A Clean Kill (24 page)

“I’m not sure it makes sense.”

Kai-Li patted the cushion next to her hip. She smiled a little, and her eyes were dilated.

She said, “Tell me.”

The rain was back. A thousand rivulets on the beachside windows dissected and warped the lead-gray expanse of Mobile Bay. Diffused lightning touched one corner of the smudged-charcoal sky and then another. Inside, the fire cast twisting gold reflections across the hearth and floor.

Joey stretched his legs out from the chair, crossed his ankles, and laced his fingers behind his neck. He started to speak, and a yawn caught him before he started. The giant man’s eyes watered as he tried to hold back.

I asked, “You comfortable?”

“Tired.”

“I just wanted to make sure the conversation’s not growing tedious for you. That you’re engaged and, you know,
comfy
.”

“Bite me.” He repeated, “I’m tired. Been running around checkin’ on our boy Zybo. What’s he’s been up to since he got outta the pen. And he ain’t exactly been
droppin’ bread crumbs.” Joey gathered in his legs, sat up straight, and cracked his neck by rotating his jaw first to one side and then the other. “Truth is, though, this whole friggin’ case is gettin’ tedious. The way I see it, it’s pretty simple.”

I knew Joey was getting ready to make a list. I’ve always admired the way he does it. Joey could break down the invasion of Europe into three or four basic ideas.

“Number one, Zybo’s playing head games with you ’cause either Judge Savin or Russell and Wagler, or maybe both, told him to. Number two, Judge Savin—let’s say it was him—told Zybo to screw with
you
’cause
you
wanna screw his money pooch.”

“Screw his money pooch?”

Joey smiled. “Like that one?”

I held up a hand, palm down, and wiggled it.

“Anyway,” he went on, “number three is we don’t know what’s goin’ on with Jim Baneberry. But you’re more or less covering that by havin’ Sheri playin’ spy,” he paused, “for whatever that’s worth.” He stood and walked to the window. “That about it, or am I missin’ somethin’?”

Kai-Li strolled in during Joey’s analysis. She said, “Yes.”

Joey drew in his chin and moved his eyes over the floor. “Yes, what?”

“Yes, you’re missing something.”

Joey pushed his hands down deep inside the hip pockets of his khakis. He had been studying Mobile Bay through the window, and it seemed he was fighting off cold absorbed by just looking out at the weather. “You gonna tell me what it is?”

Kai-Li looked over to check my reaction before answering. “You’re failing to consider the progression of events … the various levels of harassment, if you will.”

“And what would that tell me, you know,
if I will
?”

I cut in. “Zybo’s careful,
and
he’s smart.”

Joey nodded. “Boy had a year of medical school at Tulane before messin’ up and killin’ somebody.”

Kai-Li had been crossing the room to one of my club chairs. She stopped short. “Yes. That struck me when we first heard it. Do you know what happened?”

“I haven’t gotten the trial transcripts yet,” Joey said, “but the story goes that he and some buddies from school were out celebrating after first-year exams, and some kind of fight broke out. Two of his med-school buddies hauled ass and left him in an alley with three oil-rig workers who decided it’d be fun to mess up a college boy.”

“Bad idea, I guess.”

“Yeah. Again, the story goes—and I don’t know how accurate this is—the story goes that Zybo took a carpet knife away from one of ’em, killed him with it, and was in the process of skinning a second one when the cops showed up.”

Kai-Li walked over and sat beside me. “But isn’t that self-defense?”

I said, “Maybe. But the courts do not look favorably on claims of self-defense in a drunken bar fight. They cut him some kind of slack, though. He’s out.”

Kai-Li looked incensed. “With a ruined life.”

Joey laughed. “Let’s don’t get to feeling too sorry for somebody who strapped a carbon monoxide canister to the heater in Tom’s Jeep.”

Kai-Li was unfazed. “Nothing’s simple.”

I turned and smiled at her. “Is Zybo three people too?”

She gave me a look. “At least.” She turned back to Joey. “How’d some med student take on three roughnecks?”

“Well, first of all, he grew up down in a Louisiana swamp where he’d probably been fighting since he could walk,
and
he was some kind of jock at Southwest Louisiana. I’m guessing gymnastics or maybe wrestling from the way he moves. So, looking at all that, these oil-rig tough guys just chose the wrong boy.”

Joey stood there, his forehead wrinkled, thinking about Zybo’s life. Finally, he said, “We got off the subject here. Y’all were sayin’ that I’m missin’ somethin’ about the ‘sequence of events.’ ” He pointed his nose at Kai-Li but held my eyes. “Something about,” Joey switched into a bad English accent, “ ‘the levels of
harassment
.’ ” Like a Brit, he emphasized the first syllable of “harassment,” rather than the second.

Kai-Li asked, “Am I being made sport of?”

“Just yankin’ your chain a little,” Joey said. “You gonna answer my question?”

I broke in. “I started out by saying this Zybo is smart.”

Joey nodded.

“Think about what he’s done. Carbon monoxide poisoning that would be almost impossible to trace. Piling furniture in my living room with me asleep and the alarm set, making it so it’d look like a joke if I called the cops. Then he just put a dead squirrel on my hood.”

Joey got it. “The lighted house with music playin’ and the busted window on the Land Rover. That was too much.”

I agreed. “Way too much. Almost as if someone else did it. Someone who wanted us to stay focused on Zybo and not look elsewhere for answers.” I glanced over at Kai-Li. “Bottom line is, we think Judge Savin’s jury-rigging club is getting ready to bust apart from more pressure than we’re putting on it.”

Joey wrinkled his head again and turned back toward the window. “Something else’s goin’ on that we don’t know about.”

“Something else is going on.”

Joey turned and propped his butt against the window frame. “Is that gonna affect what we’re doing?”

“Seems like it should, doesn’t it?”

Joey nodded and the phone rang.

Kai-Li picked up the receiver and said, “Hello … Thank you again for last night. We … I’m sorry, what? Hang on.” She held the receiver out to me with her palm placed over the mouthpiece. She whispered. “It’s Laurel Adderson. She’s not happy.”

Now I said hello, and that was pretty much the last complete thought I managed to work into the conversation. I listened. I tried a couple of excuses and said goodbye.

Joey was grinning, enjoying my obvious discomfort. When I hung up, he asked, “What’s goin’ on?”

I sighed and sat back against the sofa. “Basically, the doctor wanted to ask
how dare I
advise Sheri to join the lawsuit against her.
How dare I
come to her house and eat her food after doing such an underhanded thing. Pretty much,
how dare I
go on living and breathing on the planet.”

Joey smiled. “She let you answer?”

“Hell no.” I stood and walked over to stand between
Joey and Kai-Li. “I’ve been thinking. Sounds like we know about as much about Zion Thibbodeaux as we’re ever going to.” I nodded at Joey. “I’d like for you to switch over and see what you and Loutie can find out about Jim Baneberry’s suit against Dr. Adderson. Check out the parties. Check out Baneberry’s finances, his company, that kind of thing.” I paused. “And check out that sonofabitch Jonathan Cort while you’re at it.”

Joey smiled. “You got it.” Then he walked out, leaving Kai-Li and me standing by the window, staring off into the overcast sky.

Kai-Li and I drove into Fairhope for lunch. Inside a quaint café with twenty-foot ceilings, I ate half a dozen dry shrimp arranged on a bed of pasta. It was a “heart-healthy” menu item. Must have been. It tasted like hell.

Thirty minutes later, we were in Dr. Adderson’s waiting room.

“The doctor can’t see you today.” The nurse wore white scrubs. She looked like a refrigerator with shoes.

I tried to look friendly. “It’ll just take a minute.”

She shook her head. “Sorry.” And she disappeared through one of those swinging doors that mark the boundary of every doctor’s inviolate territory.

I decided to violate it.

No one stopped me. The scrub-suited fridge had disappeared, and I wandered the hallways unmolested, finally locating Dr. Adderson’s small, neat office in the back right corner of the building. I sat in the client chair—or maybe the patient chair—and waited. Nothing happened. I got bored and walked over to sit in Dr. Adderson’s tufted leather chair. I looked at the phone.

Someone—maybe the fridge—had typed a little note and taped it to the doctor’s phone: “To page, dial 6, wait for a dial tone, then dial 999.”

Sounded good to me. I punched in the numbers. “Paging Dr. Laurel Adderson. Paging Dr. Laurel Adderson. You’re late for a meeting in your office. Thank you.”

Pretty professional
, I thought.

A blanket of white uniform filled the doorway. “Get out of here this minute! Who do you think you are? Get out of the
doctor’s
chair!”

Nurses tend to think of doctors as little gods. Doctors like it that way.

I stood to plead my case, but, before I could speak, Dr. Adderson’s calm voice sounded behind the mainsail in the doorway. “It’s okay, Millie. Go call the police.”

“Yes,
doctor
.” She virtually spit the last word at me. She had me now. I was screwing around with the
doctor
.

Laurel Adderson entered the room. “Would you like to say anything before the police get here?”

“That’s why I came.” I moved around to the visitor’s side of her desk.

“So,” she said, “speak. Whatever it is must be very important for you to make this big an ass of yourself over it.”

“Actually, this is about average on the ass meter for me.”

She sat down and crossed her arms.

I sat in the patient’s chair so I could look directly into her face. I placed my elbows on my knees and leaned forward—earnestly, imploringly, I hoped. “I did not
advise Sheri to sue you. She fired me. Any actions she and her father take against you are outside my control.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. Except that she left owing me fees, which I can’t collect now because I managed to get my license suspended trying to represent her.”

Now Dr. Adderson leaned forward. She propped her elbows on her desk. “I do not feel sorry for you, Tom. You pursued Sheri’s case in a way … well, let’s just say that the judge believes you could have handled it better.”

“Probably true.” I tried to look ashamed. “But my reputation can’t take much more right now. I wanted you to know I didn’t release any information you gave me to Jim Baneberry’s lawyers.” And that much
was
true.

“Fine. You’ve told me. If you leave now, you may manage to avoid meeting the police on the way out.”

I stood. “One more thing. I need a favor.”

She sat back in her chair. “You’re kidding.”

“No. I’m not. I want you to explain all this to Judge Savin. Tell him about our conversation. And, if you would, tell him this. Tell him that I want to keep my law license. I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to hold on to my practice and to collect my fees from Sheri Baneberry.” I walked to the door and turned back. “You weren’t the only one who got screwed when Sheri joined the opposition, Dr. Adderson.”

I walked quickly away. In the waiting room, I edged past a white refrigerator with a bright red face and crooked a finger at Kai-Li. She was on her feet and matching my pace as we hit the door and hurried through the foyer and out into the parking lot.

As we reached the Safari, a black-and-white pulled up alongside and rolled down a window. A lone, uniformed cop leaned out. “What’s happening here? Did you come from inside the doctor’s office?”

Kai-Li stepped into the passenger seat and closed her door.

I said, “Yeah. There’s this big, red-faced nurse in there. Size of a Buick. She’s in the waiting room, yelling something about the doctor’s office and threatening to smother anyone who comes near her.” I pointed over my shoulder at Kai-Li. “Had to get my wife out of there. Woman was scaring her to death.”

The cop stepped out of his patrol car, told me to “wait right there,” and ran inside the building.

I nodded. Then I stepped into the Safari and drove out of the parking lot.

The sign read,
Sunset Villas, Baneberry-Cort Construction, General Contractor
.

I raised my paper cup in the direction of a skeleton of rust-colored steel that slashed the evening sky into irregular, unnatural shapes. “Ugly, isn’t it?”

Joey sat in the passenger seat of the Safari, eating his second Quarter Pounder with Cheese. “I think all these damn things are ugly. I like Saint George and Dog Island. Grayton Beach is okay. Hurricanes keep blowing Gulf Shores off the map, and contractors keep coming back and fuckin’ it up. Beach always seemed to me like the wrong place for a ten-story condo.” He took another huge bite of burger. “That’s what I think, but nobody asked my ass about it.”

“My condolences to your ass.”

Joey grunted.

“Is this all you wanted me to see?”

My giant friend polished off his sandwich, popped
the plastic cover off a large Coke, and took a long swallow before answering. “Look at the completion date on the sign.”

“Where?”

He placed his drink in a cup holder and opened his door. “Come on.”

I followed him to the sign—a painted four-by-eight sheet of exterior plywood. In smaller print, in one corner, the sign read: A
VAILABLE FOR
O
CCUPANCY
, but the date had been painted over.

Joey flipped on a flashlight. “Look. You can just see it.”

The date was almost a year past.

“Is that it? That’s why I had to come way out here in rush-hour traffic? Hell, Joey. You know as well as I do, construction gets stalled for all kinds of reasons—zoning, owner financing problems, lousy advance sales.”