37

by David Achord

“Are you going to take his case?” he asked.

  “He can’t afford me,” I said. “I sympathize, but he can’t afford me.”

  Mick was quiet for a solid two minutes, which was highly unusual for him, but then he said something that surprised me.

  “I had a little brother.”

  I glanced over at him. “I didn’t know that. You said had, as in past tense.”

  “Yeah, he died when he was nine. Leukemia.”

  I stopped for a traffic light and stared at my friend, who was now looking out of the window, lost in his thoughts. In all of the time the two of us had been friends, he had never once mentioned his dead brother. It must have been difficult for him to talk about.

  “If you were me, what would you do?” I asked him.

  He did not answer. Instead, he rolled down the window and stared out at the passing scenery until we arrived back at his cigar bar. When we walked in, he went directly to his office. His wife, Kim, looked at me questioningly.

  “He just told me about his brother,” I whispered. I didn’t know if he’d told any of the other patrons and did not want to be the one who blabbed. Kim’s expression darkened.

  “It still bothers him,” she said and gave a worried glance at the closed office door. “He’ll be okay. I’ve learned to just give him some space and he’s back to his normal self in no time. You want a beer?”

  “Certainly. How about a Nashville Lager?” I said and gave a casual glance around the bar. There was the usual afternoon crowd in the place, a mixture of retired men who had nothing else to do and businessmen who wanted to unwind a little before going home to their families. Mick O’Hara was a foul-mouthed curmudgeon, but likeable enough where he had a strong following who regularly patronized his place.

  “Hey, Thomas, come join us,” one of the regulars said.

  “Maybe later,” I replied. “I’m meeting someone.”

  Most of the regulars were likable guys, but they were always getting into silly debates about sports, politics, religion, or some other stupidity. A couple of days ago, a couple of them got into a heated argument over the proper method to peel a banana. When the adult beverages were flowing, silly arguments happened frequently.

  None of that for me today. I decided on a cigar, my second of the day, and sat at a table at the far end of the bar. I pulled my laptop out of my briefcase, plugged in, turned it on, and lit my cigar as I waited for it to boot up.

  “Hey, Thomas, one day you really should think about getting an office,” one of the regulars said.

  “Yeah, one day, Ebbie, one day,” I replied and then promptly ignored him.

  When I first got into PI work, money was tight. I simply could not afford to rent an office space. I soon found I did not actually need one. A computer and a cell phone were sufficient for the work I did. Any time I needed to meet with someone, I could always find a location.

  I sent a text to Hal, informing him I was at Mick’s. He responded he was stuck in traffic and it would be approximately another thirty minutes. So, I filled the time by checking my emails. I scanned for familiar names and opened those first. The only one of note was from Sherman. He’d talked me into going in with him and a couple of others on a real estate investment trust, more commonly known as a REIT. His email informed me there were some issues and had scheduled a meeting. It was two days from now. I checked the calendar and responded I’d try to be there and went on to rest of the emails.

  I was halfway through my cigar before my client drove into the parking lot. Hal Garrison was a criminal defense attorney who had been practicing law for the past thirty-something years. Hal had an easygoing, smart-assed personality outside of the courtroom, but in the courtroom, he was a tiger. He was highly skilled and unrelenting when cross-examining prosecution witnesses, especially cops. We’d had more than one courtroom encounter back in the day. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, we’d become friends. Sort of. He greeted me warmly as he sat down.

  “Whatta ya’ say, asshole.”

  “Not much, dickhead,” I replied.

  Now in his late sixties, Hal had somehow managed to stay slim and trim throughout the years, but, male pattern baldness had attacked at an early age. Since the only hair he had left now was a little peach fuzz on each side, he preferred to completely shave it. It looked better that way, but the first time I saw him with a shaved head I told him he looked like a dick with ears.

  Currently, he had two independent cases involving murder. One was charged with murdering two prostitutes in a massage parlor over twenty years ago. The other was a man charged with murdering his estranged wife. Most attorneys would never have two murder cases going at the same time, but Hal wasn’t like most attorneys.

  “Alright, enough of the idle chitchat. I hope you’re not going to hit me up for more money. I know how you private dicks are,” he said as he clipped and lit a cigar.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” I asked, ignoring the jibe.

  “Surprise me.”

  “Alright, I’ll start with the Jackson case,” I said.

  Last year, Allen Jackson, no relation to the country music superstar, had laid in wait for his estranged wife to come home from a late-night assignation with her lover. He shot her twice as soon as she parked her Jaguar in the garage of their home. As he was leaving the scene, a neighbor happened to be walking his dog and encountered Allen exiting his driveway. Instead of stopping to say hello, or simply waving, Allen sped out in his customized Corvette, leaving a fresh line of tire tracks in his wake. The neighbor, sensing something amiss, went to investigate and found Mrs. Jackson.

  “Unless they’re hiding something from you, it appears they searched and processed the Jackson home without a search warrant and without the consent of your client,” I said. “As you know, even though they were separated, he was still paying the mortgage.”

  Hal grinned. “And if they weren’t going to bother with a search warrant, they needed his consent. Nice catch. Now all of that other shit can be suppressed.”

  The “other shit” he was referring to were numerous pieces of documentary evidence the detectives seized which contained a mélange of incriminating evidence regarding Allen’s ongoing criminal enterprises. The mafia did not have a strong presence in Nashville, but there were organized crime figures here nonetheless. Allen Jackson was one of them.

  “But the murder charge will stick,” I said. “When he was arrested, he was placed in the back of a patrol car, whereupon he asked the officer if he could use his cell phone, to which the officer gladly accommodated him.”

  I watched as Hal started chewing on his cigar in thought for several seconds before he spoke. “What happened?”

  “It’ll come out in discovery, but the patrol officer had his backseat wired. He was able to record a conversation of your client talking about the murder. According to my source, during the conversation he said, and I quote, I killed the bitch.”

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what I was told. If it’s true, it’s admissible, you know that, right?”

  He gave me a look and blew a waft of blue smoke in my direction. “Of course, I know that. I’ve been doing this stuff since you were a kid.”

  I was making a dig at him. In Tennessee, the absence of a reasonable expectation of privacy while in police custody allowed the police to surreptitiously record an arrestee. Any criminal attorney worth their salt knew this. For that matter, any criminal worth their salt knew it as well.

  Hal digested the information with no overt signs of consternation and moved on to the other murder case. “Alright, what about Vancouver?”

  Javonte Vancouver was Hal’s other client. His high school sweetheart was a cute nineteen-year-old who had been seduced by the excitement of parties and drugs. For some reason, she got herself a job at a massage parlor, which was nothing more than a front for prostitution. Vancouver had joined the Marines after high school and found out about her new lifestyle
while he was home on leave.

  The two girls had been stabbed well over a hundred times, a classic indicator of a rage murder. He soon emerged as a possible suspect, but there was not enough to arrest him, as far as the detectives knew. The case languished for years. There were no witnesses, no murder weapon was recovered, and there was no surveillance video.

  Eventually, the cold case detectives took over. One of them reviewed the case and spotted an error; the medical examiner had taken fingernail scrapings from both of the girls, but nobody had ever submitted the scrapings for DNA analysis. This case had already been through the judicial process known as the preliminary hearing, which allowed Hal to file discovery. He promptly hired me and tasked me to analyze the evidence.

  “It’s winnable,” I said reluctantly.

  Hal arched his furry eyebrows. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “How so?” he asked.

  “It’s all in my report,” I replied and tapped the three-ring binder lying on the table.

  “Well give me an overview, asshole. I’ll read your report later.”

  I cleared my throat. “Okay, starting from when the victims were first discovered, the scene was overrun with police personnel. Here, I’ll show you.” I inserted a USB drive into my laptop and opened a file. A friend of mine who worked for one of the local new stations searched the archives and found some video. I played it for Hal.

  “Look at all of those officers and detectives wandering in and out of the business. I know all of them, and only one still works for the department. The rest are either retired or dead. Now, you can review it later, but out of all of those officers, only three of them wrote a supplement report detailing their actions in the scene.”

  I clicked on another file. “Here’s all of the detective’s reports. They did a lot, but there are a lot of things they didn’t do.”

  “Like what, for instance?” Hal asked.

  “I know from personal experience that several of the businesses up and down this street had exterior surveillance cameras, yet nobody had bothered checking them or downloading videos during the time frame of the murder.”

  “No video, got it. What else?”

  I went to another set of reports.

  “When they decided your client was a person of interest, he was back at Parris Island. A couple of detectives went there five days later and interviewed him. It was a superficial interview, recorded on a microcassette tape, which was stupid.”

  “I’ve got one of those, what’s wrong with them?” Hal asked.

  “A microcassette tape is not meant to be played over and over, which is what I believe has been done with this one. The sound quality has deteriorated somewhat. So much so, the stenographer had a hard time transcribing it. There are several indecipherable words. In legal terms, it’s going to be worthless for the prosecution. The only real thing that’s clear is your client denying being involved in the murder.”

  “Okay, good. Anything else?”

  “Yes. At some point, they shifted the focus of the investigation away from Vancouver. They decided the murders were the work of a serial killer that was operating in Nashville at that time and abandoned the investigation on your client.”

  “Who was the serial killer?”

  “A knucklehead by the name of Paul Reid. They expended a lot of man-hours trying to link him to the murders, but never came up with anything. Incidentally, Paul Reid died while on death row and at least one member of the command staff wanted to write up the case with Reid being the suspect and then close it.”

  “Interesting,” Hal said. “Have you spoken with any of those retired cops?”

  “I’ve gotten in touch with most of them. One is living in Belize and he told me to piss off. Six of them are dead. The others claim amnesia, which means they aren’t interested in wasting their time sitting court without being paid. The only detective who was actually on the scene and is still with the department is Paul Parton.”

  “I’ve cross examined him before,” Hal said. “He seems to know his onions.”

  “He’s a sawed-off little runt who’ll lie at the drop of hat,” I replied. “He claims to have a photographic memory.”

  “Hell, everyone lies,” he said with a chuckle. “I take it there’s a history between you two.”

  “Yeah, you might say that.”

  In fact, there were two people still employed with the department who I considered enemies, the kind of enemies that, if I ever bumped into them in a dark alley, I’d give them a beating they’d never forget. Parton was one of them. I didn’t bother telling Hal the story; it was old news.

  “There are other issues with the case which you can use in court. It’s all in my report.”

  “Did he do it?” Hal asked.

  I looked at him with a frown. “Isn’t it one of those unwritten rules a defense attorney never questions the guilt of their client?”

  He made a flippant wave with his cigar. “It’s just you and me talking here. If it was your case, would you have arrested him?”

  I answered without hesitating. “Yes.”

  “Wait, why weren’t you involved in the case?”

  “It happened before I transferred into homicide,” I replied.

  “Oh.” He puffed on his cigar and thought a minute. “Winnable, huh?”

  “The man belongs in prison, but yeah, with your courtroom skills, it’s winnable.”

  “And Jackson?” he asked.

  “If you ask me, file a motion to suppress all of the evidence they recovered from the house and then see what kind of deal they’ll offer. But, you’re already considering that, aren’t you.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, I am. The only problem I’m going to have is with my client. He believes he can skate on this. You didn’t hear it from me, but he’s an arrogant prick of galactic proportions. If the DA offers six to twelve, which would be a damn good offer, I have no doubt he’ll reject it.”

  “I hope you’re getting a good paycheck out of it,” I remarked.

  “You better believe it. I’ve been called a lot of things, Thomas, most of them may be true, but stupid isn’t one of them.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. He grinned in return, took a large swallow of beer, and set the glass down.

  “Alright, I’ve got to go. The wife has some people from church coming over for dinner, I better get home.” He stood. “Always a pleasure. See you later, asshole.”

  “You too, dickhead,” I replied.

  My cellphone buzzed. I glanced down at the screen and saw it was from Anna.

  Where are you?

  I’m at Mick’s.

  Stay there. OMW.

  I ordered another beer and joined the regulars as they watched the evening news. A busty redhead was on the scene where some skeletal remains were found at a construction site in the bottom of a cistern well.

  “What do you think about that, Thomas?” one of them asked.

  I gave a noncommittal shrug. “It’s a true mystery.”

  “They think he was a Civil War soldier,” another one said. “I’ve no doubt I’ll be called in to consult on this.”

  The one who made that somber declaration was Ebbie, and he was once a professor of history at a local university. He, not unlike a couple of other regulars, had an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Businesses that served alcohol often attracted these types.

  I listened as they conversed. A couple of them had opinions on how the person died and ended up in the well, which led to an all-out discussion which soon segued into unsolved murders and the Civil War. I gave a few hmms and yesses at the appropriate times, but mostly stayed out of it. Trying to have an intellectual debate with a bunch of drunks was seldom fun.

  Anna arrived several minutes later in her blue Nissan Cube. She had her stereo turned up so loud I could hear it from inside the bar. She walked in with another woman her age, a petite blonde with ample breasts which were being shown off with a tight-fitting, low-cut top. Anna was w
earing a plain blue T-shirt with some kind of logo on it, and both were wearing what those silly looking skinny jeans.

  “Hey,” I greeted and motioned toward two empty barstools.

  “You girls want something to drink?” Kim asked after they had gotten seated. She’d lived in Tennessee for the last forty years, but she still had a distinct native Korean accent.

  “Yes,” Anna said with a slight amount of eagerness. They ordered two Black Abbeys, I ordered another Nashville Lager.

  “This is Marti,” Anna said. “I don’t know if you remember her.”

  “I believe I do. You two used to be roommates, right?”

  In fact, the two of them were strippers at the Red Lynx together. That was Anna’s place of employment back when I first met her. When it burned down, it was probably one of the better things that happened to Nashville.

  I never thought of Anna as the stripper type, but Marti was a textbook definition of one. She had the body, the big boobs, the tattoos, and that sultry yet trashy look about her. I bet she made a lot of money.

  “Good memory,” Marti said with a smile and stuck out her hand. “My real name is Martina, but everyone calls me Marti.” The handshake lingered a little bit longer than normal, which was discomforting, but I gave a friendly smile.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “What are you girls up to?”

  “Just hanging out. What’ve you been doing?” Anna asked.

  “I played a round of golf with Mick and a couple of others,” I said.

  “And we kicked their ass,” Mick said. He’d walked up with our beers and set them down with a grin. He then gave Anna a sweaty hug, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “So, you won?” she asked him.

  “You bet your ass we did. The Dago here struggled a little bit, but I managed to carry him and pull it out.”

  Obviously, he was back to his normal self. He looked over at Wally, who was sitting at his usual spot at the end of the bar. At the moment, he was unabashedly leering at the girls. Mick noticed and continued.

  “And, the two losers still haven’t paid up,” he said loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear, which elicited a few knowing chuckles from the regulars.