Bleeding Hearts(16)

This did not seem a time for sitting still. Casey Holder was gazing up at her, half-fascinated and half-tense, an anxious young woman who would always resent other women, for reasons she would never be willing to explain to herself.

“You know,” Candida told her, “if what you really want is some kind of hint, you ought to talk to Fred Scherrer. If your Gregor Demarkian is right and somebody always knows, then Fred Scherrer is definitely the man who knows about this.”





7


FRED SCHERRER HAD BEEN interviewed for 60 Minutes by Ed Bradley, and in the middle of that interview he had declared—in a sound byte that made the air—that he could defend Saddam Hussein in an Israeli court and get him off. Fred Scherrer was fifty-two years old, and for the last thirty of those years he had been the most famous defense attorney in America. He might have been the most famous lawyer in the history of America with the exception of Clarence Darrow. He was certainly a phenomenon. Illiterate teenagers in southern Georgia knew his name. Associate justices of the United States Supreme Court cursed him over cocktails in the bar of the Burning Tree Country Club. Millions of middle-aged women with a lust for blood and an insatiable curiosity about capital cases snapped up the books he wrote for $22 a pop, making him the only lawyer on record to have a book spend one hundred sixty-four weeks on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.

If one of the middle-aged women with a lust for blood had met Fred Scherrer, she might not have been impressed. He was not a physically prepossessing man. Five foot seven, a hundred fifty-four pounds, kick-sand-in-my-face thin running to wrinkles and paunch—from a distance, Fred Scherrer resembled the sort of man who spends his life working at the post office but never has quite enough juice to get promoted off the carrier routes. It was only face-to-face that he began to be impressive.

Right now Fred Scherrer wasn’t even being impressive face-to-face. He had shut himself down, in a way, turned all the interior emotion off, blanked himself out. He always did that while he was waiting for a jury to come in, which was what he was doing. He was being especially impassive, because there was no doubt whatsoever what verdict this jury would bring back. Getting Saddam Hussein off in Jerusalem was one thing. Getting Chuckie Bickerson off in Westchester County was something else. This was the sort of case Fred took for practice. Chuckie Bickerson had kidnapped a fifteen-year-old Mount Vernon cheerleader from the parking lot of her school at four o’clock in the afternoon in full view of her boyfriend, the junior varsity cheerleading squad, and the sour-faced Puritan English teacher who served as adviser to the Glee Club. The phrase “asking to get caught” came to mind, but Fred found it ludicrously inadequate. And dumb? Good God. Talking to Chuckie Bickerson could give a normal person a migraine. Chuckie had raped and murdered the cheerleader, of course. He’d raped and murdered a few other girls too, and when the police finally caught up to him—which, after the stunt in Mount Vernon, wasn’t too difficult—they’d found the bodies of those girls in Chuckie’s basement, just lying there stacked up against the vinyl-covered furniture and stretched out on the industrial-grade rug. The smell had been awful.

Chuckie’s smell was awful too. It was as if the sourness of his sweat were woven into him, unremovable by soap. Fred would never have taken his case if Chuckie hadn’t insisted on pleading innocent.

Ass.

Chuckie stirred in his seat, stretched his arms, shook his head. “I got to go to the bathroom,” he said. “Where’s that guy that takes me to the bathroom?”

“Maybe he’s gone to the bathroom himself. He’ll be back in a minute, Chuckie. Just hold your water.”

“I been holding my water,” Chuckie said. “I been holding myself. Why didn’t you let me get up there and talk?”

I didn’t let you get up there and talk, Fred thought, because I didn’t want to be witness to a lynching. He said, “The defendant doesn’t have to testify, Chuckie. And it’s generally a good idea if he doesn’t. Prosecutors can be very tricky bastards.”

“I could have explained myself,” Chuckie objected. “I mean, I had things to say.”

“I know you did, Chuckie.”

“I could have told them all about those girls. The things they said to me. The things they did.”

“I know.”

“Once you’ve screwed ’em, their lives are ruined anyway,” Chuckie said. “My mother told me that. A woman’s virtue is all she has. If she loses it, she might as well be dead.”

“Your mother must have been a very interesting woman, Chuckie.”