A Shattered Lens

by Layton Green

“Okay, then. It was nothing serious. We just didn’t get along.”

  “Did you worry that would impact your future with Claire ?”

  “I mean . . . not long term. Once the kid was gone, we’d have been fine. Claire and I are pretty tight, man. We get along great. Never argued, except about the kid.”

  “What did you think of David? Apart from the tension between you two ?

  “He was a little moody, but a good kid. Stayed out of trouble. A little cocky too, but who isn’t at that age ?”

  “Did you two ever hang out without Claire ? Go to dinner, catch a flick?”

  Brett shook his head. “I asked. He wasn’t interested.”

  “Do you have any idea whether he was in some kind of trouble ?” “Nothing that would lead to . . . not that kind of trouble. God, no.” Brett slapped a knee and stared at the floor for a long time, as if the emotions had just hit him. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.” “What do you mean, not that kind of trouble ?”

  “Huh?” He took another long swallow of beer. “Hey man, whatever we say here, it’s between us, right ?”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “Oh.”

  “There’s no such thing as client confidentiality with the police, if that’s what you mean. Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?” Brett considered the question, then said, “About a week ago, David came home from football practice with a black eye. He told his mom he got it in practice.”

  “Hard to get a black eye beneath a helmet.”

  “That’s what I thought, and I told him so. He insisted it happened when the pads were off. I said, who lets their star quarterback get hit in the eye during the season, without pads ?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He admitted he got in a fight with one of the players after practice. He wouldn’t go into detail and made me swear not to tell his mom. So if you tell her, I’d appreciate it if it didn’t come from me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier ?”

  He shrugged. “It’s just kid stuff, right? Claire flips about little things.”

  “It may be kid stuff, but a kid’s dead.” He made a note about the fight. “Do you know the other kid’s name ?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’ll take that glass of water.”

  “Oh—sure.”

  Once Brett returned, Preach took a swallow and said, “You don’t have any guns, do you?”

  His eyes became guarded again. “A few, yeah. I collect them.”

  “Is that right? Do you mind if I take a look at the collection?”

  Brett hesitated. “Sure. I suppose cops and guns go together, don’t they?”

  “We respect them.”

  He sniffed. “They’re in the basement,” he said, then led Preach down a staircase to a furnished lower level as big as the first floor. The wood-paneled main room housed a pool table with a novelty glass playing surface. On the way through, Preach glimpsed a guest bedroom, a wine cellar, and a room with stadium seating and a projector screen.

  “What’s in there ?” he asked, as they passed a doorway cracked just enough for Preach to notice the finished concrete walls.

  Brett pushed the door open. The room was empty except for a bed bolted to the wall, a monitor beside the door, and a kitchenette recessed into a side wall. “My safe room.”

  “Your safe room ?”

  Brett grinned like a schoolboy. “Two-foot concrete walls, blastproof door, control panel, separate internet. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Why do you need a safe room?”

  “Hey, man, crime is rampant in this country. I shouldn’t need to tell you that.”

  “In suburban Chapel Hill?”

  “I’ve got money. You can’t be too careful.”

  Preach was unable to stop picturing someone held against their will inside the concrete bunker. He let his gaze linger on the room and said, “Let’s see the guns.”

  Just past the wine cellar, Brett entered a room with mahogany cabinets filled with a dizzying array of firearms. Stuffed deer and boar heads filled the space on the wall between the cabinets. Preach guessed the room held a few hundred guns, and he supposed the two plush armchairs in the middle allowed guests to observe the magnificence of the collection. “This is a few?” Preach said.

  “I know people with a helluva lot more.”

  “Fantastic. You’ve got a permit for all these ?”

  “Every single one.” Brett gave a conspiratorial roll of his eyes. “Not that it’s hard. Hey, man, I love my guns, but we’ve got to tighten up those regulations. No one wants deadly weapons in the hands of the wrong people.”

  Preach didn’t bother answering. By this time he knew Brett mostly talked to himself.

  After Preach took a walk around the room, they returned upstairs, and he picked up his overcoat. On the way out, he said, “Do you mind if I take a look at your phone ?”

  Brett stilled. “Why?”

  “We haven’t found David’s yet, and I’d like to read any texts he sent you. See if I can get some context on what was going on in his life.” “We almost never texted.”

  “Then it shouldn’t take too long.”

  A vein in Brett’s neck started to pulse. “You know, I do mind. I’d tell you if there was anything on there.”

  “I’m a detective. It’s my job to see things other people don’t.”

  “I just don’t think you need to see my phone.”

  Preach shrugged into his coat, eying Brett the entire time. “Maybe you do need that lawyer.”

  Brett mumbled something and looked off to the side.

  “Sorry?” Preach said.

  “I said, maybe I do.”

  “Why don’t you stick around town for a while?” Preach said, knowing he could get the texts from the phone records even if Brett deleted them. “We might need to talk again.”

  The host’s face darkened. “And if I don’t?”

  “You should probably ask your lawyer the answer to that question.”

  7

  Not one for bubbly displays of emotion, Ari corralled her excitement as she stepped up to the counter at Choco-latte, a coffee shop in the heart of downtown Durham. It wasn’t just the smell of fresh grounds and steaming milk foam that had brightened her Monday morning. An hour from now, after less than three months on the job, she would be interviewing her first witness in a murder case.

  We like you, her supervising attorney, Fenton Underwood, had told her. We think you’re smart and we think you’re ready.

  Ari thought she was ready too. Then again, she was smart enough to know she didn’t know very much. Murder cases were the big leagues. High profile. Fenton was the lead attorney on the case, but if it went to trial, Ari might get to handle a minor witness in court. This was one of the many reasons she had chosen the path she did. In a large law firm, she might not see the inside of a courtroom for years. In the overburdened DA’s office, trial by fire was a necessity.

  Would the case go to trial? Not many did. Most defendants were guilty, and they pled out rather than risk a maximum sentence.

  The defendant in the case at hand, Ronald Jackson, was a known drug dealer. One of the more vicious in town. Local police, when responding to a 911 call, had found him in a stash house with two dead bodies, warm blood still pumping from the gunshot wounds. The vitims were a fourteen-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old male.

  The police believed the young couple had tried to rob the stash house, and Ronald had gotten wind of it and taken care of the matter himself. The couple had known the location of the stash house because the fourteen-year-old was Ronald’s niece.

  Classy.

  The case had a wrinkle. Bentley Montgomery, the person who had made the 911 call and the witness Ari was about to interview, also dealt drugs—at least by reputation. He had a clean sheet, and they didn’t know much about him, except the cops said he was an up-and-comer out of East Durham, the city’s most dangerous neighborhood.r />
  While the facts of the case could lead to an interesting interview, they made for a terrible trial witness. Ari knew they couldn’t put Bentley in front of a jury. She also knew this was the reason she was being given the nod.

  After browsing the pastries, she ordered a latte from the pierced and tattooed counter clerk. A refurbished mechanic’s shop that threw open its tall garage doors in nice weather, Choco-latte was the hub of the city’s counterculture. Ari loved to walk down from her apartment and absorb the stained-brick, alt-music, sustainable-living, starving-artist, mis- matched-sofa,coffee-straight-from-the-dirt-encrusted-hands-of-Peruvian- farmers vibe.

  Despite the recent prosperity, Durham was still a grungy town. “Keep Durham Dirty” was the town motto. Like Creekville, most of its residents wanted nothing to do with suburban America and the status quo. Durham, however, was an older and much larger city, complicated, reflective of the New South.

  Once a prosperous tobacco and textile town, Durham had also been an early hub of African American business. Black Wall Street, it had been dubbed before the fortunes of the tobacco companies had waned, the manufacturing slump hit, and the city built a freeway through the historic black neighborhoods, gutting them. The warehouses downtown emptied. Businesses fled. Grandiose Southern homes had devolved into crack houses, and weeds strangled the neglected streets. For the last few decades, Durham was the town in the Piedmont that no one visited after dark.

  The Renaissance began when the Research Triangle took off, fueled by cheap land and smart tech investments. In a startling turnaround that Ari herself had witnessed over the last few years, downtown Durham had transformed almost magically into a hipster haven full of repurposed brick warehouses, Duke graduates who decided to stay instead of fleeing to Manhattan, new residents who poured in daily, and a legion of small businesses so local and specialized it made her laugh. What does a city that small do with eight bakeries? A Basque- themed cider bar? So many wood-fired, locally sourced pizzerias she had lost count ?

  She hoped the trend continued, but she also wondered if the optimism of the long-suffering residents had not outstripped the limits of the economy.

  Not only that, but a legacy of violence and poverty still loomed beneath the surface. As a district attorney, she knew all too well about the gangs and housing projects and quiet desperation that existed in more neighborhoods in Durham than anyone wanted to admit.

  Still, the city was making leaps and bounds, struggling to succeed. Before she left the café, Ari’s thoughts turned elsewhere: to the whirlwind of graduation, taking the bar, and starting a new job. She gave the other patrons in the café a lingering look. Not long ago, she had been one of them. Hovered over a laptop, slumming in ripped jeans and an oversize sweater, earbuds in place. Now, dressed in a sleek gray suit and high- heeled black boots, her hair pinned above her head, clutching a case file and hurrying to work, she was firmly entrenched on the other side.

  One of them.

  As a professional, she thought she was ready to meet with this witness. It was the transition to responsible adulthood she wasn’t so sure about.

  “Ready?” Fenton Underwood asked, with a grandiose wave toward the conference room door.

  The corners of Ari’s lips upturned. “As I’ll ever be.”

  Fenton was as old school Southern as they came. Colored pocket squares that matched his ties, seersucker suits, gray fedora with a black ribbon, courteous and polite at all times. Nearing retirement age, he was something of a local legend, one of the best attorneys in the city yet never desirous of a political run. Ari liked him but knew very little about him. No one did. He protected his private life like the child he’d never had.

  “Good luck in there” he said, shuffling toward his office. Unlike lawyers in large firms, district attorneys were too busy and pressed for resources to double up in depositions and client meetings.

  “Thanks.”

  “Let’s chat when it’s over. Ari ?” he called back.

  “Mm?”

  “Remember you’re in charge. Every witness, favorable or not, has their own agenda. You stick to yours.”

  “Thanks, Fenton.”

  His craggy face, always ready with a grin, turned serious. “Some prosecutors lose sight of the goal. Somewhere along the way, or maybe before they started, they decide that making their numbers is more important than putting the right people away. Don’t be one of them.”

  There were other attorneys within earshot, and he hadn’t bothered to lower his voice. With a tip of his fedora, he turned and disappeared down the hallway.

  Cup of coffee in hand, Ari opened the door and saw a black male in his late thirties waiting on the other side of the conference table. A tall and bulky man, his arms were crossed over a conservative brown suit, and his hair was cut an inch from the scalp. He watched her enter with shrewd, close-set eyes that shone with an unnerving vibrancy that made them seem much larger in size. It felt as if he was absorbing everything about her and stashing it away for later use.

  Not wanting to seem weak from the start, Ari stared right back at him. “Mr. Montgomery,” she said evenly, “thank you for coming. I’m Ari Hale.”

  He offered his hand. “Just doing my civic duty,” he said, with a crooked smile that highlighted the asymmetry of his features. Bentley was not a handsome man.

  Ari accepted the gesture, though she found handshakes a pointless, sanitized, outdated ritual that emphasized physical strength. Bentley’s grip was powerful, and she quickly disengaged.

  Transitioning from law school study groups to dealing with hardened criminals was not an easy thing to get used to. She thought she was beginning to understand what Preach must go through on a daily basis, and she had quickly learned to keep a shield over her emotions while at work. That level of exposure to the depravity of mankind had to take a toll.

  She offered Bentley water and coffee, which he declined. After sitting, she took a moment to compose herself. Northern lawyers, Fenton had told her, tried to steamroll their opponents with their intelligence. Southern lawyers preferred to be underestimated, right until they won in court. Neither Northern nor Southern, nor from anywhere in particular, Ari was still feeling out her own style.

  She had her suspicions as to Bentley’s motivation, but decided to treat him the same as any other witness. Focus on the truth. “Let’s start with some background information.”

  He spread his hands. “All right. Awful young to fly solo, aren’t you?

  Taken aback, she said, “I’m assisting Mr. Underwood. This is a meeting to gather information, not a formal deposition, so you’re not under oath. But please stick to the facts.”

  “Or you’ll subpoena the hell out of me ?”

  “Or we’ll get nowhere. If this goes to trial, you’ll be under oath there.”

  “So you want the truth, huh?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not what you want me to say, counselor ?”

  Ari leveled her gaze at him. “That’s right.”

  He chuckled, his eyes boring into her. “Not many people want the truth, Ms. Hale. Not in this country.”

  She glanced down at her outline for the interview. “Let’s start with some background information. Where were you born?”

  “In the back seat of a Chevy Nova.”

  Ari blinked.

  “Momma was homeless at the time, and the battery died on the way to the hospital.” He flashed another uneven smile. “Some people like to talk about getting a jump-start on life. I had a real one.”

  Ari could tell from the frankness of his tone that he wasn’t j oking— nor would he tolerate any pity. “You’re from Durham?”

  “If your records search hasn’t turned up anything, that’s because my real name isn’t Bentley Montgomery. It’s Javontis Washington.”

  She made a note. “When did you change it?”

  “As soon as I realized I wanted to make as much money as possible. It’s a white world, counselor, and I knew I had to w
ork extra hard to fit in.” He plucked his bottom lip, then reached up and held a stiff piece of hair between his fingers. “It doesn’t get much blacker than this, and I’m not pretty like Denzel. Add a ghetto first name and a slave-owning surname, and my story was told before it began.”

  She sensed he had an agenda for giving out this information. In fact, judging by the controlled manner of his speech and the deliberate nature of every facial expression or hand movement, she sensed he had an agenda for everything he did. His eyes flicked to her hands, which she had just folded on the table, and he continued, “There’s no need to squirm. I’m the furthest thing from an activist. I’m a realist. A businessman. Someone trying to do the best I can in the world as it stands. But to answer your question, I changed my name when I was twelve. I took it off the shelter wall, from two different donors, once I decided to make a go at it.”

  “A go at what ?”

  “Life. Bentley’s a pretty white name, don’t you think? As white as fresh cream on a frat boy.”

  “You changed it legally?”

  “Once I found out how.”

  “What’s your level of education?”

  “You mean my IQ?”

  “I mean your schooling,” she said.

  “Ah.” He gave an amused smile, as if he’d uncovered a secret part of her personality. “I almost finished the fifth grade.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any children?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What’s your profession?”

  “Like I said. I’m a businessman.”

  Ari tapped her pen against the table. She knew better than to probe his alleged drug dealing, but she also had to ask some basic questions. While she was forming her next question, he said, “What have you heard about me, Ms. Hale ? Maybe I can clear up some misconceptions.” “I’d prefer if you just tell me anything you find relevant.”

  He tipped back in his chair. “I’m an entrepreneur. I sold my software company a while back, and now I’m an angel investor, mostly for local start-ups. I also develop apps, and I’ve got a patent portfolio.”

  At first, she thought he was joking. But his expression never changed until he chuckled at her confusion.