He just shrugged his shoulders. “It’s late, dad. I gotta get to bed.”
I stood up and squeezed his shoulders and tousled his hair. “You’re right. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I turned away, closing the door behind me. Before I went to bed, I went to Amelia’s room, and checked on her. She was fast asleep, so I went down to my own room, sat on the bed, and thought about things.
I thought about what my therapist, Dr. Jordan, told me about how I was supposed to deal with Nate. I realized that was just not possible. Until I got my mom out of this jam, there was nothing that I could really do but work her case and make sure that she got the best representation possible. I didn’t trust her case in anybody else’s hands.
I decided to go ahead and call Harper. It was late, I knew that, but I knew that she usually did stay up late working on her cases. I had a feeling that she was not going to be too upset with me if I called her.
She answered on the third ring. She sounded like she had been crying. “What’s going on, Damien?”
“Nothing.” I took a deep breath. To tell the truth, I didn’t know why I was calling her. I guess I just needed someone to talk to, a sounding board. I had been seeing, off and on, Ally Hughes from the prosecutor’s office. It wasn’t anything serious, and she wasn’t necessarily somebody I could call and talk to when I was feeling out of sorts. Yet Harper and I had become close friends and confidants, as well as being partners in our law firm.
She sniffled on the phone. “It’s not nothing, the reason why you called. Something must be going on. You don’t ever call me this time of night. So, tell me what’s up?”
I took a deep breath. “Are the girls in bed? I’d really like to come over. My kids are asleep, but I can have the neighbor girl, Gretchen, come over and watch them. She does that sometimes when I need her at night.” She didn’t mind it. There were times when I would go out late at night, and she would come over and sleep on the couch or in the guest bedroom. I only had her come over because I didn’t entirely trust my two young children to be home alone. And the great thing about Gretchen was that she lived close by, so she could come over at just any time. At a moment’s notice. And she liked it, because I paid her a lot more when she was able to come over on an emergency basis.
Harper sniffled again, and coughed. “Yeah, the girls are in bed. Come on over. In fact, I’m glad you called. I really didn’t want to be alone tonight.”
“Why? Is there something going on?”
She cleared her throat. “Axel and I are not seeing each other anymore. He broke up with me tonight. He told me that he was going back to Australia, because he’s being deported. I thought he was a permanent resident, even a citizen. I mean, he’s been in the states for a long time. But he told me that he had tried to become a permanent resident, but his brother Daniel had already been deported to Australia because of his drug problems. Because of his brother’s problems, Axel kind of broke the law to make sure that his brother didn’t go to prison. He covered up his brother’s drug problems by taking some evidence out of the evidence room at the police department. His brother was going to go to prison for life, because he was busted with a lot of drugs, and the Feds were going to get involved, so Axel went into the evidence room and destroyed the evidence that was going to be used against Daniel. The KCPD had to drop the charges against Daniel after that. I guess he finally got caught, so now he’s being deported.”
I listened to Harper without a word. I knew what she was going through. I had gone through my share of broken hearts myself. My most recent broken heart was when I divorced my wife, Sarah.
Sarah was not a good person. Granted, she had gone through a lot in her life – her father committed suicide, her brother died of cancer when she was young, not six months after her father committed suicide, and her mother had a hard time trying to pick up the pieces with just the two of them. So, in a way, I had a lot of sympathy for her. Even though she abandoned Amelia and me when we needed her the most, when Amelia was on death’s door, and I really thought that I was going to have to say goodbye to her, I still felt sorry for Sarah. During that time, Sarah was not only not around, she was fighting me every step of the way. She wanted to stop Amelia’s treatment. She thought it wasn’t doing her any good, and that she was only suffering on our behalf. I was of the mind that I had to do everything I could to make sure that Amelia could survive. I felt that if I didn’t do everything in my power that I would have a lot of regrets if she ended up dying. Turned out that the last thing I did was the thing that actually saved her, so I didn’t regret putting Amelia through all those years of torture.
That was bad enough, but when Sarah tried to terminate my parental rights to Amelia, just because she wanted her new boyfriend to get his inheritance money, and he wasn’t entitled to it unless he had a child, it was the final straw. Sarah claimed that her new boyfriend was Amelia’s biological father and doctored up a paternity test to prove it. It turned out that I wasn’t Amelia’s biological father. Yet, I was able to not have my rights severed, because the biological father also was not Sarah’s boyfriend. It was another guy, a guy who didn’t want to be named the biological father of Amelia. Because of that, I beat the case that Sarah filed against me to have my rights terminated to Amelia. It was a long way back, psychologically, for Amelia and me after that.
I couldn’t forgive Sarah for doing that to us.
And that, truth be told, was a lot of the reason why I was reluctant to get close with Ally. She was a beautiful girl, very smart and capable, and we had a lot of fun together. But I was held back by my general lack of trust in women. If Sarah was capable of doing something like that to me, then who knows what somebody else might do to me? I trusted Sarah completely, and she burned me in the worst way possible.
I drove over to Harper’s house, and she greeted me on her front porch.
“Come on in,” she said to me. “I’m glad you came by. I’m glad you’re able to come over and talk. I really have been sitting here in a dark room, trying to imagine what’s going to happen to me now. Axel was the first man I’ve been able to be with since my teenage years. He’s been the first man I’ve been able to trust. I’ve never been able to let a man into my heart, until him. Now I just worry that everything is going to be sown back up. That my heart is going to be blocked again.”
I looked at her glass, and saw that it had an amber liquid in it. I felt more than a little concerned about it. Harper was a recovering alcoholic, and she had been off the wagon a time or two in the recent past. I had to hope and pray that she was not drinking again.
I sniffed at her glass, and I smelled the unmistakable odor of bourbon.
I put my arm around her. “Harper,” I said, as gently as I could. “Is that whiskey in that glass?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “What of it?”
I took a deep breath, not knowing how to handle the situation. I had been around my mother as she was trying to quit drinking several times, and it never took. But I knew that Harper had really wanted to not go back to drinking. I knew how much she struggled. I knew that she had gone to AA, and that she had a sponsor, whose name was Crystal Warner. She had had several sponsors over the years, and Crystal was her current one.
“I understand that you’re hurting, but you have a couple of children to think about. They’re going to be affected if you’re drinking again. You need to think of them.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t know, Damien. Sometimes I think that I just can’t handle life. Just can’t face it. Deal with it. I thought that when Axel and I were good and that he would be the one who would be there for me. Hold me up when I’m down. He was my person. And now he’s gone. Deported to Australia. I’m never gonna see him again.”
Harper was not known to be a woman who felt sorry for herself a lot of the time. She was always somebody, in my eyes, who carried on no matter what happened to her. Yet, it seemed that she was breaking down.
She shook her head as she took another sip of
her bourbon. “It’s just one. I can handle it. It’s just one.”
I was very concerned, because that was what all addicts say. They say it’s just the one, they can handle it, they don’t really have a problem. But that’s a lie. It’s a lie that all addicts tell themselves and tell the world. And I didn’t really know what to do. I could never stop my mom from drinking. As much as I tried to stop her from drinking when I was younger, she never would.
And now, here my mother was, being charged with murder. And what she did to be charged with murder was a nonsense charge, but that didn’t matter. In a way, her drinking led her to where she was at the moment – sitting in a cell. If she wasn’t such a drinker, she would have never been at the bar where she met that Tracy Dunham, and if she never would’ve met Tracy Dunham, she would never have been charged with his murder.
I didn’t know what to say to Harper, so I decided to just go ahead and change the subject. “Thanks for seeing me. I was feeling out of sorts because of what’s going on with Nate, and my mother –”
She nodded her head. “After you told me that your mother was being charged with murdering Tracy Dunham, I did a little bit of research on him. Bet you didn’t know that his family is very well-connected, and very wealthy. Came as a surprise to me too, because of what you said about him. Sounded to me like he was just kind of a drifter and loser. I don’t know, I guess that was just my own prejudice showing. Whenever I hear of people dying of a heroin overdose I always think that they’re people who are on the fringes of society. People who don’t have it all together. This guy was not only from a wealthy family, but he was a medical doctor himself.”
A medical doctor? His family was rich and powerful? I guessed that made a certain kind of perverse sense to me, considering the fact that my mother said that she met him in a fake biker bar, where professionals hung out and tried to pretend that they were hog-riders. It sounded like Tracy Dunham was one of those fakers who probably wore leather jackets and dark sunglasses while hanging out at a biker bar, trying to look cool. I doubted that he even could find Sturgis on a map, let alone attend an annual rally.
“That’s interesting to hear,” I said to her. “What kind of medical doctor was he?”
She laughed ruefully and took another sip of her bourbon. “You want one?” she asked me, gesturing with her glass.
I shook my head. “No,” I said, not wanting to encourage her or enable her. “Thank you.”
“Suit yourself,”she said. “It’s the good stuff. Pappy Van Winkle 20 year reserve. Smooth as molasses, this one is. The better stuff doesn’t give as much of a hangover, either.” She took another sip and seemed to forget the question that I just asked her.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now…” I cleared my throat. “What kind of doctor was Tracy Dunham?”
She nodded her head. “Dr. Tracy Dunham was the best kind of doctor there was if you’ve been in a bad car accident or skiing mishap and are in excruciating pain. His specialty was pain management.” She laughed. “Ironic, huh? You would think that a guy like that would be able to substitute hillbilly heroin for the real thing. I wonder why he would want to go out and get high on street junk like that, let alone take so much that he overdosed.”
That made little sense to me, either. Harper was right. A doctor like that would have access to Oxycontin, Fentanyl, Codeine, Hydrocodone, anything that he would want to get high.
Then again, once I thought about it, I realized that he probably was trying to hide his drug use and addiction, and there’s only so much a doctor can do to legally obtain painkillers. Even a pain management doctor. He couldn’t legally use his own scrip pad to write himself a prescription. He would have access to free samples sent by pharmaceutical companies as well as drugs that his patients might bring to his office for disposal. But, unless he was actually diagnosed with a condition that would warrant him being prescribed pain meds, he wouldn’t have legal access to them.
“I don’t think that he would be able to get pain meds legally, even if he was a doctor,” I said.
She nodded her head. “Huh. How naive are you?”
I took a deep breath, not liking where this conversation was going. I didn’t like Harper’s attitude, either. She seemed colder, more bitter, more cynical than usual. Harper wasn’t exactly the warmest woman on the planet, even on a good day, but at the moment she seemed to be just a bit icy. “Harper, maybe this was a mistake, my coming here.”
“A mistake?” She shook her head. “I did you a solid, finding out about your victim. I know that you didn’t know that about him, although you probably should have. Wasn’t his occupation in the file you read before you went to see your mother?”
“I don’t recall seeing that,” I said. “But, then again, I skimmed that file. I was just looking to see if my mother was high at the time he showed up at her door.”
“Well, let’s see,” Harper said. “Something is clearly amiss in this case. I don’t know what, but something clearly is. Your mother insisted to you, up and down, that she didn’t take a single drug that night. Yet, opiates were found in her system. Tracy Dunham wasn’t a rando drug user off the street, he was a physician and his family was rich. Is rich. The cops interrogated your mother as if she were high and Dunham was a rando, but they had to have known at the time that this just wasn’t true. It sounds like they never even pressed the issue of Dunham’s occupation when they were questioning your mother, now, why do you think that’s the case? Add to that the fact that they have such a hard-on for poor Olivia in the first place, and I think that you can agree that there is something clearly rotten in the state of Denmark on this one.”
“Well, that goes without saying,” I said. “And I would imagine that I’ll figure out just what happened in this case. I usually do. And I thank you for doing the research on it.”
“Not a problem,” she said. “After Axel dumped me, I went looking for something to do to clear my mind and I decided that I was going to try to solve your case with your mother. Because I know that you have more important things on your mind and you don’t need to be worrying about whether or not your mother is going to end up thrown in the clink.”
I rocked in the porch chair for a few minutes, while Harper sipped her bourbon. I looked up at the sky, noticing that it was clear, and there was a blanket of stars visible. A man walking his dog ambled up the sidewalk and the dog lifted his leg on Harper’s bush while the man rapidly walked past.
“Harper,” I finally said. “I’m concerned about you.”
“Why?” she asked. “Because of this?” She lifted her glass of bourbon and then brought it to her lips again. “Most people don’t stay on the wagon, you know. It’s too difficult. Sometimes you go for so long and then you get triggered and you just can’t help yourself. It’s there, it’s a friend, it’s always been the one thing that can you make you feel good when you feel pretty worthless. And that’s what I feel - worthless. I just can’t seem to not screw up my life, no matter what I do. So, I drink. I drink to drown out those feelings.”
She looked up at the stars and it was her turn to get silent.
“Harper-”
“My rapist is out of prison,” she said, not looking at me. She brought her hand to her mouth and wiped it. “His lawyer was able to prove ineffective assistance of counsel, no problem. While he was at it, he almost got my bar license. I had to do some pretty creative maneuvering and butt-kissing to keep my license after what I did to Michael Reynolds.” She shook her head. “He lost his first appeal to the Missouri Court of Appeals, and I thought that was that. But it wasn’t that. He filed a Rule 29.15, challenging his conviction, and he won on that.”
Rule 29.15 in Missouri was what inmates filed after they lost their appeal, and it was used to challenge a conviction, using facts that were outside the trial record. Where an appeal to the Court of Appeals was based on the trial record, and was based on any errors that the court might have made, a Rule 29.15 was what was filed when there weren’t any trial e
rrors, but there were grounds for conviction relief because of events that might have happened outside of trial. Rule 29.15 relief was typically where convictions were overturned for ineffective assistance of counsel, as the facts concerning such bases for relief were typically outside of the trial record.
I cocked my head. “What did you do to him?”
“I took his case with the express purpose of throwing him under the bus. Dammit, I proved that he was the one who killed his father-in-law, too. I proved it. I had a pair of his leather gloves, showed that his DNA was on those gloves and then the prosecutor proved that those gloves were on the murder weapon. It was all for naught.”
“What happened?”
“Well, the bastard managed to show all the ways that I screwed him over at trial, including the fact that I secretly sent those leather gloves to the prosecutor. The prosecutor requested documents and I gave her documents and those gloves.” She shrugged. “She asked for any objects that I planned to introduce at trial, and I sent her the gloves. I mean, obviously, I wasn’t going to introduce those gloves at trial. That would be inculpating, to say the very least. But, you know, I wanted her to have those gloves, because I knew that they would be the one thing that would nail him to the wall.”
I closed my eyes. “And-”
“Well, he lost in the Missouri Court of Appeals, but it was an open and shut case for Rule 29.15 relief. Made even more open-and-shut by all the other things I did, including tricking his girlfriend into confessing all that had happened. I told her that I could get her a good deal with the prosecutor if she just told me what happened, and she did. Of course, I lied, and she went to the bar, too. By the time that whole crew got through with me, I was on probation, a probation that was almost revoked when I got stopped by a cop who planted pot in my car. Anyhow…”
“Let me guess. Michael Reynolds got a new trial and the prosecutor wasn’t able to introduce the gloves and he walked. How close am I?”
“Bingo. His new lawyer was a much better lawyer than me, and he managed to keep the gloves out of evidence. Which was a real trick, considering the fact that the gloves were known by the state to exist at the time of his second trial, when they weren’t known to have existed in the first. The state wouldn’t have even known about them if I didn’t send them to the prosecutor. Without the gloves, it was all circumstantial, and the bastard was acquitted.”
Until Proven Guilty Page 3
