Small Town

five

John Blair Creighton looked at his attorney, standing there with his thumbs hooked under his suspenders and his stomach pushing forcefully against his shirtfront, and decided the man looked like Clarence Darrow — or, more accurately, like the actor playing Darrow in Inherit the Wind. Well, he thought, if the man had to imitate someone, he could do worse. Darrow, as he recalled, generally won.

“Your Honor,” Winters was saying. “Your Honor, you can see how little regard Ms. Fabrizzio has for her own case. Her office is trying to imprison my client before trial because they realize it’s the only chance they’ll get.”

“Ah, Mr. Winters,” the judge said. “I suppose you feel the best way to demonstrate confidence in the prosecution’s case would be to release your client on his own recognizance.”

“That’s exactly what they should do,” Winters said, “if only out of good sportsmanship and a love of the arts. Mr. Creighton is a writer, Your Honor, and a respected one with a good critical reputation and an international readership. Unfortunately, our society doesn’t always reward an artist commensurate with his talent, and—”

The assistant DA, a deceptively soft-faced blonde, sighed theatrically. “Mr. Winters’s client is charged with strangling a woman, not splitting an infinitive. His talent or lack thereof—”

“His talent is unquestioned, Your Honor.”

“He’s charged with a capital offense,” the judge pointed out. “High bail is hardly unusual in such circumstances.”

“Excessive bail is punishment in advance, Your Honor. Mr. Creighton has no criminal record whatsoever, and his roots in the community make it clear he’s no flight risk.”

Fabrizzio said, “Roots in the community? The man doesn’t have a job, he doesn’t own property, he’s unmarried, he lives alone...”

“He has children whom he sees regularly,” Winters countered. “He’s on the faculty of an important local university. Furthermore, Ms. Fabrizzio might want to note the distinction between unemployment and self-employment, should she one day leave the comforting embrace of the district attorney’s office. Your Honor, jobs come and go, as do relationships, but my client has something more, something nobody would walk away from. The man is the statutory tenant of a rent-controlled apartment on one of the best blocks in the West Village. Does Ms. Fabrizzio honestly think...”

Laughter drowned out the rest of the sentence, and the judge let it build for a moment before he used his gavel. “A rent-controlled apartment,” he said. “All right, Mr. Winters. Your point is taken. If your client can come up with fifty thousand dollars, he can go back and stare at his bargain-priced walls.”

And he was staring at them now. He didn’t know what else to do.

It beat staring at the walls of a cell. That’s where they’d put him when they arrested him, and that’s where they stowed him again after the arraignment, after Winters had done such a skillful job of getting his bail reduced to a tenth of what the prosecution had been demanding. The lawyer had been beaming in triumph, but bail might as well have been five million dollars as far as he was concerned, or five hundred million, because $50,000 was four times what he’d had in the bank, checking and savings accounts combined, the day his callers turned out to be cops instead of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Of course you didn’t have to come up with the whole amount, you could make use of a bail bondsman, but you had to have some cash, and he’d already written out a check for ten grand to Maury Winters as a retainer, and had rushed to move money from savings to checking to cover it. Because it wouldn’t do to bounce a check to your attorney, would it?

Winters had wanted to know whom he could call to post bond, and he’d been unable to come up with a name. His publishers? Jesus, it had been hard enough to get the cheap bastards to spring for airfare and pocket money for that book-and-author luncheon in Kansas City. Posting bail for a writer with dwindling sales seemed out of the question.

His agent? Roz was a pit bull in negotiations, a mother hen when the words wouldn’t come, but she wasn’t rolling in cash herself. She’d set up shop three years ago, when they’d cut her loose after a merger. Until then she’d been his editor — they let him go, too — and it had seemed sensible enough to go with her, and his former agents didn’t break down and weep when he told them he was leaving. Roz had made some sales for him since then, and she always returned his calls, but he didn’t know that her fifteen percent commission bought him a Get Out of Jail Free card.

His friends? You made a list, Winters had told him, and you worked your way down it and made the calls, and you got a few dollars here and a few dollars there, and yes, it was marginally humiliating, but so was Rikers Island, and, you should pardon the expression, making a few phone calls wouldn’t get you fucked in the ass.

Except it might, he thought. Metaphorically, anyway.

He’d begun making the list, but before he could finish it or start calling any of the names on it, he was out of jail. His ex-wife, the once and once again Karin Frechette (Karin Frechette-Creighton-Frechette, he’d called her, when she’d informed him she had decided to return to her maiden name), had put up her equity in the Montclair house as surety for his bond.

“Well, of course,” she’d said, when he called to thank her. “How could I leave you in a jail cell?”

The conversation was a difficult one. He’d asked about the kids, whom he didn’t see as often as his lawyer had suggested, and she said she didn’t think they really knew what was going on. “But I suppose they will,” she said, “before this is over. I just wish it would get cleared up in a hurry.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“Listen,” she said toward the end, “you’re not going to catch a plane to Brazil or anything, are you?”

“Brazil?”

“I mean, you won’t skip bail, will you? Because I’d hate it if they took the house away from me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he told her.

He went to the refrigerator, found a stray bottle of Beck’s hiding behind a carton of orange juice. The juice was clearly past it and he poured it down the sink, then uncapped the beer and drank deeply from the bottle.

Brazil, for the love of God.

What she hadn’t asked — what no one had asked, aside from the two cops, Slaughter and Reade — was whether or not he had done it.

The phone rang, and he had to stop himself from reaching for it, waited dutifully while the machine picked up. “Blair? Hey, guy, been trying to reach you. Could you pick up?”

The manner was that of a close friend, a buddy, but the voice was not one he recognized, and the people he was that close to mostly called him John. He waited, and the fellow left a number and an extension. And, not too surprisingly, no name.

On a hunch he rang the number but didn’t punch in the three-digit extension, waiting until an operator came on the line and said, “New York Post, will you hold please?” He replaced the receiver and drank the rest of his beer.

All in all, he preferred the straightforward approach. “Mr. Creighton, my name’s Alison Mowbray, with the Daily News. I’d love to give you a chance to get your side of the story in front of the public.”

His side of the story.

“They’ll try to persuade you that it’s dangerous to get all the pretrial publicity flowing in the prosecution’s direction,” Maury Winters had told him, “and there’s some truth in that, but we have to pick the time and the place, and most important the person we talk to. It’s way too early, you haven’t even been indicted yet.”

He’d be indicted?

“You think you’re less than a ham sandwich?” And, when he’d just stared in response, the lawyer had explained that one judge had said famously that any good DA could get a ham sandwich indicted. “A grand jury does pretty much what a prosecutor asks it to do, John. You ever been on a grand jury? You’re stuck there every day for a month. After a week or so you’re mean enough to indict a blind man for peeping in windows. You’ll be indicted, and the sooner the better.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because, my friend, I’m happy to say I don’t think much of their case. Usual procedure, I’m out there asking for postponements, looking to delay the start of the trial as long as possible. You know why? Because time’s a great fixer. Witnesses disappear, they change their testimony, sometimes they’re even considerate enough to drop dead. Evidence gets tainted and can’t be introduced, or, even better, it gets lost. They lock it away somewhere and forget where they put it. Don’t laugh, sonny boy, it happens more often than you’d think possible. I stall, and I’m a hell of a staller when I want to be, and some innocent little ADA like Fabrizzio, who’s got a cute little ass on her, I don’t know if you happened to notice, stands there with her mouth open and watches her whole case fall apart. My client’s guilty and everybody knows it including his own mother and they have to give him a walk.”

“But because I’m innocent...”

“Guilt, innocence, who ever said that’s got anything to do with it? A case is strong or it’s weak, and that’s what we’re dealing with here, not does she or doesn’t she. Their case is weak as midwestern coffee, my friend. You ever been to the Midwest? You ever had coffee there? Then you know what I’m talking about. They got a roomful of drunks who saw you leave a bar with the dead girl. Not that she was dead at the time, but she got that way before too long, though exactly how long’s a matter of opinion. They got evidence’ll place you in her apartment, though how strong and solid it is remains to be seen.”

“I already admitted I was in the apartment.”

“Who says the jury’s gonna get to hear that? Never mind, beside the point. You got a whole apartment full of evidence, all of which gets cleaned and scrubbed by this darling little faygeleh who couldn’t have done better by us if we were the ones paying him. He sweeps, he dusts, he wipes, he mops, he vacuums — I tell my wife, all she wants to know is has he got two afternoons a week open. He’s a jewel, this kid. Time he trips over the dead girl, he’s got half the evidence stuffed in the garbage cans along with everybody else’s in the building, so how can you tell whose is whose, and the rest of it’s down the drain, and so’s their case. You sure he’s not your cousin?”

Winters hadn’t waited for an answer. “Constitution says you’re entitled to a speedy trial,” he said, “and for a change that’s what we want. Their mistake was arresting you as early as they did. Granted, there’s pressure, a professional woman murdered in her own bed in a decent neighborhood. High-profile case, so you got all these newspaper readers thinking that could be me, that could be my daughter, that could be my sister, so why don’t the cops get off their asses and do something? Case like that you want to be able to announce an arrest, and, my opinion, they jumped the gun. Now they got to indict you, and once they indict you they got to give you your speedy trial, and once that’s over, my friend, you can forget the whole thing ever happened.”

“Just like that?”

“Better yet, write about it. Don’t forget, I want an autographed copy.”

And if they were to drop the charges?

“They got that option, drop ’em and reinstate ’em later on. But they hate to do that because it makes them look like morons, tells the world they can’t make a case. And later on that’s what everybody remembers. Hey, didn’t they drop this case once already? What’s the matter, they can’t find the guy who did it so they’re picking on this poor zhlub again?”

Meanwhile, he was the poor zhlub. And what was he supposed to do with himself?

His apartment — his legendary rent-controlled apartment, that even the judge had to agree he’d be crazy to jeopardize — was a good deal larger and more comfortable than a jail cell. Quieter, too. It was funny, but none of the books he’d read over the years, none of the TV shows, none of the prison movies, had suggested how fiercely noisy the place could be. But his apartment, on a lazy weekday afternoon, was as quiet as a grave.

They’d buried her, of course. Or did whatever they did, whoever they were. She must have had family, and they’d buried her or had her cremated, whatever they decided, whoever they were.

Or did they hold the body of a murder victim for a certain amount of time? He’d watched countless episodes of Law & Order, you’d think he’d have learned something about forensic procedures by now.

Then again, what did it matter?

Marilyn Fairchild.

He tried to remember what she looked like, but his own memory had been supplanted by the picture they’d run over and over in the papers and on television, a photo that must have been taken four or five years earlier. She’d had long hair then, and when he pictured her now that’s what he saw, long hair, and he had to remind himself that the woman he’d gone home with had had short hair.

He remembered her voice, pitched low, with an edge to it. The voice had been part of the initial attraction, it had seemed to promise something, though he was unsure just what. A low voice was supposed to be sexy, and he had to wonder why. Was it some kind of latent gay thing? But her voice was neither mannish nor boyish. There was just something about it that managed to suggest he’d find the owner engaging.

Yeah, right.

His other images of her were more fragmentary, rendered so by the drinks he’d had before and after their time together. He remembered the look on her face when she paused on her way to the kitchen and glanced over her shoulder at him. He’d been turning the pages of a magazine, more a brochure, her office’s portfolio of co-ops and condos for sale, and something made him look up, and she was looking at him. There’d been something enigmatic in her expression, something that even now kept the image in his memory, but before he could work it out she’d turned again, and when she came back with the bottle and glasses whatever it had been was gone.

He raised the beer bottle to his lips, remembered he’d finished it. There was booze in the house, unless the cops had gotten into it while they went through his things. They’d had a warrant, and they’d come back and searched the place after they took him to Central Booking, and predictably enough they’d left the place a mess. He wasn’t what you’d call compulsively neat, and Karin had once accused him of being the third Collyer brother, but the clutter he lived with was his own, and it had taken him a while to restore some semblance of order (or manageable disorder) to the scene.

He checked, and the liquor was apparently untouched, and he left it that way and lit another cigarette instead. Drinking alone, he decided, was probably not the best idea in the world.

So what was he supposed to do? Drop by the Kettle?

He was free, he could go anywhere and do anything, but how free was he? Where could he go, when you came right down to it? What could he do?

Yesterday he’d forced himself to go out for a walk. Picked up a carton of Camels, bought coffee at Starbucks. They gave you a free cup of coffee when you bought a pound, and he’d sat at a window table and watched the people pass. He felt throughout as though he was being watched in turn, but the tables near his were unoccupied, the baristas too busy or too self-involved to notice him.

He’d finished the coffee and left, unable to shake the feeling that people were staring at him, recognizing him. Later, when he was hungry enough for dinner, he’d been unable to bring himself to leave the apartment. He wound up ordering Chinese food, and the kid from Sung Chu Mei was concerned only with getting paid and stuffing menus under the doors of the building’s other tenants. He clearly had no idea he had just brought an order of beef with orange flavor to a man who’d been charged with murder.

And now it was a gorgeous day, New York at its best, and the thought of leaving his apartment was entirely without appeal. No, wrong, it was hugely appealing, but the appeal was more than offset by a reluctance to subject himself to the real or imagined stares of his fellow citizens.

Maybe he’d just stay put. For today, or maybe not just for today. That was one thing about New York — barring eviction, you never had to leave your apartment. You could stay inside 24/7, and, as long as the phone and the doorbell worked, you could arrange to provide yourself with everything you needed. Because everybody delivered — the deli, the liquor store, and all the restaurants, even the fancy ones.

He had plenty to read, a whole wall full of books. He wouldn’t run out, not with two dozen Russian novels sitting there, the complete works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, all bought during a spell of manic optimism and untouched since the day he’d put them on the shelves. And there were other books, ones he might actually want to read. (Although who was to say that now wasn’t the time to get through Crime and Punishment?)

And every week the mailman would bring him fresh copies of New York and The New Yorker. Of course he’d have to go downstairs for the mail, the guy wouldn’t bring it to his door, but he could wait until four in the morning, say, and slip silently out his door and down the stairs, returning with the mail before a neighbor could catch a glimpse of him.

The crazy part was that he could imagine himself sinking into that sort of existence. He didn’t really believe it was likely, but his imagination was more than equal to the task of conjuring up a life of deliberate agoraphobia. A recluse, eyes darting around suspiciously at the slightest sound, hair uncut and beard unshaven, wearing the same clothes until they fell apart. (But was that necessary? Gap and Lands’ End would clothe him if he called their 800 numbers, and damn near everything was available online. Dry cleaners would pick up and deliver. And no doubt there were barbers who’d make house calls, if the money was right.)

He shook his head, trying to shake off the life he was envisioning for himself. He decided the silence wasn’t helping, and looked for a record to play. But no, the last thing he needed was to be forced to make choices. He put on the radio, found the jazz station, and listened to something he didn’t recognize. There was a trumpet player, and he was trying to decide if it was Clifford Brown.

His mind wandered, and he was thinking of something else when the announcer ran down the personnel on the cut she’d just played. He realized as much after the fact, and thought of calling the station. He could do that, and she would never realize she was talking to an accused murderer. Unless she had caller ID, but even then—

Oh, really, did he honestly give a rat’s ass who’d been playing the trumpet?

He was in jail, he realized. He was home, but he was in jail, and nobody could come along and bail him out of it.