“Great photographs,” I say sincerely, noticing the expensive matting behind one picture that shows a child with AIDS or perhaps simply starving.
“These ought to be in a museum.”
She goes to the wall with the rich kids and adjusts a frame that has begun to tilt to the left.
“Some of them were. When people learn of my interest in children, they send them to me.”
There is a knock at the door, and Kerr Bowman enters, carrying a file. Men working for women. It is still a rare sight in the South-especially in the law business. Kerr smiles at me as if I were best man at his wedding.
“Hi, Gideon,” he says and pumps my hand for the second time in twenty-four hours.
“Nice to see you again!” Maybe he is running for something, too. All this friendliness is beginning to make me want to gag.
“Would you like to sit down at my workbench?” Jill says, ignoring Kerr’s glad-handing. Kerr, her expression implies, is like a gorgeous but brainless secretary, nice to look at but not to be taken seriously.
For the first time I notice her desk. A “workbench” it isn’t. I sit down at one of the loveliest pieces of furniture I ‘we ever seen. Most lawyers’ desks are as functional and ugly as the floor of a public men’s room. This looks like a French antique from the seventeenth century. The ornamentation on the sides is so delicate I can’t imagine how she got it in here without breaking it. This is a desk a king’s mistress would bend over when writing her lover. As I sit down across from her, I run my fingers over the surface. I’m not much on decorating, but I love wood.
“This is exquisite,” I acknowledge.
This woman, I’m starting to realize, is a cut above the usual occupant in this office.
“Thank you,” Jill says simply, and takes the file Kerr had handed her. She looks down at it.
“I don’t know how much you know about the death of the child. Have you seen a picture of her?”
“Not yet,” I admit. I should have asked for one from the mother, but I may not have wanted to see it.
Jill hands me a five-by-seven-inch black-and-white.
“The back says it was taken a couple of years ago.”
I take the picture and study it. I don’t know what I was expecting, a freak maybe. But Pam, though not pretty by a long shot, is not hideous either. My guess is that she was in restraints at the time this picture was made. Her shoulders are square to the camera, but since it is mostly of her head I can’t be sure. Her brown hair, with bangs almost to her eyebrows, is combed. She seems to be grimacing rather than smiling. Her teeth are her worst feature.
As strapped as the state is, I guess I shouldn’t expect to encounter the work of an orthodontist. Since I know she is retarded, I think from the picture it is obvious. But I’m not sure I would know otherwise. Fourteen is not the most attractive age for any kid, and there were plenty of round-faced girls this slow-looking in Sarah’s high school yearbook. There is no resemblance at all to Olivia. What I want is a picture of Pam after she was dead, to see if her face is swollen or bruised from blows she might have inflicted on herself before shock was applied. That is the photograph I want the jury to see, so it will understand why shock was necessary.
This is no autopsy report. The decision to treat the death as a crime obviously has come in the last few days. The body had been cremated. A statement signed by Travis Beavers, M.D.” the doc who pronounced Pam dead, concludes:
“Apparent fibrillary contraction of heart secondary to electric shock.” There are straightforward statements from Andy and the others present about the accident. I learn Olivia and the social worker were watching behind a oneway mirror. The damage comes from a statement by a psychologist by the name of Warren Holditch, who is identified as a member of the staff at the Bonaventure Clinic, a psychological consulting and testing group in Blackwell County.
Holditch, a Ph.D.” rips Andy a new one with each sentence.
I scan it hurriedly, but even a cursory reading tells me Andy is in trouble. I ask Jill for a duplicate of the file, and she tells me I am looking at my own copy. Evidently, she is waiting for a reaction from me, but until I have studied the report of Holditch and done some research of my own, she won’t get a peep out of me. I smile and tell her thank you and get up to leave.
Jill is studying me as if I were one of the photographs on her wall.”
“You’re not going to be able to blackmail this office this time around,” she says, her voice sweet and innocent like that of a child announcing she is ready to be tucked into bed.
I stand up straight and pretend to look at one of the pictures on the wall to give myself time to think of an appropriate comeback. I know she is referring to the Hart Anderson case. I want to stick it to her in the worst way, but down the road I will have to deal with her office many times, and I manage to bite my tongue. I turn back to her and say brusquely, pretending anger I don’t feel, “Of all people, you ought to be aware there was more than one side to the way the Hart Anderson case got dealt down. You were in this office then.”
She doesn’t blink.
“Don’t waste your time asking for a deal, Gideon. You won’t get one.”
I leave her office then but manage not to slam her door. A tough bitch if there ever was one. Why had I ever thought of her as a schoolteacher?
7
Julia, dressed today like a circus clown, in green polka-dotted pants and a ruffled orange collar like crepe paper around a lime top, greets me loudly as soon as I enter the reception area.
“Last night on TV I saw you and that black dude who fried that poor kid,” she says, her tone almost respectful for the first time.
“None of the dudes on our floor who call themselves attorneys have ever even been in a commercial.
The phone’s been ringing off the wall for you, and it’s not even nine o’clock.”
I rest the box of junk I have picked up from Mays amp; Burton on the edge of the reception desk as I pick up my messages.
As crude as she is, Julia at least is honest. The receptionist at Mays amp; Burton, a young woman I had considered a friend, just treated me a few minutes ago as if I had joined a leper colony instead of having taken a client they never would have represented in the first place.
“Good for business, huh?” I say, fishing out four messages from my slot. Three are from women and one is from a guy at the county jail. Nothing beats free advertising.
She nods, unwrapping a stick of Juicy Fruit.
“Yeah,” she advises, and begins to work the gum vigorously as if it were a piece of candle wax.
“Listen, if you’re gonna be on TV, you gotta get some decent suits. Those pants yesterday were so shiny you could of signaled a cruise ship into dock with ‘em.”
From one clothes horse to another, I think, glancing down at her to see if she is serious. She smiles magnanimously, as if she had given me a sure tip on the ninth race at Oaklawn in Hot Springs.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I say.
“Maybe there’ll be enough money for both of us.”
A puzzled look comes over her face, making her mouth look like the dot at the bottom of a question mark.