A Clean Kill

by Mike Stewart

  I mounted the steps and paused just outside the front door.

  Joey said, “What’s wrong?”

  I sighed. “My keys are still in the Jeep.”

  Joey laughed. Kelly stepped up and fitted a key into the door. I’d forgotten she had one. Joey said, “I’ve already got a man out there looking around. He’ll get your keys. Don’t worry about it.”

  Inside, Kelly said, “You should sit down, Tom. Do you want a Coke or maybe something to eat?” She was in her mother mode, which is particularly amusing on someone who’s about the size of a healthy twelve-year-old.

  “I’d like a drink.”

  She shook her head. “Nope. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  I said, “Probably not,” and plopped down on the sofa. As Kelly walked toward the kitchen, I added, “You do remember that you can’t cook, don’t you?”

  She waved me off over her shoulder.

  It took fifteen minutes for Kelly to make a ham sandwich and put it in front of me. It took about fifteen seconds for me to eat it.

  While Kelly was puttering in the kitchen, I had been bringing Joey up to speed. He listened quietly, asking only two or three pointed questions, and nodded his head. I knew he already had someone checking out the Jeep before some wrecker service could haul it away, which was exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to look for, other than my keys and shotgun. I left that up to him. Joey would know a hell of a lot more about investigating possible tampering than I would. So all I did was fill him in on the Baneberry case and share a few theories. Finally, I asked if he knew anybody who might make me a deal on a new Jeep. He promised to bring over something for me to drive until I could get to a dealership.

  By 9:30, my Mutt-and-Jeff nurses were gone. I locked up the house, set the alarm, and climbed into bed.

  I slept like a rock, which was surprising considering how much pain I was in when I finally woke up. The bedside clock read 10:23 A.M. My shoulders, my back, and my legs ached so badly that I barely noticed the headache.

  Two extra-strength Tylenol and a long, hot shower helped. I scraped at the stubble on my chin, dabbed Neosporin on a few wreck-related cuts, and dressed for a day off in jeans and a polo shirt. Combing my hair in front of the bathroom mirror, I thought I looked pretty good for someone who’d careened unconscious into a concrete horse trough. But then, anything this side of dead under the circumstances was, it seemed to me, looking pretty good.

  I padded downstairs and hung a right with the intention of heading through the living room to the kitchen.

  And I froze.

  My living-room sofa and two club chairs had been shoved against the back wall. An oak table from the kitchen squatted in the middle of the living room. On top of the table stood two dining chairs facing away from each other. Across the tops of the chairs, someone had balanced the coffee table, and on top of that was a tall crystal vase from the entry hall with a basketball perched on top. It was all my stuff, but none of it was exactly, or even remotely, where I’d left it.

  I ran to the front door and jiggled the knob, then reached into the front closet and pulled out a softball bat. A quick search of the house yielded nothing. A more thorough search inside closets, under beds, and inside major appliances had the same result.

  The doors and windows were locked, and, most disturbing, the alarm was still set.

  Shit. I picked up the phone and punched in Joey’s cell number. He answered on the first ring.

  “Joey? You’re not going to believe this.” I filled him in on the makeshift sculpture in my living room.

  He didn’t say anything. He was thinking.

  I broke the silence. “Have you found anything useful on the Jeep?”

  “Not yet.” Joey was quiet for a few seconds before saying, “I guess I’m statin’ the obvious, but it’s pretty clear that somebody wanted you to know the wreck last night wasn’t an accident.”

  I didn’t answer. He didn’t expect me to.

  “Why do you think they did that, though? What’s piling up a bunch of crap in your living room got to do with anything?”

  I looked up at the Rube Goldberg sculpture. “Actually, if someone is trying to send a warning, it’s a pretty smart way to do it. Think about it. If I get the cops out here, they’re going to take one look at this and treat the break-in like a prank. And if I told them I totaled my Jeep last night and this pile of stuff is a warning … they’d probably give me a ride back to the hospital so I could get my brains unscrambled.”

  Joey said, “Somebody wants to play.”

  “Looks that way.”

  Joey’s an unusual guy. You never know what’s going to get to him. “Fine. Somebody wants to play, we’ll fuckin’ play.” He paused. “Why are you so quiet?”

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  Joey thought about that. “You’re gettin’ pissed off, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  Seven

  My midnight visitor had shoved a glass-topped table over by the window to make room for his sculpture. Now, morning sunlight bounced off the tabletop and angled up to shine dead center on the vase that formed a crystal column between the precariously balanced coffee table and my ancient basketball. The vase threw a shimmering, cut-glass rainbow across the ceiling. And I wanted very much to kick the whole damn thing over. Unfortunately, the whole damn thing was made out of some of my favorite stuff.

  By the time I had wrestled the oak table back into the kitchen and shoved my living-room furniture into place, I desperately needed food. Either inhaling carbon monoxide or crashing into a concrete slab had unsettled my insides, and my empty stomach felt as though it were coated with dryer lint.

  Twenty minutes later, I had already polished off two bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and was pouring a cup of coffee when Joey knocked on my door. I found him standing on the front porch. He looked especially proud of himself.

  The smiling giant glanced over my shoulder. “Where’s that pile of furniture and stuff you told me about?”

  “I put everything back.”

  Joey shook his head. “You got no sense of the absurd. I wanted to see it.”

  “What the hell are you so happy about?”

  “Just trying to cheer you up.” Since our phone conversation, Joey had shifted into his cheer-up-the-sick-guy mode.

  I smiled. “Yeah, well, I don’t want to be cheered up.”

  Joey raised his eyebrows, shook his head theatrically, and made tsk-tsk-tsk noises. Then he stepped away from the door and swept his hand out toward the driveway. The Vanna White move didn’t really suit him. “And look what I brought you.”

  I looked. Squatting on my white gravel drive was … I didn’t know what it was. But it looked like a great-white-hunter vehicle, like the kind of thing John Wayne and Red Buttons would have used to chase a wildebeest across the Serengeti in Hatari! The sand-colored 4×4 had a spare tire bolted to the hood, a huge winch welded to something that looked like a cattle catcher in front of the grille, and a metal luggage rack running around all four sides of its roof.

  “Okay.” I looked back at Joey’s smiling face. “What is it?”

  “It’s a Land Rover, bubba. And not one of those pussy SUVs stockbrokers buy to haul their kids to soccer games. This is a serious off-road vehicle. A Series 2-A Safari. Somebody told me Land Rover only sold ’em in Africa and South America.”

  “And you got this one …?”

  “It was a fee. I managed to locate something you don’t wanna know about for a client you really don’t wanna know about. The guy was in the kind of business where you’re rich one day and indicted the next. Give him credit, though. The government attached his liquid assets, so he paid me off with this.”

  I looked from Joey to the Land Rover and back to Joey again. “You sure you don’t want to keep it? It’s got all those memories for you.”

  A classic red GTO convertible pulled into my driveway. “Loutie’s here. Gotta go.” Joey tossed me th
e keys. “Check it out. The guy I got the Rover from blew a wad of cash on it. Brush guards, steel-mesh headlight covers. Leather seats and a CD player, a phone, everything you could want. Bought it from some place in California that restores ’em to like new.”

  “Does it have airbags? I’ve developed a real fondness for airbags.”

  “Yeah, I think so. If you wanna keep it, I’ll let you have it for what the guy owed me in fees. Be a hell of a deal.”

  As Joey trotted out toward Loutie’s car, I said, “You’re a prince.”

  Joey yelled back, “Ain’t that the God’s honest truth.”

  Loutie Blue—a gorgeous ex-stripper who for years had been Joey’s best operative—smiled and waved, and they were gone.

  I glanced down at the key ring in my hand. It held two remotes, two sets of keys, and a gold disk about the size of a half-dollar. Each side of the medallion bore the likeness of a cannabis leaf—and I thought I understood what kind of business Joey’s client had pursued before his unfortunate incarceration.

  Bright blue skies belied near-freezing temperatures, but it felt good to get out of the house and drive through the countryside. After Joey and Loutie Blue left, I had piddled around, typed a few notes on my laptop, and made some lunch. By one o’clock, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Now I was heading north toward Bay Minette, the county seat, to talk with a friend at the courthouse. I knew that I was probably wasting my time, but I was out of the house. And I was doing something. Someone had tried to stop me. It was important to keep going.

  I followed County Road 104 through Silverhill to Highway 59 and turned north. It was a workday, and I passed half a dozen log trucks and that many more refrigerated vans hauling seafood. Every few miles, an entrepreneur with a pickup truck had set up either a firewood or a Christmas-wreath stand by the side of the road. One old guy was selling both. I met two Volvos and one Jeep with Frazier firs roped to their roofs.

  Around 2:30, I pulled Joey’s safari vehicle into a metered space next to the Bay Minette town square. Baldwin County long ago erected a gorgeous courthouse with character and architectural detail to burn; so, of course, they tore it down. Instead, I followed a concrete walkway to the side door of the kind of government building people build nowadays, which is to say square and ugly. Inside, I walked the familiar hallways of justice to the Office of the Clerk of the Court.

  I had called ahead, and Janie—the clerk’s secretary—greeted me by name. “Tom! What in the world happened to you?”

  I’d forgotten the spiderweb of shallow cuts on my forehead. Apparently, the air bag had protected most of my face during the collision, but the Jeep’s windshield had splattered my crown and forehead with tiny glass projectiles. I smiled. “I ran my Jeep into a horse trough.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good idea. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. But you’re right. It was a terrible idea, especially for the Jeep. Is Curtis in?”

  Janie stood and walked back to a door and leaned inside. “Curtis? Tom McInnes is here to see you. You got a minute?”

  A booming voice said, “Sure I do. Tell him to come on in.”

  Curtis Krait is one of those men who continues to insist in middle age that he wears a forty-regular suit, because that’s what he wore in college. Every time I saw him around the courthouse, I cringed at the sight of starched cotton digging into his neck and expensive wool suits that pulled and puckered across his expanding vanity. But it was a harmless vanity, to everyone except Curtis.

  As I stepped into his office, I saw that Curtis had shed his coat, and the only apparent discomforts were the contrasting and painful-looking cinches at his neck and waist. The county court clerk stood and held out a soft brown hand. And I had to smile. Everyone likes Curtis. You can’t help it. He’s one of those natural political animals who radiate likability, even on those occasions when he’s otherwise irritating the hell out of you.

  Following a few concerned questions about my encounter with a horse trough, we moved on to basic Southern pleasantries about each other’s jobs and families. I only had the former; Curtis had both. In the real South—which is to say, not Atlanta or South Florida—if you ever decide to skip the small talk and go straight to business, well, you’re just an asshole is what you are.

  Finally, I got around to why I’d come. “Curtis, I’m trying to dig up information about a woman who was on jury duty here three weeks ago. It would have been the second week in November.”

  Curtis squinted his eyes behind smudged, horn-rimmed glasses. “Does she have a complaint about something?”

  “Well, she’s probably not real happy about being dead.”

  “God, Tom.” Curtis chuckled, then said, “Oh! I bet you’re talking about that woman … What’s her name?”

  “Baneberry.”

  “Yeah, Kate Baneberry.” He reached up to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose. The round horn-rims immediately returned to half-mast. He seemed not to notice. “I remember her. I guess you’re working for the family.”

  “Why would you remember one sick juror?”

  “ ’Cause of the case. Don’t you know what case she was on?”

  I shook my head and tried to look ashamed.

  Curtis pushed at his glasses again. It was a nervous habit. “That was the Federal Life case. The plaintiffs got fourteen million dollars out of that thing.”

  “Okay. Yeah, I remember seeing something about it in the paper. Bad faith.”

  Curtis nodded. “Woman got most of her skin burned off in a car fire, and Federal wouldn’t pay.”

  “Was she covered?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? The jury thought so. What’s going on here, Tom? Are you getting into plaintiff’s work?”

  “No way. I’m just looking into Mrs. Baneberry’s death for a family member. And why I’m here is really kind of a long shot. It’s just that Kate Baneberry’s doctor told me that stress could have played a part in her death. Now that I know what case it was, I can see where she probably was under a lot more stress than she was used to.”

  Curtis just nodded.

  I studied his face. There was something there. “Curtis, you’ve got hundreds of jurors filing through here every week. Is there any other reason you remember Kate Baneberry?”

  He folded his hands, formed an arrow with his index fingers and bumped it against his lips. He was thinking. I shut up and let him.

  Finally, he said, “You quote me on this and I’ll tell people you’re a lying SOB.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tom, you know how bailiffs are. It’s a relatively boring job. Herding jurors around and fetching lunch, guarding folks who really don’t need to be guarded. Basically, it’s a lot of standing around waiting. So, they tend to entertain themselves by gossiping like a bunch of old biddies. And, since they’re stationed outside the jury room where they can hear most of what’s going on, they usually have plenty to gossip about.”

  I nodded. Every lawyer knows that, if they like you, bailiffs can be an invaluable source of information about which way a jury is leaning.

  Curtis went on. “Well, when this Baneberry woman turned up dead, the bailiffs were laughing—well, not laughing, but you know what I mean. They were talking about it because they claimed Baneberry was the sole holdout on the jury.”

  Now he had my attention. “You’re telling me that Kate Baneberry was the only juror standing between the plaintiff and fourteen million dollars?”

  He laughed. “Worse than that. She was the only thing standing between Russell and Wagler and forty percent of fourteen million dollars.”

  “What?”

  Curtis got up and walked around me and closed the door. “I’m serious now. You going to keep this to yourself?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, the bailiffs were saying that, one other time about three months ago, a holdout juror on a Russell and Wagler case got sick and had to be replaced by an alternate. They claim that in that case too, after the sick juror lef
t, the jury ended deliberations early and returned a plaintiff’s verdict.” Curtis reared back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “Tom, you know as well as I do that stuff like this gets better in the telling. But, true or not, it’s kind of getting to be a running joke around the courthouse. You know, stuff like Russell and Wagler should come with a surgeon general’s warning: Disagreeing with this firm can be hazardous to your health.”

  “Do you think there’s anything to it? Other than gossip, I mean.”

  “Tom.” His light-brown eyes scanned my face. “I think it’s just a bunch of bored guys trying to stir up a new courthouse legend. I’m not taking it seriously, and you shouldn’t either.”

  “It is interesting, though.”

  Curtis nodded and his glasses slipped further down his nose.

  “Who was lead counsel?”

  “Chris Galerina was first chair for the plaintiff.” He pushed at his glasses. “Is any of this helpful?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Well, good, bad, or indifferent, that’s all I know. I’m sorry to rush you out, but I’ve got to get some work done.”

  I stood to leave. Curtis followed me to the door and put his hand on my shoulder. “You owe me one.”

  I opened the door and stepped out. “Any time I can help, Curtis. You know that.”

  Curtis held my eyes. “I know. That’s why I’m talking to you.” He smiled and closed the door.

  Whether it’s the Office of the Clerk of the Court of Baldwin County, Alabama, or the hallways of the U.S. Senate, politics is politics. Information is swapped for favors, and favors beget even better information. Curtis was good at it. He knew who to talk to, who to bullshit, and who to ignore. But he still talked when it suited his needs, which is precisely why I hadn’t told him that Jim Baneberry had now hired Russell & Wagler to bring suit in connection with a death that had already benefitted that firm to the tune of about six million dollars.

  It was beginning to look as though—just maybe—Jim Baneberry had the fox guarding the henhouse, and I wondered if he knew it.