A Shattered Lens

by Layton Green

  At the bar, he spied a long-haired bruiser in a tank top, a woman with Goth makeup and a full-length leather coat, and a guy wearing a felt cape over a repurposed bath robe dyed in psychedelic colors.

  No sign of Nate.

  Preach checked inside the photo booth just past the booths along the wall, earning a few annoyed stares, then squeezed between the bar and a chalkboard wall covered with band flyers. A bartender of uncertain gender, with pierced lips and a green Mohawk, gave him the eye. Preach guessed this was due to the group of stringy-haired teens at the far end of the bar who looked barely old enough to vote, let alone drink.

  Preach knew he stuck out like, well, a detective in a musty green overcoat at an alternative music venue. If Nate was here, he needed to find him fast, before someone tipped him off.

  Past the bar, the club opened up a bit. The stage was just ahead, on the other side of a small dance floor. To his left was a pair of low- slung chairs and an old leather loveseat. He thought Ari might like the band. They reminded him of a modern Duran Duran, a moody vocalist merging synthpop and rock.

  Stay alert, Preach.

  A white man in his sixties was doing a weird line dance by the loveseat. He looked like a retired professor. Definitely tripping. After a glance into the bathroom, Preach edged into the crowd near the stage and noticed a seating area wedged along the wall, invisible from the front of the club. Nate was drinking a beer on a chartreuse couch with a group of friends, nodding along to the music. He saw Preach at the same time Preach saw him. For an instant, both of them froze, and as Preach started forward Nate jumped up and darted down a hallway beside the stage.

  Preach cursed and pushed through the crowd, causing a stir. The hallway was short, ending at a door to the outside that was just closing. Preach burst onto a tiny patio in time to see Nate struggling with Bill Wright, who Preach had planted by the back door. After pushing the flustered older officer into the low wall surrounding the patio, Nate fled to his left, down a concrete walkway. Preach followed, yelling at him to stop. Nate didn’t listen, and Preach had little choice. He wasn’t about to shoot a kid in the back.

  Nate slipped around a patio table in the middle of the walkway and overturned a pair of chairs. Preach jumped over them. The path continued along the back side of a line of tall brick buildings. To the right, across a parking lot and then a wide avenue, Durham’s modern performing arts center gleamed in the glow of streetlights.

  At the end of the path, Nate squeezed through a weird jigsaw section of wall that partially concealed a generator. Once Preach got through, he saw Nate dashing through a private parking lot, aiming for a waist-high iron fence that separated the lot from the street. Preach sprinted at full speed for the gate. No doubt Nate knew the nooks and crannies of the city, and he probably had a car or a bike stashed around the corner.

  Just before Nate made it over the fence, Preach lunged and caught the back of his sleeveless gray vest, trapping him atop the iron bars. Nate struggled to no avail and, as easy as lifting a bag of groceries, Preach picked the kid up and hoisted him to the ground. While Nate sulked, Preach patted him down, then led him by the arm to a corner off to their left, where the gate met the brick building.

  By that time, Bill had caught up to them, glaring at Nate with his hand on his gun. Preach put a palm out to calm Bill. “Long way from home, aren’t you, Nate ?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Is that really how you want to start this off ?”

  Nate brushed a limp bang out of his face and looked away. His eyes were as sunken as ever, his skin as sallow as candle wax in the weak ambient light.

  “Believe it or not” Preach continued, “I’m not here to arrest you. I just want to talk.”

  “I already told you, I don’t know anything about David.”

  “Then why do you keep running away from me ?”

  Nate snorted. “Because you’re the cops, man.”

  “So? None of the rest of the people in the club ran away.”

  “That’s because they don’t know you.”

  “Maybe. So why are you running?”

  Nate swore again and lit a cigarette. Preach didn’t object.

  “I don’t like cops,” Nate said. “You’re always nosing around. Arresting people for doing nothing.”

  Bill took a step forward. “Listen, you punk—”

  Preach cut him off with a raised hand. “I hope that’s not the case,” Preach said gravely. “To my knowledge, I’ve never arrested someone for doing nothing.”

  Nate guffawed.

  “I believe you about David,” Preach said. “At least for now. That’s not why I’m here, though. I need your help with something.”

  Nate blew smoke and didn’t respond.

  “I know you deal drugs around town.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Nate.”

  “You ain’t got nothing on me.”

  “I’ve got you twice for avoiding arrest, and more importantly—” Preach held up an evidence baggie of heroin he had found hidden in Nate’s bedroom on the way over, less than an hour ago—”we found this in your dresser. That’s a Class I felony.”

  “You searched my home? My damn mom—”

  “Your mother tried her best to keep me out.” Preach reached into his coat and produced the warrant he had obtained from a quick call to a judge, also that evening. Though unhappy about being disturbed at night, the judge had agreed the warrant was important. “I’m working a murder, Nate. You ran away from me, you had a fight with David, and multiple people have told me you deal.”

  “That stuff’s not mine,” Nate said, with a snarl. “One of my friends must have left it there.”

  Preach gave him a sad look. “What happens next depends on you.” “What do you mean?”

  “Who’s your supplier? Who do you take orders from?”

  Nate waved a hand, dismissive.

  “Bill?” Preach said.

  Officer Wright stepped forward with a pair of handcuffs. Nate shrank against the building. “Hey now. Listen.”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Preach said.

  Nate sucked down his cigarette and lit another. “Goddamn, man. She’ll kill me if I rat.”

  Preach exchanged a glance with Bill. “So it’s a she ?”

  Nate swallowed and puffed even harder.

  “Is it Alana?” Preach said.

  Nate laughed.

  “Your mother ?”

  “You don’t know anything, do you?”

  “Lisa Waverly?”

  “What? Get off, man.”

  “Is it David’s mom?”

  Nate kept dragging on the cigarette, though his eyes widened ever so slightly.

  “Nate, is it Claire?” Preach said quietly.

  “Felony I, kid,” Bill chimed in. “You know what that means ?” Preach held up a hand again. “If you’re telling the truth, she’s going to jail. She can’t hurt you from there.”

  The kid’s eyes roved from one officer to the other. “And what happens to me, if I say something? I go free?”

  “That’s the DA’s call. But if you can give us details on the record, I’ll strongly suggest your sentence be reduced to a misdemeanor. And in my experience, the DA usually takes my advice.”

  Nate finished his cigarette, sniffed, and stubbed out the butt.

  “Is it Claire, Nate ?”

  The kid flicked the butt away and flexed his fingers, again and again, as he stared at the ground.

  Preach stepped closer. “I need to know. Right now. You have my word I’ll go to bat for you. Does Claire Lourdis give you drugs to sell ?”

  Nate shoved his hands in his pockets and looked up, and Preach felt his chest tighten when he saw the acknowledgement in the kid’s eyes. “Yeah,” Nate said. “It’s Claire.”

  A few hours later, with blue lights flashing on the street behind him, Preach knocked on Claire’s front door for the second time that night. After they had taken N
ate to the juvenile detention center and processed him, he had refused to say more without an attorney. But he had said enough to arrest Claire.

  As Preach waited for her to appear, he couldn’t get a quote from Kierkegaard out of his mind.

  “The truth is a trap,” the philosopher had once written. “You cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.”

  The detective’s pace slowed as he approached the door. A light was on in Claire’s living room, even though it was 1 a.m. He could see her silhouette through the gauze curtain.

  When the door opened, she was still wearing her white slip. “Change your mind?” she asked.

  “You need to get dressed and come with me.”

  “You need to get undressed and come with me.” She seemed to ignore the flashing lights, and he could smell the alcohol on her breath. She reached up to stroke his cheek, and he grabbed her wrist. “Don’t.” “Not in front of the men, you mean?”

  “Get dressed.”

  “Do you want to know what David and I argued about that night ?”

  His eyes scanned the house behind her and saw no sign of a weapon. Just a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen, the living room as he had left it, and a collection of empty wine bottles in a paper bag by the door.

  “We argued about Brett. David told me about the affair that night.”

  “That’s not what you led me to believe.”

  She shrugged. “I was embarrassed. You know what I told David? I told him that I didn’t care. I said it out of anger. I meant it, of course, but I should never have said that to my son. To think that was our last conversation.”

  “What did he say?” Preach said quietly.

  A soft, ironic smile creased her mouth. “He said that makes me a whore. I said that makes me a good mother.” She slumped to the ground, her back against the door, arms folded across her chest.

  “Claire.”

  Her eyes slipped upward.

  “We have to go.”

  “I’ll get dressed and leave with you,” she said, after a moment. “But listen to me, Joe. Whatever it is you think you know—it’s wrong.”

  Preach took her downtown and saw to her processing himself. After that, he returned to her house to get an update from forensics. As soon as he arrived, Lela Jimenez led him to the guest bedroom, where the bedspread and sheets were gathered in a pile on the floor. After pointing out a slit in the queen-size mattress, Lela handed him a notebook they had found tucked into the barely noticeable hiding space. The notebook was filled with Excel spreadsheets divided into four sections: date, carrier, amount, and a final column labeled product that contained shorthand notations consisting of two letters, most likely a code. Likewise, two initials made up each line of the carrier column. One set of initials that appeared with frequency was N. W.

  Preach felt confident that N. W. stood for Nate Wilkinson. He felt even more confident, because he had seen similar notebooks often enough during his career, that he was looking at a drug ledger.

  32

  After work on Wednesday, Ari met Fenton Underwood at the bar of 21C, a luxury hotel and art gallery in downtown Durham. The cocktails were so fancy she didn’t recognize most of them. Elaborate sculptures of jungle animals in a variety of artistic styles hung on the walls, and in combination with the beige leather stools and the brown marble bar that resembled a piece of sleek wood, the room evoked a pan-African vibe.

  How very Durham, she thought, and she had to admit she liked it. Fenton picked up his drink, grinned, and waved at her to follow. Curious, she took her vodka martini and stepped into a leather-padded elevator that took them to the basement, where a cocktail lounge had been fashioned out of an old bank vault. A pair of doors with rusting iron bars separated the rooms, and the original copper-plated safety deposit boxes still lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Inside the vault, Durham’s business set sipped cocktails on velvet sofas while flapper-era jazz cast a spell on the room.

  “One of Durham’s little gems” Fenton said, as they squeezed into a corner of the lounge.

  “Nice digs” she said, though she felt a little claustrophobic. “I never knew this was here.”

  “You could almost imagine a gangster with a tommy gun bursting in and holding the place up.”

  She agreed, though it brought an unwanted image of Preach to mind and how safe she always felt with him. Ari had lived and traveled on her own for years and did not need a man to protect her. But Preach had an undeniable strength of presence about him, years of experience with keeping the bad guys at bay.

  She supposed Claire felt the same way.

  Fenton removed his jacket and draped it across his lap as he sat. After loosening his tie, he removed the lemon rind from the lip of his Sazerac. “How’s life ?” he asked, taking an exploratory sip and nodding in approval.

  Pretty shitty, she wanted to say, but she didn’t know Fenton well enough to vent her personal issues.

  “Busy.”

  “Take some advice from an old man. Set boundaries with work. The law is a harsh mistress, as I’m sure they told you in law school. Some cases, you could grind twenty-hours a day for months, and it wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “What’s the trick?” she asked.

  “Knowing when to call it a day, and when to put in those twenty- four hours.”

  “I don’t think I’m quite there yet.”

  He chuckled. “You’ve been on the job what, five minutes? You’ll learn to step back and see the big picture. Misdemeanors, white collar, a murder one: Stakes aside, they’re all the same in the end. What’s the balance of the evidence ? What will a jury think? Where can you make an impact?”

  “The Ronald Jackson case . . . I don’t think it’s going too well.”

  “Talk to me.”

  During her update, Fenton sat quietly and held his Sazerac, sometimes taking a sip. He was a good listener. Just like Preach.

  Too bad Joe listens to other women as well.

  Since the night at the café, he had tried to call her at least three times. She had ignored his efforts, not to be mean, but because she didn’t know what came next. While part of her yearned to give him another chance, part of her couldn’t shake the sense of betrayal.

  The whole ordeal had left her feeling numb on the inside, and she wasn’t sure what that meant. Was she protecting herself? Had her feelings changed?

  Did work have anything to do with it, she wondered? Had the two of them been growing apart even before the text from Claire? If so, then why? His job hadn’t changed—was it her?

  She didn’t like that thought very much.

  Who was she becoming?

  Fenton leaned back in his seat. “What’s your next move, counselor ?” “Sorry?” she said, startled by the question.

  “How do you recommend the office proceeds with Ronald Jackson?”

  “Oh.” I was kind of hoping you would tell me, she thought. But she knew what he was doing, and she appreciated it. He was doing his job as a mentor. Pushing her to learn.

  “Ronald is guilty. I’m convinced of that.”

  Fenton cocked a grin, as if to say, so what? “Do you think we can convince a jury of that ?”

  “What if we don’t have to ? What if we get a plea instead ?”

  Was Bentley putting words in her mouth, she wondered? Had that been the point of their last conversation, a hidden directive disguised as a civil rights lecture?

  “Do you think we have enough?” he asked.

  “What if we make a show of moving forward? I think Ronald is terrified of what a jury will do.”

  Fenton’s eyebrows lifted. “You figured that out quick. It usually takes at least a year or two to become a cynic.”

  She buried her face in her martini.

  “Playing that game is risky,” he said. “Meredith is a pit bull. We might get smacked hard by credibility questions for these witnesses.” “Don’t we owe it to the victims to try?”

  “We answer to the law, Ari.
We want justice but not rogue justice.” “Is it justice if the system can’t convict a murderer?”

  “The alternative is worse. You don’t want a system that can be manipulated to convict whoever you want.”

  Isn’t that what we have already, she wondered ?

  God, I am a cynic.

  Her phone rang, and she dug it out of her pocket. “It’s Meredith Verela,” she said to Fenton. “Do you want to take this?”

  “She called you.”

  “She probably wants to tell me she’s sick of waiting for Desiree.”

  Fenton waved his glass. “Give her hell, counselor.”

  Ari stepped into the hallway.

  “Have you heard ?” Meredith said abruptly, as soon as Ari answered. “Heard what ?”

  “About Ronald. He’s dead.”

  Ari stilled. “What? How?”

  “He was stabbed in the throat this afternoon, in his cell.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “You’ve been played, Ari.”

  “Excuse me ?”

  “The man who stabbed Ronald is also a murder suspect. His name is LeDarius Milton. He’s been in jail for a year awaiting trial.”

  A year?

  “Three different lawyers have been appointed, there’s no bond, and your boss keeps stalling. LeDarius is accused of killing a twelve-year- old girl in a drive-by, and maybe he’s guilty, but everyone deserves their day in court.”

  “But why did he kill Ronald?”

  “LeDarius is from East Durham. A known enforcer. He was transferred to Ronald’s cell block just this morning, a request put in through LeDarius’s attorney. Do you want to know when the transfer request was submitted?”

  In the ensuing pause, a prickle of gooseflesh crept down Ari’s arms. “The same day Ronald was sent to prison,” Meredith said. “Do you know who this attorney also represents, Ari ? I did a little digging, on a hunch.”

  Ari couldn’t bring herself to say the name.

  “Bentley Montgomery. What did he promise you, Ari ? That he’d return with this new witness soon? Maybe by next week?”

  By Friday, Ari thought.

  “There’s more,” Meredith said. “The male victim killed in Ronald’s stash house, Lionel Braston? The police tell me he was on Bentley’s payroll. One informant went so far as to call him Bentley’s protege. Do you understand what happened, Ari ? Your client set my client up.”