BLIND TRIAL Brian Deer (best novels for beginners TXT) 📖

gas station, Luke had switched over to quiz mode. Now he’d attempt a cross-examination. He was a motel roach on deception. He often claimed to detect a “change in the light,” or a “smell” he picked up off a lie. And, once he got that, his antennae would twitch, he’d say “So…” and go beetling in.

“So… The foxy lady. The doc in San Francisco. She slap you when you opened the drapes?”

“Nah. Klingon thing. Gets me off. And don’t talk with your mouth full. It sucks.”

Years had passed since he’d tried to snow job Luke. It was better to have him inside the tent. He never got mad except once, way back, when a plate went missing from St. Savior’s. If Luke heard gunfire, caught Ben with a dead woman, a smoking .45, and blood on his face, he’d click with his tongue, step over the corpse, shower, and go to the gym.

“So… You remember to block your SIM card? Yeah? Or there’s guys getting free calls on your Samsung.”

Undistracted, Luke would gnaw, triangulate facts, and eventually spit back a narrative. He’d repeat the best parts like a bedroom confidence, or a courtroom summation to the bench. “And so, your honor, my client’s associates killed Ms. Glinski with a lethal injection because, at the time, it appeared to them to be a commercially prudent course of action.”

But Luke could keep his nose out. He needn’t know the story. This wasn’t cheating at cards.

Ben gazed at the sky. “Looks like rain coming.”

“So… You were saying. Henry’s pal.”

“Fuck you talking about now?”

“You know what I’m talking about now.”

Ben watched the traffic on Monroe Drive: turning into the mall or heading south. The afternoon was as gray as the sweatpants on his legs. Luke’s phone said it was raining already. “Wish I knew, to tell you the truth. If there’s a thing called ‘the truth.’ Beginning to wonder about that.”

“Wonder about what?” Luke wasn’t paying attention. For a moment, he’d flipped to cruise mode. He could do that too: give the impression of showing interest, while his brain had moved on to higher things. Right now, it had moved on to a dark, hairy guy: moody, mid-twenties, facial stubble.

“So… Everything’s good then with your BerneWerner buddies?”

“Who knows what’s good? How d’you know what’s good? How d’you know how shit turns out?”

Ben rose from the table, stepped inside the restaurant, and grabbed a fist of napkins from a box. The hairy guy watched him—sneaky eyes—across the terrace. Luke buried his teeth in beef and cheese.

Ben returned and snatched the shades. “I mean, how d’you know what’s good and what’s bad, if you don’t know how it all turns out?”

“I’m wearing those.”

“I mean, you take Tricky Dicky Nixon. Nineteen sixty. Like, he whacks his knee on a car door when he’s running for president, right? Been in the hospital, debates JFK, looks crap, sweating and everything on TV, and so he loses. How the fuck you work out how the world would be today if he’d gotten out the other side of the car?”

“Was a crook, whatever side.”

“Yeah, well what’s a crook?”

“Perpetrator of crime.”

“Yeah, well what about the cause of crime?”

Luke took back the sunglasses and hooked them on his vest. “What about it?”

“The cause of crime is injustice.”

“Hold on. I’ll write that down. The cause of crime is injustice. Might try it in a reckless homicide.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you should. All I’m saying’s, if you don’t know where shit’s heading, and you don’t know where it’s come from, how the fuck you know the right thing from the wrong thing?”

Luke watched the hairy guy stroll to his car. “No, look, you got it the wrong way round. You start out knowing the right thing from the wrong thing. Like walking fifty miles in some desert. You gotta get it right on the first steps, or you’re gonna find yourself going so way off behind the sand dunes you’ll end up blowing camels.”

“Pertinent image.”

“All I’m saying’s, is something funny going down here? Something to do with that Hoffman guy and Henry Louviere? Just tell me. Get it the fuck over with. Please don’t go to jail. You owe me money.”

BACK AT THE apartment, Ben tuned the Gibson while Luke switched outfits to the DePaul & Furbeck T-shirt with blue surf shorts before heading downstairs to the pool.

At the sound of the first splash, Ben quit guitar and dug into a pile of cartons in the bedroom. They were stacked in a corner with bags he hadn’t opened since he brought them down Memorial Day. He rooted among stuff he’d known he’d never need: an old catcher’s mitt, a bag of glass marbles, a set of Cartoon Network wobbleheads.

Then—there—he found it: a Mead composition book, wrapped in crumpled clear plastic. It bulged with clippings—Xeroxes and printouts—held together in a cross of rubber bands.

He’d found the originals twelve years back, hidden among his mother’s personal stuff. At the time, she worked nights on an acute ward at Memorial, leaving him home, alone, and on a mission. Like previous expeditions, he turned the house over: closets, drawers, cookie cans, and shoe boxes. He snooped in spare purses and postmarked envelopes.

Then he found a cereal carton full of papers.

Their letters, he didn’t touch, except to see they were love letters. Today, he’d probably read every one. But what he did read—and much later copy—were a bunch of raw clippings from his father’s first trial: the full folded pages and headlines. That was the big one—in the United States court—producing twenty-five Trib and Sun-Times stories.

Now he removed the rubber bands, took out the papers, and unfolded them flat on his knees: front pages, double-pages, columnists, readers’ letters. Exactly as sold on the streets.

Here was the event before the later state conviction that WGN cranked up like Watergate. He remembered their special feature, with its slo-mo perp walk. But this first trial, in federal court, had so freaked him out that, on the night he found the clippings, he cried