Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1)

by Peter Kirkland

  As I took a seat down the bar from him, a red-haired waitress came up from behind me and yelled an order back to the kitchen, which was visible through a wall of stainless steel shelves.

  She shouted, “Two wings, extra large, extra hot! And don’t wimp out this time—I mean really fucking hot!”

  As I shook my head, trying to get my hearing back after her drive-by shouting, she gave me a big smile and said, “Hey, babe. I’m Cheryl. Want something to eat?”

  “Thank you kindly,” I said. “You folks have onion rings?”

  “Yeah. They’re real good.”

  “Okay, then—”

  She leaned across the bar and screamed, “Onion rings!”

  Between the stainless shelves, I thought I saw a fry cook flip her the bird.

  She smiled at me again and said, “You want ketchup, honey? Anything you want, you just let me know.”

  “You know what,” I said, raising my voice because the exotic dance music was reaching its crescendo, “I’d actually like to know, by any chance is Kitty Ives working tonight?”

  She pouted like a child, jutting out her lipstick-bright lower lip. “Aw, honey,” she said. “Don’t you like me no more?”

  I laughed. She was fishing hard for tips, and I couldn’t blame her. “Aw, Cheryl,” I said, “course I do! I just wanted to say hi if Kitty was here.”

  “Well, she ain’t. You’ll just have to settle for me.”

  “Now, that ain’t settling,” I said.

  “Aw, thank you.”

  I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Dunk had come down to our end of the bar to hand her the platters of wings the fry cook had just flung onto the shelves. She took them, said, “Back soon, babe,” and winked at me as she left.

  Dunk growled, in a voice several octaves lower than Cheryl’s, “Evening, Leland. Something to drink?”

  “Yeah, thanks, Dunk.” It hadn’t occurred to me that our town’s foremost businessman, or second foremost since Blue Seas Yacht Charter had come in and classed the place up, would know my name. “Wish I could order something good, but I’m driving, so it’s got to be tonic water.”

  Without his blank expression changing one iota, he said, “You want a maraschino cherry in that? Or maybe a little umbrella?”

  I wasn’t sure if he was straight-up insulting my manhood or if I was supposed to be in on the joke. It seemed wise not to take offense at anything said by a man his size, so I laughed and said, “Sure. Make it a pink umbrella and a diet maraschino cherry, if you got some.”

  I heard a faint noise, like a car engine backfiring a couple blocks away, and then realized he was chuckling. “Diet maraschino cherry,” he said, enjoying the line, and then he headed back up the bar to get my tonic water.

  As he was coming back with a bottle of Schweppes and a glass of ice, the fry cook slung my plate of onion rings onto the shelf. Cheryl materialized out of nowhere with a bottle of ketchup, tossed her long hair, and started shaking the bottle up and down in about as transparent an imitation of a hand job as I’d ever seen. “It’s hard to get the ketchup to come out,” she explained, with a suggestive smile. “I just thought I’d help you get it going.”

  I resolved to leave her more of a tip than I could afford, partly out of pity for any woman so desperate for cash, but mainly because she seemed like the talkative type. I had long since realized that waitresses knew everything about their regulars, and for an investigator, a talkative waitress who liked you was pure gold.

  Dunk set my rings and drink down. “Table six,” he told her, pointing off behind me.

  She looked. “Oh, shit,” she said. She set my ketchup on the bar, smiled at me, and said, “Honey, I got some impatient folks over there. But you need anything, you just let me know.”

  To Dunk, I said, “Nice girl. Kitty’s nice too. You hire good waitresses.”

  He shrugged and said, “I got standards. For them and the dancers.”

  “I guess you do.” I took a drink of the Schweppes. “Say, when’s Kitty on shift next? I was hoping to say hi.”

  He was wiping the bar with a rag but looking me straight in the eye. “I guess she didn’t tell you,” he said. “She gave her notice a few weeks back. She done hightailed it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Huh.” I took another drink.

  “For a guy that’s been sniffing around,” he said, passing someone’s meal over the bar to Cheryl, “you don’t know much.”

  “I guess not.” I started in on the onion rings. “Cheryl was right,” I said. “These are damn good.”

  “My grandma’s recipe,” he said. “And I will take it to my grave.”

  I nodded like that was the right thing to do. Then I said, “Karl Warton took a lot to his grave too. Lot of things I wish I knew.”

  “Hell of a thing,” Dunk said, “getting offed by your own kid.”

  I chuckled. “Well, you’re excused from jury duty, I can tell you that right now.”

  “I ain’t never done jury duty.” He sounded proud. He was rubbing the bar down almost gleefully. “Been called a couple times, but I always get out of it.”

  “Well, you got businesses to run. You’re a busy man.”

  He stopped washing the bar and looked at me. I was chewing an onion ring and felt suddenly self-conscious.

  “Munroe,” he said, “I don’t butter up easy.” His voice was cold. “And I don’t trust folks who try. What exactly is it you want from me?”

  I washed the food down with a sip of my Schweppes. If he was suspicious of flattery, a straightforward approach was the only way. I asked, “You know Karl well?”

  “Beers till five, then Jack straight up.”

  “You ever know him to indulge in anything else? Illegal stuff? I’m not talking about here,” I said, waving an onion ring to take in the whole place. “Just anywhere.”

  I did not like the look he was giving me.

  After a second, he said, “What folks do on their own time is not my business.” Then, perhaps thinking a chess move or two ahead, he added, “But no, that’s not something I ever recall seeing Karl do. Why, would that get his kid out of jail?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Sure it is. Life is simple. If there’s smoke, there’s a fire. If it quacks, it’s a duck.” He turned to the array of bottles behind him, poured himself a finger of Johnnie Walker Blue, and turned back to face me. “And if I’m thirsty,” he said, “I drink.” He swallowed half the whisky and sighed with satisfaction. “Life ain’t some TV show with plot twists and all that shit. It is what it is.”

  “That why you think Jackson killed Karl? Because it’s simple?”

  “Sure!” He shrugged and shook his head like asking that question didn’t make sense. “I mean, who the hell else even cared enough about Karl to bother?”

  I wasn’t about to say I agreed with him, but he had a point. I went for the hint of a joke: “Doesn’t seem like he inspired much in the way of passion.”

  He snorted with laughter. “What do you expect? He drank. He fished. He fucked. It ain’t much of an obituary.”

  “No, it ain’t.” I finished my Schweppes. The music got louder; another dancer must have gone on stage. I half yelled, “Speaking of drinking, you ever see him hanging out with a guy named Pete? A trucker?”

  “Hard to say,” he yelled back. He finished his whisky. “We’re right on the highway. No way I can remember everyone who passes through here.”

  He was looking at me like he dared me to prove otherwise. I wondered how much experience he had, if any, on the wrong side of the law. He sure seemed well versed in the fact that if you don’t want to get caught in a lie, saying you couldn’t remember was your best bet.

  “Well,” I said, swirling my last onion ring in the ketchup, “my compliments to your grandma. I ain’t never had better rings.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him jut his chin to signal someone. Seconds later, Cheryl appeared and set the bill down on the bar. It was a ten-dollar tab.
I handed her a five-dollar tip.

  “Oh my goodness,” she gushed. “Honey, thank you! I want to see you back here, okay?”

  Dunk snorted and walked back up the bar, shaking his head.

  Watching him go, she leaned close to my ear to ask, “Darlin’, did you make him mad?”

  “I might have.” I stood up and stuck my wallet back in my pocket. “Didn’t mean to.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “Don’t do that. You just do whatever you got to do to get along with him.”

  “What, he hold grudges?”

  She hesitated. Her eyes flicked to the side, making sure he was far enough away. Then she said, “He does a lot of things.”

  I nodded, thinking on that. “Thank you,” I said. “Now, you take care of yourself, okay?”

  “I will.”

  The parking lot outside was deserted, and it was dark. I got in my beater, slammed the door, and dialed Kitty Ives’s number. Then I thought better of calling her from here, where Dunk might come out the door at any moment. I headed toward Roy’s office for the Blue Seas file he needed me to work on and called Kitty on the way.

  I got an automated message: her number was not in service.

  Dunk wasn’t kidding. She’d really gone to ground.

  20

  Wednesday, August 7, Afternoon

  I took a break from researching maritime law for Blue Seas and drove down to the beach to meet Terri, swinging by my house on the way to get Squatter. For all the digging I’d done on Jackson’s case, my shovel kept coming up empty. He was reasonably safe—when the hospital sent him back to jail, I got him put in solitary instead of in the general population—but my investigation was stalled. I thought if Terri and I sat on a bench eating lunch, watching the dogs play and talking about things, maybe the sun and the sea breeze would clear the fog out of my brain.

  In the parking lot, Terri checked out my new silver Malibu and said, “Nice car. You can tell it’s new by that big old towel on the seat.”

  I laughed. The fear of damaging Roy’s car had made me put a folded-up towel on the passenger seat to prevent Squatter and his dog purse from ever touching the upholstery.

  We got lunch at the hot dog stand, which was about ten yards from the ice cream stand that, I remained convinced, Jackson had set on fire. It was already almost completely repaired. A sign announced a grand reopening next week. I pointed it out as Terri loaded up her first hot dog with onions, relish, banana peppers, and every other topping available.

  “Good for them,” she said. “At least they’ll catch the last part of summer. It’s family-run. They’d probably go under if they missed the whole season.”

  “Seems like you know everything about this town,” I said. “I couldn’t have said who ran that place.”

  “Even though it’s part of your case?”

  “Yeah, I should know.” I shook my head, wondering what else I’d missed.

  Her pup, smelling the food, stood on his hind legs and pawed at her hips. He knocked her off balance; he had to weigh at least forty pounds. “Buster!” she said. “Down!” He sat right back down in the sand, perfectly behaved. I would have too, if she’d aimed that voice at me.

  I was impressed. “You training him yourself?”

  She gave me a look. I laughed. She didn’t need to put words to it, but she did anyway: “No, Leland, I got Buster his own private tutor. And I take him for a hot-stone massage and doggy acupuncture every week. Because that’s just the kind of person I am.”

  I was still laughing as I ordered my food. Pocketing my change, I told her, “I’m working on my obliviousness. But it could take a while.”

  She smiled. “We all got our crosses to bear.” She took her second hot dog, which was topping-free, out of its wrapper and held it down to Buster. “Wait,” she said, and he did. When he’d waited long enough, which was a while, she said, “Okay,” and in a flash of black fur the snack disappeared.

  Squatter’s ears wilted. As he searched the sand for crumbs that might have fallen from Buster’s mouth, I broke off one end of my hot dog and bun for him. The sight of it made his day, if not his week.

  As we headed over to a bench on the side of the beach where dogs could be off leash, I asked, “Any luck tracking down Kitty Ives? Or that trucker she and Karl knew, Pete?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “You’d think a bright red Mustang would be easier to find.”

  “You sure she took it, then?”

  “I think so, since she tried to sell it and couldn’t. I traced it back to where Karl bought it, off a pretty nice used car lot over in Bluffton.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Thought he bought it new.”

  “Just about. It’s a 2019, but somebody else bought it new, then changed his mind and traded it back in. I went and talked to the owner of the lot, and he remembered Karl because he paid in cash. He remembered Kitty too, since she came with him. He told me she swung by ten or twelve days ago driving it, looking real pretty, asking if he could help her and what she might be able to get for it.”

  “Even though it ain’t hers?”

  “That’s what he explained to her. From how he told me, he was real apologetic, and she was practically crying.”

  “The old damsel in distress thing?”

  “Or she really could be scared of something. I mean, she’s lived here going on ten years. It takes a lot to make a settled person skip town.”

  I looked around, making sure the few other beachgoers present on a weekday afternoon were far enough off, before asking, “You think the heroin was her?”

  “It could be. But there’s a lot of people it could be.”

  We sat down and unleashed our pups. As Squatter watched, Buster barreled back and forth between the stretch of sand we were on and some nearby rocks.

  I said, “Maybe I’m out of touch, but heroin just seems weird. I mean, on some middle-aged yahoo’s motorboat? When I think about the opiate crisis here, or anywhere in small-town America, I think OxyContin, fentanyl, that kind of thing.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Not some resin from a flower in Afghanistan.”

  I thought about that a second. “Did Karl know any veterans?”

  “Of Afghanistan, you mean? Hmm. I’ll look into that.”

  “I imagine there’s a few on the police force.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, several I can think of off the bat. Not Blount, but some folks he works with. Or used to, at least.”

  “Or it could just be some junkie friend of Karl’s. He came over, they got high. Maybe Dunk is right, and things are mostly pretty simple.” I’d told her about my encounter with him at the Broke Spoke.

  Squatter curled up against my foot to sleep. He’d used up his daily quota of energy.

  She flicked a chunk of onion off her finger into the sand and said, “I wouldn’t go looking to Dunk McDonough for crime-solving tips. Or life advice, or whatever that was supposed to be.”

  I said, “I don’t love the guy, to say the least. But I am curious what you got against him.”

  She looked out at the breaking waves, thinking. I got the sense she was doing what I sometimes did: parsing through an answer to remove sensitive content before she spoke.

  Finally she said, “Would you agree if I said you get the measure of someone’s character when you see how they treat folks who aren’t any use to them? And how they treat someone that they could get away with hurting?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s a damn good barometer.”

  She nodded. “So, the problem is, Dunk fails on both counts.”

  I could tell from her voice that that was all I was going to get. The details were confidential.

  I said, “You think we should be looking at him? About Karl, I mean?”

  She shrugged. “I think we need to be looking for somebody like that,” she said. “But unfortunately, there’s a lot of people like that around here.”

  “Damn. It must be hard knowing what you know.” With her eight years on the force, plus a
decade as a private eye and however long volunteering in social work, I thought she probably knew the underbelly of this town better than most anybody else.

  “It can be,” she said. “Hard, I mean.”

  I looked out at the water with her. A couple of families with kids were playing in the surf. I figured if they were locals, she could see right through them: she probably knew if the kids were safe and if anybody was a wife beater, a druggie, or a drunk.

  She looked up toward the rocks and said, with a smile in her voice, “That’s why I got myself a big old cheerful puppy.”

  I followed her gaze. Buster was jumping around, trying to grab seagulls out of the air. The effort was futile, but he looked happy as hell.

  I drove back to Roy’s office, trying to figure out where Karl had gotten the money to buy a $30,000 car in cash. The simple answer, the Dunk answer, would probably be that he was dealing drugs—or running them in his boat. But Karl had no history of any type of drug arrest, and in all our digging, nothing had come up about his ever being involved in drugs or having friends who were. The Mustang was his only luxury, the only sign of money. And, given how thoroughly the forensic report had analyzed every last fish scale found on his motorboat, I at least knew the boat couldn’t have been command central for any type of drug operation. That would’ve left far more than one solitary trace amount of heroin.

  After work, I thought, I might swing by the fishing supply store where Karl’s brother Tim worked part-time, to see if he was there. He had his own preoccupations with the Mustang and with money, as I recalled. And he was the kind who seemed to say whatever the heck was on his mind, without thinking first. People like that were like peach trees you could just shake to make fruit fall. Of course, a lot of what fell was pure BS, but if I could get one peach out of the deal, the shower of manure would be worth it.

  The Rusty Hook Bait & Tackle Shop wasn’t far from the causeway. It was an oversize hut with an old, cracked oar hung over the doorway. Inside, antique corks and bobbers hung from blue-painted rafters. Tim was at the register bagging up someone’s purchase, so I went down one of the two aisles, pretending to browse. I knew a lot more about fishing than I did about boats—I had to; as a kid, it kept us fed—but I didn’t want to spend more than necessary to get Tim talking. The extra work Roy had set me up with was a big help, but not that big.