Trace of Innocence (2 page)

“C
an I help you?” I asked warily.

The man slid off my hood and stood on the sidewalk, thrusting out his hand, which was the size of a baseball mitt. “Joe Franklin,” he said, smiling.

I didn’t take his hand. “What do you want?”

“A minute of both of your time.”

I turned to look at Lewis, but he had broken out in a huge grin. “Joe Franklin! My God, but I once made a thousand bucks off of you.” He walked to the man and shook his hand.

“You two know each other?” I asked.

“No,” said Lewis. “Never met. But this is Joe Franklin from the New Orleans Saints. Center. Retired. Blew his knee out, home game against Tampa Bay Bucs.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. I was completely confused, but then again, this was Lewis we were talking about. He invites confusion with the wily way he talks sometimes.

Joe Franklin smiled. He had the slightest of gaps between his two front teeth, which gleamed like a toothpaste-commercial smile. “We had a few losing seasons when I was with the Saints. You must have bet against the home team.”

“Naw, not me. I bet the over-under. I would never bet against the Saints. And you were the greatest center in the NFL at the time.”

“Thanks. Nice to be remembered. Well, listen, Mr. LeBarge—”

“Lewis.”

“Well, Lewis…Ms. Quinn—”

“How do you know my name?” I asked suspiciously.

“I’m the founder, with my partner, C.C., of the Justice Foundation.”

Now it all made sense to me. The Justice Foundation was a nonprofit group dedicated to freeing innocent prisoners through the use of DNA evidence.

“I’d like,” he said, “to buy you both a drink and see if maybe you might see it in your hearts to help us.”

I rolled my eyes. Where I come from, we know that if you’re in prison, even if the charge is made-up, chances are you belong there anyway. The guy they originally thought killed my mother was freed when he came up with an alibi. But he was arrested not six months after his release for strangling his stepdaughter.

“I don’t know.” I hesitated.

“Well, I could always use a drink,” Lewis said. “If you promise to regale me with the story of the time y’all beat the Bucs with that Hail Mary pass, I could at least listen to what you have to say.”

“Deal,” said Joe, flashing his megawatt smile. “Margaritas sound okay?”

Lewis nodded. “Man after my own heart. I like a nice tequila myself. Also like a smooth bourbon.”

“He hasn’t met a liquor he doesn’t like,” I muttered. Then I shrugged and sighed, but fell into step with Lewis and Joe. As we walked, I noticed that the massive man next to me was wearing loafers that had easily set him back a grand, and his pants had the crisp cut of an Italian designer. His leather jacket—which had to
have been custom-made, given his ex-NFL build—looked butter soft.

“You went to law school after the NFL, right?” Lewis asked.

Joe nodded. “Blew my knee out, but they still had to honor the rest of my contract. I had invested wisely over the five years I played. Owned my place outright, owned my car. Didn’t buy into the flash—except maybe for my clothes.” He grinned, running his hands down the lapel of his jacket. “I drove a nice Mercedes sedan, not a souped-up sports car. I was set for life, as far as I was concerned. Invested in real estate, some solid stocks. My mama taught me very well. ‘Don’t be a flash in the pan, son,’ she used to say. I was restless in retirement. She’d always instilled in me a love of reading and education so I decided to go to law school. After a couple of years with a blue-chip firm, I started my own private practice. I represent a lot of my old NFL buddies. Making almost as much as when I was with the league. But I started the Foundation because I felt that there were too many young African-American men in prison and that DNA might help get some of the innocent ones out. Since then, we’ve freed men of all colors and backgrounds.”

I pulled my jacket tighter around me as a brisk wind whipped down between the tall apartment buildings. The sign for Coyote Canyon was lit in neon, with a giant green cactus sign jutting out over the door. The place used to be a hole-in-the-wall, before Hoboken became a trendy place to live back two decades or so ago. Yuppies started renting anything and everything they could find, hence Coyote Canyon became popular with the suit-and-tie crowd fresh off the commuter trains that hurtled beneath the river to Manhattan.

When we walked in, the hostess recognized Joe and pointed to a table where a woman sat waiting for us. We maneuvered around the women in Manhattan stylish clothes and the men with real Rolex watches on their wrists and sat down. Joe leaned over to give the woman a peck on the cheek first.

“Lewis LeBarge, Billie Quinn, this is Sister Catherine Christine. She goes by C.C.”

The woman stood and smiled and shook each of our hands. She was stunning—and not dressed in a nun’s habit. She wore a simple black turtleneck and black pants over black riding boots. She had a plain gold band on her left hand, and a simple gold cross around her neck with a diamond chip in the center of it. Her hair was long—and she had lots of it, in tight, strawberry-blond curls.

“Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with us,” she said, smiling.

I looked over at Lewis, who was clearly captivated by her. He drawled, “May I ask how a nun and a football player ended up as partners?” He smiled as we sat down.

C.C. looked at Joe, who nodded.

“Well,” she said in a soft, gentle voice. “I was in prison ministry…. I know it seems an odd choice, but I always felt like prisoners are the modern-day lepers. Forgotten, tossed away…And I met a young man by the name of Thomas Garson. He’d been railroaded into taking a plea bargain for murder two, but he was innocent.”

“How did you know?” Lewis asked.

“Intuition. Prayer. Divine guidance. And I’ve been doing this long enough to smell the guilt on a man.”

I tried to avoid laughing out loud. Lewis and I were creatures of science—and intuition and prayer weren’t high on our agenda. Lewis was an atheist. I hadn’t darkened a Catholic church in years. I understood what was under a microscope or in my test tube. I trusted traces of blood and sperm, or intricate patterns of crystallized drugs. Like most criminalists, I was a chemistry major in college, and I had my masters in molecular biology.

“Thomas was a fan of Joe’s. His family had moved to New Jersey from Louisiana when he was a boy, but like a lot of people, he still rooted for that hometown team. Me? I could move to Alaska and still root for the Giants.”

“A nun who follows football?” Lewis cocked an eyebrow.

She laughed and continued. “I promised to try to get him an autograph or a letter of encouragement. I’m sure Joe thought I was crazy, but I tracked him down. I hadn’t realized he had gone into law. I told him about Thomas, and one thing led to another and Joe took his case pro bono and won an appeal. Thomas is now the file clerk for Joe’s firm. Has a new baby daughter and a pretty young wife who’s a paralegal.”

“A happy ending,” I said dryly. C.C. nodded. “But for every happy ending, there’s an innocent man languishing. More like ten innocent men. If they’re of color or they’re Hispanic or foreign-born, the number rises.”

A waitress came over and Joe ordered a pitcher of margaritas and a basket of chips with salsa.

“No offense, Sister,” I began. “But we just process the evidence. It’s not for us to determine if some guy is guilty or innocent.”

“Please call me C.C.” she said. I wanted to
dislike her because she gave off an aura of such kindness my instinct was to think she was a fake, but I couldn’t make myself. She just seemed that nice.

The waitress returned with a pitcher, four glasses and a basket filled with freshly warmed tortilla chips.

“Look,” Joe said, leaning on the table with both elbows. “Walter Leighton used to advise us. But now that he’s a super celebrity, he’s forgotten us. We need you two to help us look at cases to see if there’s even the possibility that new evidence might reverse a conviction or win a new trial.”

“I always knew that Walter’s swelled head would get the best of him,” Lewis said.

Walter Leighton had written the forensic bible. When he consulted on a couple of really huge cases, his face time on
Court TV, Dateline, Primetime Live
and the
Today Show
increased until he was pretty much a household name and a celebrity. Then he had a ghostwriter pen two novels about a forensics investigative team and a police detective, sold about a million copies of each, and now he was famous and rich. Lewis hated the sight of Walter. I used to think it was professional jealousy. After I got to know Lewis better, I realized he saw the arrogance in Wal
ter. It would be just like that guy to abandon the Justice Foundation. If Walter had walked away from C.C. and Joe, I knew just what Lewis was going to say before he even said it.

“We’ll be happy to offer our professional opinions where we can,” he said.

We.
I’d gotten used to that, too. It was as if he thought of us as one person in that lab.

C.C. took out a folder from her briefcase. Her eyes were moist when she looked at us. “You have no idea how grateful we are.” She absentmindedly patted Joe’s forearm. “This work…it’s our lives.”

She slid the folder across the table.

Staring up at me from the mug shot was a man who made me blink slowly several times. He was beautiful. But beyond that, his eyes were soulful. Large and dark. He had a small scar on his left cheek, right near the corner of his eye, which brought my gaze to rest right at his pupils. His eyelashes were dark and made his eyes appear almost angelic. His hair was black and thick, with curl at the ends. He held up his processing number, and he looked stunned.

“What’s pretty boy’s story?” Lewis asked.

“David Falco is serving life for a rape-murder. The suicide king case,” C.C. replied.

“I don’t remember that one,” I said.

“About ten years ago. A woman murdered in her apartment. She was an acquaintance of his. She was splayed out, and the suicide king from a deck of playing cards—you know, the one with the knife through the head—was left by her side. A knife had been plunged into her temple.”

“Oh yeah.” I nodded. “Now I remember.” I had learned not to shudder anymore. Too many depraved cases.

“Evidence tying him to the murder?” I asked. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I had a knot in my belly, as if I wanted to believe that the man whose face was so innocent-looking had to be, in fact, innocent.

“Not much. He admitted he had been in her apartment, so his fingerprints were there, but no fingerprint on the knife or the playing card. He was seen leaving her apartment in the window of time when she was likely murdered—but so was another man who was never found or questioned. David said the three of them had been hanging out together.”

“So who was the other man?”

“He doesn’t know. Said it was a friend of hers. But he never got the guy’s name.”

“Sounds fishy,” Lewis said.

“I know,” said C.C., “but there was possibly semen on her panties—panties lost by the police. The case was botched from the word
go.
And I don’t know…he just doesn’t give off a dangerous vibe.”

“None of them do,” Lewis said, pouring himself another margarita.

“That’s not so. Even men who are innocent, after a time in prison, they start to smell of violence. They give off that feeling. But not him.”

“So where do we come in?” I asked, still fascinated by the picture.

“Well, the panties surfaced after the trial in a paper bag in another evidence file. They were well preserved and I figure we have one shot at testing what may or may not be semen. I mean, we think it is. And we just need a break on this one.”

I sipped my margarita and stared down at the picture. I wondered what the years in prison had done to that innocent-looking face.

I
drove a drunken Lewis home. He was a goner, and I don’t mean just drunk—though he was that, too.

“Isn’t she amazing?”

“Who?”

“Don’t give me that—C.C.” He pressed the electric button to move his seat way back in the car so he could stretch his legs.

I tried to avoid swerving off the road. “You can’t be serious.”

“What? You don’t think she’s beautiful?”

“Yes, I think she’s stunning. She’s also an N-U-N. Lewis…she’s not available.”

“I know.” He smacked his forehead with his hand. “My luck I finally meet a woman besides you that I’m interested in and she’s a nun. A beautiful nun, not one with a hairy mole on her chin.”

“I’m not even going to ask why that would be your impression of nuns, because I’m sure there’s some demented Lewis LeBarge story having to do with a decrepit old nun and I’m not in the mood.”

“It’s a good story.”

“Save it,” I snapped. “Lewis, be straight with me. Is the reason we’re doing this consulting work revenge against Walter Leighton or is it because you’ve got a crush on a nun?”

“A combination.”

“But it really has nothing to do with wanting to see justice served.”

“Not really, no.”

“You drive me nuts.”

“I know. Listen, do you recall whether the lid was closed on Ripper’s tank?”

About once a week, Lewis lost his tarantula.

“I think it was closed.”

I eased my car into a space on the street.

“You want to crash here tonight?” Lewis asked, looking at me.

“As long as Ripper is in his tank, yeah.”

We climbed out of the car and went into Lewis’s house. I was tired, but I was still thinking about the whole crazy night. Lewis gave me a drunken hug, which for him also usually means planting a very loud kiss on my cheek—an exaggerated form of affection.

“There’s pork rinds and Slim Jims if you’re hungry, and your usual in the fridge.”

“I’ll pass on the snacks, but I think I’ll have a Dr. Brown’s.”

I had long ago developed an addiction for Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda—not always easy to find. The addiction was nurtured by my father, who used to take me and my brother to every diner between Rahway Correctional, where we visited my uncles, and home in Montclair, New Jersey, as well as every town we ever visited that had a diner, for that matter. Lewis always kept a supply of black cherry soda on hand, along with his sickening snack choices.

I heard Lewis climb up his stairs, and then I heard first one boot, then the other hit the floor as he pulled them off. I wandered into the kitchen and pulled a Dr. Brown’s out of the refrigerator. I walked back into the living room. A soft chenille blanket was draped over the back of the very comfortable leather couch. I settled a pillow on the arm of the couch and took the
remote and clicked on to Comedy Central. Part of me wanted to laugh. I popped the top on my soda and started drinking. It hit the spot, but then, like the soda often did, it made me start thinking about my father, my brother, my mother and me. It was entwined with my memories of childhood. And then, inevitably, I thought of the night she disappeared.

The lights of a cop cruiser reflected through the window and onto the walls of my bedroom. Red pulsated and filled my room. I rubbed my eyes and sat up as a police officer entered my room, the beam from his flashlight hitting my face. The cop lowered the flashlight immediately.

“Hey, sweetie,” he soothed. “You okay?”

I nodded sleepily.

“Okay, then. You go back to sleep, honey.”

“Is Mommy okay?”

“Why?”

“I heard them arguing.”

“Who?”

I shrugged.

The cop came closer to me. “Think, honey. Can you remember what they said?”

I shook my head. “Where’s Mikey?”

“Your brother?”

I nodded.

“He’s downstairs with Officer Martin. You want to come down there?”

I nodded, and my teeth started chattering. Something was wrong, and I had no idea what. The cop came to my bed, and I saw the shadow of pity cross his face, a shadow I have learned to recognize many times since then. He scooped me into his arms and carried me down in my nightgown to the kitchen where my brother, Mikey, sat eating cookies with Officer Martin. They were dunking Keebler chocolate chip cookies into milk, and Mikey was talking a mile a minute.

I looked around the kitchen, teeth still chattering, and was handed a glass of Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda in a highball glass with ice cubes. The officers asked me questions that I no longer remember. All I do remember is the look on my father’s face when he got home that night.

She would never have left them alone,
he screamed. He shouted what I already knew. In the instant I saw the red lights reflecting on my bedroom walls, in the moments of sipping Dr. Brown’s, the bubbles tingling my nose, I knew. Whereas Mikey always had about him the belief that the world was a safe place, I knew differently.

Like Ripper on the prowl, even as a little kid I knew that sometimes bad things escaped from their hiding places.