Opal and Aura Jefferson have stopped returning his calls. It’s time the kid gloves came off. So they’re making a shoe-leather trip to Langston, on through Stillwater, Dean poring through the Grimes file while Dragnet drives. Hoping to scare up statements in assist of Billy’s defense.
After the Guthrie turnoff Dragnet quiets the car stereo and says, “How’d you get into this, Tonto?”
Dean has been thumbing through birth certificates and hospital records, affidavits and school transcripts, job applications and time sheets. Eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence dredged from the misbegotten world. And the thought dogging him, as he rifles through Billy’s life, is that fate has a certain dumb momentum to it. That we are simply vectors of raw power and possibility, hurtling along the edges of a few numbered days. Always in danger of crashing headlong into some opposing force and getting bounced out into the void.
“You know these kids we defend,” Dean finally answers, “sometimes it’s like watching one of those nature shows on PBS. Every one of them born into fucked-up families. I mean. Every. Single. One. Parents high or gone missing. Neglectful. Or feral. Like those bears that eat their young. And our clients with their spindly little legs and big doe eyes, trying to keep up with the herd. Let’s bet on who gets to the end of the episode without getting eaten for lunch.”
Dragnet clucks his tongue. “That’s some kind of answer.”
Dean folds Billy’s case file closed and watches the world glide by the window.
“Wolfman stopped me from killing someone.”
With one thick finger Dragnet adjusts his retro G-man spectacles, nudging them farther up that gin-blossom nose of his.
“This I have got to hear.”
“I’d been on a two-day drunk.”
“I can’t even picture that. Honest.”
“I was leaving some honky-tonk south of town, walking across the parking lot, when this cowboy gets in my face. When the fight got going, I hit him in the throat. He dropped like a sack of meal. But I wasn’t done. I hit him again. And again. Again. I was maybe two beats shy of killing the poor guy—and he was just a kid, hell, we were both kids—when Wolfman tackled me. A few drunk punches away from winding up just like Billy Grimes.”
“No way, Tonto. No way you’re anything like that punk. I’ve seen into him.”
“Wolfman gives me his card. Tells me come visit when I get sober. Which I do. Second time I see him Wolfman’s offering me a job.”
“Killers are made,” Dragnet begins.
“Not born,” Dean finishes.
“Wolfman recites it like catechism.”
Dean cracks his knuckles and stretches his arms above his head.
“Any luck on your end of discovery?”
“The case is crow bait. Let’s just say Wolfman will need to lean on your mitigation findings. Any luck finding the parents?”
“None.”
“Friends?”
“None.”
“Well. Our boy is pretty well fucked.”
Dean reopens Billy’s discovery file. In it are photos of Carl Jefferson’s mangled and naked body lying upon the coroner’s slab. Snapshots of assholes and pubic hair and cloying, blue-black hemorrhages. A strained death grimace preserved in 35mm precision. These images tend to linger in the mind’s eye. Seeing them, Wolfman’s doctrine can be a difficult one to get behind. Dean feels complicit, at times, in the crimes of his clients, eyeing these pictures. As if he’s violated some private trust.
“You want to know a funny thing?” Dean asks.
“Always.”
“On my life, I can’t remember what that cowboy said to set me off.”