Heat Wave
Authors: Judith Arnold
Tags: #lawyer teacher jukebox oldies southern belle teenage prank viral video smalltown corruption
HEAT WAVE
The Magic
Jukebox
:
BOOK
FOUR
***
Copyright © 2015 by Barbara Keiler
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***
Table of
Contents
Caleb Solomon usually didn’t meet with
clients in bars. But he couldn’t survive another minute in his
office. The central air conditioning had conked out mid-morning on
a June day that was aiming to break a heat record. By two in the
afternoon, he felt as if his bones had melted into molasses. He’d
shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and his shirt hung limp
and damp from his shoulders. His hair weighed heavily on his scalp,
as if a dead squirrel had dropped from the sky and landed on his
skull.
He vowed to send a big donation to some
reputable environmental organization. If this was what global
warming was like, it had to be reversed. Immediately.
He’d badgered Megan about calling the
landlord, but that hadn’t stopped him from marching down the hall
to the reception area in the middle of the afternoon and badgering
her some more. “I’ve phoned twice,” she’d assured him. “I left a
message both times.”
“Call him again,” Caleb had demanded. “Tell
him we’re hiring our own repair service and sending him the bill.
Hell,” he’d added, mopping sweat from the nape of his neck with a
swipe of his hand. “Tell him we’re adding a surcharge to the bill
for our pain and suffering.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Megan had suggested,
as placid as he was stressed. In her sleeveless cotton dress and
strappy sandals, she’d seemed cool and composed, her hair in a
bouncy pony-tail and her face wearing not a single drop of
perspiration. “Heather and Niall found excuses to clear out. You
can, too.”
Heather Chase, one third of Chase, Mullen
and Solomon, Attorneys-at-Law, was in court that day. Niall Mullen,
another third, was down in Boston, taking a deposition. Caleb would
have welcomed any excuse to leave the sauna-like suite of offices
the firm rented a block from the heart of Brogan Point’s
downtown.
He found his own excuse to leave shortly
after his latest bout of complaining to Megan, when Jerry Felton
phoned and asked for a meeting. “Fine,” Caleb said. “I’ll come to
Town Hall. You’ve got functioning AC, don’t you?”
“You can’t come here,” Felton mumbled, his
voice hushed to a near whisper. “I don’t want people to see me
meeting with a hot-shot lawyer.”
Caleb let the adjective pass without
comment. If people considered him a hot-shot, good for business.
Good for his rep. Good for scaring the opposition.
That Brogan Point’s town manager needed to
meet with a hot-shot lawyer without being seen whetted Caleb’s
curiosity. “Well, here’s the situation,” he explained. “Our AC is
dead. In another ten minutes, I’m going to be dead, too. Heat
stroke can be fatal, right? You can’t come here.”
“Meet me at the Faulk Street Tavern,” Felton
suggested. “If anyone sees us, we’re having a friendly drink.”
Two-thirty in the afternoon
was a bit early for a “friendly drink,” although Caleb supposed he
could order an iced tea, or an iced coffee—or an iced
anything
. And to his
great relief, he discovered once he entered the downscale bar near
Brogan’s Point’s waterfront, the vents in the tavern’s ceiling were
blasting deliciously chilled air into the room, cooling him
down.
Felton arrived a few minutes later. He had
no difficulty locating Caleb, seated alone in one of the booths,
since the place was nearly empty. A couple of grizzled retirees sat
at the bar, nursing beers and arguing loudly about the Red Sox’s
pitching roster, and a well-muscled guy worked behind the bar,
rattling bottles and glasses and occasionally adding fuel to the
Red Sox debate by insisting the team hadn’t had a decent pitcher
since Pedro Martinez left. Felton headed straight for Caleb’s booth
and slid onto the seat facing Caleb.
Caleb didn’t know the guy well. But Jerry
Felton had been the town manager since before Caleb had set up his
law practice with Heather and Niall here in Brogan’s Point four
years ago, and you couldn’t live in a town this size and not know
who ran it, at least not if you paid passing attention to the way
things were run. As far as Caleb could tell, Felton managed the
town competently. He was a barrel-chested man, too old to have
political aspirations beyond the corner office in the Town Hall of
this cozy seaside community on Massachusetts’s North Shore. His
thin brown hair was fading to gray and his face was square and
bluff, as if carved out of granite and then layered in putty to
soften the edges.
Caleb pulled his laptop from his briefcase,
and Felton quickly waved his hand, signaling Caleb to put it away.
“We’re having a friendly drink,” he reminded Caleb. “We’re just
talking. Okay?”
“Sure,” Caleb said carefully, sliding the
laptop back into its padded pocket. “What are we talking
about?”
They were talking about nothing until Felton
ordered two iced teas at the bar and carried them to the table.
Then he leaned toward Caleb, as if about to confide some hideous
secret. “I’m going to be indicted,” he whispered.
Caleb’s eyebrows arched, but he said
nothing. Instead, he squeezed the wedge of lemon garnishing his
iced tea, letting its tart juice drip into the glass.
“Word is, a grand jury is handing down an
indictment. When I knew I was under investigation, I conferred with
Joe Tenney—the town’s attorney. Do you know him?”
Caleb nodded. He’d never had dealings with
Tenney, but he knew who the guy was. Caleb had sat in on a couple
of town meetings during which Tenney appeared to be napping. Not
the sort of lawyer the term “hot-shot” would apply to.
“Once it became clear where the grand jury
was headed, Joe said that because he worked for the town, there was
a conflict of interest and he couldn’t represent me. He told me to
hire you.”
Maybe Tenney was sharper
than he appeared, Caleb thought with a private smile. Anyone who
recommended him had to possess at least
some
intelligence. “What’s the
indictment about?”
“Embezzling from the town’s pension fund.
Here’s the thing: a couple of months ago, I became aware that our
town treasurer, Sheila Valenti, was skimming money from the pension
fund. I fired her. I was kind, though. I did it discreetly. I put
out an announcement that she was leaving the job for personal
reasons. I thought we’d worked out an arrangement for her to pay
back the money she’d taken, a little at a time. I wanted to spare
her a scandal. And the town, too.”
Caleb nodded again.
“So, instead, she turns on
me and accuses
me
of embezzling the money. There’s no evidence. No proof. Of
course there isn’t, because I didn’t do it. But now we have a case
of he-said-she-said, and the grand jury decided to believe her. All
because I was kind-hearted and discreet and tried not to trash her
reputation.”
“If she embezzled money from the town,”
Caleb pointed out, “maybe she deserved to have her reputation
trashed.”
“That’s not how I operate,” Felton said.
“I’m not a vengeful person. I was trying to leave her with
something salvageable, so she could get another job and repay the
money she’d stolen.”
“What kind of money are we talking about?”
Caleb asked.
“Eight hundred sixty thousand dollars, give
or take.”
That was a lot of money in a small town’s
budget. “So.” Caleb desperately wished he could pull out his laptop
and start typing notes. Instead, he took a sip of iced tea. “You
haven’t seen the indictment yet?”
“No. I just heard from Joe that it was going
to be handed down soon.”
“Okay. I’ll visit the DA’s office tomorrow
and find out what we’re dealing with.” He hoped the District
Attorney’s office had air conditioning. Even more, he hoped the air
conditioning in his own office would be fixed by then. “In the
meantime, don’t say anything. Don’t talk to the media.”
“The media?”
“You’re the town manager.
The press is going to be all over this story. If anyone calls you—a
reporter, a blogger,
anyone
—tell them to contact me. Don’t
say a word without my permission.”
“Not even the local—?”
“No one,” Caleb emphasized. “We don’t know
what we’re dealing with yet. You’re a politician, you’re used to
schmoozing the press and vice versa, but no. I’ll also need all the
pension fund financials covering the period the embezzlement took
place. I’ll need to view your personal bank records, your tax
returns. The DA has gone through these records with a forensic
accountant. We’re going to do that, too. I’ll get everything he’s
got, we’ll go through it, and we’ll put together a defense.
Okay?”
Felton looked marginally calmer. “Because
I’m innocent,” he swore. “I didn’t take that money.”
“And my job will be to prove
that. Assuming you even get indicted. All we’re operating on right
now is some second-hand information from Joe Tenney.”
Who naps during town meetings,
Caleb almost added.
“So…you’re going to get me off?”
“I’m going to give you the best defense I
can,” Caleb promised. “I’ll call you after I’ve talked to the DA
tomorrow. Okay?”
“Thank you.” Layers of tension melted from
Felton’s face until he was actually smiling. “Joe Tenney says
you’re the best.”
Courtesy compelled Caleb to return Tenney’s
compliment. “The man has good judgment,” was the best he could
muster without lying.
It took a few minutes of idle chatter about
the record-setting June heat to see Caleb and Felton through the
rest of their iced tea. Once Felton’s glass was empty, he stood,
shook Caleb’s hand, and headed for the door. As soon as he was
gone, Caleb pulled out his laptop, turned it on, and opened a new
file. If Annie, the office paralegal, were here, she would have
been taking notes for him. But Caleb was on his own.
Not a problem. He knew how to take notes. If
aspiring novelists could sit in Starbucks, pounding away on their
laptops, he could sit in a neighborhood pub and pound away on
his.
Bar patrons began to
drift into the tavern. He checked his watch: a little after four
o’clock. Folks getting off work early, he guessed. The woman who
owned the place materialized behind the bar, tall and sturdy, her
shoulders nearly as broad as Caleb’s. He wondered if she’d been an
athlete in her youth. Most likely basketball, given her height.
Niall had grown up in Brogan’s Point; he’d probably know her
story.
Caleb did his best to block out the
crescendo of chatter rising around him. A group of young women
gathered in the booth behind him, bitching about their boss. They
sounded indignant, but their words were seasoned with laughter. A
group of fishermen carried the scent of the ocean past Caleb’s
table en route to the bar. A waitress paused at his table and asked
if he wanted a refill of his iced tea. “Thanks,” he said with a
nod.