The Norris jury was out all that night. Cuddy began to hope we’d get a conviction after all. Friday morning he and I met with Dr. Isabel Sonora, an assistant dean of Haver Medical School. She took us past a dissecting arena where two young men in white coats, presumably students, were cheerfully laughing about something as they fiddled with a long human leg on a table. The dean was tall and thin with a bony look to her rather like the row of skeletons hanging around the walls. A large fan blew through the room and the skeletons trembled as if they were hearing a musical cue to start a medieval dance of death.
As Dr. Sonora pushed open the door to a huge freezer room labeled Cadaver Storage, she sternly repeated the lecture she’d already given us in her office. “Next time, if you people think you’re going to need your cadavers back, don’t donate them. You’re lucky we found as much of her as we did.”
The dean pointed at a long counter surface where neatly arranged in a row were the dismembered skeletal remains of one full human arm, one forearm, one detached hand and a footless lower leg.
“That’s it?” Cuddy asked, upset. “Some arms and legs?”
Dr. Sonora opened a cadaver drawer. “I said you were lucky. This was going into a classroom next week.” The dean showed us a female torso with no arms or legs. But the flesh was still on it and the head was still attached. I knew who it was. Having been embalmed, stored in freezers, first at the city morgue, then here at Haver Medical School, Kristin Stiller had decomposed not all that much more since I’d first seen her lying in a ditch of rotted leaves and raw red earth where her murderer had left her. But eerily enough, her eyes were now missing (having been used in a class), giving her a macabre resemblance to her fellow victim Lucy Griggs.
We presented Dr. Sonora with the court order to release what was left of Kristin Stiller’s body to Dr. Samuel Chang, the forensic pathologist, when he arrived here this afternoon. She accepted the legal papers rather grumpily and on the way out of the building couldn’t stop herself from scolding us again not to expect to be able to show up two months after donating an anonymous cadaver and find it waiting for us. “These things are expensive. You’re very lucky.”
“Luckier than Kristin Stiller,” I agreed.
She looked at me then at an oil painting on the paneled wall of the reception room. “What did you say your name was?”
“Justin Savile.”
She gestured at the oil painting. “Dr. Justin Savile was head of this medical school.” I nodded. “Your father?” I nodded again. “Good man, people around here say.” I kept nodding. “Died in a car crash?”
I said no, he’d had a heart attack in the car crash and died from it later. She said she was sorry. I didn’t say that it was snowing that night on Catawba Drive, that I was driving him home, that I was drinking. I was surprised she didn’t already know. Years ago it was the talk of the town.
Walking back to the car, Cuddy examined his drivers’ license. “I’m donating my organs. I like the notion of my eyes seeing Hillston and my heart feeling good about a nice spring day. But don’t give them the rest of me, okay? I swear I’m not sure I want med students yucking it up over my femur after I’m gone.”
Just as we reached Haver Hospital parking lot, a woman came running through a line of cars toward ours. I heard the beeping of a nearby Land Rover as she clicked her remote key. It was Dr. Josie Roth, Linsley Norris’s older sister, still in a white lab coat. She didn’t stop or even slow down as she raced to open her door. But she recognized and called to us, “The jury’s in. Court’s reconvening in fifteen minutes.” Her tires screeched as she backed out of her parking spot.
We watched her speed off. Finally Cuddy said almost wistfully, “They were out sixteen hours. But that may not be long enough.”
Headed back to town, he leaned his head out the car window as if he needed clean air. “Well, comrade, so much for my new improved justice system in the South. Looks like your old grandpa judge—what was his name? You know, the judge that averaged sentencing twenty black men a year to the electric chair and kept it up ’til they made him Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court?”
“His name was Benjamin Virgil Dollard.” I took out the old gold pocket watch my mother had given me with those initials on one side and the female figure of Justice on the other and gave it to him.
He looked at the watch, spun it on its chain. “Right, BVD. How could I forget? Well, BVD would feel right at home in Hillston today, ’cause it’s looking like if you’re white, rich, come from a good family, and talk nice, you can still get away with murder in the South.”
I took back my watch. “It’s no different in the North.”
“You got me there.”
“Cuddy, you keep expecting America to keep its promises. Maybe that’s why the Fourth of July is so damn important to you.”
“Jesus, Justin. Don’t start analyzing. I don’t expect anything to keep its promise…. Except me.”
“Sounds lonesome.”
“It is.” He looked out at the town he’d policed his whole adult life as we drove down a block of Main Street. The lampposts were decorated with clusters of small American flags. Wryly he saluted them as we passed.
• • •
Courtroom A was so jammed with sightseers and journalists that Judge Turbot made the bailiff move the crowd back from the side aisles and away from the jury box. Cuddy and I stood against the back wall watching as Bee Turner took the folded verdict from the foreperson of the jury—a nervous middle-aged woman whose hand shook as she passed it to her. Miss Turner stood on tiptoe in her oddly youthful bright blue high heels to hand it up to the judge on the bench. Margy read the verdict, folded it, crossed her hands over it, and asked Tyler Norris to stand.
In his blue blazer, striped tie, and gray slacks, Norris looked more as if he were waiting for a dinner table at the Hillston Club than news about whether he was going to live or die. Beside him, Isaac Rosethorn painfully pushed himself up against the defense table. Tyler watched the judge. Isaac watched the jury. Cuddy watched Isaac.
Margy asked the foreman, “On the charge of murder in the first degree, how do you find the defendant Tyler Gilbert Norris?”
“Not guilty,” whispered Cuddy to me.
“Not guilty,” said the foreman to the judge.
“The jury finds the defendant not guilty.” Margy raised her gavel, expecting the commotion that usually follows a verdict in a homicide case, shrieks of joy, shouts of anger. But Courtroom A was strangely subdued, maybe because no one was surprised. There was a short rumbled murmur from the crowd. Scattered applause. People started leaving before Margy finished her final remarks, dismissed the jury, and set Tyler Norris free.
The senior Norrises and Linsley’s parents politely embraced each other and moved together to the defense table where Tyler coolly received a round of hugs. Then they shook hands with Isaac Rosethorn who messily shoved papers into his tattered, taped-up briefcase and hurried away, almost forgetting to limp. The Norris group was soon joined by a dozen other well-dressed WASPs, all shaking hands and looking like a reception line at a society wedding.
The clumped mass of the crowd pressed through the doors and clotted together in the lobby. Cuddy was trying to push aside a cluster of reporters to reach Dr. Josie Roth, the one member of Linsley’s family who’d testified against Tyler. Still in the white medical coat in which she’d run through the university parking lot earlier, she stood alone against the wall, trying hard not to lose control before she could make her way through the crowd to get out of the lobby.
Suddenly one of the small dark foreign women, the one I’d seen at Southern Depot, the one I’d decided was deaf, hurried up and stepped in front of Cuddy. She shoved a long thin parcel wrapped in old newspaper into his arms and then scurried away through the crowd.
“Drop it,” I said to Cuddy as I took off after her. But when I reached the broad stone portico outside, she was already running down the sidewalk in her odd flat-footed way, beneath the rows of clustered American flags. I saw Nancy and Zeke starting up the steps and yelled at them, “Stop her! Woman in black! The Ninety-fiver!” Nancy and Zeke raced dodging back through the puzzled crowd. Zeke was remarkably fast; he swept down upon the small woman, lifting her off her feet. She began to scream.
I hurried back through the revolving door into the lobby where Cuddy had naturally not listened to me but had unwrapped the newspaper. He was staring down at a dead fish. Sticking out of the fish’s mouth was the white queen from his office chess set.
Upset, he gingerly slid out the painted wood figure of the Indian queen with a Kleenex. Because the set had been given to him by children in the Costa Rica village where he’d taught as a volunteer twenty years earlier, it was one of his beloved possessions.
“You think Guess Who did this?” I asked him.
“Yes.” He wrapped the chess piece in the tissue.
“What’s his point? Queen? White Queen?”
“First Lady,” said Cuddy.