A Killing in the Valley (16 page)

“How are you?”

“Shitty. How else would I be?”

“Are you being treated okay?”

“Nobody’s hassling me, if that’s what you mean. I’m still in isolation.”

“Are you eating okay?”

A half head-shake accompanied a shrug. “I eat enough so I won’t be hungry. The food sucks, it’s all starches. In Mexico at least they let you bring in your own food.”

You don’t want to be in a Mexican jail, Luke thought. You don’t know how good you have it in here. “Hopefully, that will change tomorrow,” he said, trying to sound more positive than he felt.

“You mean when I get bail?”

“Yes, if you get bail,” Luke answered evenly.

Steven picked up on the difference between the certain
when
and the uncertain
if.
“So that’s still a possibility?” he asked, his voice wavering. “Not getting bail?”

“Yes,” Luke answered. “Which I’ve already explained. This is a murder case,” he repeated, yet again. “Bail is often denied in murder cases, especially the first time it’s requested. But if it is denied tomorrow we can take another crack when we can make a credible case for it.”

Steven looked down at the floor. His body sagged. “Is there anything we can do to improve the odds?”

Luke leaned closer to him across the table. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here.” He reached into his briefcase and took out the questionnaire he had given Steven to fill out. “You need to help me here, my friend. Help me help you, you get it?” He placed the document on the table, slid it over to Steven. “You didn’t fill this out the way I asked you to.”

Steven’s expression as he looked at the form was one of incomprehension. “What didn’t I do?”

“You didn’t fill it out in any detail.” Luke leafed through the list. “You were at Butterfly Beach, but where? Next to the Coral Casino, or down by where the road turns up to the Music Academy? What side of Channel Drive did you park your Pathfinder on? Details like that.” He flipped over a page. “You had a couple of beers at Kris & Jerry’s Bar. Describe whoever you saw and whatever you did, in as much detail as you can, down to the brand of beer you drank.” He sat back. “And so forth.”

Steven stared at him. “What’s the point of what kind of beer I drank? I wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you mean. Or where I was at the beach, or any of that? I don’t get it.”

This was a bright kid, supposedly. Honors student, on his way to being a doctor. He wasn’t showing that now. Or maybe he wasn’t connecting the dots because he was psychologically and emotionally in shock. “You were in several public places…so you say.”

Steven nodded. “Yes.”

“But you don’t remember anyone from any of them.”

Steven shook his head. “I was on cruise control, you know what I mean?”

Luke did know. He had done that himself, after the divorce from Polly. Up in Mendocino County, where he had run with his tail tucked between his legs, he would go for days, weeks, in a fog. So he understood Steven’s blank frame of mind on that day. But that didn’t help this situation, it made it worse. They needed to connect some dots.

“Here’s why these things could be important.
You
don’t remember anyone, but someone might remember
you.
The more you can be specific, the more there’s a chance we can find whoever that might be. Because if we can locate someone who clearly remembers you from that afternoon, you have an alibi, and we could all go home happy campers.
Now
do you understand?” he asked again.

Steven nodded slowly. “So you want me to go over this again?” he asked, looking at the form.

“Yes, and fast. I’ll send somebody for it tomorrow morning, first thing. Put in everything you can think of, no matter how irrelevant you might think it is. Don’t filter.” He stood up. They had done enough for one day. “One more thing. Take care of your personal hygiene. If they don’t let you shower every day, give yourself a sponge bath in your sink. Shave. Use deodorant. Brush your teeth.” He grabbed Steven’s forearm in a tight clasp. “This is going to be a long journey, Steven. You have to stay strong.”

Steven looked at him forlornly. “That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Garrison. You’re not the one who’s in here.”

“Bail is denied. The preliminary hearing is scheduled one week from today. At that time you can bring up your request again,” Judge Stanley Allison told Luke.

“Thank you, your honor,” Luke answered dutifully. He looked across the aisle to the prosecution table. Alex Gordon looked back at him for a moment, then turned away. Elise Hobson maintained her rigid composure—she didn’t so much as steal a glance at him. “We will definitely do that,” Luke told the judge, as much to plant a burr under Alex’s hide as for the record.

He sat down next to Steven. He could feel Steven shivering under his jail jumpsuit. “Don’t get too upset about this,” he whispered into Steven’s ear. “I expected it to happen this go-around. We’ll do better next week.”

Steven nodded; then he slumped back in his chair.

“Stay strong,” Luke urged him. “We’ll get you out.” He gave Steven a reassuring squeeze on the forearm. He wished he felt as confident as he said he was.

A courtroom deputy touched Steven on the shoulder. Steven shuffled to his feet. The deputy cuffed Steven and led him out of the courtroom.

Luke stood and walked to the back of the courtroom, where Kate sat with Juanita McCoy. Steven’s parents weren’t present—they had called last night and told Luke they couldn’t handle the tension. They would come for the following session. Luke had been surprised, but not shocked. They were fighting their own emotional battles over this, particularly their guilt about what they might have done to prevent it, like every parent does when their child becomes involved in a tragedy.

He didn’t want to think about the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room—that Steven’s parents might really believe their son murdered Maria Estrada, and were beginning to emotionally distance themselves from him. Luke had seen that in a few other situations similar to this one. It was heartbreaking for everyone.

Given the grim circumstances, Juanita McCoy looked relatively composed. Luke sat down next to her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McCoy,” he said. “It was a gutless call, but we were anticipating it, as I told you. We should have better luck at the next hearing.”

“In a week?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“That poor boy,” she said. “How he must be suffering.” She squeezed Kate’s hand. “Is there anything I can do?”

Luke told her the same thing he’d said to her grandson: “Stay strong.”

Kate swung into Kris & Jerry’s Bar, which was tucked into an alley a block off State Street, the city’s main drag. The bar was frequented more by locals than tourists, which was how the owners wanted it. The decor was a jumbled mixture of Trader Vic-style Tiki bar and Greenwich Village bistro, circa 1968. Kris, one of the owners, was a prominent land-use lawyer who spent most of his vacations in Hawaii, where he consumed copious quantities of mai tais and other tropical drinks; thus the Tiki-bar angle. Everyone in town was his friend, which made for a solid, steady clientele. The other owner, Jerry, a television and commercial director, had been a jazz and folk buff in the Village in the mid-’60s, where he grooved on the sounds of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins; so the faux-homage to the White Horse was his contribution.

Over the decade that the two friends had owned the place the disparate styles had softened and blended into each other, so that now it was a comfortable, laid-back drinking spot for the over-thirty crowd. Most of the regulars were professionals—lawyers, architects, businessmen of both sexes. Layabouts and goofballs were strongly encouraged to skedaddle.

It was early, a few minutes after four. A couple of middle-aged men, who looked like real-estate agents, had established a beachhead in a booth near the back, drinking the first martinis of the afternoon. Other than that, the bar was empty, except for the female bartender and a waitress, both of whom looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties. They were California beach-style attractive, the kind of women men will order the extra drink from and then leave a big tip. They wore identical Tommy Bahama shirts in a tropical pattern, fitted black slacks, and open-toed black slides. They had good pedicures, Kate noticed, which reminded her to get one herself before her daughter ragged on her about that again.

Not the place where you’d think a twenty-one-year-old would choose to knock back a few, Kate thought, as she dropped onto a barstool. There were a slew of college bars on lower State for people his age. And this one, being off the beaten track, wasn’t that easy to find. So if Steven had been in here the chance that someone might remember him was better than zero, which were the results she had gotten at the other places on Steven’s list.

It had been a frustrating beginning. She had talked with employees from the Coral Casino, the private swimming club at the beach where Steven had laid out in the sun and then swam. Nobody had a clue about him, which was what she expected. Ditto the Biltmore, the posh hotel across the street. This was her last stop of the day before she went back to her office and dove into the rest of her work.

“Vodka tonic, double lime,” she told the bartender, as a cocktail napkin was placed in front of her.

“Coming at you.”

She watched the woman make her drink. Crisp, no wasted motion. When the libation was placed in front of her she took a nourishing sip. Perfect. And it was billable.

“Ask you a question?” She reached into her soft attaché case and pulled out the file with Steven’s picture in it. It was a good likeness. He looked like a unique human being, not a generic composite.

The bartender came over. “What’s up?” she asked.

Kate slid the picture across the bar. “Any chance you’ve ever seen him in here?” she asked. “Take your time.”

The bartender looked at the picture for a moment. She nodded. “I remember him. He goes to college.”

If Kate had wings, she would have flown up to the ceiling. “That’s right, he does,” she said. “Do you remember anything else about him?”

The bartender smiled. “He was a cutie. I remember that.”

My God, did we strike gold, Kate thought? She took out a notepad and pen. “What else do you recall?”

“He was casually on the make. Not offensively or anything,” the woman added quickly. “I was throwing off a welcoming vibe, too. I have ten years on him, but if it works for Demi Moore, why not?”

Why hadn’t Steven mentioned this, Kate thought? This was an attractive woman, he had to have remembered flirting with her.

And then it hit her. The woman had been doing the flirting. Steven had been polite, but not in touch. He was in his own space, he wasn’t picking up on the signs. The woman had been reading the tea leaves wrong. How easily single women deceive ourselves. She could relate to that.

“Can we get specific about a few things?” she asked the woman.

“Like what?” Not cagey, exactly, but protective.

“You and he didn’t get together outside of here, did you?”

The bartender shook her head. “No. He claimed he had a prior commitment. I thought he’d be back the next day and we’d pick up where we’d left off, but I never saw him again. Men,” she sighed.

“He had school the next day,” Kate explained. “So—can we lock down when he was in here? Around four or five o’clock, right?”

The bartender frowned. “Four or five? No. It was eleven or twelve.”

Kate almost fell off her barstool. She grabbed the edge to keep her balance. “Twelve at night?” she sputtered.

The bartender nodded. “We aren’t open in the morning. Four at night till one in the morning, those are our middle of the week hours. Two on the weekends. Anyway, what’s this about going back to school? He was on winter break, he wasn’t due back for two weeks.” With some rancor: “So he claimed.”

“So it wasn’t September 14 that you saw him in here?”

“This September? A few weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

The bartender shook her head with certainty. “If he had been in here then, I would have remembered it.”

“He hosed us.”

Kate was thoroughly pissed off. Two days of shit-detail work and it had come to a blatant lie.

“Maybe not. She might not have been on that day. Or she came on after he left. Or maybe he got the bars confused. I’ll ask him about it.”

It was after seven o’clock. They were in Luke’s office, a few blocks from hers. She had walked over after she had finished the pile of work she’d been neglecting.

Kate stood up. “I promised my daughter we’d eat dinner together, unless I had an emergency. Which this is not,” she stated emphatically.

Luke got up, too. “I’ll walk out with you.”

The low sun was casting long shadows across the asphalt as they walked to their cars, which were parked next to each other in his lot. Luke was looking forward to a cold beer, a dip in the pool with his wife and children, steaks on the barbeque. A shot of single-malt scotch to go with the beer.

He thought about the barmaid’s story. Regardless of Steven’s actual innocence or guilt, he would represent him as best he could. But if Steven was deliberately lying to him, that turned the equation upside down. He could live with a client holding back damaging information; they all did that. But to outright lie, that was unacceptable. They would get straight on that issue, first thing in the morning.

Kate’s thoughts, as she opened her car door and tossed her purse onto the passenger seat, weren’t about whether or not Steven McCoy had lied. She was thinking about herself, and her involvement in the case. She had committed to it, and she always honored a commitment. But there were boundaries. She could live with helping to defend a guilty man. The system didn’t work otherwise. But she didn’t want to be part of a grand deception—that they would come to believe that Steven was innocent, or at least that he wasn’t guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, work their tails off to get him acquitted, only to learn, too late, that he was really guilty and that he’d been lying to them all along. Those were the kinds of cases that drove lawyers and investigators to drink, to ulcers, to dropping out.