A Clean Kill

by Mike Stewart

  The noonday news played beneath squares of bright sunlight that faded the screen. The pretty blonde was anchoring—Gina something. Apparently, there were only fifteen shopping days till Christmas. Another pulp mill was closing. Pollution in Mobile Bay would be reduced. Two hundred thirty-three people would lose their jobs the week before Christmas. The high temperature was going to be thirty-eight degrees.

  And I couldn’t find my client.

  Sheri Baneberry was not at work. She’s out of the office on business. Try back next week. Her home number yielded an answering machine. I tried a listing for Bobbi Mactans and got a series of unanswered rings.

  Rather than waste time trying to get information out of Jim Baneberry, I called Joey’s cell phone, then his house. When he answered his home phone, I said, “We’ve got a missing client.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. What are you doing today?”

  “Nothin’ really. Just hangin’ around here, you know, waitin’ to hear if the cops have ID’d the Cajun.”

  “The country cops have him?”

  “Yeah,” Joey said, “Baldwin County sheriff’s Department. The Mobile cops would be movin’ faster, but you’re in the sheriff’s jurisdiction out there.”

  Kai-Li and my lawyer, Sully Walker, walked into the living room from my study. They’d been huddled in there getting ready for an upcoming hearing on my fitness to practice law—what with my being a ruffian and a possible murderer and so on.

  Sully wanted to submit Kai-Li’s research at the hearing in Montgomery to show that Chris Galerina had been fixing jury trials before he caught a bullet in the temple near my beach house. But, I thought, even if the State Bar Disciplinary Committee accepted Kai-Li’s data, I wouldn’t necessarily be in the clear. I would, however, be taking a lot of powerful people down with me.

  Sully had argued that the political types at the Bar would choose to leave my license to practice alone—until I was actually convicted of something—over stirring up a hornets’ nest at Russell & Wagler. I figured he was right. Probably right.

  Joey said, “Tom? You there?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about something.”

  “That Cajun boy scramble your brains?”

  He didn’t expect an answer. “Think you can find Sheri Baneberry?”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “Call me when you know something … about Sheri or the Cajun.”

  Joey said, “You got it,” and hung up.

  Sully, Kai-Li, and I talked. She’d hurried down yesterday after dropping off her daughter at the Montgomery Airport, which meant she’d arrived at my doorstep without a change of clothes or a bottle of shampoo. Fortunately, though, Kai-Li had a habit of carrying work projects around in an ancient satchel that moved with her from home to office to wherever. She had her jury-fixing data on disk and in her satchel. Now Sully had it too. And he had more faith than I did that he could make use of it.

  He and I argued about that some, and he left.

  Kai-Li needed clothes. She left to buy some.

  I settled my head against the sofa’s back cushions. Dr. Adderson had prescribed something for the ache in my chest, and, as the painkiller kicked in, the television began to fuzz around the edges. I focused on blue sky through the window to clear my eyes. When I looked back down, the screen wobbled like the view through a handheld video camera. An unnecessarily happy guy in a beard and a chef’s hat prattled about “holiday treats.” I could have sworn he said the words, “Bake the cookies or die,” just before I fell asleep.

  The news anchor had changed, and the window over the television had gone black. One lighted lamp cast long shadows across the room. I sat up and looked around.

  “Welcome back.”

  I turned and saw Kai-Li sitting in an easy chair. She had my Beretta over-and-under laid across her lap.

  I smiled. “Expecting trouble?”

  “The Cajun made bail.”

  “What?”

  “The Cajun …”

  “I heard you. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  She shook her head. “I tried, Tom. Whatever Dr. Adderson gave you really knocked you out. It’s probably an overreaction, but Joey said to ‘take measures’ so I called your secretary, Kelly, and she told me about the gun closet.”

  “Where’d you get …?”

  “A key? Your pants pocket. As I said, that stuff really knocked you out. I could’ve stripped you naked and painted you blue if I’d wanted.”

  I reached over and clicked on the lamp next to the sofa. I glanced down at my forearms. They weren’t blue. “Where’s Joey?”

  “Looking for your client, the Baneberry woman.”

  Kai-Li stood and walked over in front of me and held out the shotgun. “You take this, okay?”

  I took the gun. “Do we at least have a name on the Cajun? I assume the sheriff found out that much before he let him go.”

  Kai-Li turned and picked up a curled sheet of fax paper from the coffee table. She read out loud. “Zion Thibbodeaux.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  She smiled. “Nope. That’s his given name. Zion Thibbodeaux. Let’s see. I saw something.” Kai-Li sat down on the sofa next to me and held the paper toward the lamp. I could smell the scent of shampoo in her hair. She’d had a shower while I slept—I guessed before she heard about Mr. Thibbodeaux. “Here it is. Under ‘aliases,’ it says ‘Zybo.’ ” And she spelled it.

  I held out my hand. “Can I look at that?”

  She handed it to me, but then scooted over and leaned against my shoulder so she could continue to read. I glanced over at her emerald eyes as they scanned the sheet.

  She pointed. “Look. Here’s what I wanted you to see. Four years and, what is it, about eight months in maximum security at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola?”

  “Yeah.” I skimmed down the page. “He went up for manslaughter.”

  Kai-Li nodded. “That’s why I got the gun from your closet.”

  I stood and walked to the window. The sun had set while I slept and, out past the yard, the beach floated like a strip of golden haze between dark borders of grass and saltwater.

  I asked, “Has Joey made any headway finding Sheri?”

  “Haven’t heard anything.” Kai-Li stood and walked over to stand beside me just as a wash of headlights swept a sliver of beach. “What’s that?” She sounded alarmed.

  “Somebody just pulled into my driveway.” I broke open the Beretta, checked to make sure it was loaded, and snapped it closed. “Let’s go see who it is.”

  Twenty

  “Is she drugged?”

  Joey shook his head. “Just drunk, I think.”

  Sheri Baneberry lay unconscious on top of the covers of the four-poster in one of the guest rooms. Joey turned and walked out. I stood there alone and watched my client sleep.

  Her hair looked as though she had run a comb through it after a shower and let it dry, and she wore no makeup. Her eyelashes, which had been touched with mascara before, now were as pale as her hair. Her lips were parted, just barely, to reveal a slice of those big white teeth.

  Sheri Baneberry looked about sixteen years old. I left the room, killing the light and closing the door on the way out.

  Downstairs, I found Joey and Kai-Li in the kitchen. The better-looking of the two stood by the stove, shaking dried spices into a boiler of beef stew. Kai-Li returned the spice jar to the cabinet and asked if Sheri was all right.

  “Seems to be,” I said. “Joey thinks she’s just had too much to drink.” Kai-Li looked doubtful, so I added, “I’ve seen her drunk before. Not like this, but pretty bad. Sheri said at the time she was grieving for her mother. But people who grieve with a bottle … well, I think any excuse’ll do if you want the stuff.”

  Joey spoke up. “Dead mother’s a pretty good excuse, Tom.”

  He was right. I could have tried to explain what I’d meant, but I didn’t.

 
Joey popped the cap off a bottle of Foster’s and took a long swig before saying, “You haven’t asked me where I found her.”

  “I assumed she was holed up at home on a binge.”

  Joey shook his head. “Nope. Not at home.”

  “Bobbi Mactans’s?”

  Joey nodded. “Second place I thought of too. Took a while ’cause I didn’t wanna have to beat up a woman to get her out of there.”

  “I think you’d have had to kill Bobbi to get Sheri out.”

  “Yeah. Could be. So, I hung around until Bobbi went out for groceries or more liquor or an extra dildo or somethin’ and went in and got Sheri off the sofa.”

  Kai-Li looked mildly shocked and asked, “Who’s Bobbi Mactans and why does she need an extra dildo?”

  Joey grinned. “She’s a friend, more or less, of Sheri’s. Bobbi Mactans’s father—a prick named Jonathan Cort—and Sheri’s father, Jim, are business partners. Both Bobbi and her father been trying to get Sheri away from Tom since she hired him.”

  Kai-Li asked the obvious question. “Why?”

  Joey glanced at me. When I didn’t answer, he said, “We don’t know. Could be the father’s business is crooked, and he doesn’t want Tom screwing around in his operation, kickin’ over rocks to see what crawls out. Could be Bobbi—who’s your basic man-hatin’ bull dyke—is a control freak and doesn’t want anybody getting between her and her little blonde poontang.”

  Kai-Li said, “You’re not a democrat, are you, Joey?”

  Joey chuckled and turned to me. “Am I wrong?”

  “No. No, you’re not wrong. You explained it a little more colorfully than I would have.” I turned to Kai-Li. “Joey values clarity over diplomacy.”

  “Yeah,” Joey said, “that’s me.”

  Dinner was Irish stew, French bread, and Australian beer. Kai-Li, Joey, and I watched some TV, talked a little, and sat in silent thought a little. I took another painkiller for my chest. By nine, I was nearly gone. I went to my room. Kai-Li went to hers. Joey carried a club chair upstairs and wedged it in front of Sheri’s door, where he would sleep the rest of the night.

  The house grew quiet. But then, as I lay there beneath cool sheets and warm covers in the seconds before exhaustion pushed me under, I could have sworn that I heard the soft murmur of Kai-Li talking quietly on the phone in her room.

  It was around 7:00 A.M. when Kai-Li and I arrived at the little landing strip in Fairhope. A lavender haze filled the east, providing the only relief from gray fields, gray cloudcover, and, it seemed, gray air.

  We climbed aboard Sully Walker’s little Cessna twin engine. I’d had a painkiller hangover when I awoke at five. The lingering cottonmouth, vague nausea, and mild headache had lingered and grown less vague and mild. Now Sully wanted me in front so we could talk about the hearing that morning before the State Bar Disciplinary Committee in Montgomery.

  After some sphincter-tightening bumping, rolling, and weaving, we were airborne and headed north to Montgomery. Between mumbling nonsense into a gray, handheld microphone, Sully yelled at me over the roar of his engines, telling me his strategy for the hearing, filling me in on what documents he had filed with the committee and why.

  I took sips from a warm bottle of Coke and tried to listen, tried to become engaged in defending my license to practice law. But the truth was that I just wanted to go home. I could never remember being so relatively safe and yet still wanting so badly to be somewhere else. I hadn’t thought the disciplinary hearing would bother me so much. I’d been wrong.

  I felt a hand close on my shoulder, and I turned around. Kai-Li was leaning forward from the back seat. “Are you okay?” She had to yell over the engines, and the private question felt rough and intrusive.

  I thought about lying, but just looked at her.

  She yelled, “You thinking about the hearing?”

  “Kind of woozy from the painkillers, I think.”

  “Worried too, I suppose.”

  I shrugged.

  “Is it that you aren’t in control of what’s going to happen to you? Is that what’s bothering you?”

  Kai-Li was being a psychologist again. And she was probably right. But I didn’t want to talk about it, so I just looked at her some more. She kept looking back, so I gave her my best thanks-but-leave-me-the-hell-alone look.

  She smiled a smile meant to pacify. “Okay. But if that is it, just go ahead and recognize that it’s a control issue. Sheri’s safe with Joey, and you’re safe here. And, you said yourself, Sully’s a great lawyer. This is going to work out.” She gave me her reassuring analyst’s smile again. “It’s just a control thing, Tom. Think about it. You’ll feel better.”

  I turned back toward a windshield full of gray sky and drank some warm Coke.

  The night held Sully’s twin-engine Cessna in a black-velvet glove. There was no moon. No light of any kind. There wasn’t even a sense of forward movement toward home—just vibration mixed with the stomach-tingling dips and sways of a private plane.

  Sully was yelling again, but not this time because of the engines’ roar. “Goddamnit! I’ve never seen anything like it. In all the years I’ve practiced law …” He couldn’t finish his sentence. Sully sputtered and shouted again. “Goddamnit!”

  I felt Kai-Li’s fingers squeeze my shoulder. I shook my head, and she withdrew her hand.

  It had been a red-letter day for the forces of good.

  The Auburn clerk from Tiger Tooth Photo had appeared in all his pious, injured glory. The police detective assigned to Chris Galerina’s homicide investigation had driven up from Mobile to introduce evidence that my fingerprints were on the murder/suicide weapon. The three dour members of the disciplinary committee had accepted into evidence the highway patrol’s pictures of my wrecked Jeep—whatever the hell that had to do with anything. They had accepted articles from four newspapers outlining my alleged involvement in Galerina’s death; they had accepted twice that many news clippings reciting the facts surrounding the unsolved murder of my drug-dealing younger brother a year earlier; and they had readily accepted into evidence news stories and court records reciting my admitted guilt in the self-defense killing of someone who may or may not—according to the record—have been instrumental in my brother’s murder. The committee had even accepted as relevant evidence an affidavit from my former law firm stating that I had been “a gifted attorney whose poor impulse control and capricious temper had stalled an otherwise promising career.”

  The only thing the committee had excluded from evidence as “wholly irrelevant” was Dr. Kai-Li Cantil’s research, which meant her testimony also was irrelevant to the proceedings and was not heard.

  The hearing had lasted just over two hours. And, by the end of it, even I was beginning to agree with one committee member’s statement that I was “perhaps too volatile and unpredictable for the solemn and demanding life of a counselor at law.”

  Sully shattered my thoughts. “You know, we’ve got fourteen days before the committee publishes its decision. And we can appeal to the courts after that. But I don’t wanna have to appeal a bullshit lynching like the one we saw this afternoon.” He paused and said, “We can do a hell of a lot in fourteen days, Tom.”

  I nodded.

  Sully cut his eyes at me. Pale light from the control panel deepened twin furrows above his nose. “You are going to keep fighting this, aren’t you?”

  I nodded again.

  “We cannot let them get away with this, Tom.”

  “We won’t,” I said. “It’s a control issue.”

  Twenty-one

  When Kai-Li and I pulled onto my driveway a little before eight that evening, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn. A small spotlight—which was something I didn’t know I had—highlighted a holly-encircled front door, which, in its center, held a fat wreath covered with nuts, pine cones, ribbons, and other seasonal knicknacks.

  Kai-Li smiled. “Did you have this done?”

  I said, “Nope,” and stepped down out of
the Safari.

  By the time we mounted the steps, Joey opened the front door. “How’d it go?”

  I shook my head. “Not good.”

  Joey stood blocking the door. He was thinking. “We’ll just come at ’em a different way.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Joey made a noise, getting ready to speak, and was interrupted by a seemingly sober Sheri Baneberry, popping her head around his shoulder. “Come around to the beach.” Sheri squeezed by Joey and trotted down the front steps, where she paused on the walkway. “Come on.”

  Kai-Li caught my eye and gave me a look I didn’t quite understand; then she turned and followed Sheri. Joey and I waited a few beats before bringing up the rear.

  Joey whispered when he spoke. “We’ve been decorating.” He didn’t sound happy about it.

  “Your idea?”

  “Yeah, you know me—Martha Stewart with a dick.”

  “I’m guessing you were keeping her busy.”

  “Yeah, well. It started out like that and ended up the other way around.”

  Sheri led us around the house and to a point about twenty feet behind the lower deck, where she held out an upturned palm and gestured toward the house. I turned. A towering, Christmas-tree—shaped mass of tiny white lights twinkled at us through the beach-side windows.

  Kai-Li said, “Wow. That really is beautiful.” Then she gently poked me in the ribs.

  “Yeah, it’s great, Sheri. Thank you.”

  Sheri nodded. “It’s not much in return for screwing up your life. But, for whatever it’s worth …”

  The next morning, December 10, the temperature in Point Clear was twenty-two degrees and snow flurries rolled across Mobile Bay—surely both signs of impending Armageddon. Eastern Shore residents enjoy the appearance of snow swirling over salt water perhaps two or three times a decade—and even then it’s usually late in February when a warm front rolls headlong into a sudden freeze. I’d hardly ever seen the white stuff stick for more than a few hours, and I’d never seen it happen during the holidays. Perhaps pigs would fly later in the afternoon.