Blind Justice (13 page)

THE FIRST AVAILABLE pub was a place called Frisbee’s, just about a mile from the main highway.

It was spacious and cool inside with two large-screen TVs at either end. Both were blaring a baseball game for the afternoon crowd, which appeared to be young locals and a few older professionals.

Surprised at how tired I was, I took a seat at a small table. There was some sort of psychic combat going on between Tolletson and me. It went beyond the usual sparring between prosecution and defense. It had something to do with reminders of my father, but it also felt like something deeper. I didn’t know what. All I knew was that I had to beat Benton Tolletson.

But how?

My case was extremely weak. Although the defense doesn’t have to prove innocence, it’s an unwritten rule that in fact, it does. Ninety-five percent of the time, the prosecution wins either through plea agreement or verdict. Occasionally, a strong case of reasonable doubt takes the verdict away. However, when the defense wins a not-guilty verdict, it’s almost always because it has proved to the jury’s satisfaction that the defendant is innocent.

A young waitress in a Frisbee’s tee shirt asked what I wanted. I almost said,
A friendly person around here to talk to.
I ordered a beer instead.

The TVs were carrying a contest between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. I watched the game half-heartedly for awhile, ordered another beer from the pretty waitress, and got a little drowsy. In fact, I started drifting toward slumber, snapping my head back to upright every time it started to droop.

In this state, I had a vision.

I’m not talking about a bright, bold movie before my eyes, but merely the hint of a dream, or a nightmare.

In this scant hallucination I saw a courtroom hallway. I was looking through my eyes as if I was actually standing in this corridor and waiting to go inside a courtroom. People walked up and down the hallway silently, looking more like the walking dead than real folk.

Then I saw Benton Tolletson walking toward me. He had on a three-piece suit and held a briefcase and walked in slow motion. He walked with purpose, his face set like a stone god. Then he came right up to me and stopped. I looked at his face. It was frozen for an instant.

Then it changed, transforming from the stern but benign visage of the local district attorney to a horrible, monstrous face—with hungry, lupine eyes and sharp, fanged teeth that dripped blood.

I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding. I may have said something out loud, something like, “What in the . . .”

For a moment I sat there like a person coming out of a coma who had to readjust his vision for a minute or two to get his brain back to working order.

As I felt my way back to awareness, I heard the fight start.

Someone was yelling at the far end of the bar. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was unmistakable. Whoever it was, he was ready to take on all comers.

Then I saw two bodies wrestle each other off their bar stools and onto the floor. Almost immediately, they were surrounded by other patrons and a bartender pulling them away from each other. The shouting drowned out the din of the ballgame.

The pretty waitress arrived with my beer and set it down on the table even as she watched the commotion.

“Is it always like this?” I asked with a laugh.

“No,” she replied. “It’s just Darcy.”

“Darcy?”

“Hazelton.”

I thought a moment. “Where have I heard that name before?”

“The winery,” she said. “He’s the captain’s kid.”

That was it. Captain Warren Hazelton. I’d read a story about his winery in the local paper.

The bartender and a couple of other patrons were showing Darcy to the door. “He come in here often?” I asked the waitress.

“All the time. Never a dull moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“He gets that way when he’s had a few.”

“Likes to make a scene?”

“You got it.”

“Spoiled rich kid?”

“Something like that. His parents . . .” She shook her head and made a face like she smelled something distasteful.

“What about his parents?”

“Weird.”

I heard the sound of a car engine angrily revving up, followed by the din of a radio station cranked all the way up and booming some sort of urban beat right into the bar and my chest.

“Nice sound system!” I shouted to the waitress. We listened as tires squealed and the blaring music did a Doppler effect away from the bar. I noticed the waitress was smiling. “In what way are his parents weird?” I asked.

“What? Oh, just weird. His mom’s really his stepmom.”

“What happened to his birth mother?”

“No one knows,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “I mean, one day she just wasn’t there.”

“She left?”

“Some say. When I was little, my friends and I used to say the house up there was haunted by the ghost of Darcy’s mother.”

“Is it?”

“Maybe,” she laughed, then scurried away to take care of another table.

For the first time I felt as if I’d finally gotten to know this town, the way you do when you hear about the skeletons in someone’s family closet. Maybe it was just my morbid curiosity, but I suddenly wanted to find out more about this particular set of bones.

I motioned for my waitress and asked her to send the guy over who had scuffled with Darcy Hazelton. She looked puzzled but did it for me. I watched as the guy at the bar looked my way, hesitated, then grabbed his glass of beer and walked to my table.

He was a big man in his mid-twenties. He wore a tank top that gave ample room for his muscles to show. On his upper right arm was a tattoo of a cobra ready to strike. His head was shaved, and he had a stud in his right ear. I was immediately sorry I’d asked for his company.

“Who are you?” he said coldly. His face was flushed, an obvious aftereffect of the scuffle. More than that, his eyes were red, a classic sign of some sort of substance abuse.

“Sit down a second,” I said.

He didn’t move. “What do you want?”

“I want to buy you a beer,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m a lawyer,” I said.

“So?”

“I’m working on a case up here.”

His eyes seemed glassy now, unfocused. His voice was low and thick. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“Please, have a seat.” I motioned for him to sit down. As he sat, I said, “My name’s Jake Denney.”

“Cool.”

“You have a name?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you like to share that with me?”

He had a dumb half-smile on his face, as if the littlest thing might amuse him. “Hang Creswell,” he said.

“Hank?”

“Hang. As in loose, man. Or noose.”

I raised my hand for the waitress. “What’ll you have?”

“Bud. Wise. Er.” He laughed.

After I ordered two of them, I said, “That’s an interesting first name you have. Where’d it come from?”

“Nickname. My real name is Chaney. Now wouldn’t you want a nickname if your first name was Chaney?”

I shrugged. “Beats some names I know.”

“I hate it. I surf. Hang is short for ‘Hang Ten.’ Get it?”

“You live around here?”

“A few miles. What’s this all about, man?”

The waitress returned with the beers, and Hang happily accepted.

“I want to get a feel for the town. I may be picking a jury here soon, and it pays to know the personality.”

“Personality?”

“All jury pools have a certain personality.”

“Cool. How do you find out?”

“Well, you can spend a lot of money and hire what is known as a jury consultant. Jury consultants study a certain demographic area and tell you what kind of people live there and what kind of person you want to sit on your jury.”

“That work?”

“When the lawyers on the side that hires a jury consultant win, they say it works.”

“What about when they lose?”

“They say they hired the wrong consultant.”

Hang Creswell laughed.

“My way,” I said, “is the product of necessity. I can’t afford to hire a consultant. So I try to talk to people in the area, get a feel for what they might think, who they are.”

“That why you’re talking to me?”

“Partly. The other part is that little scuffle that just took place. What happened?”

Smiling, Creswell said, “Oh, Darcy. He gets a little out of it sometimes.”

“You know him?”

“Sure, man.”

“So what was the fight about?”

“He said something about my sister. See, he likes the ladies. And he’s got money, family money, so he thinks he can say what he wants. I smacked him in the face, and he screamed and jumped me. That’s all.”

“That’s all? You make it sound like a friendly game of badminton.”

“You expect that from Darcy, that’s all. Anything else? I wanna get back to my friends.”

There wasn’t any reason to ask him the next question, but I did anyway, like a stab in the dark. “Did you know Rae Patino?”

Hang Creswell’s face, which had been sort of macho friendly, suddenly changed to macho cold. His eyes slowly widened. “You the lawyer for her husband?”

“That’s me.”

Creswell stood up quickly. “Thanks for the beer, man, but I ain’t talking to you.”

“Hey, why . . .”

“Forget it.”

I stood up and faced him. “Listen to me then. Did you know Chip Delliplane?”

Hang’s red-rimmed eyes turned serious and had a hint of sadness about them. “Oh, man, yeah. We surfed.”

“You think he drowned?”

“What are you talkin’ about, man?” He took two steps toward me and raised his right hand in a fist.

“Easy,” I said, “I’m just asking questions.”

“Well, you better not ask around here again, you got it?”

Before I could say another word, he turned and headed back to the bar.

I started to sense an undercurrent.

High-profile cases usually create an undercurrent, some unspecified but real feeling that permeates a community. When the community is small like this one, the undercurrent has greater palpability.

The problem is, you can’t predict the direction of the under-current. And, if you get caught in it, you don’t know where you’re going to end up.

Back at my apartment, I was assaulted by the angry blinking of my answering machine. It was Barb, and her voice was not friendly. “Call me the minute you get in.”

I called her.

“How could you do this, Jake?”

“I was up north. On a case.”

“Really?”

“Do you think I’m making this up?”

“I don’t know anymore, Jake. I really don’t. One of the things a drinker will do . . .” She didn’t finish.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“Have you been drinking today?”

My first instinct was to lie, but I knew she wouldn’t believe a denial. She had my number, in multiples. So I went into attack mode. “Is that an accusation of some kind?”

“Jake—”

“Because if it is, I’m not going to sit here and listen to it. I’ve got too many other things to deal with, like making a living.”

“Jake, will you—”

“Now why don’t you just settle down and bring Mandy over here right now.”

“No, Jake.”

“What do you mean,
No, Jake?”

“Mandy’s with Rick’s mom.”

“I don’t want her with Rick’s mom. I want her here.”

“She’s not coming.”

My face was getting hot, and my rationality was getting kicked downstairs by my anger. “You can go pick her up and bring her over here.”

“Jake, we have to talk.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I’m not going to bring her, Jake.”

“Then I’ll go get her myself.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Watch me!”

“Listen, Jake,” Barb said softly, “there’s something I have to tell you.”

I waited, hardly hearing her, aware of my own breathing.

“I’m going to change the custody arrangement,” she said.

My head erupted with rage. “You
what?”

“You’re a danger to yourself and to Mandy,” my ex-wife said coolly, as if she had the whole thing rehearsed. “I can’t have her in that environment.”

“Spell it out for me, Barb.”

“You need help.”

“About Mandy!”

“No unsupervised visits.”

“There’s no way.”

“It’s already that way, Jake. I’m going to get a restraining order.”

I suddenly felt like a blind man in an avalanche, not knowing which way to turn and powerless before the onslaught. “You really thought this out, didn’t you?”

Her tone sounded apologetic. “How else can we get through to you?”

“We? Who is this we?”

“Mandy and me.”

“Does she know about this?”

“Yes.”

“And I suppose she agrees with you?”

“She knows you need help.”

“She’s five years old! She knows what you tell her to know, and what you’ve told her is pretty obvious! Well, I’m going to report that you’ve kidnapped her, that you’re using her, that you’re an unfit mother. I’ll fight you every step of the way!” Specks of sweat popped out on my forehead.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Jake. I had hoped we could talk about this like adults.”

“I won’t forget this, Barb. I’m going to make your life miserable. I’m going to get you.”

No answer this time, just a click on the other end of the line.

For a long moment I just stood there, frozen in an emotional vice, not sure where the pressure was greatest. Images of Barb flashed into my head, setting off more rage, but they were quickly followed by a picture of Mandy, at a distance, beyond my reach, maybe forever.