Phil sank back into his chair.
Melinda wobbled up from hers. “Uh, um, the state asks for the defendant to be held without bail, Your Honor. He’s, um, a repeat defendant, and this is a serious crime. He’s known to consort with a bad element, and we believe he is a danger to the community.”
I stared at her. Melinda was always pale, but the teeter-tottering on her heels, the way she was speaking like a novice debater instead of a seasoned ADA, these things weren’t like her. She was off her game. As I watched her, she bit her pinky nail.
The judge seemed to notice as well. His brows furrowed like accordion doors across his forehead before he turned to Jack. “Mr. Holden?”
“Ridiculous, Your Honor. Mr. Escalante owns a business in the community, he has a fiancée here, and two young boys that think of him as a stepfather. He’s not going anywhere, and he was already exonerated in this court one time.”
“I’m inclined to agree, although I wouldn’t hang my hat on that last point. Give me a number, Ms. Stafford.”
She threw up one hand. “Two million.”
Jack snorted. “That’s the same as no number at all. My client doesn’t have that kind of money. We propose that he be released under his own recognizance.”
“Neither of you is any help.” The judge rolled his eyes. “One million.” He stood. “Ms. Stafford, you should get some Emergen-C from the bailiff. You don’t look well.”
Melinda’s mouth fell open, and she worked her jaw. But for once in her life nothing came out.
“Dismissed.” With a swirl of black robes and a clomping of boots, Judge Herring disappeared back into his chambers.
Phil slumped over with his head on the table.
Chapter Seven
The ambulance that came for Phil took him to the Southwest Hospital Emergency Room. Jack and I raced after it in his Jeep Wrangler. People turned to watch as we went by and I wasn’t sure if it was the ambulance or the chartreuse back quarter panel that swiveled heads.
I hit Nadine’s name on my favorites list to call her. Voice mail picked up.
“Nadine, this is Emily. Please meet us at Southwest Hospital. I am sure everything will be fine, but Phil is being transported there now. He collapsed in the courtroom.”
Jack glanced over at me, his eyes soft and concerned. “Maybe we should go pick her up.”
“Yeah, if we can find her.” A half wail escaped my lips. “Oh, Jack. This is nuts. Everything. Everything has just fallen apart. Poor Phil and Nadine. And Betsy, the Hodges . . .” I put my fist to my mouth.
Jack’s hand crawled over to mine for a quick squeeze before he had to make another turn.
I sat up. “I know. I can send Wallace for her.”
I was already hitting speed dial by the time Jack nodded approvingly.
Wallace picked up on the first ring. “How did court go?”
“Awful! Phil collapsed and hasn’t woken up.”
“Oh my God!”
“He’s in an ambulance to Southwest. Nadine had left to pick up Eric because he was barfing at school. I can’t get ahold of her. I left her a voice mail, and I’m worried about her.”
“Oh my God,” Wallace repeated.
“I’m with Jack. We’re following the ambulance.”
“How can I help?”
“Can you find Nadine and bring her to the hospital?”
“Absolutely. Ethan and I are on our way.” Ethan was Wallace’s significant other. Possibly more significant than I’d realized.
“Oh, thank you, and thank him, too. I feel like I let her down so badly this weekend, and I just, well, I just want someone to be with her.”
“Before we go, anything else about the proceedings?”
“They’re sending it to the grand jury. Bail’s a million.”
“A million? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“I know.”
We said our somber good-byes.
Jack pulled into a parking space outside the emergency room. “Won’t be a need for bail any time soon, the way this is going.”
I stared at him openmouthed. Then I shuddered. He was right.
***
Three hours later, we stood inside Phil’s room in the Intensive Care Unit. Monitors beeped and lights blinked. A strong antiseptic scent competed with something metallic and earthy. I held Nadine to me in a humid embrace, her hot tears sliding down my face, her head on top of mine. Jack stood staring out the window into the blue nothing. Phil lay on the hospital bed with wires, tubes, and an IV running from him to the bank of machines behind him that were keeping him alive, and a handcuff securing his wrist to the guardrail on the side of the bed. He was pale and clammy, and in a diabetic coma.
“I didn’t even know,” Nadine kept repeating. It had been her mantra since the doctors left. “I didn’t even know.”
“I understand. We didn’t either.” I swayed gently side to side, guiding her with me.
Jack’s voice sounded muffled against the window. “He always took food breaks when we were preparing for his trial. I didn’t think anything of it.”
Nadine sniffed. “Yeah, same with me.”
Jack turned toward us. “The doctors said he had a couple of medications in his system. That he had to have them with him or at the jail before court. Have you seen him taking any meds, Nadine?”
“He takes vitamins. He keeps them in pill cases, you know, like Monday morning, Monday noon, Monday night, for each day of the week. I tease him about it.” She slowly released me. “I guess they could have been diabetes medications. I never looked that closely.” A sob caught in her throat. “I trusted him.”
Jack nodded slowly, like his head was keeping rhythm to a slow, sad song.
I looked from Jack to Nadine. “Well, the best news is that they think they can manage this and get him out of the coma.”
Nadine flopped into the chair next to Phil’s bed. “But they don’t know how long it will take. It could be days.” She grabbed his hand and pressed it to her cheek. In a whisper she said, “Or never.”
I couldn’t let her go down that path. “What can I do, Nadine? For you, for your boys? For Phil?”
“Me, too,” Jack said. “I’ve got my Jeep.”
Nadine didn’t raise her head. “Wallace has the boys, but I imagine I’m going to need help with them tomorrow if Phil’s not better.”
I made a command decision. “Can you run get us some food, Jack?”
Nadine shook her head. “I can’t eat.”
“I can. And you will later.”
“Where and what?” Jack asked.
“Curries from My Thai.”
Nadine’s head rose enough that her eyes showed. “Make them give you my employee discount.”
Jack and I smiled at each other. “I’m on it,” he said. He walked up to me, put his mouth to my ear, and whispered, “See if she knows anything about Phil and Dennis.”
I pulled my head back to see if he was joking. His eyes were serious. I leaned in and whispered furiously, “You’re deluded if you think I’ll pump her for information while Phil lays here near death!”
He kissed my temple. “When he wakes up, he goes back to jail and faces a murder charge. Phil is our client.”
Anger coursed through my veins like mercury to the top of a thermometer. Phil is our client. Anything ending in “our client” were words I least liked to hear coming out of Jack’s mouth, because they always meant he was telling me to do something that felt wrong.
Jack winked at me like he didn’t know I was furious. “Hang in there, ladies. I’ll be right back.”
***
My brain trapped Jack’s cold words inside my head, and they froze in place. Phil is our client. Phil is our client. Phil is our client. But Nadine is our friend! I wanted to shout. How had I managed to betroth myself to a man so callous that he wanted me to take advantage of my friend’s emotional distress to get her to spill her guts? Who couldn’t even spit out the words “I love you” to the woman he wanted to marry in one mon
th? Who didn’t find it necessary to tell me what he was working on, when we were supposed to be partners on all of his cases? I wanted to scream and stomp my foot like a child, but my eyes darted to Nadine, bowed over Phil, to the bank of flashing monitors behind them, and I held it in.
Now, that was love—the look on Nadine’s face, the tenderness in her eyes. She was one of the best friends I’d ever had. If I could help her get what she wanted most in the world by doing something in my power, then I should do it, and Jack could take a long walk off a short plank. So I just had to figure out what it was that she would want. I watched her gently kiss Phil’s forehead, and a tear from her cheek slipped onto his.
When the realization hit me, I wracked my brain for a fresh, satisfying curse word that didn’t violate my mother’s rules. Her old standby, “spit in a well bucket”? Something foul and hospital worthy, like “pusbuckets”?
“Fudge!” I said, drawing out the F much louder than the whisper I’d intended.
Nadine straightened up. “Fudge?” She wiped her eyes, then her nose.
“Nothing.”
She flopped down into the chair beside Phil.
I perched on the window seat. A quick glance toward the hall revealed no one was lingering outside. I gut-checked my epiphany from a moment ago. Would Nadine want to have Phil out of the hospital and out of jail, so they could be together, more than anything else in the world? Of course she would. I couldn’t help with the hospital part, but since Phil was our client, I could help with the other. Which meant . . . Jack was right—an annoying habit of his. And I loved him—an irritating susceptibility of mine. Insensitive or not, I loved him.
Besides, I wasn’t exactly Miss Sensitive myself, now, was I? I was the one who hid from Nadine all day Friday without answering her questions about Phil, knowing she was troubled.
I picked at my too-dark plum fingernail polish, which gave me somewhere to look besides into Nadine’s eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back Friday.”
“I understand. You were meeting Jack’s parents.” She said the right thing in the wrong tone of voice, the tone that said she would have called me back in my place.
“Yes, but still.”
“Plus, you aren’t a good liar. And I know you were going to lie to me about the search at Phil’s.”
“I—”
“Phil told me he made you guys promise. Pulled the client card on you.”
“Um, yeah, but I’d already told Jack I was going to tell you Monday. It’s just that, well, things went bad before then.” I had tucked the sketch artist’s rendering into my purse that morning, planning to show it to Phil that day. I pulled it out. “Do you know this guy?”
She took it from me, studied it. “I saw you talking to him at the party, but that was the first time I’d ever laid eyes on him.” She handed it back to me. “Why?”
“He wanted me to tell Jack ‘He didn’t do it.’ That’s why he came up and talked to me.”
“Didn’t do what? Kill Dennis?”
“Maybe, but I have no idea. I told the police and they had an artist do this picture, and then they went ahead and searched Phil’s place Friday morning.”
“What could they have possibly been looking for?”
“Besides a murder weapon—which they didn’t find—I was hoping you might know.”
“Me? Why?”
I flicked the last of the plum nail polish to the floor and scooched it under a chair with my foot. “Because you knew Phil and Dennis, their relationship.”
Nadine took a deep breath and started to speak. “There is—”
A young blonde nurse in flowered scrubs poked her head in. “Pardon me, ladies. Time to get some vitals.”
Nadine sighed and waved her flattened hand back and forth in a noncommittal gesture. The young woman switched out an IV bag, checked Phil’s pulse manually, and wrote on a chart. She looked super fit, in a triathlete kind of way. “Are you two, um, family?”
Nadine glared at her.
The nurse backed up. “I only ask because we have very strict visiting rules in Intensive Care.”
I pointed at Nadine. “My sister is his wife.”
She nodded briskly. “Excellent, carry on, then.” Her fancy running shoes made squelchy noises as she left.
“Who says I’m not a good liar?” I wriggled my eyebrows at Nadine.
“I take it all back.”
“You were saying?”
“What?”
“Before we were interrupted?”
“Huh?” She tucked sheets under Phil’s legs with her back to me. “I don’t remember.”
This time she was the one making up stories. Nadine was usually a straight shooter. So I decided to play it her way. “Yes, you do.”
She whirled. “Are you calling me a liar now?”
In my softest voice I said, “I’m on your side, Nadine. If there’s something you want to say, I’m the right one to say it to.”
A few short breaths through her nose later, Nadine’s face crumpled. “But what if what I have to say is bad for Phil?”
I got up and took both her hands. “That’s the most important kind of thing to tell me. To let Jack and me know, so we know what to look for, what to anticipate, what to protect Phil from.”
She pulled away from me and turned to Phil again. Her words were barely audible. “I heard him. At the party, I heard him on the phone with Dennis.”
“That’s good.”
Her long jet-black hair swayed as she shook her head. “No, it isn’t.” She put her hands on the side rail to Phil’s bed and her body rocked forward and backward. “And I didn’t even ask him about it. I should have trusted him enough to ask him instead of hiding it away and stewing over it.”
I put my fingers lightly on her shoulder and waited.
She threw her voice lower, like a man. “Why did it have to be her, you dumbass? I got your forward. Meet me outside. We need to talk.”
I rubbed her back in small circles. “Are you sure it was Dennis?”
“Yeah. I saw it come up on caller ID.”
“Forward, like forwarded email?”
“That’s what I assumed.”
“Any idea what Phil was talking about?”
“None. But he was really pissed.”
My brain sorted through all that I knew about the case so far. It didn’t take long, because it wasn’t much, if you discounted the man I’d seen and focused in on Phil instead. John had said a witness saw Phil and Dennis arguing in the parking lot. Nadine heard Phil and Dennis talking, and Phil was angry. So she was right. What she had to tell me sure didn’t help. I needed to know more if I was going to help him.
“Do you have Phil’s phone?”
“No.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“It could be at his house, if it’s not with his things at the jail.” Phil had spent three nights there after his arrest, and I knew what Nadine meant. All his personal belongings would have been confiscated.
“Well, we’ve got to find it so I can see the call log between them and read his texts and emails.” A small frisson of excitement shot through me. I had a new lead. A tiny one, but still a lead that might take me to the information we needed to exonerate Phil. “It sounds like there’s something going on between Dennis and Phil that we need to get our eyes on.”
Chapter Eight
The next morning as I got in the shower, I heard Jack’s phone ringing in the bathroom and Snowflake exploding into cell phone attack mode.
“Hello?” Jack said over Snowflake’s hysteria, then his boot steps faded as he walked away from the bathroom.
Two minutes later, Jack poked his head into the bathroom. “I’ve got to get in early today.”
I opened the glass shower door, eucalyptus mint shampoo tingling on my scalp. “I need fifteen minutes.”
He shook his head. “Gotta leave now.”
“Okay,” I said, drawing the second syllable into a third. I cocked one hip, b
ut his eyes weren’t even on my body.
“See you later.”
I puckered my lips and leaned out for a good-bye kiss, but too late. Jack was gone. I stood there with soap running in my eyes and my mouth open. What was up with him? He seemed tense and distracted, unlike the sweet if not very talkative man I’d come to know kinda-sorta well.
I took my time getting ready, nursing my bruised feelings in the deathly quiet house. Jack must have taken Snowflake. I missed the jangle of the tags on her collar and her cold, wet nose against my skin. I finally dragged myself to the garage half an hour later. I opened the outer door and felt the unseasonably warm air in the garage escape. It was barely April and already we’d had temperatures in the 90s over the weekend. I opened the door to the Mustang and plopped down into the driver’s seat, immediately gagging. A noxious odor enveloped me. My eyes stung and I jumped back out with the acidic taste of bile in my mouth from my two-coffee, no-breakfast morning.
“What in Hades?” I slammed the car door. My first thought was a skunk. I peered through the closed window. The car looked tidy and rodent-free. Had someone planted a stink bomb in it? Or a true enemy could have poisoned me with mustard gas. Both seemed highly unlikely. I didn’t want to open the car to test the smell again, but I knew I was going to have to get in it eventually. I cracked the door and took a cautious sniff. Nausea roiled my belly again, but my brain still whirred, searching for the stink in my memory files. I got a hit almost immediately: we’d had an old hound dog when I was in elementary school, and he liked to chase birds. In fact, he was quite successful in his chasing and often caught them, which ended badly for the birds. He’d bring his prizes home and put them in his doghouse. During the winter, it was a disturbing habit, but in the summer it was a disgusting one. The worst stench he ever wrought on our backyard was the neighborhood rooster, four days after the last time I’d heard it crow.
Chicken. I smelled rotten chicken.
I lifted my knit shirt over my face and ducked into the car, searching for an errant chicken nugget or finger or patty from some fast food meal of Jack’s hidden away under a seat but came up empty-handed. I popped the trunk and went behind the car. When I was still three steps away, the odor intensified, and suddenly I knew what I would find.
Hell to Pay (What Doesn’t Kill You, #7): An Emily Romantic Mystery Page 8