Grif Stockley - Religious conviction

RELIGIOUS CONVICTION by Grif Stockley

IVY BOOKS NEW YORK

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as unsold or destroyed and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

Ivy Books Published by Ballantine Books Copyright 1994 by Grif Stockley

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-34194

ISBN 0-8041-1255-X

This edition published by arrangement with Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Printed in Canada

First Ballantine Books Edition: April 1995

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To my daughter, Erin Temple Stockley Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned. In the sixteenth century astronomy, in the seventeenth microbiology, in the eighteenth geology and paleontology, in the nineteenth Darwins biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multi folded brain like wood lice from under the lumber pile. Barth had been right: to taliter aliter. Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured.

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john up dike Rogers Version

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Chet bracken is here to see me? I ask in disbelief.

Stuffed on a big lunch, I come awake and sit upright in my chair and stare at my telephone as if I expect it to pop up a picture of Blackwell Countys one true whiz bang hotshot criminal attorney, Chester Theodore Bracken, an ugly, short man with jug ears the size of satellite dishes and a paunch he doesnt bother to hide.

Bracken is the guy you call if you shoot Mother Teresa in a room full of nuns as she is being blessed by the Pope. Oddly enough. Bracken has showed up in my life unannounced once before. He had just picked up a client in the Hart Anderson murder case and rumbled through my office at the Public Defenders that day like a flash flood, intimidating me with his reputation and overbearing manner. It doesnt seem to have made much difference that Im in private practice now. Why doesnt he just use the telephone like everybody else?

Hes not Jesus Christ, for Gods sake! barks Julia, our floor secretary and receptionist, her tone up to her usual snotty standards.

Are you gonna see him, or do you want me to say youre too busy crapping in your pants?

If Julia werent right so often, shed still be intolerable. As a relative of the owner of the building, she dresses and talks as she pleases. Today the magenta sweater covering her breast implants is so tight her nipples look like rivets that have popped out of their holes from metal fatigue. At some perverse level, the lawyers on our floor like Julia and have grown attached to her, as one would a dog with a nasty growl. She can be a bitch, but shes our bitch. I look down at the blank legal pad in front of me. I had set aside this morning to work on a brief to the Arkansas Supreme Court, but what the hell, its a loser anywaya cocaine deal with the search being the main issue. If the money is right, the temptation is overwhelming to bag the client before he can slither out the door down to someone elses office.

Ill be right out.

Whats the big deal? Julia mutters.

This guy looks pretty scruffy to me.

Wonderful, Julia! I exclaim.

Why dont you put down the phone and just yell it in his face? Yet I know what she means. Outside of a courtroom, Bracken is a ratty dressercowboy boots the color of musca dine wine, ties that strain against his bulging neck like sprung mousetraps, and belt buckles that double as beer bottle openers. Still, Id cut off my left arm to get the results he does for his clients. My friend Dan Bailey, a veteran Chet Bracken watcher, retells the story that Bracken is so prepared he can tell you what his clients ate for breakfast the day they got themselves into trouble.

In the reception room Brackens appearance is, in fact, alarming. Scruffy isnt the word. His suit, a cow patty gray, hangs on him; he looks like the family runt who has acquired a wardrobe of hand-me-downs. If he has been trying to lose weight, he should consider a career change as a barker for Weight Watchers. Otherwise he looks like a candidate for a bone-marrow transplant.

Immediately, I think he must have AIDS and realize I havent seen him around in two or three months. Despite the ghost he has become, Chet is a presence in Blackwell County legal circles, whether he is sighted or not.

Mr. Bracken, I say with a forced, uneasy jocularity, to what do I owe the honor of this visit? I would feel awkward calling him by his first name. We are not friends or equals, merely colleagues in a suspicious profession. A couple in the waiting room stare at Bracken and me as if I am greeting royalty.

Bracken pushes up from his chair and says, Page, you got a few minutes? No handshake. No smile. He may not look like the Chet Bracken of three months ago, but he is acting the same.

Come on back, I say, determined not to let myself be overwhelmed by him.

Seated in one of my chairs (the first time he came to my office at the PDs he stood the entire time), he asks, Page, you know anything about the Wallace murder?

Only a little, I say. Leigh Wallace is a knockout brunette in her early twenties and the daughter of the minister of one of the largest nondenominational churches in the South who is on trial this month for the murder of her wealthy businessman husband at their swank home overlooking the Arkansas River.

You got any interest in helping on the case?

Bracken grunts so quickly I wonder if I have heard him.

I cant believe he is asking me. Bracken has always been a one-man band, paying investigators and law clerks on a case-by-case basis.

What do you need? I ask, trying not to sound suspicious. While Bracken is the best criminal defense attorney Blackwell County has to offer, his reputation is clouded by rumors of violent paybacks when he feels a witness has lied to him on the stand. (One informant supposedly ended up with broken kneecaps.) Yet, since nothing has ever been documented, the stories may be mere jealousy. We like winners in Arkansas, but we like to hate them, too.

Right now I need your word that what Im about to tell you will go no further than this room, he says, his voice earnest and low, whether you come in with me on this case or not.

My curiosity raised by the hint of pleading in his tone, I nod and say, Of course, noticing that the lines around Brackens mouth look drawn so tightly they appear to be sewn on his face.

Im dying of cancer, he says hoarsely.

Im on some painkillers, but Im not going in for all the experimental crap and pretend Ive got a chance.

Brackens words send a chill through me that leaves me clammy. My wife, Rosa, died of breast cancer less than four years ago at the age of thirty-nine, and Ive become spooked by the disease. It hasnt been a year since my girlfriend was in St. Thomas for a breast biopsy that ultimately proved benign but not before her surgeon (the same sawbones who mutilated Rosa) told us to expect the worst. Even though my experience with Bracken is that he is an obnoxious son of a bitch, I can not imagine this intensely driven man dead. He cant be more than forty.