Lost in Clover Page 6

  “Objection,” Carson said.

  “I’ll rephrase. Mr. Cochran, what did you plan to do once you got to the Cooper’s residence?”

  “It’s, uh, kind of, uh…sort of like, um…” Randy searched for the word in his head. “A tradition. You, uh, show up at somebody’s doorstep…tell ’em to come out.”

  “Does this strategy often work?”

  “Yes, sir. It does…”

  “What happened if you don’t walk outside?”

  “Well, uh, if you don’t…you’re considered a…um, a…um…” Randy looked up at the ceiling, looking genuinely stumped. “I can’t think of a proper word to use in public.”

  “Are you thinking of a word like ‘wimp?’” Lawrence said.

  “Yes, wimp.”

  “But you don’t use that word? Wimp?”

  “Not…not anymore… Used it in elementary school.”

  “Does that other word start with a ‘p’ and describe a woman’s body part or a cat?”

  “Objection, what is the relevance of this?” Carson said.

  “I’m trying to create an atmosphere of the event of what happened and the state and mood of these men on the night of the attack, Your Honor,” Lawrence said.

  “Objection overruled.”

  “Is it the ‘p’ word?”

  Randy cracked a slight smile. “That’s the one.”

  “Pussy, correct?”

  The classroom burst in laugher.

  “Objection!” Carson shouted, standing up suddenly and knocking over a pile papers. “This is irrelevant and it is being broadcast live to families and children, Your Honor.”

  “Withdrawn, Your Honor,” Lawrence said, hiding a smirk.

  The Judge nodded. “Continue. I don’t need to instruct the jury.”

  Lawrence from Lawrence turned back to Randy and pasted a big smile on his lips. “Mr. Cochran, Would ever want to be called that p-word?”

  “Never… Definitely not to your face… You, you’d have to do something about it if somebody called you that to your face.”

  A slight laugh rumbled in the courtroom.

  “Damn straight,” the jock said in the classroom.

  “It’s a code. A man code, is the right, Mr. Cochran?” Lawrence said.

  “Yes sir. It is.”

  “So if men come taunting you to come out of the house, lest you be called that other word for a wimp, you’d have to step outside and take whatever that group is dishing out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You didn’t expect Eddie to come out shooting, did you?”

  “No, sir… Not at all.”

  “Have you ever encountered guns when you’ve tried to put somebody in their place?”

  Randy thought about for a while, then his face brightened.

  “Once, I think. A mother…maybe a sister…came out with a shotgun. Only time I recall.”

  “Did she pull the trigger?”

  “No…and Crazy Eddie didn’t give no warning shot.” He stared straight at Crazy Eddie. The camera switched to Crazy Eddie holding his stare.

  “I didn’t ask about Mr. Cooper,” Lawrence said. “But that’s fine. Did you know you were on private property when you drove up to the Coopers’ residence?”

  “It’s r-r-rural… I didn’t know. We s-s-stayed on the dirt road,” Randy said with a determined look on his face.

  “Did it occur to you that the road and everything around it might be private property?”

  “No… Not at all.”

  “Were you drunk at the time of the shooting?”

  “I… I’d been drinking some…but not drunk.”

  “I’m not trying to contradict you, but earlier in the trial, the coroner testified that his autopsy report showed all of the men who were killed had a blood alcohol content of point one two or higher. It sounds like you and your buddies kicked back more than a couple of brews, isn’t that true?”

  Randy didn’t say anything, but stared down, swallowing hard.

  “How many did you drink, Mr. Cochran?”

  “I… I don’t remember…”

  “Fair enough. Can you say that you were drunk enough to perhaps not have the best idea at that moment and time what was private property or not?”

  Randy dropped his chin to his chest. “I…don’t know,” the witness whispered.

  “When Eddie saw all of you out on his front lawn, drunk by the legal definition in the State of Kansas, you did not expect him to want to defend his family’s home?”

  “Objection!” Carson said, rising from his chair. “This is pure speculation.”

  “I’ll withdraw the question, Your Honor.”

  “Move to strike.”

  “So stricken.” The judge turned to the unseen jury and instructed them to disregard Lawrence’s last question.

  Jeremy watched the students in his class as they pondered the implications of drunken hooligans invading their property so they could beat the crap out of them.

  “Mr. Elliot,” Judge Reinhardt continued. “I’d advise you to save your comments about the case until the closing remarks.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. I have no more questions.”

  Carson asked for a redirect, but the judge shook his head.

  “After lunch, Mr. McKinney. My stomach is churning.”

  He hammered the gavel, and the audience rose to exit as voices increased from a cacophony of mumbles to chorus of fragmented voices. The bits and fragments of conversations that Jeremy caught over the television included phrases like “they shouldn’t have been driving at all, drunk like that,” “they should have known better than to enter another man’s property,” and “drunk as a skunk.” The students sat uncomfortably silent, as if wanting to be loyal to one of their own, but feeling Randy might have been wrong.

  18. HISTORY LESSON

  Although Carson tried for damage control with his redirect of Randy emphasizing Crazy Eddie’s violence, it looked desperate. Randy came across as guilty and regretful. Public opinion swayed in Lawrence’s favor. The death penalty no longer seemed like a slam-dunk, though manslaughter—in a self-defense plea—couldn’t be attained, not with Crazy Eddie’s brutality.

  Jeremy, in spite of himself, followed the trial obsessively. He didn’t talk about it, but listened to the news, friends, or anybody vocalizing a theory about what would happen next. Even though he felt he wouldn’t be called on at this point, he couldn’t get his mind off of the trial. Would Crazy Eddie be freed or fried? He honestly didn’t know and felt too scared to have his own opinion, lest it might come true. And he felt he had done enough dirty work arranging the fates.

  Lawrence from Lawrence brought in folks from Topeka and the University of Kansas to discuss property law and defending it. He even had an old historian and rancher, Dr. Jake Clemmons, discuss the history of Kansas and what happened to cattle rustlers and other ne’er-do-wells who entered another man’s property a century ago.

  “Branding, blinding, hanging, dragging a man by his ankles with a horse to the county line. They did a lot of things to men who entered another man’s property with ill intent,” Dr. Clemmons said. He was dressed in a faded jean shirt with pearl buttons and a turquoise stone bolo. His seventy-year-old skin was leathery from decades in the sun.

  “Did these trespassers know that they were going to get into a heap of…” Lawrence stopped himself with a self-deprecating smile. “Let me rephrase that. I’m getting a little caught up in all this exciting history.” The audience laughed. So did Jeremy’s classmates. Can’t they see this is just an act? Jeremy thought.

  “Did they know they were going to endure all of this retribution if they entered another man’s property illegally?” Lawrence continued.

  “Yep. It was a code. A code of the property owner you might say. If you entered another man’s property you were a dead man until you made it back to other side of that property line.”

  “Was there much documentation on these procedures?” Lawrence asked.


  “Well, nothing was officially documented, you see. It was something that was just done. Outside of a few hangings and an occasional write-up in a town paper by an editor, most documentation is found in diaries of old.”

  “Would you say that what Eddie Cooper did was in keeping with code of the property owner?”

  “Well it was a bit of an extreme…”

  “But was it within the bounds of property owner code from the olden days?”

  “Yes, I’d say it was, but with modern technology.”

  A chill went through the classroom. Jeremy knew what they felt because he was feeling it too. Crazy Eddie might’ve been right.

  19. CAUGHT

  More than once Carson had called for a sidebar with the judge and Lawrence. It seemed that the prosecution wanted to cut a deal, something that would have been unthinkable a week earlier. For almost eight months people had talked with dead certainty about how Crazy Eddie was going to get a state funded lethal concoction shot in his veins. No two ways about it. But then Lawrence rode into and shook everything up. Left was right, and up was down. Was it possible that Crazy Eddie was a victim and not a mass murderer? Jeremy was as confused as everybody else.

  After the property rights experts testified, constitutional law professors discussed the importance of the second amendment. It seemed like Crazy Eddie was only defending his family from a group of hooligans with uncertain intentions. More than one Clover resident admitted to spending a night tossing and turning, trying to figure what was right and what was wrong. Rumor had it that Lawrence wasn’t interested in cutting any deal: manslaughter or nothing. Even with all the arguments supporting Crazy Eddie, people said a manslaughter charge just wasn’t enough. He had killed seven unarmed boys, finishing them off at point blank range. And Carson McKinney had to know that no district attorney with an ounce of political ambition or any modicum of self-esteem would allow such a compromise.

  Lawrence finished his expert testimonials with psychoanalysts and doctors, all of whom testified that Eddie Cooper had suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder from an abusive father and ridicule of his family by the students and citizens of Clover. Most of the accused citizens, whether sitting on the wooden benches of the courthouse, relaxing in the comfort of their sofas, or watching from molded plastic classroom chairs, kept their eyes down, focused on the floor. Jeremy could tell that Lawrence’s guilt trip on Clover was having an effect. It seemed that people believed they may have had something to do with the creation of the monster they named Crazy Eddie. Lawrence had momentum, and the slam-dunk murder charge seemed to have slipped away from Carson. Then Thursday night happened.

  Ladies had been swooning over the handsome and sophisticated Lawrence Eliot since he had arrived in Clover. He had taken up weekday residence in a Holiday Inn in Emporia instead of commuting daily from Lawrence. His equally polished law school friends often drove down to Clover to visit and watch the trial. In the evenings, Lawrence and his entourage hung out at Chuck’s Bar and Grill on the Shelby-Clover border, drink a few pints of beer before dinner and then downing stronger stuff afterwards. Ladies of all ages and marital statuses had ventured up to the group and sometimes Lawrence or his crew would buy them a shot or two. More than one man had threatened to kick Lawrence’s ass because a girlfriend had swooned or shared a drink with him. Even though Lawrence flirted with women at the bar, the biggest rumor wasn’t about them. It was about those who couldn’t get in the bar.

  Jeremy heard Lawrence’s name paired with a few high school girls. All of them had reputations of easy virtue and had most likely been with men over eighteen long before Lawrence came to Clover. But when a state trooper pulled a BMW over for erratic driving at two in the morning, what he found, according to local buzz, was Mr. Lawrence Eliot with his pants unzipped, an open bottle of scotch, and fifteen-year-old Katie Brannegan.

  20. LAWRENCE

  The trial was delayed that Friday morning until the following Monday, based on “outside developments.” Gossip hit the fan and splattered far and wide. Phone calls, emails, texts, and social networking pages buzzed with stories of horn dog Lawrence and how he had swept the virtuous Katie Brannegan, granddaughter of a Baptist minister, no less, off her feet with his wily lawyerly ways.

  The charges against him included driving under the influence, reckless driving, endangerment of a minor, lewd exposure to a minor, statutory rape, and sodomy. Lawrence made bail early Friday morning, avoiding most of the reporters by ducking his head under his jacket, and jumping into a drinking buddy’s Land Rover. Reporters and hecklers followed the SUV to his hotel in Emporia. Lawrence sprinted inside and returned with bags in hand a minute later to the waiting Rover. Fewer followed him back to Lawrence, where he finally escaped them via underground parking in an exclusive townhome. Within hours a video of Lawrence running back and forth with the press following him was sped up and cut to Benny Hill music. Jeremy laughed longer and harder than he ever remembered in his life.

  *

  Lawrence surprised everybody in Clover when he attended services on Sunday at the Prairie View Methodist church. He arrived sullen. His shoulders were sagging and his face held a world of sadness. But his public display of contrition seemed to backfire. Jeremy sensed the congregation’s discomfort. Lawrence sat on a pew with space on both sides of him, like he had a contagious disease. Few people shook his hands afterwards, though several children gawked, and many parents physically pushed their young daughters away from him.

  *

  On Monday, the crowd that surrounded the courthouse was even bigger than when the trial began, or for even Randy’s testimony. People from the neighboring towns came over, including that annoying roving Westboro Baptist church notorious for protesting soldiers’ funerals. They could have made a case about God hating pedophiles, but kept with their anti-homosexual message instead.

  Katie’s parents and immediate relatives locked the doors to their houses and refused to talk to anybody. They had circled the wagons around Katie.

  Jeremy watched Lawrence on TV when he arrived at the courthouse all smiles with an extra helping of smarmy charm, but Jeremy saw fear in his eyes. The courtroom sounded like a football stadium with nonstop chattering voices. Even when the judge strode out, the audience did not quiet down. Judge Rhinehart banged his gavel so hard it looked like the handle cracked.

  “I’ll throw every one of you out if I hear another peep. This is a courtroom, my courtroom!” He was red faced, and the veins in his temples pulsed rapidly. “You all are guests here and nothing more.”

  The judge looked at Lawrence wearily for a moment. The camera switched to Crazy Eddie, who flexed his tattooed fingers back and forth, giving the judge a contemptuous stare. The camera returned to Judge Rhinehart as he turned to the jury. “I don’t know what the hell you’ve heard, but it doesn’t matter at all. This case is solely about Mr. Eddie Cooper and nobody else.”

  He turned back to Lawrence.

  “Now, Mr. Elliot, would you like to continue from where you left off on Thursday?”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. I would.”

  The camera took a shot of Crazy Eddie staring straight ahead and not even acknowledging Lawrence. It seemed like his chances for manslaughter were as thin as the day he was arrested.

  21. WYNONA

  On Monday afternoon Lawrence brought out his final witness: Eddie’s sister, Wynona. Maybe he was banking on her testimony to sow doubt in the jurors’ minds. But when she sauntered up to the stand in a short black skirt and ill-fitting high heels, Jeremy could tell even through the television that Lawrence lost hope. During the swearing in, she chewed gum while her polished neon-pink nails touched the bible. After the judge had her spit out the gum, she described the fear she felt on that night.

  “When those boys showed up, drunk and all, shouting and cursing at Eddie, I was scared. We all were.”

  “How did your brother take all of the threats shouted at him?”

  “Poor Eddie didn’t know wha
t to do. He was trying to defend the family property. And they were standing right there in the middle of it.”

  “Some have been saying that it was too much, what Eddie did. Do you believe it was too much?”

  “You have seven or eight twenty-year-olds showing up in trucks in the middle of the night, shouting and making noise. Who isn’t going to overreact, you know? I mean, they were the ones who attacked us first. They were the ones who trespassed.”

  Carson was gentle with Wynona, though he managed to paint her as a conspirator in the massacre after she admitted to previously “being with” a couple of the boys.

  “I definitely didn’t like them, not the way they treated me after…”

  “After what, Miss Cooper?”

  “After I gave them something better than they’d ever had before.”

  Laughter erupted from the audience and in the classroom. Crazy Eddie stood and glared at the audience.

  “Ya’ll better shut up. You hear?” he said in a deep voice.

  Lawrence put his hand on Crazy Eddie’s shoulder.

  “Now just sit and—”

  Crazy Eddie shoved Lawrence to the floor. He glared, standing over his lawyer.

  The audience gasped. Everybody in Jeremy’s classroom stood to watch closer. Two sheriff deputies grabbed Crazy Eddie and tried to set him back into his chair. Even though he had on cuffs, he pushed and kicked them away. Lawrence got up and tried to help hold Crazy Eddie down as he struggled, swearing and bucking. Lawrence caught an elbow in the mouth and fell to the floor a second time. The audience was in an uproar, standing on their feet and blocking the television cameras.

  *

  “Sit down!” students in Jeremy’s class yelled at the TV.

  Although nobody could see her, Wynona was yelling, “Eddie, Eddie!”

  The judge banged the gavel. “Order, order!” The handle broke off of the gavel.

  The deputies tased Crazy Eddie three times before he went down.