Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1)

by Peter Kirkland

  When the customer left, I got a Super Sally lure and headed up to the register.

  Tim looked up as I approached. I said, “Oh, hey.”

  “Hey there, Mr. Lawyer.”

  “Oh, I’m just Leland when I’m not wearing a tie.”

  “Didn’t know you was a fishing man.”

  “Thought I’d take my son out, see what we can get. I’m hoping for some largemouth bass.” I tossed the lure on the counter.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, ringing it up. “These Super Sallies, them bass just jump right on ’em. But you know,” he said, tapping the blue-and-black skirt of my lure with his fingertip, “I’ve had better luck with the chartreuse than with this color.”

  “That so?”

  “Mm-hmm. Much better. Round here, it’s just what they seem to like.”

  “Well, thank you. I’ll be right back.”

  I took the lure to the shelf where I’d found it and swapped it for a chartreuse one. Handing it to Tim along with a ten-dollar bill, I said, “I could’ve used one of these when I was a kid. We would’ve eaten a damn sight better, I’m sure.”

  He nodded. “We was the same way,” he said. “Three of us used to fish together—me, Pat, and Karl—and when our uncle took us out with the, you know, the original one of these, the smaller one, I swear, we thought it was magic.”

  He sighed at the memory.

  I said, “I sure am sorry about your brother.”

  “Yeah, well.” He shrugged and handed me my change. After a second’s pause, staring at the counter or maybe the floor beyond, he said, “You know, that did make sense, what you said back in court. About Jackson saving his daddy’s life. He could’ve just let him choke.”

  “Yeah, he could’ve.”

  He looked me in the eye and said, “So, I just don’t know.”

  I nodded to say I understood.

  “Thing is, though,” he said, “who else could it be? And why?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  He put my lure in a plastic bag, shaking his head at the puzzle. “It’s just, I ain’t never seen nobody but Jackson get that mad at him. Apart from Mazie, and I mean, she’s so little she couldn’t kill a dang cat, much less Karl.”

  “Yep,” I said. “You know, one thing I’m trying to find out, which might help figure all of this out, is where he came up with the money for that Mustang.”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “Naw, he didn’t need none. He straight-up won that car in a card game.”

  “Did he?” I figured Karl had told his brothers that story so they wouldn’t know about the money he had. “Dang, what kind of high rollers was he playing cards with?”

  “Don’t rightly know,” he said. “I never went myself. He went most every month, up in Charleston, and most always came back flush. He was a hell of a poker player. I don’t think I ever beat him once in my life.”

  “Well, ain’t that interesting. You know, anything else you might happen to remember about those card games, if you could let me know, it’d be much appreciated.”

  “You could ask Pat,” he said. “He went with him at least once that I recall.”

  “Well, thank you much,” I said, picking up the bag with the lure. “I’ll do that.”

  “Go down the Broke Spoke,” he said. “He’s there three, four nights a week, I’d say.”

  21

  Thursday, August 15, Afternoon

  It was yet another glorious, sunny day. I’d driven down to the beach to get a paper cone of fried shrimp for lunch. I wondered sometimes if living in this perfection of ocean breezes, seafood, and endless summer days made people a little crazy. We were living in Eden, but instead of enjoying it, some folks were running around whacking people in the head with crowbars, abusing their own families, and, according to Jackson, trying to frame teenage boys for vicious murders. And on top of that, as I’d learned from the Blue Seas work I was doing for Roy, our eminent councilman Henry Carrell was playing some kind of barely legal shell game with offshore subsidiaries, all in the name of squeezing a few more dollars out of his already-lucrative company. It seemed like most every trouble that existed in the world was right here too, quietly poisoning our idyllic-looking seaside town.

  What I hadn’t learned yet was any more about Karl’s monthly poker games in Charleston. I’d cruised past the Broke Spoke a few times, looking for Pat’s battered pickup in the parking lot, but hadn’t seen it. I could’ve gone back to the trailer park and looked for him there, but I thought I’d get more out of him if I could catch him half drunk at the strip club.

  Here on the beach, the ice cream stand was doing great business. Even though it was a weekday afternoon, the line was almost twenty people long. Once Jackson’s jaw was healed enough for him to talk again, I was going to need to badger him a little more about the arson. If he’d cop to it, I could narrow that night’s timeline and maybe create reasonable doubt about whether he’d even had time to commit the murder.

  My phone beeped with a text: Mazie letting me know she got off at five. I texted back that I’d swing by her house. Before talking to Jackson, I wanted to find out what I could about the white T-shirt he’d been wearing in the photo and see if she had any idea whether the ice cream stand had some sort of meaning for him. I was just trying to understand the kid. If I could do that, maybe I could get around whatever it was that had him too scared to talk to me about the arson. Not to mention too scared to tell me which prisoner or guard had been involved in the so-called fall that broke his jaw.

  I knew Mazie always showered and changed after work—she didn’t want to smell like a greasy spoon all night long—so I didn’t show up at her place until close to six. She hollered to me to let myself in. When I got into the kitchen, she was pulling a cup of coffee out of the microwave. Two plastic-wrapped slices of pie sat on the counter. “The diner was just going to throw them out,” she said, “because they’re from yesterday. You want cherry? Or key lime?”

  “Oh, whichever one you’re not having.”

  We got situated and started eating. I said, “This is good, but I doubt it holds a candle to what you make yourself. Karl’s brothers had high praise for your pie.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, tastes great, and it almost killed Karl. That definitely wasn’t part of the recipe.”

  “Well, there’s things drunk people just shouldn’t do. Wolfing down pecan pie is one of them, I guess.”

  “And going sailing at night,” she said. “Are they really sure he didn’t fall and hit his head?”

  I winced at the memory of the photos in the coroner’s report. “Yeah, they’re sure.”

  She sighed.

  “It’s all down to Blount, then,” she said. “Ain’t it.”

  “As far as evidence against Jackson, yeah. Speaking of which, I know he’s always wearing those death metal T-shirts, but does he have any white ones?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, taking a bite of her key lime pie. “I tried to get him out of all that fireball-and-death stuff. At least for work, because I mean, skulls with worms crawling out of the eyeholes and whatnot, that just ain’t professional. You ain’t going nowhere in life looking like that. So I bought him a pack of plain white shirts, three of them. And he did wear them sometimes.”

  “Any idea where those shirts are now?”

  She screwed her eyebrows up like she’d just remembered something. “Oh,” she said, and looked at me. “He came home in one of those the next morning. Or, you know, right before dawn, right after Karl died. Oh my God. Not one of them black shirts like Blount was talking about.”

  I nodded. “Tell me more.”

  “Well,” she said, “I remember because it was such a mess. I had to put detergent on the stains and soak it a while before I could wash it. And it still didn’t come out right.”

  “What kind of stains?”

  “Just—” She caught herself and stopped. As she took a sip of coffee, she looked at me warily over the rim of the cup.
Then she set it down and said, “I mean, it could’ve been from a campfire.”

  “Mazie—”

  “Look, my son is in enough trouble already. I don’t see how it helps to add arson to the neck-high pile of crap he’s already standing in.”

  “It could change the timeline,” I said. “It could make it less likely that he would’ve had time to kill Karl.”

  She nodded slowly, seeing my point. Then she covered her eyes with one hand and said, “Oh, Lord. Lord, I don’t even hardly dare hope, but thank you for this. Thank you for helping me remember this.”

  When she finished her little prayer and took another sip of coffee, she said, “He was wearing one of them skull T-shirts before, that same night, but it got messed up in the fight with Karl. Blood, dirt, and I think it even got tore up a little bit. That’s why he changed.”

  “Was there anything else on the white T-shirt when he came home? Any blood?”

  “Not one drop. All the stains were black or, like, dark gray.”

  “You still have it? And the one he had on during the fight?”

  “Yeah. I washed them both, but yeah, they’re in his drawer.”

  “Okay, hang on to them.”

  I made a mental note to formally ask Ruiz to hand over any footage from the day of the murder that the prosecution might have. Most of the shops along the beach had security cameras, and the ones trained on the entrances would also pick up people walking past outside. If I could get a glimpse of Jackson wearing a white T-shirt that night, before the murder, then the selfie Noah had shown me from hours later would be even more powerful evidence. Ruiz was legally obligated to turn over any evidence that might exonerate Jackson—I didn’t even have to ask him for that—but I could see why, from his perspective, security-cam footage from hours before the murder wouldn’t seem to be in that category.

  I drained my coffee, set it down, and asked, “About that ice cream stand. It’s been there since I was a kid. Do you remember anything that might have happened to him there? Or anything about the folks who own it? I’m trying to get a sense of why he might’ve targeted it.”

  She sat back and crossed her arms. She was mad. “If we got the T-shirt,” she said, “if Blount was lying about what he was wearing that night, then what do we need the fire for? I didn’t ask you to help put my boy in jail on some other charge.”

  “A first-time arson with no victims—and not even any possible victims, since the place was closed when it burned—is nothing like murder in terms of the sentence he could get. If he pleads to it and keeps up the good behavior, I mean, they probably wouldn’t let him out on time served, but I doubt it’d be that much longer.”

  She looked at the ceiling like the answer to all her troubles just might be there. Then she sighed: it didn’t seem to be. She looked back at me and said, “If he burned that thing down, would that mean for sure they couldn’t get him on the murder?”

  I sighed. “I wish it was that simple. As of now, no, it’s not definitive, because we’re not exactly sure when Karl died. But it’s an important piece of the puzzle, because it makes it a whole lot less likely.”

  “I tell you what,” she said. Her arms were still crossed, and she’d tilted her head, cocking her jaw at me defiantly. “If you find some other piece of your puzzle, so I know this’ll help him instead of hurting him, then you come back and let me know. Then I might just remember something else about that night.”

  I looked her in the eye. I could tell she wasn’t going to say one more word right now.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I’ll keep digging.”

  That evening, when I did my nightly swing past the Broke Spoke, Pat’s beat-up gray pickup was out front. I toured the lot for a minute, trying to find a parking spot that made me feel confident nobody was going to bang into Roy’s Malibu when they came out drunk and yanked open their door. The lot was crowded, and there was no such confidence to be had. I pulled back out and parked on the side street.

  Inside, there had to be twice as many people as the last time I’d been there. A dozen or more guys were crushed up against the stage, stuffing some woman’s thong with bills. It seemed darker, somehow. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I looked around for Pat. I didn’t see him, and the colored lights didn’t help; they were flicking back and forth across the crowd, making the place feel like some shabby little knockoff of a rock concert.

  Dunk wasn’t at the bar, and I didn’t recognize the angry little man who was. He glared at me when I ordered my Schweppes.

  After a minute, my talkative waitress came and found me. Over the music, she yelled, “Hi, honey!”

  “Hey, Cheryl! How you doing?”

  “Better now you’re here!”

  The bartender slammed my tonic water down—just the bottle, no glass—and went away. Cheryl threw her head back and laughed. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “Don’t pay him no mind.”

  I smiled and said, “He don’t seem to like me much.”

  “Oh, he don’t like nobody.”

  I laughed. “Hey,” I said, “tell me—you ain’t seen Pat Warton tonight, have you?”

  “Why you always looking for somebody other than me?”

  “Somebody in addition to you,” I said. “And hell, he ain’t no competition.”

  She laughed and pointed him out at a table by the wall.

  “Thank you.” I pulled out my wallet and handed her a ten-dollar bill. “This here’s all I’m ordering tonight,” I said, holding up the tonic water, “so you just keep the change.”

  “Aw, thank you!”

  I gave her a nod and headed over to Pat.

  “Hey there,” I half yelled. The music was louder here.

  I could tell he didn’t recognize me for a second. When he did, he wasn’t friendly.

  “I was talking to your brother the other day,” I said. “He said I should come over here some night and talk with you.”

  “What about?”

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged. When I set my Schweppes down, he smiled at it like I was an idiot and asked, “What the hell is that?”

  “Got a medical condition,” I said. “It’s a damn shame, but it is what it is.” Lately I’d decided that was going to be my excuse. If I told a man who was drinking that I didn’t want to drink and drive, he might take it as an insult to his own choices. And if I told him I could not bear to drink after what had happened to my wife… well, at that point I might as well go straight to an Al-Anon meeting and give up on any kind of normal conversation.

  He was watching the stage show without much interest. If he was really here that often, maybe it was all too familiar by now but he was still trying to avoid interacting with me.

  “So, your brother told me something interesting,” I said. “About that Mustang Karl had.”

  Without looking away from the stripper, he said, “Why the hell you still so interested in that?”

  “I was just wondering,” I said, “were you at the card game where he won it?”

  He turned his head so fast I thought he might get whiplash. It was too dark to be sure, but I could’ve sworn I saw a flash of fear in his eyes.

  “Okay, I don’t know what you’re up to,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “But I got nothing to say to you.” He peeled off a twenty, slid it under his half-empty beer glass, and stood up.

  I was glad I’d already paid Cheryl. Pat wasn’t three steps away when I stood up myself and followed him.

  Out in the parking lot, the door slammed behind us and he turned on me. He looked around like he was making sure nobody else was in the lot, and then he hissed, “I don’t know what the hell you’re playing at, but I got nothing to say to you. Them card games, that was Karl and Pete’s thing. I never had nothing to do with that.”

  I deployed my poker voice. I didn’t want him sensing that all my attention had zeroed in on that name, the trucker Kitty had mentioned. Terri was still trying to track Pete down.

 
; “Look,” I said, holding my hands palms-out to say I was no threat, “I got nothing against you at all. If I saw you doing lines off a stripper’s ass, I’d look the other way. I do not care. All I’m interested in is how your brother got killed.”

  “He beat his kid, goddammit, and then his kid got big enough to whup him for it.” He looked like he truly believed that: indignant, and frustrated as all hell that I somehow couldn’t see that simple truth.

  “Well, I just don’t think so,” I said. “And I don’t think Karl would want to see his son jailed for life for something he didn’t do. You already lost a brother. You want to lose your nephew too?”

  He shook his head. I could see it kind of tore him up.

  “They told me,” he said, “I mean them detectives, he probably wouldn’t go down for too long. Because it’s probably just manslaughter, right? With all that Karl done to him, that ain’t really murder.”

  “Well, it depends,” I said, deploying the poker voice again. “Was this Detective Blount? He try to get you to testify to something?”

  “Yeah, that crew-cut guy,” he said. “The tall one. The resident asshole. But, I mean, he’s just trying to do his job.”

  It sounded like someone in the strip club was approaching the door, about to join us in the parking lot, so I cut to the chase. “If you’d tell me a little more about that, or about Karl’s friend Pete, it’d be much appreciated.”

  “Look, why you got to root around in all this shit? Best thing for anyone to do is forget it and move on.”

  The door pushed open, pouring electronic music into the parking lot. A few men stumbled out as Pat stalked off to his truck.