Idling in a southside parking lot, watching students arrive for school. Show-muscled jocks and dye-job Goths pile out of fastbacks, awkward and invincible with youth. The children mass in self-selecting packs that range over the asphalt for class.
Dean’s wristwatch reads 9:01 but it’s wrong, he forgot to fall back. He has an appointment with the Southeast High custodian of records to review Billy Grimes’s transcripts. Dean visits several times a semester on other official business and could probably walk in unannounced. Best, though, not to squander Marla’s good temper. Dean spins the watch crown around and time unwinds. A few seconds ago he was running late; now there’s an extra hour to kill.
He cruises south Oklahoma City in the primer-paneled Oldsmobile Delta 88 that once and future clients call a hoopty. The gunmetal streets are glutted with unexpected light.
When he first moved to the city Dean lived four years in a cracker-box shack just beyond the school’s catchment area. The deadhead pursuits of the old stomping grounds have yet to present, but it’s early. Flatfooted maids are already following top-heavy housekeeping carts from one flophouse room to the next, restoring order. The wastoids will start crawling out of the woodwork soon enough, huffing gas in back alleys, queuing up before riot-gated liquor store doors. Then Oklahoma City’s finest will badge up, ready to serve and protect, and the whole batshit game of crazy will pick up right where everyone left off last night.
Dean’s seen enough evidence to know their client is likely guilty. He hasn’t pushed Billy too hard, hasn’t let Willa tell him too much about the night of Carl Jefferson’s murder. Macy’s got the burden of proof, the reasoning goes, so let’s let sleeping dogs lie a little while longer.
If Dean is right, too much truth too soon could put Wolfman in a tight spot.
Most murderers aren’t so different from the rest of us. Quick to laugh, maybe, or tell a good joke. But Grimes is one of these chip-on-the-shoulder violent types. Hypersensitive. He likes teasing Dean. Likes bragging right up against the edge of confession. Sympathy for this poor devil will be a hard sell. What jury is going to buy the line that this big Indian—the one who tortured Carl Jefferson for forty dollars worth of crank, the one who thought it might be a good idea to have his five-year-old son watch as he drowned Carl in a litterbox swamped with Wild Turkey and cat droppings—that this dumb chug shouldn’t die on a gurney?
Dean drives back to Southeast High, parks his beater in the visitors’ lot and steps smiling into the records room. The wall clock points straight at nine. Right on time.
“Marla, it’s like you’re aging backwards,” Dean says. “You get prettier every week.”
Marla’s wise to his Eddie Haskell act, but Dean doesn’t care. He has learned to appreciate the emotional economies governed by the golden rule. There is a cheesy teambuilding poster hanging in his office downtown which outlines, in seven sentences, everything a man need know about human relations. It boils to two words: Be nice.
He hands over the standard packet of release forms and follows Marla down to the basement-level file vault. New coat of color on the walls but the carpet hasn’t changed. Marla leaves him with the fresh paint fumes, acrylicized air burning at his throat. Dean sifts through stacks of cardboard boxes looking for report cards, hall passes, detention slips, attendance records—anything he can find on Grimes.
He is trying to wrap his mind around the chronology of a life gone horribly off-rail. If Billy had his bell rung in football practice, Dean needs to know. What’s this two-week absence in April of his sophomore year? Did the kid have a part-time job? Clock in five minutes late? Break a bone? Get busted for fighting? Ever come down with lice? Mono? Shingles? Was he bullied in grade school? Teased for bad body odor?
He used to get a kind of shot in the arm from this job. Some wrong thing was getting set right. Or so he told himself. But not all things want righting. These kids come stumbling through lockup like the undead. Numbed-out, imprisoned in the present tense, they break bad with adrenal spurts of violence and jinx all the tomorrows to follow.
Bad juju, Wolfman calls it.
Then somebody gets his ticket punched and everyone goes grasping at the past for answers.
There are references in the paper trail to separate medical records administered by the school nurse. He asks Marla if he can see these, please. She could demand an additional privacy release but it hardly ever hurts to ask. People don’t know what they don’t know, which is a lot, and the net effect of these unknowns is that Dean has room in which to work.
Marla marches into the nurse’s office and returns with Grimes’s file. Dean remembers to thank her. He scribbles names on columned foolscap for future follow-up: Authority Figures, Friends, Family, Other. Everything is photocopied twice, filed inside a bulky accordion-file box labeled: Grimes, William (Billy, Male)—DISCOVERY.
“The Public Defender’s office really appreciates your help, Marla.”
The next-to-last maxim on that teambuilding poster over his desk reads: “The least helpful word to know in any language is: ‘I.’”
Dean smiles and waves goodbye and says, “We’ll see you soon.”