She cried all the way back to her car, and then she started shouting in anger.
“Aw, man,” Noah said. I followed his gaze and saw what he was reacting to: Mazie’s car had been booted. She was parked just fine, but I remembered what she’d said about all the unpaid tickets Jackson had stuck her with.
“Dang,” I said. “Listen, Mazie, you want a ride home?”
“I ain’t going home,” she said. “I finally got a new job, and I got to be there in fifteen minutes. Leland, I am never going to get out of this hole!”
“You will. My car’s right here. You just tell me where to drop you.”
She gave me directions to a roadside restaurant where, she said, everyone was passing through. There were no regulars to whisper about her son’s murder charges and stiff her on tips.
As we drove, she said, “Leland, was that normal, how the judge treated him?”
“How do you mean?”
“He never even looked at him. When you said Jackson didn’t do it, it was like he didn’t want to know.”
“Oh, that’s because you don’t enter a plea until the preliminary hearing. We weren’t supposed to talk about that yet. I just wanted to plant a seed of doubt in the judge’s mind, on account of that bit of character assassination we heard from the solicitor.”
From the back seat, Noah said an enthusiastic, “Yeah!”
Mazie said, sniffling, “It’s like he’s not a person no more. When I call the jail, they ask for his inmate number, not his name. It’s like nobody cares if his life gets wrecked.”
“Well,” I said, “we care. And the preliminary hearing will be different. The judge will hear us out. It won’t be for a little while—I want to wait until the last day to request it, which would give us nearly three weeks to dig up more info and find the holes in the prosecution’s case.”
She nodded, looking numb. We’d arrived at her highway restaurant. She glanced in the wing mirror, wiped off her smeared mascara, said thanks, and got out.
Noah took her place in the front and said, “I was hoping for lunch, but I guess now I got to get to my PT appointment.”
I turned around and headed north. “I’ll bring you a sandwich when I pick you up. How’s PT going?”
He sighed and looked at his lap. “Well,” he said, “last week the therapist was talking about this case, actually. Everyone’s talking about it. He said trials these days are done before they start. People see your Instagram and it’s like, case closed.”
I thought of Jackson’s podcast and winced. “Most of that stuff doesn’t come in as evidence,” I said. “And we question the jurors to get rid of the, you know, the tainted ones.”
He didn’t seem too convinced. We drove in silence for a bit. Then he said, “Does he have an alibi?”
“You know I can’t discuss the details of a case.”
He exhaled irritably. “Okay. I just meant, has he told you where he was that night?”
Something in his tone made me think he had something in mind and was checking to see if I had it too. When we stopped at a light, I turned to him. He kept looking straight ahead.
“Noah,” I said, “do you know something?”
He didn’t answer.
“Okay,” I said. “But if you do, if you know anything, the best thing you can do is tell me.” The car behind honked at me, and I accelerated a little too fast, throwing both of us back in our seats.
“Smooth move,” he said.
“Well, nobody hired me for my driving,” I said. “I get hired for my legal skills, but I can’t do my best unless I know the truth. If you know anything, you got to tell me. Even if you think it’s bad for Jackson’s case, you telling me means I can be prepared to deal with it, instead of getting ambushed.”
“Look, I’m not your goddamned spy,” he said. “I’m not going to narc on my friends for the rest of my life just because you caught me doing stupid shit in high school.”
He sat with his arms crossed, not talking, until I pulled up in front of the physical therapy place. My alarm bells were ringing. I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. I also knew I couldn’t keep pushing, or he’d leave.
As he got out of the car, I said, “Have a good session. I hope you know I’m just trying to help Jackson.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” He slammed the door, then said through the window, “I thought the prosecution had to prove its case. Why do you want me to tell you all his private business like it’s on us to prove he’s innocent?”
I had no answer. He knew it. He walked away.
11
Friday, July 19, Morning
Sitting in my office at Benton & Hearst, watching the raggedy palm fronds outside my window sway in the breeze, I listened to three or four rings of Aaron Ruiz’s phone. I’d made an appointment to meet him that morning to, as I put it, “see what we can work out here.” Jackson was still dead set against any kind of plea, but Aaron didn’t need to know that.
“Solicitor’s office,” he answered. “Ruiz here.”
“Hey there. I’m about to swing by, if it’s still a good time, and wanted to check if I could bring you a coffee. I always hated the coffee we had at the office back in Charleston.”
He laughed. “Yeah, nobody up here appears to have any idea how to make a good cup, either.”
“We got other priorities, I suppose. What do you want?”
“A latte, I guess, if you don’t mind.”
After we got off the phone, I took another look at the notes I’d made for the meeting. My goal was to find out what I could about the evidence Ruiz had and what he thought about the strength of his case. The probable cause hearing was coming up, so it was a logical time to start feeling each other out for maybe reducing the charges or doing a plea deal. If he offered one, I would tell him I’d run it past my client.
As I was getting up to leave, Roy popped his head in the door. “Morning, Leland. You got a second?”
“Just barely,” I said. “I got an appointment, but a couple minutes won’t kill me.”
He held out a big manila envelope. “I hate to ask,” he said, “but is there any way you could run this up toward Charleston for me today? Not into the city, just one of the gated communities on the islands. I got so much going on, and then I thought, this might be a nice opportunity for you to connect with this client.”
“Who’s the client?” I had no desire to drive anywhere, but apart from meeting with Ruiz, my schedule was clear. Ample free time was a side effect of my lack of business development skills.
“Collin Porter. The major investor in Blue Seas. Henry’s buying two more yachts, and we got some papers for Porter to look over and sign.”
“Okay, will do.” I took the envelope.
“Great. Uh, try and be a little more enthusiastic, maybe?” He was smiling, like he was teasing me, but I could tell he was bothered. “I’m trying to help you build your future here. Mr. Porter’s an important man, and I want him to like you.”
“Oh, thanks much,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m just distracted. Lot going on.”
“That murder case?”
I nodded. I wished I hadn’t opened the door to talking about that.
He sighed like he was about to lecture someone young and foolish. “Leland, I’m sorry to tell you, but that case is a dog. You’ll never hear me say that outside this office, of course. I been telling people you’re trying to make a name for yourself. Take on something big to show you can do a lot more than get somebody out of a DUI.”
“Well, thank you,” I said. “I appreciate that. Uh, who’s been asking?”
“Just about everybody. On top of it being murder, the Wartons are notorious. You know how it is.”
“I do,” I said, in my poker voice. I had my views on what it said about a man’s intelligence to mindlessly go along with small-town prejudice, but he didn’t need to know them.
“Okay then,” he said. “Anyway, I’ll have Laura text you Porter’s address and the times h
e’s available today. Just try not to be too distracted when you’re there.”
Ruiz’s office was on the second floor of the courthouse. He was the same rank I’d been, assistant solicitor, so it was nothing fancy, just the usual hand-me-down cherry-veneer desk and wall of legal books that nobody ever read. He’d tossed his necktie on the windowsill and undone the first button of his shirt. I took that as a good sign. It was the opposite of aggressive.
When we’d got through the niceties and about half of our coffees, I leaned back, crossed my left ankle on my right knee and said, in an apologetic tone, “So, I hope you’ll forgive me on this, but I’m still not getting why the office charged this as murder.” I was careful not to say you charged it. Blame made folks defensive, and I knew it was his boss’s decision anyway. “I mean, we got a teenage boy with no history of anything like this, and no evidence placing him on the boat, so…”
He was shaking his head a little, side to side, like he could see my point but there was more to it. I sensed from his reaction that I was probably right about the boat: they didn’t have any evidence Jackson had been on it that night.
“Well,” he said, “we do have a police detective who placed him at the marina. And said he was carrying something that could be used as a weapon.”
“Oh, I hear you,” I said. “I mean, that ain’t good for a defendant. But can you really look at it in a vacuum? I mean, without considering the defendant’s record or the fact that folks can make an honest mistake about what they’ve seen? Or who?”
“Well, no,” he said. “But when you got someone who had a fight with the victim earlier that evening, and he’s walking down to where the victim is with some kind of blunt-force instrument in his hands, I got no basis to call that manslaughter.”
“Mm-hmm.” I nodded, taking that in. I would’ve seen it the same way if I were sitting on his side of the desk. Going to find somebody at night, for no good reason, with a weapon in your hand, certainly looked like malice aforethought. Unless the coroner’s report clearly pointed one way or the other, it was all going to come down to Detective Blount’s testimony.
“I mean,” he said, “you’ve been in my shoes before. What would you do on these facts?”
“I’d do the same thing you are,” I said. I had a good enough sense of who Ruiz was to know that if I wanted him to believe a word I said, I had to answer that one frankly. “On just those facts, if I was looking at it in a vacuum, I’d do the same thing. And maybe your Mr. Ludlow,” I said, meaning his boss, “is looking at it in a vacuum. But back at the bond hearing, you know, I was speaking the God’s honest truth. We got hospital records. That kid was beaten, had his bones broken, the works. Karl was… I mean, would you want any sister of yours to marry a man like that?”
“Oh, hell no. Look, I prosecuted Karl myself, nine or ten years ago, for breaking and entering and illegal possession of a firearm. That’s public record, and I know a lot more things that aren’t.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said. “That man was a blight on God’s green earth.”
“Sure, but murder charges don’t depend on whether the victim was a good guy.”
“Not whether he was a good guy exactly, no,” I said. “But would I be lying if I said the difference between the thirty-year minimum sentence for murder and the two-year minimum for manslaughter does sometimes come down to whether the sumbitch was asking for it?”
He chuckled despite himself and said, “Nope, you wouldn’t.” Prosecutors tended toward brutal humor. When you spent every working day dealing with atrocities, it was a necessity.
He finished his coffee and asked, “So is that what you’re saying? That what we got here is an abused boy who finally snapped?”
“If he did it at all,” I said, “then yeah, that’s how I see it. And I can tell you we’re looking at a not-guilty plea. I plan to put Jackson on the stand.” He would know that meant Jackson had not confessed murder to me. I wasn’t allowed to put a man on the stand who I knew intended to perjure himself.
He took that in, nodding like he could see a jury buying that story. If we did end up getting offered a plea on manslaughter, Jackson would hate me for it, and his mother might too. But two years was a hell of a lot better than thirty.
“Well,” said Ruiz, “I can’t reduce the charges just on your say-so. We got some steps ahead of us, and we got to go through them, and I got to run it past Ludlow.”
“You getting pressure from above?” It was odd that he hadn’t come into this meeting with permission to at least sketch out some options.
“Oh, you know,” he said. I didn’t know, and he seemed a touch uncomfortable, like he wanted to get off the subject. “But I do hear what you’re saying. And I like the way you work. I had some guy in here last week shouting Bible verses at me. You should tell your friends on the defense bar they’d help their clients a lot more by taking a cue from you.”
“Oh Lord,” I said. “I don’t have friends on the defense bar, and I don’t intend to. Soon as this case is over, I’m going back to trying to launch myself in business law and civil litigation.”
“This isn’t where you want to be?” he asked. “I figured that’s why you took the case. I mean, I know you know the family, but a murder case that’s all anyone’s talking about is a quick way to make a name for yourself.”
“Aw, hell no,” I said. “If I’m going to be in criminal law at all, I want to be putting bad guys away.”
“Yep, yep, yep,” he said, nodding. “I hear you on that.” Ruiz was a straight arrow. Even back in high school, I remembered, he kept his hair cut like a forty-year-old businessman, and he declined all invitations to get drunk or high. He tossed his coffee cup in the trash and asked, “So why you doing it? Just loyalty?”
“Partly that, yeah,” I said. “And partly, I do not think the kid did it. At all.”
“I mean, the abuse thing, though,” Ruiz said. “There’s motive right there.”
“He had that motive all his life,” I said. “And never did anything.”
“People can snap, though,” he said.
“Lots of people,” I agreed. “Karl was a nasty drunk, and his own brothers don’t care that he’s gone. I’m not saying that to cast aspersions on a dead man. I just mean there’s any number of people who might’ve had a grievance against him.”
“Only one who was seen by a police detective down by the marina, though.”
I nodded. Blount really was the linchpin. If Jackson wanted to be a free man, instead of going down at least a couple years on manslaughter, I was going to have to find some way to make Blount look like a liar.
But I also wanted to figure out why Ludlow was getting in the way of a plea. What did he stand to gain from seeing a teenage boy imprisoned for thirty years?
12
Friday, July 19, Afternoon
Heading up toward the highway to Charleston, I decided to swing past the Broke Spoke. I’d never been inside. When I was young enough to be interested in strip clubs—young enough to overlook how desperate most of the girls looked—the Broke Spoke was still just a twinkle in the eye of Dunk McDonough, one of our sleazier local entrepreneurs. He owned the highway truck stop, and at some point he’d had a storage shed behind it expanded and converted into a strip club. With all the passing truckers, I had to admit it was probably a good business move.
In broad daylight the club was plain ugly: a box with tiny windows and shabby siding the color of pea soup. I figured Dunk must’ve gotten a hell of a deal on that siding. It didn’t take much expertise in erotica to know that pea green was not widely considered a sexy color.
There were only a few cars in the lot—at four p.m., I wasn’t expecting many—but one of them was a red Mustang convertible. It had South Carolina plates. Perhaps Karl’s brothers had accurately intuited that his missing sports car was with his waitress girlfriend.
I didn’t think it’d be a good investigative move to show up at a club I’d never set foot in and ask her que
stions about her dead boyfriend. That kind of thing made witnesses bolt, especially a witness who had inexplicably retained the dead man’s thirty-thousand-dollar car. I scribbled the plate number in my notebook and got back on the road.
Going to Charleston wasn’t easy. They say people who’ve lost a limb can still feel it. They can tell you what position their phantom limb is in, and feel pain in it. My life up there was like that: a phantom family living in the house we’d lost. At this hour on a Friday, phantom Elise was on her way home from work, listening to classical music on WSCI, 89.3 FM.
Thoughts like this were why I didn’t like long drives.
I scrounged for a CD in the console and popped Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ greatest hits into the player. Elise had never shared my enthusiasm for that band, so it worked pretty well to numb the phantom pain.
The address Roy had given me was in one of the gated communities on the islands. Golfer paradise. It was exactly where I’d expect someone to live if the word “investor” was part of their job title. I was glad to get off the highway before I got too close to my old exit.
The road wound through a thick growth of palmettos, oaks, and hickories. At a couple of bends, the dense woods opened onto pools of water dotted with cypress trees draped in Spanish moss. I rounded another bend and saw the gatehouse. It looked like a Swiss chalet and was tastefully accented with summer flowers. When I pulled up at the window, the slow blink of the uniformed man inside reminded me what a piece of crap I was driving. I also got self-conscious about Tom Petty belting out “Refugee.” I turned it down to a more civilized volume.
The guard disappeared with my license for a second. When he came back to return it, he said, “Mr. Porter will see you.” He sounded surprised as he pressed the button to open the gate.
Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1) Page 8