by Peter Styles
“No,” I said, simply.
“Excuse me?” Whereas I’d moved away from him over the course of the argument, dancing back and forth, Landon crossed the room towards in me in two steps. “You’d better start watching that—”
“No,” I repeated, standing my ground. Any other time, this would have been the hottest I’d seen him yet, but I wasn’t in any mood for games. Not now, and maybe not ever again. Everything that Quinn had said and every misapprehension my tio had about Landon came flooding back to me right then. I knew then that I wasn’t about to get on my knees for Landon Case anytime soon. “Come at me, cabron. I said ‘no.’”
“Nico!” Landon yelled again, this time less in anger and more in shock and frustration. “Nico, what do you want me to do? What do you want? I did all that for you.”
Hearing Landon say that stunned me and must have stunned him, too. He almost looked surprised that he’d said it aloud, but he swallowed hard and kept going. “I did it for you. Because I know how much your uncle means to you, and I know what it’s like to be inspired by a family member who needs you, I know what it’s like. I feel for you. And…” Landon trailed off again, only to get some of his courage back and to continue, “And, fuck it. I have feelings for you. It meant something to me. All of it meant something to me. You mean something to me and, even before I knew that, I wanted to do what was right. I wanted justice.”
“Justice?” I asked, coldly, more coldly than I usually heard myself. Cuban anger burns hot to a point, but if you get a Cuban to burn cold…that’s just bad news. “You wanted justice?”
“Yes, I wanted justice. What if your uncle really was innocent? I like you, and I can tell you like me, too, so listen, we’ll figure something out, but right now, you’ve got to—”
“If?” I repeated once again. “If my uncle was innocent? What does that mean?”
“Jesus Christ, Nico, you know what I mean,” Landon said quickly, maybe realizing he’d said more than he’d meant to.
“If my uncle was innocent. That doesn’t sound like you’re convinced. That doesn’t sound like you’ve been convinced this whole time.”
“You didn’t have much to go on, and I wanted to give him a fair shot. I wanted to give you a shot,” Landon tried to argue on his own behalf.
“All right, yeah. You said that the first time we ever really talked. But now? That didn’t sound like you were convinced that my uncle is innocent right now.” I narrowed my eyes at him and crossed my arms together and prepared to ask him the question that would maybe redefine this whole situation for me.
“Right now. Balls to the wall. Do you think my uncle is innocent? Do you think he killed Nora Grant?”
Landon seemed to be searching for words. He raised his hands up in an ‘I-don’t-know’ sort of gesture and brought them back down again, still without saying anything.
“It’s a yes or no question, Landon,” I needled him.
“Yes. No. I don’t know, Nico. It’s not my job to know. You may be studying to go to a fancy law school one day, but even as a detective, if I ever do get promoted after this fucking shitshow, it’s not my job to know. It’s my job to take the DA my best interpretation of what happened and all of the evidence that supports it so that they can duke it out in a courtroom and convince a jury of what happened one way or the other. That’s exactly what happened in your uncle’s case, and the state proved their point. There are some reasons to think he did it. There are some reasons to think he didn’t. I. don’t. know,” he finished, angrily.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. His description of the process wasn’t wrong. It was a little condescending to explain it to me like I was completely outside of the process, but fine, he was right in that sense. “Well, if it’s not your job to know, and if you aren’t sure, and you could go either way on this, why go through all the trouble?” I asked. “You didn’t have to. I might have let you fuck me, regardless.”
“Fuck you, Nico. That wasn’t the point of all this, and you know it. You came on to me. You came out of the shower, you teased, you started it. In fact, why didn’t you just run a people search for Nina? Why the fuck did you come looking for me in the parking lot? You didn’t need me to pull her address. If that was my whole goal, you’re right, I didn’t have to go through all that effort. But I did because, again, I care. I don’t know how else to prove it to you.”
Maybe at any other time, I would have realized that he was right. Maybe I would have realized that I had said a lot of what I said with the specific intent to hurt him and to rile him and that that wasn’t fair of me, either. But, in the heat of the moment, I couldn’t hear anything except Landon being unsure of whether my uncle was guilty or not. Possibly, even falling down in favor of my uncle being guilty since that’s what the jury had decided years ago.
Fine. Fuck it, I thought, tamping down all the feelings I’d grown to have for Landon, determined to lock them away and to disappear the key forever.
I grabbed my keys and, without another word to him, I left.
16
I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. My skin felt itchy after I’d watched Nico explode. Part of me wanted to be angry at him, but I just didn’t have it in me to be. It wasn’t his fault. None of this was his fault. He hadn’t done anything to make any of this happen, and he was trying, failing, but trying to do anything he could to save his uncle from a life behind bars. I couldn’t be angry at him for that. I couldn’t be angry at him for wanting to protect Oliver and for hating me for not being able to give him what he needed. So, I went to Noah’s.
I opened the front door with the key Noah thought he was clever for hiding not under the rock beside the door on the porch, but in the other rock beside the door.
“We need to talk about your security one of these days, bro,” I said as I walked in. The living room was empty, however, and I looked around before my ears caught up with my eyes. From upstairs, rich music filled the air. I followed the sounds and leaned up against the doorframe to watch Noah play. It wasn’t my thing, classical music. I was more a beer and whatever the hell was on the jukebox kind of guy. ‘Couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket,’ our mom had said. She wasn’t wrong.
The song was simple, plaintive. Even though it wasn’t my thing, Noah could make a statue feel something when he played, I was sure of it. I lost myself in my troubles, until I realized that the music had stopped. Noah was leaning back in his chair now, studying me.
“What happened?” He asked.
“What makes you think anything happened?” I asked. It was just a front though. Noah knew me just as well as I knew him.
He grinned. “Because something did.”
I started from the beginning, explaining everything from the beginning from the time I arrested Oliver Suarez until the fight with Nico just hours ago. Noah listened quietly, at points smiling and at others furrowing his brows, at others coughing politely and trying not to let his eyes get too wide; but never once saying anything until I’d finished.
“So, I don’t know what the fuck to do. If say something and go over Wolfton’s head, my ass is grass, and if I don’t--”
“You’ll lose him.”
I nodded, “And an innocent man may spend the rest of his life in jail.”
“But before, with Nico, it doesn’t sound like you were very convinced that he was innocent,” Noah said, puzzled.
“I’m not. But, I’m not convinced he’s not innocent.”
“Look, Landon. I know you well enough to know that you’re not going to be able to live with yourself unless you do exactly what you want to do. And, what you want to do is what you think is right. It always is. It’s why you went into the army, it’s why you do the job you do now. You’ve got to do what you think is right or it’s going to eat you up,” Noah explained.
“But what is that?” I asked, throwing my hands up. “My job is about the system. Fuck, I am the system. I arrested a person after figuring there was enough evidence to charge him with the m
urder. The DA and the judge and the jury does the rest. That’s my role. That’s the system. Oliver Suarez got a fair trial in front of a jury of his peers. That’s their job, the jury. It’s not for me to say whether he’s guilty or not.”
“What if he didn’t do it, though?” Noah asked.
“If he’s innocent… I don’t know. What’s my obligation then? What’s my job? As an officer? As Nico’s… fuck. I don’t know, as Nico’s something? Someone that cares about him?”
“Sounds like there’s a lot in that sentence you don’t know.”
“You’re telling me,” I said, exasperated.
“Well, come on downstairs,” Noah said, standing up and carefully placing his cello back in its case. “I’ll order shitty Chinese delivery and you can drink away your troubles. But Landon?”
“Yeah?”
Noah came up close and clasped me on the shoulder. “You’ve got to figure that last part out, Landon. What he is to you. If you don’t, and you fuck up the first part, I mean it, you’ll lose him. He won’t forgive you that. Hell, if it were different, if it were me in there for something I might not have done, you wouldn’t forgive anyone for keeping me in there, now, would you? No matter what it cost them.”
I shook my head.
“Well, then. Figure it out. Come on, it’s nothing Lo Mein and shitty TV can’t fix.”
* * *
The alley was just like it had been three years ago, the dumpster in the back for the chicken place on the other side of the road, the trash cans for the apartments rising up from the left, and the dilapidated, now deserted, thrift store on the right. Nora Grant’s body was found by a runner on a morning jog. She had seen a woman’s high-heeled shoe at the entryway to the alley. It’d grabbed her attention just enough for her to look and see Nora’s legs from behind the dumpster where it had been pushed out, her body partially concealed from view.
In my first three years on the force, I’d seen my fair share of crimes, but this was the first murder I’d worked where we didn’t have any idea who could have done it. It took weeks and weeks to get a description, to have a halfway-reliable sketch made, and to finally close in on Oliver Suarez. After that, the whole process had gone so fast, so sloppy, it would have made your head spin.
I reread the Xerox of Starr’s letter. Nina claimed to have watched the whole thing from her window on the second floor. I looked at the windows and realized that her line of sight would have matched up with the street light just over my head. She would have been able to get a good look at the person who killed Nora. The crime scene had been photographed and recorded over and over again in the months after, the heels had been used as evidence at trial, but something that had never been mentioned, not once in the court records or anything else was what Nora Grant had been wearing that night. She was a young woman, it had been late, and she’d come from a local club with her friends. She’d left them a few blocks before walking past this alley on her way home. The dress had been short, red, racy.
The prosecutor hadn’t wanted to submit it for fear that, like many women, Nora Grant would be judged not by the horrific thing that had happened to her, but by what she looked like when she died. It hadn’t been relevant, so it had been forgotten in an evidence bag somewhere. But, when I looked at the case file in my hands, there it was. And… there it was in the letter Starr had written for Nina, down to the beading on the front and the slit in the back. All of it was there in a detail that Nora couldn’t have known unless she’d seen it, that Starr couldn’t have known at all.
My heart started beating harder, feeling like I was onto something in a way I hadn’t been before. If that part of the letter rang true, what other things were also correct?
The description we had gotten of Oliver had been from an older lady who’d admitted she hadn’t heard anything that evening but had seen a man matching Oliver’s description at some point that night near the alley. But the letter suggested someone else completely. Where the older woman had described someone with olive-colored skin, in his early forties, who was regularly built and taller than average, the letter describes a white man, older, gray haired, and overweight with a tattoo on his arm.
Curious, I went to my cruiser and ran some reports. There were three men who lived in Worthington at the time of the crime who matched that description, and each one had some sort of rap sheet, but one, one had not just past crimes, but past violent felonies--assault and robbery--on his record. I looked back at his past addresses and saw that, no, it couldn’t be. Only three days after the attack happened, a new address was registered for him. It was plausible. It was certainly more than I had before.
I didn’t think. I just grabbed my phone and called Nico. It rang a few times before the line was picked up.
“Digame.” It was him. By now, I’d know his voice anywhere.
“Nico,” I said.
“Case, por Dios. I swear to God, leave me the fuck alone.”
“It’s back to Case now?” I asked, smirking even though I could still hear his anger.
“What the hell else should it be?”
That’s fair. I sighed. “Look, I found something. Something I think you need to know. A man named Andrew Jay Hudson moved to Worthington a few days before Nora was killed. His address was only registered afterward, but he matches the description in the letter. He’s a fit. He could be the guy.”
“So, why are you calling, Case?” Nico asked, his voice flat.
“Like I said, you need to kno--”
“No! No! No more shit I need to know. Not anymore. No way. Unless you’re actually going to do something, be something, I’m not wasting my time,” his voice was strained. “I’m not wasting another second on someone who can’t be what I need.”
“Nico, now, hold on a sec--”
“Goodbye, Landon.” The line went dead. When I tried to call again, it went straight to voicemail. I threw my phone into the floorboard in anger. Fuck. What the hell was I going to do?
I thought back to Noah’s words, to what Nico had just said. It hurt, ached somewhere in my ribs, like being shot all over again. What would I have done if it was Noah? What would I do if it were Nico?
Like that, my mind cleared. All the tension, all the confusion of the past few days went away. If it were Nico? With the shoddy work investigating, the blindness of the officers to only make an arrest of anyone, anyone to right the wrong of Nora’s death, the willingness of anyone, everyone in the process to accept that someone like Oliver could have done this, it could have been Nico. It could be Nico tomorrow. And there was no way in Hell I’d let it be Nico. There was no version of me that would let any version of him go away for something based on those facts, based on any facts.
I scrambled for my phone and called again. When the line went live, I spoke before the person on the other line could even say anything.
“This is Landon Case with the Worthington Sheriff’s Department. I need to speak to District Attorney Gadwell. It’s urgent.”
17
“Nico? What’s up, man?” Quinn answered brightly over the phone.
“Do you swear not to say I told you so?” I asked, not caring if he did or not. I just wanted some sort outlet that would let me vent about everything that had happened with Landon…or, Case, as things stood.
“Are you calling to tell me that I was right to tell you to be careful about Landon, same as I told you that Miguel Acevedes in the tenth grade was running game on you, but you were like ‘no, Quinn, no, I’m a good judge of character’ and all that?”
“Sort of. I don’t know. It’s different but it’s not really different, is it? I thought because he was all honor-and-justice and serve-and-protect he’d be different than the other guys I dated—," I explained, getting faster and louder than I intended to. I had originally intended to be cool over the phone with Quinn, but I evidently couldn’t be reminded of how disappointed I was with Case without feeling all of that anger wash over me again.
“You do have a type,
” Quinn pointed out.
“I know! I know. I thought it was different, but all of that serve-and-protect bullshit is apparently as far as it goes. Some decisions are past just what’s legal and are down to what’s moral, right? Isn’t that more important?”
“Nico,” Quinn’s tone suddenly deepened out of worry. He must have heard something in what I wasn’t saying, ‘What do you mean?” He tried to ask as though he were talking someone off a ledge, gently but urgently.
“Nothing. I’m just saying that sometimes what’s right to do isn’t what’s legal to do and vice versa. And I don’t think Landon understands that. He doesn’t have any reason to, right? He’s got every reason in the world to not see things that way and I was stupid to think he ever could”
“OK, I mean, just in theory, I agree,” Quinn said, still slow and cautious, “but is there any sort of specific situation right now where you might be thinking of doing something that you think is right but that may not be strictly above-board? You’re not trying to break Oliver out of jail or something right now, are you?”
Well, no. I wasn’t. But he knew me too well to explain his concerns away believably, so I picked to say nothing.
“Nico, what are you going to do?” Quinn asked again.
“Whatever it takes, man. Whatever I have to do,” I sighed and answered tiredly before I faked a headache and promised Quinn we’d talk later.
I didn’t want to say too much, and I had already said more than I meant to say. Whatever happened, if anything did happen, I didn’t want Quinn to know more than I could absolutely help. The last thing I wanted now was for him to get called in to testify against me or anything like that which, more and more, was seeming like a real possibility, depending on how things went down.