The Dreams of Ada (34 page)

JM:
Okay.

Moyer got out to help a customer. Kerner drove off east on Arlington through the waves of heat. He cut up the short, sharp ramp that led to the parking lot behind Wyatt, Austin & Associates. He reached into the backseat, under the towel, and checked the recorder. He had gotten it all on tape.

The investigator went inside, told Don Wyatt what he had; Wyatt smiled, shook his head, spit tobacco juice.

Now they had a fifth scenario to ponder: this Lurch, whoever he was, and someone who looked like Tommy Ward.

The mansions fronting Kings Road were familiar to Winifred Harrell as she drove her van to work each morning and home each evening. There was the Delaney mansion, built in the 1930s by Gus Delaney with oil money from the Fitts field; later sold by his widow, who now was living out her years in a smaller house next door. There was the house with an Olympic-sized swimming pool indoors, fed by an underground spring. There was the house of the woman Winifred believed was the richest person in town: built not by oil money, but by the profits from bingo parlors the woman ran in other parts of the state. Most of the pioneer oil speculators and their spouses were dead; many of the Kings Road mansions were owned now by the doctors who had treated them in their last years.

As she drove the familiar route, the five volumes of the Ward-Fontenot preliminary hearings on the seat beside her, Winifred was tired. For the past two weeks she had been working almost around the clock, taking the black-bound volumes home in the evenings, and on Saturdays and Sundays as well. She was going through the testimony of every witness, summarizing on paper for Don Wyatt the crux of what each one had said, noting the pages on which he could find their testimony. He would need this for his cross-examinations during the trial.

Winifred had read, too, Richard Kerner’s reports on his investigations to date; they had altered her opinion of the case. In the beginning she had been as convinced as all of her Kings Road neighbors that Ward and Fontenot were guilty, and would be convicted. For eight months, despite working professionally in Ward’s defense, she had retained that personal opinion. Now, in the past two weeks, for the first time, she wasn’t sure. These other possible suspects…these other trucks…these other scenarios. Now Winifred Harrell did not know what to believe.

Don Wyatt was not liked by most of the lawyers in Ada: perhaps because of his personality, which could be abrasive; perhaps because they were jealous of his earnings, his offices; most likely a combination of both. He was close to, and proud of, his wife, Jean, a psychiatric social worker. Beyond that his good friends were few. The closest was his office business manager, Bill Willett, a hearty, bluff, energetic man whose explosive laughter, upon his hearing a joke over the telephone, boomed through the entire building, which seemed to revolve around his central, unwalled desk. It was with Bill Willett that the lawyer often went hunting birds or shooting skeet, his favorite outdoor recreations. Beyond that, Wyatt was an indoor man, and a private man. He had a talent for painting when he found the time: a skillfully rendered scene of pheasants in flight hung behind the front desk of his receptionist, Judy Wood, and was the first thing visitors saw upon entering the building. He liked to read; needing only four or five hours of sleep each night, he stayed up in the dark hours devouring novels. His tastes were catholic: a small shelf above his desk, holding a handful of books, was divided between Stephen King and Philip Roth; he was one of the very few people in Ada to cherish a copy of
Portnoy’s Complaint
. His own secret dream was to write a novel and get it published. He had written most of one once: five hundred pages, single-spaced. With uncharacteristic carelessness he had not made a duplicate. He had kept the manuscript in his office on Main Street, because he thought it would be safer there than in his home. Then the office building had burned down. Along with the countless legal files that had to be reconstructed, he lost his novel. In his mind now was an idea for another one, if he ever found the time: a novel about the corruption of justice in a small town.

Wyatt was proud: proud of his large civil practice, the fifth or sixth biggest in the state; and proud of some dramatic victories in criminal cases. In one of his first cases, in 1977, he defended a woman who was accused of murdering her lover; she had run him over several times with her car; the prosecution was seeking the death penalty. Wyatt demonstrated that his client was a “battered wife”; she was found guilty of manslaughter in the second degree, and got a two-year sentence. He handled a triple-homicide case involving an auto accident, and got the defendants off on a misdemeanor. He defended a woman who was accused of shooting her husband five times; the man was wheeled into the courtroom in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic as a result of the shooting. Wyatt demonstrated that the man was a drug user, and a wife-beater; he won an acquittal. The wife had said the husband was coming after her with a gun when she shot him; the husband said he was in bed, preparing to sleep. But he’d had his pants on, his keys in his pocket, when he was shot; the jury believed the wife.

These and other cases, he believed, had created a kind of aura in the town, the aura that “Wyatt wins.” He was hoping it might intimidate the district attorney’s office, even in the Ward case.

Some people viewed Wyatt as a bully; some of those close to him thought his forceful manner was a cover for insecurity. Whatever his inner feelings, he clearly could adopt a bullying stance when it suited his purposes. Such was the mood Tricia found him in when she went to his office on Tuesday, September 3. He had called and said he wanted to see her and members of the family. Tricia rounded up her mother and Kay and went down there, and found the lawyer angry with them. He was angry about money.

They had given him $5,000 to date, Wyatt told them (most of it from Joel); much of this had gone to the private investigator; some for the transcript; some to a psychiatrist who examined Tommy in the jail. There was only $500 for his own fee. He wanted something settled about the house; he was not going into the courtroom next Monday to defend Tommy unless they settled first about the house.

This was pure bluff and bluster. Once Wyatt took the case, his fee was his own problem; the court would not have let him withdraw because he wasn’t being paid. He had told that to Tricia at the beginning; she remembered it now. But she didn’t want him angry like that.

Miz Ward said she’d had an offer of $15,000 for the house and the property on which it stood; Wyatt said that would not be settled by Monday. He wanted her to sign over the deed to him, now, though the original agreement gave them until October 25 before he was entitled to the house. Miz Ward smiled blandly, not seeming to understand. Tricia told her to go ahead and sign the deed, pointing out that Miz Ward did not want the house anyway, that she preferred living in Tulsa now.

Miz Ward agreed. She signed over to the lawyer the house she’d moved into in 1938, the day Jesse planted the pecan tree. When that was done, Wyatt’s attitude changed. Suddenly he was their friend again. He told them about Richard Kerner’s findings. They were encouraged; they felt that after all these months, Wyatt was finally working full speed on the case.

He told them about the trial procedure. He said they should dress well. He said those who were not witnesses should be in the courtroom as much as possible, showing support for Tommy. Miz Ward should hug him whenever possible, he said. Miz Ward said she had done that anyway, at the preliminary hearing, and an officer told her he was about to shoot her when she first moved toward Tommy. After that she had always asked permission. Wyatt told her, “Don’t ask permission. Just ignore them and go hug him. That carries weight with the jury. So does support by the family in the courtroom.”

He told them he wanted as many family members as possible present during the jury selection, so they could tell him, or write notes to him, about any prospective jurors who’d had fights with the family, who might have grudges against family members; so he could reject them as jurors; and, in the same way, to point out to him any people they knew had good feelings about the family, so he could try to keep them on.

He also mentioned a woman who had called his office to say she had information that would “definitely” exonerate Tommy. She was coming to see him on Wednesday.

Buoyed by this, and by the investigator’s findings, Tricia, Kay, and Miz Ward left the attorney’s office feeling optimistic. His anger at not being paid was forgiven; he was working hard for Tommy.

When they got home, Tricia fixed on an idea that wouldn’t go away. The woman who had called, who had said she could definitely exonerate Tommy: who better could prove he was innocent than Denice Haraway! Perhaps it was Denice Haraway herself who had called! Or if not her, then someone who knew her, someone who had seen her alive!

That night, obsessed with the possibility, the hope, Tricia could hardly sleep. Her mind was going ninety-to-nothin’.

On Wednesday afternoon, she called Wyatt, to find out. He told her that yes, the woman had shown up. But if she had any real information, he said, she had become frightened and had not told him. What she did have to say, the lawyer told Tricia, “didn’t amount to a hill of beans.”

The Indians of Oklahoma once lived in harmony with the wealth of the land, as did Indians across America. Now, most of them lived close to the poverty level, victims of culture shock, poor education, racial prejudice—as were Indians across America.

Days before the trial was to begin, a poor Indian woman was stabbed to death amid a cluster of mobile homes at the southern edge of Ada. The police detained her husband briefly, then released him. Apparently there were no witnesses, or none that would talk to the police. The killing was the subject of a brief item in the Ada
News
the next day; then it disappeared from public view, quickly forgotten.

Maxine and C. L. Wolf wondered aloud why this Indian woman’s life seemed to mean nothing to the authorities, while they were still pursuing the Haraway case after a year and a half, in the absence of a body.

They wondered aloud, but they felt they knew the answer: the dark-skinned and the poor did not count for much, in Ada or anywhere else.

Don Wyatt told Miz Ward he wanted Tommy to have a clean, pressed suit to wear, every day of the trial. She was relieved to discover that Bud’s suits fit Tommy; he could wear those. Then she was called by a deputy at the jail, and was told to bring over a suit for Karl; he could not be tried in his prison garb; that would be prejudicial.

Miz Ward did not know why it was her responsibility to supply Karl; she knew him, but not well; she had not even been to visit him. But by her quiet, retiring nature, and her general bewilderment at the way the world worked, she was not one to question authority. She went to the Salvation Army store a few blocks from Tricia’s house and picked out a rust-colored, three-piece suit, in good condition, marked “$15.” She was able to buy it for ten dollars—more than she could afford—along with a shirt. The Saturday before the trial she brought them to the jail.

Only later did she learn that the deputy thought Miz Ward was in possession of Karl’s clothing.

Don Wyatt held a Sunday meeting at his office with George Butner, Fontenot’s attorney. Butner had been unable to obtain money from the state to hire a private investigator; Wyatt filled him in on Richard Kerner’s latest scenarios. In mounting the defense, they agreed, Butner would have to follow Wyatt’s lead. Wyatt had told Tricia and Miz Ward he thought they had a fifty-fifty chance of getting the boys off. Butner was not that optimistic. He did not see how they would get around the tapes.

At the jail, waiting, Karl Fontenot used an evocative phrase to a visiting journalist. He said he felt “lost in the case.”

Bill Peterson went to church with his family, then went home, his mind, too, going ninety-to-nothin’, as not he but Tricia would have said. The sun was blazing outside, the temperature on September 8 still in the nineties. Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers and Mike Baskin and Chris Ross waited. Steve Haraway, in from Norman for the duration of the trial, was at the home of his parents, east of Ada. He, and they, waited. Judge Donald Powers, at his home in Chandler, packed a suitcase; he would drive the eighty miles to Ada in the morning, would stay at the Raintree Motel on Mississippi, a Best Western motel.

In the evening, many of the people of Ada went to church, as was the Baptist practice. Some drove to Wintersmith Park, and walked around the lake in the humid air, watching the ducks and geese glide on the surface. Students from East Central played touch football. On Main Street, Sunday traffic was light, as usual. One of the films showing at the McSwain Twin was a James Bond picture:
A View to a Kill
. Atop the highest turret of the feed mill a red light flashed, flashed, as it did every night.

Bud and Tricia had fifteen people staying in their cluttered three-bedroom house: themselves and the three children; Miz Ward; Melvin; Joice and her four kids, down from Tulsa; Kay and Billy and their infant son, also down from Tulsa. Joel and Robert would be arriving Sunday night. Mattresses were strewn on the floor everywhere; and babies; and children. But unexpectedly amid the chaos, there was an evening of quiet. Joice’s husband, Robert, when he arrived from Tulsa, took one look around the jammed house and took Joice and their four kids to the Indian Hills Motel, on Broadway, to give Tricia some peace. For a few hours, Bud, Tricia, their own three children, and Miz Ward were alone there. The calm seemed almost unnatural amid the clutter.

Tricia shooed the kids to their room, went in to put them to sleep. Bud and Miz Ward sat in the living room. Most times the TV set would have been on; the TV was always on, whether anyone was watching it or not. But now the tube was dark, silent, its innards burned out by the lightning. In retrospect, even that lightning storm seemed to have a meaning: the broken set would spare them from seeing the nightly reports of the trial on the news.