The Last Alibi (3 page)

3.

Shauna

Tuesday, June 4

I slump into my chair and groan as I look over the files in front of me on my desk. My body is rubbery, fatigued. My brain is still fuzzy, buzzing from the comedown, even though I gave myself a long weekend to shake it out.

Last Friday, on the eve of a jury verdict, we settled our personal injury case, my client an industrial painter who got zapped by an electrical wire while working on a hydraulic lift underneath the train tracks. He survived, but suffered severe nerve damage to his right arm and can no longer hold a toothbrush, much less a sandblaster. We went to trial almost three weeks ago. The general contractor and electric utility blamed each other—the GC said the utility knew the work was going to be performed that day and was supposed to kill the power to those lines; the utility said the work went out of order and nobody told them my client, Joe Mariel, would be blasting by those electrical wires at that location on that day.

We gave it to the jury last Thursday morning. On Friday, while the jury was still deliberating, the general contractor and power company collectively coughed up $650,000 to end the suspense. My client Joe dipped me like a ballroom dancer with his good arm and planted a wet kiss on me when I delivered their final offer to him.

So the law firm of Tasker & Kolarich had a big day—over $200,000—and I had my first weekend to myself in a month. No twenty-hour days, no combing over expert reports and witness summaries, no mock direct and cross-examinations, no hair-graying stress wondering if I’d make some crucial mistake that would sink my client’s fortunes.

Now the bad news, which, I guess, is also good news: I have another trial starting in five weeks. What are the odds? Civil litigants don’t go to trial very often. I hadn’t been in front of a jury in almost three years before this PI case. And now two trials within eight weeks? Unheard of. I find myself longing for the old days—before my time, actually—when the caseloads on the judiciary were less oppressive, and judges and lawyers alike tended to schedule everything around their summers. I’m going to lose my June prepping for
Arangold
and my July trying it.

I don’t live for these things. I like practicing law (you didn’t hear me say
love
) because I like helping people. I enjoy strategizing and the challenge of a good legal argument, too, but I don’t relish the fight, the drama, the high-stakes poker.

That’s Jason. That’s
all
he enjoys. Jason would prefer to be on trial constantly, because it’s the only thing that energizes him, the high-wire stuff. The preparation and workup in the time before trial are viewed as merely a necessary evil to him, something he tries to delegate as much as he can.

I need Jason,
I think to myself. I needed him for the personal injury trial, too, but he was still recuperating from the knee surgery. But the Arangolds are expecting Jason to be the lead trial attorney. They swooned when he came in and did his
aw-shucks
routine while we discussed his successful defense of Senator Almundo on federal RICO charges, his role in the downfall of Governor Snow, and the number of cases he’s tried overall, both as a prosecutor and then as a private attorney. I made it clear that Jason would be there when the jury was in the box. I hate to admit it—really hate to—but I don’t think I could have landed this case without Jason.

I hear him now, down the hall, and feel an extra skip to my pulse. I don’t think we’ve been in the office together once in the past month—or if we were, I was too busy huddling with a witness or the client or an expert. He’s my law partner and best friend, and I haven’t laid eyes on him for weeks. The law firm managed okay while he was laid up, but it felt like an effort, like the entire small firm of Tasker and Kolarich was hobbling on a bad knee along with him.

“Hey, trial lawyer,” he says when he pops into my office. He is glowing from the aftermath of an adversarial hearing himself, some rich kid who got caught with crack cocaine and was looking to Jason to use a legal technicality, also known as the Fourth Amendment.

Glowing, but different. Skinnier, longer hair, dark circles under his eyes. The skinnier part reminds me of high school at Bonaventure, the broad-shouldered, tall kid without much definition to him before Coach Fox got hold of him and he became one of the best football players in school history. The longer hair, of when we were roommates at State, after he got kicked off the football team for fighting and was strongly considering dropping out of school altogether. The dark circles, of the stretch of time two years ago after his wife and daughter missed a turn on a rain-slicked county highway.

I get out of my chair as he walks into my office. I take note of the knee, which doesn’t seem to be causing a limp. He wraps one of his bear-arms around my neck and draws me close. He smells like bar soap, exactly as he has ever since Bon-Bon.

“Hey, handsome,” I say, noting that it’s not the kind of thing you say to someone you see every day and know like a brother. It’s something you say to someone you don’t know that well.

“Sorry I missed the celebration,” he says when we pull back. “Great job on
Marion
. Six-fifty?”

Actually,
Mariel
was my client’s last name, but whatever. “Six-fifty.”

“Wow.”

“I’ve missed you.” I put a hand on his cheek. “You look like you could use some sleep.”

“Nah, I’m all good.”

“How’s the knee?”

“All good.”

Jason is one of those guys who think it’s heroic to be stoic. Nothing ever hurts. Nothing’s ever wrong. When Talia and his baby, Emily, died off that county highway, he dropped off the face of the earth for six weeks. He didn’t answer his phone, and when he did, he never once told me he was sad. I never once saw him cry, though he assured me he did. I had to drag him to my law office, put him behind a desk, sit a client in front of him, and say, “Help this person, he needs your help.” That was the only thing that got him back on his feet.

“And how is Richie Rich doing?” I ask. “Will he be standing trial or whistling on his way home?” I can’t tell from his expression whether his hearing went well or not, just that he participated, that post-performance glow.

Jason shrugs. “Who knows?” That’s the funny thing about him. He’s all for the fight but little for the glory. I could hold him down and put a knife to his throat and he wouldn’t say a nice thing about himself.

Our associate, Bradley John, appears in the doorway looking fresh and bright-eyed. He second-chaired the trial with me. It looks like the long weekend helped him more than it did me. “Jumping into
Arangold
,” he says. I’d warned him that Tuesday afternoon we’d be back full-throttle in trial preparation.

Jason takes the cue and makes his exit. I watch him leave. There’s something not quite right, a couple pieces missing or something.

“You sure you’re okay?” I ask.

But I know the answer. “All good,” we say together.

4.

Jason

Tuesday, June 4

I push away the papers on my desk, transcripts from an ATF overhear on a weapons case the feds brought against my client. It can be painful reading, all the starts and stops, the
umm
s and
ahhh
s, one talker interrupting the other, and sorting through the nicknames—Combo and Greasy and No-Dope. And best of all, the code words for the product being sold, the automatic weapons. Nobody ever says
gun
or
rifle
or
ammo
over the phone. They think if they code up the whole thing, the ATF agents—and a federal jury—will believe that these gangsters were really talking on their cell phones about the number of tickets they were planning to purchase for the movies that night.

I light the match and hold it upright, the dancing flames inching down the stem to the point where they meet my thumb and ring finger. The fire reaches my fingertips before I can finish the words:

I’ve got tar on my feet and I can’t see.

All the birds look down and laugh at me.

I blow out the flame and toss it into a Styrofoam cup of water, whispers of fleeting smoke curling upward. The flame singed the skin on the tip of my ring finger and turned the corner of the nail black. It hurts more, for some reason, when your eyes are open, when you’re watching it happen.

My intercom buzzes. Marie’s voice comes over the speaker when I tap it.

“Your three o’clock,”
she says.

I didn’t know I had an appointment at three o’clock. I didn’t know it was three o’clock, either. It’s three o’clock?

“I reminded you this morning?”
she says in a hushed voice.

Whatever. She probably did. “Okay.”

I fish through my e-mails and find the calendar reminder for today at three
P.M.
James Drinker is his name. Okay. Hooray for James Drinker.

He comes in and reaches to shake my hand. I stand cautiously and reach over the desk. The nausea asserts itself, sending a warning message up my throat to the back of my mouth, but it’s always a false alarm. Sometimes retching, but never vomiting. It doesn’t attack me so much as it stalks me, letting me know it’s lurking out there, but never moving in for the kill.

It’s not the big pains,
my mother said to me about a week before she died.
They’ve got the medicine for that. It’s the knowing, boy. Knowing that it’s coming and you can’t stop it.

James Drinker is one of the oddest-looking people I’ve ever seen, a walking contradiction: big but awkward, a kid’s head on a grown-up’s developed body. His hair hangs around the sides of his face in tangles, a reddish mop that looks like it doesn’t belong, with matching bushy red eyebrows; he is otherwise clean-cut and has a quizzical expression on his face. He wears thick black eyeglasses. His shoulders, chest, and arms suggest he’s a workout fiend, but a rounded midsection says he favors Big Macs and chili fries.

The eyes are usually the tell, but they’re hard for me to inspect through the thick spectacles. If I were still a prosecutor and he were a suspect in an interview room, I’d make him take them off. My best guess: James Drinker has done some bad things.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” says he.

My mistake. That’s a first for me, a client denying his guilt. A first this afternoon, I mean.

“But I’m afraid I’m going to be accused of doing something wrong,” he says.

“What are you going to be accused of doing wrong?”

He pauses. “This is all confidential, right?”

“Anything you tell me about what happened in the past is confidential,” I say. “The only thing I can’t keep confidential is if you tell me you’re going to commit a crime in the future.”

“I’m not going to commit a crime in the future,” he says.

That’s always nice to hear. I wave a hand.

“Okay. So James, what crime do you expect to be accused of committing?”

“Murder,” he says, without hesitation.

I sit higher in my chair. Homicides don’t walk through the door every day. And here I thought this meeting was going to be boring.

“Two women were killed,” he says. “I didn’t kill them.” Drinker crosses a leg. His sport coat opens as he leans back. Quite the fleshy midsection, this one. Pumps iron and then hits Taco Bell. I raise a fist to my mouth and fight another wave of nausea.

He takes a deep breath. “I knew each of them,” he says. “One was a friend of mine. The other one I dated. Two women I knew, two women murdered.”

He’s right to be worried. That isn’t what the police would call a fanciful coincidence.

“Do the murders appear to be related?” I ask.

He nods, but doesn’t answer at first. His eyes are combing my walls, not that there’s much to see—some diplomas and certificates, a couple of photographs. It’s part of his overall appraisal, checking the schools I attended, equating my stature with the quality of my office.

I pick up a nearby Bic pen, the cap chewed mercilessly, and chew it some more. I hate these cheap pens. I have a fancy Visconti fountain pen my brother, Pete, gave me last Christmas, but it uses replaceable ink cartridges, and I don’t want to waste good ink on this guy. The cheap Bic it is.

“Both women were followed home from where they work,” he says. “And they were both stabbed multiple times.”

The cool deliberation with which he describes the murders sends an icy wave across my back. You can defend all sorts of criminals, but some things you hear, you never get used to. On the bright side, I’m waking up.

“Alicia Corey and Lauren Gibbs,” says Drinker. “Alicia, I dated a couple of times. Nothing serious. Just a couple of dinners.”

I write down those names with my shitty pen. I hate this pen. I should light the
pen
on fire.

“Is there proof of these dinners?” I ask.

“I . . . I paid for the dinners in cash,” he says.

Interesting. Unusual. Doesn’t make him a killer, but most people pay with credit these days. I draw a couple of dollar signs on the pad. Then a smiley face. Then a knife. My mother always said,
You have a flair for art, boy,
but she was talking to my brother, Pete.

“I have a lot of cash,” Drinker explains. “I’m a mechanic at Higgins Auto Body—over on Delaney?—and sometimes our boss pays us overtime off the books—y’know, in cash.”

Fair enough. A decent explanation to a jury, but not one his employer would want made public—in fact, one he’d probably deny if he thought Uncle Sam might get wind.

“The dinners were on May twelfth and May nineteenth,” he goes on. “She was murdered the following week. May twenty-second, I think. A Wednesday.”

“You said she was leaving work?”

“She was an exotic dancer,” he says. “A stripper. Place called Knockers?”

This guy was dating a stripper? There’s no accounting for taste, and this guy seems pretty well built, but the goofy red hair down near his shoulders? The fast-food gut? The face made for radio?

“You’re surprised,” he says. “You don’t think a stripper would date me.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Tell you what, James.” I lean forward. Again, the vertigo, the feeling I’m tipping to one side. “I’ll make you a deal. Don’t tell me what
I
think, and I won’t tell you what
you
think. Deal?”

“Deal.” He nods. “So she left the club at two in the morning and she was murdered at her house when she got home. She was stabbed six or seven times.”

That’s a lot of detail for someone who hasn’t talked to the police,
I think to myself.
And for someone who didn’t kill her.

“Go on,” I say. “Tell me about the second woman.”