The Other Shoe Page 16

  She’d taken to playing the tune about someone’s daughter far away, the rolling river, and Henry Brusett, her constant audience, heard her devise a dozen variations on the theme, and from his comfy, fuzzy hell he was determined to listen so long as she was inclined to stroke the strings. Shenandoah. This was a most satisfactory world, but a small one, and he expected to fall or be pushed off it at any time.

  A visit one morning by Deputy Lovell ended the suspense. “Mr. Brusett,” said the plump young lawman, “I am Deputy John Lovell of the Conrad County Sheriff’s Department. Henry Brusett, I meant to say—you are Henry Brusett. Anyway, I’ve got a warrant for your arrest.”

  “All right. Can you let me get dressed? You caught me right in the middle of a bath.”

  “Could you go for a cup of coffee?” Karen asked the deputy. “Or are you in a big hurry?”

  “The charge,” said Lovell, “is deliberate homicide on Calvin Teague, so that means it’s pretty serious.” Deputy Lovell made rapid mention of Henry Brusett’s many rights. “Do you understand these rights I have said to you?”

  Henry held a knot of towel at his waist, his gourd of a belly rolled out in a furry, rude display. “Yeah,” he said, “but can I get dressed?”

  The deputy searched the pockets of the prisoner’s jeans, and when he found them empty, he watched Henry put them on, and then a sweatshirt, and then his boots. Lovell took him out and shackled him close, his wrists and elbows secured to the belly chain, his strides hobbled to six inches—all this though no one imagined that Henry Brusett had the will or the capacity to run. Karen followed along at his side, arms tight across her chest and mouthing a long message, not one word of which he understood from the gyrations of her lips. But he made a quick dip of his chin as if he did understand, and then, just as he was being tucked into the back of Lovell’s cruiser, she asked him aloud, “How long you think you’ll be?”

  “Longer than I can go without my scrips, honey. My cousin Tubby’s a jailer, so . . . Oh, and you might want to pick that corn tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the day.”

  Lovell, driving away, examined him fairly constantly over his shoulder, tight-lipped and tense about it, and Henry Brusett found that, though he was a murderer, he did not care for the deputy’s pissant disapproval. He found once again that the presence of another human being filled his veins with hissing apprehension. Of all the horrors then marching through his head, the worst and most repetitive of them was the thought of the crowded life he was now likely to join. The deputy wanted small talk. “You get any fishin’ done this summer? I see you had some tackle up on your porch.”

  Sere forest. August drought, the first of Indian summer.

  “Judge wants to see you right away. A case like this, everyone likes to do the exact right thing. Make sure, you know. You want perfect procedure every step of the way, ’cause you’re lookin’ to get a real high conviction rate on your homicides.”

  Henry Brusett’s pulse surged against the drugs; he never had any secure notion of what to say, and rarely had there been much refuge in saying nothing.

  “But who knows?” the deputy speculated. “Things might not be as bad as they look right now. Look on the bright . . . Well, you never know how things’ll turn out. We got quite the legal system. You ever pray?”

  Henry looked away.

  When they reached the highway, Deputy Lovell, stung a little by Henry’s unsociable ways, hit his lights and siren, and they made ninety miles an hour getting to Law and Order, and when they reached it, Lovell hustled Henry straight into a holding cell, and he said, “They’ll book you after. So just sit tight, all right? Good luck, I guess.”

  The room was small and hard. His breathing echoed bluntly under the noises bouncing through the jail. There was a bench along the wall, and cinched as he was, the most comfortable thing he could do was sit on it and stare at his knees. From some other cell laughter burst now and again from a cheap television. Riveted walls, all within arm’s reach, a drain in the floor, the itch of old disinfectants in his nose, grain alcohol chief among them. This was not temporary; this was also not undeserved, but he had no reason to believe he could stand it. He wanted to tell them he was guilty and then to say no more.

  In a near room a load of laundry ran through a washer, and then a dryer, and the machines could be felt pulsing in their turn through the floor. A meal was served in the jail, but Henry wasn’t fed, not that he wished to be—only evil could come of anything he might trust to his stomach. The rhythms of the television and other barely audible events marked the passage of time, and at times a banging developed somewhere nearby. He had the comforting sense he’d been forgotten, misplaced, and when at last the cell door swung open, regret rushed in on a draft of fresher air. A pleasant young woman in riot gear and a ball cap awaited him in the hall. “Mr. Brusett.” She smiled and held fast to the black baton on her belt. She stood with her legs well braced. “Everything all right?”

  He was greasy with fear. “Sorry, I sure never meant to smell this bad.”

  “You’re a rose compared to some of ’em.”

  “Does Tubby still work here? Tubby Ginnings?”

  “He’s been night shift,” she said. “Sorry you had to wait so long. They were gettin’ everybody rounded up. Lotta times it’s just me and the accused guy at these things, these initials. So, see, you’re kind of a big deal now.” The girl’s eyes and mouth were too small for her face and somewhat misaligned. Thrust up by a Kevlar vest, her arms rode out and away from her torso like a wrestler’s. “Well, let’s get this done, Mr. Brusett. See what they want to do with you next.”

  The office of Aaron Mendenhal, justice of the peace, was filled like any other in the courthouse with houseplants and mementos from the home lives of bureaucrats, in this case a broken oar mounted on a wall, a bicycle wheel, and there were photographs of many Mendenhals, ranked by generation. The judge was robed and so ugly that it was hard to see any connection between him and the happy subjects of his family pictures. Henry Brusett could find no way to look past the spray of blackheads, the cratered nose, and even briefly into the man’s eyes. The judge spoke of the state of Montana as if it were someone else in that already-crowded room, someone unhappy, and he spoke of proceedings in another court, orders signed by another judge, and Henry Brusett stood as tall as he could make himself just before the desk on a patch of linoleum worn gray by worried feet. There were three of them behind him—the dumpling jailer, still winded from their climb to the third floor, and Hoot Meyers, and a sharp-chinned woman with a smashed mouth who wore a dark, heavy suit.

  All eyes on Henry Brusett, everyone inhaling his stench, and the judge had more information to offer than Henry could possibly take in, but he perfectly understood him to say, “A term of imprisonment of not less than ten, nor more than a hundred years.”

  Henry Brusett happened then to think of his son, Davey, who might very well still be in prison himself. Deer Lodge, he thought, must be the scene of many family reunions. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Not now,” said the judge. “Not here. Your case is bound over to district court. But I’m appointing Ms. Meany to represent you, and after you’ve had a chance to talk to her, I’ll set your bail.”

  “That’s all right, Judge,” said Hoot Meyers from behind. “The state will recommend a ten-thousand-dollar bail, with whatever release orders the court sees fit to impose.”

  “On a deliberate homicide, Mr. Meyers? Seriously?”

  “Seriously. He’s not going anywhere.”

  The woman came forward then, Henry Brusett’s attorney, and she made to shake his hand until she saw how near his groin it was strapped. “Giselle,” she told him. “I’m Giselle, okay?” And to no one in particular she said, “Does he have to be trussed up like this? Is this necessary?”

  “I don’t even have the keys with me.” The jailer made as if to search her belt for any sign of them. “The keys to this exact set of restraints. So I guess he’s k
ind of stuck with ’em until we can get him back to the jail.”

  “April,” the judge directed, for that was apparently the jailer’s name, “take Ms. Meany and her client back to the jury room and wait outside the door. It’s fine, there’s only one door to it, and he’s welcome to try the window if he wants. It’s a long fall. They have to have their privacy.”

  “I’m ready to just cooperate, if I could.” Henry Brusett’s pain took the shape of his several injuries, and, oddly, of a tree—a large trunk with many branches. “There’s no reason to drag this out.” He felt his attorney’s hand clutch his elbow, found himself being directed by April the jailer and Ms. Meany out of the office, down the hall, through the big courtroom with its rows of pews and its smell of carpet shampoo, and the lawyer showed him into the jury room, a stifling thing with one long table, many chairs, and a single window that occupied nearly all its west wall. April called to them through the door, “I’m supposed to be off work in twenty-six minutes, so kinda step it up in there, would you please?”

  The lawyer drew him into a far corner of the room before she asked if she might call him Henry. As a killer, he had noticed, he seemed to command a new level of courtesy. There was in this room a library of leather-bound ledgers dating from Prohibition, an incomplete but vast history of Conrad County’s transgressors. Toiling dust. Henry Brusett, still in his chains. Ms. Meany positioned him so that he couldn’t back away, and she told him, “They don’t have much of a case, Henry. If they can’t come up with a lot more than what the county attorney had in his affidavit, then I don’t, I can’t see how they’d get a conviction. They have to prove this charge now, and I don’t think they can do it.”

  “Is that what they think?”

  “Who knows?” Ms. Meany’s eyes were direct and of a yellow cast. “But it does seem like kind of a bluff to me. What they’re charging you with right now.”

  “I’d like to get it over with.” He feared the woman meant to believe in him.

  “You’re upset. You’ve been through some upsetting things, and it’s not a good time for you to be making any important decisions. Anyway, Judge Mendenhal can’t hear your plea. You can’t do that until your arraignment in district court when Judge Samara comes to town, and I doubt if that’s what we’ll do even then—enter any kind of plea just yet. This won’t be simple, Henry. It’s just not a simple thing, and there’s nothing anyone can do to make it that way. But we can get you through it.”

  “A fact,” he said, “is still kind of a fact. For me. I am really, really sorry about the way I smell. You don’t have to stand so close.”

  “They do not have a good case. That’s the point I want to emphasize, and that’s a point I want you to consider before you make any important decisions, before you talk to anyone. Even me, Henry. About anything. Right now you shouldn’t do much more than pass the time of day, and even then you’d better stick to weather chat. We’ll talk eventually. You and I. Pretty soon. We’ll decide what details we want to get into—but later, all right? For now we’ll just concern ourselves with getting you out of jail.”

  “They’d let me out?”

  His lawyer knew from papers already filed by the prosecution that he had a wife, and that, the lawyer said, meant he had ties to the community—a good thing. Did he have other warrants outstanding? No. A criminal history? None. Any troubles with his neighbors—restraining orders, public squabbles going on? No, no neighbors. Did he have a job? He was ashamed to say he didn’t. How much could he scrape together to pay a bondsman? Maybe six hundred dollars, the bare remains of his life’s savings.

  “Well,” she said, “you’re practically a knight in shining armor, Henry. And Meyers seems to think you’re okay. And it’s such a skimpy little case—I think we can get you out of here. Today, maybe.”

  “And I’d go home? They’d just let me go?” He had not expected to have his freedom any time soon, but from the moment its star rose in the east he was transfixed.

  “Sure. Well, maybe. You’ve got a lot of factors going for you.” Ms. Meany was a small woman lugging an insupportable will around, and she flung this at him, pressed him into a corner with it. Perhaps she wanted him at a disadvantage, or maybe she hadn’t noticed how he shrank from her, or maybe she didn’t know how to back away—she stood between Henry and all the rest of the room. “Promise me, no rash decisions. And no talking to anybody. Please? Can you do that for me?”

  “What happens if they let me out, and I hightail it?”

  “You wouldn’t do that.” She was innocent only in her faith in him. “But if you did, they’d catch you and drag you back here. They’d probably hit you with a bill for the transport, too, and you’d wind up paying for a lot of gas and overtime. Then you’d be absolutely stuck in jail until your case was finished. But you wouldn’t try and run, would you? There wouldn’t be any point in running. Right?”

  “Well, if you can get me out, that’d be real good. I can just about see myself stuck on a wall in that jail. It’s loud in there. Maybe louder than I can take.”

  So she took him back before the judge, and Ms. Meany spoke of his reliability; his lawyer went on at length about his absolute lack of any criminal record, his physical condition and its challenges, and she asked that her client be released on his own recognizance; the county attorney did not oppose her request. The judge, however, set bond at fifty thousand dollars, saying, “They’ve got you accused of doing something pretty bad here, Mr. Brusett, and I can’t see just sending you home on the promise that you wouldn’t do it again. It’s public safety I have to think about, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”

  April the jailer hied Henry back to jail as fast as she could make him mince down the stairs in his shackles, and Ms. Meany kept pace alongside, explaining, “What-an-asshole—well, anyway, do you own any vehicles worth five thousand? Five thousand to a bondsman, and you can get out of here. But the five thousand would be gone—or, you wouldn’t have anything worth fifty thousand or so? Do a property bond? You’d have to own it free and clear. In fact, that would probably be the only way. I just don’t see why he couldn’t set a reasonable bond, take in all the factors. But, do you have anything?”

  “Maybe the place,” said Henry, “our land.”

  “Okay. We’ll have to have a title search done before you can put that up. Maybe an appraisal.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “It can take weeks. It’s a real low priority for those folks down at the title company. They’ve never sat in jail, so it’s hard for them to understand how it might be a little urgent.”

  “Weeks, huh?”

  “We might get Judge Samara to lower the bond at arraignment, but I doubt it. I’ll think of something, maybe—and would you please get those chains off him now? I’ll be seeing you pretty soon, Henry. We’ll be talking soon, all right?”

  The Conrad County Law and Order Complex was built as a bunker and did not appear very large from outside, but inside there were dozens of enclosures, each room specific to some small purpose. April the jailer left him in one of these to change into his orange jumper, and when Henry emerged from it, she was gone. His cousin had come on shift. “Of anybody,” said Tubby Ginnings, “you’re the last guy I ever thought I’d see in here. Nobody’s heard a peep out of you for . . . ever, just about, and now look. Geez, Henry. You ever had your fingerprints done? It makes kind of a mess, but we gotta do it.” He was ideal to his calling, Tubby—night shift at the county jail—thirty years old and already thinking nightly of that adequate pension.

  “Has Karen come around? She bring some prescriptions by?”

  “She did, but the sheriff has to authorize those, tell us we can give ’em to you.”

  “Is he here?”

  “You kidding? He goes home to take his little nap at lunch, and usually he don’t come back.”

  “You can see my name right there on the bottles. They’re prescriptions. Can you call him? There’s a couple of those I can’t do without.
Pain pills.”

  “Sure,” said Tubby. “I’ll try. Now, when you get back there, there’s a guy named Leonard, and he’s on his way to Washington, or Mississippi, or our pen, or somewhere—eventually. There’s a bunch of places that want that guy. You know that three-strikes thing? Well, he must have about three dozen. At least he’ll never see the light of day, but right now he’s waiting on an appeal—or his lawyers are—and for some reason that makes him my customer. He tries to be kind of a badass in there. Sometimes.”

  “There’s no empty cells?” Henry Brusett needed a shower.

  “It’s not a Super 8.”

  “How about that holding cell? That first cell they had me in? That’d work fine for me.”

  “We could actually get in trouble if we left you in there too long. That’s isolation. The holding cell? Whattaya? Relax, nobody’ll hurt you in here. I run a pretty nice jail, cuz. Just keep an eye out for that Leonard, and you should be fine. Most guys prefer the barracks cell. It’s gin rummy to a zillion points in there, and that’s where the TV is.”

  “No,” said Henry involuntarily.

  “Come on,” said Tubby. “It’s not that bad. Here, you get two blankets—one of these can go away if you get in some trouble, not that I’d think you would—and your towel, itty-bitty bar of your own personal soap, your slippers—and, believe me, I wash these real good. I go through a gallon of Clorox a month, man. You’re not a smoker, are you? We give ’em one smoke a day, but it’s a lot more treat than the non-smokers ever get. One smoke a day, no exercise, and three squares. We had a woman once, a welfare cheat, she did thirty days and gained about thirty pounds. Boy, was her old man pissed when she came out. It’s starch that does it to ’em. But that’d be about the worst that could happen to you. Blow up a little bit and get fat. You’ll see.”

  “There’s gotta be someplace you can put me by myself. What do you have to do to get into solitary? What would I have to do to go in there?”