A Clean Kill (10 page)

“Yeah.”

“Well, where did that slop—the rotten shrimp heads and fish guts and stuff—where did that come from? Did you put it in, or had somebody been back there cleaning fish?”

Joey laughed. “The pit already had rainwater in it. And it was already black and nasty-looking where the water had soaked up some old ashes and stuff. That’s what gave me the idea. I just looked around the alley and found a ten-gallon lard can full of stuff somebody was probably saving to chum for sharks and dumped it in.”

“Why?”

“You know. Just for fun.”

I hit Montgomery that night a few minutes before ten and found a room at the Riverfront Ramada, the one near the restored Victorian train station. Dinner was soggy room service. Sleep was fitful. I rolled out of bed at seven Saturday morning, showered and shaved, dressed, and packed. I had planned to stay in the capital for the weekend—resting, convalescing, whatever. I couldn’t sit still. I paid my bill with cash, drove to a little café in Old Cloverdale for breakfast, and headed out toward Auburn.

After an hour buzzing east along I-85, a set of huge orange tiger-paw prints led me up an off-ramp and across the overpass. Five miles later, College Street wound past the old brick-and-steeple campus—the one where my father had taken classes forty years ago—and into a downtown of bicycle shops, pizza joints, and collegial bars.

Auburn is a pure college town. It exists for no other
purpose than to surround and support the university, and every business on the street was designed to satisfy some particular want, or imagined need, of a twenty-year-old undergraduate. But now fall semester was over. Most of the student body—and therefore most of the city’s inhabitants—had departed for Christmas break with the folks. The little town seemed to be resting.

After pulling into a metered spot just past Toomer’s Corner, I stepped out of Joey’s Expedition and up onto the sidewalk. Waves of frigid air rolled down the street, ruffling the hair and clothes of a few lonely souls out running errands among the storefronts. I zipped my coat and started walking. I didn’t really know why I had pulled over to window shop instead of searching out Dr. Kai-Li Cantil. But I’ve learned that if some weight starts tugging at my subconscious, it’s usually a good idea to listen. Homo sapiens has survived for thousands of years, in no small part, by listening to primitive alarms, by listening to an instinctual intelligence that tells us to run or fight or hide. I didn’t see any reason to start ignoring it now.

I stopped at a jewelry store window full of fraternity and sorority pins scattered across rumpled black velvet. Next door was a plate-glass window decorated with snowmen and snowflakes. In one corner, the artist had painted a green Christmas tree surrounded with colored squares that were meant to be presents.

It was a sub and pizza joint. I walked inside. “Nice window.”

Three girls in Colorado skiwear worked behind the food counter. The nearest one—a copper-tone redhead with tiny freckles scattered across her nose and
cheekbones—said, “Thanks. Take a seat anywhere. We’re just opening.”

I took a table against the wall and watched. The redhead rang open the cash register and broke rolls of quarters, dimes, and nickels into divided trays. One of the other girls wiped down the counter. The third girl, a vacant brunette, opened a sliding window behind the counter to reveal a middle-aged black woman in the kitchen.

And something still bothered me. I stood and looked at the redhead. “Do you have a phone I can use?”

“Back hallway. Outside the restrooms.”

I thanked her, and she smiled. Red had a great smile. But then, youth has a great smile.

I picked up the receiver before remembering Joey’s warning. After hanging up the receiver, I punched in Joey’s home number on my cell phone and got his answering machine. At his office, I got voice mail. Trying
his
cell phone, I got a lounge-lizard baritone telling me to try again later.

I tapped in Kelly’s home number. She answered on the third ring. I said, “Good morning.”

“Good morning yourself. Where are you?”

“That doesn’t matter. But I wanted to tell you that I’ll be out of the office the first couple days of next week.” I paused. “Is everything okay?”

“Sure. Everything’s fine. Loutie Blue’s been trying to get you, though.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. What’s going on, Tom?”

I looked around the empty café. No one to hear. I turned my back to the room and told Kelly about the Cajun stranger.

When I was through, she said, “Call Loutie.”

So, when I hung up, that’s what I did. Loutie didn’t work at an office. I rang her up at the house on Monterey Street in Mobile.

“Tom.” It was Loutie’s usual greeting, and it always sounded different. She formed the sound to fit the circumstances.

“Good morning, Loutie. Kelly says you’re trying to get me.”

“Yeah. It’s probably nothing …” She paused in mid-thought. “You sound strange. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Something’s scratching at the back of my mind. I’m not sure what it is yet.” I turned to watch the redhead place a single carnation in a bud vase on my table. “So, what’s ‘probably nothing’? Why were you trying to reach me?”

“I can’t find Joey.”

“It’s Saturday. I bet he’s sleeping in. Not answering the phone.”

“It’s more than that, Tom. Joey was supposed to come by here last night, and he was a no-show. This morning, I went by to take him to breakfast. He’s not home. He’s not anywhere, as far as I can tell.” She paused. “And I know that happens sometimes with Joey, if he’s on a case or something, so I’m not ready to panic. But I knew he was doing some work for you, so I was wondering …”

I said, “He
is
working,” and stopped short.

Suddenly, I knew part of what had been bothering me. Joey had gone back to get the Styrofoam cooler in the alley. And if I had been smart enough to think of going back last night to retrieve the cooler to check for fingerprints, then the Cajun may have been smart
enough to know we’d do just that. He also may have been smart enough to have been waiting for Joey when he stepped into the alley.
Shit
. If it had been anyone except Joey, I would have warned him not to go alone. But I was not in the habit of worrying much about Joey’s safety. The man can bench-press a Buick.

I told Loutie Blue about my and Joey’s adventure in the alley, up to and including Joey’s statement that he was going back for the cooler.

“At least now I know where to start looking.” Loutie was a practical woman.

“Be careful, Loutie.”

“I’m always careful.”

“No. I mean it. We had this guy at gunpoint and stuck up to his ass in a puddle of fish guts. All Joey did was look away for half a second. The guy put Joey on his back, grabbed the camera, and was in the process of kicking my ass when Joey got the gun back on him. And he just disappeared. You hear what I’m saying, Loutie? I’m not saying he could take Joey head-to-head. But this guy doesn’t come at you head-on. He screws around with your mind and tampers with your car and takes you out at the knees when you’re not looking.” I realized I sounded scared. I was.

Joey’s best operative said, “I promise. I won’t take any chances.”

And, after years of working around Joey and Loutie, I understood what that meant. It meant that the beautiful ex-stripper on the other end of the phone would shoot my Cajun friend in the knee, or some other part of his anatomy vital to locomotion, the minute she saw him.

I just hoped she’d see him coming.

After working my way through a tall cappuccino and most of
The Montgomery Advertiser
, I called ahead from the pizza shop. Dr. Cantil was in her faculty office that Saturday morning and would see me then instead of Monday. She would be grading finals, she said. But I had come a long way, and she agreed to make time. I thought she sounded slightly disapproving of my apparent eagerness, but the perceived disapproval may have been colored more by my expectations than her tone. Or maybe I was put off by the slight British accent—they come with reserve built in.

I paid Red for the coffee and got directions to the nearest one-hour film developer. Tiger Tooth Photo had a place two blocks down. I knew someone would. College is the time to engage in expensive, artistic pursuits that will, in two or three years, gather dust on a closet shelf behind flannel suits and tassel loafers.

The shots of my Cajun tormentor were promised for 1:30 that afternoon.

After backing out of my downtown parking space, it took about four minutes to drive to the professor’s building, where I borrowed a reserved parking space next to the back door. Unlike the Architecture and Business schools, Behavioral Sciences resided in the same nondescript building it had occupied fifteen years earlier when I was an undergraduate. It seems that alumni with psychology and sociology degrees do not endow buildings—not that some of them probably don’t want to.

Freezing mist stung my lips and cheeks as I stepped out of the warmth of Joey’s SUV and hurried across a veneer of ice that had begun to form on granite slabs cascading from the back entrance. I pulled open one of the double fire doors and stepped into a puff of heated air.

My footsteps echoed unpleasantly in the corridor. I cringed at each sharply defined footfall without really knowing why. I found a staircase and climbed to the third floor, where the words K
AI-
L
I
C
ANTIL
, P
H.
D. were painted in black on the frosted-glass panel in the door to room 315. I knocked and heard the British-colony voice from the phone tell me to come in.

I pushed through and found Dr. Cantil sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her desk. She was surrounded by five stacks of documents, which she had fanned out around her like the arms of a starfish. The assistant professor looked like she was praying or meditating. Her elbows rested on her knees, her thumbs moved in barely discernable circles against her temples, and her fingers overlapped across a bowed forehead as if she were trying to shield her eyes from the light. It
didn’t look like she was grading papers. But whatever she was doing was her business, not mine.

Without looking up, Kai-Li Cantil said, “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

I closed the door, leaned my back against the cool glass rectangle, and waited. The professor’s straight black hair hung in a shining curtain nearly to her waist, fanned around her shoulders, and fell forward from the sides of her bowed head. She was completely absorbed by the papers in front of her, which meant she wasn’t paying any attention to me, which meant I could stand there and unabashedly study her like a model in a magazine.

Her skin held a light tan blush, even in December. But Dr. Cantil wasn’t pure Asian or simply an olive-skinned Brit with an exotic name. She was, I decided, a bit of both. Considering the look and the accent, I was thinking Hong Kong.

Finally, Dr. Cantil unlaced her fingers and massaged her eyes with the muscles at the base of her thumbs. She looked up. “Sorry. I was in the middle of something.” As she spoke, the professor got to her feet.

Dr. Cantil was tall—close to five-nine—and young. I decided she looked about twenty-eight, but she could have been a year or two older. She had the high cheekbones and angular features of Asian ancestry, softened by a strong dose of European blood and made more striking by the contrast of bright green eyes. I missed a beat when I met those eyes.

Dr. Cantil looked vaguely amused by my expression.

“Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “I got into town early. I would’ve been stuck here all weekend if we’d had to wait till Monday afternoon to do this.”

“No problem. But, as I said by phone, I have no familiarity with your request. I would have gone over my secretary’s notes before our scheduled meeting.” Dr. Cantil walked around and sat behind a plain oak desk that lived somewhere beneath a foot-thick carpet of faded treatises, scattered photocopies, and paperback journals. She motioned at an inexpensive wooden chair. “Please. Have a seat.”

I sat, and all of the professor from the nose down disappeared behind stacks of research. I stood and dragged the chair to the side of her desk.

She smiled. “Sorry. It’s the way I work.”

I fished a business card out of my pocket and held it out. She took the card and dropped it on a pile of photocopies that lay on her desk in a twisted spiral like cocktail napkins on a bar. She didn’t mention hourly rates or business arrangements. It seemed clear that the professor was much more interested in
why
I had come to see her than in how much money she would make as a result.

Those penetrating green eyes were waiting expectantly. I started. “What I’ve been told is that you are an assistant professor of psychology who’s studying the effects of jury service on jurors.”

She nodded. “Yes. The physical
and
emotional effects of jury service.”

“I understand that the state bar’s providing some of your funding.”

“Some of it.”

“Well, I need to talk with you—as a jury expert—about a case that may go to trial. So I need our conversations, and any documents that may pass between us, to remain confidential.”

“Of course. I’ve worked with attorneys before.”

“Okay. I just didn’t want it getting back to the bar that I’m investigating another law firm.”

Her eyes searched my face. “Is that what you’re doing, Mr. McInnes?”

I felt my focus drifting inside those exotic green eyes, and I glanced at my watch to break the moment. When I looked up, I still didn’t know what time it was. “There’s a, ah, plaintiffs’ firm in Mobile called Russell and Wagler.”

She nodded. “Serious people.”

“Yeah,” I said, “top of the food chain. But even for meat-eaters like them, the firm has been just a little too damn lucky with jurors. In at least two trials, Russell and Wagler has gotten a huge verdict after a holdout juror got sick and was replaced by an alternate.”

Dr. Cantil leaned back in her swivel chair and put her heels on the corner of her desk. She was wearing jeans and worn hiking boots. “Two sick jurors does not a sample make. You can’t logically draw any conclusions without more data.”