Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1)

by Peter Kirkland

  That silky ability to make every client feel how they wanted to feel was not something I’d ever learned. It just wasn’t relevant as a prosecutor. Without it, I questioned how I was ever going to get my practice off the ground.

  I checked my email on the off chance someone had sent an inquiry through my new website. They hadn’t. Instead I had notices that made my gut twist up in knots. Back when keeping on top of finances was just an item on my to-do list instead of the double-barreled hell it had become, I’d opted in to automatic emails from our health insurance every time a new medical bill came in. This morning there were three of them, all for Noah’s recent care. Together they added up to more than $6,200.

  Two years earlier I could not have imagined being in this hole. I had everything on autopay and enough coming in every month to cover it. Things were going so well that I was bored and considering a switch into politics. My son was getting high on stolen Vicodin with his friends, but I didn’t know that. My wife was an alcoholic, and that I did know.

  The way I was trying to help her deal with that was called enabling, and it didn’t help anyone. But I didn’t face that fact until after she passed away. Her accident, Noah’s care, and the lawsuit from the other guy she hurt took everything we had.

  That, and some mistakes I’d made in trying to look out for her. There was an investigation. It was suggested I should resign in order to avoid being fired.

  Getting out of town was my idea. When Noah was out of rehab and down to two PT visits a week, putting some distance between us and our old life became possible. But I’d been overly optimistic about the career options for suddenly retired former prosecutors. The normal path would have been criminal defense, but the life of a small-town criminal defender, helping good ole boys get away with DUIs and domestic violence, wasn’t something I could stomach. I was shooting for business law, for better money and less-unsavory clients.

  So I was starting from scratch.

  I logged into my accounts to see where things stood. The savings account that was supposed to carry us through building my new practice would barely cover two more months’ worth of expenses—or less, if I counted Noah’s medical bills. The only account that wasn’t running on fumes was his college fund. If I tapped that, he might not be able to afford college. If I didn’t, he might have to stop PT and accept his diminished state as just how things were.

  Work was the only solution. I got going on the papers for Roy.

  The phone rang, startling me out of my work trance. The sunlight was coming in the other side of the office; hours must’ve passed.

  I looked at the number. Local, but I didn’t recognize it. I felt a blast of hope: an opportunity, maybe? A new client? I let it ring twice, not wanting to seem desperate, and then said, “Hello?”

  “Leland! Please help me. Oh my God, I don’t know what to do!” It was Mazie. I’d never heard her so upset.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Karl’s dead! He’s dead, and the police came by, and Jackson’s run off!”

  “Now, whatever’s wrong,” I said, “I got you, Mazie. I got you.” My crisis voice kicked in, the one I’d developed over years of dealing with crime victims and their families. A little deeper than my normal voice, and slow enough to soothe. I was damned if I was going to let a friend of mine go over the edge. “Just tell me where you are.”

  “The police took me down to the station.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  I said, “I’ll be right there.”

  4

  Tuesday, June 11, Evening

  As I drove over, I kicked myself for getting so deep in Roy’s work that I’d forgotten to keep an ear out for news. I should’ve found a way to tell Mazie about Karl’s death myself. Hearing it from the local cops, who weren’t exactly friendly toward her kin, had to be about the worst way to find out. And to have Jackson run when the cops came did not look good. I could’ve spared the two of them a lot of trouble today if I hadn’t fallen into my old tunnel vision, seeing nothing in the world beyond the work on my desk.

  The police station’s tiny lobby was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. Back in Charleston we counted murders per year, but Basking Rock was so small you could count the years between murders. Karl’s death was big news. I recognized some faces—a detective I knew, and a couple local losers trading gossip about the condition of the corpse—but didn’t see Mazie. The sullen cop at the desk stopped chawing his tobacco long enough to tell me she’d gone into the ladies’. I started making my way through the gossipers to check in with Detective Blount, maybe get some sense of what the news was and why Mazie had been brought here, but when he glanced my way and I gave him a nod hello, he glared, turned his back, and headed down the hall.

  When I was a prosecutor, no cop would’ve done that. I was still getting used to being persona non grata by virtue of my new sideline in defending people accused of petty crimes. And if that weren’t enough to dent my reputation, any connection to the Warton clan knocked a man down a notch or two around here. I’d never thought of Mazie that way, but I was realizing she was considered basically a Warton despite never having married Jackson’s father.

  It occurred to me she’d probably taken refuge in the restroom just to get away from the gossip and the nasty looks. I wondered if she’d called me from there. I stepped out of the fray and leaned against a wall to shoot her a text saying I was here.

  She came right out. She had the masklike expression I’d seen countless times. The mothers of murderers and murder victims, the wives of dead men and of perps, they nearly always had this look on their faces when they had to wade through crowds of reporters, cops, and curious onlookers. She was barely holding it together.

  I stepped over to her and offered her a ride home.

  As we drove, windows down because my AC was on the blink, she didn’t speak. I didn’t either; I didn’t want to upset her, especially not when we were still in stop-and-go traffic near the courthouse and the jail. She didn’t need some gawker snapping photos of her crying in my car.

  When we turned onto the causeway, the long view over the water seemed to relax her. Since there was nobody around—the causeway only had two lanes, with nothing but rocks and palm trees on either side—I asked, “So, what all happened there?”

  The floodgates opened. She started sobbing.

  “It was Karl they found,” she said. Again, I wanted to kick myself for letting her find out from someone else. “It’s so awful. I hated that man, but nobody deserves that. His face was gone, Leland! His brothers had to identify him by his tattoos!”

  I dug a pack of Kleenex out of my center console and handed it to her.

  She took it and said, “And they kept asking me about Jackson. I don’t know where he went. I’m just glad they didn’t need him to identify the—”

  She started crying again. When she’d blown her nose a couple times and started calming down, I said, “So… tell me, Mazie. Walk me through it. How’d you end up at the police station?”

  “Well, I got home around six-thirty,” she said. “With the grease, I always take a shower after work. I was just drying off when the doorbell rang. When Jackson didn’t get the door, I yelled for him a couple times. They just leaned on the bell and started hammering, louder even than Karl when he’s drunk.”

  I guess that made her nostalgic, because she went quiet and looked out at the water. The sun was getting low, and the palm trees were casting long shadows on the waves.

  To get her talking again, I said gently, “What happened then?”

  “Oh, I went and answered the door. And that Detective Blount, you know, he just blurted it out about Karl, like you’d expect him to.”

  He was blunt, she meant. That was the joke in high school, on account of his last name. It was a nicer way of saying he lacked basic courtesy, to the point that I questioned his Southernness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, it ain’t nothing. Remember, I stayed her
e. I never had occasion to forget how he was. But Leland, the thing is, he kept asking about Jackson. Where he was, where he’d been the past few days. I went to get him, so he could set Blount straight, but he was gone. His window faces the back, and I guess he just jumped out. That’s going to give them the wrong idea, isn’t it?”

  It was the kind of thing that would’ve gotten pride of place in my opening statement, back when I was a prosecutor: Ladies and gentlemen, when the police arrived to inform the family of Mr. Warton’s death, the defendant didn’t answer the door. Instead, he jumped out the back window and fled.

  There was no point telling her that. I asked, “You have any idea where he might be?”

  “Might want to ask your Noah. But no, I don’t. I didn’t even know he’d gone until we looked in his room. But that Blount, he right out accused me of stalling so Jackson could run! I was in a robe, my hair was all wet, and I still had to take him in the bathroom and show him the fogged-up mirror before he’d believe I really was in the shower when they got there.”

  I didn’t like how aggressive Blount was being. I didn’t know if he was bluffing or just making assumptions, or, God forbid, if he had hard evidence.

  That wasn’t a question that could be answered yet. “So how’d you end up down at the station?”

  “They asked me to come. We got nothing to hide, and I didn’t want them thinking I wasn’t cooperating.”

  “Oh, uh-huh.” I kept my voice casual. What she’d done was the opposite of what I would’ve recommended, but there was no sense making her feel bad now. “So what all did they want to know?”

  “Oh, everything. Where was I on this day or that? Where was Jackson? They already knew he and Karl had fought, so they wanted to hear all about that. I told them it was Karl who started it. He came over drunk and raring for a fight. They wanted to know every single thing that happened after that.”

  “Mm-hmm.” That did not sound good, and it was my fault. If I hadn’t been so focused on getting Roy’s research done, I could’ve told both her and Jackson to sit tight. I knew even good cops could be overzealous sometimes, so the first rule of not getting railroaded was to not talk to them.

  I eased off the causeway into the little business district on her side of town. Gun shop, gas station, dollar store. I asked her, “Any idea why Jackson went out the window?”

  She sighed. I could tell she was embarrassed.

  “Now, Mazie,” I said, “you know I ain’t going to judge him none. Not only do you and I go way back, but compared to what I saw in Charleston, nothing in this town is going to shock me.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just, he’s gotten in a few scrapes. Like possession of marijuana. I know it’s wrong, but—”

  I sighed. “It’s about as low on the totem pole of wrong as a crime can be. Hell, I wish my Noah’d just been doing that. He had a problem with painkillers, and then with the accident it got even worse.”

  “Leland, I am so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Hardly anyone does. He’s come out of it now, I think, but I almost lost him. Smoking reefer’s a cakewalk compared to that.”

  “Well, still,” she said. “He shouldn’t be doing it. But I think he must’ve had some stashed someplace, and he ran to dump it somewhere in case they searched his room.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That ain’t great, but it’s understandable.”

  As I reached an intersection and stopped at the light, I could feel her looking at me from the passenger seat. She said, “I probably shouldn’t have talked to them, huh?”

  Before I could answer, a car shot past and something exploded across my windshield.

  “What the hell!” I veered to the shoulder, my heart hammering. The glass was covered with what looked like a chocolate milkshake. I leaned out the window to see what I could of the other car. Its taillights were disappearing in the distance.

  “What was that?” I said. “Some new YouTube prank or something?”

  She gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, no. Leland, you’ve been gone a long time.”

  “How do you mean?” I turned the wipers on. They didn’t help much.

  “That’s what you get for mixing with the Wartons. Somebody must’ve spotted me in your car.”

  I hit the windshield-washer button, trying to think of another explanation.

  “More likely just some stupid kids,” I said. “The speed they were going, I don’t know how they could’ve gotten a good look at you. They weren’t even on the passenger side.”

  “Maybe,” she said after a moment. “It’s just hard. After a while, I mean, you get to expect the insults and being the butt of every joke.”

  I sighed. “I’m sorry things went this way for you,” I said. “You should’ve had a better life.”

  She shrugged. She didn’t say anything, but as she breathed I heard a catch in her throat that made me think she might start crying again.

  “Listen,” I said, “let’s get you home. Don’t let those punks distract us from what’s going on. Jackson’s got to be scared. He ain’t thinking straight, but he’s just a kid.” I pulled out into the road again. “We’re the grown-ups. We got to think this through.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So, what all do you think might’ve made the police want to talk to him?”

  “Just the fight, I think. Half the neighborhood saw that. And all of them heard it.”

  “But they also saw Karl leave, right?”

  “Yeah. And he was alone. Jackson came back inside.”

  “Well, okay then.” It sounded to me like if Karl fell in the water after that, the killer was probably Jack Daniels, not Jackson.

  I parked in front of her house. As we went up the rickety porch, I saw the next-door neighbor’s curtain twitching and made a mental note to keep my voice down even when we got inside.

  Jackson still wasn’t home. As Mazie turned on the lights, I asked if I could make her something: coffee, maybe a sandwich?

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. She was planted right in front of me, staring up into my eyes, desperation in her voice. “I don’t want nothing but to know my boy is going to be okay.”

  That was exactly how I’d felt at the hospital after Noah’s accident. Her pale, tired face had the same vulnerability she used to have in high school. She’d always have that, I thought; if life hadn’t hardened her by now, it never would. But motherhood had made her fierce, and I understood that down to my bones.

  “Mazie,” I said, “you can help him. Let’s figure this out. Hang on one second.”

  I didn’t want any nosy neighbors to overhear, but it was too hot to shut the windows. I turned the TV on loud and signaled that we should talk quietly. “So,” I said, “everyone saw Karl show up drunk, right? What happened then?”

  “He just stood in the front yard hollering. He was saying horrible things about me. Nothing I ain’t used to, but still. Jackson was mad. I tried to stop him, but he went out on the porch and told Karl he was a loser and needed to get on home and never come back. And, Leland, everybody heard that. Anybody who could see anything must’ve seen that Karl came charging up the porch, yelling that Jackson had no right to talk like that to his own father, and hit him right in the face.”

  “That’s the black eye,” I said.

  “Yes. I ran out and got between them. I don’t think Jackson even landed a punch at all. He just went out to defend me, and then he had to fend off his dad. He didn’t get Karl’s mean streak, thank the Lord.”

  “Well, he’s your son too,” I said. “And you raised him right. What happened then? He just come on back in and, what, eat and go to bed?”

  “He came in, and I put him in the shower and cleaned his face up after. He needed a Band-Aid.” She touched her cheek as if remembering. “And we watched TV a while. But then he went back out. I told him not to, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “Sounds like Noah,” I said. “You tell a boy that age the right thing to do, he’ll do the opposite just to mess wit
h you. About what time was that, when he left?”

  “Right after Law & Order came on,” she said. “I remember because I hate that show. He got up when it came on, and we argued a little. When he left, I switched over to Magnum, P.I. It can’t have been more than a few minutes past nine.”

  “How long’d he stay out, do you know?”

  “Well, I finished my show,” she said. “But I just didn’t feel right. He’d gone off on his bike, and I was worried. I drove around a little while, here and there, keeping an eye out. Went down to the marina, because he’s like me—likes to look at the waves. They’re relaxing.”

  I remembered that about her. It was how she’d met Karl, unfortunately. He’d always had some shabby-ass little boat to tool around in.

  “You see Jackson there?”

  “No. And I looked for Karl’s boat, but it wasn’t there either. Which I thought was a little strange—what is there to do out on the water in the dark? But then, Karl never did make much sense.”

  She sighed and stepped over to the kitchenette. She got instant coffee from the cabinet, offered me some, and put the first cup of water in the microwave to boil. I could tell something was troubling her. When our coffees were fixed up how we liked them, she gestured to me to join her at the counter.

  “Leland,” she said, “Jackson ain’t never set foot outside the Lowcountry. He can’t have gone far. But they’re looking for him, and they’re taking this real serious. We’re going to need help, and I don’t know any other lawyers but you.”

  “Well,” I said, “I think they’re just doing their due diligence. He had a fight with Karl on the night Karl died. They’re going to want to talk to him, that’s all.”

  “You sure?” she said. “What if that’s not all? What if they arrest him?”

  “I mean, they can’t just do that without evidence.” Even as I said it, I knew I sounded like a fool. Some cops liked to pin crimes on whoever the local scapegoats were. It made their jobs easier and left everyone’s assumptions comfortably intact.