The Hallows, page 19
When I got to the office the next morning, Will and Jia were at a whiteboard brainstorming ideas about what Pritcher might have that made him want an expedited trial. Their list ran the gamut from surprise witness to dirt on the judge.
“I like the blackmail,” I said, walking in, “but I’ve known Judge Allred since I was a kid, and she’d rather die than take a bribe, I think.”
I took off my suit coat and leaned against Jia’s desk as I stared at the board. Will said, “So the best one we have so far is that he’s got, or knows how to get, some info on the potential jury. The jury gets called two weeks before a trial date in Allred’s court.”
I nodded. “And if he’s got a clerk on the payroll willing to tell him who’s in the pool, he can either research them or, more his style, outright bribe them. Okay, not bad. What else?”
Jia said, “Could be the escorting, but we don’t think that’s damaging enough to skip the prelim for. Plus, there’s no need to rush with that. The only other plausible thing is that his investigators have found some piece of evidence we haven’t.”
“That reminds me, file a reverse discovery request. If he does have something like that, he’ll be required to hand it over. I doubt it’ll help since he’s too smart for that. What he’ll do is ask to have it introduced, and when I throw a tantrum, he’ll say that he sent it the night before, which is when it mysteriously appeared on his desk from some anonymous source.”
“Will that work?” Jia asked.
“Why not? It’s worked for me several times.” I scanned the board again and said, “Well, whatever it is, we’ve got to hope what we have is better: I’m cutting a deal with Steven.”
“Seriously?” Will said.
“My investigator found out that Anderson was lying about the rape when he was a juvenile. He killed Patty, and he and Russell put on a little show for me to get me to buy his alibi at the jail. So he’s probably the brains behind the outfit. Will, draft up an agreement for Steven. He’s getting attempted homicide, one to fifteen, in exchange for his testimony at trial against Anderson. Then set an appointment and run down to the jail and have him and his attorney sign it. They have notaries at the jail.”
“On it.”
“Jia, we need to keep digging as much as we can and find out what Russell’s going to spring on us. Talk to everyone, and I mean everyone, that’s interacted with him since he got into town. Maybe they saw something or overheard something.”
I scanned the board again and said, “I haven’t gotten my ass kicked yet, and I do not want to start here of all places and against a weasel like Russell. Don’t let me down, kids.” I went to leave and Will said, “Where you going?”
“Just someone I need to see.”
54
The cemetery was crowded with flowers. It was small and built on a hill overlooking River Falls. When I got out, I could see past the town to the red-rock mountains to the south and the Nevada border beyond that. I always forgot how small the town was until I looked at it from up high.
I climbed up farther on the hill and then stopped, unsure which way to go. I wandered around until I recognized a tree. A few paces behind that was the grave I was looking for.
The headstone said, “Marilyn Rose Graham. Beloved mother and wife.”
I sat down in front of the headstone and picked some grass. I played with it, twirling it and feeling the texture. A breeze started blowing.
“You know what I remember most?” I said out loud. “You used to tell me I could always come to you. That mothers had special bonds to their sons and could always give them the best advice when they needed it.” I tossed the grass on the ground. “I could sure use some of that advice right now, Mom. Because I feel like I’m lost at sea.”
I inhaled deeply and rose, staring down at the grave a long time. I kissed my hand and then lightly touched the headstone before leaving.
When I drove to Adam’s house, he was sitting on his porch. He was looking worse and worse. Pale with eyes rimmed red, his nose pink, burst capillaries from the intense coughing fits. More than that, he looked tired. A man who just wanted to lie down and not get back up.
I sat next to him and said, “I remember Mom out here mowing the lawn before it became my chore when I was ten or whatever. Never understood why you let her do it instead of doing it yourself.”
“I tried, but your mother said I didn’t do it right. That the lines on the lawn had to go up and down and be straight and that I went side to side too much. She had to have things a certain way. It would drive her nuts when they weren’t that way. I tried to mow them straight for years, but it was never straight enough.”
I looked to him. “She had OCD?”
“We didn’t have words like that back then. People were just people. We all have our quirks. There’s no reason to give it a name.”
I looked over the grass. “Adam, you have to go back to the hospital. You’re going to die.”
He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off the lawn, seeing some distant memory there. “I know.”
“You know? What is that supposed to mean? You mean you’re going to accept it and lie back and cough yourself to death?”
“Hey, I am sick of this holier-than-thou attitude from you. I’m an adult, and adults get to make their own decisions. I’m healthy and I’m goin’ to stay healthy until it’s time for me to go. And I ain’t goin’ on some hospital bed with a twenty-year-old doctor tellin’ me how sorry he is for me. This is my home. This is the home I brought my wife to after our wedding and the home my father brought my mother to after their wedding. I ain’t leavin’ it.”
I shook my head and rose. “Well, that’s just great. But I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not going to sit here and watch you slowly die. So you can count me out.”
“Good. Go back to your fancy mansion and easy women, Tatum. You never really belonged in this town anyway.”
“I got news for ya, Adam. Neither did you. Maybe if you had more balls, you would’ve done what I did and left instead of slowly dying here as a ranch hand.”
His eyes widened and he turned away. I knew it was the sorest spot in his life, that spot that everyone feared and wouldn’t look at too closely: the spot that revealed a life that had been wasted, and the realization that it was too late to do anything about it.
“Adam,” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I’d like to be alone.”
“Look, I get angry and I say—”
“I’d like to be alone, Tatum. Please.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
55
The time before trial was a flurry of activity for me. Back in Miami, everyone knew to stay out of my way. When I got into the office in the mornings, there was a bagel and coffee sitting on my desk, and for lunch one of the staff would bring me a sandwich and soup, lay it on the desk without a word, and leave. Dinner was take-out Chinese and then some bourbon when the day was done at two or three in the morning while I sat in my office staring at the ocean. We had a mock courtroom, and the weeks before trial were spent there, running through arguments over and over until I knew every word I was going to say to that jury.
I didn’t have any of that here. So I spent the days reviewing case notes, checking in with witnesses, practicing my arguments in front of a mirror, and helping Jia and Will realize that a trial was won or lost in preparation and how you framed the case to the jury in the opening arguments would determine which way the case would go when they read that verdict.
During the week before the trial, Gates and I went out a few times. Occasionally we had home-cooked meals at her house and a couple of times drove to Vegas for fancy sushi. My favorite thing was her laugh: I could always make her laugh, from the time we were kids. When I saw her at that restaurant, she stuck out like a diamond among coals. It wasn’t just her physical beauty. Gates had whatever that beauty is on the inside that radiates out of some women. Men didn’t have it. Whatever it was, I could sit in awe of it all day. Sometimes at night back in my condo, I wondered how the hell I had left her behind.
56
Something had been bothering me the past three weeks since my meeting with Nina, and I couldn’t shake it: Anderson and Roscoe Mallory were lying about how Anderson’s eye got hurt. The fact that the doctor told Nina that Anderson had likely taken a beating with fists, rather than running into a pipe, meant I was onto something, but I couldn’t see what.
I parked at the high school and went in. Roscoe was out on the football field coaching about thirty young men. He had his arms folded and a clipboard hung from his fingers. One of the boys missed a pass, and Roscoe said, “Damn it, keep your eyes on the ball.” He tossed the clipboard behind him near a gym bag and shook his head as he talked to one of the other coaches.
“Tatum,” he said when he saw me. “What’re you doing here?”
He held out his hand and we shook. “Oh, you know, nothing I like more than visiting the one place that holds my most painful childhood memories.”
He chuckled. “You were picked on a bit, weren’t you?”
“A bit? I showed up to freshman homecoming with a girl I found out only brought me there on a dare, and her boyfriend kicked my ass in the parking lot in front of the entire school. So yeah, there were some issues.”
“Well, it’s just jealousy. I was jealous as hell of your brains. I wasn’t always nice to you, and I’m sorry about that.”
“Water under the bridge, Roscoe.” I looked out over the field. “Good team you got here.”
“We got a shot at state. That boy there, Lopez, he’s the best running back I’ve ever seen. He’s got a sub-five forty dash.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “That kid’s goin’ pro.” He looked at me. “What really brings you by?”
“Can we talk in private?”
“Sure thing.”
He told the other coach to watch things, and we walked off the field and onto the bleachers. We sat at the fifty-yard line, and I looked out over the field. I’d never been to a single football game when I’d gone here, so this particular place held no memories for me.
“What kind of kid was Anderson when he went here?”
He looked out over the field. “Kind of a pain in the rear, to be honest. One of those kids you just want to get through the semester with and get him out of your class. Wasn’t no better out here on the field. Always harassing the cheerleaders. Groping them and things. I had to bench him several times for pulling things like that.”
“Any violence?”
“One time he got into a fight with one of our other players. Young black kid named David.”
I nodded. “I can imagine why. Anything else?”
“No. He was a talker but didn’t have too much bite. He weighed less than anyone on the team.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You ever get into it with him?”
He chuckled. “Not to be vulgar, but if he walked between my legs people would think he was my penis.”
I stared at him, and he grew embarrassed and looked away. “I just mean he’s tiny. If I hit him, he would break.”
“That isn’t a no, Roscoe.”
“No,” he said sternly. “No, I never got into it with him.”
“I read the statement you gave to the school about the injury. You said there was a pipe near the bleachers, and while he was doing laps, he slipped and hit the end of the pipe. But the doctor we spoke with suggested his eye injury was from repeated blunt force trauma. He thinks the most likely weapon was someone’s fists. Now, normally I would just talk to other players on the team about what happened, but that’s the funny thing: we did, and there weren’t any other players around to witness what happened. Just you and him after school on the field.”
He sighed. “Look, he groped one of the girls. I had him stay after and run laps as punishment.”
“That’s not in your statement.”
He shook his head. “No, no, it wouldn’t be. I . . . um . . . I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a little punk, but he’s the best kicker we’ve ever had, and we had a big game that Saturday. If I’d have gone to the principal with this, he would’ve been suspended. So I had him run laps.”
“You let a sexual predator off the hook so you could win a game? Nice.”
“Hey, football is all we got around here. It’s important to this town, and sacrifices have to be made.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, it’s right up there with world peace.” I glanced at the field and saw the quarterback get sacked. “Who was the girl?”
“You wouldn’t know her. She graduated last year and went to the University of Denver.”
“I’d like her name.”
“I’d rather not give it out. I promised her I wouldn’t bring it up. She was really embarrassed.”
I stood up and faced him, blocking his view of the field. “Listen to me: I have never, not once, lost a trial. And I’m not about to start now. And the way I win is that I know everything, and I mean everything, that is going to happen in that courtroom before I step inside. No surprises. If I walk in there and there’s a surprise, you do not want to see what I’m going to do to you.”
He shook his head. “No surprises. He groped her, I kept him after, and he slipped and hit a pipe. I don’t know anything about medicine, but that doctor’s wrong. I saw him hit the pipe, and I drove him to the ER.”
I nodded. “I’ll believe you, for now. But if you’re lying to me, not going to state is going to be the least of your problems.”
I walked off the field, took out my cell phone, and dialed Will.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Roscoe Mallory. He’s lying about what happened to Anderson’s eye, and I don’t know why. I want everything you can find about him, and I mean everything. If he bought a porno mag at the grocery store, I want to know about it.”
“I’ve known the coach since I was in high school. Everybody in town loves that guy. You really think he did something shady?”
“He just happens to mention to me right now that Anderson groped a girl but refused to give me her name. So either it never happened, or it’s someone he doesn’t want to tell me about.”
“Someone like Patty.”
“Right. Maybe Anderson groped Patty, then got a beating after, and Roscoe might be the one that administered that little can of whoop-ass. Beating a teenager up for groping a classmate—that’s not a high school teacher reaction. That’s the reaction of a lover. Which means—”
“Which means he might be on the list of Patty’s clientele and maybe the obsessed one that was stalking her.”
“Exactamundo, kiddo. So I need to know if he was seeing Patty and how often. And last I checked, high school teachers weren’t millionaires, so let’s dig into his finances and find out how he was swinging two grand for a date.”
Will let out a long breath. “Man, Coach Mallory . . . that’s crazy. You sure about this? I mean, you could be wrong.”
“I don’t know if I’m wrong or not, but it’s too late to worry about that now. Let’s find out what skeletons he’s got lurking around.”
“All right, I’ll get on it. Oh, got the reports from the lab. No one ever found the hammer Anderson hit Patty with. The truck was cleaned with a blood cleaner. The forensics guys said it could have had blood, but the blood cleaner gets rid of all traces.”
“Well, not the end of the world, but, man, Patty’s blood on that hammer would’ve helped us.”
He sighed again. “This is scary. Never been this invested in a case before.”
I saw some young girls entering the high school, laughing and joking. Children. No older than Patty . . . or Bethany Bower. “Me neither.”
57
That night I had dinner with Gates at her ranch. We ate hamburgers and watched a football game on television after. She sipped from her beer and set it down to check her phone.
“I stopped in to see your dad today,” she said.
“Was he his usual pleasant self?”
“No. He couldn’t talk. He’d lost his voice. I tried to get him to eat, but he just wanted his pills. Wouldn’t eat anything.”
I shook my head. “He’s impossible to reason with.”
“What’re you going to do?”
I exhaled through my nose and stared blankly at the television. “Can we watch something else?”
She was quiet a second and said, “Tatum, what’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know, okay. I have no idea. I didn’t sign up for this. I came out here to get away from my problems, not inherit everyone else’s.”
“Well, sorry we’re such burdens, but he’s your dad.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
She rose and went into the kitchen and began washing plates off before putting them in the dishwasher. I rubbed my face and leaned my head against the couch cushions.
“How many hours a week you put into this ranch?” I said.
“About thirty.”
“On top of everything with work?”
“Yeah.”
“So what do you do for fun?”
She chuckled. “You’d think it was stupid.”
“You know I wouldn’t.”
She stopped washing the dishes and dried her hands on a towel. “Come here.”
I followed her outside and over to a barn. She slid open a massive door and inside was a truck and two cars. One of the cars, an old Nissan, was up on a mechanic’s platform, and the engine was only halfway put together.
“You fix cars for fun?”
“Technically I build them. That’s a Nissan body with a Mustang engine.”
“You watch football and build cars, while taking care of a ranch. Why do I get the feeling I’m the girl in this relationship?”
“That’s because you’ve bought into the lies about what a woman is. We’re not trophies and we’re not princesses.”
“Hey, I ain’t complaining. More power to you.” I stepped closer and peered at the engine. “Where you even learn how to do this?”
