“What—?”
“Just checking,” I said. “Your wrist is white.”
“Of course it is. I always wear my watch. Aren’t you going to eat your sandwich?”
My appetite was fading, so I cut it in two and gave him half. “Hurry up and eat,” I said. “I want to see that suicide note again before I have to go back to court.”
Grumbling, he wolfed down his lunch; and even though his legs are much longer than mine, he had to stretch them out to keep up as I hurried back to his office.
“What?” he asked, when I was studying the note again.
“I think you ought to let the SBI’s handwriting experts take a closer look at this.”
“my?”
“Well, look at it,” I said, pointing to the word about.
“See how it juts out in the margin? And see that little mark where the a starts? Couldn’t that be a comma? What if the original version was just I’m sorry, Chass? What if somebody also added the capital E to make you think it was a note to Edward when it was probably a love letter to Chastity?”
“Huh?” Dwight took the paper from my hand and looked at it closer.
We’ve known each other so long he can almost read my mind at times.
“But Edward Barefoot was in court when his wife was shot. He couldn’t be two places at one time.”
“Yes, he could,” I said and told him how.
I cut court short that afternoon so that I’d be there when they brought Edward Barefoot in for questioning.
He denied everything and called for an attorney.
“I was in traffic court,” he told Dwight when his attorney was there and questioning resumed. “Ask the judge here.” He turned to me with a hopeful look. “You let me off with a prayer for judgment. You said so yourself at the funeral home.”
“I was mistaken,” I said gently. “It was your brother George that I let off. You three brothers look so much alike that when I saw you at the funeral home, I had no reason not to think you were the same man who’d been in court. I didn’t immediately recognize you, but I thought that was because you were in shock. You’re not in shock right now, though. This is your natural color.”
Puzzled, his attorney said, “I beg your pardon?”
“He puts in ten or twelve hours a day at an office, so he isn’t tan. The man who stood before my bench had just had a fresh haircut and he was so tanned that it left a ring of white around the hairline. When’s the last time you had a haircut, Mr. Barefoot?”
He touched his hair. Clearly, it was normally short and neat. Just as clearly, he hadn’t visited a barber in three or four weeks. “I’ve — Everything’s been so—”
“Don’t answer that,” said his attorney.
I thought about his little daughter’s nut-brown arms clasped tightly around his pale neck and I wasn’t happy about where this would end for her.
“When the trooper stopped your wife’s car for speeding, your brother knew he’d be facing more jail time if he gave his right name. So he gave your name instead. He could rattle off your address and birthdate glibly enough to satisfy the trooper. Then all he had to do was show up in court with your driver’s license and your clean record and act respectable and contrite. Did you know he was out with Chastity that night?”
Like a stuck needle, the attorney said, “Don’t answer that.”
“The time and date would be on any speeding ticket he showed you,” said Dwight. “Along with the license number and make of the car.”
“She said she was at her friend’s in Raleigh and that his girlfriend had dumped him and he was hitching a ride home,” Edward burst out over the protest of his attorney. “Like I was stupid enough to believe that after everything else!”
“So you made George get a haircut, lent him a suit and tie, dropped him at the courthouse, with your driver’s license, and then went back to your house and killed Chastity. After court, you met George here in Dobbs, killed him and dumped his body on the way out of town.”
“We’ll find people who were in the courtroom last Monday morning and can testify about his appearance,” said Dwight. “We’ll find the barber. We may even find your fingerprints on the note.”
Edward Barefoot seemed to shrink down into the chair.
“You don’t have to respond to any of these accusations,” said his attorney. “They’re just guessing.”
Guessing?
Maybe.
Half of life is guesswork.
The little Barefoot girl might be only two years old, but I’m guessing that she’ll never be allowed to forget that her daddy killed her mama.
Especially when gardenias are in bloom.
Jay McInerney
Con Doctor
from Playboy
They’ve come for you at last. Outside your cell door, gathered like a storm. Each man holds a pendant sock and in the sock is a heavy steel combination lock which he has removed from the locker in his own cell. You feel them out there, every predatory one of them, and still they wait. They have found you. Finally they crowd open the cell door and pour in, flailing at you like mad drummers on amphetamines, their cats’ eyes glowing yellow in the dark, hammering at the recalcitrant bones of your face and the tender regions of your prone carcass, the soft tattoo of blows interwoven with grunts of exertion. It’s the old lock’n sock. You should have known. As you wait for the end, you think that it could’ve been worse. It has been worse, Christ, what they do to you some nights.
In the morning, over seven grain cereal and skim milk, Terri says, “The grass looks sick.”
“You want the lawn doctor,” McClarty says. “I’m the con doctor.”
“I wish you’d go back to private practice. I can’t believe you didn’t report that inmate who threatened to kill you.” McClarty now feels guilty that he told Terri about this little incident — a con named Lesko who made the threat after McClarty cut back his Valium — in the spirit of stoking her sexual ardor. His mention of the threat, his exploitation of it, has the unintended effect of making it seem more real.
“The association is supposed to take care of the grass,” Terri says. They live in 3 community called Live Oakes Manor, two to four bedroom homes behind an eight-foot brick wall, with four tennis courts, a small clubhouse and a duck pond. This is the way we live now — walled in, on cul de sacs in false communities. Bradford Arms, Ridgeview Farms, Tudor Crescent, Wedgewood Heights, Oakdale Manor, Olde Towne Estates — these capricious appellations with their diminutive suggestion of the baronial, their vague Anglo-pastoral allusiveness. Terri’s two-bedroom unit with sun-deck and jacuzzi is described in the literature as “contemporary Georgian.”
McClarty thinks about how, back in the days of pills and needles — of Percodan and Dilaudid and finally fentanyl — he didn’t have these damn nightmares. In fact he didn’t have dreams. Now when he’s not dreaming about the prison, he dreams about the pills and also about the powders and the deliquescent Demerol mingling in the barrel of the syringe with his own brilliant blood. He dreams that he can see it glowing green beneath the skin like a radioactive isotope as it moves up the vein, warming everything in its path until it blossoms in his brain stem. Maybe, he thinks, he should go to a meeting.
“I’m going to call this morning,” Terri continues. “And have them check the gutters while they’re at it.” She will, too. Her remarkable sense of economy and organization, which might seem comical or even obnoxious, is touching to McClarty, who sees it as a function of her recovering alcoholic’s battle against chaos. He admires this. And he likes the fact that she knows how to get the oil in the cars changed or free upgrades when they fly to St. Thomas. Outside of the examining room McClarty still feels bereft of competence and will.