A Clean Kill (25 page)

Joey just listened. That’s how I knew he had the answer. “But this one was financed, designed, and
almost
built by one company.”

“Baneberry-Cort Construction.”

Joey turned to walk back to the vehicle. “Amazing. Hit you over the head a few times, and you pick right up on it.” He stopped to lean against the hood and look out over the Gulf of Mexico. “And guess who was the third partner in the firm of Baneberry-Cort Construction.”

I stopped to think. “Kate Baneberry.”

Joey turned and opened the passenger door. “About time.”

I looked at him.

“I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.” He grabbed his Coke from inside the truck and leaned
back out. “Time to quit fuckin’ around with these folks, Tom.”

He killed his drink and threw the ice across the construction site before stepping inside the vehicle.

The skies over Gulf Shores were still tinged with the last bright smudges of daylight when we pulled off the construction site and headed home. I drove, and I took it easy, which is unusual. I needed to think.

Twenty minutes into the ride, Joey pointed at a Jr. Food Store coming up on the right, and I pulled over. I pumped gas while Joey went inside and came out with two six-packs of Heineken.

I asked, “You pay for the gas?”

He nodded.

That was it. Neither Joey nor I spoke for the next hour. He was thinking. So was I.

As we passed through Fairhope, I recalled that Joey had once worked for the investigative arm of the state troopers, and I broke the silence.

“You used to be with Alabama Bureau of Investigation, didn’t you?”

Joey grunted an affirmative noise.

“You got any ABI friends left up in Montgomery?”

Joey was slow answering. “Yeah. I guess. A couple, maybe.”

“Good.”

Joey turned in his seat to look at me. And, for the rest of the drive into Point Clear, we discussed how we could best exploit his friends’ loyalty to our advantage.

Kai-Li had enjoyed enough surprises during our brief time together. I honked the horn as we pulled up next to the house, and, seconds later, Loutie’s face appeared in the column of windows next to my front door. Joey and I walked in. We were out of beer.

Loutie asked, “You two drunk?”

Joey reached over and absentmindedly patted her hip. “Just a few beers.”

As Joey passed through to the living room, Loutie hung back. “Tom?” Her hard, clear eyes searched my face. “Kai-Li seems like a nice girl. Smart.”

Something was wrong. “Yeah, I think so.”

She nodded. “Susan called from Chicago.”

My heart missed a beat, and I asked without thinking, “She okay?”

Loutie understood. I’d nearly gotten Susan killed once upon a time, and I felt more than a little protective of her. “She’s fine. She wants you to call her.”

I nodded.

“Go ahead and do it now.”

I looked hard into her eyes. “And she’s fine?”

“She’s fine. Go call.”

I said hello to Kai-Li on the way through the living room, and got a sympathetic smile in return. Both women knew I was about to get the there’s-someone-else news. Now I knew it too.

I sat at my desk and dialed the number in Illinois. Susan sounded relaxed, happy, and concerned.
He
was an assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony. I made a feeble joke about how I’d never believed the conventional wisdom that
all
symphony conductors are gay. She laughed. I wished her the best. She wished the same for me. I went back into my own living room to
be pitied and treated with kid gloves by an ex-stripper and an Asian shrink.

Sometimes life sucks.

As I came into the living room, Joey said, “So. I hear she dumped your ass.”

Loutie balled her fist, and Joey moved quickly out of reach. She was not a woman given to playful punches. Loutie was getting ready to pop Joey one, and he knew it. But the pity, the serious demeanor of the women, and Joey running from Loutie—it was all too much, and I started laughing.

Joey grinned. “Poor little fella. He’s in shock.” He winked at me. “Come on, Tom. Let’s go get us a beer before Loutie kicks my ass in front of this distinguished professor you got stayin’ with you.”

I followed Joey into the kitchen, where we opened the first of an unknown number of beers that would be consumed that night.

I honestly didn’t feel as bad about being dumped as I probably should have—Susan and I had split up weeks before—but, as Joey was sensitive enough to point out, “Not datin’ a woman anymore and knowin’ some other guy is bonin’ her are two different things.”

On top of that, it had been a hell of a week on a lot of levels. So, Joey and I conducted an inebriated tour of the beers of the world—as least as represented by the contents of my refrigerator. It is not an exaggeration to say we covered at least two beer-producing countries on each of the major continents.

By the time he and Loutie said good night some time around midnight, I was lit. Glowing. Basically drunk as Cooter Brown, as my mother used to say. And, as Joey’s Expedition disappeared into the night,
I’m almost certain I tried to engage Kai-Li in a discussion of just exactly who Cooder Brown might have been.

As I recall, she had very few thoughts on the subject.

A door opened. I rolled over onto my back and opened my eyes. Bad idea. Bright sunshine stabbed through my pupils like steel needles. A bundle of nerves just behind my eyes seemed to explode before I could screw my eyes shut again.

Kai-Li’s voice said, “Headache?”

I think I said, “Umm.”

“I made some coffee. Would you like some?”

I repeated my all-purpose syllable.

By the time she walked back into the room, wearing the New Orleans Jazz Festival T-shirt I’d given her to use as a nightgown and carrying two stoneware mugs of steaming coffee, I’d managed to prop two pillows against the headboard and achieve a more-or-less upright position.

She carefully placed a hot mug in my hands and I said, “Thank you.”

“Actual words.” Kai-Li smiled and sat cross-legged on the bed facing me. “Impressive.”

I looked down and felt a glandular jolt. “Umm.”

“Words, Thomas.”

“I can see your underwear.”

She rolled her eyes and punched the long T-shirt down between her legs. “You happy now?”

“I was happy before.” I tried to smile. It hurt.

Kai-Li returned my smile. “Then you should have kept your mouth shut. In any event, sexy small talk—
which is not something I’m completely adverse to engaging in with you at some future date—should probably be left to a time when you look less like a drunken toad.”

I sipped some coffee. “Toad, huh?”

She pressed her lips together, raised her eyebrows, and nodded.

“Afraid so. Anyway, time to get up and hit the showers. You’ve had a call this morning from your colleagues at Russell and Wagler.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I’m not. You said that’s what you expected after your meeting yesterday with Dr. Adderson.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I wasn’t sure it was going to work.”

“Well, it did. Get up. You’ve got a meeting at their offices at two this afternoon.” As she talked, Kai-Li uncrossed her legs, rolled onto one hip, and bounced off the bed. When she did, I glanced down again at her cream-colored panties. I really meant not to, but that’s what happened.

Kai-Li said, “I saw that.”

“What do you expect from a drunken toad?”

The glass and steel of Mobile Convention Center interrupted the waterfront, and I hung a left on Government Street. The wide pavement made a “V” around the entrance to Bankhead Tunnel and passed by the old Admiral Sims Hotel, a television station, and a couple of municipal buildings before gaining some dignity beneath twin rows of live oaks, the tips of whose limbs touched and moved against one another over five lanes of traffic.

In summer, the oaks cast a cool, civilizing shade over the busy street. Now, a few days before Christmas, harsh light cut through a stark, black crisscross of limbs. Up ahead, at the apex of the park on Old Government, a cannon seated in white concrete at just about windshield height pointed straight at me.

“Look for the cannon. You’ll see it, but we’re a couple of blocks before the road splits. On the right.” The directions had been friendly, professional, and impersonal,
and they’d been delivered by Russell & Wagler’s newest receptionist.

I slowed the Safari, then turned right and left again to ease into the paved lot behind the antebellum mansion that housed the law firm. It was not an unusual setup for successful plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Corporate firms—lawyers who draft contracts and argue over tax issues and securities fraud—are, almost invariably, on the highest possible floor of some bank building. There are two reasons for this: Corporate clients feel more comfortable in corporate buildings, and banks generally insist that their own firms rent space in their newest overpriced building.

Plaintiff firms, by contrast, are trying to impress blue-collar workers, for the most part, so those workers will hire the firm to sue the kind of corporation that builds overpriced office buildings. Using an old mansion is a way of separating a “blue-collar” firm from the corporation the plaintiff hates, and it’s a pretty good way of making your firm look like a winner. Nothing says success to an assembly-line worker like a mansion—and, of course, a receptionist in a miniskirt.

I stepped out into a hard winter day, swung the door shut, and shot the Safari with the remote. The alarm responded with that double beep that makes parking decks at 8:00
A.M
. sound like they’re full of bobwhites.

A concrete path beside the building and around the front led to tall steps. Up on the columned porch, green double doors held twin wreaths. A brass sign instructed me to C
OME
I
N
.

The entry hall was twenty feet wide, almost as tall, and ran the depth of the house, ending at a wall of sheer curtains and floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the
receptionist’s desk. Loutie sat in front of those windows, where harsh December light silhouetted every curve of the curviest woman I’ve ever known.

I walked across marble and slate and handmade rugs, passed between staircases that curved onto the floor like twin parentheses, and stopped in front of a small desk designed to let clients check out the receptionist’s legs.

Loutie flashed a beautiful smile. “Yes sir? May I help you?” No wink. No sidelong glance. She was playing her part to the hilt.

I told one of my best friends my name. “I’m here to see Mr. Wagler.”

“Just a moment.” Loutie punched a button on an electronic console and spoke quietly into a tiny microphone suspended from a single earpiece that seemed to bloom naturally from her ear. She punched another button. “His assistant is on her way down.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“No,” I said, “I really appreciate your help.”

“It’s no problem, sir.”

“Seriously, you’re great at this. Do they send you to school for this or what? I don’t mind telling you. I’ve had some complaints about my secretary’s greeting skills. And I’m thinking …”

Loutie looked hard into my eyes, and my stomach tightened a little. She whispered, “Get away from me.”

I tried to smile. It wasn’t easy. I’m a little afraid of Loutie Blue.

High heels echoed on marble, and I looked up to see an attractive, middle-aged woman descending the left staircase. As I met her eyes, she said, “Good afternoon Mr. McInnes. Mr. Wagler will meet you in his conference
room.” She reached the foot of the stairs and held out her hand. I shook it. The woman had a nice handshake. She told me her name was Cruella.

“I’m sorry?”

She smiled. “Sue Ella. Named for my grandmothers.” I apologized.

She smiled again. “Happens all the time. This way, please.”

Upstairs, the ceilings fell to ten feet, and the flooring changed from marble and slate to heart pine. Cruella Sue Ella paused outside a paneled door and tapped with one knuckle.

A male voice said, “Come in.”

My escort opened the door, stepped aside while I walked through, and remained in the hallway when she closed it.

Inside, Bill Wagler sat at one end of the conference table and Judge Luther Savin—chief judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and Dr. Laurel Adderson’s love machine—sat at the other.

Wagler rose out of his seat and took my hand. “Good of you to come, Tom. I’ve been looking forward to this.” He motioned at Judge Savin, who sat watching me with a smile on his lips. “You know the judge, I believe.”

“Yes. He and I had dinner together at the home of a mutual friend just two nights ago.” I flashed my best fake smile. “Good to see you again, judge.”

Judge Savin didn’t respond. He just sat there—round, furry, and satisfied—like a tomcat who’d just batted around and then devoured the last rat in the barn.

He was starting to piss me off.

Wagler motioned toward an empty chair. “Sit down. Please. Judge Savin and I had finished up and were just
catching up on Montgomery politics. He was getting up to leave when you came in.”