Lassiter

49 Jailhouse Rock

Lucinda Bailey loves fine wine. At Christmas, I buy Lucinda a case of Syrah from the Eberle Winery in California. All year long, she keeps me informed of the comings and goings at the county’s penal institutions.

Lucinda runs Information Technology for the jail system, and she’d been calling me every morning for the last nine weeks. I had asked her to keep tabs on Amy. If my client really had been with a man the night Perlow was shot, I figured that guy might visit her in jail. But each day, Lucinda had the same news-no visitors the previous day. Until this morning.

I was in the office. I had no customers, so I was studying the pre-season college football betting lines. Alabama was the favorite to win its second straight national championship. But pre-season wagers are sucker bets. Too many variables. A twelve-game season, plus a conference championship game, plus the BCS title game, if the Crimson Tide got that far. I’d wait until September, place a sentimental bet on Penn State, and start studying the point spreads week to week.

Lucinda Bailey’s call interrupted my dreams of greenbacks. “Your client had a male visitor at 8:05 A.M. yesterday. Stayed for thirty-seven minutes.”

“Finally! What’s his name?” I was prepared for a guy named John Doe with phony I.D. and a Groucho Marx nose and glasses.

“Charles Ziegler, Anglo male, lives on Casuarina Concourse in Gables Estates.”

What the hell!

The man Amy supposedly intended to kill comes visiting. Bizarre. He couldn’t be her alibi witness. He was two feet away when Perlow took a slug in the chest, and he claimed Amy was the shooter. So what was he doing there? What hadn’t my client told me?

I headed for the jail. Driving across the causeway, I ran through what I knew and what I didn’t know, the latter outweighing the former. I had stirred up the waters surrounding Krista Larkin’s disappearance. Castiel, Ziegler, and Perlow all went to battle stations. Perlow threatened my life, but he’s the one who ended up dead. What secret was I close to discovering? If I could figure that out, I would know who killed Perlow.

Or was it far less complicated? Had my client simply taken a shot at Ziegler and hit the wrong guy? Had she used me to find the guy who killed Krista, not for a trial, but for an execution? Which still didn’t answer the question of why Ziegler came visiting.

Something else. My previously high-strung, nerves-rubbed-raw client was oddly at peace, just a week before she was to be tried for murder. On the other side, Alex Castiel was so cocky of a conviction he didn’t even offer a plea.

Forty minutes after taking Lucinda’s call, I was sitting across from Amy in the glass-walled lawyer’s room at the women’s jail. She seemed intent on making me an even less effective trial lawyer than I already was.

“I can’t tell you why Ziegler was here.”

“Sure you can. What did you talk about?”

“I’m sorry, Jake.”

“Is it dangerous for Ziegler, too? Like your bullshit alibi witness? Mr. X?”

“I just can’t.”

“You want to know my theory? You and Ziegler killed Perlow together.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“I didn’t shoot Perlow. I swear it.”

“You know what? I don’t care. I quit. I’m firing myself.”

“You can’t, Jake. I checked. No judge will let you out right before trial. Besides, you don’t quit on people.”

“Says who?”

“You.”

Great. Just great. I was going to trial not believing my client, and that wasn’t the worst of it. I knew land mines were buried in the sand, but the only way to find them was to run blindly ahead, awaiting the roar.