The Troubled Man: A Q.C. Davis Mystery, page 4
“I know. My sister always accused her of that, but she never, like, kept all the corners square or washed her hands all the time or those things. She just wanted things her way. It drove Amber crazy.” She looked down and cleared her throat. “She and Mom couldn’t stop arguing. About stupid things. Like, Amber would say why not have the forks stems down? That way the little tines don’t get stuck in the holes at the bottom of the silverware holder. And Mom would talk about spots on the silverware and then they’d be all into Amber not liking our house and just everything.”
“How about you? Did you get along with your mom?”
Alexis swallowed hard. “Yeah. I just did things her way. You know, what’s the big deal? I watched Amber, and it never got her anywhere to argue. So I put the forks in tines down or whatever. It’s not the end of the world. And that way Mom wasn’t always checking on me the way she did on Amber. She trusted me. Even though I broke the rules more than Amber.”
“Any particular rules?”
“Oh, do all my homework before playing any online games. Don’t hang out with any friends she hasn’t met. Which was sometimes hard because she didn’t consider it meeting them if it was online. It had to be in person, but she didn’t like to go to school events or anything. And not everyone could come to my house before we could hang out.”
I looked up from my legal pad. “So you ignored that rule sometimes?”
Her forehead creased. “You’re not going to tell my uncle and aunt are you? That I don’t always follow the rules?”
“I don’t think anyone always follows the rules. But no. As your attorney, I can’t tell anyone anything you say to me in confidence.”
Technically with Eric sitting there this wasn’t a confidential conversation. But I had no intention of telling her secrets. Not unless keeping quiet posed a risk to her safety.
I sipped my tea. Despite the sticky August weather, I found its warmth soothing. “Back to your dad. You said they argued a lot recently. Just during the divorce process?”
“A little before that. But they hardly ever argued until I was, like, eleven? Dad doesn’t argue with anyone. He’s like me. You know, he goes along with you. If you want to see a movie, he’ll go to the movies and see what you want to see. He says the point is to be with who you want to be with, not what you’re doing.”
“What did they argue about?”
She shrugged. “Everything kind of.”
Part of me was surprised she didn’t know more. I wondered if I’d been as unaware of my parents’ lives as a teenager. Probably, given how surprised I was by their sudden move “home” to Edwardsville when I was sixteen.
“Did anything else change in your family around that time? Something that might have sparked arguments?”
“Well, Dad started driving locally. So he was around more. Mom was starting the store. So she wasn’t home as much. And my sister went away to school.”
“Did your mom and dad fight about anything in particular around the time of your mom’s death?”
She shook her head. “If they did, I didn’t hear about it.”
“Would you? Did your mom or dad confide in you?”
Almost whenever my mom talked to me as I was growing up, other than when she gave me voice lessons, she spilled out whatever she felt anxious or upset about. She did the same to my sister. My dad sometimes talked to us, too, about what concerned him. He said he didn’t want to talk to my mom and add to her anxiety. It was part of why a tiny part of me – no, a pretty large part of me – felt relieved after they moved away. I didn’t need to be a sounding board anymore.
But from my other friends and therapy, I knew that wasn’t exactly normal behavior for parents. Or at least it wasn’t ideal behavior.
“No, they didn’t talk to us about each other much. They always made everything sound like they decided together,” Alexis said.
“Even after they separated?”
“Yeah, pretty much. We could never, like, play them off one another. I think my mom read some parenting book about how bad that was or something.”
That could show a couple handling their parenting and their divorce in a healthy way. Or it could show one making all the decisions and the other agreeing on a united front. Or probably any of a number of other parenting approaches. But it did suggest they both cared a great deal about their kids.
Which seemed to me not consistent with Santiago killing his wife and leaving his children without a mother.
I flipped down the pages on my legal pad and slid it into my accordion folder. It was after two, and Eric’s mom was picking the two of them up from the skate park at three-thirty. I wanted Alexis to have time for some fun if she could manage it.
“That’s enough to get me started, assuming your sister agrees when we talk to her tonight. Any questions that you have?”
“All I can think about is my dad being locked up, how wrong it is. Not about my mom. Like, at her funeral I cried. But I keep only thinking about my dad. Do you think that makes me a bad person?”
I reached across the table and touched the back of her hand. “People grieve in lots of different ways. When Eric’s dad died, it took me a long time to let myself really feel it. Now sometimes I still cry at odd times, but I didn’t at all at first. However you’re feeling, it’s okay.”
I watched as the two of them walked south on Dearborn Street, hands linked, toting their skateboards. And wished I could do more for her.
7
My friend Lauren and I had been planning to have drinks together that night after she finished an open house at a condo down the street. But Alexis texted that she and her sister could talk with me at eight. I asked Lauren to come over a little later with a bottle of wine, and for dinner I microwaved Stouffer’s lasagna. It’s not nearly as good as my Gram’s, but it reminded me a little of home.
Then I sat at the patio table in the outdoor deck area just off my condo’s back door. It’s shared with only a few other neighbors, so it’s pretty private. Especially tonight, when it was still nearly eighty-five degrees out and humid. Everyone was barricaded inside in the air conditioning. But I felt too restless and cooped up inside.
I poured a tall glass of ice water and put the phone on speaker.
Alexis barely finished introducing me when Amber interrupted. “What’s the point of a lawsuit?”
Her photos on social media showed an older version of Alexis with sleek dark hair, clearer skin, and a tattoo of a flying raven across her bare shoulder. Her voice was pitched much lower than Alexis’, making me imagine she would appear taller and a bit larger if she stood next to Alexis, though pitch doesn’t always correlate to size. In the background I heard voices rising and falling, tinny crowd sounds from what was probably a sports game on TV, and the clink of glasses and dishes.
“It may not become a lawsuit,” I said. “But you and your sister retaining me can give me a reason to ask people questions and for them to want to answer to help you both. And down the road it could help me get documents and information from people who don’t want to share with us.”
“And you really think you can find something that proves my dad didn’t do this?” Her emphasis on “really” suggested she doubted it.
“That’s the goal. I can’t promise I’ll succeed. But I’ll try. If you both want me to.”
Something knocked against Amber’s phone. Amber’s muffled voice told someone to give her a few minutes.
Behind me, my glass door slid open and Lauren stepped out onto my deck. She wore khaki shorts and a black tank top and had pulled her short, shiny blond hair into a ponytail, a nod to the heat. She held a bottle of chilled Riesling, its sides wet with condensation, in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. I had told her to just come in since I’d be on the phone.
The conversation should be confidential, so I clicked off speaker and held the phone to my ear.
“Amber?” I said.
Lauren set everything on the table and disappeared inside again.
“I just don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Amber said. “Maybe we ought to stay out of it.”
“Sure, fine for you,” Alexis said. “So who cares about me?”
More clattering in the background from Amber’s side. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“All you care about is all your friends and parties at school. You’re glad to be away. While I’m squeezed into Aunt Sylvania’s and Uncle Hank’s. I’m the one who helped Dad box up all mom’s stuff. I’m the one who doesn’t get to go back home.”
“I don’t either,” Amber said.
The age difference between Alexis and her sister was similar to mine with my sister Kendra. She was the oldest. Then there was the original Q.C. Davis, who died before I was born, then me. I felt lost and angry when Kendra went away to school. We hadn’t spent that much time together as kids because of the age difference. Still, she had taught me to tie my shoes and to count and to imagine places I wanted to go on vacation when I woke up scared from bad dreams.
I missed her when she left, and maybe she missed me, but she couldn’t wait to go.
“But you live at school,” Alexis said. “That’s home for you.”
Lauren returned with two wine glasses and a corkscrew to open the Riesling. Usually I don’t like white wine. But the dessert wine would be sweet and cool, and I could use that.
“Fine, whatever. But what’s in this for Quille? Why’s she doing this?” Amber said.
“She’s not charging us,” Alexis said.
“Only costs,” I said. “If there’s some recovery. Unless we have to go to trial, and then a ten percent fee, which goes to the personal injury lawyer who’s helping me.”
Trying a case with Mensa Sam didn’t appeal to me, but I needed his expertise. And he had surprised me by not asking for a third of any amount we recovered, which is the typical amount a personal injury lawyer would take.
“Why the charity?” Amber said.
“She’s a really good friend of Eric’s,” Alexis said.
“Oh.” Her voice warmed a bit. “That little boyfriend of yours. The one I met at the wake?”
“Yes.”
I noticed Alexis didn’t deny the term the way Eric had. Which seemed like a good thing for him.
“Well, I guess if you want to donate your time, Quille,” Amber said. “Just don’t make any promises you can’t keep. This is hard enough on Alexis.”
“I’m fine,” Alexis said. “It’s Dad we should worry about.”
“Dad can take care of himself.”
“Yeah, that’s why he’s in jail,” Alexis said.
“Alexis. Amber,” I said. “This is a hard time. A terrible time. For both of you, for your dad, for everyone who cared about your mom. Amber’s right, I can’t promise anything. And it will be hard for both of you. You may need to talk to people to get them to open up to me. I might have questions for you. Lawsuits can put a strain on people emotionally – more than you’re already feeling, which I imagine is hard to believe. But I’ll do my best for you, and Danielle will do her best for your dad. And I hope, with all of that, we can get your dad out of jail.”
A lawsuit makes it harder to let go of pain or anger. It focuses people on their suffering or what they’ve lost as they try to get someone else to pay for it. It might be that the other party bears responsibility for the injury and should pay, but the process makes it hard to let go and move forward. Clients expect it to make them feel better, and mostly it doesn’t. At least not until quite a while after it’s over.
“Okay,” Amber said. “It’s – you’re probably both right. I just don’t want Alexis to be disappointed.”
After answering a few more questions about how the process worked I promised to send a contract to both Alexis and Amber, though only Amber needed to sign.
After I ended the call, I reached for the wine glass Lauren had filled for me. “After all this, I hope I can find answers. Otherwise all I’ll do is create more discord between the sisters on top of everything else they’re going through.”
8
“I guarantee that discord was already there,” Lauren said after I told her about the parts of the call that weren’t confidential.
She spoke with certainty despite being an only child. Lauren usually had a pretty good read on people, though. And I valued her insights partly because her childhood, and her whole life, had been so different from mine. She saw things I didn’t, and vice versa.
The wine tasted sweet with a faint hint of apple. I studied the sun dropping behind the buildings to the west. “Probably. But I still don’t want to make it worse.“
“You’re sure you’re okay with doing this? It’s got to hit close to home.”
“You sound like Ty. It’s nothing like my family.”
Lauren pulled apart the bag of chips with a pop. “Seriously? Controlling mom? Tragic death? Try-to-get-along-with-everyone dad? And big sis is off at college, happily away from it all.”
“My mom’s too depressed and anxious to be controlling.”
“Quille, that’s exactly how she is controlling. Everything revolves around her. Maybe she’s not doing it on purpose, and Ivy it sounds like was, but the result’s the same. Kudos to you and Kendra for breaking away.”
“No, we –” I stopped, drank a little more wine, and reached for a handful of chips. Sour cream and onion flavored. My favorite. “Okay, maybe. But it’s different.”
“Maybe. But you’re not just a little angry at Amber on Alexis’ behalf? For leaving her here to deal?”
I sighed and drank the wine. “A little. But school’s important. She shouldn’t have to derail her education after losing her mom, too.”
“No. But it sounds like she could take a stab at being a little more supportive. It has to suck to be Alexis right now.”
“It’s not easy for either of them,” I said.
Once she made up her mind, Amber wasn’t slow to act. I sent her a contract in the morning and she returned a signed and scanned PDF by four that afternoon.
After getting a root beer – the only beverage Mensa Sam stocked for tenants in the shared kitchen – I made a list of people close to Ivy. I sent it to Amber and Alexis and asked them to add anyone else they thought I ought to talk to or know about. Also, for some people, I asked one or the other of the girls to call or text and specifically ask them to talk with me. Then I reviewed my list of legal deadlines. Two new cases had come in late the week before. That meant income I badly needed, but also too many projects due by the end of the week. Meaning it would be another late night.
I called Ty to say I’d need to skip dinner but could meet him for drinks, then spent the next two hours revising a memo to a client who had been sued for sending unsolicited faxes. Something I hadn’t realized anybody did anymore.
I printed it to make it more likely I’d spot any typos when I reread it in the morning and looked over the Ivy list.
It seemed to me the first person to talk to was Santiago Jimenez-Brown himself.
Danielle spends almost every morning in one courtroom or another, and sometimes part of the afternoon as well. But most days she pops into our shared office by three-thirty or four. This time it was five before she arrived and then it was to pick up some photos she had forgotten and needed for a half-day trial the next morning.
I asked her what I needed to do to visit Santiago in jail.
She clicked her mouse to scroll through email. “You don’t. Not yet and not without me. I need to see him on my own first. We’ve only talked on the phone.”
“You don’t trust me to visit alone?”
“It’s not that. Hold on.” She typed a few words, hit Enter, then spun her chair to face me. “I don’t want you to go alone because what if he says something that hurts his defense? Or what if you do? None of your conversations with him are privileged.”
“Oh. Right.”
An attorney’s communications with a client are privileged, meaning no one else is allowed to find out about them except in very unusual circumstances. But I wasn’t Santiago’s attorney.
“Look, I get it,” she said. “For Alexis and her sister, the most important thing is to know someone else did this. Someone else killed their mom. But whether Santiago did it or not, if your work for them makes it more likely he gets convicted, I’m thinking they won’t want that.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I sat back in my chair. It wasn’t that I had a great desire to see the inside of the Cook County jail. But not being able to talk to Santiago made it a lot harder to put together the pieces.
“A phone call?” I said. “With you on the line?”
“They’re monitored. And recorded. Remember how mad I got at Louis See-You-In-The-Next-Life Lyzinski?”
“The whole office suite remembers that.”
Danielle had come back from court fuming and cursing. More than I had ever heard her do before.
“That’s what he did. Middle of a double-murder trial. One night after court he called his buddy from jail. Told him what to say on the witness stand the next day. I told him a hundred times it’s a recorded line.” She pushed together loose papers on her desk and shoved them into a file, creasing the top ones. “Plus there’s a message that tells you it’s recorded when you start the call. He claimed he didn’t think anyone ever listened to the recordings. Guess what – they do. I got to court the next day and my witness was barred.” She banged the file folder on the edge of the desk.
“And it still gets to you.”
“You bet. Worked my ass off to get him out of jail and he does a thing like that. How someone who runs a multi-level drug ring as large as his could be that stupid.”
“Can I at least take Alexis to visit if I don’t ask Santiago anything?” That would give me a chance to observe Santiago with his daughter. More important, Alexis could see her dad. So far her uncle refused to take her.
Danielle took a breath, straightened the papers, and shook her head. “Only a parent or guardian can take a minor to visit someone.”
