Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1)

by Peter Kirkland

  “Well, but what about you and that guy?” I said. “Can’t remember his name, but the one with the Dennis Rodman hair? Tall as Big Bird?” I was referring to her high-school boyfriend, who’d left town even before I did.

  She laughed. “Okay, point taken.”

  We’d always enjoyed teasing each other. To keep it fair, I turned it on myself: “There ain’t no truer guide to life than how you felt when you were seventeen, is there. Keep that flame alive! Hell, at that age I thought I might end up on the Supreme Court.”

  She cracked up. I did too. The distance between how the future had looked then and how things looked now was so great that laughing was about all you could do.

  She finished off another wing and said, “Speaking of teenagers, how’s yours?”

  “Oh,” I said, checking my watch. It was almost seven-thirty. “He’s okay. I hate to run out on you, but I did tell him I’d be home for dinner tonight.” I called the bartender over for a doggie bag and reached for my wallet.

  She reached for hers and pulled out a ten. “My half,” she explained. I must have looked puzzled, because she added, “You ain’t paying for me. You want the whole town to think we’re on a date?” We both laughed.

  “That is the last damn thing either of us needs,” I said, laying my own ten on the bar.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I can think of a few diseases and some crimes that might be lower on the list.”

  “Why thank you,” I said, “for the compliment.”

  We strolled out and went our separate ways.

  When I got home, Noah was at the kitchen table just closing his laptop. Seeing him with it gave me a chill. The remains of a TV dinner sat nearby.

  I headed for the kitchen. “What you up to?” I said, in what I meant to be a cheerful tone.

  He glared at me. “Nothing.”

  It had been a few months since he’d earned back the right to use his laptop, in public parts of the house only. I’d taken it from him after seeing some messages between him and a friend in Charleston. They’d both been high on stolen Vicodin.

  I sat down across from him and reached for the laptop. He jerked it away and asked, “You going to keep on thinking the worst of me? Like, always?”

  “Well, when you act like you got something to hide,” I said, “it makes it hard to think you don’t.” I sighed. “And there’s a lot going on. If you know anything at all about Jackson, about where he is, you tell me, okay? Or if, God forbid, you’re having any trouble staying clean?”

  He gave a shake of his head like he could not believe I was thinking either of those things.

  “How long did I spend,” I asked, “thinking everything was fine with you? And where did that get us?”

  He shoved his laptop over to me and folded his arms across his chest.

  I opened it and typed his password—sharing it with me was part of our deal—and the website he’d been on appeared. It was some veterinarian’s page about how to tell if your dog has arthritis. The other tabs were home remedies for arthritic dogs and how to make your pup more comfortable.

  I felt like such a heel.

  He took the laptop back without a word, opened it up, and hunched over it. It reminded me of how as a kid he’d made forts around his breakfast bowl with cereal boxes.

  “Noah, I’m sorry,” I said. “Jackson’s in trouble, and it’s making me worry about both of you.”

  “Worrying’s one thing,” he said, tapping away, not looking at me. “Big Brother’s another. I ain’t going to live under a microscope. Either you start trusting me or I got to move out.”

  That made all the fight go out of me. I tried to think of a way to ask him not to, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Before I could get them to, Squatter tottered into the room. I picked him up and set him on my lap.

  Noah said, still not looking at me, “That site said to massage his hips.”

  It felt like a ridiculous thing to do, but I gave it a try. Squatter seemed happy about it.

  After a while, Noah said, “What’ll happen if Jackson gets arrested? You’ll help him, right?”

  I still didn’t have it in me to explain the financials. We’d lost our house in Charleston, lost just about everything, and helping his friend would mean struggling through probably another year before I could even begin trying to put the fires out.

  Instead I stuck with the facts. “I just came from the police station,” I told him. “I was looking into it.”

  He glanced at me, gave me a nod, and looked back at his screen.

  That glance stuck with me. It’d been a long time since I’d seen any kind of approval in his eyes.

  7

  Thursday, June 20, Evening

  The next day, with Roy’s work done by lunch, I tried to read up on marketing my law practice. Jackson’s predicament kept me from concentrating, so I called a friend in Charleston to see what he could tell me about getting a public defender and whether he knew anything about the PDs down in my county. I’d hoped to be able to give Mazie and Terri some intel on that, but what I learned wasn’t exactly encouraging.

  I decided to leave early and stop by the trailer park Karl’s brothers lived at to see if I could find out what they’d told the police. It was on the other side of the same marsh Mazie’s place looked over. As I drove past the beat-up wooden sign reading “Sheep’s Lodge”—for reasons lost to time, that’s what this park was called—I had flashbacks to drunken high-school parties I’d attended here. The place did not look to have come up in the world since then.

  An older woman using a walker was shuffling down the side of the only paved road. I pulled alongside to ask her if she could remind me where the Warton brothers lived.

  She glared at me. “Who’s asking?” A stray breeze tossed her gray hair, and I noticed, above her right ear, a single pink curler that she seemed to have forgotten.

  “Uh, it’s Leland Munroe, ma’am,” I said. “Pleased to meet you. I seem to recall they’re off to the left up there, but I can’t remember which street exactly and didn’t want to intrude.”

  My politeness, and maybe also the beater I was driving, seemed to convince her I wasn’t a process server or the tax man or whoever she wanted to keep out. She pointed the way.

  When I turned up the third dirt road to the left, I spotted Tim Warton in a lawn chair nursing what looked like a forty-ounce bottle of beer. He had on a dirty white tank top. His brother Pat was setting on the top step of their porch. When I got out and slammed my car door, Pat hauled himself to his feet and went inside without a word. Tim just took another draw on his beer.

  As I trudged across the gravel between me and him, Tim pulled a phone out of the pocket of his shorts and held it up. “I’m Livebookin’ you!” he called out. “You’re on camera, and I know my rights!”

  “Yessir,” I said. “Afternoon, Mr. Warton. I ain’t here to interfere with your rights whatsoever.”

  “You law enforcement?”

  “No, sir. Name’s Leland Munroe. I’m a local attorney. I heard about your brother Karl, and it’s a damn shame. My condolences.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. I waited for the flash of brotherly grief across his face, but none appeared. When he took another drink and then shifted to set the bottle on the ground, I noticed he wasn’t sitting in a lawn chair after all. It was wood, and handsomely carved. I thought I saw a mermaid twining around one of the rails behind him.

  He settled back against the mermaid and asked, looking downright cheerful, “You think we got somebody we could sue? You one of them lawyers that don’t charge nothing unless you win, like on the TV?”

  “Well, sir,” I said, “there’s cases where I can do a contingency, yes. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. By the way, that’s a mighty unusual chair you got there. I don’t believe I ever seen one like it.”

  “Made it myself. Carved every detail.” He looked proud, and rightly so.

  I gave a low whistle and said, “My goodness. You
have a God-given skill.” He nodded in acknowledgment. The red glow of the wood made me ask, “That ain’t teak, is it?”

  “It sure is,” he said. “And teakwood ain’t easy to carve. It’s hard. You need a mallet and chisel. You can’t even cut it with a regular blade. Got to be carbide.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I whistled again. As he reached for his forty on the ground, I saw the muscle and sinew shift under his skin. He was tanned as only a man who all but lived outdoors can be. I took him for about a decade older than me, but he still looked like he could take just about any man in a fight.

  After another gulp of beer, or malt liquor, as I realized when I saw the label, he asked, “So what all you come down here for? We don’t get a lot o’ lawyers round here.”

  From inside the trailer, I heard his brother laugh. Tim turned and hollered over his shoulder, “We don’t, though, do we? Hey, when you come out, bring me my T-shirt with the, uh, the tuxedo printed on it. We got a fancy guest, and I want to dress appropriate.”

  Inside, his brother cracked up.

  “You dress how you want,” I said. “This is your property. I just came by to see what I could figure out about the situation.”

  He squinted at me, hesitant. “You from the insurance?”

  “No, sir. I don’t got a dog in this race as of yet. I’m just trying to understand what happened. If there was a wrongful death situation, if there was insurance, we can get there in due time, and I can refer you to somebody, but first I got to understand how your poor brother lost his life.”

  “Huh.” He went to set his liquor down on the arm of his chair, then paused to flick a fly out of the way. It was so hot even the flies didn’t move unless they had to. When it had crept off around the side of the armrest, he turned to yell back at the trailer, “This here lawyer don’t even know how Karl died!”

  Pat yelled, “What? That’s crazy.” He stuck his head out the window and told me, “Whole town already knows Jackson killed him.”

  With a slow nod, Tim said, “He sure did.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Now, you’re sure about that? How come?”

  “Well,” he said, and took a swig of liquor. “He said he was going to kill him, and now Karl’s dead. It don’t get much more case-closed than that.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Now, when exactly did he say that?”

  “What was it, now,” he said. “Thanksgiving?”

  “Christmas,” Pat said from inside. “Hang on.” The flimsy trailer shook as he walked. He pulled the door open, leaned against the frame, and said, “There was an ornament on the Christmas tree shaped like a red Mustang, and Karl said he’d always wanted one. I remembered that after he got the car.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Tim. He asked me, “Speaking of which, who gets a man’s car, if his normal heir is who killed him?”

  “Well, that would depend on a whole lot of things,” I said. Brothers like these two made me happy Noah was an only child.

  Tim was still staring, waiting for an answer.

  I said, “Sir, I can’t tell you for sure without seeing the title and so forth.”

  Pat, whose knuckles were rapping a rhythm on the doorframe, said, “Aw, he probably left the convertible with that stripper he was banging. And you know possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Well, I could look into that, if you’d point me to her.”

  Tim said, “Ain’t she a waitress?”

  “Might be,” said Pat. “Works at the Broke Spoke, anyway. A waitress there might as well be a stripper.”

  “Jackson didn’t like her none either,” Tim said. “No, sir. Said something about her too, that same night when he told Karl he wanted him dead.”

  “Speaking of which, what was it exactly he said?” I asked.

  “Let me think,” Tim said. “We was all up at Mazie’s. And Karl was drunk as shit. Drunk when he got there and just kept on going. Every drink he had, you could see Jackson looking at him meaner.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Pat said. “It’s a hard thing for a boy to see.”

  “But I mean,” said Tim, “if he ain’t got used to it by now, when’s he going to? You can’t change what you can’t change.”

  “Well, sure,” Pat said.

  “Anyhow, Mazie had made a pecan pie,” said Tim. “She makes a hell of a pie. And Karl stuffed it in his craw, and he got to choking. I mean, like he was gonna die, turning blue, bent over the table…”

  “I thought that was it,” Pat said.

  “We all did. But Jackson did that thing from the TV, where he grabs him—it’s like a punch to the stomach, but you punch from behind. And it worked! Damned if that pie didn’t come right back up!”

  Pat said, “He saved his life.”

  “He did. But drunk as Karl was, and eating like he had, getting punched brought everything back up. He barfed all over himself, and on the table too. He was too drunk to even know Jackson had saved his life. He just popped him one right in the lip.”

  “That kid bled everywhere.”

  “Yeah, he’s a bleeder. Always has been. But he said right there, in front of everyone, that he shouldn’t have saved him, and matter of fact he’d put him six feet under if he ever got the chance.”

  “He did,” Pat said. “Can’t blame him, though.”

  I said, “I guess anybody might get hotheaded in a situation like that.”

  Pat shook his head. “He wasn’t hotheaded at all. He was just… dead calm. Like he meant it, you know?”

  “And that wasn’t the only time,” Tim said. “I recall Jackson saying more than once that he’d like to see his daddy dead. Whenever Karl fell off the wagon, which was a lot, he said something like that.”

  Pat agreed. “Christmas was just the, you know, that’s the one that sticks in your memory.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, I can understand why.”

  “You know,” said Tim, “you ought to check Jackson’s Facebook or whatever that is. Instagram? I don’t know. But I bet he’s even put that down in writing.”

  His brother said, “That sure would be dumb.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But how dumb you got to be, to tell a man in front of everybody that you’d like to see him dead, and then go killing him?”

  When I got home I took Squatter for a walk in the dog park, hoping to clear my head. Talking to the Warton brothers had brought home how hard it was going to be for Jackson to get an unbiased jury. I’d seen jurors believe the damnedest things, but to see even his own kin thinking that way was alarming.

  At his age, Squatter wore out quick, so he soon curled up in a sunbeam to nap. I sat on a bench with my phone, scrolling through Jackson’s social media. Apart from some surprisingly biting commentary on life in Basking Rock, which I mostly agreed with, it was mind-numbing. How many times, I wondered, did a person have to let the world know he supported legalized marijuana? I would’ve thought one meme stating that opinion ought to be enough, but Jackson apparently did not share my view. I scrolled through page after page, feeling like an old man as I shook my head at kids today.

  When my phone rang it was a welcome interruption, and all the more so because it was Terri calling.

  “Hey there, Oprah,” I said. “How you been? You solved the crime for me yet?”

  She laughed. “Naw, I actually wasn’t calling about that at all. I just wanted to apologize for sticking my nose in your business last night. I don’t know why I listened to those rumors about you and Mazie.”

  “I know how it is, though,” I said, as Squatter, curled up beside my foot, gave a muffled bark in his sleep. “In this town, rumors can all but replace reality.”

  “They sure can.”

  “Speaking of things replacing reality,” I said, “I’ve been doing a deep dive on, uh, his social media.” I looked around. There was hardly anyone in the dog park, but I didn’t want to say Jackson’s name out loud. “And I have to say, if social media’s more exciting than reality, then reality is even
more boring than I thought.”

  She laughed. “I can tell you how to search if you want. So you don’t have to scroll through all the memes and whatnot.”

  “Could you? That would be—”

  Another call was coming in. It was Mazie.

  “Hey,” I said. “I got a call I need to take. Hang on one second, if you don’t mind.”

  I switched over. She interrupted my friendly hello with a frantic, “Oh my God, oh my God!”

  “What is it, Mazie?” I said, trying to calm her down, though I had a pretty good idea what was coming next.

  “They found him, Leland! They arrested my boy! They’re charging him with murder!”

  8

  Thursday, June 20, Evening

  I headed for my car. Mazie had said she and Jackson were at the county jail. My phone was buzzing with text alerts. I glanced at it, but the sun was so bright I couldn’t see anything until I shadowed it with my hand. Noah’s name popped up. His message said, Cops dragged him out of some shed in cuffs! Help!

  I wrote back, I’m on it.

  Then one from Terri popped up. I’d completely forgotten we’d been on the phone. She’d heard the news, she said, and would find out what she could.

  I had the feeling I’d forgotten something else. I stopped on the sidewalk, trying to think what it was. Then I realized the dog purse slung over my shoulder, this ridiculous accessory Noah had gotten to keep Squatter from having to walk too much, was empty. I looked back. My poor old dog was still curled up beside the bench.

  I went back and scooped him up. He was full of doggy joy at the sight of me. Unlike Noah, he had no clue I ever neglected him—or if he did, he had total faith I’d rescue him in the end.

  I parked by the jail and headed in with Squatter in his bag. The guard manning the X-ray machine perused my ID and bar card for a good while, like he wished there was some problem with them so he could harass me. When they passed his heightened scrutiny, he zeroed in on the dog purse.