Ralph said, “You’re a fine defense attorney, but God himself couldn’t get Maitland out from under this one. And by the way, there might have been twelve hundred people there, fifteen hundred at most. Estelle Barga Field won’t hold two thousand. The bleachers would collapse.”
Gold ignored this feeble stab at lightening the atmosphere. He was staring at Ralph as though he were some new kind of bug. “But you arrested him in a public place, at what one could argue was the moment of his apotheosis—”
“His apothie-whatsis?” Samuels asked, smiling.
Gold ignored this, as well. He was still studying Ralph. “You did it even though you could have put a quiet police presence around the field and then arrested him at his home, after the game was over. You did it in front of his wife and daughters, which had to be deliberate. What possessed you? What on God’s green earth possessed you?”
Ralph felt his face heating up again. “You really want to know, counselor?”
“Ralph,” Samuels said warningly. He put a restraining hand on Ralph’s arm.
Ralph shook it off. “I wasn’t the one who arrested him. I had a couple of officers do that, because I was afraid I might put my hands around his throat and choke him blue. Which would give a smart lawyer like you a little too much to work with.” He stepped forward, getting into Gold’s space to make him stop the back and forth rocking. “He grabbed Frank Peterson and took him to Figgis Park. There he raped the kid with a tree branch, and there he killed him. Do you want to know how he killed him?”
“Ralph, that’s privileged!” Samuels squawked.
Ralph paid no attention. “Preliminary forensics suggests he tore the kid’s throat open with his teeth. He may even have swallowed some of the flesh, okay? All that got him so excited that he dropped trou and spilled his spunk all over the back of the kid’s thighs. Nastiest, vilest, most unspeakable murder any of us will ever see, God willing. He must have been building up to it for a long time. None of us who were at the scene will ever get it out of our minds. And Terry Maitland did it. Coach T did it, and not so long ago he had his hands on my son’s hands, showing him how to bunt. He just told me all about it, like it was supposed to exonerate him, or something.”
Gold was no longer staring at him like he was a bug. Now there was a kind of wonder on his face, as if he had stumbled upon an artifact left behind by some unknowable extraterrestrial race. Ralph didn’t care. He was beyond caring.
“You’ve got a boy yourself—Tommy, right? Isn’t that why you started coaching Pop Warner with Terry, because Tommy was playing? He had his hands on your son, too. And now you’re going to defend him?”
Samuels said, “For Christ’s sake, shut your trap.”
Gold had stopped rocking, but he gave no ground, and he was still staring at Ralph with that expression of almost anthropological wonder. “Didn’t even interview him,” he breathed. “Didn’t. Even. I have never . . . I have never . . .”
“Oh, come on,” Samuels said with forced jollity. “You’ve seen everything, Howie. Most of it twice.”
“I want to conference with him now,” Gold said briskly, “so turn off your audio shit and close the curtain.”
“Fine,” Samuels said. “You can have fifteen minutes, then we’ll join you. See if the coach has anything to say.”
Gold said, “I will have an hour, Mr. Samuels.”
“Half an hour. Then we’ll either take his confession—which could conceivably make a difference between life in McAlester and the needle—or he’s going into a cell until his arraignment on Monday. Up to you. But if you think we did this lightly, you were never more wrong in your life.”
Gold went to the door. Ralph swiped his card across the lock, listened to the clunk as the double bolts let go, then returned to the window to watch the attorney enter. Samuels tensed when Maitland rose from his seat and started toward Gold with his arms out, but the expression on Maitland’s face was one of relief, not aggression. He embraced Gold, who dropped his boxy briefcase and hugged him back.
“Bro hug,” Samuels said. “Ain’t that just the sweetest.”
Gold turned as if he had heard, and pointed to the camera with its little red light. “Turn it off,” came his voice through the overhead speaker. “Sound as well. Then draw the curtain.”
The switches were on a wall-mounted console that also held audio and video recorders. Ralph flipped them. The red light on the camera in the corner of the interview room went out. He nodded to Samuels, who yanked the curtain. The sound it made as it covered the glass brought Ralph an unpleasant memory. On three occasions—all before Bill Samuels’s day—Ralph had attended executions at McAlester. There was a similar curtain (perhaps made by the same company!) over the long glass window between the execution chamber and the viewing room. It was pulled open when the witnesses entered the viewing room, and closed as soon as the prisoner was pronounced dead. It made that same unpleasant rasping sound.
“I’m going across the street to Zoney’s for a soda and a burger,” Samuels said. “I was too nervous to eat any dinner. Do you want anything?”
“I could do with a coffee. No milk, one sugar.”
“You sure? I’ve had Zoney’s coffee, and they don’t call it the Black Death for nothing.”
“I’ll take the chance,” Ralph said.
“Okay. I’ll be back in fifteen. If they break early, don’t start without me.”
No chance of that. As far as Ralph was concerned, this was now Bill Samuels’s show. Let him have all the glory, if there was any to be had in a horror like this. There were chairs lining the far side of the hall. Ralph took the one next to the photocopier, which was droning softly in its sleep. He stared at the drawn curtain and wondered what Terry Maitland was saying in there, what outlandish alibi he was trying out for his Pop Warner co-coach.
Ralph found himself thinking of the big Native American woman who had picked Maitland up at Gentlemen, Please and taken him to the train station in Dubrow. I coach Prairie League basketball down at the YMCA, she’d said. Maitland used to come down and sit on the bleachers with the parents and watch the kids play. He told me he was scouting talent for City League baseball . . .
She had known him, and he must have known her—given her size and ethnicity, she’d be a hard woman to forget. Yet in the cab he had called her ma’am. Why was that? Because even if he knew her face from the Y, he didn’t remember her name? That was possible, but Ralph didn’t like it much. As names went, Willow Rainwater wasn’t all that forgettable, either.
“Well, he was under stress,” Ralph muttered, either to himself or to the drowsing photocopier. “Also . . .”
Another memory came to him, and with it a reason for Maitland’s use of ma’am that he liked better. His kid brother, Johnny, three years younger, had not been much good when it came to hide-and-seek. Many times he’d just run into his bedroom and throw the covers over his head, apparently thinking that if he couldn’t see Ralphie, Ralphie couldn’t see him. Wasn’t it possible that a man who had just committed a terrible murder might be prone to the same sort of magical thinking? If I don’t know you, you don’t know me. Mad logic, sure, but it had been a madman’s crime, and it could explain more than just Terry’s reaction to Rainwater; it could explain why he’d thought he could get away with it even though he was well-known to lots of folks in Flint City, and an actual celebrity to sports fans.