Accused (8 page)

"Not out the front door. Reporter."

Scott went back to the bail window, signed for her personal effects, and asked Sarge if Rebecca could leave out a back door. Sarge obliged. While he took her around back, Scott walked outside and past Renée Ramirez just as her cell phone rang. She answered and said, "
What?
He's here? I didn't see a lawyer go in." She hung up and hurried inside, trailed by her cameraman. Scott got into the Jetta and drove around back where he found Sarge with Rebecca. He opened the door for her like a hotel doorman.

"Hope you enjoyed your stay, ma'am."

Sarge shut the door and gave them a little salute. Scott drove around front just as Renée Ramirez and her cameraman came running back out.

"Duck down."

Rebecca ducked her head until they had exited the parking lot. When she came back up, she said, "What happened to the Ferrari?"

"Repoed. I lost everything. Sold the house to avoid foreclosure when the bank called the note."

Scott drove past the bail bonds and low-rent law offices that lined 54th Street, bit players in the tragedy that was the American criminal justice system. He stopped at a red light at Broadway. They sat in silence until the light turned green. He stepped on the gas pedal, and she spoke in a soft voice.

"Scott, they think I killed Trey.
Why?
"

"I don't know. But I'll find out."

Scott parked on Seawall Boulevard fronting the Gulf of Mexico.

"Let's walk."

They got out. Rebecca lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes, inhaling the fresh sea air like a lifer pardoned after thirty years behind bars.

"I'm free. Thank God. I thought I was going to die in there."

Three days in county jail—she'd never make life in prison. They walked down the wide sidewalk. Across the boulevard to their left were bars, restaurants, hotels, condos, and swim shops; to their right was the beach, seventeen feet below. The air was warm and the sky blue. The breeze blew strong and brought the smell of the sea to shore. Above them, white seagulls floated on the wind currents then suddenly dove down to the water and swooped back up with fish in their beaks. Down below on the beach, colorful umbrellas lined the narrow strip of sand. Sunbathers lay on towels, surfers rode the low waves, and tourists tiptoed through the tide. Waves crashed against the jetties or died out in the sand. Girls in bikinis and boys in swim trunks rolled past on rollerblades and skateboards. Parents pedaled children in surreys. To anyone who observed them, they were just another couple strolling the seawall on a fine summer day, not a lawyer and his ex-wife who stood accused of murdering her lover. A police cruiser with lights flashing and siren wailing sped past. Rebecca froze until it was out of sight then turned to him.

"Scott, I can't go back to that jail."

"Don't worry. You won't."

That assurance and the fresh air seemed to relax her. A block further down, she pointed at a structure being built atop pilings embedded in the beach.

"Ike took down the Hooters and Murdoch's Pier. They're rebuilding Murdoch's."

A few more steps and she gestured at two rows of vacant pilings extending into the Gulf.

"And that's all that's left of the Balinese."

For almost four decades after the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture, sale, transportation, and importation of intoxicating liquors in America took effect in 1920, sinners flocked to Galveston Island for booze, prostitution, and gambling. Galveston became known as "Sin City." And no venue on the Island offered more sin than the Balinese Room, a swanky South Sea-themed speakeasy situated at the end of a wooden pier extending six hundred feet into the Gulf of Mexico. Two Sicilian-born barbers who became bootleggers named Salvatore and Rosario Maceo brought sin and stars to Galveston, Texas. Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Groucho Marx played the Balinese, where a bartender concocted the first margarita. Proud locals dubbed their lawless island the "Free State of Galveston" where sin reigned supreme until 1957 when the Texas Rangers raided the Balinese Room and shut down vice on the Island. The Balinese's glory days came to an end, but the red building on the 21st Street pier had remained a Galveston landmark until Hurricane Ike washed it out to sea.

"Remember that spring break?" Rebecca asked.

He did. They had come to Galveston with a group from SMU, he the former football star and she the reigning Miss SMU. They had partied at the Balinese Room and had sex on the beach. Every night.

"I could never drive past the Balinese without thinking of that week," she said.

"Why, Rebecca?"

"Those nights on the beach—"

"No. Why'd you leave me?"

Twenty-two months and eleven days he had waited to ask her that question.

"Scott, I …"

"I kept your letter. You said—"

"Don't, Scott. I'm not that person anymore."

"Rebecca, what did you need from me that I didn't give you?"

"It wasn't you, Scott. It was me."

"Was it because I lost everything?"

"It was because
I
was lost. I didn't know who I was. I was playing a role. All my life I had played a role. Little Miss Texas. Miss Dallas. Miss SMU. Miss Cheerleader. Mrs. A. Scott Fenney, the most beautiful woman in Highland Park. I felt like I was always onstage … or in a cage. Like an animal in the zoo, everyone staring at me. When the cage door opened, I ran." She faced him. "I'm sorry, Scott. I know I hurt you … both of you."

They walked another block before Rebecca spoke again.

"Can I see her? Boo."

EIGHT

"And Scotty Junior was a girl named Boo," Rebecca said.

Scott had parked in the shade of the beach house, but they had not gotten out. They sat and watched Boo on the beach. She had changed into a white swimsuit and was building a sand castle with a little shovel and bucket. Her head of red hair bobbed like a buoy in the Gulf.

"Last time I saw her, she had her hair in cornrows."

"That lasted a while then she went to the ponytail."

"She's so tall."

"She's eleven now."

"I sent her birthday presents."

Boo had never opened them.

"How is she?"

"She's good. Makes straight As. They both do."

"Both who?"

"She and her sister."

"
Sister?
You remarried?"

"I adopted."

He pointed at Pajamae, who came running down the beach to Boo. Louis soon followed and stood watch nearby, holding a book in one hand as if reading to the girls below or the gulls above.

"Shawanda's daughter."

"That's her? The little black girl you brought home?"

Scott nodded. "Her mother died. She's mine now."

"She's living with you in Highland Park?"

"Yep."

"How's that working?"

"It has its moments."

"I read you got her mother off."

"She was innocent."

"So am I."

They watched the girls a while longer, then Scott said, "She might act mad at first, so be prepared."

Rebecca took a deep breath and opened her door. They got out and walked to the beach. Pajamae spotted them and waved. Boo looked their way then shielded her eyes from the sun. Her hand dropped, and she stood frozen, as if trying to choose between her anger or her mother. After a long moment, she broke into a big smile and ran to her mother. Rebecca dropped to her knees and held her arms out; Boo dove into her arms, and they fell to the sand. Their heads of red hair became one. Scott left them alone and walked over to Pajamae and Louis.

"Boo's real happy to see her mama," Pajamae said.

Louis looked up from his book. "I expect she is."

Pajamae stood motionless, watching Boo and her mother and wondering if she would lose her sister to that white woman.

Scott arrived and said, "Honey, let's find some seashells."

"Soon as I finish this chapter, Mr. Fenney," Louis said.

"I meant Pajamae."

"Oh. Say, I like this Cormac dude. Writes like real folks talk." He snapped the book shut like a preacher who had just finished his sermon. "Reckon I'll build us a fire ring. Mr. Herrin, he says we're gonna barbecue shrimp on the beach tonight."

"Shrimp on the barbie and man beer on the beach," Bobby said. "Doesn't get any better than this."

They were drinking bottled beer iced in a tin bucket stuck in the sand and eating char-broiled shrimp dipped in Louis's homemade Cajun-style barbecue sauce. Louis had constructed a fire ring from rocks that would have made a brick mason proud. Inside the ring, the fire spit flames up through a black grill that made the shrimp sizzle. They were sitting around the campfire like cowboys on a cattle drive. And there among his friends and his children and his wife—ex-wife, anyway—Scott Fenney felt whole again.

The air had cooled enough for the girls to need sweat shirts. Boo's head lay in Rebecca's lap and Pajamae's in Boo's lap. They were fighting sleep, afraid they might miss something grownup and interesting. Consuela held Maria in her arms; the baby was wrapped in a blanket like a papoose. The moon and fire provided the only light. The burning wood cracked and popped and spit sparks that floated up into the dark sky and filled the air with a sweet aroma. Rebecca's face glowed in the light of the fire. She had showered, and her red hair was now full and fluffy in the night breeze. She did not look like a murderer.

"You're in your eighth month?" she said to Karen.

Karen was eating cookie-dough ice cream out of the carton. Bobby was helping her.

"And enjoying every constipated moment of it," she said.

"Louis's barbecue sauce will take care of that," Bobby said.

"Guaranteed cure for all that ails a body," Louis said.

Rebecca held her plate out to Louis again. She was eating as if she'd been a political prisoner on a starvation fast in jail; but the food had improved her spirits. She had spent the rest of the day walking the beach with Boo. When Boo had gone inside to clean up, Rebecca had stood alone on the beach, staring out to sea, as if the answer to her prayers lay out there, somewhere. Scott had gone to her and stood by her. She had seemed depressed, but that was to be expected. She was the prime suspect in a murder case. Rebecca now turned to Karen.

"Did you go to SMU?"

"Rice."

"But you're pretty enough to have gotten into SMU."

"I was smart enough to get into Rice."

"Oh. So how'd you hook up with these guys?"

"I worked for Scott at Ford Stevens. Didn't care for that life, so I left to help them with Shawanda's case. Plus, I fell for a certain handsome lawyer."

"But she married me," Bobby said.

"Don't make me laugh, Bobby, I'll pee in my pants again."

"Diaper."

"You'll be a great father, Bobby," Rebecca said. "Seems like yesterday we were all at SMU … What happened to all that curly hair?"

"Too much testosterone. Makes you go bald."

"Oh, that explains it," Karen said. "I've gained forty pounds and he still can't keep his hands off me."

"I've only gained thirty," Bobby said, digging his spoon into the ice cream carton.

They talked and laughed and ate shrimp and drank beer, as if they were on a family vacation. Scott wished they were. But they were there because the man who had taken his wife was dead.

"Those were good times back then," Rebecca said.

"Last time we were down here, that spring break," Bobby said, "I almost got into a fight at the Balinese with some UT guys. Scotty saved me."

Boo sat up. "A. Scott got into a fight at the Village," she said. "Mother, it was so exciting!"

"A fight?" Rebecca said. "At a shopping center?"

"He beat up a car with his nine-iron," Boo said.

"Why?"

"Because I didn't have a three-wood," Scott said.

"Because the bad man followed me and Pajamae there," Boo said. "So I called A. Scott and he came and broke out the windows on the man's car with his golf club, then the man drove off. It was great."

"What bad man?"

"McCall's goon," Scott said.

"When was this?"

"The day you left," Boo said.

"Oh."

There was an awkward moment of silence. Everyone stared at the sand. Scott stood. "Okay, time for bed."

"Can Mother stay here? She can sleep with us."

"She's going home." To Rebecca: "Where is your home?"

She pointed west into the darkness. "About two miles down the beach. But I can't go home."

"Why not?"

"The police told me not to go back when they released me from jail, said it was still a crime scene, said I can't even get my clothes."