“She’s staying,” Jim said. “The judge would be crazy to let her out again.”
“Then I’m stayin’, too.”
Vern gaped at her. “No, you’re not, Aunt Aggie. You’re going home, if I have to take you myself.”
“You can’t let a criminal like me back out on the streets,” Aunt Aggie said. “Not when I could go around accessorizin’ more murders, stealin’ and whatnot.”
“Aunt Aggie, I’m not locking you up! Go home!”
She sat back down and put her purse stubbornly in her lap, determined not to move. “Then I want to press charges.”
“Against who?” Vern shot back.
“Against me. For stealin’ that badge. I confess. Go get one o’ them court reporters in here and I’ll give ’em my statement.”
Jim began to chuckle with frustration. “Aunt Aggie, we’re not going to lock you up for stealing a badge.”
“Why not? What kinda po-lice department you call this? If you can’t get locked up confessin’ to a crime…”
“The judge wouldn’t give you more than a slap on the hand for stealing a badge off of a uniform.”
She could feel her face reddening, and her heart hammered with anger. She got up and looked Vern squarely in the eye. “What about assaultin’ a po-lice officer?”
Jim chuckled again, but Vern didn’t find it funny. “Aunt Aggie, you don’t want to do that.”
“Why not? I done it before. Ask Sid Ford if I ain’t.”
Jim nodded confirmation, and Vern rolled his eyes. “Aunt Aggie, I told you. Go home.”
“Make me.”
Vern’s face twisted with disgust. “What are you? Six years old? Give it up, Aunt Aggie! You can sit in here all night if you want. I’m through with you.” With that, he turned to leave.
Aunt Aggie couldn’t think of anything she hated worse than not being taken seriously. Suddenly, she decided to make sure she got her way.
She swung her purse in a circle from its handle, just like a lasso, then sent it flying across the room. It hit the back of Vern’s head, and he swung around, his eyes livid. “Are you crazy?”
“That’s twice now I assaulted a po-lice officer. Add that to stealin’, and accessorizin’ murder, and you got plenty o’ reason to lock me up. I demand to be locked up!”
Vern’s nostrils were flaring, not a pretty sight. “Demand? You demand it? All right, Aunt Aggie. I’ll lock you up. But you won’t be in the cell with Celia, if that’s what you hoped. You can both sit there alone and think about what you’ve done.”
Aunt Aggie wasn’t afraid. She’d been in the women’s part of the jail to visit people before, and she knew that there were only four small cells. If she and Celia weren’t roommates, at least they could talk to each other, and she could make sure she was all right. She held out her hands to accept the cuffs. “I’m ready.”
Vern looked as if he could scream. “I’m not cuffing you, Aunt Aggie.”
She was a little disappointed. Something about walking through the police station in handcuffs appealed to her. The uproar it would cause, the rumors, the outrage…
He opened the door and took her arm, led her out. David was waiting for her.
“They lockin’ me up,” she yelled to him, louder than she needed to. “Throwin’ me in the pokey.”
David’s jaw fell open. “You’ve got to be kidding. For what?”
Vern seemed too embarrassed to answer, so Aunt Aggie obliged. “Assaultin’ a po-lice officer. Couldn’t get ’em to do it for nothin’ else.”
David turned his outraged eyes on Vern, then on Jim Shoemaker. “This is ludicrous! What is the matter with you people? Locking up my sister, and now my eighty-one-year-old aunt? Are you absolutely out of your minds?”
Jim’s amusement had passed, and he was beginning to lose his patience. “If you want to make it a threesome, we can oblige you, too.”
“None of us did anything!” he shouted. “My sister is being framed. And Aunt Aggie…well, give me a break. You know what she wants. She’s looking out for my sister, but for crying out loud, she doesn’t need to go to jail, too. Look, I’ll just take her home, and—” He reached for her, but Aunt Aggie jerked back from him.
“David, so help me, I’ll wallop you, too, if you interfere. Justice is bein’ served. I got to serve my time.”
David’s face was crimson. “You’ve done some crazy things, Aunt Aggie, but this beats everything.”
Aunt Aggie couldn’t help smiling. “It does, don’t it? How ’bout that? Now you run on home. If my fire boys call to see where I am, you tell ’em I can’t cook for ’em till they let me outa jail, now, you hear? They’ll understand.”
David looked at Vern with disgust. “They’ll tar and feather you. They’ll raid the place to get her out.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Vern said, then pulled Aunt Aggie into the hall leading down to the basement where the jail cells were.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Though it was getting late when Jill left the police station, she walked next door to the fire station to see if Dan was working. She found him in the weight room bench-pressing, and stood at the door watching him for a moment before he saw her.
She didn’t know why she was here, really. She should be able to handle this. She’d had difficult cases before. Granted, none of them had left her client’s life hanging in the balance. And she’d never had so many surprises in a case, surprises that shouldn’t have been…
But she did believe Celia. She did.
Tears pushed into her eyes, and she sniffed. Dan heard her and looked up. “Jill.” He got up, as if self-conscious about what he was doing, and wiped his face on a towel. “I didn’t know you were here. It’s late.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I was just at the police station. Thought I’d come see if you were here.”
“You’re upset,” he said, looking into her eyes. “Come sit down. Tell me what’s wrong.”
She let him lead her to a folding chair, and he took the weight bench across from her. “Nothing, really,” she said. “I just…uh…I’m having some problems with Celia’s case. I don’t know quite what to do.”
“Has something happened?”
She contemplated telling him. How much was attorney-client privilege? How much was guaranteed to be in the paper tomorrow, anyway? How much would the fire department know in just the next few minutes when the cops started talking?
“Celia’s back in jail.”
“What? Why?”
She got up and walked across the room, picked up a small barbell, set it back down. “She broke a court order and went to see Stan tonight. It just so happens that, after she got caught, they discovered that someone had injected arsenic into his IV bag.”
Dan got slowly to his feet, his mouth open.
“He’s okay. I mean, this new poison didn’t have much time to get into his system. They caught it in time.”
“Jill—”
“I know,” she said, stemming his response. “I know how it looks. Believe me…I know. She’s in jail. They probably won’t let her out. And I don’t know how I’ll fight this.”
Forgetting the sweat he’d worked up, he put his arms around her and pressed her head against his shoulder. She rested in that embrace, thankful that something had the power to bring her that much relief, that much comfort.
“What is she saying?” Dan asked.
Jill pulled back and looked up at him. “That she didn’t do it. Even Stan…he’s saying that an orderly came in before her and switched the bags…Sid is convinced he’s covering for her. But that doesn’t make sense. She would know she’d get caught. Why would she do that?”
“It’s an awful coincidence, Jill,” he said. “For this person to come in and poison him again, and it just happens to be right before she comes? That’s hard to buy.”
“She didn’t do it.” The words were said so weakly that she hardly believed them herself. “She didn’t, Dan. It may look like it to everyo
ne else, but not to us.”
He let her go and sat slowly down. “I want to believe her. I know what it’s like to have people accuse you because of how things look. This town is bad about that. I haven’t forgotten how they almost strung me up. You were the only one who believed in me.”
“I may be the only one who believes in her. But I have to.”
He met her eyes. “What if you’re wrong?”
“Then I’ll be wrong. But she’s my friend, and now she’s my client. I have to get rid of whatever doubts I have.”
“Then you admit you have some?”
She looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t want to, Dan. I don’t want to have doubts about my friend. I look in her eyes, and I believe her. But then when I walk away, and I start adding things up…”
“You start to realize you’re human?”
“I haven’t got time to be human,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Issie Mattreaux hated to be stood up. She sat alone at the bar at Joe’s Place, nursing a glass of wine and feeling sorry for herself. She might have known the guy who was meeting her here wouldn’t show. She’d met him on one of her calls today, when he’d found his cousin in a hypoglycemic coma. He had called 911 and had been impressed when she so easily revived the patient with glucose. She’d spent the next half hour bantering with him, and when he’d finally asked her out, she’d had high hopes. He’d had to work late, so he’d asked her to meet him at ten o’clock. But it was already eleven, so he was an hour late, and she knew better than to kid herself any longer.
From the corner of her eye she noticed a man across the room looking at her, and she turned and met his eyes. He wasn’t bad looking. In fact, he looked better than most of the men who frequented this place—even better than the guy who’d stood her up. She smiled at him; he smiled back. After a moment, he got up and came to claim the stool next to her. “Buy you a drink?” he asked.
She lifted hers slightly. “Got one.”
He smiled. “Can I buy you the next one?”
She considered that a moment, then lifted her glass and finished it off. “Sure.”
He grinned and waited for the waiter. “How about another one for the lady?”
Joe seemed to sneer at him, and Issie frowned. It wasn’t Joe’s way to be rude to his customers. There must be something wrong. She glanced up at the man. “I’m Issie Mattreaux,” she said.
He nodded. “Lee Barnett.”
The name sounded familiar. She ran it through her mind, trying to process it. “You new in town?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just been here a few days.”
Suddenly it came back to her. The gossip at the fire station, about the man in Celia’s past. No wonder Joe was giving him the cold shoulder. Joe brought her the drink and she thought of refusing it, but then decided she needed it. “I’ve heard things about you,” she said, bringing it to her lips.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess everybody has, but they’re not true.”
She looked up at him. “How do you know what I’ve heard?”
“Because they’re sayin’ that I had somethin’ to do with Stan Shepherd’s poisonin’, and that I’m involved with his wife.”
“Aren’t you?”
He sat there a moment, as if contemplating the question. “Tell you the truth, I’m not sure.”
“Not sure? That’s interesting.”
“Well, see, I thought I was. I thought there was this letter from her, and a check…”
He’d had too much to drink, she could tell, because his speech was slurred. She wondered how many he’d put away.
“But I don’t think she wrote that letter, and I don’t think she wrote those checks.”
“Then who did?”
“Got me. That’s the ten million dollar question. Matter of fact, it could be a life or death question.”
“If you’re not involved with her, then how come you’re staying around town?” she asked.
He shrugged. “They won’t let me leave till the investigation’s over. But I’m tellin’ you, I didn’t do anything.”
Something told her to get up and leave, to walk right out, but she was lonely, and she had nothing to do at home. She decided to stay. What could it hurt? She took another drink of her wine, set it down, ran her finger along the rim.
“You a friend of Celia’s?” he asked.
“I know her.”
“What about Stan?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I know him better. I’m a paramedic. I work with him from time to time.”
“Paramedic, huh? So you go around saving lives?”
The question irritated her. “Sometimes. I almost lost Stan Shepherd.” She regarded him, watching for his reaction. He was handsome, just the type she could picture Celia dating years ago. She wondered if there really was anything between them. Something about that possibility piqued her interest in him. She wasn’t sure why that was, didn’t want to explore it. But when a man had an attractive woman interested in him, he seemed more valuable in her eyes. As if to counter her attraction, she said, “So I hear you were in prison.”
He swiveled on his stool and looked out over the crowd. “Not the kind of thing I like for a girl to know about me the first time I meet her, but yeah, it’s true.”
She sipped her drink. “Got involved in a barroom brawl and killed somebody?”
“Word travels fast.”
She picked a fish-shaped cracker out of the bowl on the bar and nibbled on it. “So if you could kill somebody in a bar, what would keep you from killing somebody with poison?”
“Prison,” he said simply. “The best deterrent I know. I’m not going back.”
She finished off the cracker, took another sip, then glanced at him again. “It’s just suspicious, you know. You being here, where Celia is. Showing up right around the time Stan was poisoned.”
He leaned his elbow on the bar and lowered his voice. “I think it was supposed to be suspicious,” he said. “That’s what this is all about. We’re both being framed.”
“She’s the one in jail,” Issie pointed out. “You’re sitting in a bar hitting on me.”
He pulled back a little and grinned at her. “Hitting on you? I thought I was making conversation.”
A grin tugged at one side of her lips. “You bought me a drink, didn’t you?”
He laughed softly. “Yeah, I bought you a drink.”
“That usually means that you’re being hit on.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been out of circulation for a while,” he said. “I don’t know the rules anymore.”
She breathed a humorless laugh. “Oh, you know the rules. Who are you kidding?” She was playing with him, she realized, and she wondered if she had had too much to drink, herself. But there was something about his eyes. Something exciting, something fun, a thrill she hadn’t had the opportunity to experience in a long time. The forbidden.
He seemed to read her thoughts. “This place is awfully smoky,” he said in a deep voice too close to her ear. “What do you say we go someplace else?”
“Someplace like what?” she asked innocently.
“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one who knows Newpointe.”
Her senses came alive as she thought of the possibilities. They could go to Maison de Manger and get a bite, or they could go for a walk along the bayou behind the fire station. Or they could drive down to Lake Pontchartrain, or go to her apartment, or his…
She’d heard about his apartment, that Celia had set him up there, and she wondered what it looked like. Then her common sense ruled that out, and she realized that it was stupid. She couldn’t be caught alone in an ex-con’s apartment, not when he was suspected of murder, no matter how much she’d had to drink.
“I think I’ll just stay right here,” she said.
He grinned again. “Okay. I’ll stay here with you. It’s safer. I can’t attack you if we’re in a crowd.”
She grinned. “You c
ouldn’t attack me, anyway.”
“Tough guy, huh?”
She nodded. “I can hold my own.” It was true. She’d had self-defense training, and was stronger than she looked. More than a dozen times lately she’d had to lift an unconscious grown man onto a gurney. She felt quite sure she could fight one off if she had to.
“If you’re so tough, then why are you so afraid to go anywhere with me? It can be someplace public, you know.”
“I know.” She winked. “But I think I’ll stay right here.”
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe we can get to know each other even in all the smoke and noise.”
“Do you like to dance?” she asked.
He grinned. “Haven’t done it in five years. There weren’t many cotillions in prison, but we can give it a whirl.”
She set her glass down. “All right,” she said. “Let’s have at it.”
Chapter Forty
There were only four small cells in the women’s portion of the Newpointe city jail. They were each five by ten, with a small cot with a flat mattress, and a sink and commode behind a partition. Celia lay on her cot, fighting her nausea. She didn’t need that sick feeling on top of the despair closing in on her, but it was there, nonetheless, reminding her that there was a baby involved, that this was no longer just about her life and her integrity. Now she was also defending her child.
She got up and went to the sink, bent over, and splashed water on her face. At least the sink was clean. It could be worse. The commode, too, had been recently cleaned, and a sterile smell wafted in the air.
She sighed and sat back down on the bed, wishing for something to occupy her mind, to keep her from thinking of the horror on Stan’s face as they had dragged her out of his room. He still loved her; she knew that without a doubt. But she wasn’t sure he believed in her anymore, not after someone had poisoned him.
But didn’t he know that it wasn’t her? He had to.
She tried to rest in that knowledge, but it was difficult.
The door to the hall opened, and she heard footsteps. Were they coming for her? Had Jill maneuvered a way to get her out this time?
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