Edgar stood with his arms crossed. “I’m charging her with manslaughter. Take it or leave it. I’ll ask for a hundred-thousand dollar bond.”
“Hundred-thousand-dollar bond. Are you crazy? That’s totally out of the question, Edgar. She’s not a flight risk. She shouldn’t be arrested, not to mention having to post bail.” Sandra looked at Dennis for help, but he stood mute.
“If you cooperate, I’ll ask Judge McWheeter to authorize a pretrial release bond,” Edgar said. “At least getting out of jail won’t cost her a fortune.”
Sandra’s temper flared. They were fixing to take her client into custody. Not only could she not believe it, but apparently there was nothing she could do about it. The most they offered was a way to walk her through the system and get her out right away. Frustrated, she gritted her teeth. “That’s what I get for trying to be the good guy and bringing her down here to make a statement. I could have sat on her and made you figure it out.”
“Take it or leave it, Sandra,” Edgar said.
She had a strong desire to stick her tongue out at him, or spit, or do something to show him how she felt. “Give me a moment to explain it to her.” She started toward Kitty and then turned back. “But don’t think I’m giving up without a fight.”
His expression unchanged, Edgar said, “I know you better than that.”
Perching on her chair again, Sandra said, “I’m sorry, Kitty. They’re charging you with manslaughter.”
“You mean I have to go to jail?” Her eyes grew large and her face puckered up again.
“Now hold on.” She held Kitty by the shoulders and stared at her. “Just for a few minutes. I’ll stay as close to you as I can. They agreed not to oppose pretrial release.”
“I don’t understand any of this, Sandy.” Her eyes searched Sandra’s face. “Are they saying they don’t believe me?”
“Look, they believe it was . . . there are certain parts they believe. Otherwise, I guess they’d be charging you with something worse.”
“Like murder?” Her hair had pulled loose from the French twist and stood out on the back of her head like a rooster’s tail feathers.
Sandra nodded. “They think he died when he hit the ground.”
“Oh my God. So they do think I killed him. Am I going to get the death penalty?”
“No, of course not. If you’ll just calm down a minute, I’ll explain it all to you.” Sandra pulled up a chair opposite Kitty’s.
Kitty looked like a recalcitrant child. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it. Now listen. Just because you’re being charged with something doesn’t mean you’re automatically convicted. That’s what you’ve hired me for. Manslaughter is a second-degree felony. It’s not a death penalty charge.”
“What could I get?”
“We’ll worry about that later.”
“No. Now. Tell me what I could get.”
“It’s punishable by . . .” Sandra closed her eyes and recited the penal code from memory. “Two to twenty years and/or a ten-thousand-dollar fine.”
“Twenty years in prison?” Kitty’s voice was loud and high pitched. Sandra was sure they could hear her on the mainland.
“Now I’m not going to let that happen.” She felt herself growing impatient. “Come on, get up. Lieutenant Truman will drive you to the county jail. I’ll follow. Mr. Saul is going to call the judge and get him to authorize your release on a pretrial bond. We can pick up your car later.”
Kitty stood. Her shoulders slumped. Her suit was as crumpled as she looked. “I don’t understand.”
“Your bail—instead of a bail bondsman, you’re going to get out much cheaper through the county pretrial release program, where you just have to pay a few hundred dollars.”
“I don’t care about the money,” she said. “I didn’t do it.” Kitty looked beaten.
“I’m sorry, honey. It’s the best I can do right now. As soon as we get you squared away, we’ll start working not only on your defense, but I’ll try to figure out who really did it. Okay?”
“Okay. I know you know what you’re doing, Sandy. I trust you.”
The sweet expression Kitty wore for a moment was like a knife in Sandra’s stomach. Talk about feeling guilty. She couldn’t have felt worse if she’d killed him herself. She called out to Truman. “Let’s go.”
Truman did five minutes’ worth of paperwork in the police department booking office next to the holding tank, and then he put Kitty in the back of his car. Sandra followed him in her Volvo.
Sunday evenings at the county jail were literally a scream when weekend drunks were hauled in. The cells smelled like vomit and salt. Sand covered the floor from the swimsuits and bare feet of young people arrested for disorderly conduct, minor drug charges, or driving while intoxicated. It was a loud, noisy, and unruly crowd, but the upshot was that, with all of the commotion, it was a less frightening place than in the quietly intimidating atmosphere of the off-season.
Sandra left her car on the street while Truman, since he was a police officer, parked in the sallyport and took Kitty through the locked side door. Sandra was well-known at the jail. Normally, lawyers showed their state bar ID cards at the bulletproof window and the deputy buzzed them through. Sandra waved at the deputy behind the glass.
The buzzer for the first door went off immediately. As soon as it shut behind her, the lock of the iron-barred door in front of her clacked in her ears. Pulling the heavy door open, she swung through it, her nose immediately assaulted by the smell of ammonia from the mop water with a faint scent of fresh vomit. Her eyes watered. She spotted Kitty at the far end of a long counter. Catcalls and whistles rang out from the cells. Kitty’s appearance had created quite a stir. Sandra quickly wrote the date, time, and her name on the lawyer’s sign-in sheet and hurried to Kitty, who continuously smoothed down the wrinkles in her black suit.
There was one other woman in sight. She sat alone in the soundproof interview room. Sandra recognized her as a prostitute. When she’d first begun private practice, she’d been appointed to represent the woman on a misdemeanor. Small and fair, Ruth had been better looking than most of the locals. She had come from a good family, but cocaine use had forced her into the streets. Sandra inclined her head as Ruth’s eyes met hers.
Dennis Truman spoke to the desk sergeant, who nodded to Sandra as she walked up. “You all right?” she asked Kitty.
Kitty smiled. “Lieutenant Truman is real nice. He said he’d try to get them to take me to a room by myself to book me.
“They’ll probably agree. I don’t think they’d get much cooperation from any of these guys if you were stuck on the bench with them for a couple of hours.” She indicated the young drunks lining the walls and cells, waiting to be processed in or out.
Kitty’s smile was the first she had seen since the party on Friday night. Sandra had forgotten how attractive Kitty could be. Her eyes crinkled. Her face lost its pitiful look.
“You’re going to be okay, kid.” She rounded Kitty and leaned over to hear what Truman and Sergeant Jiminez said.
“ID is going to come get her and process her in their office,” Truman told her.
“I appreciate that, Dennis. Thank you.”
“You can take her on back,” Jiminez said, pointing. The ID sergeant strolled around the corner.
Truman, Kitty, and Sandra followed the other sergeant to an office where they could be alone. As soon as Kitty was settled, Sandra went outside and phoned Raymond, explaining what had happened. It didn’t take a lot of coaxing to get him to agree to meet them when Kitty was released. Returning to the office, Sandra found that the sergeant had just finished fingerprinting Kitty.
Kitty rubbed at the black ink on her fingertips with a brown institutional paper towel, a stricken expression on her face. Two Polaroid photographs lay on the desk next to the fingerprint card. One was a frontal view: the other, a profile. In spite of the tendrils of hair that framed her face, in each of them Kitty looked stark. Scared.
“Thanks, Dennis. You about finished, Sergeant?”
“Let me read back what I have in the computer to be sure it’s correct, and then you can go to pretrial.”
Kitty sat in the chair next to the sergeant’s desk while he reviewed the data with her.
“Well, that’s all for me,” Truman said, reaching for the door.
Sandra held out her hand. “You’ll call when the autopsy is in?”
Dennis took her hand. His was big and warm. Made her realize how cold hers was. “Sure,” he said. “In fact, I’ll call the M.E. tomorrow and see if they can hurry it up.”
“Listen, Dennis. Thanks for being so good about everything. I appreciate the way you handled her. You couldn’t have been nicer.”
He waved her away. “No problem,” he said awkwardly and pulled the door open.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you on your day off, but I thought you’d want to be the one—”
Nodding, he said, “Talk to you tomorrow. See you, Dan,” he called to the sergeant as he went through the doorway.
Sandra stood over Kitty as she waited. She was anxious to get her out of there and even more anxious to discuss the case with her mother. It would take a bit to calm Erma down, but once she got past her personal feelings about the matter, Erma would be Kitty’s greatest ally, Sandra just knew it. In spite of her old-fashioned ways, Erma had one of the finest legal minds in the state when it came to criminal law. Though the trial work now fell to Sandra, they reviewed and picked apart each case until they had thoroughly analyzed every facet. Erma also read the law for pure entertainment. As a result, her mind was a wealth of legal information. Sandra couldn’t have picked a better law partner than the one to whom she had been born.
As soon as the sergeant was through with Kitty, Sandra led her back down the hallway, past the prisoners who again became more than unruly, and to the Pretrial Release office. Theirs was a one-page application, legal-size. All Kitty had to do was fill out the form as to her name and address, list three references, her work history, her criminal history, Sandra’s name as retained counsel, and they were out of there. Fifteen minutes later, Sandra delivered Kitty to Raymond, who ushered her down the stairs and into his car before the one reporter who hung around on weekends could figure out who she was. Trying cases in the newspapers was not Sandra’s style.
Heaving a huge sigh of relief, she rubbed the ache in her neck; the muscles felt like tightly twisted ropes. Bugs circled the corner streetlight in the dark. The area around the county courthouse and jail was deserted. In the morning, three hundred jurors reporting for jury duty would be looking for parking in two hundred spots. The humidity was at least a hundred and fifty percent.
As she dragged herself back to her car, Sandra began to wonder who had finished off Phillip Parker if it wasn’t Kitty. The way she saw it, there weren’t that many suspects. She only hoped it hadn’t been Raymond, in whose custody she had just placed her client.
CHAPTER SIX
Erma vaguely heard the front door open and close. She had dragged herself out of bed later than usual, her energy having evaporated during the night. She remembered having eaten a meal sometime during the day, but not what. She remembered having spoken to her daughter on the telephone, but the details of the conversation escaped her. She remembered sitting down in her favorite chair in the living room, but she didn’t know how long she’d been there. Everything in her mind seemed to be disappearing into a black hole.
“What are you doing dressed like that?” Sandra asked. “You look like you’re wearing widows’ weeds.”
“CNN Headline News” blared on the television in the living room. Erma looked from the screen to Sandra. “When did you get here?”
“About ten minutes ago. I let myself in and used your bathroom. I walked right in front of you. Didn’t you see me?” She took the remote control from the side table and turned off the TV. “Are you okay?”
Erma said, “You look like shit. Did you go down to the jail like that? You could have at least put a dress on.”
“Next time I walk a client through, I’ll be sure to tell them that my mother won’t let me go until I put on a dress.”
“Goddamnit, don’t get sarcastic with me. I never went out when I was your age without looking like a lawyer. People won’t hire you if you look like a pig. They want someone who looks like they’re an expensive mouthpiece, a professional.”
“Yes, Mother. I know how frightening I look without makeup. I know I shouldn’t do legal business in shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes. You’ve told me a hundred million times. In the middle of the Kitty-crisis, I just didn’t think about looking like a professional mouthpiece.”
“Aw, quit patronizing me.” Erma got up slowly from her Queen Anne chair, trying not to let Sandra see that she was having difficulty. She picked up her highball glass from the floor beside her chair and hobbled toward the kitchen.
“So, are we still having dinner?” Sandra asked, following.
“You’re hours late.”
“I know. I called you and explained everything, remember?”
“I’d ask you for a note from your mother except, goddamnit, I am your mother.”
“Not funny, Mother.”
“Call me Erma. It makes me feel so much younger.”
“Okay, Erma. Are we still having dinner? I’m very hungry and would appreciate something to eat. We could talk about the case at the same time.”
“The case.” Erma glanced at her daughter as she set the glass down in the sink. “Sit down over there,” she said, indicating the kitchen table.
Sandra complied. “What are we having?”
“I’ve already eaten.” Erma pulled a plastic-wrapped plate of food from the refrigerator and plopped it onto the dinette table in front of Sandra. Wilted lettuce and tomato peered out from under a smear of French dressing. A layer of fat covered small, red potatoes and a chicken breast.
“You’re punishing me. I can tell,” Sandra said. “Could you at least warm it up in the microwave?”
Erma grunted her assent and picked up the plate again. “Ha, so you’re using it now. It only took you two years.”
“You’re using it now?” Erma mimicked Sandra. “I most certainly am not. I went over to the Wal-Mart and got one of those where you just turn the lever to the amount of time you want to cook. The fancy one you gave me I donated to the women’s shelter.”
Sandra rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Erma. Scrape the salad off the plate and that congealed fat from the chicken and potatoes before you microwave it, okay?”
“Is that a comment on the weight of the evidence?” Erma said. “Ha ha. Joke’s on you.” She pushed the salad into the sink.
Sandra frowned. “You’re not making sense. Are you drunk? I saw the glass you put in the sink. You’ve been drinking.”
There seemed to be a big ball about to burst inside Erma. She kept her back to Sandra, wanting to be as strong for her as she had always been. Opening a lower cupboard door next to the sink, Erma leaned over and pressed a button on the compact microwave that had been concealed inside. The door popped open. Making a big production of standing out of the way so that Sandra could see, Erma slid the plate inside and slammed the door.
“Mom,” Sandra said, “I’m glad you’re adapting. I’m glad you’re using any microwave. It didn’t have to be the one I gave you.”
Erma stood facing away from Sandra, not replying, her eyes squeezed shut.
“I apologize for the crack about being drunk. I know you’re trying to follow the doctor’s orders. Let’s not fight.” Erma heaved a sigh. The bell rang on the oven. Opening the door, she poked at the chicken, pushed the plate back inside, and started the process again. “How’s Melinda?”
“You really are aching for a fight, aren’t you? Rather than talk about your gra
nddaughter, why don’t we discuss Kitty?”
“That murdering bitch—”
“She didn’t do it. If you’ll just listen for five minutes, you’ll understand the situation.”
Erma sighed again. Breathing deeply was hard sometimes. A good sigh could be an accomplishment. She turned to Sandra. “I can’t believe that you agreed to represent her without discussing it with me, Sandra Salinsky. It’s not like this case is a routine criminal case. Phillip was my closest, dearest . . .” her voice began to crack.
Sandra jumped up and ran over to Erma. “What’s the matter with you? Are you crying?”
“I demand an explanation, goddamnit. You can’t just take a case like that without my consent.”
“You are crying,” Sandra said. “So his death finally got to you. Thirty-six hours, not bad.”
“I’m angry, that’s all. You should have spoken to me first. I’m not crying, crying. I’m just angry crying.”
“It’s okay, Erma,” Sandra said and put her arms around her mother. “Everything is going to be okay.” Her chin rested on the top of her mother’s head.
Erma pushed at Sandra’s arms, but Sandra held tight. Erma sighed again. If she could keep on sighing, she might feel better. The bell rang on the microwave. “There’s your dinner.”
“Mother, it’s okay to be sad that Phillip died.”
“Was murdered by that bitch.”
Sandra dropped her arms. “She didn’t do it. If you’d just let me explain. Erma, he was her father.”
Erma, who had leaned over to get the plate out of the microwave, stood straight up. “I knew it. I knew there was something about that girl.”
“Oh, so you did, did you?” Sandra smiled.
Erma nodded and reached for the plate again, using a cup towel for a potholder. “But that doesn’t mean she didn’t kill him.” She shuffled over to the table and dropped the plate onto the placemat. “Now eat.”
Sandra obediently sat back down and picked up her fork. “So you’ll listen?”
Erma poured Sandra a glass of iced tea and pushed a spoon, a lemon slice, and sweetener toward her. Her chest felt tight. She tried sighing again but with no success. “All right. What have you got?”
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