Acts of Love (21 page)

“Under what terms did Ted Waring leave your firm?” Reardon asked.

“He cheated his way out.”

Fisk jumped to his feet, exasperated. “Objection. This is all completely irrelevant and prejudicial.”

Carruthers nodded. “Where are you going with this, Mr. Reardon?”

“We plan on showing a conscious pattern of behavior on the part of the defendant,” Reardon claimed. “Lack of mistake,” he amended, in the official legal tongue.

Carruthers considered this tenuous reasoning for offering evidence of prior misbehavior. “I will hear this testimony outside of court and then make my decision.” She instructed the jury, all of whom had been taking copious notes except for a man with pockmarked skin and oily shoulder-length hair, who was staring off into space, that they would have to leave temporarily. Taken aback by what they could only see as a rebuke, they rose reluctantly, glancing over their shoulders as they exited, certain that they were somehow being cheated.

When the door swung closed behind them, Reardon proceeded. “Can you explain what you mean by ‘cheated his way out'?”

“I trusted him. My mistake, I admit that. But when I wasn't looking, he copied my files, all my financial information, suppliers' names, prospective clients, everything. He's lying to me the whole time, you understand, pretending all he cares about is helping the firm, pretending he's this stand-up guy. But he plotted this for months.”

Fisk was on his feet once more. “Objection. Mr. Parsell is offering nothing but unfounded opinions.”

Carruthers turned to the witness. “Again, Mr. Parsell, I must remind you please to try to stick to the facts.”

Parsell pursed his lips, annoyed. “He leaves one day with no notice to open his own shop, and he steals half my clients by underbidding me. Those are the facts. Don't people go to jail for insider trading?” he couldn't resist asking. “Or something?”

“Would you call Ted Waring an honest man?” Reardon asked.

“Haven't you been listening? This guy smiled at me every morning, he even asked me over to dinner, all while he's planning to destroy my business. I have a lot of words for that, but honest isn't one of them. Hell, I've never seen such a smooth liar, you want to know the truth.” He leaned, his sausage arms heavy on the banister, in Ted's direction, and Ted, meeting him head-on, thought only of a fatty slab of raw beef hanging in a butcher's window. He returned to studying the shadows on the wall behind the witness stand as they thinned and lengthened with the day.

“Mr. Parsell, the week after Ted Waring opened his business, did you pay a visit to his premises?”

“I did.”

“And can you tell the court what transpired on that occasion?”

“I just had to tell him what I thought, you know? I mean, he played me for a complete sucker. So I walk in there at ten in the morning. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I just wanted to see him for myself. Anyway, before I could get two words out, Waring takes one look at me and tells me if I ever come anywhere near his place again he'll have me taken care of.”

“What did you take that to mean, ‘taken care of'?”

Parsell snorted. “It was pretty clear what he meant. Call it a threat, okay? Look, to tell you the truth, I wasn't about to find out. I don't trust this guy. I think he's capable of anything. Anything.”

Reardon paused, letting the words hover. “I have no further questions.”

Both lawyers turned to the judge. “This testimony is irrelevant to the charge of manslaughter,” she ruled. “I will not allow it.”

Fisk allowed himself a brief smile.

“Instruct the jury to enter,” Carruthers ordered the bailiff.

As soon as the jury was resettled, peering into the faces before them for clues as to what had happened in their absence, testing the air for temperature changes, Fisk walked slowly to the witness stand, regarded Parsell disparagingly, and then turned to the jury. He shook his head before returning to the witness. “Mr. Parsell,” he began, “did you consistently promote Ted Waring while he was in your employ?”

“Yes, but…”

“And isn't it fair to say that you would only have promoted him if he was doing a good job?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“Did you trust him alone on job sites, where there were thousands of dollars of equipment at stake?”

“I may have.”

“Did he ever steal money from you, Mr. Parsell?”

“He stole my goddamned business.”

“I repeat my question. Did he ever steal money from you?”

“Not cash, no.”

“He worked with numerous contractors and clients. There were lots of opportunities for kickbacks, which, no offense, I understand is something of a problem in your industry. Was there any evidence that Mr. Waring partook of anything of that nature?”

“No. And I do take offense,
sir.
I wasn't aware that
your
profession was winning any cleanliness contests lately.”

The jury snickered and Fisk did, too; he had to. “Well,” he went on, “did any client ever complain to you about Mr. Waring?”

“No.”

“Was he ever late for work?”

“Not that I remember, but…”

“Did he forget to pay for his coffee? Anything? Anything at all, Mr. Parsell?”

“Nothing like that. He just…”

“Mr. Parsell, isn't it true that your company was so saddled with debt that you were forced to file for Chapter Eleven?”

“So?”

“Isn't it true that Ted Waring left your company only when you had little work to offer him?”

“He had work.”

“And isn't it also true that many of the clients who followed him did so because they were concerned about your solvency?”

“Our solvency would have been just fine if Waring hadn't stabbed me in the back.”

“You seem quite angry with him, Mr. Parsell.”

“I just don't like men you can't trust,” Parsell replied.

“Or men who are more successful than you?”

“Objection,” Reardon interrupted.

“I withdraw the question. Let's talk about this visit you paid to Waring and Freeman. Isn't it possible that Ted Waring was the one who felt threatened by your presence when you came storming in, looking for revenge?”

“I wasn't looking for revenge.”

“What were you looking for, Mr. Parsell?”

“I don't know.”

“I have no further questions.”

“He didn't feel threatened, he felt guilty,” Parsell spit out. “Guilty.”

Fisk objected, and the judge ruled that the last words be stricken from the record.

Still, when Parsell finally descended from the witness stand, he paused a foot from the defense table, and there was a sly, victorious shimmer in his eyes as he glanced down at Ted.

 

S
ANDY WAS THE ONLY WITNESS
who had been given a special dispensation allowing her to attend the trial even when she was not directly involved with the day's proceedings. But she had been forced to leave before Parsell finished testifying, for she had been given no such dispensation from work and was often caught trying to balance the two, slighting both in the process. She sat now in the rear of the third floor in the converted school building where the town council was holding a special meeting to discuss a replacement for the Hardison police chief, who after eighteen years of service had just made clear his intention to resign at the end of the month. Though there had been much grumbling about the short notice, rumors of a medical exigency—lung cancer? prostate?—had done much to silence the complaints. Sandy's eyes wandered to the unshaded windows, polished glass divisions between the gray outside and the gray within. Across the street, a garbage truck was picking up the purple, blue, and yellow bins in front of each house. The
Chronicle
had been filled lately with letters to the editor complaining of the inefficacy of the new recycling system. There were those, too, who did not quite believe that the contents of all the bins were not thrown together the minute they were out of sight. People wanted proof. She turned back to the long table in front of the room, where the six-person council sat with cardboard boxes of sugared donuts and paper cups of coffee littered about them. They seemed far away to her, faded, as if she were watching the proceedings on a desiccated piece of film, crackling and dry, the sound sputtering on and off. Even the increasingly strident voices did little to interest her. The notepad on her lap remained unmarked, the pen still.

Webb Johnson banged his hand on the table. “Goddamn it,” he said. “What's wrong with you people? You think you're gonna get some hotshot from downstate to come here? First of all, you won't. And second of all, why would you want to? What do we want a stranger for, that's the question. We got a deputy's been here for ten years serving this community, Officer Rick Gerard. No one knows the problems of this town better than him.” The council listened politely. Gerard was Johnson's brother-in-law, not a bad man, but not known for the scope of his intellect.

“Look, Webb,” Dina Frederickson began. “We all know Gerard's a fine policeman. But things are changing around here. The crime rate in Hardison has gone up close to four percent in the last year and a half. Now, I don't know about you, but that's not something I want to fool around with.”

At the mention of the crime rate, the members of the council looked anxiously to the back of the room at Sandy. They had long ago gotten used to her presence at these meetings, were even somewhat thrilled by it, and they would frequently look up surreptitiously to check whether she was taking notes when they spoke, hopeful that their names would appear in print. But they had become shy of her lately, and the very word “crime” only exacerbated their ill ease, for it clung to her, emitting its insidious odor from her pulse points, the back of her neck.

Dina Frederickson peered impatiently over her reading glasses, smiled perfunctorily, and returned to the business at hand. “Please, people, your attention.” There were those who said she was a little cranky since the business with Ann Waring. Her ex-husband's name was sure to come up in court. “We have a busy agenda,” she reminded her fellow council members. They followed her lead reluctantly.

Sandy remembered the children's game of staring, the contest to see who could hold another's gaze longer before looking away, laughing, embarrassed, bored. She had always won, could continue staring hard and expressionless and unwavering long after her opponent had given up. It was not a talent that led to popularity, but she prided herself on her control. She looked back at the members, one at a time, until their heads bent to the papers before them, and she did not write a word.

 

W
HEN SHE RETURNED
to her office an hour later, Sandy flipped on her computer and began to enter a summary of the meeting before she forgot it. Though she hadn't wanted to give them the pleasure of seeing her take notes, she knew that the meeting was important, and knew, too, that Ray Stinson was keeping an eye on her, reading her copy with more exacting attention, closely monitoring her mien. He was the nearest she had ever come to having a mentor, and she armed herself with objectivity when she was within his view, though she sometimes suspected that the very objectivity he so valued somehow disappointed him now, disappointed many, cheated them. She looked up and saw Peter Gorrick four desks away, typing rapidly. The soft padding of his fingers, click, click, click, annoyed her, and she lost her train of thought. She watched him for another minute and then rose and walked over to his desk, perching on the corner.

“So,” she said, leaning over him, “have you gotten your
Vanity Fair
contract yet?”

Gorrick looked up. “Excuse me?”

“Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you were trying to peddle this to one of the big glossies out of New York. Isn't that what people like you do?”

He took his fingers from the keyboard. “Just what do you mean by people like me?”

“You think you're so smooth, don't you? Mr. Charm.”

Gorrick looked away. One of his journalism professors had said to him that if he ever wanted to succeed, he would have to decide whether he wanted to be liked or wanted to be a good reporter. “Your problem is that you think you can be both,” he had told Peter. “When you decide which is more important to you, you'll figure out what kind of writer you can be.” Working for the college paper, and occasionally as a stringer for the Boston dailies, he had found it next to impossible to challenge people in an interview, and even when he did manage to ask an uncomfortable question, he tended immediately to fill the silence that greeted it with his own nervous chatter, as if he were most fearful of being thought rude. Later, when he wrote the piece up, he buried any negative slant so deep within the profile that he was the only one who could find it. “You have to have a point of view,” the same professor had insisted. And though Peter tried to defend his style by saying he wanted merely to present the facts and let the reader make up his own mind, he knew this wasn't true. It was this softness in his clips, he suspected, that had kept him from getting a job in a bigger market. And it was this softness that he was most determined to conquer in Hardison, tempering his copy until it was firm and resolute and could not be denied. Often at night, in the quiet of his apartment in town, he listened to tapes of old interviews, reread old stories, practicing how he would do them differently. Though lonely, he dated little and rarely went to bars or movies or other places where he might meet people. He did not plan on staying in Hardison any longer than necessary.