“Sounds like a plan. Matt, I think you have a devious side.”
“Occupational failing. All lawyers are afflicted with it.”
We each ordered sandwiches, ate them, and finished our pretzel. It was nearing two p.m., and I noticed that my bartender buddy Amber Marris had come in and was helping the day shift tidy up behind the bar. I excused myself from the table and took the transcript of the recording I’d made on Friday and handed it to Amber. “Would you read this over and make sure it’s correct?” I asked.
She smiled. “Sure.” When she finished, she said, “Looks right. Do you want me to sign it?”
I handed her a pen and copy of the transcript. “Thanks. You’ve been a big help. I’ve got the name of the assistant state attorney who’ll be prosecuting the case. She’s Meredith Evans and you can reach her at the state attorney’s office in Bushnell. I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from both of us as this case moves toward trial.”
Judy drove me back to the plaza and I headed toward Bushnell and my appointment with the woman I would be butting heads with for the next few months, Assistant State Attorney Meredith Evans.
CHAPTER 12
MY FIRST IMPRESSION of Meredith Evans was, well, average. She was an average-looking woman, wearing average-looking clothes, and had an average-looking smile. Her hair was average-looking, brownish and cut short enough that she didn’t have to spend much time taking care of it. Her handshake was of average pressure, not too tight, not too loose, and her greeting was average for the lawyer she was. That is, it was average until she said the magic words. “So, you’re the great Matt Royal.”
Now that kind of greeting sent tremors of delight up and down my ego and made me think that this was a very perceptive woman. I mentally kicked myself for the fool I am and thought about what a hoot J.D. would have at my expense if she were here and could read my mind. Which, I’m pretty sure she’s able to do.
“Great?” I asked.
“I watched most of that trial where you defended Dr. Carpenter several years ago.”
“Sometimes you get lucky.”
“That wasn’t luck. Come on back to my office. Let’s talk about Esther Higgins. Want some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’m about coffeed out for the day.”
We sat in her office, a bare place with institutional gray paint on the walls and a diploma that told me she had graduated from the University of Florida College of Law ten years before. A window looked out over a parking lot, with a side street beyond. She waved me to a chair and took her seat behind a cheap desk. “I heard you’d retired to the Keys,” she said.
“Common mistake,” I said. “Actually, I retired to Longboat Key near Sarasota. People hear the word key and they think Florida Keys.”
“What brings you out of retirement for a case in Sumter County?”
“Esther is a relative of a friend of mine, and I was asked to help.”
“You sure you want to get back into this mess?”
I laughed. “I’m pretty sure I don’t, but duty calls.”
“Do you want to talk about a plea?”
“Not even if you reduced it to a misdemeanor. Esther is innocent.”
She smiled. “You guys always say that.”
“Show me your cards,” I said.
“Not yet.”
“Why not? You’ll have to give them to me sooner or later.”
“I will, but I haven’t even seen them yet. I was out of town this weekend and I’ve been up in Ocala all morning. I’ll get it to you timely, though. I promise.”
“I checked you out, you know,” I said.
“Hah. I’m not surprised. Who did you talk to?”
“An old drinking buddy down in Tavares. Billy Ray Johnson.”
“You know Billy Ray? That man could drink an alligator into a stupor. He’s got to be pushing seventy now, and I don’t see any sign of his slowing down.”
“Yep. He and I go way back. I figured if anybody in this circuit could tell me about you, it’d be him.”
“What did he say?”
“He said you kicked his butt last year in Ocala.”
“Barely. And I had a cop for an eyewitness who saw the perp shoot the victim. What else did the old bastard have to say?”
“He said you were tough as nails, honest as the day is long, and always prepared. You’ve probably noticed he likes clichés. He has a very high opinion of you, and Billy Ray is not lavish with his praise of prosecutors.”
“When did you talk to him?” she asked. “He sounds like he’s mellowing some.”
“I called him about an hour ago.”
“My boss thinks you’re the best lawyer he ever faced in a courtroom. You beat him on a case he didn’t think he could lose and he says you did it fair and square.”
“I hope he doesn’t hold a grudge.”
“Not at all. The doctor you sprung is a model citizen and helps out a lot of folks that don’t have insurance and can’t pay for medical care. I think you did the community a favor.”
“I doubt the sheriff feels the same way.”
“You might be surprised,” she said, with a small smile. “Look, Matt, I understand your client is an upstanding citizen who taught school for most of her life.”
“Not exactly the profile of a killer.”
“People surprise us. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve prosecuted someone I never would have thought had it in them to commit a crime.”
“I’ve met those people, too, but I don’t think Esther is one of them.”
“I guess we’ll see. I should have the investigative material coming in over the next couple of weeks, probably starting with the first reports tomorrow. Why don’t you file a motion, and we’ll get the judge to enter an open order so that I have to provide the discovery to you as it comes in. Say, with ten days’ grace time from the day I get it.”
“I appreciate that, Meredith. I filed the motion first thing this morning.” I reached into my briefcase and pulled out a copy and gave it to her. “Are you going to get any pushback from your boss?”
“No. He lets me run my cases the way I want.”
“How about bail?”
“Sorry. I can’t agree to that. I don’t want to push my luck. My boss has to run for reelection this year, and he has an ironclad rule about not agreeing to bail in murder cases.”
I stood. “I’ll look forward to working with you, Counselor. Time for me to head for the beach. I’ll be in touch.” I gave her my business card and told her to call me anytime.
I stopped by the detention center and spent another hour with Esther, telling her about my day and my conversations with Judy and the prosecutor. “We’re going to have a hard time getting bail set. Evans is going to argue against it. You might be here until trial.”
“Do what you can, Matt. If you can’t get bail, I’ll understand. Are you going to be spending a lot of time up here?”
“Yes. I’ve got a lot of people to talk to, and we’ll probably have a lot of hearings between now and the trial.”
“Why don’t you move into my place for the duration? No sense in your driving back and forth to Longboat Key every day.”
“What if we get bail?”
She laughed. “You stay in the guest bedroom. J.D. will understand and the neighbors will think I’ve scored with a younger man. My next-door neighbor Sue has a spare key. Make yourself at home.”
“That’s probably a good idea. I’ll let you know.” I told her I’d see her in a couple of days and kissed her cheek good-bye.
I left the jail, connected my iPod to the Explorer’s sound system, turned on some classic country music, and started the two-hour drive to Longboat Key. I have to admit that I sang along with all those good old boys who were mostly dead now. Except for Willie Nelson, of course.
CHAPTER 13
J.D. WAS WEARING shorts and a halter-top, sitting in a lounger on the patio. I walked in the front door of my cottage, threw my coat and tie over the back of
the sofa, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, and joined her. She looked up from a book and said, “Jock’s playing golf with Logan Hamilton, Sam Lastinger, and Tom Stout.”
“Where are they playing?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Sammy called and gave me the directions to give to Jock. He said to tell him to take Bee Ridge Road east until he runs into the dump. Turn right and when Jock thinks he’s gone too far, keep going.”
“Great directions.”
“Well, it is Sammy. Did you talk to Judy Ferguson?”
“She’s your new aunt.” I told her about my day and all of the ideas Judy and I had discussed about J.D.’s undercover operation.
“I think that sounds like a plan. Maybe I’ll become a blond. What do you think?”
“Well, they do say that blonds have more fun. Might be good for you.”
“Are you suggesting I’m no fun?”
“No, ma’am. You are loads of fun.” I’m constantly amazed at how easily I can find myself on thin ice simply by muttering something stupid.
She laughed, the tinkling one that always made me feel like a big shot, and reached for my hand. “Then you don’t really think my being blond is going to make any difference?”
“Not at all,” I said, and adroitly changed the subject. “Have you talked to the chief about some time off?”
“I did. He has no problem with it. He’s going to make Steve Carey the acting detective, and I can be gone for a month.”
“Maybe I haven’t given this idea the attention it deserves. A month apart is going to really disrupt our lives.”
“Maybe not too much. We’ll see each other up there.”
“Only in passing,” I said. “We can’t let on that we know each other.”
“I’ll get out of there every few days and meet you here. Nobody will figure it out. If anybody asks, Judy can tell them that I have to go to Miami now and then because of the divorce proceedings.”
“When do you want to move in with Judy?”
“I need to do something about my hair, pack some things. I’ll see if Gary Winters can squeeze me into his salon tomorrow and, if he can, I should be ready to go on Wednesday morning. When do you have to be back up there?”
“Not until later this week. I think the prosecutor is going to send me some initial stuff in the next couple of days—police reports, that sort of thing. I’ll need to get back up there and talk to some of the witnesses again.”
“Are you going to hire an investigator to do some of that?”
“Maybe. Right now, I’d like to talk to these folks on my own. Maybe I can get some leads that I can pass on to you for follow-up.”
“I talked to that Daily Sun reporter today,” J.D. said. “Told her I was your assistant and was trying to follow up on some stuff for you. She gave me the name of the aide the publisher sent along with Lathom on the book-signing trip. She’s a freelancer based in Cincinnati and does this kind of thing for several of the major publishers. She babysits authors around the Southeast and Midwest. Her name is Peggy Keefe.” She handed me a piece of notepaper with the aide’s name and a cell phone number.
“I’ll give her a call tomorrow. Either that or go to Cincinnati and talk to her in person. Did the reporter have anything else to tell you?”
“Not much. She said that Ms. Keefe was very cooperative and anxious to get home. She spent quite a bit of time with the sheriff’s detectives and then left on Friday morning. What do you hope to find out from her?”
“I’d like to re-create Lathom’s last hours. When I get the autopsy report I’ll have an approximate time of death, and we know about what time she finished the signing at Barnes & Noble. I hope Ms. Keefe can tighten that timeline up a bit. She’ll know what time she and Lathom separated, so then we only have to fill in the time between when Keefe saw her last and the time of death.”
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“Good question. I noticed that when a visitor enters one of the villages, they’re staring into a camera as they push the button to raise the bar at the gatehouse to let them in. I can’t believe The Villages security people wouldn’t have some way to identify the guests. They’ll have a picture of the driver and probably a license plate number. If we can narrow the time down, maybe we can get a look at the pictures from those cameras. We might be able to tell where Lathom went and when she went there. If she was killed in one of the villages, somebody took her body to Brownwood. We may be able to find out which neighborhood she entered last by determining that she didn’t go into another.”
“What about her car?” J.D. asked.
“Another good question. If she was traveling alone, she had to have a car. Where did she get the car? Peggy Keefe might know something about that. If we can narrow that down, it’ll save us a lot of time looking through pictures of drivers. I’ll bet the security people can search their database by license plate numbers. If we can get a plate number to give the security people, that should help us find when the car went through the security gates.”
“And why is that so important?”
“Right now, only because it may help us pinpoint the location where she was killed. That’ll be a starting place to find the killer.”
She smiled. “You’d have made a pretty good detective.”
“Only pretty good?”
“We’ll see how this plays out. Want some dinner?”
“I’m feeling expensive. Let’s go to Euphemia Haye. Chef Ray has the best steak au poivre in the state.”
“What about Jock?”
“Those guys will be drinking and eating in the clubhouse wherever they’re playing. Besides, I want to get a little dressed up and spend some quality time with my honey.”
“Your honey?”
I grinned. “Yep. My honey.”
CHAPTER 14
MY TUESDAY MORNING jog on the beach cleared my head of the extra beers I’d drunk at the Haye Loft bar the night before. J.D. and I had enjoyed a comfortable evening with great food and a quiet togetherness that we seemed to seldom find for ourselves. After dinner, we climbed the stairs to the Haye Loft bar and sat quietly listening to the jazz pianist Michael Markaverich.
I’d been wrong about the golfers staying in the clubhouse at the course they’d played. They nosily arrived in the Haye Loft about twenty minutes after we sat down. Given the warmth of the day and the eighteen holes they’d played, they didn’t smell as rank as I would have expected.
We joined them and probably enjoyed the evening too much. None of them were great golfers, but Tom Stout had been to golf school, whatever that is, in Orlando for a few days, and had apparently learned enough to beat the other three. The lies they all told were mildly humorous, but as the bartender Eric Bell pointed out, the same stories were told several times and the retelling ran the gamut from a little bit funny to hilarious. Eric figured that was a direct result of the amount of alcohol consumed by the participants. Including yours truly.
Tuesday was shaping up to be one of those glorious days we often get in March. I’d slept in a bit and gotten a late start on my daily jog. At a little after ten in the morning, the humidity was low and the thermometer hovered at seventy degrees. People were on the beach taking advantage of the weather. Many were lounging on beach chairs reading books, some were walking along the water’s edge, and a few were surf-fishing.
The Gulf was calm, its turquoise waters flat and as reflective as a freshly burnished mirror. Cumulus clouds floated high above, their whiteness stark against the rich blue of the sky. Pelicans were diving for their breakfast, splashing into the surface and gulping down the hapless fish they’d spotted. Sandpipers skittered out of the way of the walkers and nearby a colony of seagulls was squawking loudly as they fought over the remains of a fish that had washed in with the tide. Far out on the horizon, a sailboat was moving on a northerly course, its sails billowing in the breeze that barely touched the shore.
Endorphins were flooding my system, the exercise and the bea
uty of my surroundings conflating to send my spirits into paroxysms of joie de vivre. God, I loved this island. And here I was, about to exchange days like this for days in a courtroom. I decided I must be nuts. There isn’t a trial lawyer in the world who would have disagreed with me.
J.D. had stayed the night at my cottage and left early for a trip to see her hairdresser on the mainland. I planned to call Peggy Keefe when I got home and see if she could tell me anything that might be of use in defending Esther. I didn’t hold out much hope of finding the proverbial smoking gun, but she might be able to add a few details that over time would merge with other facts from other witnesses, and like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, begin to merge into a recognizable pattern.
Building a defense is a process. Different witnesses know different things. They are often only aware of a fact or two, and do not initially see how what they know might fit into the narrative that the trial lawyer must assemble in defense of his client.
When the lawyer starts to put together the pieces of the puzzle, everything is hazy. But over time, as the investigation proceeds and more facts surface, the picture starts to form. When the puzzle is nearly finished, and only a few crucial pieces are missing, that moment of clarity strikes, and the lawyer begins to see his way to an acquittal.
A case, civil or criminal, is a mind game. The lawyer never entirely stops thinking about it. Little tendrils of ideas constantly play across his brain, one hypothesis forming only to be replaced by another when new facts emerge and new theories are formed. The process is mentally exhausting and not nearly as much fun as fishing. But sometimes, one does what one has to do, and Aunt Esther’s freedom was certainly worth my giving up a few months of indolence.
I jogged the beach for the better part of an hour and was walking as I neared the North Shore Road boardwalk that spanned the dunes. My phone rang. I answered.
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