Mr. Kiss and Tell (2 page)

The mid-July heat in Courtroom Three was stifling. Spectators packed into the gallery had removed their jackets and loosened their collars, shirts and blouses sheer with sweat. Makeshift paper fans, folded from crime-prevention handout flyers, fluttered throughout the room. The AC in this wing of the Balboa County Courthouse was out. And because the criminal justice institutions of Neptune, California, thought Eli “Weevil” Navarro’s conviction was a foregone conclusion, they hadn’t seen fit to move the proceedings to a cooler part of the building. It figured to be a quick day’s work proving that an inked-up
ése
with a rap sheet dating back to grade school had returned to his old ways.

Generally a safe call around here,
thought Veronica Mars, sitting near the back of the courtroom next to her father.
Neptune’s finest seldom collar anyone who can afford a long trial. If you’re poor or nonwhite, our wheels of justice run fast, but not necessarily true.

She opened the collar of her shirt and gave it a few quick tugs, trying to accomplish what the dead AC couldn’t.
But say this for us: When we railroad ’em, we do it in classic Hollywood style. Sweltering courtroom…fluttering paper fans…court reporter blotting her cleavage. All we lack are the bailiffs in Colonel Sanders suits and the gallery full of saturnine black folks in overalls.

“In the past week, you’ve heard the evidence against my client fall apart piece by piece.” Cliff McCormack stood in front of the courtroom, his dark hair plastered to his forehead. He was fiftyish, six-three, and angular, dressed in a gray suit and a
Jungle Jewels
green tie that was one part razzle-dazzle and two parts JC Penney clearance rack. His voice was deep and whiskey-dry as he addressed the jury.

“The so-called witness who claimed to have sold the gun to Mr. Navarro rescinded his statement in the weeks after the incident. The recording of the roadside-assistance call Celeste Kane made to the Beacon Corporation just before the incident also contradicts much of her story—including her claim that Mr. Navarro threatened her verbally.”

Is it me or did someone put extra
sambal
in Cliff McCormack’s pad thai? The old warhorse is bringing it hard for Weevil.
Veronica had known the public defender for most of her life; he and her father were old friends. He had a sardonic, often self-deprecating manner—he referred to himself as the Kmart of the legal system—but Veronica knew better. Cliff worked hard to try to get his clients a fair shake. It was quixotic work in a town like Neptune, with justice for sale to the highest bidder, but he was one of the good guys. “The prosecution has gone out of its way to paint a picture of a hardened criminal returning to his old ways. But what are we to make of the
five years
between his last conviction and the events that took place the night of January twenty-fifth? Five years in which Eli Navarro has proven himself a responsible and law-abiding citizen, time and time again. You’ve heard from dozens of character witnesses—friends, coworkers, clergy—who say my client is a hard worker, a loving father and husband—in all respects a model of reform.”

Hmm…laying it on a bit thick there, Cliffy,
Veronica thought
.
Sure, until six, seven months ago, Weevil Navarro
had
seemed like a changed man—a far cry, at least, from the high school crime kingpin Veronica had known a decade earlier. Back then, Weevil was the alpha head cracker of the local bike gang. His photo was a staple in
BUST*ed!
, the local police mug shot tabloid. But when she’d seen him at their high school reunion less than a year earlier, it seemed he’d finally settled down. He was happily married, a doting father, a small business owner.

That had all changed when he’d tried to help Celeste Kane after her car had broken down in one of the more “colorful” parts of town. Weevil had woken up in the hospital with a hole in his shoulder and a stack of criminal charges on his head, including attempted theft, attempted assault, and brandishing a deadly weapon. Celeste claimed he’d threatened her. According to the cops, he’d been clutching a stolen Glock in his hand when they’d arrived on the scene. According to Weevil, he hadn’t touched a gun in years.

Since then, his once-successful auto repair shop had folded. None of Neptune’s wealthy wanted their Bentleys and McLarens being cased by a guy who’d allegedly pulled a gun on one of their own. He’d been putting in a few hours at his uncle’s body shop, but he was barely scraping by. Small wonder, then, that he’d backslid into some of his old habits with his old crew of biker reprobates. Weevil took care not to tell her more than he thought she, a detective and the daughter of a former sheriff, needed to know. But his newfound discretion made it, if anything, even clearer that he was extralegally supplementing his income.

“In the end,” Cliff said, “the prosecution’s case is a house of cards, collapsing from the weight of unanswered questions and flatly bizarre assumptions. Remember, the alleged attack took place just
sixteen minutes
after he’d taken his babysitter home.” He paused to let this fact sink in.

From her seat, all Veronica could see of Weevil was the back of his head. It was close-shaven, shiny with sweat. The fading Gothic letters of a tattoo were just visible, creeping up his neck right above his collar. Behind him, Navarro siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles crowded into the gallery, tense and silent. She recognized Chardo, the cousin who’d once let Weevil take the rap for his own credit card fraud. Apparently that was water under the bridge now.

A few chairs down from Chardo, Weevil’s wife, Jade, sat with her shoulders rigid, her gaze fixed on the jury box. The pretty, doe-eyed woman looked more haggard every time Veronica saw her—dark semicircles under her eyes, collarbone showing through her top with alarming sharpness. Between the garage’s closure, the medical bills, the criminal charges, and Weevil getting back with his boon companions in the PCH gang, Jade was under a lot of falling dominoes. And now the last one was teetering and ready to fall one way or the other.

“According to Ms. Ortiz, Mr. Navarro was sober, lucid, and cheerful when he dropped her off. So are we supposed to believe he spent the evening of his ten-year high school reunion scheming to slip in a quick assault and robbery before picking up diapers and going home to his wife and child? It doesn’t make any sense. Why would a successful small businessman with a family to support risk everything to carjack one of Neptune’s best-known citizens? Why would a man who has worked tirelessly to escape a life of crime and poverty just wake up one day and decide to throw it all away?”

Cliff was, indisputably, killing it. Yet Veronica knew these weren’t the questions he really wanted to ask. While preparing Weevil’s defense he’d had Keith look into the accusations of planted evidence against the Sheriff’s Department that had popped up in the past few years. Keith had found dozens of people who claimed to be victims. They were all predictably easy targets—the poor with priors, most of whom pleaded out in order not to suffer long trials and trumped-up charges. They’d planned to use the claims of falsified evidence to show a pattern of corruption and help clear Weevil’s name, but all that testimony had been thrown out before the trial. Judge Oglesbee had deemed it “irrelevant.”

Veronica had seen Cliff take some hard knocks over the years, but that one was egregiously painful. Cliff paced a few steps away from the jury, then turned again to face them. One of Veronica’s law professors at Columbia used to swear he could call any verdict based solely on the jurors’ expressions during closing arguments. Based on the twelve blank faces she could make out in the jury box, she had to conclude respectfully, Professor, that that was a steaming load.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as you deliberate, we ask you to consider: Has the prosecution answered
any
of these questions? Have they accounted for the holes in the evidence, the flaws in the timeline, the lack of credible motivation? If they haven’t, Eli Navarro should go free. Thank you very much.”

Murmurs rolled through the courtroom. The judge pounded his gavel in two brisk strokes.

“We’ll now adjourn for deliberations. Bailiff, please show the jury to the chamber.”

Veronica and Keith exchanged glances. All around them, chairs scraped the ground, people clambered to their feet.

All they could do now was wait.

“How can you do that right now?”

Two hours and change after the jury withdrew, Keith Mars sat with his daughter in a booth at Miki’s, a surf-themed greasy spoon across the street from the courthouse. Keith had frequented the place since his days as sheriff, and the diner had barely changed since then. Sure, there were a few more duct-taped tears in the vinyl seats, a few new dings in the fiberglass surfboards lining the walls, but the bacon was still crisp and pancakes were available twenty-four hours a day, the way the good Lord intended.

He looked up from the crossword puzzle he was filling in to see Veronica, her French toast untouched in a congealed pool of syrup, her fingertips anxiously tapping her coffee mug.

“I don’t know if you realize this, but your old man is pret-ty sharp.” He held up the newspaper to reveal a smear of blue ink, almost illegible in the puzzle’s neat black grid. “How many people do you know have the
guts
to work in pen?”

“Got it, Steve McQueen; you laugh at danger and break all the rules.”

“Honey, I’m that cold-blooded dude in Tiananmen Square. And this puzzle’s the tank—frantically zigging and zagging to escape humiliation!” Keith smirked, nodded with exaggerated slowness, and filled in another long word.

Veronica rolled her eyes. “Bit more work on that Yeezy chin thrust and you could have a nice gig entertaining his ‘second string bitches.’ ” She sighed, drumming her fingers more urgently against the mug. “How much longer do you think they’ll take?”

She reached for the mug’s handle, but Keith intercepted the saucer, pulling it a few inches away. “Maybe it’s time to lay off the coffee. You’ve had four cups since we got here.”

“Okay, you’re right. Good thing we decided not to wait in the bar. By now I’d be standing on my chair, trying to start a ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ sing-along.” She rested her chin on her hand and sighed. “I just can’t stop obsessing over Cliff’s case. Trying to figure out which way the jury will go so I’ll be braced for it. I mean, his argument was really solid. Discrediting all the evidence, making the prosecution’s story sound ridiculous…”

“Look at you,” he said. “It’s almost like you went to law school.” Veronica had turned down a job at a top law firm in New York to come back to Neptune, a choice Keith was still struggling to get on board with even nine months later. Following in his footsteps as a PI had never been what he wanted for his daughter.

“Would that I really had ‘almost gone.’ ” Veronica rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I feel like it could go either way. If they’d let us use the planted-evidence testimonies…”

“I know, but they didn’t. We can’t keep dwelling on it.” Keith reached across the table and patted her hand. “Look, Cliff was inspired. He did a fantastic job considering what he had to work with. All we can do is wait and hope the jury agrees. We’ve got to accept that some things are just out of our control.”

Veronica paused, weighing her words. “Permission to speak freely?”

“Of course.”

“Dad, what you just said—it’s one of those serenity prayers that old folks share on Facebook, not a Keith Mars response to getting hosed. You did all that legwork on the planted evidence, and now we can’t even use it. Plus, Lamb’s about to get away with it again, even if Weevil gets off.” She gave him a sidelong look. “Not to mention the car crash. You should be way more bitter about this.”

Keith pretended to mull over his crossword puzzle again. Veronica had been fishing for information about the accident for months now and he wasn’t about to rise to her bait this late in the game. He knew she suspected the truth—that he’d been meeting with Deputy Jerry Sacks about the planted evidence. That Sacks had been about to turn whistle-blower on the department when someone in a delivery truck T-boned their car, then circled back and rammed it again. Sacks had died and Keith had come close.

Keith had been investigating the crash for six months with little to show for the effort. The official story was that Sacks had been on the take and his relationship with one of his underworld contacts had gone south. But Keith hadn’t found any evidence that Jerry Sacks was dirty. And while he couldn’t prove that the truck driver had been operating on Sheriff Dan Lamb’s orders, he believed it with bone-deep certainty.

Which was why Veronica wasn’t going to be involved. Lamb and Company had already proved they were willing to kill to keep their secrets. He wasn’t about to put her at risk too—no matter how badly he wanted to expose the department’s corruption.

“Why do I need to be bitter? You’re bitter enough for both of us.” Keith smiled faintly and jotted down “RAMIS” in twelve across:
Bespectacled ghost exterminator
. “At this point I’m just hoping Eli doesn’t get prison time. If we can clear him, I’ll consider that a success.”

Veronica sighed and looked down, but she didn’t argue. She had to know he was right. Neptune had always been dirty, and it would be for a long time to come, with or without Lamb. If Eli went free, they’d have at least prevented him from becoming the town’s latest victim.

But Veronica never had been good at picking her battles, a clearly hereditary trait. After all, Keith had been filling his laptop with information on Lamb for months, interviewing dozens of people who claimed the Sheriff’s Department had planted evidence to gain a conviction, or used excessive force, or taken property under some yanked-from-their-asses interpretation of search and seizure law.

Aside from the victims in the planted-evidence cases, Keith had finally pieced together a clear picture of the corruption within the department. Lamb had a racket functionally identical to that of an organized crime ring. Local businesses that paid up got protection; the ones that didn’t ran the risk of theft, arson, even assault on their premises. The money trails were labyrinthine and nearly impossible to follow. But Keith knew Lamb shouldn’t have been able to afford the beach house he’d just purchased, never mind the annual Tahoe ski trip, the brand-new Escalade, or the floor-side seats he got, five or six times a season, to see the Lakers.

Time was, Veronica would’ve followed all these developments in real time after snooping around his desk and figuring out his safe code. She’d done it before. Maybe Keith should have stopped her, that night eleven years ago when he’d realized that she was looking through the Lilly Kane files. But for some reason he still didn’t fully understand, he couldn’t bring himself to shut her out. She’d gone after Lilly’s murderer with a single-minded fury, and Aaron Echolls had almost killed her—and then Keith—for her trouble. The memory of flames licking at his legs, of knowing that Veronica was trapped behind them, still made him flinch involuntarily.

But that had been a long time ago. They were partners now. She was almost twenty-nine; she had her own caseload, her own life. As far as he knew, she’d respected his decision to keep her at arm’s length on the planted-evidence investigation.

The waitress stopped by their table to freshen their coffee. Veronica tugged her mug back across the table, and started her compulsive drink-doctoring ritual. Keith watched in silent amusement as she shook the sugar packet—four times, as always—ripped off the end, and dumped the contents into her coffee, followed by a generous slosh of cream. She dinged the spoon three times against the mug and placed it on a neatly folded napkin.

“What’ll it mean for Lamb if Weevil gets off?”

The question tumbled out of her abruptly. Keith put the crossword puzzle down next to his empty plate.

“Well, there might be an inquiry into the stolen Glock. Knowing Lamb, he’ll find a way to shake it off. You know, pin it on a couple of low-ranking deputies, fire them, and proclaim the whole department squeaky clean.”

She grimaced. “At least it’ll generate some bad press. That could hurt him in the election.”

“Well, he’s running uncontested, so it’s hard to see Weevil’s case driving the outcome. For that you’d need a scandal outrageous enough to totally invalidate him as a candidate.” Keith gestured to the front page of the paper, which showed a grinning Lamb shaking hands with the mayor at some awards ceremony.

“I’m beginning to view democracy as the Siri of political systems.
So
much better in theory.” Veronica put her elbow on the table and rested her cheek in her hand. “But I keep hoping for Lamb to deliver an eleventh-hour Hail Mary. Public livestock-shagging, instituting Sharia law, Tasering a cappuccino-skinned movie star he didn’t recognize. Something so appalling people just can’t ignore it anymore.”

“There’s my girl, always praying for someone’s downfall!” Keith glanced back at his puzzle. “Now help me out with this. I need a nine-letter word for ‘anatomical name for Achilles.’ Starts with ‘C’—unless ‘CAROL CHANNING’ is wrong for thirteen down, but I don’t think…”

He was interrupted when both their phones chimed at the same time. He glanced down at the screen.

It was from Cliff.

Their eyes met over the table. In spite of all his feigned calm, Keith’s heart gave an uneven lurch in his chest.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m ready.” She grabbed her bag and slid her jacket back on over her shoulders. “By the way, it’s ‘calcaneal.’ You know…the tendon behind your shin. Achilles’ downfall.”

“Okay, smarty.” Keith punched her lightly in the arm. “Let’s go find out if we’ve got anything to celebrate.”