Harper put her hand on my shoulder. “They might. They might. Don’t give up hope.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “At any rate, I need to go ahead and see Nick in prison. I need to ask him about this Joey Caruso guy. See what he knows about him. That might tell me something, in turn, about Gina. I have the feeling that she’s not being truthful about Enzo Degrazio. I don’t know. Something seems kind of off about her story.”
“What feels off?”
“Just some details. She didn’t want to tell me, at first, that Enzo was the one who supplied the money for her bail. When I asked her why she wasn’t more forthcoming, she told me that she was afraid that I might have suspected that she and Enzo were in on Vittorio’s murder together. What was odd was that she, at first, said that she was afraid that I would think that Enzo set her up to take the fall. So, her story changed in the blink of an eye right there. And I personally think that it’s odd that Enzo would give her the money for her bail in the first place. As I told her, it didn’t sound like she and Enzo had a great love story. So why would he stick his neck out and give her $3 million for her bail? And how did he get that kind of money, anyhow? He owns an Italian restaurant downtown, that’s true, but I really wasn’t aware that owning a restaurant made you wealthy enough to just toss around $3 million like it’s water.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. There are just a few holes in her story that are bothering me.”
“What else is bothering you about the story?”
“The fact that her gun was used in the murder. It was registered to her. She said that she kept that gun underneath the bed when she lived with Vittorio. Which would mean that, if somebody else decided to use that gun to murder Vittorio, they had to have known where to find it and then they would have had to have stolen it while Vittorio wasn’t looking somehow. And there wasn’t a sign of a forced entry. It’s all adding up to Gina having done the murder. I just think that she’s lying when she said that she had nothing to do with killing her husband.”
Harper nodded her head. “So, you’re going to the prison to see Nick. Could you do me a big favor?”
“What’s that?”
“I have an assistant that I’ve been training. Her name is Heather Morrison. She was a client of mine a few years back. She’s very bright and very good at research. She can find just about any case you want her to find. Anyhow, she would love to see what goes on during a prison visit. She’s been to the Jackson County jail quite a few times to do intake. But she’s never been inside a prison. Could you take her with you when you go and visit Nick?”
“Sure, why not? I’m always willing to help somebody learn. I’d be happy to bring her along.”
“She’s transgendered,” Harper said. “She was born with the name Heath.”
“And?”
Harper shrugged. “And nothing, I guess. I didn’t know if you’d have a problem with that.”
“Why would I have a problem with it?”
“Well, a lot of people do.”
“A lot of narrow-minded people do. Anyhow, no, I don’t have an issue with her being transgendered.”
“Good. She’s coming in an hour. Maybe you could meet with her then.”
“Sure.”
Heather appeared in the office about an hour later. She looked enough like a female that I would never know that she was actually a guy if I didn’t see her prominent Adam’s Apple on her throat. She was dressed in a slim black skirt, a tight red long-sleeved t-shirt, tights and high-heeled ankle boots. She looked me up and down and smiled. “You must be Damien. Hello, Damien.” Her eyes got big and she smiled broadly. “Harper, you didn’t tell me that he was so cute.”
Harper laughed. “I didn’t, did I? Well, he is. As you can see.”
“Sorry for being unprofessional, Dami. Do you like being called Dami? Like that old bat on The Exorcist calling her son Dami?”
“Believe it or not, I did get some teasing about my name growing up. Mainly because the demon child in The Omen was named Damien, but sometimes because of the priest in The Exorcist.”
“Oh, that’s right! I forgot about The Omen. How weird that two devil-related shows had main characters named Damien in them. One good, one bad.”
“You can call me Dami,” I said with a smile. I had the feeling that I was going to get along with Heather. “I’ve been called worse.”
Heather rubbed her hands together. “Well, I’m totally excited about going to Cameron with you. Harper told me all about it. Guess you have a client there that you need to see?”
I looked at Harper and she looked at me and shrugged. I guess she didn’t tell Heather about who Nick was. “Actually, I’m seeing a friend of mine. His name is Nick Savante. He’s a lifer, although he’s up for parole this year.”
“Oh, you got a friend in prison?” She smiled and nodded. “I get it, I guess.”
“Yeah. A long story. I’ll tell you about it on the way to the prison. I’m going there on Saturday. I’ll pick you up at 8?”
“Sure. I live in Mid-Town. I just got an apartment there. Thanks to Harper, I’m able to get an apartment in Mid-Town. If it weren’t for Harper, I’d be in prison right now.”
I smiled as I realized that both of us had a story to tell each other. “You tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine,” I said. “On the way to the prison. In the meantime, I’m glad to have met you. Harper speaks very highly of you. She tells me that you’re one helluva researcher.”
“I am one helluva researcher. Harper also tells me that you guys got an investigator. Tom Garrett. I was hoping that I could learn some tricks from him, too. I’d love to be an all-around legal eagle – doing investigations, doing legal research, learning the ropes. Learning everything I need to know about practicing law. Not that I ever want to go to law school and become a lawyer or anything like that. But I really enjoy doing the grunt work.”
“Actually, investigation and research isn’t grunt work. It’s the backbone of what we do. Without research and investigation, we’re nothing.”
Just then, Pearl poked her head into my office. Harper, Heather and I were sitting there when she came in and whispered into Harper’s ear.
Harper looked at me. “Excuse me. I need to see about something.”
At that, she got up and left. Then she came back in a few minutes. “I think that we have a new case. Possibly another wrongful death case.”
“Oh? Tell me about it.”
“It’s Darnell Williams. His aunt Arnetta has died. He told me that she’s been sick for awhile, and, after she was taken to the hospital this last time, it was found that her house is full of toxic black mold. I think that it’s time to do some investigating on this issue. The landlord, the guy who owned the apartment complex that Arnetta lived in, owns apartment complexes all over the city. We should find out how many of those apartments have the same problem as Arnetta’s apartment, and if anybody else has gotten really sick or has died from the mold. This could be just the thing for poor Darnell and his family. He’s at MIT right now, doing great, but he’s only a Freshman in college and his family is still very poor. He worries about them all the time. I hate that his aunt died, but if we could get some money for his family, that would help out a lot.”
I remembered Harper telling me Darnell’s story. He was a young African-American guy who was working at a Church’s Chicken when he came across the body of a policeman. He found it as he was taking out the trash. He was trying to call 911 when another policeman came along, told him to spread up against the wall, and then found drugs on him. He was arrested for drug possession and then was arrested for murder. It turned out that the policeman who arrested Darnell was the actual killer, and he planted those drugs on Darnell. It was a shameful case, made even more shameful by the fact that Darnell apparently was a really, really good kid. A bright one, too. He got into MIT, where he was apparently thriving.
And now his aunt was dead, apparently because the landlord, the person who owned the house that she rented, was
a slumlord who didn’t care about the conditions of the apartments that he rented out. At least, that was apparently what was preliminarily shown by the facts.
“Let’s go ahead and do the preliminary investigation,” I said. “And we’ll have to figure out if it’s worth it to file some cases. We should do an investigation on all of his properties and see if it’s worth it to file a class action lawsuit against him.”
“I’ll get Darnell in here and see if there’s anything that he can tell me about his aunt. I do know one thing – she didn’t have any children. That would mean that her two sisters – Violetta and Anita, Darnell’s mother, will be the ones who will get the compensation for this case. As I said, I hate that Darnell is experiencing even more tragedy in his young life, but I can’t help but think that any money from a lawsuit would do wonders for his family.”
I was skeptical about the lawsuit, for much the same reason that I was skeptical about my other wrongful death lawsuit involving the negligent doctor – I wondered how much this Arnetta’s life was “worth.” Damages in a negligence lawsuit depended upon the earnings potential of the victim, extrapolated over the years of life that the person was expected to live. If Arnetta truly died because of the toxic mold, then it implied that she must have had underlying medical issues. Generally, toxic mold isn’t fatal unless the person was weakened to begin with, unless the person was very old or very young. At any rate, I had personally never heard of a case where toxic mold killed an otherwise healthy person.
Assuming that Arnetta was already sick, then the case became complicated in two different ways. First, there was the issue of causation. If Arnetta was sick, then who is to say what truly killed her? Sure, toxic mold might have contributed to her death, but who was to say that her underlying illness, whatever that illness happened to be, wasn’t the thing that caused her death? The other issue was that of life span. If Arnetta was really sick, then her life span wasn’t expected to be very long, even if the toxic mold didn’t get her. That would mean that our compensation would be very limited.
Nonetheless, it was worth it to at least meet with Darnell. And it also was worth it to investigate if the owner of the property had other properties with the same issue. Filing a class action against that individual might be the best way to get some money for everyone, while also bringing money into the firm. Then again, we were also limited by the fact that the individual, whoever that happened to be, might not have millions of dollars to pay out for damages.
“Pearl,” Harper said. “Call Darnell. See if he can’t meet with us sometime soon. I know that he’s in Massachusetts right now, but we can pay for his flight if he wants to meet us on Saturday afternoon. He’ll probably go for that, because I’m sure he wants to see his mother and siblings.”
At that, Pearl got on the phone and called Darnell. Five minutes later, she said that it was a go. Darnell would be in our office at 2 PM Saturday.
“That means that my visit to Nick will be on a tight schedule,” I said. “Which is fine, because I don’t generally spend more than a half hour there anyhow.” Cameron prison was about 45 minutes away from where I lived, so the round trip would be about an hour and a half. Assuming that Heather and I got started around 9 in the morning, I would be back to the office with plenty of time to spare.
I had my work cut out for me, but that was okay. I really wanted to see if I could get some kind of justice for the people who were harmed by the toxic mold. If there was one thing that burned me, it was a slumlord. That was because my mom and I grew up in rancid apartments that were freezing in the winter and insufferably warm in the summer. Rats were always around, as were cockroaches. We had to have pans all over the house because the roof would always leak whenever it rained. It smelled like mold and mildew. Worst of all, nobody ever bothered to do anything about the issues. My mom would call and complain, but she never got anybody to even come out and look at our place.
I suppose that, if I really wanted to analyze the issues, I would discover that I wanted to nail the slumlord bastard to the wall because I wanted justice for my own shitty upbringing.
Then again, analysis was never my thing.
Chapter 2
That evening, when I got home, I found a most unpleasant surprise. Sarah, my estranged wife, was sitting in the living room. Just sitting there, watching a movie on Netflix. She smiled when I walked through the door. “Damien,” she said pleasantly. “I’m so glad that you’re finally here. I sent Gretchen away with the kids.”
Gretchen was my new baby-sitter. Nate, my nine-year old and Amelia, my seven-year-old, loved Gretchen because they thought that she was fun. And I guess that, to a kid, she probably was fun. She played video games with them, and let them watch as much television and streaming as they wanted. I didn’t mind that Gretchen was permissive – I tried to always get home by 6, so I was able to have dinner with the kids and make them do their homework.
Amelia was doing fantastic, health-wise. She seemed to be beating her non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Even though it seemed, last year, that Amelia was probably going to die, she didn’t. Just the opposite – she was getting stronger every day.
I supposed that that was why Sarah was in my house. Now that Amelia was out of the woods, for now, she wanted to come back. I wasn’t prepared to let her back, however. Not after what she did. Not after she abandoned Amelia and me when we needed her the most. Not after she began an affair with John Gibson long before she officially told me that she wanted out of the marriage.
No, I wasn’t going to just roll over and play dead.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Sarah as I stared at her big blue eyes which were filled with tears. Those eyes of hers used to slay me. Not anymore. “You don’t belong here anymore. I changed the locks when you moved out. I changed them for a reason.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I heard you’re dating Ally Hughes,” she said, forcing a smile. “I must say, I was surprised. I thought that you only liked blondes.”
Ally was a brown-eyed brunette with olive skin. In other words, she was just about the opposite, looks-wise, from Sarah. Sarah was a blue-eyed blonde with alabaster skin. They were both beautiful women in their own right, but only Ally was beautiful to me because Sarah had shown her ugly, ugly side.
“Who I am dating is none of your concern.”
“Have the kids met her yet?”
“No. Where are the kids right now, incidentally?”
“They’re at the Oak Park Mall with Gretchen. I sent them there with her this afternoon. I called Gretchen and asked her to go there and take the kids before I got there.”
I took a deep breath. “You did. Why?”
“Because I wanted to talk to you. You won’t return my phone calls.”
“That’s because my divorce lawyer has told me not to speak with you directly. My lawyer has been calling your lawyer, however. Which is how it’s supposed to be. Perhaps you don’t know that.”
She crossed her arms in front of her, but then slowly dropped them back down to her sides. “I do know that. But we aren’t forbidden to speak to one another, are we?”
“No. But it’s not a good idea. So, I think that you should leave.”
She sighed. “Damien, I-“
“Leave.”
“I won’t. I need to talk to you.” She lowered her head and then looked back up at me. “I miss you. I miss our life together. Our family.”
I nodded my head. “Translation. John Gibson kicked me out and Amelia seems to be getting better, so I want to come home. Well, you’re not welcome here at this house. I haven’t gotten a restraining order against you, but I swear to God, Sarah, if you don’t leave right this minute, I’ll be at the courthouse getting a restraining order so fast your head will spin.”
Her eyes were pleading with me. She put one of her hands on my face and rubbed it. “You don’t mean that,” she said softly. “You know you don’t mean that.”
“Like hell I don’t. Now get out.”
She put her other hand on my other cheek and then rubbed my hair. That always got me. Her rubbing my hair used to be one of her loving gestures. Whenever I was feeling down or stressed, she would always make me a whiskey sour and give me a neck massage and rub my hair. It used to work with me – whenever I was angry with her for some shit that she had pulled, she would just stroke my cheeks and rub my hair, and I would inevitably calm down.
Was it going to work this time? As I looked at her, my emotions were roiling. On the one hand, I absolutely hated her. Hated her. She jacked me around, she cheated on me, and she abandoned Amelia. On the other hand, there was still a lot of residual love I had for her. I really had never stopped loving her, even if I didn’t like her. Even when I hated her, I was in love with her.
And the divorce hadn’t been finalized. In fact, nothing had even been filed. My divorce attorney, Olivia Wilder, had the petition prepared and ready to go. She even had a tentative property settlement drawn up and a parenting plan. Sarah told me that she wasn’t going to fight me on any of it. All I had to do was get my lawyer and Sarah’s lawyer, Arnold Hamilton, to call a settlement conference and then everything would be ready for the uncontested divorce docket. The uncontested divorce docket was easy-peasy – the parties simply had to go in front of the judge and testify that the documents represented our agreement, and then the judge would sign off and we would be done.
Yet, I hadn’t been pressuring Olivia to call for the settlement conference, and she hadn’t even heard from Arnold Hamilton. He hadn’t returned her calls. This wasn’t all that unusual for attorneys – they get busy, or, sometimes, they become negligent, so they don’t always keep in touch with one another.
[Damien Harrington 01.0] The Alibi Page 3