Summitt

Chapter Twenty-Five

A Lebanese maid opened the door of the suite and told Thomson his wife was having her massage. Would he perhaps enjoy some tea or a drink while he was waiting for Mr. Santos to finish?

Thomson shook his head and sat down beside his wife’s circular bed. Her quarters included therapy pools and a gymnasium that opened off the main room with its carefully controlled temperature and artificial sunlight.

Miguel Santos, brown and trim in white T-shirt and trousers, supervised Adele Thomson’s water therapy and her sessions in the rhythmically pumping exercise machines. Their grueling regimen fulfilled Adele’s desperate hopes of walking again one day, and perhaps even dressing herself and doing her own hair. It was a hope no doctor had ever given her the slightest chance of realizing. But Adele refused to consider their verdicts as long as the machines could twist her body into simulated contortions, and Santos’s probing fingers could bring color and tone to her wasted flesh...

The accident that paralyzed Adele Thomson had occurred when Earl was twelve. She had been on a shooting trip with her husband in Iran, at a Pahlavi “shooting box,” a lodge on the Elburz mountains only a short flight from Tehran...

Everything in Adele’s bedroom, except for mirrors, was done in flat whites — draperies, furniture, carpets. But her wardrobe doors always stood open so that her clothes provided a colorful contrast to the relentlessly neutral walls, furs and dresses of purple and green and cool grays, tiny jewels gleaming on cashmere sweaters and edging the straps of evening sandals. Her golf and tennis footwear were also on display, the uppers plumped up tautly with slim wooden shoe trees.

Thomson couldn’t get the Selby girl’s testimony out of his mind, her quiet, deliberate voice, the awful words and images they created — he noticed a pair of headlights coming up the driveway. Davic...

The Iranian guides had driven them into the hills where lemon and rose sunlight spread over the tallest peaks. Chairs were placed at strategic sites, guns loaded and distributed, certain thickets pointed out — it was like a stage set, animals caught in spotlights, deer or large cats, to be admired before being shot to death with grace and precision. The fields of fire were marked by whitewashed poles. If a gun barrel strayed beyond these limits, a sure brown hand would be there to move it firmly back into the firing zone. Flowers glistened on the ground, tiny blue flowers that grew around the rocks and through the scaly brush like delicate veins...

Adele’s hair was still blond. She had worn it long when she was young, but now it was cut short. Her maid washed it each day, and it stood up like a healthy crown, springing vibrantly from her bony, fragile forehead in a subtly ironic rebuke to her body, which was slack and useless... ever since she’d leaped up to pick a strange blue flower glinting in the last sunlight, and Thomson had fired at the movement, sending her body crashing into a ravine, broken and stained with blood...

A knock sounded on the half-open door and Davic came in. Thomson said, “I’ll see if my wife’s ready.”

Adele lay on the massage table, eyes covered with cotton pads. Her thin legs were a deep brown against the white sheet tucked around her hips. Santos was vigorously massaging her neck and shoulders. Adele heard her husband’s footsteps.

“George?”

“Yes, Adele. Mr. Davic is here.”

“Santos isn’t through yet.”

She wanted him to stay and watch, of course, to forgive her for the pleasure she took in Santos’s hands, those oiled and sturdy fingers which manipulated her wasted muscles and forced contractions that created at least a memory of pleasures she had once known.

She’d always needed forgiveness. He had learned that early about her. That was why she had been disloyal to him, why she had taken lovers, only to be forgiven. That’s what he had told himself for a long time. It had helped a little. Her last had been the American colonel in Tehran. Madsen, was that his name? Something like that.

They returned to the bedroom together — her massage table was electrically powered, the controls at her right hand — and Santos helped her under the coverlet.

The muscular Cuban smiled a good night and left the room silently on rubber-soled shoes.

Davic then said, “Judge Flood has agreed to take your testimony from here, Mrs. Thomson. A van from the TV station with a power pickup will relay your testimony to a screen in the courtroom. That screen faces the judge and jury. A TV camera crew will be here” — he glanced about — “probably in front of the closets, the camera shooting at you but including the bed, the books behind you and so forth. The deputy DA will ask you what time you and Earl had dinner that night. I would suggest you watch Miss Brett as she questions you. When you reply, shift your eyes from the monitor to the red light. Then you’ll be looking directly at the judge and jury.”

Davic paused and glanced at his notes. “There won’t be anything in her questions for you to be concerned about. You know exactly when Earl got home, there’s always a clock at your bedside. You took no medication, nothing that would make you sleepy or confused. The prosecution will know that you use prescription medicines for pain and insomnia. It’s their business to find out such things. We won’t sidestep it. We’ll bring it out in direct examination. Now... Earl showered and changed, remember, before he joined you for dinner. That was his custom, what he did as a matter of course.”

“Oh, I know what she’s after, all right.” Adele’s one useful hand stroked the covers tensely. The mattress below her right hand concealed her security needs, a secret compartment installed by Santos, a steel box with her diary, a single pill and a small revolver. “She wants the jury to think I’m a poor excuse for a mother, isn’t that what she’ll try to prove? That I’m crippled, that I can’t push a child in a swing, paddle around a swimming pool—”

“Your relationship to your son is irrelevant, Mrs. Thomson. Miss Brett may inquire only into those areas that relate to my direct examination.”

“Let her inquire then.” Adele picked listlessly at threads in the coverlet, snapping them with the thin fingers which had unaccountably escaped the vise gripping the rest of her body. “She’s never had a child, you know. She’s never had that experience.”

Her oiled face became slack, the flesh under her cheekbones sagging toward her mouth. She was like a wax figure beginning to melt, a decorative object carelessly left too close to a flame.

Thomson nodded to Davic and told him he would join him downstairs. The lawyer said good night to Adele and left.

“Today was the worst of it,” Thomson said then.

“You promised there’d never be a trial.”

“Earl will be cleared, Adele.”

“But you let her make those obscene charges. That was too much for Earl. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.” Adele’s face hardened. Her eyes were sharp again under the cap of lush blond hair. “You’ve talked with him, you know what he wants. You’d better explain that to Davic.”

“Yes,” he said. “I intend to.”

“I suggest you do before he leaves.”

A panel beside Adele’s bed controlled a TV set mounted in the ceiling. Snapping it on, she watched a smiling game show host exuberantly addressing a panel of contestants. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen as her husband left the room.

Thomson had talked to his son Earl after the day’s session in court, and its stormy conclusion. Earl had been in his room, his face flushed from jogging about the grounds. At first his mood had been ominously mild and reasonable, his emotions masked by an apparent indifference.

“I don’t blame you for not understanding,” he’d told his father. “But you can’t realize what it’s like to sit there and have to listen to the things she said. Facing that jury and hearing myself described as a degenerate and a sadist. It just got to me. I couldn’t take it any longer. Sorry.”

But then as he pulled off his sweat shirt, his voice began to quiver with anger. “A pervert, a sodomist, a goddamn unnatural animal, that’s what she kept calling me, and those morons on the jury were licking their lips over it. I know what they’re thinking, what fun it’ll be to whip my privileged ass. But you don’t care, none of you do, because you don’t have any idea of loyalty...”

It was futile to try to reason with him. Earl had usurped the role of the victim. Now it was Earl who had been damaged and vilified and so it was his right, more, his obligation, to strike back at whatever had hurt and betrayed him.

“Even if I did fuck her,” Earl had shouted, “even if I did every goddamn thing that bitch is whining about, I’d still be innocent in a way you can’t appreciate because you don’t understand about loyalty to truth, to ideas that are more real than any damned little piece of reality, so-called, of the moment. I’m taking the heat because I believe in something... in an elite society. Damn right... and I live what I believe in. There never should have been a trial. I shouldn’t be crucified for trying to live up to something special, to what I believe in, to what, by God, is right and true—”

“Goddammit, Earl, listen,” Thomson had said. “We got problems enough already.”

“Screw it. I’ve taken all the abuse I intend to. You’re going to pay them back now, the lying bitch, her hypocrite lawyer and her goddamn righteous father. Did you see him slam me in the chest when the marshals were holding me?” Earl had stopped to draw a deep breath, trying to calm himself, but his neck and face were swollen and red with anger. “Tell that shyster you hired what I want him to do,” he’d shouted. “You tell him.”

Thomson went down the broad stairway from his wife’s suite to the foyer, where Allan Davic waited for him. The lawyer had collected his hat and gloves.

“I have an appointment in Philadelphia,” he told Thomson. “But I believe we’ve covered the events that could come up in regard to your wife’s testimony. I’m sure she’ll make an excellent witness.”

“Just one thing,” Thomson said. “Forget the talk we had at lunch yesterday.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m telling you to use the court-martial material, use every goddamn thing you’ve got or can get on Selby and the DA. And that girl.”

“Mr. Thomson, the testimony of the plaintiff today was devastating. Whether you believe her story or not, take it from me as your lawyer... those jurors did. She had the whole courtroom with her.”

“Davic, I don’t want to discuss—”

“May I finish?”

“Go ahead.”

“Earl’s emotional display in court today probably won’t hurt him. That was a reaction people can relate to and even sympathize with. In fact, it might have been the smartest thing he could have done. But make no mistake, we’re in a fight. My job is to defend your son, and I’ve got my work cut out for me. That jury — any jury — is an unpredictable beast. They’re supposed to weigh the facts impartially. But too often they believe their job is to punish someone, to take revenge. Do you understand what I’m telling you? They know there’s a victim. They’ve seen her. She sat before them today. They heard the doctor, those pictures showed the cuts in her hands, the welts on her face. They didn’t have to imagine those rope burns. Now they’re looking for a culprit. We can’t risk creating additional sympathy for Shana Shelby. There’s such a thing as legal overkill. We’ve got a case to make, our witnesses to call. But if we now drag her father into it... and with him drag the past into it... well, we may create results we can’t foresee.”

“Never mind all that... I’m doing what I have to do... I don’t intend to explain myself any further. Take the wraps off. Use ail you’ve got to hit them. That’s the way it’s got to be. Good night, Mr. Davic.”

After the sound of the attorney’s car faded from the drive, Thomson and Dom Lorso talked in the shadowed study.

“We can live with it, Giorgio.” Dom Lorso studied his cigarette. “Earl wants to protect himself, that’s normal. He’s taken a lot of shit. But you and I, Giorgio, we gotta be clear about it. Very clear between you and me, okay?”

Thomson opened a bottle of wine and filled two glasses. He snapped on a lamp and was relieved to see the shadows leap away, the light revealing shelves of books and pictures of Adele in silver frames. On a beach with Earl, on a horse in an exercise ring...

“Earl should have satisfaction,” Lorso was saying, “but we got to know what it could cost, right?”

“It won’t cost you, Dom. That’s a promise.”

“If it hurts you, it hurts me.” Lorso inhaled deeply. “Davic does what Earl wants, right? Earl calls the shots?”

Thomson nodded and sipped his wine.

Dom Lorso pointed his cigarette at him. “That’s what we got to be clear about. Something could go wrong, Giorgio. You and me, we know Earl was involved with that girl—” He held up a hand. “Hear me out. You don’t want to admit it and he probably considers himself innocent the way he looks at it. Maybe he does know more about loyalty than we do... except we must’ve been doing something right for thirty years.”

Thomson nodded and drank some wine. It warmed him, was more comforting than whiskey. He’d never lived in a kitchen with melons and cheese hanging on the walls and peppers drying in the windows, but he missed it all the same. Bocci games on church lawns, old men and women sitting out on the stoop in the summer watching children play... it was all a world his grandfather Carmine had told him about, but still, he could hear echoes of those distant, safer days in Dom Lorso’s doggedly blood-loyal defense of Earl...

“The Selby kid, hey, she could be as kinky as a fox, never mind those choir girl eyes. Maybe, once it started, she wanted him to do all that shit to her, threatened to blow a whistle if he didn’t. I don’t put anything past any of them. I knew a crazy cunt once liked electric shocks in places you wouldn’t mention in front of your mother. I’m with Earl, but if things go wrong, can we handle it our way? That’s what I got to know, Giorgio.”

Thomson shook his head, more an act of despair than an answer to Lorso’s question. “You got your money, Dom, hell, you old guinea bastard, you could buy half of Miami, Palermo, if you want. You can get out now. I wouldn’t mind if you did, that’s the truth. You’re the friend of my life and my heart, Dom. That sounds like a bullshit thing to say, but I heard my grandfather use those very words, and I couldn’t have been more than six or eight at the time. Funny the things that stick in a kid’s mind.”

Lorso lit another cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. “How long’s Earl had a gun at your head, Giorgio?”

Thomson poured more wine. He offered the bottle to Lorso, but the Sicilian waved it away.

“How long, for Christ’s sake?”

Thomson finally said, “I heard Ledge’s tapes on that call to Earl. Ledge told him we had a problem with Harry Selby about Summitt. I think Earl took a notion to help us out by scaring the Selby kid, creating a little accident that would get her father home and away from Summitt. He didn’t mean to hurt her. Then it got out of hand... like that business at Rockland. He panicked when that DA made a case against him. He’s got cracks like all of us, Dom. He’s afraid, and who can blame him for that? He decided to protect himself. Nobody looks out for number one like number one. We taught him that, Dom.” Thomson smiled ironically. “But he’s also got other ideas... an office next to mine, a place near the center of the Group, a voice in decisions.” He sighed. “Can’t blame him for that either, I suppose. Once you get power, it’s hard not to use it. Otherwise you’re never sure you’ve still got it.”

Lorso said, “How long’s he had this gun at your head?”

Thomson looked directly at his old friend. “Since that fire at the general’s place, since Slocum’s people torched Vinegar Hill. That’s how long, Dom. But it’s not a gun like you mean.” Thomson sighed. “It would be simpler if it was. Remember when Earl slipped off and flew from Philadelphia down to Summitt City? And you had Slocum and Eberle burning the wires trying to find out where he was? Well, that’s where he found the pressure to use against us.”

Thomson sipped his wine and looked out at the darkness beyond the terrace. “He knows we killed Jarrell Selby, and he can prove it. He also pretty well knows why we killed him, that he’d become a threat to our experiment at Summitt City. So you might as well go ahead and buy Sicily and plant the whole damned island in garlic, Dom.”