Absolute rage

6

She decided to leave just before dawn, to get free of the citybound traffic and be out on the great American road at sunup. Having committed herself, having spent the whole of the previous evening generating quality time with her sons (Monopoly, casino, hours of Tolkien) and explaining what she was doing, having overinstructed her daughter and her manager, she felt for the first time in a long time like the old Marlene, or at least like the nostalgic memory thereof. As she loaded her bag and dog into the Dodge, she discovered she was humming the Pirate Jenny song from Threepenny Opera.

She stopped when she saw that her daughter, dressed in an old flannel bathrobe, was watching her from the doorway, smiling.

"Off on an adventure," Lucy observed. "You're as happy as a puppy."

"It's not an adventure, " answered Marlene a little testily. "It's a very dull mission of mercy. I should be back in a week, tops."

Lucy shook her head pityingly. "Oh, Mom…"

"What? What's with this 'Oh, Mom'? I fail to understand why everyone is making such a big deal out of this. Could you please explain that?"

Lucy walked over and embraced her mother and kissed her cheek. "Take care of yourself, okay? Call me when you get there, and give my regards to the Heeneys."

Marlene made agreeable noises and hugged her back, thinking at the same time that their natural positions had somehow been reversed, that Lucy was being understandingly parental and she childish. This thought occupied her mind for the two minutes it took her to get off the property and out onto the dark road. She punched up the radio: AM, oldies. Marlene had a tape player in her console but rarely used it. She liked the local stations, liked the way they waxed and waned as the miles vanished under the wheels, little driblets of what remained of regional culture in America. The station took her into the City, around the fat underbelly of Brooklyn and over the Verrazano to Staten Island and Jersey. The sun was well up when she drove onto Interstate 78 in the middle of the Garden State, which, to her surprise, was quite gardenlike in these parts, and took it west into Pennsylvania.

By noon, she was in Youngwood, Pennsylvania, and hungry. She drove off the turnpike, ate at a Hardee's, walked and fed the dog. Full of unhealthy greases and sugars, she continued onto the 70 cutoff and then south on 79 to Charleston. South of Charleston, the land rose, the divided highway petered out at Logan, and she found herself on winding, two-lane blacktop running along mountainsides covered with dark second-growth timber. The radio was all country and western and static now, the little stations fading in the valleys and bursting out again on the ridges. As she drove deeper into the southwestern part of the state, she began to see the marks coal had made on the country. Scrapes of blackness against hillsides, with huge gallowslike structures rising above the hills, and factories with brick smokestacks and square yards of smashed windows. Once she crossed on a narrow bridge and saw a newer industrial complex of some sort tucked into the curve of the river below, lines of ocher buildings, shooting out white smoke and yellow, and a smoky flame like a badly trimmed candle twisting above a tall pipe. The river was a bright medicinal green. By three she was in Robbens County, climbing a steep grade and then descending past several roadside crosses and an escape road for runaway trucks. McCullensburg was at the bottom of a fourteen-mile-long, seven-degree grade, built on what looked like the only halfway flat patch in the county.

It was not a pretty town. The usual strip development hung on its outskirts, gas stations and fast food and little, sad, hopeful businesses in concrete-block structures, a beauty shoppe, an upholsterer, a lawnmower guy. She turned left on Market as directed and passed through the business district. Like many towns in this part of the world, it had peaked around the late nineteenth century when coal was king. The two-story brick and stone buildings were of that era, and the courthouse square had a courthouse in it, this a handsome Federal-style building flanked by old trees, complete with white columns, a portico, and a tall cupola. Six streets and the town was gone. She proceeded along Route 199 into the scant suburbs, small bungalows with aluminum siding mainly, and squat, ugly, manufactured housing, with the occasional faded wooden carpenter-Gothic Victorian. She took a turnoff marked 3112, whose blacktop soon became rutted gravel hairpinning back and forth across the steep face of a mountain.

The large mailbox that said HEENEY had been shot full of holes. The house itself was set in a grassy field surrounded by a neat white fence, and hanging over it loomed a group of large, dark oaks. The renovated farmhouse had a cedar shake roof, two cobble chimneys, and a fieldstone foundation, obviously of considerable age, but well maintained; two stories, painted buff with dark red shutters and trim. The original barn of the place stood broken-backed and sagging, covered with creeper, but a weathered shed near the house served as a garage. She saw the Heeneys' GMC there and a very old and dusty Ford next to it. She parked and got out, groaning and stretching. She let the dog out, who did the same.

The front door of the house popped open and there was Dan Heeney, looking worn and even younger than he had on Long Island.

"You got here."

"I did," she said. "Here I am to save the day, just like Mighty Mouse. But first I need to pee."

"Uh, sure, right," he said, as if unsure, and led her (and she her dog) into the house. It was spacious and well furnished with local stuff, hooked rugs and country chests, set off nicely by a few pieces of the kind of fine old cherry and mahogany accumulated by families that were well-off in the late 1800s. Marlene thought of Rose decorating this place on a fairly tight budget, out of trips to swap meets and castoffs from her family, and felt a pang of loss deeper than expected for a woman she had scarcely known.

In the bathroom (which showed the grungy effects of two young bachelors living there alone) she heard voices raised. She finished and followed these into the kitchen. Dan and his brother were standing across the room from one another, glaring and calling each other unpleasant names.

"What's up, boys?" she said cheerfully.

Both young men had red faces. Marlene didn't know whether it was from anger or embarrassment, nor did she care.

Emmett actually stamped his foot and yelled at his brother, "Goddamnit, what the hell did you think you were doing?"

"We need help, Em, and you're too damn boneheaded to see it."

Emmett cursed and got redder and made a move toward his brother, from which he was brought up short by a rumbling growl from Gog.

Marlene said, "Emmett, you're upsetting my dog, and you're upsetting me. We both prefer peaceful discourse to yelling. I have just driven twelve hours straight to help you all out, and whether or not you are personally willing to accept my help is beside the point. Right now, I'm a guest of your brother in his home. I'm sure your folks taught you better manners than what you've been showing." She indicated the enameled kitchen table. "Let us sit down and take counsel with one another and see where we are."

All three sat. After a brief silence, Marlene said, "Welcome to McCullensburg, Marlene. Did you have a pleasant trip? Would you care for some refreshment? A frosty glass of beer, perhaps? A mint julep?"

Dan looked startled for an instant and then broke into a sputtering laugh.

Emmett tried to keep his face grim and failed. "Dickhead."

"Shit for brains," said Dan kindly. "I think I can offer you a beer," he added, rising to open the refrigerator. The bottom two shelves were completely packed with cans of Iron City.

They popped, they drank. "How was your drive?" Dan asked.

"Pretty good," she said. "Your state seems extremely mountainous, however. I guess you noticed that already."

They laughed and told several mountaineer jokes, mainly hinging on people or animals having legs on one side shorter to compensate for the slope. Judging the ice to have been sufficiently broken, Marlene said to Emmett, "I couldn't help overhearing-I take it you don't approve of what Dan did. Calling me, I mean. Would you mind telling me why?"

Emmett looked uneasy as he replied, "Oh, you know, nothing personal, but Dad always told us to handle things ourselves. There's no need to have you all bothered about our troubles."

"That's good advice, generally," she agreed. "But if it'll make you feel any better, I don't intend to do very much. Dan said that the police had a man…"

"Moses Welch," Dan put in.

"Right. Who Dan thinks is a frame-up. What do you think?"

Emmett dropped his head for a moment, considering. "Yeah, I guess. I mean we all know who really done it. Or hired it done. Mose, all they got on him is the boots. And him being…" He tapped his temple.

"Okay," she said, "so the first thing is to look into his case. If, in fact, he's innocent, we want to get the charges dismissed so that the cops will keep looking for whoever really did the murders." She saw them nod in agreement. "Okay, Emmett, tell me about the night of."

"It was about a week after they stole the election. A Friday. We had a meeting here, about twenty guys from the union. Dad was telling them about him going to Washington and his meeting at the Department of Labor. They were real depressed at first, but he got them up again. He thought DOL would throw out the results and call another election and supervise it and then we'd win. The meeting went on till about ten, ten-thirty. Then everyone left. I went over to Kathy's house-that's my girlfriend-and stayed over. I usually do on weekends. The next morning, we slept in and then I came back here. I came around back and saw that somebody'd taken off the storm door in the back and tossed it down next to the stairs, and the back door into the kitchen was all ripped up around the lock, like with a wrecking bar." Emmett paused, swallowed.

"I found them inside. Mom and Dad in their bedroom. Lizzie in her bed." He paused and took several breaths. "It was pretty bad. Do you want to see where it happened?"

"Later. What did you do?"

"Well, they were dead. Anyone could see that. They used a shotgun on Dad and Mom. He must have known they were coming because he was out of bed and he had his pistol. He had a.38 he kept under the mattress. Lizzie was in her bed. They shot her sleeping. In the head."

"You said, 'they.' What makes you think there was more than one of them?"

"Had to be. Lizzie was a light sleeper. Her room was right next door to theirs. No way she wouldn't have got up to a couple of shotgun blasts. But she was shot in her bed, sleeping like I said. You could tell that."

"I take it she wasn't killed with a shotgun."

"No, a pistol. Which they didn't find on Mose or anywhere around his place. They said he must've tossed it."

"I guess they probably didn't look all that hard," she said. "Blame the lame; it's a famous stupid cop trick. He's confessed to it, naturally."

"Sure," said Dan. "They promised him a dish of chocolate ice cream is what I heard."

"And what was his lawyer, what's-his-face, doing while all this was going on?"

"Ernie Poole," said Emmett. "Sleeping, probably. That's what he mostly does. He stands up to be counted in the court and then takes a nap. It's a joke."

"Good. I love a joke. So after you found them, you called the cops."

"Right. Swett came over with a couple of his guys. They found Dad's wallet was missing. He always carried a bunch of cash on him, so they said that was probably it, a random robbery. They said the killer came on foot."

"Because…?"

"Well, that part made sense," Emmett admitted. "After they shot our dog, Dad rigged up one of those sensors like they have in gas stations, across the drive. At night it turned on the floodlights and rang a little bell in the house. They said that would've got him up, and it would have."

"I see. Did they do any crime-scene work? Take prints, vacuum for fibers, like that?"

Emmett let out a bitter laugh. "Hell, no! Those jerks don't do any of that stuff. They just about good enough to grab drunks and kids smoking weed in the bushes. The state cops do all that kind of thing."

"And did they call the state cops?"

"Yeah, they sent a team of guys out from the barracks in Logan. They took up the carpets and all and sprayed a lot of black powder around. They said they would be back and not to touch anything. I stayed with Kathy that night. Then the next day, Mose Welch came to town to show off his new boots, and they arrested him. It went with what they said about the car. Mose can't drive."

"I see. How convenient. And then…?"

"Nothing. I called the sheriff and he said the case is over, you can move back in, so we did. I got some people in to help clean up and fix the back-door locks. I still haven't put the storm door back on. Not that we need it any with this weather. We've been here since."

Marlene made some notes on her pad. "Tell me, does this Moses Welch have any relatives, a guardian of some kind?"

"I don't know about a guardian," said Emmett, "but Fairless Holler got a load of Welches. It's their home place."

"And of these Welches, which do you think would care the most about old Mose?"

The two Heeneys considered this for a moment. Then Emmett said, "I guess that would be Betty Washburn. She's his sister. He used to live in a busted-up trailer back of their place, and I guess she kept him fed and dressed, more or less."

"Good, we'll go see Mrs. Washburn," said Marlene briskly. She turned to Dan. "Meanwhile, did you get any paperwork from Poole?"

"No, sorry. He wouldn't give me any. He said it was none of my concern."

"Technically, he's right. Well, we'll have to change that. Starting with me. Show me a place I can get cleaned up and changed, will you?"

Neither of the Heeneys had ever seen Marlene in any apparel but the sort of rags she wore around her farm. She now emerged in a gray Anne Klein silk and linen suit over a pearly, loose-necked blouse, dark nylons, and Blahnik sandals. Her face was made up and her expensive haircut had been arranged the way her hairdresser had intended. A whiff of L'Aire du Temps hit them; their eyes widened; she grinned back at them.

"What do you think? Good enough for Robbens County?"

"I guess," said Emmett. "What are you going to do?"

"A couple of things. One is I have to get up to speed on local criminal statutes and procedure. I don't suppose you have anything around town like a library with a computer connected to the Internet?"

They both laughed. Dan said, "Uh, I think so. We got electricity and indoor plumbing, too. Follow me, lady."

He led her to a bedroom, a teenager's den, posters on the wall, dirty clothes strewn about, an unmade bed decorated with books and magazines, and on a table, a squat, black IBM tower, a large monitor, and a DeskJet printer.

"Oops," she said. "I forgot MIT. Sorry."

"No problem. What do you want? I got a satellite hookup."

"Great. Get me the state criminal code and the rules of criminal procedure for a start. While you're doing that, I'll take a ride with Emmett."

She went to leave and then stopped. "No, wait. Could you bring up a word-processing program?"

He did. She sat and typed out a short document and printed it. "Emmett! Let's go see Mrs. Washburn."

They drove back through town, north on 130, and off the blacktop onto a rutted gravel road that wound back and forth across a narrow stream on timber bridges. Through gaps in the trees Marlene could see little groups of structures-small, rickety houses with washing flapping on lines in their yards, some newer mobile homes, and weathered gray sheds falling back into nature. Every dwelling had several elderly vehicles in front, in various stages of demolishment or repair. From time to time a glint of metal indicated a dump in the woods. The GMC jumped and shook; a rooster tail of tan dust rose behind it.

"This is Belo Knob," Emmett told her. "I mean the mountain we're on. The town's on a flat place where five mountains come together, like in the middle of a flower. Belo's on the north side, say twelve o'clock. Then Hampden's at three, where our place is, Hogue is at six, down south of town, then Filbert Ridge, that's the highest one, at seven through nine o'clock. And then Burnt Peak's up at ten or eleven."

"And the hollows are on the mountains?"

"Up in there. The hills are all cut up by streams and those make the hollers. This is Peck Creek we've been going over, and Fairless comes into it, just up here a piece."

They turned off the gravel onto an oiled dirt road and off that onto a driveway marked by a white-painted truck tire. The Washburn home was a one-story affair with pale green siding and a narrow porch in front, on which stood an ancient round washing machine and a rocking chair. An old-fashioned "streamlined" aluminum house trailer with no wheels squatted on concrete blocks just to the rear of the house. In the front yard were a rust-red, twenty-year-old Ford pickup and an El Camino with the hood gaping. Among these stigmata of rural poverty stood, jarringly, a satellite dish eight feet in diameter, round and white as the moon. When they pulled up, two yellow dogs ran out from beneath the house and ran around their truck, barking and snarling.

The woman sitting in the rocker yelled at the dogs, to which they responded not at all. She rose heavily, picked up a baseball bat, and started toward the GMC. The dogs retreated. Emmett and Marlene left the car and walked up to the woman. Marlene thought she must have weighed 250 pounds; her upper arms looked the same size as Marlene's thighs. Her hair made a long, dirty-blond braid down her back; her eyes were small, almost colorless, and wary. She wore denim cutoffs and a pink, sleeveless sweatshirt with a picture of Tweety bird on it.

"How're y'doing, Betty," said Emmett.

"Fair," said the woman. Marlene noted she continued to grip the ball

bat. "I'm sorry about your loss, Emmett, but you know my brother didn't have nothin' at all to do with that."

"I know that. That's why we're here. This here's Marlene Ciampi from New York City. She's a lawyer. She wants to help get Mose out of jail."

The woman stared at Marlene unbelievingly. "We can't pay nothing."

"There's no need to pay, Mrs. Washburn," Marlene said. "I'm taking your brother's case pro bono."

"Who?"

"It means I'm working for free."

The woman's eyes narrowed. "Why'd you want to do that?"

"Because Rose Heeney was a friend of mine. Lizzie played with my kids. I have two boys her age. Someone killed them and I want them to pay for it, and the first thing we need to do to make that happen is getting your brother free of the false charge that he killed them."

Betty Washburn flicked her eyes rapidly between Marlene and Emmett, and Marlene could see how difficult it was for her to accept anything a stranger said at face value. Finally, her features relaxed a trifle, as did her grip on the ball bat. "Well, you all better come on in, then."

The house was cooler than the yard, but musty. The ceilings were low and made of pressboard. Everything in the house was old and worn. It was clean, though, the furniture and floors rubbed down past the finish so that their substance was slightly ground away. They sat in the kitchen around a wooden table covered by sticky lace-pattern plastic. Betty Washburn served them thin, oversweet iced tea in jelly glasses. Marlene explained that before she could do anything for Mose, she had to be named formally as his attorney. She asked whether Betty was his official guardian.

"No'm. He don't need no guardian. Mose, he kept to hisself and never hurt nor bothered no one. He got his playthings and his animals. He's real gentle with my kids. Sometimes he takes him long walks in the woods. Tell you the truth, I'm more scared of what other folks might do to him than what he might do."

"I understand. Tell me, has Mose ever been examined by a psychologist?"'

"Yeah, way back, when Maw first noticed he wasn't right. We took him upstate to this school? You know, for slows. They said he wasn't going to ever get much more'n five years old."

"Do you have any papers relating to that?"

"There was some in a box. I took it in when Maw passed. I guess they's somewheres around."

A search was organized, a dusty cardboard box appeared, and after rummaging, Marlene came up with a brown envelope containing a paper with several paragraphs of psychological bureaucratese pertaining to Moses Welch's mental abilities. She stuck it in her bag.

"Okay, the next thing is, we'll have to go down to the jail and get him to sign a paper. Have you talked with his lawyer at all?"

Mrs. Washburn sniffed. "Him? Ernie Poole ain't no more use'n tits on a boar hog."

"So I hear. Maybe I can persuade him to be more useful. Anyway, we need to go see your brother."

"What, now?"

"Unless you like having him sit in jail."

Mrs. Washburn seemed to think about that for a slow minute. Then she said, "Well, let's go do it."

She rose up, she grabbed a white patent leather handbag, and strode out of the kitchen. They followed her into the house's main room. In it were a sagging couch covered by a tan chenille bedspread, a green La-Z-Boy, a couple of rickety tables, a standard lamp with a paper shade, a wooden chest covered by a plastic doily, and a shining thirty-two-inch color television set. Two little girls were sitting on the couch watching cartoon people fight each other. They were dressed in worn tops and shorts, and each had her blond hair in a bowl cut, which Marlene was sure had been done in the kitchen with an actual bowl. Mrs. Washburn barked, "Girls, get on your shoes. We're goin' to town to see Uncle Mose."

The elder of the two said, "Do we hafta, Maw?"

"Don't pert off, child. Do as you're told."

In short order they had a convoy of two started, Mrs. Washburn following in the red pickup.

"The Welches are good folks," said Emmett over the roar. "They just have a lot of troubles."

"Are they very poor?"

"No, really about average for Robbens County, I guess. Burt-that's the husband-he's got a mechanic's job at the mine. They got a sick kid, and Burt was laid up most of last year."

"Anyway they've got satellite TV," Marlene observed.

"Oh, yeah. Folks around here'll live on lard and flour to pay their satellite bills, thems as don't outright pirate the signal. My dad used to say that satellite destroyed the working class worse than the mine owners did. Sports and porno for the boys, soap opera for the ladies, and cartoons for the younguns. There wasn't any TV at all up here, and hardly any radio, before the dishes came in. The hollers had their own way of life. Now they're getting just like everyone else."

"Is that bad?"

"It is if they become dogs and don't mind feeding off whatever scraps the big boys toss at them. My dad reminded them of what they used to be, fighting men, union men, and all that. Now… hell, I don't know what's gonna happen to them."

Marlene did not know either. She was from a union family herself, but had never been particularly interested in working-class politics, beyond the usual guilt at worldly success and a tendency to vote the straight Democratic ticket. Lefty posturing had bored her in college, especially as pitched by the upper-middle-class kids who typically espoused it. A vague social responsibility stirred in her breast; she suppressed it. She said, "Well, let's see what we can do about getting this guy out of the can and the investigation started up again."

The jail was in the basement of a two-floor, brown-brick structure adjacent to the handsome courthouse. Marlene and Mrs. Washburn went in, while Emmett took the Washburn girls for an ice cream. The deputy in charge was a scrawny man in a tan uniform and clear-framed glasses, with thinning hair combed across his scalp. He was not pleased to be taken away from his television set. He nodded to Mrs. Washburn and stared at Marlene. "Only family allowed to visit," he warned.

"I am family," said Marlene. "I'm Cousin Marlene. From Ashtabula?" The stare increased, became incredulous; Marlene met it with her own more powerful one. The man grumpily relented and led them down a sewer-smelling iron staircase to the basement.

The jail had four cells. Moses Welch was in the only occupied one. He was a large man, fleshy like his sister, with the sweet, confused expression of the dim in his pale eyes. His hair was startlingly blond, almost white, and hung lanky over his ears.

"Hey, Betty," he cried when they appeared. "Hey, Betty, did you bring ice cream?"

Marlene was surprised and touched by the way brother and sister hugged. Betty sat on the bunk next to him and brushed the hair back from his forehead. "We'll see about ice cream later, honey. I want you to say hello to Marlene here. Marlene says she's gonna get you out of this jail. "

Marlene said, "Hello, Mose."

"I saw a mouse, Marlene. It was just there."

"That's nice," said Marlene. "Mose, tell me: Do you know why you're in here?"

"Yes'm. On account of I kilt those folks."

"Yes, but you really didn't kill them, did you?"

"Sheriff says I did. On account of those boots."

"Yes, but you didn't really."

"Those boots is too tight anyways. They was real new so I thought they would fit me. I never had no real new boots."

"Uh-huh. But you found those boots, right?"

"Yes'm. 'Neath the green bridge where they's frogs and all."

Mrs. Washburn said, "He means the bridge on 130 over the Guyandotte. He's always playing down there."

"Right. You found the boots, but you didn't kill anyone," said Marlene. "That's what you have to say from now on."

"Will I get in trouble?" the man asked, worry appearing in his mild eyes.

"No, you won't, because I'm going to be your lawyer now. Do you know what a lawyer is?"

A confused shake of his head.

"A lawyer is for when you get in big trouble. She tells the sheriff you didn't really do it. Do you want me to be your lawyer?"

The man looked at his sister, who nodded. He nodded, too.

"Okay, great!" Marlene took a paper out of her bag. "Can you write your name?"

"Yes'm. Betty learned me how."

"Good. Then I want you to write it on this line here." Marlene gave him a felt-tip and he did so, slowly, his tongue protruding in concentration.

"Can I have my ice cream now?" he asked brightly.

Marlene watched Mrs. Washburn drive off with her two chocolatesmeared kids. "Emmett, where's this Poole hang out?"

He pointed across the square. "That's his office there. Unless he's drinking at the VFW."

"I might be a while, then."

"I'll be here. Take your time."

She took her dog and entered the building, a three-story brick structure with a lunchroom on the ground floor. The directory inside the door displayed the names of the tenants, mainly lawyers and bail bondsmen, court reporters, and a couple of real estate firms. Ernest J. Poole occupied 3-E. She climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. Nothing. She pounded. Silence. The door was unlocked. Inside she found an anteroom with a secretary's desk and a shrouded typewriter, both covered with dust. A philodendron had died in a pot in the corner. She saw a frosted-glass door with the lawyer's name on it in gold letters, tapped on it, and called out, "Mr. Poole?"

She heard an indistinct human noise that she accepted as an invitation and entered. The lights were out, the venetian blinds shut. The smell was of unwashed clothes, sour-mash bourbon, and the underlying ketone stink of a drunk. The drunk was lying sprawled on a brown leather couch, drunk. Marlene nudged him. No response, except a groan and an effort to bury his face in the corner of the couch. She found the light switch, flipped it on, made a tour. The desk, a heavy mahogany structure, was covered with a scant drift of papers and unopened junk mail, a large, butt-choked ashtray, a half-empty fifth of low-end bourbon, crumpled take-out food bags, filthy paper plates and cups. These also stuffed to overflowing the nearby wastebasket. Black flies buzzed heavily through the fetid air. One wall held diplomas (UWV and Vanderbilt law school) and the sort of award plaques small-town lawyers accumulate, together with group photographs of the occupant with local notables. The newest looked about twelve years old. In the photographs, Poole was in his forties sporting a sharp Chamber of Commerce optimistic look. He wore his thick, dark hair fashionably long. A square jaw with a dimple in the chin, a broad forehead, a manly nose, and a wide mouth completed a face that might once not have been out of place on a campaign poster. Marlene yanked up the blinds. A whimper sounded from the couch. She found a coffeemaker, filled the pot with cold water from a cooler, and poured it over Ernest J. Poole's head.

He sat up, sputtering. The candidate's face, she saw, had been considerably eroded by the bad living, the features softened and gullied, the skin coarsened. The head of hair was, however, still intact, although not as neatly barbered as it had been in the photos.

"Wha… wha… who… who the hell are you? Goddamnit, I'm all wet."

"My name is Marlene Ciampi, Mr. Poole. I'm Moses Welch's new lawyer."

"Whose what?"

"Moses Welch. He's been indicted for murdering the Heeney family. You're his court-appointed attorney. Now you're my local co-counsel." She held out the paper the defendant had signed for him to read. He glanced at it without interest; all of that was reserved for the bottle on the desk. He rose, wobbled, stepped, reached for it. She was quicker.

"Give me that! That's mine," he snarled. He made to grab it from her, but was arrested by a noise like a cold engine cranking. Gog bounded between man and mistress and exhibited his famous smile of destruction. Poole shied away and fell back on the couch.

"Get that animal away from me!" he demanded weakly. "If it touches me, I'll sue."

"If he touches you, you won't be in any condition to sue." Wiggling the bottle before his eyes, she said, "I know you need a drink, but you can't have one now. You need to do some work first. I'm going to make you a pot of strong black coffee, which you will consume until you are as sober as you ever get. Then we will have a professional conversation about our client and decide what to do next."

He gaped at her and wiped at his reddened eyes. "Who the hell are you?"

"I told you. I'm Marlene Ciampi, I'm Moses Welch's-"

"Yeah, I got that. What're you doing in McCullensburg?"

"I was a friend of Rose Heeney." Marlene put the coffee on. "Her sons engaged me to get Moses Welch out of this stupid situation and get the police back onto looking for the real killers."

"That's your plan, is it?" he asked, his voice tired and hollow. He rubbed his face vigorously with both hands. "You don't know much about Robbens County, that's for sure."

"No, I don't. That's another reason I need your help."

He snorted a sort of laugh. "Well, if you need my help, lady, you're in a sorry state. I tell you what I will do though. If you put a shot in my coffee, I will enlighten you as to how things are done around here. After which, you will kindly get the hell out of my office."

Marlene had nothing to say to this. She poured out a mug of coffee, added a splash of the bourbon. His eyes were fixed on the bottle's lip. With body English he urged a more generous pour, but was passive when he saw it would be minimal. He drank and talked. She sat on the edge of his desk and listened.

"Well, let's start with Moses Welch. Moses Welch is an idiot. He should have been put away a long time ago, but the Welches, of course, wouldn't hear of it. It's only a matter of time before he walks in front of a train or a coal truck or decides to grab some little girl and play doctor. He came to town in shoes soaked in the Heeneys' blood. He was duly arrested. At the arraignment, I pleaded him non compos, which he is. That plea was rejected by Judge Murdoch, and Mose was deemed fit to aid in his own defense."

"That's nonsense."

"I know. Don't interrupt. I have petitioned the court for a psychiatric examination, which will demonstrate that Moses Welch is, in fact, incapable of telling right from wrong. After he's convicted, he'll be remanded to the state institution at Morgantown indefinitely, which is probably the best place for him, all told. I want some aspirin."

This was found, a bottle of two hundred in a desk drawer. He downed four with the coffee. "There. That's the sad story of Moses Welch. Case closed. Now, please go away and leave me alone."

"But he didn't do it."

"He confessed to it."

"Yes, and you were probably right there with the ice cream. Oh, hell, just look at the poor sap! He wouldn't hurt a fly. Besides, the Heeneys were killed by at least two men."

"How do you know that?" Poole's hands shook when he said it, slopping the coffee.

"Because the Heeney boys figured it out. Lizzie was killed with a pistol shot to the head. Do you actually believe that our retard walked into the Heeney home, outshot an armed man, killed him and his wife, and then calmly pranced into a little girl's bedroom and shot her while she was still sleeping peacefully? Have you ever heard a twelve-gauge go off in a confined space?"

"He could've shot her first."

"Oh, please! And then put away his pistol, grabbed his shotgun, and dispatched the Heeneys? With Red Heeney alerted and a.38 in his fist? Who're we talking about here, John Wesley Hardin? Whose side are you on anyway?"

"You don't understand."

"Okay, enlighten me. Explain why you're selling out your client."

"I'm not selling out my client. I'm doing what I have to do to keep more people from being hurt. Look, miss, whatever your…"

"Marlene."

"Marlene. Let me ask you this-what do you think is going to happen when you mount your spirited defense of Moses Welch's innocence? You think everyone in town's going to say, oh, jeez, we made a mistake, thank you so much? Do you think the sheriff is actually going to look for someone else? They will not, and he will not. What they will do is look for the source of the upsetting reversal of a very nice arrangement. They will find it in you, and in me, and in the Heeney boys, who called in a fancy out-of-town lady lawyer. And they will expunge the persons responsible."

"Who is this they? "

"The they who run our little town. They didn't like Red Heeney unsettling things, with the results you know. It will be the same with you and me and the Heeney boys. What I'm trying to say is, you can't bring Rose back. Do you really want to be responsible for wiping out the rest of her family? Can I have a little more?" He held out his cup like a beggar, eyeing the bottle.

"No. Are you talking about Weames and the union?"

"Oh, he's part of it."

"And what's the whole thing look like?"

He laughed, a short pair of dry syllables, like a curse. "Have you got a year? A decade? I don't. I'm tired, lady. Why don't you go off and do good in some other nice county? Oh, my head!"

He lay back on the couch and groaned.

"Where's your file on Welch?"

He gestured vaguely at an oak filing cabinet. She rummaged. The file was thin, consisting only of the indictment, the arrest record, the three autopsy reports, a copy of the letter requesting a psych consult, and some technical data from the state lab regarding the blood on the defendant's boots. Or alleged boots. She noted where the report said they were a size nine, a small man's size. Mose was a moose; he'd said they were too tight.

"Didn't you file any motions to dismiss or to suppress?"

Poole groaned. "Dear lady, you're thinking like a lawyer. There's no law in Robbens County."

"We'll see about that." Marlene searched Poole's law library, found a form book and a criminal procedure volume. She had not typed mechanically for some years, and it was tedious doing it with two fingers truncated, but she soon had the standard motions completed. She brought these over to Poole; included were her "Notice of Appearance" form, which let the court and all interested parties know that she was now representing Welch, and the substitution of lead attorney declaration.

"Sign these," she ordered.

"You're crazy."

"I've been told. Sign!"

He signed. She took the papers and said, "Get cleaned up. I expect you to be respectable and sober in court first thing tomorrow. They do have court here, don't they? Or do they just meet in a cellar and decide who lives and who dies?"

"Both."

She left Poole's office and walked across the square, attracting some attention. People came out of shops to look and traffic slowed. She noticed this and remarked to the dog, "They probably don't see many Manolo Blahniks in this town. Maybe I should have gone with something less stylish." The dog said, they tremble at my size and ferocious aspect. "I was joking," she said. "Stay, and don't bite anyone." The courthouse proved to contain, as in many small-county towns, the entire county government and was busy without seeming hectic. Finding the court clerk's office, she handed her documents in to an angular, middleaged woman with thick, harlequin-framed glasses on a chain and a head of peculiar, tiny champagne curls. This person looked at the documents, studied them in fact, while also studying Marlene out of the corner of her eye. Marlene took her receipt and left, but noted without surprise that the clerk was on the phone before the glass door had swung shut.

Emmett was sitting in the Jimmy in the same place. "How'd it go?" he asked.

"Like clockwork. Let's go home. I need to make some calls."

The first one was to her husband. She described her day, to which he replied, "He actually said, 'There's no law in Robbens County'?"

"Words to that effect."

"So I reckon you're gonna have to tame that town with your blazing six-gun, clean up the bad guys, and save the farmers."

"Oh, stuff it! And it's miners in any case, and I'm not going to clean up anything. I just want to get this poor schmuck out of jail and get the cops to do their job. That might be a problem, if Poole is right about the state of local justice. He seemed like he still has enough brain cells left to convey actual facts. We shall see. What's happening in the real world?"

"You didn't hear? Probably the stagecoach with the paper didn't get there yet."

"Hey, half the people around here are watching CNN on satellite as we speak. What happened?"

"Oh, some hyped Latino kid tried to stick up a grocery over in Alphabet City with a cheap.22. The guy who ran it was one of our fine recent immigrants from East Asia. When he understood what the kid was doing, he hauls out this native blade and goes for him. The kid shoots him, the guy takes the bullet and keeps chopping. End of story? Our storekeeper cuts the kid's head off and places it in his window. The body gets tossed in the Dumpster. Apparently that's what they do in the colorful markets of his native land. It discourages thievery, he says."

"I bet it does. He speaks English?"

"He barely speaks Chinese. No, we had to get a guy down from Columbia to translate. Where is my daughter when I need her? Anyway, he's a Karen, apparently, from Burma or Myanmar or whatever the hell they're calling it today. Totally illegal, of course, and we don't have relations with his country of origin. I love this town."

"Is self-defensive decapitation an offense?"

"Not as such. Probably get him on failure to properly dispose of a corpse, a D-class misdemeanor, and failure to report a crime. I'd love to bring that one into the criminal courts with the litterers and fare jumpers. Meanwhile the Latino community is up in arms and the Asians want to give him a medal. The poor little shit!"

"Who, the kid or the Karen?"

"Both. Once again we are reminded that the law is a cultural construct."

"Which also reminds me: Do you know anyone at the Department of Labor?"

"Not really. Why?"

"Because if this place is as corrupt as Poole says it is, we may need some federal muscle. Isn't killing a union leader a federal case?"

"It might be," said Karp after a moment's consideration. "I know someone who would know for sure, though."

"Who? Oh, right, your guy Sterner."

"Uh-huh. Saul would be the one to call. Strangely enough, I have a message slip from him right here. I was just about to call him when you called."

"Well, see what he has to say and let me know. If I can pass this stinker off to someone real, I'll be a happy Girl Scout."