Nothing Lost Read online

  For sixteen years I was a prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office. A lifer. I have no problem with the penal system. I don’t want to reform it. Incarceration benefits society. Some people belong behind the walls. My opinion is: the rougher, the better. Coils of razor-sharp concertina wire, electric fences, the hole, cattle prods, the works. I once argued successfully that a fourteen-year-old should do his time at the Durango Avenue adult facility rather than at the juvenile correction center in Kiowa County. He’d crushed the skull of a Chinese takeout deliveryman with a brick for no other reason than that he had ordered General Tso chicken and in a mix-up of orders got Kung Pao shrimp instead. Because of his age, he only got nine-to-life. Of course he was buggered at Durango Avenue, and finally, at fifteen and a half, he was drowned by a fellow psychopath who held him facedown in a toilet full of excrement.

  At the trial I made a meal about the deliveryman’s pregnant wife and three children under four.

  I didn’t mention that the deliveryman was also running smack along with the MSG.

  That I was queer was never an apparent problem when I was with the A.G.’s office. I assumed people knew, I was discreet, I didn’t dress up, I had the highest conviction rate in the office, I played rugby for the Department of Corrections in a league composed of teams from the legislature and the state agencies (I lost four front teeth in a scrum during a match against the Department of Public Safety, a very butch thing to do), and I taught a course in criminal law at the university.

  Then Gerry Wormwold was elected attorney general. The Worm never missed an opportunity to punch the Christian ticket on his way to higher office. Poppy McClure liked to say that he thought the initials “A.G.” stood for “aspiring governor.” A divorce from his first wife seemed to be a speed bump on the Worm’s career highway, but the first Mrs. Wormwold agreed to sign an affidavit acknowledging that her infidelity was the predicate cause of the breakup. The first Mrs. Wormwold said it was the Christian thing to do, that she had renounced adultery and rededicated her life to Jesus, and that she had received no favors in return for the affidavit.

  Objection overruled.

  The second and current Mrs. Wormwold, the former Aphrodite Anderson, had her name legally changed to Nancy Reagan Anderson, in honor of the woman she most admired in the world, and when the A.G. announced their engagement, Nancy Reagan Anderson produced a doctor’s certificate that she was a virgin, hymen intact, who would save herself for her wedding night with her fiancé, the presumptive candidate for attorney general.

  During his campaign, the Worm had also pledged not to violate his Christian principles by appointing a gay person to a senior management position in the A.G.’s office. It was a pledge that really only applied to me. He could not legally fire me, which would have made him subject to a discrimination suit that I in fact never would have filed, but he could take me off the Darrow case. The grounds, never stated in so many words, were that as I was what he would call sexually ambiguous, I might have a conflict of interest. J.J. got the case, and I was reassigned from head of the Homicide Bureau to arraignment hearings and the misdemeanor courts. I quit the A.G., which of course was what the Worm was hoping I would do, and naturally he appointed J.J. my replacement, a move I suspect he has since come to regret.

  I also lost my lectureship at the university law school. Again courtesy of the Worm. A word here, a word there, proposed budget cuts, a restructuring of course schedules, a cutback in electives, and I was gone. Not that it really mattered. I signed on as a night school professor at Osceola Community College’s unaccredited law school. And I prospered, more or less, as a member of the defense bar, defending those I used to put behind bars, often, I regret to say, successfully.

  That was a more efficient way to get under the Worm’s skin.

  About J.J.

  He was someone who got where he was by playing the angles. When he worked for me in the Homicide Bureau, he had a reputation as an operator, a fixer, someone whose eye was always on the desired result. Where it remained when he took over from me. And as much as I dislike admitting it, he was also a very skillful attorney.

  It was a skill inherited from his father. Walter McClure had been crippled by polio when he was in grade school in the town of Hamlet, in Parker County, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Hamlet was not named after the Dane, but took its name from its size, and as it grew larger saw no reason to change. This was a part of South Midland where few words were wasted. Towns and counties bore names like Adverse and Badland, and the place-names established without unnecessary explanation local attitudes toward outsiders who entered the city limits or crossed the county line. Walter McClure had gone to South Midland University, then to the university law school, where he was on the law review, and after his graduation, had turned down corporate practice with the larger firms in Kiowa and Capital City to be a country lawyer in Hamlet. Where, at the age of thirty, he was elected Parker County attorney.

  County attorney was a job Walter McClure said he loved, though it paid him only seventy-five hundred dollars a year (stretched out with some money from his wife, Emily, who was always referred to as a St. Louis girl, as if her Missouri genes explained the source of her dowry). The cases weren’t much of a challenge—repos, unpaid taxes, DWIs, domestic abuse, drunk and disorderly, hunting or fishing out of season, bigamy, incest, crimes against nature (farmers and sheep), indecent exposure, embezzlement, fraud, grand theft larceny, a litany from the low end of the civil and penal codes—but Walter treated every one as if it would ultimately end up being reviewed by the Supreme Court. He was always cheerful, never complained about his useless legs, and for seven consecutive two-year terms he was elected president of the state bar association. It was an unpaid job nobody really wanted, and by electing someone who was handicapped, the state bar bureaucrats could congratulate themselves on doing a noble deed for good old crippled Walter McClure, what a damn shame, he could’ve been one of the best. What they didn’t say was that having Walter on the case spared electing a Jew from Cap City or Kiowa. And I was never entirely sure that Walter disagreed with that assessment. He was, after all, from Parker County, which wasn’t all that crazy about Catholics either.

  To be honest, I could not stand Walter McClure. An unsentimental verdict about someone whose legs were wrapped in metal braces, and got a lot of unearned mileage out of it. I always had the sense that Walter was trying out for one of those “Most Unforgettable Characters I Ever Met” who used to turn up in the Reader’s Digest but hadn’t made the cut. He used to say he wanted to write a book about the life of a county attorney. And what was the most important thing he had learned as a county attorney?

  That there were three stages in a man’s life—birth, puberty, and adultery.

  You see what I mean.

  Walter and Emily had J.J., and then four years later, Emmett.

  Emmett drowned when he was three, in the pond beyond the McClures’ farmhouse in Parker County.

  Five months before J.J. and Poppy were married, Walter McClure steered his wheelchair into the barn and shot himself with a single-action Colt .45 he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and he from his father.

  A story of the Old West.

  I guess Walter was more complicated than I gave him credit for.

  You can’t discuss J.J. without discussing Poppy.

  Born Sonora Ford, the Sonora from the state in northern Mexico where her mother’s family owned 212,000 acres richly veined with minerals. Margarita Ochoa Reyes had married Jim Ford, a fly-by-night prospector, and done him the favor of dying the day after their only child was born. A postpartum hemorrhage that made Jim Ford a rich man and a single parent on the same day. He was a doting father for over three decades until he was hit by a bolt of lightning on a golf course he was developing for a resort hotel he had underwritten outside Tangier. Except for charitable contributions and cash bequests to loyal retainers, Poppy was the primary beneficiary of Ji
m Ford’s largely unleveraged estate, which she used to finance her first congressional campaign and a substantial portion of her three subsequent races.

  Poppy never discouraged the notion that her nickname was affectionately given her by her father, but in fact it was bestowed on her when she was a student at Foxcroft. Her four years at Foxcroft are never mentioned in her campaign biographies, only that she went from “high school in Virginia” (never identified) to Wellesley, where she was exposed to what she now called “the pernicious virus of liberalism.” It was at Wellesley, she claimed, that she learned to hate tree huggers. “The most beautiful thing about a tree,” she says in her campaign literature, “is what you do with it after you cut it down.”

  The literature did not say that the line was lifted from Rush Limbaugh.

  From the moment she took her seat in the House, Poppy was in demand. She was beautiful, she was rich, she would say whatever was on her mind, and she would say it outrageously. It was treason to imply that the world’s ecosystem was fragile. Liberals only win elections by pretending they’re not liberals. Feminism is a twelve-step program for homely women. Prison construction is the only necessary public housing program. She was preaching to the converted, but the converted ate it up, and faltering Republican candidates begged her to show up at their fundraising events. Poppy on the dais meant headlines for her and big bucks for the party coffers. Publicity was her crack, a microphone her crack house. The Sunday-show bookers all had her on speed dial, knowing that Poppy McClure on air guaranteed a quotable sound bite. I sometimes think that the network and cable anchors, and the talk-show hosts, knew Poppy better than J.J. did.

  It occurs to me, as I am sure it had occurred to J.J., that death had twice been a fortuitous silent partner in the Ford family accomplishments. Poppy’s considerable treasure allowed J.J. to forsake the uncertainties of the private sector and remain a prominent presence in the A.G.’s office, however uncomfortable that presence made the Worm. J.J. was also too smart not to know that his role as a high-profile prosecutor boosted his political asset as husband, another complication in his and Poppy’s already complicated relationship.

  J.J. in effect was a weekend husband. He saw Poppy only when she flew back to her district on those Thursday nights when she was not booked on a talk show the following Sunday. It was common gossip among the local political reporters who covered her that, on her daily schedule, Poppy and J.J.’s occasional coupling was euphemized as “Private Time,” as in “Sunday 12:30 to 1 p.m.—Private Time.” Unless there was a fundraiser. Raising money always took precedence over copulation. It is not surprising that J.J.’s eye occasionally wandered between Poppy’s takeoff for Washington Sunday evening in the private jet she had inherited from her father and her return home to Cap City the following Thursday night. One can assume Poppy knew. There was little she didn’t know. As long as discretion was maintained, it was a trade-off she could handle.

  Poppy was a piece of work.

  Occasionally I would see J.J. in the courthouse. He had stopped saying we should get together sometime for lunch. I think I had him nervous. I hope so. He didn’t like to be read, and he thought I could read him.

  I thought I could, too.

  Begin with his appearance.

  You can pick up things there.

  He was a forty-two regular, high-end off-the-rack, nothing Italian, of course, I doubt there was a single Armani in Cap City, maybe Blass or Hilfiger with the designer label removed, he would be scrupulous about that, he wouldn’t want people whispering at the office Christmas party that he bought the basics on Poppy’s ticket, and although he wasn’t tall, five-ten or so, but definitely under six, he did a very good languid. He seemed born to put his feet up on a desk or a conference table, kicking first one shoe off and then the other, loafers usually, never lace-ups, they were for the five-hundred-an-hour corporate boys, he would say, sometimes black Mephistos for the common touch, and he made his feet on the table seem an act of grace. He didn’t work out that I knew of, no jogging, no aerobics, no StairMasters, exercycles or treadmills, no gym membership, but he didn’t carry weight either, and his hair always looked as if it was the day before a cut, not long, not short, no discernible after-forty loss, no scalp desert and definitely no comb-over; he had a private way of pointing out to a jury when opposing counsel was wearing a hairpiece, he’d keep running his hands through his hair at a lawyers’ sidebar with the judge, he thought wigs were funny, wigs were untrustworthy, a bad piece might tip a juror toward a guilty verdict, and a defendant might be remanded to Durango Avenue in part because of his court-appointed attorney’s unfortunate head ornament.

  Women thought he was attractive. Which is why he tried to stack juries with them.

  J.J. knew I had known his father, probably even that I wasn’t sold on Walter’s relentless bonhomie, but his name never came up. It was as if he had no family. After Walter’s suicide, I wrote J.J. the usual platitudes, and on the bottom of the printed card I received in return—THE FAMILY OF WALTER MCCLURE APPRECIATES YOUR EXPRESSION OF CONDOLENCE—he had scratched three words, Max—Thanks—J.J.

  I suppose what I am trying to say is that J.J. did not encourage intimacy, but then who among us does. Christ, I wouldn’t want anyone poking around my memory closet.

  Take his brother, Emmett. A very complicated story, that. As it turned out. But first the day that Percy Darrow was executed.

  I think I can put together a plausible narrative.

  CHAPTER THREE

  J.J.

  J.J. closed the door of the conference room, checked his digital Casio, then took his seat at the head of the empty conference table. The sandwich Allie had bought sat on a paper plate in front of his chair. Along with a plastic knife and fork and split of bottled water. Lunch. He took a bite and a swallow. The water was room temperature, the sandwich ice cold. He picked up the remote and clicked on News at One.

  Poor Percy Darrow. Probably the last day of his life, the first man to die in the state’s electric chair in over forty years, and the poor son of a bitch didn’t even lead the news. “Holding on to life is like holding on to a handful of sand,” Percy Darrow had said in his NewsFront interview the night before, hands and feet shackled, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Not bad as last-day quotes go. Manufactured by one of his New York and Los Angeles pro bono death-penalty lawyers. Probably Elsie Brand. She had a gift for the telling phrase, befitting an entertainment lawyer from Century City. And a former federal prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, she had taken pains to tell him. While posting signals that she might be available for a prairie interlude.

  A mistake he did not make.

  Parlance was still the big story. How often does a Republican president come to an unemployed black man’s funeral in a state he won with 61 percent of the vote, and hug Jesse Jackson in the bargain? On the screen there was film on Duane Lajoie and Bryant Gover. Both in shackles, both in prison orange, both slight, feral, shifty-eyed. They could have been twins. One had a receding chin, the other reddish-blond hair, a few strands of which he had twirled into what looked like a shoulder-length rat’s tail. A bugger grip, the hacks at Durango Avenue called that effect. As the prisoner would find out soon enough. J.J. shook his head. He knew what their rap sheets and probation reports would say. Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field. To make up for mobile homes, public housing, foster parents, grungy rentals, domestic abuse, deficient IQs, sexual molestation, juvenile detention, substance abuse, paternity tests, unpaid child support, petty crime, felony convictions, and penitentiary hard time, probably with a little buttfucking thrown in. The bumper sticker on Lajoie’s pickup said FUCK THE TELEPHONE COMPANY. It might just as well have said ARREST ME. A witness remembered seeing the bumper sticker the night of the murder, on an ’89 Ford 4x4 with a four-pin trailer-tow harness, driving at a high rate of speed on County Road 21 a mile east of the field where Parlance’s body was discovered two days later. In the ranching countie
s, people knew pickups and trailer tows better than they knew their own children. “Helped me change a tire once,” a woman of indeterminate age and hair that looked as if it had been combed with a rake told a TV reporter about Duane Lajoie. Or was it the other one? They had once been residents of the same trailer park. “Pretty much of a loner, though. A drifter, like.”

  The loner and the drifter. Twin carbuncles on the body politic. J.J. wondered which one would dime the other out first. It was going to happen. Bet the house, break the bank. The Worm won’t give me this one, thank God. Too much ink for Poppy’s husband. And ink for Poppy’s husband meant ink for Poppy. The last thing the Worm wanted.

  Poppy’s husband. As he would always be identified. There were worse fates.

  Maybe.

  Percy Darrow finally got airtime after the Frito-Lay commercial, his rapidly diminishing future hanging on the decision expected any moment of an en banc meeting of the Twelfth Circuit in Chicago. DECISION DAY was the slug line over a still photo of Percy Darrow, a Bible clutched to his chest, a WWJD tattoo displayed on his left hand, one letter on each knuckle. WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? Not for the first time it occurred to him that Jesus found a lot of converts among the constituents detained by the Department of Corrections. At least the parents of the murdered James twins would not be in attendance at Durango Avenue for the festivities. The seven-year wait for decision day had taken its toll. Mother dead of breast cancer three years earlier, father lost in a twister in Phil Sheridan County the following spring. The only other living relative was the mother’s sister, a Carmelite nun in Oregon who had taken a vow of silence. So there would be no bullshit about closure. That terrible feel-good word. There is no end to grief. It’s there, a constant, layer upon layer over the years. Like barnacles on a sunken ship.