A Clean Kill (16 page)

And so it went.

The article concluded by briefly outlining Galerina’s civic and charitable activities in the Greater Mobile Area before finally, in the last sentence, noting that the previous day’s warrant for my arrest had been “withdrawn pending further investigation.”

It was a good job. Chris Galerina looked like the Pope. I looked like a serial killer.

I drove back home, went into the kitchen, and made coffee. The first time my phone rang, I picked it up. After that, I let the reporters leave messages. Five calls in, I heard Kelly’s voice on the machine. She was telling me about the newspaper story.

“Kelly?”

“Oh. Hi. Did you hear my message?”

“Yeah. I’ve got the paper in front of me. Some schmuck with Channel Three called this morning while I was still in bed.”

Kelly sounded scared. “What are you going to do?”

“Right now I’m drinking coffee.”

A little time went by before she spoke again. “We got a fax this morning from the State Bar.”

I waited.

“There’s no good way to tell you this, Tom. The letter says you’ve been temporarily suspended from the practice of law until they can set up a hearing before the disciplinary committee.” She paused. “You want me to fax over the letter?”

“Might as well. And you may as well cancel my appointments for today while you’re at it.”

“You’ve got a hearing Friday in the Meyer case.”

“Right. Call Sully and see if he can come out here. I’ll ask him to cover the hearing. I need to talk with him about the newspaper and the bar suspension anyhow.”

“Will do.” She paused again. “What’s going on, Tom?”

“Somebody’s trying to destroy my credibility.”

“Why?”

“The Baneberry case.”

“Do you have something on someone who’s connected enough to do all this?”

“Beats me.”

A light rain had begun to fall when Kai-Li parked her aging Volvo in my driveway and jogged through the mist to the front porch. I’d watched her coming from the entry hall, through a column of square panes lined up against the doorframe. It was past 5:00 and close to dark. Tom Brokaw’s voice floated in from the living room.

Kai-Li had called Kelly from the Montgomery Airport around lunchtime. She had been waiting to meet a flight from Iowa, waiting to hand off Sunny to her ex for the holidays when she picked up the afternoon paper. My fame had spread. She’d told Kelly she wanted to talk with me in person. She’d said it was urgent. Kelly had called me on the other line to get an okay before giving Kai-Li directions to my house.

I’d spent the afternoon talking with Sully and trying without success to run down Sheri Baneberry. Around 3:00, I’d tried to get Dr. Laurel Adderson on the phone. I figured she was wondering what kind of nut she had confided in. I was right. After leaving me on hold for eight minutes, Dr. Adderson’s office manager told me that my message had been conveyed to the doctor, and she couldn’t promise that the doctor would call me back.

I opened the door as Kai-Li reached for the bell.

I smiled. “You here to fire me in person?”

Kai-Li stopped just outside the door. Her eyes, more
gray than green in the dusk, scanned my face. She smiled back. “You don’t get depressed very easily, do you, Tom?”

I stepped aside. “Just mad. But I’ve had some time to get over it.” Kai-Li passed me in the foyer and continued into the living room. I said, “I’ve already been fired by a couple of clients today, and Dr. Adderson—the physician who treated the dead juror—won’t return my calls. So I was a little surprised you wanted to drive down.”

She smiled again, and I noticed her eyes had grown bright green in the lighted room. “I can’t fire you. I work for
you
. I guess I could quit.” She walked over to the sofa. “Mind if I sit down?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Can I get you a Coke or a drink or something?”

She shook her head and collapsed onto the sofa. I walked over and clicked off the evening news before sitting beside her. She turned sideways, tucked one leg under the other, and trained those eyes on my face. “Back to the point—I guess I could resign as your consultant. And I’m ashamed to say that I likely would have done just that if I hadn’t already analyzed the data you gave me before I saw the newspaper.”

“You’ve already run the analysis?”

“You were in trouble. And, anyway, once I had the disk from the State Bar, it was mostly a programming job. It took a couple of hours to decide how to best analyze the data and a few more hours to write a simple program. Nothing to it, really.”

“And?”

“And Chris Galerina’s firm, Russell and Wagler, is
definitely hazardous to your health if you’re a juror on a big-money case.”

Hazardous to your health
. That was the joke at the courthouse, according to Curtis Krait. But I didn’t think I’d shared that with my Chinese-Scottish-American consultant. I asked, “Have you talked with any lawyers or anybody else around the state about Russell and Wagler since we met in Auburn?”

She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and shook her head. “No. I’ve been putting all my time into running the analysis. Why?”

I studied her pretty face. “No reason. Tell me what you found. Please.”

“Okay, how much do you know about statistical analysis?”

“I think I made a ‘B’ in sophomore business statistics.”

“Did you like it?”

“No.”

“Okay, we’ll go with the layman’s overview.” She paused briefly before going on. “I was lucky starting out. The State Bar Legal Directory was already in ASCII format and it was clean—you know, not full of typos or formatting problems. So all I had to do was load it into my database program, assigning addresses to the pertinent data fields. I used a system of cataloging the data that reflected the sequence of data in my existing database, so if we need to make other, additional comparisons in the future …”

I interrupted. “This is what you call the layman’s overview?”

A light blush crept up her cheeks. “Sorry. I get into this. Anyway, once I had the legal directory in my database,
I wrote a simple comparison program to check the trial attorneys in my original sample with their firms in the legal directory. I pulled everyone who wasn’t a sole practitioner and divided them into their respective firms so I’d have a large sample to compare with Russell and Wagler. Then it was a simple matter to pull juror illness rates for each firm in the directory. Now all I had to do was apply p-factor analysis …”

“Kai-Li?”

“What? Oh. That’s probably the kind of thing you wanted me to skip.”

I smiled and nodded. “You know you’re way too good-looking to be this big a nerd.”

She laughed. “And I guess you don’t get excited by legal bits, like, what do they call it? The ‘rule against perpetuities’ or something?”

“Actually, no, I don’t. But I know what you mean. Right now, though, I’d really appreciate your skipping to the end.”

“Okay, but you’re missing out.”

I looked at the floor.

“Okay, okay. Here it is. The illness rates among jurors assigned to cases being tried by Russell and Wagler
cannot
be the result of naturally occurring factors.”

“You can
really
tell that from a formula or two?”

“Yes. I really can.”

A day’s worth of tension flooded out of my neck and shoulders. I said, “I think you just saved my career.”

“Does that mean you’ll feed me? I’m starving.”

December is a gray, wet month in the deep South. My memories of Christmas mornings are of speeding downhill on steel skates or a new bike from Sears with freezing raindrops cutting at my face like razor blades, which was more fun than it sounds.

Now, as I lay in bed ruminating on my ruined career, a tingle of nostalgia or maybe just remembered cold trickled down my spine as a steady drizzle patted the roof like watery fingertips. Down the hall, Kai-Li slept in a New Orleans Jazz Festival T-shirt I’d found for her. She’d put it on in the privacy of my guest room. I imagined how she looked swallowed up inside my old shirt, sleeping on her side, the covers pulled back just enough …

This was not getting me anywhere.

Weak light framed closed drapes. I clicked on the bedside lamp and got onto my feet. I found running shorts and a Birmingham City Stages T-shirt in my top
drawer and pulled them on. My hooded sweatshirt and shoes were in the downstairs closet. I pushed bare feet into cold running shoes—I could never understand how anyone jogs in socks—and let myself out the back door.

It was time.

Feeling like I’d been beaten with sticks in my sleep, I leaned over and hugged my knees to stretch my back and hamstrings. I pulled each foot back against my butt, and then, falling forward against the house in a sort of vertical pushup, I touched both heels to the ground, one after the other, and turned toward the beach.

Sand sprayed against the backs of my legs with each kick. An orange glow framed houses and trees to the east and tipped the swells in Mobile Bay. My neighbor’s floating Christmas tree bobbed on the water, its bulbs growing dim in the early-morning light.

And someone was following me.

Around the one-mile mark, I’d caught the barest glimpse of a figure running about two hundred yards back. I sped up. So did he or she. I never turned around and took a good look. I used the corner of my eye as I looked out over the Bay in one direction and watched the sun rise in the other.

I realized I wasn’t the only person who runs on the beach before work. Being able to do that very thing is why many people live there. I also realized that Kai-Li could be back there, taking a morning run, watching me but keeping a distance, allowing me my privacy. But I didn’t think so. The same primitive alarm I’d felt in Auburn before my film was stolen was blaring inside my skull.

My shadow had been drifting closer as I ran faster.

Now I slowed to bring him or her inside a hundred yards. Around a small curve in the beach, I planted my forward foot, spun, and tried my best to make a ten-second hundred out of it.

It was a man. He froze for two beats, which was what I was counting on. It’s an old saying among cops—action is twice as fast as reaction. And, in the time it took his brain to process the change, I was twenty yards closer. I could see the Cajun.

He spun and started pumping, but I was going full speed and he was just out of the blocks. I closed to thirty yards, then the quick little bastard started pulling away fast. I’m middling fast. This guy could fly. There was no way to outrun him. I had to think fast, and what I came up with was more meat cleaver than scalpel.

I cupped my hands on either side of my mouth. “You better run, you fucking coonass coward.”

He looked back.

I slowed to a walk. “I bet your two-dollar swamp whore of a mother was fast too.”

He stopped.

I kept walking and talking. “Come on, asshole. You’re good at sneaking around in the dark. You any good at acting like a man?” I was within fifteen yards now. The Cajun’s nostrils flared with each breath. “I called your mother a two-dollar whore. That okay with you? Or maybe it’s true. Is that it?” I stopped five feet from the Cajun. “Why don’t you run away and put a dead bunny rabbit on my car? That’ll show me.”

He locked eyes with me, and a tiny shudder rippled across the skin on my back.

Long black hair swept back from a bony forehead. His sunken cheeks were marked with old scars, and the
skin on his neck seemed to strain with the effort of containing thick, twisted cables of muscle and sinew.

I’d wanted him to stop. Be careful what you wish for.

Seconds passed as we stared at each other. Finally, he said, “You want me? Heah I stan’.”

I caught a swift movement at his side and glanced down. He held a lockblade knife in his left hand, and I noticed a dagger tattoo on the thick pad of muscle between his thumb and index finger. I’m no rube. I’ve seen
Oz
, and I recognized the sign of a prison-yard assassin.

I nodded at the knife. “That your specialty in prison? Knifing unarmed men?”

He shrugged.

“But you’re not supposed to kill me, are you?”

Surprise flickered across his features before he caught himself. He said, “Accidents dey do happen.”

“I want to know who hired you.”

He shrugged his shoulders again and held up the knife. “Steers want balls.”

I decided that was just about enough talk. “Lose the knife.”

“Fug you.”

“Fuck me? Fuck you. You break into my house, poison me in my own car. You wanna act tough? Drop the knife. We’ll find out.”

He waved me off with feigned disgust and turned to walk away. The Cajun expected me to jump him when he turned his back. And I knew he expected it. But it was still the best shot I was going to get.

I was almost on him when he spun right, leading with his elbow. Stepping inside the arc, I ducked his
elbow and grabbed a handful of Cajun testicles in my left hand and squeezed hard. The blade in his left fist slashed for my chest as he came full around. I threw up my right forearm to block his knife hand and felt the burn of his blade across the bridge of my nose. Still gripping his balls, I shifted weight to my right foot, dropped my elbow, and drove the best uppercut I had into his left armpit. A glint of morning sunlight caught my eye as the steel blade spun into the sand.

A solid right cross exploded into my temple. The beach faded to gray and came back. I clubbed wildly with my right fist, while clamping down and twisting his ball sack with my left. The Cajun squealed like a hog and pounded with both fists and kicked to get away from my hold on his nuts. Time got slow, like the dreamlike motion in an auto accident, and I could feel his breath on my face, burning the open cut across my nose. I tried to butt his pock-marked face and missed as he leaped into the air in some kind of Bruce Lee spinning thing. Out of nowhere, something, maybe a knee, slammed into my chest. I went down like I’d been shot—rolling, expecting him to come after me. But he went instead for the knife, his back turned slightly to reach for it.

Something like hot tar spread through my chest as I staggered to my feet. The Cajun didn’t turn. He thought I was down, and he was counting on the knife to end it. Two quick steps, and I kicked him hard in the ribs. Nothing fancy. Just like punting a football, except I ended up on my back in the sand.