“She’s a lawyer, Tommy,” the orderly said. “She wants to see if you need help with the law.”
“The other lady, she was a lawyer, my mom brought her to see me. She had hair that was so pretty I wanted to touch it and she said, fine, you can touch it, but then Xavier made me stop.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, as Fred shut the door. “I think I know that lady lawyer, and you’re right, her hair is very pretty. Let’s see if we can find her picture in here.”
I pulled some photographs out of my briefcase. Murray and I had spent Saturday putting together a portfolio of everyone I could think of who had a connection with the case: the Salanters, Gabe Eycks, Iva and Miles Wuchnik, the Carmilla club girls, my cousin from Chicago. I also included the lawyers from Dick’s firm. I’d found a snapshot of Leydon and me in our law school robes, grinning like maniacs, another of Leydon at my wedding in a gauzy white hat.
Murray brought the pix we could find online, or in my old snapshots, to the photo director at the Herald-Star. The photo director, who’d worked with Murray for years, didn’t try to probe into why we were getting headshots of Chaim Salanter or Wade Lawlor; he just grunted and cropped Leydon’s graduation shot so that we had a close-up of her face, the eager smile, the red-gold hair curling around her like fine-spun threads.
While Murray worked with the Star’s photographer, I’d gone back to Tampier Lake Township and found a couple of snapshots of Netta Glover at the Open Tabernacle Church. I’d also persuaded Jackie Beringer to lend me a photo she had of her son Link with Magda Lawlor; the man at the Star had worked his magic on these as well.
The town library had old high school yearbooks; I’d found pictures of an adolescent Wade, with his thick black hair worn like early Paul McCartney; getting contemporary photos was easy. I’d struck out with Virginia Lawlor, Wade and Magda’s drunk mother, but the yearbooks gave me a couple of shots of Magda, looking solemn and fragile in the high school chorus.
This afternoon, in the lawyer-client room, I laid a quartet of pictures in front of Tommy: Leydon, Julia Salanter, Eloise Napier, and Lotty. I asked if the lady with the pretty hair was one of them.
“That’s her,” he crowed, picking up Leydon’s picture and stroking her hair. “I liked her, I took her up to my room but then Xavier got mad, he made her leave, he said it was against the rules.”
“Do you remember anything the lady said?”
Tommy sucked on his index finger. “She said it was sad and terrible to lock me up here like I was a dog, some kind of dog, not like Good Dog Trey but a sick dog.”
“Rabid,” I suggested.
He smiled again. “That was her word. You and her, you know the same words! She said she could help me leave, maybe, and go live with my mom, but my mom died and the lady, she never came back, so now I just keep staying here with Fred and all these other people. Anyway, when people leave they get put in handcuffs, I see them, they get put in handcuffs and chained up in this old white bus, I hate that, I hate handcuffs, they make your hands hurt and hurt and hurt. The police make you safe but then they take you away from your mom and Good Dog Trey and make you hurt!”
“What happened, Tommy? Do you know why the police took you away from your mom and put you in handcuffs?”
Tommy looked at his hands, big hands, white and flaccid from long years without much to do. He was quiet for several minutes and I let him take his time.
“Because I was watching Maggie in the water. I didn’t know it was a bad thing, she liked me watching her, but she never woke up again, and the police took me away. First they put handcuffs on me and I didn’t like it. Then they took the handcuffs away because I was good.”
“Handcuffs are no fun, I know that. It’s good that you don’t need to wear them anymore.”
I took some more pictures out of my briefcase and started laying them out slowly, beginning with Tommy’s mother. His heavy face lit up.
“That’s Mom. She died, she’s in heaven with Jesus. Did she send you this picture? Is it from heaven?”
“No. The minister at her church let me have it. Mr. Ordonez.”
The name didn’t mean anything. “I miss Mom, she brought me clothes and trucks and jelly beans.”
“You like jelly beans, Tommy?”
“Yum, jelly beans are good, good, good.”
I hadn’t been sure I could bring food, or if he might have allergies I needed to know about. “When I come next time, I’ll bring jelly beans. Today, I only have pictures.”
Tommy didn’t recognize Salanter, or his daughter or Lotty. He thought he knew Sophy Durango but then wasn’t sure, but he recognized Wade Lawlor’s current photo at once, from seeing him on television.
He frowned over the old picture of Wade as a young teen for quite a long time, and then nodded decisively. “He lives next door. We don’t like him.”