Chapter 10
Five Men on a Friday
The district attorney's office sent the plea offers out by courier on the second of October, at four in the afternoon, in five envelopes of different weights, and by six o'clock each of the five men had read his own and was doing, in his own way, the thing he did when frightened.
Grant Pruitt Jr. read his at the long table in the library of his father's house, with the lamps on and a glass of bourbon he did not touch.
It was a good room, the best in a house full of them. The shelves were walnut. The ladder rolled on brass rails. His father had bought the books by the yard from an estate in Charleston, and the leather spines had the soft, expensive, unread look of things that had been chosen to be glanced at.
"It's a good offer," said his father.
Grant Pruitt Sr. stood at the window with his back to the room. He was sixty-six, tall and heavy, with a rancher's shoulders and a surprisingly delicate voice. He had made his money in timber and lost none of it in the years since, and he had a habit, when he was thinking, of stroking the back of his own left hand with the thumb of his right, as if soothing an animal.
"It's ten years probation," said Grant.
"Yes."
"With a felony."
"A reduced felony. Sexual battery. Not what they charged. Hollis says it can be sealed in seven years."
"Sealed."
"Hollis thinks it's the best you'll see."
Grant looked at the paper. He was twenty-nine. He had a quiet, handsome, smooth face, like a boy in a catalogue, and his mother's pale eyes, and a way of speaking in complete grammatical sentences that people took for intelligence. In high school, he had been the sort of child that teachers described as a pleasure. He had never in his life been late with a paper. He did not think of himself as a cruel person. He thought of himself as someone to whom things had happened.
"I didn't do anything, Dad."
"I know."
"She was there. She came on her own. She had a drink. She was laughing. We were all laughing. And then it was a, there was a, it got confusing. And in the morning she was gone." He paused. "I never hurt her. I'd never. I just, she was willing. You have to understand that. Nobody forced anybody. It was a misunderstanding."
"I understand."
"Then why would I plead?"
His father turned, finally. His face was slack and flushed, and old. For a moment he looked at his son the way a man looks at a house he has paid for.
"Because I'd rather you were on probation," said Grant Pruitt Sr., "than testifying."
"I haven't done anything—"
"I know what you've done, son."
It was said without heat. It was said gently, almost kindly, in the voice of a man reading a figure from a ledger. And Grant, who had not been struck by his father since the age of eight, felt the air go out of him, as if he had been hit.
He picked up the bourbon, and put it down again.
"I'll sign it," he said.
Dale Sutter did not read his. He had it read to him over the phone by his lawyer, while he drove his cruiser south on Route 9 with the radio low and a cup of coffee going cold in the holder.
"Obstruction in the second degree," said the lawyer. "Misdemeanor. A fine. They'll drop the conspiracy. All you have to do is plead and, ah, cooperate."
"Cooperate."
"A statement. About the sixteenth. About the log."
"I've given a statement."
"A new one. They'd like it to say what you were doing at two in the morning."
"I was picking up a bag of evidence in another case."
"Then say it again, in a form they can sign. It's a formality, Dale."
"Is it."
"It's their way of saving face."
He didn't answer. He was thirty-one, trim and fair, with the compact, level, courteous manner of a man who had been taught as a boy that the way to get along was to be useful. He had been a Boy Scout and an altar server. He had gone into the Army for two years, and come out with an honourable discharge and a conviction, which he did not discuss, that most things worked best if somebody quietly took care of them.
He had taken care of a great many things.
"Tell them I'll think about it," he said.
"They want an answer by Monday."
"I'll think about it by Monday."
He hung up. He drove for a mile in the failing light, past a field of cut cotton and a trailer with a tarp for a roof, and then he pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. He sat with his hands on the wheel. It was very quiet. A mockingbird was singing in a utility pole.
After a while he reached down, and from the glove box took a small black notebook, and opened it to a page near the back. He ran his finger down a column of names. He found one, and stopped, and tapped it once.
Moss.
Then he put the notebook away, and started the car, and said aloud, to nobody, in a pleasant, thoughtful voice: "I wonder what you've got."
Owen Maddox was on the internet.
He was at a table in the back of the Hollow Log, which was closed on Fridays for deep cleaning. A mop bucket stood in the corner. His laptop was open between a sweating bottle of beer and a plate of cold wings, and his stitched lip, which had healed into a thin white seam, curled as he typed.
He was twenty-seven. He was loud and sunburned and good-looking in a way that would not last, with a broad fleshy laugh and the habit of saying a thing twice. His father owned the bar, and a laundromat, and half of a car wash, and had always indulged him. In the third grade he had been sent to the principal for biting a child. In the eleventh he had been sent to the principal for something his father had paid to have forgotten.
He was a member of a private forum. It had four hundred members, and a name that was a joke about a fishing lure, and its posts, which were nominally about hunting, ran increasingly to what the members called the lifestyle. He had a handle, GatorOwen, and a small grey avatar of a dog.
they offered us a deal lol, he typed. prob for the 3 of us. grant said he'd sign. fucking coward.
what's the deal? wrote someone called BrassBoots.
probation. a few yrs. u get to keep ur gun.
thats nothing. take it
u kidding? im not pleading to anything. i didnt DO anything. she was begging for it. u shouda seen her. she was all over everyone. then she gets a hangover and goes nuts
classic
crazy bitch. shes been in a loony bin, did u hear. her own lawyer said so. u cant make that up
lmao
they gonna let me walk, typed Owen Maddox. watch. the brother already went to jail for hitting me. she lost. i win.
bro, wrote someone else. delete this.
its private, he typed.
nothing is private, said the other man. delete it.
He laughed. He drank his beer. He did not delete it. And in a server farm in Ashburn, Virginia, in a rack among ten thousand identical racks, a small grey file with a timestamp and a handle was copied, without fuss, onto a backup drive, where it would remain for a very long time.
Terrence Boyle went to his mother's.
He was twenty-six, soft-faced and blinking, with a round head and a small anxious moustache that did not suit him, and he worked in the parts department of his uncle's Ford dealership. He had a one-bedroom apartment in a complex called Sweetwater Commons. He had a PlayStation. He had a girlfriend named Kayla, who had left in July, and a stutter, which he had controlled for twelve years by means of a private system of substituting words.
On Friday evening he drove across town to the brick ranch on Pecan Street where he had grown up, and sat at his mother's kitchen table, and ate pot roast, and did not tell her anything.
"You're thin," said his mother.
"I'm fine."
"You don't eat."
"I eat."
"You don't sleep." She was a short broad woman in a blue housecoat. She ran the church nursery. She had a way of speaking to him as if he were nine. "Is it that case?"
"Mom."
"I'm asking, Teddy."
"I didn't do anything."
"I know you didn't."
"I just—" He stopped. His mouth worked. He tried again, and the word stuck, and he swallowed it. It was a thing he did when he was lying. He had never been able to stop. "I just stayed."
"What?"
"I stayed. I didn't leave."
"That's not a crime, honey."
"Isn't it?" He looked up. He had wet, round, pale-blue eyes. They filled. "I was in the room. I wasn't, I didn't, I never, but I was there. I was holding the, I'd held the door. And I thought, if I leave, it'll be worse. And I stayed. I thought if I stayed it would, I could keep them, I could make them stop. And I didn't."
"Teddy."
"I never said anything."
"You don't have to say."
"They want me to testify." It came out in a rush. "They want me to say what I saw. And I can't. I can't say it. If I say it, then I did it. If I don't say it, I just, I wasn't. I stood. I just stood."
His mother put down her fork. She was a Methodist, and she believed in forgiveness, and she believed in not asking a question to which you did not want the answer. She looked at her son. For a long moment, she did not say anything. Then she reached across the table and took his hand, as she had when he was small, and held it between both of hers.
"You'll take the plea," she said.
"It isn't—"
"You'll take it. And you won't say another word to anyone. Not Kayla. Not your uncle. Not the preacher. You'll take the deal, and you'll do your time or your probation, and you'll go to church. And in a year it'll be over."
"Will it?"
"It will be over," said his mother, with a firmness that cost her everything, "because I'm telling you that it will."
He nodded. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
It will be over, he thought. And then, much more quietly, in a part of his mind that did not stutter: no it won't.
Caleb Moss sat on the floor of his apartment with his back against the sofa and his offer unopened beside him, and looked at nothing.
He lived over a dry-cleaner's on Pine Street, in two rooms with a hot plate. He was twenty-eight. He had a bartender's forearms and a poet's hands, and a beard he had finally shaved in April, which had made him look younger and more tired. A box fan turned in the window. On the wall above the sofa was a framed poster from a Hank Williams concert he had not attended.
He had not been to work in four days.
Beside the plea offer on the floor was a phone. It was an ordinary phone, an iPhone, three years old, with a cracked corner. It was off. He had turned it off on Tuesday, and had not turned it on again. It lay with its black glass face to the ceiling.
On the sofa cushion above his head was a second phone, an old Samsung, in a plastic bag.
He had texted her. He had texted her from a third phone, a cheap one, bought at a gas station in Perry with cash, and she had blocked him within thirty seconds, which meant she had been holding it in her hand.
Of course, he thought. Of course she did.
He did not blame her. He could not have borne to be forgiven.
He got up, slowly, and went to the kitchen. He opened the drawer under the stove, the one that held the takeout menus and the dead batteries, and lifted out the whole drawer, and set it on the counter. He knelt. Taped inside the cavity, with a strip of black electrical tape, was a small brass key on a paper tag.
FIRST CITIZENS — BOX 411.
He did not touch it. He looked at it. He looked at it for a long time, as one looks at a sleeping animal.
On his tablet, which stood propped on the counter, there was a folder. It was one of many. It was called TAXES 2019. It contained seven items, all of them boring, scans of W-2s and a 1099 from the bar. The last was named, in plain lowercase, june15.mov.
It had been created at 2:51 a.m.
He had not opened it in two years and one hundred and eleven days.
He knew that he should. He knew that if he did, he would be able to say to himself, calmly, in complete sentences, what he was. And he knew that if he said it, he would have to do something. There was a woman in a rented house on Dellwood Street who was entitled to the thing in that folder. There was a man in a tan uniform who would kill him for it.
Both of those are true, he thought. At once. That's the problem.
He put the drawer back. He sat on the kitchen floor with his head on his knees.
On the wall of the apartment, in the dark, the Hank Williams poster was lit by the flicker of a neon sign across the street. It said LIQUOR — BEER — LOANS. It went on and off, on and off, with a small electrical buzz, like a throat clearing.
He did not hear his phone ring in the other room.
It was not on.
In the end, it was Marcia Lenoir who said no.
She said it on Saturday morning, in her office, to a telephone, in a voice that made the district attorney, Wendell Haines, hold the receiver a little away from his ear.
"You cannot ask me to accept it," she said. "Not for Sutter. A misdemeanor? He's a sworn officer."
"It's a very fair offer, Marcia."
"It's a joke. And you know why."
"I know that the evidence has been weakened."
"By whom?"
"By the circumstances." Haines was sixty. He was a courtly, thin, sallow man with silver hair, who had been district attorney for nineteen years and had never lost an election. "By the judge's ruling on the expert. By the loss of two witnesses. By a difficult year." His voice grew gentler. "I want to be honest with you. I've spoken to Grant Senior, and to Hollis. There's some sentiment that the County has had enough."
"Of what? Justice?"
"Of litigation."
"It's a rape case, Wendell."
"I know what it is."
"There are three men whose semen is on the evidence."
"And a defense that they believed it was consensual."
"A defense that rests entirely on a psychiatrist who's been paid six hundred dollars an hour."
"I don't dispute any of that." He sounded very tired. "I'm saying that I am the elected prosecutor of a county of forty thousand people, in which the largest private employer, the second largest, and the Sheriff have all taken a position. And that I've spent three weeks looking for a way that we can still proceed. And I haven't found one."
"Then you haven't looked."
"I've looked, Marcia."
"You haven't tried."
She heard a sound on the line. It was a sigh, long and soft, like air leaving a tire.
"Take the weekend," said Wendell Haines. "I'll give you until Monday morning. If you can find me a witness who's willing to testify, an actual witness, not a nurse, not a clerk, I'll go forward. I'll back you. I give you my word."
"A witness who was in the room."
"Yes."
"They're all defendants."
"One of them might be persuaded," said the district attorney. "Moss, perhaps. The sad one. Or Boyle."
"They're going to take the plea."
"Then we have until Monday."
He hung up.
Marcia Lenoir put the receiver down. She sat for a long moment in the heat of her office, with the broken air-conditioning ticking above her and a peppermint melting in her fist. She looked at the framed photograph of her sons.
One of them might be persuaded.
She picked up the receiver again. She dialled a number she had called twice that year, and which had never answered. It rang eleven times. At the twelfth ring, a machine picked up, and a young man's voice, thick and slow and tired, said, in a recording that had been made a long time ago:
Hi, you've reached Caleb. I'm either working or I'm pretending to be. Leave a message.
She did not leave one.
She sat holding the telephone, in the empty office, in the morning light, and thought: Monday.
She did not know that by Monday, the man whose voice she had just heard would be sitting in a car outside a bank, with a brass key in his pocket, trying to remember how to breathe.
It would be too late by an hour.