Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1)

by Peter Kirkland

22

  Tuesday, August 27, Afternoon

  After Jackson got the wires removed from his jaw and let me know on the jail phone that he could talk again, I went over to visit. The sun was streaming through the high windows of the visiting room, highlighting how pale he was. The lower half of his face was still a little swollen, but apart from that, he was even skinnier than he’d always been. I realized why when he complained about eating nothing but smoothies and vegetable puree all month. His old bravado was gone; he slumped in his chair, discouraged.

  I knew from all my mistakes with him and with Noah that I was not exactly a master in the art of relating to teenage boys, so I tried to take off both my lawyer hat and my dad hat and just listen. It wasn’t easy. Dispensing advice seemed second only to breathing in terms of things I did automatically. I kept my hands under the table so I could gouge my palm with a fingernail whenever I felt that urge coming on. It didn’t work perfectly, but it helped.

  When he fell into a quiet funk, I told him, “I talked to your uncle Tim at work. He’s having second thoughts. I mean, since testifying at your probable cause hearing.”

  “Huh.” He gave a shrug and said, with maybe one-tenth of his usual feistiness, “Well, that’s big of him.”

  “He’s been thinking about how you saved Karl from choking. And thinking, you know, a killer wouldn’t have done that.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “You know what, though? I shouldn’t have. ’Cause then none of this would’ve happened, and I’d be out living my life.”

  “Yeah. It didn’t turn out right, did it. But it says something about you that you’d save a human life, even if you didn’t like the guy.”

  “Don’t know where I learned that from. Not him, for sure.”

  “Your mom, maybe. Or maybe it just comes natural to you.”

  He looked at me. His hazel eyes were so shiny I thought he might be holding back tears. “How’s my mom? I mean, she comes here, she acts strong, but…”

  “She is strong,” I said. “She loves you more than anything in the world, and she ain’t gonna rest until you’re home.”

  He nodded. He was looking me in the eye, and I had the sense that his fiery defiance was just about extinguished. Then he said, real quiet, “If there was something I could plead to, if they’d give me just a couple of years, maybe I ought to. That way she’ll know I won’t be gone too long, and she can—I don’t know—have some hope.”

  “Well, I can talk to Ruiz,” I said. “That’s always something they could put on the table, and they normally do.” I jammed my fingernail into my palm about a second too late; by the time I felt the pain, I was already saying, “But you don’t have to make that decision now. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “I’m tired of waiting, though,” he said. “I’m tired of not knowing.”

  The look on his face reminded me that for a young man, sometimes “tired of” was code for “scared of.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s hard.”

  He sighed and picked at the hem of his orange prison shirt. Shaking his head, not looking at me, he mumbled, “I looked up the arson stuff. There’s a computer in the little library they got here.”

  I waited. He didn’t say anything.

  Finally I said, as casually as I could, “Oh, yeah?”

  “I mean, you can go away for a long time for that. Like, longer than I’ve been alive.”

  I waited. He looked up at me but didn’t say anything. The look on his face, the how-does-this-law-make-sense expression, made me think that despite being a teenage boy, he actually might want a little advice from a grown man for once.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, for an arson that damages a building but doesn’t cause any injuries, that’s second degree, and it gets between three and twenty-five years in jail.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I saw. I don’t understand that. I mean, if you’re going away for twenty-five years, you might as well be convicted of murder.”

  “Oh, you’re not looking at twenty-five years. If you set fire to, like, a historic mansion or a museum or something, if you caused $10 million in damage, that’s what the high end of that sentencing range is for. But, my God, a little ice cream shack on the beach? A place they built back twice as nice in six weeks? That’s literally what the low end of the range is for.”

  “But three years is still a long time.”

  I nodded. This was one of the situations that came up sometimes and made me question the priorities of the criminal justice system. I’d seen rapists get shorter sentences than that.

  “And what if I got sentenced for both? What if they say, okay, you burned that place down, and then you went over to the marina and fought with your dad and—you know?”

  I nodded. I had to acknowledge that was a risk. The autopsy hadn’t been able to pin down a time of death for Karl, partly because of decomposition and partly because, although he had food in his stomach at a certain stage of digestion, there was no evidence as to when he’d eaten it.

  We sat in silence for a minute, long enough that I could’ve sworn I saw the sunbeam across our table slide over a little bit. Then, just to break the silence, I asked, “Did you know the family that runs that ice cream stand? Or did Karl?”

  A shield went up in his eyes. He said nothing.

  I shrugged and said, “I was just wondering.”

  “They ain’t good people,” he said. “Or the dad ain’t.”

  I waited. After a second, I said, “How so?”

  He winced and looked away.

  “It don’t matter,” he said.

  I left the jail later than I’d meant to, close to dinner time, and had to stop by Roy’s office to get a Blue Seas accordion folder full of old contracts to review that night. When I got home, I saw Terri’s car parked out front and remembered that I’d suggested she stop by for some pizza and a check-in about the case. When I walked in the front door, apologizing, she and Noah were sitting at the coffee table talking up a storm, with half a pizza left in the box between them.

  “Dad,” he said, “she’s like a spy! She literally spies on people!”

  “He was asking me about my job,” she explained.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Noah looking enthused about anything. He said, “It’s like something out of a movie! How cool is that? I mean, if you ask any of my Charleston friends what they do, they’d all be, like, ‘Oh, I’m majoring in business at Clemson’ or something. Like, ‘I’m a frat boy in cargo shorts majoring in business.’ I mean, who cares? But anyone asks you that, you get to say, ‘I’m a freaking private eye—’”

  She laughed. “Yeah, that is the best word for it. It’s more fun than saying detective or investigator.”

  Over his head, I smiled a silent thanks to Terri. For a couple of weeks, Noah had been moping about his old friends in Charleston, how they were about to head back to college for their sophomore year while he was still stuck here doing physical therapy and not much else. Their lives looked amazing on Instagram, and he felt like a loser. It was good to hear him poking fun at them. He’d finally realized they weren’t actually all that cool.

  He looked from Terri to me and sighed. “Well,” he said, “I guess you guys got to talk about stuff I’m not allowed to hear.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said.

  Terri said, “That’s where the ‘private’ in ‘private eye’ comes in.”

  “That’s awesome,” he said. “I’m going to go look some of that stuff up online.” He put two more slices of pizza on his plate, got up, and made his way carefully down the hall to his room. It had been months since the last time he’d fallen, but he was still very careful how he moved.

  I sat down across from Terri and got myself a slice of lukewarm pizza. I flipped the TV on to the news to make it harder to overhear our conversation.

  “Thanks for that,” I told her. “I can’t remember the last time I saw him excited about… well, anything, really.”

  �
��Yeah, he seemed a little down when I got here.” She slurped the last of her soda, looking thoughtful. “I think he must’ve been on social media or something, because he was talking about how all his friends he hadn’t seen in a year were heading back to college again without him. I just said writing term papers wasn’t nearly as interesting as investigating a murder, and it went from there.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “He always did love that Hardy Boys and Scooby Doo stuff when he was little. He used to sit in his window and watch the neighbors with binoculars.”

  She laughed. “So it’s not my fault. If your kid skips college to become a private eye, don’t blame me.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I’ll credit you. Any productive path that gets him out of his funk is fine by me.”

  For a second I felt Elise there, smiling with me. She’d given him the binoculars, for his seventh or eighth birthday as I recalled, and she would listen with exaggerated interest whenever he came to her and reported on what he’d seen the neighbors doing. I’d thought it was a little weird, but she was determined to support him in whoever he was becoming. It had taken me a while to get there, as a parent, but I was learning. It felt like she approved.

  Terri was looking at the TV. She said, “Is that anyone you know?”

  The newscaster was saying something about the Charleston solicitor’s office. It took me half a second to recognize Tony Rosa, maybe because he wasn’t wearing his pink cummerbund. He was standing at a podium, about to give a press conference in pinstripes and a blue tie.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “We weren’t work friends or anything, but I knew him. I actually saw him recently, over at Collin Porter’s place.” She looked at me quizzically, and I realized she didn’t know who that was. “Porter’s some big investor in Blue Seas,” I said. “Rich as all hell. Lives in a mansion in one of them gated communities on the islands.”

  “Huh,” she said. On-screen, Tony announced a major heroin bust outside Charleston. As he spoke, she asked, “That guy’s not, I don’t know, the chief solicitor or anything, is he?”

  “No, he’s junior to me. Or was junior.”

  “His family rich?”

  “I don’t think so. His oldest is a couple years younger than Noah. They were at the same high school.”

  “It just seems weird that he’d be friends with somebody rich enough to back a yacht charter. If he was in private practice, I could see it, but a prosecutor? How’d they even meet?”

  “I don’t know. I wondered the same things myself.”

  Tony congratulated local DEA agents on their successful investigation. It made me wonder what an old friend of mine was up to, a law school buddy who’d become a federal prosecutor specializing in drug crimes. Most of what I knew about the DEA came from him. We’d hung out sometimes in Charleston, and I’d sent him an email with my new address when I moved back to Basking Rock. The thought of what he must know about the local drug scene made me wish I’d kept in touch.

  I asked Terri, “Speaking of investigating, any luck on Kitty Ives?”

  “Not much. I did trace her stuff to a storage unit north of Charleston, not too far from her mom’s house. But no sign of her or the car, and she went dark on social media right around the time she disappeared.”

  I thought about that a second. “You think she’s okay?”

  “You mean alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shrugged and said, “I got no reason to think otherwise. I mean, if she’d disappeared without moving her stuff into storage first, then I’d wonder.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Yeah, and from what I can tell, she was real close to her mom—she posted tons of pictures of them together before she went dark. I think they must still be in touch. Her mom hasn’t filed a missing persons report or even said anything on her own social media about Kitty being gone.”

  “Well, that’s good.” I thought for a second. “I guess us reaching out to her mom would just scare her off more.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Maybe give her time to relax instead. She’ll get less cautious, and I’ll have a better chance of finding her.”

  “I guess that’s the one good thing,” I said, “about the wheels of justice turning slowly. We got a little time.”

  She nodded. “In the meantime, I’d like to track down that trucker,” she said. “Last year I heard from a few different women about a trucker who went by Pete, and a couple of times by other names. I wonder if it’s your guy. He was some sleaze who came through town a few times and traded drugs for sex, mostly with married women. I know of at least two women who switched from oxy to heroin through him. Soccer-mom types who were so ashamed about it all that he must’ve known they wouldn’t report him.”

  I said, “You ever feel like there’s way too many bottom-feeders in this world?”

  “All the time.”

  “I guess that’s why we have jobs.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “Well,” I said, “that particular bottom-feeder may or may not be my guy. Karl’s brother Pat knows him—my guy, I mean—and he drinks, or at least used to drink, at the Broke Spoke when he was in town. So I think the Broke Spoke is where we got to look for him. But I’m wondering if maybe you could step in for me on that. Apart from this one friendly waitress who’s desperate for tips, I get a real strong sense of not being welcome there. They’re getting tired of me. Maybe it’s time to change it up.”

  She gave me a look. I wasn’t sure why.

  I sensed from her voice that I was about to be schooled.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “How often do you think a woman walks into the Broke Spoke by herself to have a drink? And what sort of attention do you suppose she’d get if she did?”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. “Sorry, my brain must have left the room for a moment.”

  “Now, beyond that. Think back on whenever you’ve been there. Okay? You picturing it in your mind?”

  “Yep.”

  “When you were there, did you see one Black face?”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “Not even a dancer, right?”

  “Uh, nope. I don’t think so. Not that I recall.”

  She was nodding. “And just so you know,” she said, “at least one of Dunk’s bartenders is a Proud Boy. Swastika tattoos and everything. The little bald guy.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “They’re bad news. Five or six years ago I prosecuted a couple of them for a hate crime up in Charleston.”

  She gave one last nod. Her case was closed.

  “So,” she said, “there’s things I can do that you can’t. Places I can go, people I can talk to, just because of who I am. Okay? But then there’s also places I can’t go, and people I can’t talk to.”

  “Understood,” I said. “I’m sorry. And look, I appreciate the bluntness. If I do anything like that again—I mean, if I’m asking you to do something that don’t make sense or makes you uncomfortable, please just smack me upside the head.”

  She said, like it was a promise, “Oh, I will.”

  I chuckled. Even back in high school, I’d always liked the sense she gave me that I knew exactly where I stood with her. She had some sort of force field around her that made lies and BS just wither and die.

  Then I sighed and leaned back in my armchair, closing my eyes, resigning myself to my fate. “I guess I got to go see Dunk again,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. I sensed an undercurrent, something serious, in her silence. I looked at her.

  After a second, she said, “Don’t talk to him. I just—to say the least, I don’t think it’d be helpful. I understand you’ve got to find this Pete guy. But stay away from Dunk, if you can.”

  23

  Monday, September 9, Afternoon

  Sitting in my office at Benton & Hearst, I had the window open for a breeze. The sweltering summer’s heat was fading a little; it was only seventy-nine degrees. Roy had returne
d from his vacation a few days earlier, after Labor Day, deeply tanned and so relaxed that for two days in a row he actually came to work without a necktie. He’d gone down the coast on one of Henry Carrell’s yachts, ocean fishing the whole way.

  He was back to ties now, and back from lunch, lounging sociably against the frame of my office door. “You have got to come sailing with us,” he said. “I know you’re not a sailing man, but you will be. Blue Seas will convert you.”

  “That’d be great,” I said. “I got nothing against it, just never got into it.”

  “I’m thinking the shrimp festival,” he said, referring to the town’s annual week-long party in late September and early October. “He’ll have some charters going then. A short pleasure cruise, dinner on the water, that kind of thing. He’s been real happy with your work these past few weeks, and it’s time you got the social end of things going with him too. I mean, it’s way past time, but you got to start somewhere.”

  “I really appreciate that, Roy. I mean, if I’m ever imposing, you let me know, but I really do appreciate all your help.”

  “Hell,” he said, “I’m helping myself, here! I been sitting in this office for twenty-five years. I’d much rather be out sailing and golfing, but somebody’s got to sit here writing and researching while I’m out doing that.”

  I said, “Happy to oblige.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “we got us a win-win. But you got to get out in the community, let people know who you are. How they going to trust you otherwise? And if they don’t trust you, you can sit here all you want with your little computer fired up, but there won’t be any work.”

  “Yup,” I said. “Well, sign me up for the shrimp festival. Whatever Henry’s got going for that, I’m in.”

  After Roy went off to do whatever he did in the office these days, I closed my door to concentrate and got back to work on Jackson’s case. I had six Redweld files of discovery: the autopsy and the forensic report on the boat, a partly redacted but unremarkable personnel file for Detective Blount, arrest reports, piles of paper I’d read many times before. Ruiz had put a few surveillance-camera videos online in Dropbox for me, and I’d watched them a dozen times each, changing the brightness and contrast in case it helped, and concentrating on different parts of the frame. I hadn’t spotted Jackson in any of them. No magic bullet had emerged. The mess remained a mess.