David dug his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker and walked on with his shoulders back and his eyes front. No one else spoke to him. He was left with his own thoughts.
Kate would probably take one look at him and try to run a stake through his heart. He had to convince her to stay and to take Jason’s case. Appealing to their common history sure as hell wouldn’t do it.
She might be willing to take the case to show David how well she was doing without him. Thumb her nose at him. Fine. Whatever worked.
Because he needed her.
He started up the courthouse steps, made his way across the hall, and downstairs to the jail area in the basement. A deputy whom he knew by sight but not by name stood aside and watched him curiously. David could feel the man’s eyes on his back as he pulled open the door and walked down the hall to the interrogation rooms.
When he’d seen Jason’s white face as the boy had been driven away in the back of Sheriff Tait’s squad car, David had wondered whether this was his final penance. To lose Jason, the one truly blessed thing to come out of all the mistakes he’d made in his life.
No God could be that cruel. If David had to face Kate’s wrath, her recriminations, her hatred, then for the sake of his child he’d do precisely that. He’d offer no excuses and no explanations. She probably wouldn’t listen anyway.
He had trusted only two women in his life—his mother, who’d believed everything she’d ever told him, and Kate, who had never lied to him about anything. And she’d always stood up for what she believed.
Now he needed to persuade her to fight for Jason. David hadn’t done any serious acting in twenty years, but he hoped he hadn’t lost his touch.
If he wanted Kate to stay, he’d have to convince her he believed Jason was innocent...when he was desperately afraid his son was guilty.
KATE CAUGHT her breath. David was walking down the hall behind her. She knew his step, but more than that, after twenty years she’d recognize that scent in the dark. Her eyes still on Arnold’s face, she said in what she hoped was a conversational tone, “Hello, David.” Please God, she thought. Let him be bald and fat.
“Hello, Kate,” he said. “Jason didn’t murder anyone.”
That voice definitely hadn’t grown fat and bald. David’s full baritone still eddied around her like warm clover honey.
She kept her panicked eyes on Arnold’s face and fought to keep her voice steady. “Really?”
She knew she had to turn around, to face this man who had betrayed her in the most devastating way a man could betray a woman. She was glad she’d changed from jeans to her Chanel in the bathroom at the airport. Her suit screamed success.
She wished she had sweated off that ten pounds she’d gained in the last couple of years, but she was still twenty pounds lighter than she’d been when she and David lived in that godawful flat on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. These days she ran and she worked out. Her buns might not be steel exactly, but they were definitely aluminum. Her haircut had cost a packet in Beverly Hills and looked it.
She could do this. She shoved away from the wall, took a deep breath and turned around.
“How did you know it was me?” he asked.
Despite her good intentions she had to close her eyes a moment against the impact of him. Not fat and bald. Not fair.
He held out his hand. She ignored it. “You still use that expensive sandalwood soap.” She curled her lip. “No doubt you can afford it—now. I suppose you could say I smelled you.”
He nodded.
Oh, damn, damn, damn. Why did men have to get better as they aged while women got worse? He seemed even taller, although that couldn’t be. Maybe he was wearing those high-heeled cowboy boots. His shoulders seemed broader, more muscular in his plaid shirt. There was gray in his sandy hair, but while most people got dull bits of gray straggling all over, David’s lay in neat silver wings over his ears. His face was tan, his body lean and taut, and the incipient crow’s-feet around his eyes seemed like arrows pointing to the blue of his eyes.
Crazy eyes. Plenty of people wore contact lenses to turn their eyes that blue, but David had been born with them. Never saw a man with eyes that dark blue. Like the Blue Grotto in Capri or the Hope Diamond. Killer diamond. Better analogy. Definitely killer eyes.
The David she remembered was a combination of Brad Pitt and his namesake David by Michelangelo. This man was Harrison Ford and Richard Gere and Sean Connery sand...
And she hated him.
He dropped his hand as though he hadn’t really expected her to shake it.
“Are you responsible for getting me down here for your son?” she asked, waving toward the door behind which his no-doubt bewildered son still sat with his huge baby-sitter.
“Yes.”
“Oh, David, what possessed you? My Lord, even if I were F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran rolled into one I wouldn’t handle this case. And if you know enough about me to find me as Kate Mulholland, you must know I’m not a criminal litigator any longer. I don’t do murderers.”
“He’s not a murderer. He’s innocent.”
“He could be as innocent as the angels and I still wouldn’t be the right lawyer to defend him. If you’re dead set on using the firm, we’ve got a crack team of guys who will use every trick in the book to get him free. We call them ‘the murder twins.’ Say the word murder and they point like bird dogs and begin to drool.”
“I want you.”
“Then you’re crazy. Besides, Jason may not want me. Does he know who I am? Who I was?”
“Nobody does. Nobody has to. So far as Athena is concerned, you’re here because you’re a great lawyer.”
“And so far as you’re concerned?”
“Because you’re a great lawyer and because I would trust you with my life. More to the point, I would trust you with my son’s life.”
She shook her head. “We’ll return your check.”
“Um,” Arnold said, “I’m afraid it’s been deposited.”
She waved a hand at him. “Call the office and tell them to cut one to David for the same amount.”
“I refuse to accept it,” David said. “I am paying for your services, and I will accept no one and nothing less.”
Kate wondered if fear for his son was enough motivation to put that strength in him, or whether he’d actually grown stronger through the years. Even as Macbeth his senior year in college, he’d never truly caught the timbre of command she heard in his voice now. He’d always been too amiable. He hated making enemies. Maybe making an enemy of Kate had taught him the knack.
“Your check entitles you to the services of the firm. And that’s what you’ll get.”
“When? Tomorrow? The next day? When somebody else can manage to get down here?” He reached out a large brown hand. She shrank away—the thought of any molecule from his body touching any molecule of hers appalled her.
“We can’t wait that long. Jason can’t spend another night in this place. He’s innocent, for God’s sake. Forget he’s my son and think of him as a terrified nineteen-year-old kid stuck in a situation he doesn’t understand.”
“What do you want me to do about it? Break him out?”
“Can’t you get him out on bail?”
“This afternoon?” She glanced at Arnold. “Is there a judge in this place we can see this afternoon?”
“Bail hearing tentatively set for four,” Arnold told her. “I still have to confirm, but I think we can manage it.”
Kate sighed. “One of these days you’re going to go too far, Arnold, dear.”
“Hey. It’s my job to smooth your path, right?”
“You’ve sandbagged me is what you’ve done.”
“So you’ll handle the bail hearing?” David asked. Kate heard the hope in his voice. “And then come on out to the house later and meet Dub?”
“Dub?”
“His real name is Douglas Mays. He’s my father-in-law and the biggest planter in this part of the state. Hear us ou
t. Hear Jason out. Then make up your mind whether to take the case or not.” He ran his hand down his face, and when he removed it, the steel was gone. “Maybe you’re right that this is a bad idea, but please, Kate, do this one thing for me.”
“For you? I thought it was for your son.” She turned away. “It is always and forever about you, isn’t it? Come on, Arnold, let’s go talk to our client.”
“THIS IS CRAZY.”
Jason sat slumped on his side of the table in his orange prison jumpsuit. His fingers played five-finger piano exercises on the table in front of him. He walked them thumb to little finger and back again. He watched them as though if he concentrated long and hard enough, he’d be able to hear Mozart. Or, more likely in his case, some new hardrock group with a creepy name.
Arnold pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and shoved it across the table. Jason looked up at him with a sneer. “Don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I,” Arnold said, retrieved the packet and stuck it back in his briefcase. “I keep them for nervous client.”
Jason glanced up at the guard. “I don’t smoke cigarettes or anything stronger. No dope. You hear me, Otis?” The guard, who leaned against the wall looking half-asleep, didn’t acknowledge the remark.
“I think it’s time we had a little privacy, isn’t it, Otis?” Kate asked sweetly. “And I assume there’s no one behind that.” She gestured to a broad two-way mirror along one wall. “That would be terribly naughty. Lawyers speak to their clients in total privacy. Rather like the confessional.” She smiled again. “Oh, and unlock his ankles and wrists on your way out, please.”
“Can’t do it.”
“Of course you can, Otis. As a matter of fact, I insist on it. And so, incidentally, does the Constitution of the United States, if you’d care to check. We’ll be happy to wait.”
Grumbling, Otis unlocked the chains and pulled them away from Jason’s body. “I’ll be right outside.”
“Thank you so much. We’ll call you when we’re finished.”
Jason’s head stayed bent. His fingers hesitated only momentarily and then went back to their Czerny exercises, but Kate caught the edge of a grin on his face and winked at Arnold.
“So, what happened?” Kate asked.
“Huh?” This time Jason looked at her directly.
Kate caught her breath. Michelangelo would have fainted dead away with lust at the sight of the boy. He was, if anything, more beautiful than David had been at that age. No, David had been ruggedly handsome. Jason looked like David, but with a fine-boned elegance that was only heightened by the tension in his body. Those fine bones came, no doubt, from his mother, good old Melba, she of the size-two dresses and the size-nothing shoes. But he had his father’s sapphire eyes. Suddenly Kate wanted to reach across the table and hug him.
She was so startled by her impulse that she dropped her pen under the table in all the muck and had to bend over to get it. Under the table, Jason’s feet in their expensive running shoes—without either socks or laces for fear of a suicide attempt in his cell—were drumming in tiny dance patterns.
When she had rearranged herself, she said, “All right, Jason, let’s get down to it. I’m asking you what happened. You’re sitting in jail without your shoelaces and obviously without a shower and accused of rape and murder. Unless this is an everyday occurrence in your life, I imagine you’d be anxious to tell me why you’re here.”
“I didn’t do it.”
No fear. Jason Canfield was stunned and angry, but he wasn’t afraid.
“Okay. So who did?”
He jerked in his chair and looked away. “How the hell should I know?”
“All right,” Arnold said soothingly. “Since you have refused to give a statement to the authorities—good thinking, by the way...”
“I watch ‘Homicide’ and ’N.Y.P.D. Blue,’” Jason said. “I know I’m not supposed to say squat to anybody without my lawyer.”
“Thank God for television,” Arnold breathed. “We are, however, your lawyers, and we are now here. So take it from the top. What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right,” Arnold said smoothly. “But according to witnesses, you did have a date with Waneath Talley Saturday night.”
“Sure. I mean I’m home on Thanksgiving vacation, right? And Waneath and I have been dating since high school, right? So why wouldn’t I have a date with her? What’s the biggie?”
“No biggie,” Kate said, “except that you had a screaming fight in front of some juke joint that was overheard by half the town. Then you drove off together still fighting, and nobody saw Waneath until her body was discovered by the side of the road the following morning.”
“Well, somebody sure saw her after I did.”
“Did you have sex?”
“That’s none of your business.”
Kate leaned back in her chair. She was becoming deeply ticked off at her client. Scratch that—her firm’s client. Stubborn as a mule. Just like his daddy. Must be something in the genes.
At the thought of David, who was probably storming up and down the hall outside, she felt a flutter in her stomach. Sooner or later she’d have to face him again. Probably after she’d failed to secure bail for this truculent little jerk in front of her. She had a history of failure when it came to David. History did tend to repeat itself.
“All right,” she said quietly. “I assume this means that you really want to spend the next twenty-five years of your life in Parchman Penitentiary which, from everything I hear, is the garden spot of the universe. Assuming they don’t execute you, that is.”
“I didn’t do anything!” Jason wailed. And now there was fear. His face broke out in a sheen of sweat. His hands stopped playing Mozart and clenched tight to keep them from trembling. “She was alive when I left her.”
“After you’d made love?”
“Yes. Okay, yes.”
“Where?”
“In the back seat of my car, where else?” He’d recovered some of his truculence, but now Kate knew that it was an act. He really was a scared kid. With David’s eyes.
“Always worked for me,” Arnold said.
Kate glanced over at him in surprise. She couldn’t conceive of an Arnold young enough and wild enough to make love in the back seat of a car. He caught her glance, shrugged and grinned.
“The D.A. is saying you raped her.”
“Get real. I mean, we’d been messing around since the tenth grade. Why would I suddenly have to rape her? They got semen?”
“You leave any?”
“Nah. Always use a condom. Listen, I go to Pepperdine.”
“Malibu?”
“Right. I always practice safe sex. In California you’d be crazy not to.” He clammed up suddenly.
“With your girlfriend at Pepperdine.”
“I never said I had a girlfriend at Pepperdine.”
“But you do, don’t you? More than one, maybe? Was that what the argument with Waneath was about? Another girl?”
He looked up and then to his right. “Yeah.”
You’re lying, Kate thought. Whatever they had fought about, that wasn’t it. Or not all of it, at any rate.
Pulling information from him was like dentistry with fence pliers.
At the end of twenty minutes, Kate leaned back and rubbed the muscles along the tops of her shoulders.
“All right. Now, your story is that you had an argument over a possible girlfriend or girlfriends at Pepperdine, and moved it to your car, where, in the course of the rest of the evening, you made up. You then moved to the back seat where you had sex—dutifully protected by a condom. Then she began to make demands that you dump the girlfriends in California, which you refused to do. So she got out of the car and began walking home. By that time you were half-smashed on the beer you had brought along—a lovely DUI to add to the charges, by the way, both dangerous and nitwitted—and you were mad at her. So you drove off and left her to walk home alone.”
/> “Hey, I came back, didn’t I?”
“So you say. You say you drove around, parked until you were semisober, then realized you couldn’t leave Waneath walking along a back road after midnight, no matter how you felt about her, so you drove to where you’d left her.”
“But she was gone. I drove up and down a couple of times and called her name. I figured she’d hitched a ride with somebody.”
“So you went home to your grandfather’s house and went to bed without bothering to call her house to find out whether or not she’d gotten home safely. Quite the little gentleman.”
“Hey, her daddy would have skinned me alive if I’d called at one in the morning. I mean, nothing ever happens around here. I wasn’t worried.”
“Not until they dragged you out of bed at your grandfather’s and arrested you for her murder.”
“I keep telling you. I didn’t do it.”
Suddenly Kate had had enough. “Fine. We’re trying to set up a bail hearing for you this afternoon.”
“I’m going home?”
“I have no idea. They’re going to try like crazy to keep you. In the meantime, I’ll get the guards to let you shower and shave.”
“In this place?” Jason curled his lip. “I’ll wait until I get home. I might drop the soap.” He grinned at her with an attempt at insouciance that didn’t quite conceal the terror he obviously felt. “I’m already being screwed over this murder stuff. Once is enough.”
After Otis had taken Jason back to his cell, Arnold turned to Kate.
“You’ve got to face him, you know. And I’m not talking about Jason.”
“We need to talk to the district attorney or whoever passes for one in this godforsaken place,” she said as they left the interview room and went into the hallway.
“You need some lunch.”
“Not with David.”
“I don’t know where to eat in this town. He does.”
“Then not alone. You come too.”
At the far end of the hall, David stood silhouetted with his hands in his pockets. He stared up through the grimy window at the increasingly gray November skies. The little light that filtered through struck his hair like a nimbus.
Fathers and Sons (Harlequin Super Romance) Page 2