She was staring at me. We both knew that in this town, anyone associated with the Warton clan was fair game.
I switched gears. There was a simple answer to her question, so I rattled it off. “Okay, if they did, for a major felony they could hold him for between thirty-six and ninety-six hours without charge. That’s when they’d try to question him, but he’s entitled to have a lawyer present. He just needs to know not to talk without one.”
“So you’ll be there with him?”
“Well,” I said, and paused. If there did turn out to be evidence, if this went to trial, it could take a solid year of work. Months at the minimum. I was trying to get my business litigation practice off the ground, not do murder trials. Not even for pay, much less for nothing. I could barely float another month or two on what I had left, and she didn’t have anything.
“Leland,” she said. Her voice was trembling. “He’s just a kid. My kid.”
“I know, Mazie, but what I was saying is, there’s public defenders who do nothing but this type of work. The court would appoint—”
“But I don’t know them! Where do those folks work, Charleston? They don’t know this town. And they don’t know me.”
A tear ran down her face. In all my life I’d never seen her cry until today.
“Mazie,” I said, “you can call me anytime you need, but I think this is going to blow over. Karl fell off his boat and drowned. Jackson can’t get in trouble for that.”
“Then why’d the cops come for him?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
5
Wednesday, June 19, Evening
Walking into the Ocean View Diner, I was surprised to see it packed with locals and tourists alike, all of them rubbernecking to get a look at Mazie. A lot had come out about Karl’s murder—not least, that it looked like a murder. People were gossiping about autopsy results, but I knew how that worked; the police probably wouldn’t get the full report for another four or five weeks. Still, the word on the street was that Karl had been brutally beaten and then tossed overboard to drown.
It was possible the rumor mill had amplified bits of information beyond all recognition. It was also possible the coroner’s office had sprung a leak.
From the way the customers were treating Mazie, they liked scandal whether it was true or not. With Jackson still gone and the whole town knowing about his fight with Karl, she’d been branded a killer’s mother.
She was handling it as well as a person could. I’d come to get coffee and give moral support, but she was run off her feet with all the gawkers getting early dinners. Apart from when she poured my coffee, she hadn’t even looked at me.
When the place closed, I headed out to wait while she cleaned up. I’d dropped her off at work and told her I’d get her home, so she wouldn’t spend her shift worrying about her tires getting slashed or someone tossing a rock through her windshield.
I drove over to the diner’s back door so she wouldn’t have to go far. At twilight, when she came out and slid into the passenger seat, she looked more exhausted than I’d ever seen her. As I pulled onto the street, I asked, “You okay?” It was a stupid question, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“You tell me,” she said. “My son’s gone, the whole town thinks he’s a murderer, and on top of that, old Mr. Graham just asked me not to come back to work tomorrow. Or ever.”
“Aw, dang.” It was a lousy job, but I knew she needed the money.
There was a hint of humor in her voice when she added, “I can’t believe he didn’t appreciate all the business I was bringing in.”
I smiled. Finding humor where she could had always been her way. Maybe that was why a hard life hadn’t hardened her. “Someone else will see the business opportunity,” I said. “You’ll find something.”
“Yeah, if I want every shift to be a freak show,” she said, sounding very tired. “Jackson’s boss told me he ain’t showed up either. I’ve texted him, but I got no idea where he is. This can’t go on long, or we’ll lose the house. The landlord don’t take kindly to unpaid rent.”
“Maybe Roy has something,” I said. “Some work where you wouldn’t have to deal with the public. He’s got a secretary, but I don’t know, cleaning, maybe? He could ask around if he doesn’t have anything himself.”
She gave a laugh that was past hope. “Even before all this,” she said, “Roy wouldn’t have hired a Warton. He runs a respectable firm.”
“Maybe things have changed,” I said. “I mean, he’s got Blue Seas for a client, and they had Karl and his brothers on the payroll.”
“They did?”
We were on the causeway now, and I kept my eyes on the road, but I could feel her looking at me in surprise. “You didn’t know?”
“Oh, Karl never wanted me to know anything about his money. According to everything he ever told me or filed in court, he had none, especially not for child support. I guess I was supposed to think that boat of his ran on seawater and thin air.”
“He said that in court filings?”
“On the stand, once. But it was a long time ago.”
“Dang. I wish I’d known. Maybe we could’ve put some pressure on him to help you out. Doesn’t matter how long ago it was. There’s no statute of limitations on crimes in South Carolina, and perjury’s a crime.”
She didn’t say anything. I put the window down for a breeze. The palm trees alongside the road were so close that each one made a whooshing noise as we passed, a rhythmic punctuation. Streetlights were few and far between, but in the light of one I caught sight of more tears on her face.
“Mazie, if there’s anything I can do to help you feel better...”
She wiped her face roughly, seeming annoyed that I’d caught her crying, and said, “It ain’t about how I feel. It’s about Jackson. He needs help. I need you to save my son.”
“Mazie, I know he’s running scared, but I don’t see a case here. I know the gossip is pretty horrifying, but it’s got to blow over sometime, and—”
She slammed her hand down on the dashboard. “Leland, no! This kind of thing doesn’t blow over for people like us. And ain’t you heard, or do you just not listen? They got a witness now. Some cop who docks at the marina says he saw Jackson there that night.”
I tried not to let her see me wince. A defendant who fled out his back window, and now a police officer who placed him at the scene. She had reason to be scared.
“Mazie, gossip ain’t evidence. I want to help, but…” I signaled a turn and checked traffic, taking the opportunity to stop talking. I didn’t want to get into my finances with her.
Of course, compared to seeing your only child imprisoned for murder, worrying that mine might have to take out big loans in order to afford college felt ridiculous.
“But what?” she said. “My boy didn’t do this. I know him. Maybe if Karl had attacked me, Jackson might do him harm fighting him off. I could see that. But he would never have chased his father down and murdered him. I need a lawyer who understands that. And who understands that this town has always thought the worst of us.”
I nodded, still looking at the road. “I do understand that,” I said.
“Then help us!”
“Here, we gotta shut these windows,” I said, hitting the button to close them. We were getting into the built-up part of her edge-of-nowhere neighborhood. “I don’t want anybody to hear us talk.”
When we pulled up outside her house, I put the car in park, turned to her, and said, “Look, for a lot of reasons, I don’t know if I could take this case—if it turns into a case, which it still might not.”
She laughed like I was foolish to think there was any hope of that.
“If you hear from Jackson,” I said, “you tell him to call me. And tell him he’s not to say anything to the police without me there, no matter what. Easier said than done, for a kid his age, but it’s critical.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding. “I’ll tell him just that. Can I tell him in a text, in case I
don’t hear from him?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want her creating any evidence that might look bad to the cops or a jury. “Okay,” I said, “here’s what you do. Tell him exactly this: ‘Jackson, don’t worry.’”
“Hang on a second,” she said. She pulled her phone out and started typing.
“So, ‘Don’t worry. You have the right to a lawyer, and we’ll get you one. But don’t talk to the police without one. I’m not sure I trust them.’ Just say that, and then sign off however you normally do.”
When she’d finished writing, I said, “If you hear from him, or if he’s arrested, call me right away. In the meantime, I’ll do some digging. I’ll see if I can find out what the police have. There’s a decent chance they don’t have anything at all.”
“But how? Old Mr. Graham said he had it straight from a cop he knows that they got another cop who saw Jackson there.”
“Mazie, the police are allowed to distort things, make them sound worse than they are. It flushes out witnesses, gets people to tell them what really happened, gets one crook to turn state’s witness against another. They do it all the time.”
“But that’s terrible! It’s immoral!”
“Well, it’s a legit investigative technique. Or at least, it can be. I’m just letting you know it can be misused, and also, once rumors get going, they take on a life of their own. It don’t mean the police actually have anything. It don’t mean your boy’s really in danger.”
The streetlight at the corner let me see her well enough to know I’d lost her there. Her expression closed off like I was moving back into the “stranger” category.
“My son is in danger,” she said. “You know who we are. We’re the kind who get the consequences. He ain’t no worse than those summer kids who smash mailboxes and smoke weed on the docks, but then those boys all go off to college and nobody ever holds them to account. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to be for Noah too, before the accident. You know, just floating through life whichever way he wanted, and nobody stopping him, nobody blaming him for anything that went wrong. But it was never going to be that way for Jackson.”
She opened the door and got out before I could think of anything to say. I called out, “Evening,” and watched to make sure she got in safely, but she didn’t say another word.
She was right. If Jackson had gone through what Noah had—if he’d been arrested for stealing prescription drugs, if he’d been in an accident that nearly killed him and would’ve left him disabled if not for all that rehab and PT—well, he wouldn’t have gotten a second chance. He might’ve done time for the pills, instead of getting off with a stint in juvenile rehab. And he would’ve been left disabled, because there was no way Mazie could pay for all the care it took to bring a boy in that condition almost all the way back.
I’d given Noah that second chance. It had cost almost everything I had, but wasn’t that what money was for?
Surely Jackson deserved the same.
6
Wednesday, June 19, Evening
I left Mazie’s and drove back up the causeway, but I didn’t go straight home. I hated to leave Noah waiting, but half the time he wasn’t there anyway. And, I told myself, at least now I wasn’t ignoring him to focus on my work. I was trying to help his friend.
If Detective Blount was still on duty—it was only a little bit past six—I might be able to find out some things from him. And if he wasn’t, I could find out when his next shift was. He’d been pretty rude in the crowd the other day, but then he never had any social graces to begin with. I pulled into a spot outside the police station.
As I went up the steps, the door at the top opened and Terri Washington came out. We’d been friends in high school, two outcast nerds who shared an interest in the law, but I’d only seen her maybe twice since returning to Basking Rock.
“My goodness, Terri,” I said. “For half a second I thought Oprah Winfrey was coming down these steps. I was about to look for a TV camera.” She really did look like Oprah, and she’d loved the comparison back in high school.
“Uh-huh,” she said, with a glint of humor. “Wish I had her money instead of her looks. How you been?”
We stopped to chat, her standing two steps above me on account of how petite she was. I asked, “What you doing at the cop shop? You back on the force?”
With a look that clearly said I had lost my mind, she asked, “You suffer some kind of brain injury, Leland? You here to report some mugger hit you upside the head? I quit about thirty seconds after my pension vested. It’d take an act of God to bring me back.”
A breeze came up as we chatted. Evening was one of the few pleasant times to be outdoors in the summer. Terri told me she was working as a private investigator while studying part-time for a degree in social work. “People are always underestimating me,” she said. “When you’re a cop that’s a bad thing, but as a PI, it’s good. I don’t get noticed. And even if I do, people still do any damn fool thing in front of me.”
“What, do they just think you don’t carry no consequences?”
“That’s exactly it. Like, what harm could I do?”
“Well, you could put ’em on your TV show, make ’em have some kind of embarrassing heart-to-heart with Dr. Phil.”
She laughed.
“That why you’re here?” I asked. “Some PI thing?”
“Uh-uh.” She explained that she volunteered for Jumpstart, a local halfway house for women in recovery. I felt a pang of guilt. What if I’d done more to push Elise into something like that?
“You okay?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. It’s just, you know, it’s a sad thing.”
“Addiction? Yeah. Especially when they relapse. We had two of those in the past week, and one of them got picked up. I was just in there talking to her. Going to need a public defender.”
“I know some good ones up in Charleston County,” I said. “They might have some intel on whoever you get down here.”
“Well, thank you.” She looked at her watch. “I should let you go take care of whatever you’re here for.”
“Yeah, hoping to talk with Detective Blount.”
In her eyes I saw her put two and two together. She said, “The Warton thing?” When I nodded, she said, “He was already gone when I got here.”
Without moving her head one iota, her eyes flicked around like she was checking that the coast was clear. Then she looked at me quite pointedly and said, in a tone much more casual than the look in her eyes, “I do have time for a quick drink. Unless you want to keep standing here on these steps?”
I took that as the strong recommendation it was and suggested a nearby restaurant. We headed over. Of the two we could walk to, it was noisier; whatever she had to say would be harder for anyone else to overhear.
We took a seat at the corner of the bar and ordered beers.
“You mind if we split some wings and fries?” she said. “I never got around to having lunch today, and the smell just, you know, hit me. I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
I mentally reviewed what was in my wallet: a little cash, and I did have the one card of mine that still worked. I hoped whatever intel she had would be worth my eating cereal for lunch tomorrow.
“No problem,” I said. I called the bartender over and ordered the food.
She took a sip of her beer, set it down, and said, “Okay. So, you can cross Blount off your friends list right now. The boys have themselves a witness, and he’s it. He’s got a speedboat he keeps down at the marina, and he’s saying he went fishing that day and saw Jackson coming into the marina around ten at night, when he was heading out.”
That wasn’t great, but it didn’t seem like the bombshell Mazie was afraid of. It didn’t even place Jackson with Karl.
I said, “They’re going to need more than that.”
“Yeah.”
“Motive, for one thing.”
“Mm-hmm. Everybody knows Karl wasn’t the best father in town, but they also know he
was pretty damn far from the worst.”
That rang true. And she would know. Even in high school, I remembered, she’d had a sixth sense about that kind of thing. Whose bruises really were accidental and whose weren’t. Which girl wore long sleeves because she was cutting, and sometimes even why she was doing it. I’d told her in our junior year she ought to be a detective.
The bartender set down our fries and wings. While she started in on them, I took a swig of beer. “I suppose that’s what’s got them so aggressive,” I said. “They feel like they got a little bite, and they’re itching to haul it all the way in.”
“Mm-hmm. Easier than throwing the whole net out and seeing if they catch anything.” She set what was left of a wing on her napkin. “One of the reasons I left is, there wasn’t a whole lot of investigating going on. They’d always rather bust the obvious suspect in under a week, instead of taking the time to look deep. And, I mean, it’s a small-town police force. This isn’t where the great investigative minds end up.”
I nodded. “I can’t say I met a whole lot of Sherlock Holmes types up in Charleston either.”
“Few and far between,” she agreed. She dabbed a fry in ketchup and added, “They had Karl’s brothers in again today.”
“Huh,” I said. “Wonder if they’re trying to exclude them. I doubt those two can say much about Jackson. I don’t get the impression he ever was close to that side of the family.”
“You sure seem interested,” she said gently. “Is it purely professional, or you worried about Mazie?”
“Oh, of course I’m worried about her.”
“So folks have been saying,” she said. “That, and more.”
I looked at her and said, “Sometimes I hate this damn town.”
“Aw, but you know how it works. People see you driving her around, dropping by her restaurant, they’re going to talk.” She smiled and said, “Don’t let it bother you none. If there’s still something there, there’s still something there.”
Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1) Page 4