Death Come Quickly (3 page)

Ruby raised both eyebrows. “Karen went to the mall to
meet
somebody? I thought Felicity said she was shopping for a birthday present.”

“That's what she told her daughter,” Sheila said. “But Felicity remembered the phone call and thought there might be a connection. We're looking into it from that angle, since—as you say—this doesn't sound like your everyday mugging.”

I finished tallying the checks and paper-clipped the calculator tape to the deposit slip. “If you want to know anything about that film Karen's students have been working on,” I said, “you can ask Ruby. She's in it.”

“No kidding?” Sheila asked in surprise, turning to Ruby. “What role do you play?”

“Myself,” Ruby said modestly.

“It's a documentary,” I explained. “Ruby is one of the talking heads. She knows the whole brutal story, beginning to end.”

“I am an interview subject,” Ruby put in quickly. “Talking heads are on TV.”

“Whatever.” I pulled a blue bank deposit bag out from under the counter.

“Brutal?” Sheila asked. “Brutal, how?”

“It's a documentary about an old crime,” Ruby said. “One of my neighbors in the San Jacinto neighborhood was murdered, thirteen or fourteen years ago.” She shivered. “She was beaten to death. With a golf club.”

“A golf club.” Sheila pursed her lips. “What was the victim's name?”

“Christine Morris. Maybe you've heard about her.”

“Oh, yes, the Morris case,” Sheila said. “We're carrying it in the cold case files, although Bubba swears they charged the right man—somebody named Borden, I think. He was acquitted.” Bubba Harris was Sheila's predecessor. He had been chief since Pecan Springs was just a bump on the Texas map, and not a very big one at that. “Of course, it wasn't Bubba's fault,” Sheila added with a touch of irony. “He insists that the jury was bamboozled by some slick, highfalutin defense attorney from out of town.” She grinned at me. She never misses an opportunity to rub my nose in my former profession. “In any event, Borden walked.”

“Bowen, not Borden,” Ruby corrected her. “Dick Bowen. He lived next door to Christine. After he was acquitted, he moved to Houston. He's dead now—died a couple of years ago.”

“And that slick big-city defense attorney,” I put in, “would be Johnnie Carlson.” I bent over to hide the fifty dollars in bills and ten dollars in change that I keep overnight under a stack of bags. I always leave the register open. I'd much rather a burglar get away with the cash than destroy the cash register looking for it. “Johnnie's dead, too,” I added. “Died several years ago, of a heart attack.”

“Bowen's attorney was quite a character,” Ruby remarked with interest. “You actually
knew
that guy?”

“For a while, we both worked for the same law firm,” I replied. “He and another attorney—both of them renegades—bailed out of the firm a year or two before I did, and opened their own practice. They asked me to go with them, but at the time, I wasn't ready to leave.”

Another attorney. That would be Aaron. Aaron Brooks. The thought of him made me smile. I picked up a dust cloth (made by soaking a microfiber cloth in a solution of equal parts vinegar and water, with a dollop of olive oil and a few drops of lemon essential oil) and began wiping the counter, which is the last thing I do every night before I leave. “Johnnie and his partner and I were drinking together one evening, some time after the Bowen trial. He told us the story.”

I remember telling Aaron that I wished I'd been at the trial, so I could have watched Johnnie put on his defense. He had mentored me when I tried my first cases and I always learned from him. In the Bowen case, he used the same strategy that the O.J. Simpson dream team had used to squeeze the Juice out of a double murder conviction: basically, convincing the jury that the cops hadn't played by the rules. Unfortunately, that happens all too often. And in the Bowen case, Johnnie claimed that his client was innocent of the murder.

Aaron and I had laughed. “Yeah, Johnnie,” I teased, “innocent as a baby, so pure he floats.”

Of course, all three of us knew better than that. Sure, there are clients who claim to be totally innocent. But most are totally guilty—and if they're not guilty of the crime they're charged with, they're guilty of something else. (As in, “I did actually cheat on my husband, but I didn't stab the jerk in the heart with my sewing scissors while he was asleep.”)

Johnnie answered with a straight—and unusually serious—face, “Not exactly pure, no, which is another part of the story. I had a viable alternative suspect, but I couldn't proceed. The evidence was admissible, but the judge ruled the usual: marginal relevancy, unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, danger of misleading the jury.” He turned down his mouth. “Somebody told me later that the judge and the prosecutor always played poker on Friday nights.”

“That's too bad,” I said regretfully. “But it's no great surprise.”

Regardless of what you might have guessed from watching legal dramas on television, a defense attorney cannot save his client in the courtroom by pulling the real murderer out of his hat at the last moment. Texas, like most other states, operates according to Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence: “The court may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of one or more of the following: unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence.”

Translation: if the defense intends to argue that somebody else committed the crime, the attorney has to present the evidence to the judge before the jury is allowed to hear it. He doesn't have to demonstrate a bulletproof link between the alternative suspect and the crime, but he does have to convince the judge that he is not just guessing, wasting the court's time, gumming up the works, or leading the jury into the wilderness. The attorney can't simply haul witnesses into court and fire questions at them willy-nilly, with the hope of coming up with some clever bit of information that will magically convert speculation into fact, like the miracle of changing water into wine.

And the trial judge has the last word on the matter—until appeal, anyway. He's supposed to recuse himself if he feels that his friendship with one of the opposing counsel (or the royal flush dealt to him by the prosecutor the previous Saturday night) might prejudice his opinion. But most of the time judges don't. They like to think of themselves as impartial as Solomon, which is a pile of horsefeathers, of course. Any defense attorney will tell you that a judge is just a lawyer who's been promoted (via election or appointment) to the bench—and that most trial judges like to be seen as coming down like a ton of bricks on criminals. Ergo, they tend to favor the prosecution.

“Yeah, too damn bad,” Johnnie replied with a shrug. “But I knew we weren't in trouble. The investigating officer was in a hurry to pick on somebody—for his own reasons, of course. And Bowen made the mistake of living right next door. The cops targeted him as their perp without bothering to consider anybody else. But there
was
another suspect, a viable one. Someday I'll show you the notes on my argument in chambers, China, and you'll see why I say that.”

“Too bad you didn't pull a Perry Mason,” Aaron had said lazily.

I laughed. “Yeah. You could've scored a few extra points for justice.”

Johnnie grunted. “Who gives a damn about justice? I didn't need to go to the trouble. The cops zeroed in on the wrong guy when they picked Bowen. He was Pecan Springs' favorite son, a stalwart in the community. He had given money and time to every worthy cause in town. The jury was in his corner start to finish, and the investigators' mistakes gave the jurors more than enough cause for reasonable doubt. I knew Bowen was going to walk, and he did. To hell with justice.”

That may sound callous, but it's not. Finding the real murderer wasn't in Johnnie's job description. All he had to do was get his client off. Justice was not his problem.

He downed his drink in one gulp. “But as I say, China, I'll be glad to show you my alternative suspect notes. Maybe someday they'll be relevant. To something or other.”

“Hey.” Sheila turned back to Ruby. “I'm lost. What's all this about? And what does it have to do with Karen Prior?”

“Karen is a faculty member in Radio-TV-Film at CTSU,” Ruby explained. “She's supervising the filming of a documentary about Christine Morris' murder. It's a thesis project for a couple of her graduate students—just about finished now, I understand. And yes, it
was
brutal—the Christine Morris murder, I mean. I was still married to Wade then, and we lived down the street.” Wade Wilcox and Ruby have been divorced for as long as I've known her. “I saw the place where she was killed,” Ruby added, “and the puddle of dried blood. It didn't get cleaned up for days and days.” She shuddered. “The thing about Christine, though—” She stopped.

Sheila waited a moment, then asked, “What about her?”

Ruby sighed. “I hate to speak ill of the dead. But the truth is that
everybody
spoke ill of her, and while she was still very much alive
.
She was an out-of-towner—a ‘foreigner' from River Oaks—who had an inflated idea of her own importance.” River Oaks, deep in the heart of Houston, is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Texas. “She came to Pecan Springs and made a career out of making enemies. I'm sure that documentary will be very interesting.” She shook her head, frowning. “Gosh. With Karen in the hospital, I wonder what's going to happen to the film. The girls—Kitt and Gretchen—have already put a ton of work into it. I hope they'll be able to finish it.”

Sheila started to say something, but her cell phone dinged. She spoke briefly into it, then snapped it shut. “I think I might need to know more about that documentary,” she said. She pulled out her notebook. “Kitt and Gretchen? Last names?”

“Kitt Bradley, Gretchen Keene. Kitt is a friend of my daughter, Amy. Both Kitt and Gretchen are grad students in the RTF department. You can reach them there.”

“Gretchen Keene?” I repeated, surprised. “I know her. She's Jake's sister.” Jake is my son Brian's longtime girlfriend. Gretchen, who was a student in a couple of McQuaid's undergraduate criminology classes, had been to our house several times, either with Jake or with McQuaid's class. I hadn't known she was interested in film.

Sheila wrote down the names and flipped her notebook shut. “I have to get back to the office. How about if I drop in tomorrow and get you to tell me what you know about the situation behind the documentary? It may turn out to have something to do with the attack on Prior. And regardless of what Bubba says, the Morris case is still an open cold case. It might just give us a lead.”

“Of course,” Ruby said. “I'll be glad to.”

“Make it around noon.” I put the currency, the checks, the credit card slips, and the calculator tape into the bank deposit bag. “Cass has come up with a couple of new items for the tearoom menu, using roses. You can give us your opinion.”

A few years ago, Ruby and I remodeled the back of the building, adding a small but fully equipped and state-licensed commercial kitchen and a tearoom, Thyme for Tea. Cass Wilde does the cooking and Ruby and I and a couple of helpers manage the serving. Cass also does the cooking for our catering service, Party Thyme, and the three of us work together to staff the events—small parties and large. (If you're interested, you'll find brochures on the counters in our shops and on the tables in the tearoom.) Obviously, we are a busy bunch. But you can't have a successful business without keeping busy. It takes a lot of sweat to grow a healthy bottom line.

“Roses? You said roses?” Sheila wrinkled her nose. “Roses are for pretty, not for eating.”

“Wrong,” I said. “Prepare to be surprised.”

“Well, if you're sure.” Sheila paused, with a mysterious look. “But I came here with a question and some news, so before I go, I want to tell you. You have to promise to keep it a secret, though.”

“Tell us what?” Ruby asked, leaning forward. Her eyes were sparkling. Ruby likes nothing more than having a secret, although she's not very good at keeping them.

“Hey, wait.” Sheila lifted a cautioning hand. “First you have to promise not to breathe a word—to anybody.”

I zipped the deposit bag shut. “I hope your secret isn't another job, Smart Cookie, because that would mean you'd be moving out of town.” I paused, frowning. “But if that were the case, I'm sure I'd know about it already. Blackie would have told McQuaid.”

Sheila and I are more than just friends. Her husband and my husband are in business together: McQuaid, Blackwell, and Associates, Private Investigators. Blackie Blackwell and Mike McQuaid. I got used to calling my husband—a former Houston homicide detective—by his last name when we met on a domestic violence case, with both of us on the same side, for a change. Yes, I know. It's dicey to fall for a cop because most of them spell trouble. And because the only thing shared by most female defense lawyers and most male cops is a permanent and reciprocal antagonism. But while I still keep my bar membership current, I am no longer a practicing attorney and McQuaid—although he's still in the investigating business—is no longer a cop. He's a part-time faculty member in the CTSU Criminal Justice Department and a private investigator. And since Blackie signed on last year, their caseload has tripled. They're a good team. They have all the work they can handle, and then some.

“It's not another job,” Sheila said. “Well, I suppose it is, but not in the way you're thinking.” There was that mysterious look again. “But I won't tell you unless you promise.”