“How d’you mean?”
“Oh, you weren’t even in kindergarten yet, I don’t think, when Henry Carrell came up with the idea. Everyone in town pretty much had their own family shrimp fest for white shrimp season, but he’s the one who got the ear of someone at the county tourism office to get something bigger started. I’m sure he thought it’d be good for his boat business—and he was right. And, to be fair, also good for the local economy.”
“That’s so weird,” he said. “I mean, this is a tradition, you know? It feels like we’ve been coming to this my whole life.”
“Well, you pretty much have.” We walked a few yards in silence before I added, “Even though your mom didn’t like shrimp.”
“What?” He laughed in disbelief. “How is that possible?”
“I know,” I said. “But I married her anyway.”
He laughed. “I guess you got to be open-minded,” he said. “People can have other qualities even if their taste buds just don’t work.”
I chuckled and felt a flash of pride that my kid had a sense of humor.
“If I leave you nothing else,” I said, “as my legacy, at least you love shrimp and you know how to crack a joke.”
“It don’t look like you’re going to leave me much else,” he said. “I mean, judging by that plastic-and-duct-tape window you put on the only car you actually own.”
I laughed so hard I had to stop walking for a second. It wasn’t just because my kid was damn funny. It was because joking around like this made me think that someday, when he was older, when we’d gotten through the fallout of Elise’s death and his injury, we might be able to settle into something like friendship.
At the beach we stood in line, saying hi to familiar faces as they passed, and then walked around a while munching on mixed baskets of shrimp that had been fried in a half dozen different kinds of batter. The nightly breeze had started blowing toward the water, and in its coolness I could feel the first hint of fall. From the side of the beach where fairground rides and booths had been set up, kids screamed happily on a whirling teacup ride, and I saw Detective Blount trying to shoot rubber ducks to win a stuffed animal for his youngest boy.
He failed.
Instead of being a good sport, Blount rammed the butt of the toy rifle into the sand and taught his boy five or six swear words. I remembered what Terri had said about him being an angry person, or having anger problems, or however she’d put it.
I told Noah, “That’s Detective Blount, there. Who we were talking about last week or whenever.”
“Oh, yeah. He’s… yeah, nobody likes him.”
“Well, I share that sentiment. And by the way, anything you find out about him, or anything you remember, might possibly be helpful for Jackson’s case. So let me know.”
“Oh yeah?” It sounded like news to him that I wanted intel on Blount. “I’ll do that,” he said. “I’ll think real hard.”
Our father-son moment ended when he saw a gang of teenage boys standing around like they were too cool to actually enjoy the funnel cakes and fried ice cream that they were eating. He started talking with them, and I got the sense my continued presence would be embarrassing. I vaguely recognized one of the boys, though it took me a minute to realize from where: he was Jackson’s friend who ran the idiotic podcast about the wonders of marijuana.
Not who I wanted hanging around with my son, but I knew saying so would put an end to any chance of a pleasant evening with Noah. And if I insisted on a house rule that he couldn’t have any pot-smoking friends, that would eliminate most of the boys his age in town.
Noah asked for money—I slipped him my last twenty—and promised to keep an eye on his texts so if Roy came through on his suggestion of a yacht ride tonight, he could come with us. Yachts were apparently cooler than other teenagers, and he was looking forward to it.
I texted Roy, hoping to get that part of the evening to kick off ASAP. Then I pocketed my phone and strolled on down the beach. It seemed like half the town was there. It looked exactly like it had every other time I’d been to the shrimp fest, and the whole last decade and a half blurred together in my mind. I could hardly believe that Noah no longer only came up to my waist, or that Elise was gone.
A woman’s voice called out, “Hey, doll!” It took her a couple tries before I saw her in the crowd and realized she was talking to me. Cheryl, my extremely friendly Broke Spoke waitress. She wasn’t alone; apparently Dunk had an entourage, and she was part of it.
I said, “Oh, hey, Cheryl! And Dunk, and all y’all!”
Dunk grunted a grudging hello and said to one of his compadres, “Give him a shirt.” The whole crew, all six or eight of them, were wearing Broke Spoke T-shirts. The compadre balled up a black one and tossed it to me. I opened it up and saw, under the club’s name, a nude female silhouette bending over a motorcycle wheel. My life as I knew it did not contain any type of event at which I would wear such a shirt.
I said, “Thanks much!” When I looked up, I noticed the women’s shirts were a little different: same illustration, but the club’s name was written in sequins.
Cheryl said, with a big smile, “I hope you come on back soon, now!”
Before I could answer, Dunk told her, “You know he don’t drink nothing but water. With maraschino cherries sometimes.”
The men he was with guffawed. One of them looked like a younger, less bulky Dunk. I’d heard he had a son.
Dunk told Cheryl, “Unless you’re getting ten-dollar tips on two-cent cherries, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Her smile faltered. “But it’s a medical condition,” she said, looking to me for confirmation. “Ain’t it? That’s what Pat Warton told me.”
I nodded, wondering how well she and Pat knew each other.
“Medical condition, my ass,” Dunk said. His eyes narrowed.
“It is what it is,” I said, with a shrug.
He looked friendly all of a sudden—not toward me, but toward whoever he’d spotted behind me. I turned and saw Henry Carrell staring clear over my head at him. Henry had a tight smile on his face, the kind of smile I associated with running into someone you owed money to. Or how I’d probably looked, I thought, when I’d run into Tony Rosa and worried he might tell folks I’d left our former workplace under a cloud of disgrace.
“Henry!” Dunk walked past me, holding out his meaty paw, and smacked a handshake on Henry that would’ve knocked some people over.
“Great to see you, Dunk.” Henry’s politician voice had kicked in, and he sounded sincere.
“Henry and I go way the hell back,” Dunk told his entourage. “To when we was this high.” He gestured. “Third grade, wasn’t it?”
“Third grade,” Henry confirmed.
“Nobody thought punk kids like us would be the economic future of this town. Or that you’d get so high and mighty. Look at him, a fisherman’s son, on the beach in a goddamn suit!”
Dunk’s buddies laughed.
Henry tried a little joke: “Well, we only got a week until the election, and I’m fishing for votes.” I gave him a polite chuckle; nobody else did. He added, “Speaking of which, I got to get going—”
I said, “Mind if I come with? You got my vote, and I got no problem telling other folks why.”
“Well, that’s mighty kind of you, Leland.”
Over his shoulder, Dunk said, “Give me extra large. Pink or pastel or some shit.” His compadre tossed him a mint-green shirt, and he put it in Henry’s hands.
Henry unfolded it and looked at the illustration. His eyebrows went up. “Dunk,” he said, trying to hand it back, “you know I support local businesses. But advertising a strip club ain’t going to set right with my wife, or my church.”
Dunk crossed his arms on his chest. “Carrell,” he said, “That is the least of your wife’s worries. And I did not get my ass shot at in Iraq just to come home and get disrespected by some jumped-up fisherman’s kid.”
After a second, Henry said, “Course not.” His arm d
ropped; he’d given up trying to get rid of the shirt. “And as I’ve said before, thank you for your service.”
As we walked up the beach, Henry glad-handing every third or fourth person while I carried both T-shirts, I wondered but didn’t ask why he’d let Dunk give him such a drubbing. I didn’t remember them being friends, enemies, or anything else in high school. I hadn’t realized how far back they went.
As we headed to the parking lot to meet up with Roy, I said, “I owe you for making my son think I might not be completely uncool. He’s looking forward to this yacht trip so much, he’s even willing to hang out with his dad.”
He gave a sympathetic laugh. “How old is he, again?”
“Nineteen.”
“Lord.” He shook his head. “The teenage years are a special kind of hell, aren’t they.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Eighteen next month. And she’s a wonderful girl, doing great in school, but… Lord.”
I laughed. “I hope for your sake she doesn’t listen to Nordic death metal music.”
He didn’t know what that was, so I shared what little I knew.
In disbelief, he said, “Your boy listens to that?”
“Little bit. He picked it up from friends, unfortunately.”
“Leland,” he said, “if your boy comes near my daughter and she starts listening to that, I swear, I will rescind the invitation I was planning to extend for you to come to my Christmas party this year.”
“On the yacht?”
He nodded.
“You have my word,” I said.
Noah met us at the parking lot, and Roy drove us all down to the marina. The Lady Jane was at the dock, looking like a postcard, with graceful palm trees framing it as we approached. It was fifty or sixty feet long, and strips of lit-up windows showed it had two levels below the deck.
“Dang!” said Noah.
Roy pulled into a parking spot and asked, “This your first time?”
“I been on motorboats,” he said. “And a sailboat once, and crawdad fishing. But nothing like this.”
Henry, in the passenger seat, said, “Well, your dad made a strong case I should invite you.”
“Awesome! Thanks, Dad.”
As Noah got out, Henry looked back at me and winked.
We headed down the dock. It was as finely made and tastefully lit as any up in Charleston, with lamps casting golden pools on the wood and small spotlights in the sand illuminating the boat. Henry, or Blue Seas, had spared no expense. Down in the sand I saw a worker, judging by the blue shirt they all wore, talking with a man in a suit that I thought I recognized.
Henry was asking Noah what his college plans were, so I asked Roy, “Isn’t that the investor you sent me to see? Collin Porter?”
Roy paused to peer down at them. “Yeah, that’s him. I guess he’ll be joining us tonight.”
He didn’t, though. Or, at any rate, he never joined us on deck.
26
Saturday, October 5, Afternoon
I’d finished drafting something Roy needed filed on Monday and was tapping a pen on the edge of my desk, thinking about Jackson’s case. I’d left one stone unturned, and it was bothering me. Who was that trucker, Pete, who Karl had hung out with? If he was the same guy Terri had said was trading opiates for sex, was that my angle in, to show that Karl had been dealing and had made himself some enemies in the process?
That night back in August, when Pat Warton was heading to his truck in the parking lot of the Broke Spoke, he’d told me Pete was a poker buddy of Karl’s. He’d also felt the need to add that he himself had “nothing to do with that,” which was a strange thing to say about an innocent poker game. I wondered what all he knew.
The weekend seemed like a good time to find him at home, so I headed over to the trailer park.
When I turned up the dirt road to the Wartons’ trailer, I saw Tim sitting in the mermaid chair with what I assumed was a bottle of malt liquor in hand. The only change since my visit in the summertime was that he had added a Hawaiian shirt to his shorts-and-tank-top ensemble, probably because temperatures had dropped to the low seventies. As I parked and stepped out, he gave a whistle of appreciation and yelled, “Check out the fancy new car, Mr. Lawyer!”
“Yep,” I said. “Moving on up in the world, I guess.” My silver Malibu had not sparked such enthusiasm in anyone else. I wondered if Tim was a little drunk already, even though it was only two in the afternoon.
We got to talking. I asked about the half-carved wooden sculpture behind him, which was nearly as tall as I was and portrayed a fish leaping out of waves. It was a striped bass, he explained, the official state fish of South Carolina, and the base of the sculpture, when he finished carving it, was going to look like our state flag. He had a lot to say about which woodworking tools he’d used and why.
Pat was nowhere to be seen, which I thought might be a blessing, since he had struck me as the more intelligent and paranoid of the two. Those weren’t qualities I wanted to deal with just now. A man who was talkative even when he wasn’t drinking, and who was most of the way through a forty-ounce bottle of what was indeed malt liquor, was much better.
“Hey, Tim,” I said, as if the thought had just occurred to me, “you ever play poker with your brother? Karl, I mean?”
“Not in years,” he said. “He wiped me out every time I ever did.”
“Yeah, I heard he was good. Played with some folks up in Charleston, from what I understand.”
“I guess. Oh, yeah, that’s how he got the Mustang, I remember.” He shook his head, smiling in admiration at Karl’s luck.
“Did he win that off a guy named Pete? Or was it someone else?”
“Don’t rightly know,” he said, taking a swig from his bottle. “Wouldn’t that be on the title? Who owned it before? I’d be interested to know where that car is, and who gets it now.”
“Well, if I worked for the government,” I said, “It’d be easy for me to look at the title. But I don’t. So I just wondered if you’d heard anything about that.”
He thought for a minute, tapping his foot like it might trigger a memory. He was wearing flip-flops, and his feet were spattered with what I figured must be wood stain.
Finally he said, “I don’t think it was Dupree. All I ever heard about him was trucks and garbage. Not cars.”
“Pete Dupree? The trucker?” I kept my voice calm, but my mind was in overdrive. I’d heard that name somewhere before.
“Uh-huh. Well, not a trucker like you’re thinking of. He drove, but mainly he owned a little waste-hauling company, from what I recall. And I don’t remember Karl ever mentioning him when he talked about that car.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I guess we can cross his name off.”
After another ten minutes of chatting about Karl’s poker buddies and how to find the car, I said I’d keep him posted if I found it and took my leave.
On my way out of the trailer park, I gave Terri a call. She wasn’t familiar with the name Dupree but said she’d check with some of the women he’d victimized to see if it rang a bell with them.
If she didn’t know the name, then clearly I hadn’t heard it from her. But I’d heard it, and although I couldn’t recall where, my brain had filed it under “work.” It filed most things under work—one of the arguments Elise and I used to have was whether my being a workaholic was responsible for her drinking problem—but that still seemed like a good clue. I decided to head back to the office.
At my desk, I fired up my computer and then stopped. I leaned back in my chair, staring at the ceiling. If Pete Dupree was mentioned somewhere in Roy’s client files, or if, God forbid, he or his waste-haulage company was a client, the state ethics board might have some thoughts about my actions right now. Those thoughts would not be positive.
Then again, I wouldn’t know if there was a conflict until I figured out who Pete Dupree was. For all I knew, he’d been one of the protesters Roy had mentioned harassing Blue Seas
a while back. That particular scenario seemed unlikely for a waste-haulage guy, but it was entirely possible his name had come up on the opposing side of some problem one of our clients had had. In that case, there wouldn’t be any ethical issue at all.
I ran some searches. It didn’t take long, because Roy, who preferred almost any leisure activity to actually working, had invested in some very solid practice management software. It warned us of all upcoming deadlines, kept everything organized, and applied various other bells and whistles with the end goal of leaving Roy free to golf.
And there, highlighted in blue on my screen, it showed me the name Pete Dupree.
He wasn’t a client, thank God. He worked, or had worked—this file was from two years earlier—in waste haulage for Blue Seas.
I kept searching. A little over a year ago, I learned, Dupree, Karl, and a Blue Seas shipboard worker called Luis Garza had been arrested for trespassing at a salvage yard up in Charleston. Henry Carrell had vouched for them personally, and Roy helped get them off. The arrest report showed a Charleston address for Dupree, in a nicer neighborhood than my old one. I wondered if it was waste-haulage money or drug money that had allowed that.
I picked up the phone to call Terri, then put it back down to think. Blue Seas was Roy’s client, which in terms of ethics rules meant mine too, since I worked for Roy. But employees or contractors of Blue Seas were not our clients. If their interests were in conflict with Blue Seas—and any drug dealing by Dupree would sure as hell fall in that category—then I had zero obligation to protect them.
I called Terri, got voicemail, and left her a message with the information I’d found. Within ten minutes, she texted back that Dupree had sold his Charleston house and moved on to parts unknown.
I sighed and shut my eyes. This case had been an obstacle course from the start, and it seemed like every new lead presented a new problem along with it. My brain just wanted to power down and forget it all. I got up and took a little walk around the office. As I passed Laura’s empty desk, I wished I’d thought to start up the coffee maker when I arrived.
Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1) Page 18