The Case Against William Page 13

  "Let's go up to the clubhouse. Time for a drink."

  The sun sat low in the sky and transformed the wispy clouds hanging at the horizon into an orange-and-yellow masterpiece of nature. The sunsets always gave Frank hope; he had survived another day. They collected sand dollars on the walk back.

  "We're in the chips now."

  Frank tossed two sand dollars into the pile in the center of the card table.

  "Whoa, we got us a big spender tonight," Dwayne said.

  Frank was holding only a pair of fours, but Dwayne was always a sucker for a bluff.

  "Practiced a little law today," Frank said. "Hence, the Jim Beam."

  He had ridden the bike—he had no car, just a big-wheeled Schwinn with a basket up front, and there was no law in Texas against biking while drunk—to the store in town and bought four T-bone steaks and a fifth of whiskey for their Saturday night card game. Chuck had grilled the steaks on the Weber, and now they played cards and drank bourbon on the back porch of the bungalow. They each wore reading glasses; the curse of middle age. Dwayne smoked a cigar, Chuck a cigarette, and Chico a joint. Being a drunk himself, Frank tried not to judge, so long as Chico stayed downwind. A single sixty-watt light bulb dangled from above and illuminated the table sufficiently to make out the cards. Willie Nelson's "Phases and Stages" drifted out the open windows.

  "I liked him better when he was young," Chuck said.

  "He's eighty," Dwayne said. "You weren't alive when Willie was young."

  Dwayne Gentry was fifty-six and an ex-homicide cop from Houston. Born and raised in the Fifth Ward, he was big and black and educated by the U.S. Army. Twenty-two years on the job, he had taken early retirement; in fact, he had been kicked off the force for being drunk on duty. Frank had known him from the old days; he was a good cop. He got the bad guys. He did the job the right way. But he had fallen hard for the wrong woman. A married white woman. And he had fallen alone; when he hit the ground, he didn't get up. Instead, he started drinking. He was already a bona fide drunk by the time Frank picked up the bottle, but Frank was a fast learner. Dwayne had stumbled into Rockport a year ago.

  "Your son, that was a hell of a pass," Dwayne said. "Last second win over Oklahoma, that's got to feel good."

  "Man, I'd love to get a tape, break the game down," Chuck said.

  Chuck Miller studied game film as if he were still coaching. He was white, forty-nine, and stocky. He had grown up in Uvalde and won a football scholarship to SMU, back before the NCAA had given the school the death penalty in the eighties when it came to light that boosters (including the governor of Texas) had paid players. Chuck had played strong safety and was known for leading with his head; consequently, he had inflicted and suffered numerous concussions. He had been a good player, but not good enough to be paid by the boosters or the pros. After graduating with a degree in football, he hired on at a Houston high school to coach football. He promptly fell head over heels for the nineteen-year-old senior drum majorette. Her mother discovered their affair and reported him to the principal. He was promptly arrested for having an "improper relationship between an educator and a student." It was consensual sex with a female above the age of legal consent; she was an adult under the law and dated men older than Chuck. But those facts were not defenses to the offense. She was a student; he was an educator (although his lawyer had argued that a football coach could not be considered an educator under any known definition of the word). Which made their affair a second-degree felony under Texas law. For him, not her. He was a twenty-three-year-old coach just out of college and working his first job. It would be his last. The judge gave Chuck probation; the school district gave him a termination notice. Twenty-six years later, he still harbored dreams of getting back in the game. But it was hard enough to get hired in Texas after coaching a losing season, much less after screwing the drum majorette. He would never get back in the game. Chuck had found his way to Rockport five years before Frank fell face down in the sand.

  "I'd've given my left nut to be as good as your boy," Chuck said.

  "Hell, you could've given the right one too, much as you're using them," Dwayne said.

  Chuck grasped the football he always carried as if to throw a pass. He carried the ball like old women carried poodles; he thought it kept him in the game.

  "You know how rich your boy's gonna be in a few months? And playing quarterback for the Cowboys, man, he's gonna have to beat those Dallas girls off with a stick. Wonder if the team still bans the players from dating the cheerleaders? Always seemed like a harsh rule to me."

  "That kind of wondering about cheerleaders is what put you on this beach."

  "She was a majorette."

  "She was a student."

  Chuck shrugged. "Girls are my weakness."

  "When's the last time you were with a girl?"

  "In what sense?"

  "The Biblical sense."

  "Does phone sex count?"

  "Those call-ins you pay for?"

  "Yeah."

  "No. In-person sex."

  "Oh. Well, that really limits the sample size. Let's see, that would've been eleven years ago. No … twelve. I think."

  "Girls ain't your weakness, Chuck. Delusional thinking, that's your weakness."

  "Least my delusions aren't married."

  "My wife's married," Chico said. "But not to me."

  Chico Duran was fifty-two and an ex-con. He started his career in crime knocking over ATMs and then quickly graduated to bank robbery. The electronic variety. He never stuck a gun to a bank teller's head; just a few mouse clicks, and he transferred $50,000 to the Cayman Islands. Thirteen times. Chico maintained that he was simply striking a blow for working class Americans. "The government loans the big banks trillions at zero percent interest rate, then they turn around and charge thirty percent on our credit card debt. What is that but highway robbery? But I go to jail?" He did. Five years in a federal penitentiary. He remained indignant over his conviction to that day. He had called Rockport home the longest.

  "Frank," Chico said, "how much money you make lawyering other lawyers?"

  "Fifty bucks per session."

  "On a monthly basis."

  "Good month, five hundred."

  "Five hundred? Man, I can get you a thousand, and you don't have to meet with lawyers."

  Like a doctor saying you didn't need a digital rectal exam this visit.

  "Tax-free money, Frank. Everyone's riding that government gravy train. You ought to jump on before all the gravy's gone."

  Chico had found a less detectable crime than bank robbery: Medicaid fraud. Specifically, obtaining disability payments through false pretenses. He had forged the necessary documents, and eight weeks later received his first disability check. That was four years ago.

  "Two months, I'll have you on the payroll. Lifetime benefit."

  Frank had always declined Chico's offer. He still held out hope of getting sober and his law license reinstated. A federal Medicaid fraud charge wouldn't further the cause.

  "And the beauty of it is," Chico said, "so many folks are doing it, you get lost in the pile. Almost no chance of getting caught."

  "Almost."

  "Ain't no guarantees in life, Frank."

  An ex-cop, an ex-coach, an ex-con, and an ex-lawyer. All the exes of life. Castaways adrift in a harsh, unforgiving world. Each a loser in his own right. Everyone gets the opportunity to screw up his life, some more than others. Each of them had taken full advantage of his opportunities. Each dreamed of recapturing his old life, but then, dreamers and losers were next of kin.

  "Panama," Dwayne said.

  Chuck and Chico groaned. Dwayne was always researching foreign locations to live where his police pension would go farther than in the U.S. Chuck and Chico said nothing; they knew not to encourage him. But Frank enjoyed Dwayne's calculations. Sometimes he sounded almost rationale.

  "Panama?" Frank said.

  "Yep. They use the U.S. dollar as their currency, but it's worth a
lot more. You can live like a king down there. Everything's cheap. Housing, food, whiskey"—he held up his stogie—"cigars, cost you nothing down there. It's like going back to the fifties."

  "You want to live in Panama?"

  "I want to live someplace I can afford to live. Hell, I came down here figuring it would be cheaper than Houston, but all the Houston people are moving here, driving up the price of whiskey."

  "If you want cheap," Chuck said, "why don't you move to Cambodia, eat fish and rice?"

  "No cable TV."

  Chuck grunted. "No ESPN, that would be a deal-breaker."

  "But if you put your money in a bank in Panama," Frank said, "it might not be there tomorrow. There's no deposit insurance, and those governments down there, they're like Greece—one day you wake up and the government decides to take ten percent of everyone's bank account."

  Dwayne shook his head. "You don't take your money down there, Frank. You leave it here. I'm not gonna offshore my money—I'm gonna offshore myself."

  "Offshore yourself?"

  "Yeah. See, rich guys like Romney, they stay here but send their money offshore. Poor folks like us, we leave our money here and send ourselves offshore."

  It almost sounded rationale. Dwayne tossed his cards on the table.

  "I'm busted."

  He stood and pulled out his small Mag flashlight as if pulling his weapon on a suspect. Beyond the light from the bungalow, the beach lay dark.

  "I'm gonna have to dig up some more chips."

  He took a step toward the sea just as a phone rang. Frank and Chuck did not react because neither had a cell phone. Dwayne and Chico checked theirs.

  "Not mine."

  "Or mine."

  Another ring.

  "It's from inside," Dwayne said. "I didn't know your landline worked, Frank."

  "News to me. I thought they had pulled the plug for nonpayment."

  Another ring. Frank was content to let it ring, but Dwayne was already up. He stepped inside and found the phone; he answered.

  "Tucker estate."

  He said nothing for a moment.

  "Jail? Your one call?"

  He returned to the porch with an odd expression on his face.

  "Frank … it's your son."

  Chapter 18

  The desk sergeant sniffed the air like a bird dog on a hunt then eyed the four men as if they were suspects.

  "Smells like a brewery. You boys been drinking?"

  It was the next afternoon. They had piled into Chico's 4x4 SUV that morning and driven the two hundred miles to Austin. Four drunks in one car for three and a half hours. Who would still be sober?

  "We're drunks, Sergeant," Frank said. "So, yeah, we've been drinking." He gestured at Chico. "Well, he's been smoking dope."

  The sergeant regarded Chico over his reading glasses. Chico gave him a stoned grin.

  "Little old for that sort of thing, don't you think, amigo? Just 'cause you got that ponytail, don't make you Willie."

  The sergeant had amused himself. They had parked on Tenth Street in front of the old courthouse in downtown and walked through the plaza and a gauntlet of cameras with logos not of news networks but of cable sports channels; consequently, a carnival atmosphere prevailed on the plaza. They did not appear important in their beach attire, so their presence warranted no media attention. They now stood at the public reception desk inside the Travis County Jail; the sergeant stood on the other side. His nametag read "Sgt. Murphy." His red Irish face said he was no stranger to alcoholic beverages.

  "Just the lawyer."

  Frank turned to Dwayne (clamping an unlit cigar in his teeth), Chuck (holding a football), and Chico (eating Cheetos) and then back to the sergeant. He tried to keep a straight face when he said, "They're part of the defense team."

  The sergeant could not keep a straight face.

  "Defense team? They look like the Beach Boys on their fiftieth reunion tour."

  He had amused himself again.

  "Boys, they were good. Dead Man's Curve, I loved that song."

  "That was Jan and Dean," Frank said, "not the Boys."

  "Really?" The sergeant grunted. "Aw, hell, it's Sunday, no one's here. All right."

  He waved them all back but gestured at Chuck's football and shook his head.

  "He won't sign it. Asked him to sign a ball for my boy, promised I wouldn't put it on eBay—he told me to drop dead." Back to Frank: "Your son, he's a bit of a jerk, but he is a hell of a football player."

  "White boy gonna play football for the Huntsville Inmates 'stead of the Dallas Cowboys. Gonna score license plates instead of touchdowns. Gonna get paid two dollars an hour instead of two hundred million. Gonna—"

  "Kick your ass if you don't shut the fuck up."

  The other guests of the Travis County Jail fell silent. The black dude with the big mouth looked as if someone had told him his father was white.

  "What … what you say?"

  "You're stupid. Are you deaf too?"

  William stood in one corner of the large holding cell. The black dude sat in the opposite corner with his homeboys. He pushed himself up off the concrete floor and sauntered over with his pimp roll. He was lean and muscular, a street thug. William was bigger, stronger, and younger.

  "What you say?"

  "I said, I'm gonna kick your ass if you don't shut the fuck up."

  "You a tough white boy, is that it?"

  "Tough enough to kick your black ass, homey."

  "Homey?"

  The dude grinned. But not because he thought William's comment was funny. William had lived with black guys from the 'hood the last four years—like all major college football powerhouses, UT recruited black players from the inner cities of Houston and Dallas because they were the ticket to bowl game revenues—so he knew every move in the 'hood book. There were no rules on the street; there were only predators and prey. The dude's first move would be to fake the grin and then laugh—

  He laughed.

  —and then he would turn back to his bros and turn his palms up, as if saying, What am I supposed to do with this silly-ass white boy?—

  He turned back to the other black inmates and turned his palms up.

  —which move he hoped would lure William into a false sense of security, which security would be brutally violated when he suddenly whipped around and sucker punched the silly-ass white boy. Sure enough, the dude's right fist clenched behind him and his shoulders started rotating toward William and his fist came up and around and his head spun around and—

  William drove his huge fist into the dude's chin so hard he heard the jaw cartilage crack just as he had heard so many knee cartilages crack on the football field. The dude was out before his body hit the floor. William stared at the dude's bros.

  "Anyone else want to fuck with me?"

  "William Tucker!" the jail guard shouted. "Your lawyer's here."

  Sitting in the chair on the visitor's side of the Plexiglas partition in the interview room, Frank felt a distinct sense of deja vu. As if he had been there before. His brain fought through the fog of whiskey and found the memory. He had been there before. In this same cubicle. Facing Bradley Todd.

  But it wasn't the same. Bradley Todd was not his son.

  Frank hadn't spoken to or seen his son in two years, except on the old television. When the guard escorted an inmate wearing a green-and-white striped uniform into the interview room, Frank almost didn't recognize his son. At twenty, he had been a boy, albeit a big boy, lean and sinewy; at twenty-two he was an action-figure, with a massive chest, broad shoulders, and thick arms with veins that looked like blue cords. His bulky body stretched the uniform to the breaking point and filled the space in the cubicle on his side of the glass. He remained standing. Frank wanted desperately to embrace his son, but more than the one inch of glass separated father and son. William spoke, but Frank couldn't hear him. He picked up the phone on his side and pointed to the phone on his son's side. William put the phone to his face and spoke
again.

  "This is bullshit! I didn't kill anyone! I didn't rape anyone! These fucking idiots got the wrong guy! I'm innocent!"

  Frank had come to the jail as a father even though he hadn't been much of a father to his son since he had started drinking six years before; and he likely wouldn't be his son's lawyer because his license was suspended. The father in him knew that his son could never have committed such violent acts against a girl; but the lawyer in him wanted to ask that question—"Did you do it?"—so he felt a sense of relief to hear his son say those two words: I'm innocent. Those words led in one direction—dismissal of the charges before trial or acquittal at trial—while I'm guilty would have led in another direction—a plea and prison.

  "They act like they don't know who the hell I am! I can't believe they made me stay here overnight—they didn't even give me a private room!"

  As if he were on a road trip with the team instead of in the county jail.

  "Get me the fuck out of here!"

  Not "Hi, Dad. Good to see you after two years." But perhaps that was expecting too much. His son was in jail charged with rape and murder. He was breathing hard. Blood spotted the knuckles on his right hand.

  "What happened?"

  "Fight. Back in the cellblock."

  "You okay?"

  "This time. Next time I'll have to fight five brothers."

  William dropped the phone and paced the cubicle; he was hyped up on adrenaline and anger. Frank gave him time to calm. After a few minutes, William's respiration noticeably eased; he sat down hard in the chair on his side and blew out a big breath. The adrenaline resided, and his big body calmed. Frank leaned forward in his chair, but his son leaned back, as if trying to escape. But there was nowhere to go. He regarded Frank a long moment then picked up the phone.