with somebody coming through the motel door. On the other hand, this time it was just as well she came up with the wrong tube in her haste and panic, because she was already aiming the thing and pressing the top of it with a shaking thumb when Jack’s voice said, “Is that you? Are you awake?”
Sara lowered the fatal lipstick. “Jack? What are you doing here?”
“Okay if I turn on the light?”
“I think you’d better.”
Lights burst into existence, causing Sara to squint and to shield her eyes with the hand holding the lipstick. And there was Jack, with his suitcase and some sort of dumb grin, saying, “So that’s what you wear when I’m not with you. I like that shorty kind of stuff.”
“Do you.”
Peering more closely at her, at her hand, he said, “You’re putting on lipstick in the dark?”
“I was trying to Mace you. From now on, call first.”
“Mace me with a lipstick?”
“Oh shut up,” she said, and turned to put the lipstick back in her bag; there was the damn Mace. And when he ran a hand up inside her shorty nightgown, she irritably slapped it away. “Don’t scare me in the middle of the night.”
“I thought you’d be pleased to see me.”
Then she was. All at once, she remembered how her last thought before falling asleep was how much she missed having Jack in the bed beside her.
Which didn’t mean she wasn’t still mad at him for scaring her. Forgiving, and not forgiving, she turned and said, “What are you doing here at this hour, anyway? What hour is it?”
“A little after one.”
“What are you— How can you get here this late?”
“This time,” Jack told her with an almost boyish eagerness, “we can get the Galaxy on a number of felonies, with people who would be very happy to prosecute. Hiram wanted me here to set it up. It was too late to make a connection to Springfield, so I drove down from St. Louis.”
“And didn’t pass a single telephone along the way.”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“You succeeded. Leave Sunday morning, come back Monday night — that’s fairly surprising.” All at once, Sara wrinkled her mouth like a rejected page of copy and said, “Uk. What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That taste, it’s like — I don’t know what it’s like.”
He looked at her with real concern. “It just hit, just this second?”
“No, it’s—” She made a series of disgusting mouths, with sound effects; he looked away, not wanting to know this. She said, “It’s been building the last few days. I didn’t notice, really, but waking up just now it hit me; it’s” — smack-smack — “salty, nasty, kind of — not rancid, exactly...”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve been getting it, too. You know, you don’t pay attention, but you’re right.”
They both went smack-smack, tasting their mouths. Jack said, “Is it something in the water?”
“No, it’s... I almost remember; it’s—” She stopped, mouth and eyes wide open, and stared at Jack. “Bac-O Bits!”
“What?”
“Bac-O Bits! You know, that fake bacon stuff. You shake it out; it’s like coarse pepper, only it’s — what color is that? Cordovan!”
“Cordovan? And it’s a food?”
“Kinda.”
“This,” Jack said, “is a part of Americana I don’t want to know.”
“Bac-O Bits,” Sara repeated, then nodded and tasted some more. “It’s the redneck’s garlic,” she said. “They put it on everything; we’ve been getting it in every meal. They put it on the eggs in the morning, on the sandwich at lunch, in the salad at dinner.”
Jack, belatedly wary, hunched his shoulders and said, “I had a Bloody Mary.”
“Bac-O Bits!”
“Does it build up in the body,” he asked,“like PCBs?”
“It builds up in the mouth,” Sara said, and turned toward the bathroom, saying, “Excuse me while I brush.”
“Me second.”
In the bathroom doorway, she turned back to say, “What did Binx want?”
“Oh, it’s great,” Jack assured her, chortling. “Wait’ll you hear. Binx has pulled the greatest caper; he’s home and dry, you’ll be proud of him.”