Reardon dispensed with the usual smarmy tactic of trying to ingratiate himself with the jury by wishing them good morning and thanking them profusely for their service and the attention they were about to give. It was entirely out of character, but he’d already read this bunch as a tough minded. He cut to the chase.
“Mr. Crandall,” he began and paused. “He didn’t tell you some things yesterday.”
His big, handsome head ticced to one side when he said it, as though his indignation at the omissions made him twitch. The jurors saw it. He had captured their attention with the mention of Crandall’s name and by remaining seated at the defense table when he spoke. We had to follow his soft, rueful voice to find him in the big room.
“What didn’t Mr. Crandall tell you?” he asked a little louder, buffing another coat of rhetorical wax on the allegation of Crandall’s deception as he rose.
“Mr. Crandall,” Reardon said, standing in front of Crandall and pointing at him as Crandall had pointed at Reardon’s client the day before. “Mr. Crandall did not tell you that Ms. Nusbaumer, his best witness, never saw the faces of the men who shot her and the children.”
Reardon tried to make eye contact with each juror, but they were all looking at Crandall, who returned their “is-this-true?” glances with his own puzzled expression as though he had no idea of what Reardon was talking about.
From behind me, I heard Naomi gasp and the pen scratching among the clans suddenly seemed louder and frenzied.
“Do you remember how he phrased it yesterday?” Reardon asked.
He turned and went back to the defense table. Legs, looking exceptionally shapely even under the unisex veneer of a boxy, charcoal gray suit and royal blue, silk blouse, handed him a legal pad turned to an appropriate page.
“He said, ‘Lottie Nusbaumer’s going to describe the man and boy who entered her home that night.’”
Reardon noisily flipped the page noisily back and forth.
“He said, ‘The man she will describe has all of the characteristics of this man.’”
Reardon tossed the pad back at Legs, who fielded it expertly.
“He said Ms. Nusbaumer’s going to describe. He said Ms. Nusbaumer’s going to talk about characteristics. What he did not say was that she is going to identify the man who shot her and the children.”
Crandall had had enough. He started to rise to object, but Secrist told him to sit.
“Mr. Reardon,” Secrist said, “you’re at the line.”
Everyone but the jury on that side of the rail knew Secrist was referring to the boundary between statement and argument. The jurors looked puzzled, but Reardon merely said, “Of course, your honor” and tipped his head in deference to the Court.
“The reason Ms. Nusbaumer cannot identify the men who entered her trailer is that both of them wore masks.” He passed a hand across his face and smiled. “Ski masks. Mr. Crandall did not tell you that.”
He closed his eyes, tilted back his head, and shook a fifty-dollar haircut into place.
“Mr. Crandall,” Reardon said finally, pointing again at the prosecutor, “did not tell you that this boy he’s so fond of—the one who’s admitted pulling the trigger on all four of the victims, the one who’s supposed to know so much about how this crime occurred because he did it—Mr. Crandall did not tell you that this boy will never stand trial for his role in this crime. That’s because this man”—Reardon aimed his index finger at Crandall for the third time, beating Crandall now by one in the number of opening statement finger points—“This man gave that boy a deal to get his testimony.”
Most of us on this side of the rail knew about the deal. What was new was that Reardon clearly had decided to make trying Crandall part of his strategy. He would not be interviewed later, but we “veteran observers,” who have rehashed the trial any number of times since, agree that from the beginning Reardon had to be concerned about the relationship Crandall had so quickly forged with the jury and decided immediately to undermine it.
For his part, Crandall did not flinch. He met each juror’s stare and nodded once, acknowledging the truth of it.
“Why?” Reardon asked, his brows raised in confusion. “Why coerce a boy to say such things about my client? Because—at the time—my client was charged with dealing drugs in another county, and the authorities there could not prove it.”
He walked from one end of the box to the other and back as he talked. Three long strides each way and the jurors’ eyes followed.
“The police and the prosecutors decided they were going to get my client for something . . .”
“Mr. Reardon,” Secrist said in warning as Crandall again started to rise again.
“. . . and they used that boy to do it.”
Reardon held up a hand to show Secrist he would submit. He really did not want to dwell much more on the subject because bringing up it at all had been a risky move.
It is a maxim among litigators that an opening statement is a promise a lawyer makes to a jury. If the lawyer does not deliver on his promise to provide a jury with evidence the lawyer says or implies he has, a jury usually will feel cheated and may react vindictively against his client.
Reardon had essentially promised to tell this jury not only about his client’s past criminal history, but also about what is, in this part of the world, a particularly offensive allegation against his client. He also tipped his hand to Crandall, who would now prepare to address the “they’re-out-to-get-my-guy” defense, if he had not so already.
No doubt, Reardon offered the defense because he had concluded that Crandall would get evidence of that part of the Defendant’s criminal history in anyway and Reardon figured he could minimize its persuasive effect on the jury if they heard it from him first. The “inoculation” theory among litigators runs like this: No fact can be as bad as my opponent would lead you to believe it is if I’m happy to tell you about it myself.
But Reardon had too much time in the saddle to risk exposing his defenses and hardening a jury’s heart to gain just one advantage. Tying the fact of his client’s drug dealing to a theory that the cops used Jake to get his client could elegantly undercut the credibility of Jake, Crandall, and the police and weaken not only Crandall’s case but also the drug-dealing case. If Reardon could make a police-conspiracy theory work in the murder case, he would also turn it back to greater effect on the drug-dealing charge. And if the jury believed Jake and convicted on the murder charges, well, the outcome of the drug-dealing charge wouldn’t amount to much in the larger scheme of his client’s life.
“Keep that in mind as you listen to the evidence,” Reardon repeated.
“And keep in mind some other things Mr. Crandall did not tell you. Keep in mind a set of footprints found at the crime scene, footprints that proceed directly from Ms. Nusbaumer’s trailer into the woods that surround it and then toward a neighbor’s house. These footprints don’t match up either to my client or to anyone else the police talked to in this investigation.”
Reardon was making me more than a little nervous now, but neither he or anyone else turned to look at me so I kept my head down and wrote notes as fast as I could. At that moment, I very much wanted to appear no different than the rest of my colleagues.
“As you listen to the evidence,” Reardon continued, “listen for what is not said, as well as what is said. It’s how you figure out whether someone’s telling the truth.”
Reardon walked toward the bench and turned. With his back to Secrist, Reardon stood as if to align himself with the judge and keep the jury’s attention off Crandall and the victims’ families sitting behind him.
“What will our witnesses tell you?”
He extended a welcoming hand back to his table.
“My client’s wife, the mother of his infant son, will tell you that, like nearly every other night of their life together, he was lying beside her on the night of the incident.”
Reardon ironed the inside flap of his double-breasted jacket back into place with the flat of his hand.
“A detective who was with the state police for nearly 40 years before he retired will tell you that the police who investigated this matter screwed up. He’ll say there are areas where the investigation was sloppy, and, most important, he’ll say the police failed to rule out all other persons before they arrested and charged my client.
Reardon stood with his hands folded across his stomach, measuring the jurors’ reaction and apparently finding them to be satisfactory since he started to wrap it up.
“So where will that leave you, the jury, at the close of evidence.”
He held up one hand, his first point.
“You’ll know where my client was not. He was not in Lottie Nusbaumer’s home on the night she and the children were shot. Someone else was.”
He swept his gaze across the courtroom gallery as if to suggest that someone else could be here. He seemed to linger on me longer than I would have liked, before he raised his other hand.
“You’ll know where my client was. He was at home with his family asleep.”
He threw up his hands.
“It’s physics. Simple physics. A man can’t be in two places at once. If my client was not at Lottie Nusbaumer’s that night, as he was not, if he was, in fact, somewhere else, as he was, you have to find him not guilty.”
Reardon had given the jury plenty to think about, and he wanted them to think about it some more. As he sauntered back to the defense table, he looked at Crandall for reaction, then pulled himself up short and turned to Secrist.
“Maybe it’s a little early, Judge,” he said, touching his temple as though he had just thought of it, “but if the first witness is going to take some time, as I suspect he will, maybe we ought to take a break now.”
Secrist looked at the jurors and Crandall, who shrugged, and agreed.
Those of us among the clans who had deadlines before noon did not exactly skip across the heads of those behind us to get out of that courtroom, but it was close. Reardon’s claim that the assailants wore masks and that Lottie therefore could not identify the Defendant was contrary to everything Crandall, McConegal, Wood and every other cop who would talk had been implying for months. That was certainly news. Reardon’s suggestions of police sloppiness and conspiracy to get his client had their own charm.
I hip-checked a radio guy at the top of stairs, tucked myself in behind a couple of twinks who were stiff-arming dawdlers in front of them, and drafted down to the first floor, where I made a break for a side door to get to a phone.
I dictated to Marley fifteen pearly paragraphs to top off last night’s material. I quoted Reardon extensively. I summarized his obvious strategy.
Marley used nine graphs and only two quotes and told me to write the rest up as analysis for the next day’s edition. I wasn’t necessarily happy about that, but I was feeling pretty good about myself until I got back in the courthouse.
At first, the trooper at the door would not let me back in the courtroom. I had made the mistake of stopping for an over-confident, little snack on the way back to the courthouse, and unlike most judges of my acquaintance, Secrist actually resumed proceedings when he said he would.
“They’re in the middle of the kid’s testimony,” the trooper said, putting a gentle, but oh-so-certain hand on my chest. “You heard the judge.”
The kid was Moze, and I had heard the judge.
“It’ll be my ass,” I told the trooper.
“No, it’ll be my ass,” he said. “And shut up. The turd’s going to cross him.”
He turned to adjust a volume knob on a set of speakers that had been set up in the hallway for those who could not get in the courtroom. When he did, I slipped in the door and took up a position standing against the back wall. Secrist scowled at me but said nothing.
“You hadn’t been a police officer long when this incident occurred, had you?” Reardon began.
Moze looked him in the eye and said “No” in a flat voice. I knew that Crandall had spent a good deal of time preparing him for his testimony, but I was also pretty sure that some of his brother officers had taken him aside to counsel him in even blunter terms.
They would have taught him to testify on cross in the way most cops testify on cross: One word better than two; one syllable best of all. Reveal no emotion. And never, ever lie—unless the fucking defense attorney makes you and you can’t be caught.
“Less than a year, correct?”
“Yeah.”
Reardon had started the cross sitting at the defense table. He stood now and strolled to the side of the witness stand away from the jury box. His position would make it difficult for Moze to look at the jury. Some lawyers, apparently Reardon among them, subscribe to a theory that it undercuts a witness’ credibility if the lawyer prevents the witness from making eye contact with a jury.
“This was your first homicide investigation?”
“Yeah.”
“True you’d never seen a homicide victim before?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You threw up, didn’t you?”
“Objection,” Crandall called, “irrelevant.”
“Motive, bias, prejudice; they’re always relevant,” Reardon said.
Secrist declared the objection overruled.
“You remember the question?” Reardon asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s the answer?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, you threw up?”
“Yeah, it was disgusting what your client did to those children.”
Reardon did not bat an eye.
“Who saw you throw up?”
Moze’s gaze flickered. He started to look for me in the gallery seat I had occupied before the break but caught himself.
“Nobody, I know of.”
Reardon half-turned to see who Moze might’ve looked at. He looked first to where I had been sitting, then around the gallery until he found me holding up the wall. I put my head down and wrote notes before I caught his eye.
“Could there have been somebody you don’t know of?” Reardon asked when he turned his attention back on Moze.
“Objection.” Crandall was on his feet this time. “Argumentative. Asked and answered. If he doesn’t know of anyone, the answer is no.”
Reardon smiled pleasantly, as though Crandall had just underscored his point, which, of course, he had.
“Withdrawn. Who else was at the crime scene with you?”
“Bunch of officers.”
“After a while, you mean. After you had gone out there and called it in.”
“Yeah.”
“Who was with you when you were dispatched?”
I held my breath. I had the sense others in the room were doing the same. Moze raised reptile eyes from a point on the floor between him and Reardon and stared at a point on the far wall just above Reardon’s head.
“Nobody.”
“Nobody. Who was with you when you arrived at the crime scene?”
“Nobody.”
“Who went into that trailer after you came out and before the other officers arrived?”
“What?”
“Simple question, Deputy. You went into the trailer when you arrived, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then you came out and threw up, right?”
“I already said I did.”
“After you threw up, you called it in and some other officers arrived, did they not?”
“Yes.”
“Who went into that trailer between the time you walked out of it and the other officers arrived?”
Moze’s eyes found that place on the far wall again.
“Nobody.”
“Deputy, I want the jury to understand your testimony. You’re telling us that there was never anybody at that crime scene or in that trailer other than you and other police officers?”
He lifted a hand toward the gallery.
“Victims’ families.”
“All right,” Reardon said with a trace of annoyance. “Your testimony is that there was never anybody at that crime scene or in that trailer other than you, other police officers, and the victims’ families. Is that right?”
“Objection,” Crandall called, “asked and answered.”
“Sustained,” Secrist answered. “Move on, counsel.”
I thought I heard Moze sigh. Or it could’ve been me who let out his breath, but relief on either Moze’s part or mine was premature.
Like all the good ones, Reardon worked a witness without notes. He returned to the defense table, where Legs handed him a file folder. He ran a finger down something in the folder, tapped a spot, and handed the folder back.
“Your report says you left the scene about mid-morning of the next day. Is that correct?”
Moze shrugged. He was kind of cocky after dodging a bullet.
“Yeah,” he said in that snotty tone boys use when they think a question’s too dumb to attend to.
“You were the first officer at the crime scene?”
“Yeah.”
“And you were the first officer to secure the crime scene?”
“Yeah.”
“And you were there for most, if not all, of the initial phases of the investigation?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Were you aware that there was a set of footprints found at the crime scene?”
“I ‘spect there was a bunch of them.”
Reardon pursed his lips and nodded.
“I’m talking about the ones that led from the trailer down the drive and turned into the woods.”
Crandall was on his feet.
“Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.”
But Reardon had, in the way of low-rent lawyers, lobbed in the facts he needed and there was no pulling them back.
“I assume you’ll be proving that up later, Mr. Reardon,” Secrist said.
“Just as soon as Mr. Crandall calls his first real investigator,” Reardon said.
“Overruled.”
Moze had been shifting in his seat, apparently concerned about where Reardon was going. But the obvious inference that he was not a real investigator stilled him and made color show on his neck.
“I knew about them,” Moze said with more certainty and surly undertone than was good for him.
“How were you aware of those footprints?”
“I . . . ,” said Moze, caught off guard. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Did you see those footprints when you arrived?”
“No.”
“Did you look for them?”
“Not then, no.”
“Did you ever look for footprints?”
“Nobody told me to.”
“Nobody told you to,” said Reardon, developing a pattern of repeating statements that made Moze look weak and unreliable. “So the answer is no you didn’t look for them, is that correct?
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what? Yeah, that’s correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did someone tell you the footprints had been found?”
“Objection, hearsay,” Crandall called.
“Well, I guess they must’ve,” Moze said before Secrist could rule. “I don’t remember.”
Secrist looked at Crandall and shrugged in silent recognition of the lawyers’ cliché that it’s useless to close the door after the horse has fled the barn. Moze’s response was already in evidence. It essentially relieved Reardon of his promise to introduce evidence of the footprints through another witness. Crandall glared at Moze.
“You don’t remember,” Reardon repeated.
He snagged his rump on the defense table and crossed his arms. He looked at Crandall then the jury.
“Were the footprints there when you left?”
“I reckon they must’ve been. The techs found them.”
“You know the techs found footprints, but you didn’t look for them and you don’t know who told you about them?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Whose footprints were they?”
Reardon’s earlier questions about who had been with Moze when he was dispatched and at the crime scene were steps along the garden path to get to this fork. If Moze answered the question truthfully and told Reardon the footprints were mine, as surely Moze must’ve known them to be, he would admit to perjuring himself. Moze could expect probably another hour on the witness stand while Reardon explored the length and breadth of that lie to make suspect all of the rest of Moze’s testimony as well as that of every other cop Crandall intended to call.
If Moze said he didn’t know whose footprints they were, his answer would be yet another brick Reardon would lay to build his theories that the police had been sloppy and that some unknown person killed the kids and shot Lottie. Whether Moze had all that figured out at the time is a bad bet, given his inexperience on the stand, but he must have understood instinctively neither answer helped Crandall’s case.
“I don’t do forensics,” Moze said finally.
“Perhaps not,” Reardon said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
Moze’s gaze danced around the floor between Reardon and him.
“What was your question again?”
“Whose footprints were they?”
“Nobody told me.”
“The truthful answer then is you just don’t know.”
“I reckon.”
“And apparently you didn’t bother to ask.”
Reardon told Moze he was done before Moze could answer.
Crandall did what he could to rehabilitate Moze. He asked Moze a series of questions about whether he was trained in forensics, whether it was his job to look for footprints, and whether it was common for officers to talk among themselves about investigations that they were only peripherally involved in so that it was likely he would have heard about the footprints from his brother and sister officers, if not whether a match had been made to any other footprints.
Moze’s answers amounted to no, no, and yes, just as Crandall wanted, but it didn’t help much. When Moze left the stand, not a single juror would look at him. They fixed glum gazes in the middle distance. They had wanted to like young Moze.
Litigators believe in strong starts. It is a maxim among them that juries remember and tend to believe what they hear first and what they hear last. Anything in between, you’re shooting craps.
Crandall put Moze on first not just because he was the best one to start a chronological telling of the tale but, more importantly, to sear into the jury’s mind just how revolting the scene had been inside that double-wide. When she shared her notes with me later, Janelle said he’d done an excellent job of that.
However, Reardon had muted Crandall’s intended effect and left the jury with impression that Moze was inexperienced and that he therefore might be incompetent or even a liar. Moze’s performance thus was far less than Crandall hoped and far more than Reardon had any right to expect.
You would’ve never have known it from their expressions, though. Both Crandall and Reardon kept their game faces on. Wood, sitting next to Crandall, looked put out.
Only the Defendant seemed pleased. A connoisseur of skillful manipulation, he grinned like the Cheshire Cat. Legs leaned over to whisper something to him, probably about how juries hate gloating. He blew her a kiss. His mother, sitting stone-faced, looked away.
With Crandall’s careful prompting, Orlo told the jury pretty much what he’d told me. He had been well coached. He spoke about the nature of his relationship with Lottie with warmth, not rancor, and stuck pretty much to the facts of finding her on his doorstep the night of the murders and bringing her inside.
“Did Ms. Nusbaumer say anything when you were helping her inside?” Crandall asked.
“Objection,” Reardon called, “hearsay.”
“Sustained,” Secrist said before Crandall could argue.
Crandall shrugged as though it did not make that much difference and went on. Orlo embellished only by using the language from my story; he said that the bloody palm prints on his door looked like rose petals. Crandall’s gaze cut sideways to the jury at that one. He apparently did not know Orlo read the papers closely.
Reardon did.
“A reporter visited you that night, did he not?” Reardon asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You talked to him at length then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve talked to him several times since, have you not?”
“’Bout ever’ day.”
“His name is Clayton Ambrose, and he was at the scene of the murders that night, was he not?”
Orlo suddenly looked shrewd, an expression that had not visited him before in my experience.
“That’s his name. Can’t say where he was that night, other than my place.”
“Didn’t he seem to know quite a bit about what had happened at Ms. Nusbaumer’s trailer?”
“It’s a double-wide.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not just a trailer. It’s a double-wide.”
“Very well. What’s the answer to my question? Mr. Ambrose seemed to know quite a bit about what happened at your lover’s double-wide, did he not?”
“I reckon he did.”
“Wouldn’t the fact that he seemed to know quite a bit about what had happened at Ms. Nusbaumer’s trailer suggest to you that he’d been there.”
“Well, I reckon.”
“How’d he get to your place?”
“Don’t know. Just said he needed a ride.”
“Did he? That would suggest he did not have a car, would it not?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t ask. Just took him into town.”
Reardon smiled and moved on.
“You had shotguns, did you not?”
“Then? Yeah.”
“The police took those from you on that night, did they not?”
“Yeah.”
“And they didn’t return them to you, did they?”
“Not yet, no.”
“And they questioned you about the murders, true?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And they asked you whether you liked the children Lottie Nusbaumer took care of?”
“Well, not like that they didn’t.”
Reardon turned to the defense table where Legs was making a show of holding a file folder above her head. She apparently thought things were going very well. With his back to the jury, Reardon scowled at her as he took the folder from her.
“Remember the deposition you gave me?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember me asking you what you and the police talked about?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember you telling me that the police wanted to know how you felt about Lottie’s babysitting, and you telling me that it just took time away from you and her?”
“But that don’t mean I felt one way or ‘nother about them kids.”
“Didn’t it?”
“No.”
Reardon raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
“Mr. Ratliff, what’s your shoe size?”
The sudden shift threw Orlo. In fact, most of us in the gallery were little puzzled by that one. He paused, his expression glazed.
“Twelve,” he said finally, “I think. Depends on who makes the shoe.”
“Twelve,” Reardon repeated. “Nothing further.”
The abrupt ending of the cross made it memorable, as Reardon no doubt intended. I was pretty sure we’d hear more about Orlo’s shoe size later, and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.
Crandall asked only two questions to rehabilitate Orlo.
“You were never charged with anything as a result of the shootings, were you?”
“No, sir.”
“And as you sit here today, you are a free man, are you not?”
“Yes, sir.”
Orlo’s testimony concluded on Friday afternoon, the end of the first week. When Crandall told Secrist his next witness would likely take more time than remained that day, Secrist seemed more than willing to turn us loose for the weekend, just as we were more than eager to light out for home.
We managed to keep Crandall and Reardon in the room long enough to tell us that each of them thought the week had gone well and that Crandall likely would start the next week with the forensic types. Then they—and the twinks—bolted. About a half dozen of us, admission limited to members of the print clan, stopped outside the courthouse for what had become the end-of-day ritual: Gene’s question.
Gene is the wire-service guy. He’s little, his face is dark and puckered like a dried apple, and he has a gravelly voice. His uniform is a short-sleeved white shirt, an ugly tie, and stained cotton pants a half step up from faded blue jeans. In his prime, he would’ve been described as spunky. He’s been around for 30, 35 years, he knows everybody who is anybody, and his stories go to every paper in the state.
If a reporter did not at least mention in her story what Gene had in his lede, she could expect a snippy call from her editor wanting to know why she wasn’t covering the same story as Gene. So every day, somebody asked, “Hey, Gene, what’s your lede?” And every day, Gene told us. He had nothing to hide; all our papers paid his wage.
But on that day, Janelle asked the question with a little more relish than I would have liked, and Gene, who fancied his personality to be far brighter than his deadpan, wire-service prose, delivered the punchline.
“I’m thinking Geraldo, the big boy, here,” Gene said, looking at me.
“Me, too,” said Janelle said and laughed. “I guess we know how he got his stuff early in this cluster, don’t we?”
Janelle missed it. Gene had smiled when he said it, but I was looking at his eyes, and there was no amusement to be had there.
“Everybody here knows I talked to Orlo and more than a few cops,” I said.
I looked around, but nobody was going to throw me that bone.
“You can’t equate anything I did with Geraldo,” I said. “I mean all that crap he pulls to get in his own mediocre stories. We’re not talking cult of personality here. Come on, what’s your lede? Seriously, Gene. Everybody’s trying to get the hell out of here.”
“I’m entirely serious, Clay,” he said. Indeed, he had stopped smiling.
There might’ve been some jealously, but mostly Gene is old school. No doubt, he knew Moze had lied and that offended him at the ethical and moral levels reporters and editors spend so much time talking to themselves about. At the professional level, Gene would have been frustrated that he could not write about it because he could not prove Moze had lied. On top of that, while he might’ve admired my enterprise at the crime scene and with Orlo, he would hate the fact that I’d let my name get in the story and the extent that it could now be used. He was going to have to write about that, and he may as well make me pay by putting it at the top.
“Tell me. . .”
For once in Gene’s life, he hesitated to ask a question, probably because it went to the source of a story and we’re all innately chary about asking one another about sources. He began again.
“Tell me you’re not the guy who left the footprints that Reardon questioned the deputy about, that you weren’t in that trailer on the night of the murder.”
We may as well have stood toe to toe in the schoolyard. I could feel the others draw back to let Gene and me have at it, so instead I smiled and held up my hands in submission.
“Gene,” I said, “you know better. No sources for you.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Clay.”
“Well, you got to write it the way you see it,” I said finally. “But looks to me like you’re missing the story.”
“Which is?” Gene growled.
“Orlo had guns and didn’t like the children his girlfriend babysat. He’s the one had Lottie and her blood in his house.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s either a pawn Reardon’s using to create reasonable doubt, or he’s something else.”
“Someone who should be a suspect.” I let Gene say what I wouldn’t. “Why shouldn’t the same thing be said of you—that either you’re a pawn or you ought to be a suspect?”
“I’m a little offended by the suspect shit, Gene, but for the record, I have no motive. As for the other, maybe that’s just an example for a larger story about Reardon’s strategy and some unfounded speculation about whether it’s working.”
He didn’t flinch under my stare, so I raised my hands again and lowered my head.
“You heard the same testimony I did. I’m not going to tell you how to think about it.”
I carried to my car the hope that, nurtured in the empty time it would take my colleagues to drive back to their homes and offices, the seeds of doubt I had tried to plant would spring to full flower. I know it worked for me.
In the three-hour drive back to Failey, I wrote in my head the stories that would appear in the paper the next day. The rest of the time, I speculated on the fair market value of a soul bought by selling decent people I liked down the river.
Yes, I mentioned the questions and answers footprints and who was in the double-wide in Saturday’s story, but well down in the story since I played it straight, taking the testimony chronologically. The others, Gene included, emphasized Reardon’s emerging theory that someone else had done the murders and that Reardon through his questioning had implied that Orlo was at least one someone else.
Marley said he liked the other stories better. Of course, he didn’t know then that, thanks in no small part to me, the Bunny Theory was born. What I didn’t know then was that Reardon had already thought of it a long time ago.