Back to Lazarus (Sydney Brennan)

by Judy K. Walker

  I considered her question, as I had during the hours of driving that morning. It’s one I’d known she would ask, but I could never quite come up with an answer. “Well, I’m not really sure. To tell you the truth, I think you might know better than I do.”

  I waited. Ida began twisting the edges of the napkin she’d used as a coaster, shifted in her seat. She looked down at her handiwork and spoke in such a soft voice I had to ask her to repeat herself.

  “What about the little girl?” Her head had sunk in her shoulders until her neck was barely visible, and she braced herself as if for a blow.

  “Noel?” I asked.

  “So it is Noel. I thought so, but then I felt sure they’d change her name when they got her.”

  “She’s fine. Of course, she’s not so little any more. She’s about my age.”

  Ida had the napkin in her hand now, gripping it, and nodded her head over and over. A sob exploded from her, an anguished sound from deep in her belly that would leave her throat sore when she was done. She left the room. I didn’t follow.

  When she returned five minutes later, she had washed her face and had a damp washcloth in her hand that she occasionally applied to the back of her neck. Her eyes were swollen, and from the shadows beneath them I suspected she’d had about as much sleep as I had the night before. Two women who’d never met, lying awake staring at the walls, contemplating the ghosts of the past. I got lost in the image, and Ida’s voice startled me.

  “You said she’s about your age, huh? So you’re what, 19?”

  I blushed and started to protest, but Ida held up her hand and went on. “No, I’ve done the math. You’ve got one of those faces that doesn’t show its age for a while. Mine was like that. Everybody thinks you’re still in school until you hit 45. Then all of a sudden, time catches up with you.”

  “So how many years until you start looking your age? Four or five?”

  “Oh, honey, I like you. I do have a mirror, but I still like you. It’s true though. I didn’t have a wrinkle or a gray hair for the longest time, but the last few years just about did me in. Ernest being sick, and Isaac… So Noel wants to know about her daddy?”

  “Something like that. When was the last time you heard from Isaac?”

  “Oh, Lord. It must have been about six months before he died. I don’t remember how or why, but somehow he got in touch with me. Ernest was in the last stages of cancer then—he died just a few months before Isaac did—so I didn’t have much to spare for Isaac. But he was a comfort to me, in his letters.”

  Ida’s eyes began tearing up. Her grief was so raw, I tried to take her farther from its source.

  “How did you know about Noel?”

  She smiled. “I met her once. She couldn’t have been much more than five years old. Isaac brought her with him when he came home for our mother’s funeral, and they spent a couple of days.”

  “They?”

  “Just Isaac and Noel. He didn’t bring Vanda. She didn’t exactly get along with the rest of the family. Truth is, I was surprised to see Isaac show up at all, much less with Noel.”

  “Was that the first time you’d seen her?”

  “First and last time in person. Isaac had sent me a picture after she was born. No letter, no return address, just a picture. He couldn’t.”

  Ida must have felt my skepticism because she rushed to defend her dead little brother.

  “He’d made a deal with Vanda. Vanda felt that we disapproved of her. In hindsight, we probably did treat her that way, but I couldn’t see that at the time. And Mrs. Harrison had made her feelings about Isaac very clear.”

  I tried not to laugh and ended up snorting. Ida grinned and said, “So you’ve met her?”

  I nodded.

  “Isaac and Vanda had gotten married young, and I guess they thought all their marital problems came from their families. Doesn’t seem that crazy if you’ve met Mary Harrison. In order to save their marriage, they left Lazarus and broke off contact with all of us. They didn’t even tell anyone where they’d gone. It was all very sudden. I suspect they’d just found out that Vanda was pregnant with Noel and wanted a fresh start.”

  “How’d you track down Isaac to let him know about your mother?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that hard. When he sent the picture of Noel, Isaac didn’t use a return address, but there was a postmark. It was a small town. I called the post office there, and someone got a message to him.”

  “Was that in Hainey?”

  “No. No, I can’t remember the name, but that wasn’t it. I think they moved again right after Mom’s funeral. Noel mentioned that while they were here, something about going to a different school soon.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Noel? She was a quiet child. Not shy, but just not chattery like most children are. Very intelligent. When she spoke it was like talking with an adult. I don’t remember her playing with the other children either. She just seemed more comfortable with adults. I think she read a lot. When she and Isaac drove up, I remember she was reading a book in the car.”

  She paused, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes to call up the memories. After a few moments, she opened them again. “She made me sad. She wasn’t a very physically affectionate child. I wanted more than anything to give her a hug, but I was afraid to.”

  “You said Isaac and Vanda thought their marital problems were because of the family. But you thought it was something else.”

  Ida pursed her lips and tilted her head, trying to see me from a different angle. “Do you work for Noel or not?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Can you come back tomorrow? I need to think about some things.”

  “Okay,” I said. After all, how could I say no to another day in lovely Lazarus?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Richard Frey, Screaming Sammy’s second chair during Isaac’s trial, still worked at the Public Defender’s Office. He was now the Chief Assistant, basically top dog under the elected Public Defender. Frey was out of the office, but I got him on his cellphone.

  “Yes, of course I remember who you are. Where are you?”

  “I was just over in Lazarus and I’m on the interstate headed in your direction right now. Well, the direction of your office. Where are you?”

  He’d been in Carlton Springs that morning, less than 20 miles from Lazarus, and had just caught I-10 on his way back to Hainey. I wasn’t more than a few miles behind him.

  “Listen, there’s a great little diner just off the next exit. It’s a place called Mirabelle’s—cinder block painted red, big windows. How about we grab a bite there?”

  Mirabelle’s was only about a quarter of a mile from the exit, and I pulled into the gravel parking lot a few minutes later. I recognized Frey before the door had even finished dinging my arrival. He was sitting in a booth in the corner. He’d taken his jacket off, but he was still the only man wearing a tie.

  Frey was one of those men probably more attractive now at age 50-ish than he had been 25 years ago. The lines gave definition and interest to what was likely an unremarkable face in his youth, and the gray in his hair gave distinction to what had been just plain brown. He seemed a little short of average when he stood to greet me, maybe 5’ 8”, but when he smiled I lost all thoughts of averageness. His smile must work magic with juries. For his clients’ sakes, I hoped the rest of his expressions were as charismatic.

  “You must be Sydney. I’m Richard.” His handshake was firm and comfortable, as if he offered his hand a million times a day. We settled in and ordered. I got the club sandwich at his insistence, and I wasn’t sorry when it arrived. The lettuce and bacon were crisp, the tomato ripe, and there wasn’t a hint of sogginess to the toasted sourdough bread. I ate slowly, savoring my sandwich, and found it difficult to focus on his words.

  “I was pretty green when the Thomas case came in. Of course, I didn’t think so. I guess I’d been working at the PD’s office a couple of years. I’d already gone through misdemean
ors and worked my way up to felonies. This was my first capital case.”

  “So they did seek the death penalty?”

  “Oh yeah. They’d already gone through discovery and it was close to trial by the time I got called in. You ever work capital?”

  “I’ve done a little contract work on appeals—specific witness interviews, that kind of thing—but nothing at the trial level. I don’t really know much about it. In fact, assume I don’t know anything and you’ll be pretty close.”

  “Well, a capital trial has two parts. The guilt phase is basically like a normal trial, but if the jury finds your client guilty there’s a second part, the penalty phase. The jury hears evidence from the State about why your client should die—aggravation—and evidence from you about why your client should live—mitigation. Then the jurors vote, but unlike the guilt phase it doesn’t have to be unanimous. At least not in Florida. If a majority of the jurors vote for death, just 7 to 5, your client gets a death sentence.”

  “Why only a majority?”

  I nearly choked on my sandwich when Richard grinned at me. Wow, that’ll melt your panties.

  “Don’t get me started,” he said. “If you ever want a diatribe on the Vagaries of the Criminal Justice System, just give me a call and set side a few hours.”

  Richard gave a nod to the waitress and she began making her way to our booth. “I was brought in on the Thomas case because it looked like it was going to trial, and Sam Norton needed help. We try to put two attorneys on capital cases, and seconds cut their teeth on the penalty phase stuff. Look at the defendant’s family, at his childhood, at whether he has mental health issues. That was supposed to be my job.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “Yeah, well, we never got that far, did we?” Richard shook the clotting ice cubes in his nearly empty glass of iced tea.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  I didn’t answer. Just used my trademark Sydney Stare and waited.

  Richard lowered his voice. “You ever think of becoming a cop? No, forget I said that. I’ve got enough screwed clients as it is. Damn, I’d confess if you were interrogating me.”

  I’d like an opportunity to interrogate him all right. Whoa, where had that come from? Focus. For example, on his wedding ring. Richard cleared his throat.

  “It’s funny. Now that I’m Chief Assistant, I end up fielding a lot of administrative and personnel type problems.” He leaned across the booth.

  “I hate it. Makes me feel like a babysitter. Lately there’s a lead attorney who hasn’t been pulling his weight, and his seconds have been picking up the slack. Yesterday I had one of the seconds in my office. I wanted to know why she hadn’t said anything, and she blamed it on something she half-jokingly called ‘second chair syndrome.’ Some sort of co-dependency, covering up for and enabling the lead’s behavior. I told her that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.”

  The waitress filled Richard’s glass, and I covered the mouth of my own just in time. If I had any more sweet tea today, I was going into orbit. Richard took a sip and went on.

  “I’m going to have to track her down this afternoon and apologize. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now, and Norton’s been dead for 20. Working with him just about drove me insane, but it still feels funny to talk about it.”

  “He was your first,” I said, before I realized how it sounded.

  Richard laughed. “Yeah, in a way I guess he was. I learned a lot from him, most of it being what not to do, and to trust my own instincts. When I got called in on the Thomas case, it was a mess. Norton was a mess. He’d already gotten two continuances. He hadn’t finished the depositions yet, and I don’t think he’d even read the discovery. I was supposed to be doing the penalty phase, but I wasn’t getting far with Thomas on his family history, and it seemed to me the most important thing was to get it together for the trial. If he wasn’t found guilty, we wouldn’t need to have a penalty phase. So I started organizing the files, reviewing materials.”

  “Was there a chance he’d be found not guilty?”

  Richard graced me with another panty-melting grin. “Remember, I was young. I didn’t understand yet that our justice system is made up of people. The law is just a bunch of words on paper, the rules you hope everybody will play by when no one’s there to watch them.”

  “Ouch, a cynic.”

  “That’s wisdom speaking, not cynicism. I’m still an idealist. I have seen everything, every kind of deceit and corruption of the system, many times over, and I’ll tell you nothing can surprise me. But I’m still surprised, every time. Surprised that someone’s not doing the right thing.”

  Richard chuckled and looked embarrassed. “I warned you about getting me started. If I were on a jury, Thomas would’ve walked. There simply wasn’t what I would consider to be evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. But people like me don’t end up on juries. Thomas would have been convicted, especially with Norton representing him.”

  “And that’s why you made a deal?”

  “Yeah. Well, to be honest, I was out of the loop on that one—found out after the fact and boy, was I pissed—but in hindsight it makes sense. And you have to remember that this never should have been a death case to begin with. In theory, the death penalty is reserved for the worst of the worst. Child killers, hit men, serial killers, that kind of thing. All murder is offensive to a civilized society, but we’re talking about the truly repugnant killing here, the kind of crime you just can’t get your head around. Not to diminish the very real problem of domestic violence in our country, but a man choking his wife to death just didn’t fall into that category.”

  “Really?” I asked, my tone dry.

  “I’m going to tell you a dirty little secret,” he said. “For a long time, Florida was even less enlightened than the rest of the country about domestic violence. People used to joke about the ‘one free wife’ rule here, that you could get away with killing one of your wives, but the next one would get you prison time. At some point in the 1980s that changed. There was a big swing in the other direction, and I suspect we’ve got a few guys sitting on death row—or executed by now—for that very reason. They were the public example. It could be that Thomas fell into that timeframe, and that’s why the State sought death.”

  “Who was your investigator?”

  “I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t think we had one. Of course we should have had for a capital case. We were probably short-staffed on investigators then—it feels like we always are. I know we were sharing. It wasn’t like you had designated teams, or particular investigators always worked with particular leads. You also have to keep in mind that by this point in his career, Sammy was pretty isolated. He’d managed to piss off most of the decent investigators, and he tried to avoid having one if at all possible, doing the legwork himself or having a second do it. Oh, he might have an investigator do a specific task, but he didn’t want them taking over his case.”

  He glanced at me quickly, to see if I’d been offended. “His words, not mine. I don’t know if he got paranoid at the end or he was always like that. Anyway, I suspect Isaac’s case was seen as a penalty phase case rather than a guilt phase one by everyone but me, so maybe ‘the powers that be’ didn’t push it. Shows you what a mess the office was back then—that’s when you really need somebody, is for penalty phase. Then again, we never made it to trial, and Sammy was a notorious procrastinator. It wasn’t unheard of for him to wait until a couple of weeks before trial, beyond the very last minute, to draft an investigator. That’s probably why they were all pissed off at him.”

  “I know it’s a long shot, but would the office still have your file on Thomas’s case?”

  His undivided attention made me feel short of breath and tingly, like a mild food allergy. “Sit back, and enjoy the moment, because I’m about to make your day. Drum roll, please. We do have his file, and I’ve already had it pulled.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.
Since he didn’t get the death penalty, our office normally wouldn’t have kept it this long, but as it turns out I’m a slightly anal retentive type about those things. My secretary is having it copied right now, so if you want to follow me back to Hainey, I can give you a copy of your very own this afternoon.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  We got back on I-10 for a few miles, then took the 231 exit toward Panama City. It took us about an hour, driving conservatively, to get to the PD’s office in Hainey. I wondered if Richard drove that way because he assumed I was a slow driver and didn’t want to lose me, or because he’d just pissed off too many of the area cops on cross-examination to risk getting pulled over.

  The PD’s office was in a building so new, the landscaped palms and shrubs looked stubby and fresh from the nursery. “Nice,” I said, as Richard pressed a buzzer by the door to gain admittance.

  “We shut the doors for lunch, and I forgot my key,” he explained. “Yeah, I’d rather have spent the money on something useful like more attorneys or investigators, but you can’t fight bureaucracy. Believe me, I tried.”

  Richard opened the door when the lock clicked in release, but before we entered he leaned back with the door to point around the side of the building. “Did you notice that other parking lot, and the other entrance?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Probably couldn’t see it the way we came in. We only have half the building. The State Attorney’s office has the other half. If you want to pay them a visit sometime, we share a stairwell.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No. Wish I were. You can bet I raised holy hell about that, too, for all the good it did.” He grinned. “As if we’re all not paranoid enough.”

  We took an elevator to the second floor. When the doors slid open, I was surprised to find myself facing a large room with about a dozen cubicles in the center and a few offices along one wall. The other wall was bare. Most cubicles were empty for lunch, but a few brave souls, attorneys and investigators by the sound of things, sat hunched over documents or phones.