A Clean Kill

by Mike Stewart

  And something still bothered me. I stood and looked at the redhead. “Do you have a phone I can use?”

  “Back hallway. Outside the restrooms.”

  I thanked her, and she smiled. Red had a great smile. But then, youth has a great smile.

  I picked up the receiver before remembering Joey’s warning. After hanging up the receiver, I punched in Joey’s home number on my cell phone and got his answering machine. At his office, I got voice mail. Trying his cell phone, I got a lounge-lizard baritone telling me to try again later.

  I tapped in Kelly’s home number. She answered on the third ring. I said, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning yourself. Where are you?”

  “That doesn’t matter. But I wanted to tell you that I’ll be out of the office the first couple days of next week.” I paused. “Is everything okay?”

  “Sure. Everything’s fine. Loutie Blue’s been trying to get you, though.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. What’s going on, Tom?”

  I looked around the empty café. No one to hear. I turned my back to the room and told Kelly about the Cajun stranger.

  When I was through, she said, “Call Loutie.”

  So, when I hung up, that’s what I did. Loutie didn’t work at an office. I rang her up at the house on Monterey Street in Mobile.

  “Tom.” It was Loutie’s usual greeting, and it always sounded different. She formed the sound to fit the circumstances.

  “Good morning, Loutie. Kelly says you’re trying to get me.”

  “Yeah. It’s probably nothing …” She paused in mid-thought. “You sound strange. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Something’s scratching at the back of my mind. I’m not sure what it is yet.” I turned to watch the redhead place a single carnation in a bud vase on my table. “So, what’s ‘probably nothing’? Why were you trying to reach me?”

  “I can’t find Joey.”

  “It’s Saturday. I bet he’s sleeping in. Not answering the phone.”

  “It’s more than that, Tom. Joey was supposed to come by here last night, and he was a no-show. This morning, I went by to take him to breakfast. He’s not home. He’s not anywhere, as far as I can tell.” She paused. “And I know that happens sometimes with Joey, if he’s on a case or something, so I’m not ready to panic. But I knew he was doing some work for you, so I was wondering …”

  I said, “He is working,” and stopped short.

  Suddenly, I knew part of what had been bothering me. Joey had gone back to get the Styrofoam cooler in the alley. And if I had been smart enough to think of going back last night to retrieve the cooler to check for fingerprints, then the Cajun may have been smart enough to know we’d do just that. He also may have been smart enough to have been waiting for Joey when he stepped into the alley. Shit. If it had been anyone except Joey, I would have warned him not to go alone. But I was not in the habit of worrying much about Joey’s safety. The man can bench-press a Buick.

  I told Loutie Blue about my and Joey’s adventure in the alley, up to and including Joey’s statement that he was going back for the cooler.

  “At least now I know where to start looking.” Loutie was a practical woman.

  “Be careful, Loutie.”

  “I’m always careful.”

  “No. I mean it. We had this guy at gunpoint and stuck up to his ass in a puddle of fish guts. All Joey did was look away for half a second. The guy put Joey on his back, grabbed the camera, and was in the process of kicking my ass when Joey got the gun back on him. And he just disappeared. You hear what I’m saying, Loutie? I’m not saying he could take Joey head-to-head. But this guy doesn’t come at you head-on. He screws around with your mind and tampers with your car and takes you out at the knees when you’re not looking.” I realized I sounded scared. I was.

  Joey’s best operative said, “I promise. I won’t take any chances.”

  And, after years of working around Joey and Loutie, I understood what that meant. It meant that the beautiful ex-stripper on the other end of the phone would shoot my Cajun friend in the knee, or some other part of his anatomy vital to locomotion, the minute she saw him.

  I just hoped she’d see him coming.

  Eleven

  After working my way through a tall cappuccino and most of The Montgomery Advertiser, I called ahead from the pizza shop. Dr. Cantil was in her faculty office that Saturday morning and would see me then instead of Monday. She would be grading finals, she said. But I had come a long way, and she agreed to make time. I thought she sounded slightly disapproving of my apparent eagerness, but the perceived disapproval may have been colored more by my expectations than her tone. Or maybe I was put off by the slight British accent—they come with reserve built in.

  I paid Red for the coffee and got directions to the nearest one-hour film developer. Tiger Tooth Photo had a place two blocks down. I knew someone would. College is the time to engage in expensive, artistic pursuits that will, in two or three years, gather dust on a closet shelf behind flannel suits and tassel loafers.

  The shots of my Cajun tormentor were promised for 1:30 that afternoon.

  After backing out of my downtown parking space, it took about four minutes to drive to the professor’s building, where I borrowed a reserved parking space next to the back door. Unlike the Architecture and Business schools, Behavioral Sciences resided in the same nondescript building it had occupied fifteen years earlier when I was an undergraduate. It seems that alumni with psychology and sociology degrees do not endow buildings—not that some of them probably don’t want to.

  Freezing mist stung my lips and cheeks as I stepped out of the warmth of Joey’s SUV and hurried across a veneer of ice that had begun to form on granite slabs cascading from the back entrance. I pulled open one of the double fire doors and stepped into a puff of heated air.

  My footsteps echoed unpleasantly in the corridor. I cringed at each sharply defined footfall without really knowing why. I found a staircase and climbed to the third floor, where the words KAI-LI CANTIL, PH.D. were painted in black on the frosted-glass panel in the door to room 315. I knocked and heard the British-colony voice from the phone tell me to come in.

  I pushed through and found Dr. Cantil sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her desk. She was surrounded by five stacks of documents, which she had fanned out around her like the arms of a starfish. The assistant professor looked like she was praying or meditating. Her elbows rested on her knees, her thumbs moved in barely discernable circles against her temples, and her fingers overlapped across a bowed forehead as if she were trying to shield her eyes from the light. It didn’t look like she was grading papers. But whatever she was doing was her business, not mine.

  Without looking up, Kai-Li Cantil said, “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  I closed the door, leaned my back against the cool glass rectangle, and waited. The professor’s straight black hair hung in a shining curtain nearly to her waist, fanned around her shoulders, and fell forward from the sides of her bowed head. She was completely absorbed by the papers in front of her, which meant she wasn’t paying any attention to me, which meant I could stand there and unabashedly study her like a model in a magazine.

  Her skin held a light tan blush, even in December. But Dr. Cantil wasn’t pure Asian or simply an olive-skinned Brit with an exotic name. She was, I decided, a bit of both. Considering the look and the accent, I was thinking Hong Kong.

  Finally, Dr. Cantil unlaced her fingers and massaged her eyes with the muscles at the base of her thumbs. She looked up. “Sorry. I was in the middle of something.” As she spoke, the professor got to her feet.

  Dr. Cantil was tall—close to five-nine—and young. I decided she looked about twenty-eight, but she could have been a year or two older. She had the high cheekbones and angular features of Asian ancestry, softened by a strong dose of European blood and made more striking by the contrast of bright green eyes. I missed a beat when I m
et those eyes.

  Dr. Cantil looked vaguely amused by my expression.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “I got into town early. I would’ve been stuck here all weekend if we’d had to wait till Monday afternoon to do this.”

  “No problem. But, as I said by phone, I have no familiarity with your request. I would have gone over my secretary’s notes before our scheduled meeting.” Dr. Cantil walked around and sat behind a plain oak desk that lived somewhere beneath a foot-thick carpet of faded treatises, scattered photocopies, and paperback journals. She motioned at an inexpensive wooden chair. “Please. Have a seat.”

  I sat, and all of the professor from the nose down disappeared behind stacks of research. I stood and dragged the chair to the side of her desk.

  She smiled. “Sorry. It’s the way I work.”

  I fished a business card out of my pocket and held it out. She took the card and dropped it on a pile of photocopies that lay on her desk in a twisted spiral like cocktail napkins on a bar. She didn’t mention hourly rates or business arrangements. It seemed clear that the professor was much more interested in why I had come to see her than in how much money she would make as a result.

  Those penetrating green eyes were waiting expectantly. I started. “What I’ve been told is that you are an assistant professor of psychology who’s studying the effects of jury service on jurors.”

  She nodded. “Yes. The physical and emotional effects of jury service.”

  “I understand that the state bar’s providing some of your funding.”

  “Some of it.”

  “Well, I need to talk with you—as a jury expert—about a case that may go to trial. So I need our conversations, and any documents that may pass between us, to remain confidential.”

  “Of course. I’ve worked with attorneys before.”

  “Okay. I just didn’t want it getting back to the bar that I’m investigating another law firm.”

  Her eyes searched my face. “Is that what you’re doing, Mr. McInnes?”

  I felt my focus drifting inside those exotic green eyes, and I glanced at my watch to break the moment. When I looked up, I still didn’t know what time it was. “There’s a, ah, plaintiffs’ firm in Mobile called Russell and Wagler.”

  She nodded. “Serious people.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “top of the food chain. But even for meat-eaters like them, the firm has been just a little too damn lucky with jurors. In at least two trials, Russell and Wagler has gotten a huge verdict after a holdout juror got sick and was replaced by an alternate.”

  Dr. Cantil leaned back in her swivel chair and put her heels on the corner of her desk. She was wearing jeans and worn hiking boots. “Two sick jurors does not a sample make. You can’t logically draw any conclusions without more data.”

  “Yeah. I knew that much. What I’m looking for is someone who has collected data on juror illness rates that can be tied to specific law firms, and, obviously, I was hoping you’re that person.”

  She nodded and dropped her eyes to her desk. “Let me think about that for a minute.”

  So I did.

  Dr. Cantil glanced around her office as thoughts rolled through her mind, and I watched her do it. I think it was a satisfying exercise for both of us. Finally, she said, “That presents an interesting puzzle. I don’t have data broken down by law firm. But, for every trial in my database, I do have fields for the principal attorneys on the cases. Originally, I put attorneys in the database in case I needed to contact someone to learn more about a given jury. But …” She stopped talking and looked at the corner of the ceiling for a few seconds. “I might be able to get something from Martindale-Hubbell,” referring to the national directory of attorneys. She stopped again and shook her head as if dismissing the idea. “Does the state bar association publish any kind of directory listing attorneys under the firms they work for?”

  “Sure. They publish a directory every year, broken down three or four different ways. Alphabetically, by geographic region, by firm. I can get you a copy.”

  “No. The hard copy won’t do it. I’m trying to figure out how to tease my research for the data you want without wasting my time and costing you a fortune. What I need is a CD-ROM or a Zip disk with the law-firm directory on it. If the bar association publishes the directory, they’ll have the disk they sent to the typesetter. If I can get a copy of that disk, I could write a simple search-and-compare program to match the trial attorneys in my database with their firms in the directory—that’s why I need the information on disk. Then I’d be able to pull juror illness rates by attorney. Of course, I’d have to go back and, ah …” She was thinking.

  I waited. She didn’t say anything else, so I did. “But, after you do all that, you’ll be able to determine whether it appears that Russell and Wagler has been manipulating their juries. Is that what you’re saying?”

  She nodded. “More or less. Assuming that, if they’ve done it, they’ve done it more than two times. At least, it’s theoretically possible to determine whether the rate of juror disability on their cases is outside the range of naturally occurring events. But are you seriously claiming that this firm is … what? Poisoning people or bribing them or something?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  She paused. “What happened to your head?” Dr. Cantil was looking at the network of cuts on my forehead. The real-world psychologist was overtaking the abstract researcher, and she may have been wondering if she was sitting across from a head-trauma case gone goofy.

  I debated how much to tell her. If I told her everything—including the attempt on my life, the stacked sculpture in my living room, and the dead squirrel on my hood—she might throw me out of her office and call the guys with butterfly nets. But if I wasn’t forthcoming, I could be putting her in real danger with no warning about what she was getting into.

  “I was in a wreck. Someone tampered with my Jeep, and I think the same person who caused the wreck has been watching me. You should know—before you agree to help—that I think the wreck and the surveillance have something to do with this case.”

  The professor squinted her eyes. “You do know, Mr. McInnes, that you sound a bit crazy.”

  “That was blunt.”

  She smiled. “I’m a psychologist. I know crazy when I hear it.”

  “Do I look crazy?”

  “You don’t look like a homeless schizophrenic, if that’s what you mean. You look like a cute, successful attorney who’s probably used to getting his way. But delusional psychosis is a chemical imbalance in the brain. You could look perfectly normal and still be, as we say in the profession, crazy as a loon.”

  “You think I’m delusional?”

  “No. But I do think I’m going to check you out before I spend my Christmas break doing research for you.”

  I was beginning to like Dr. Kai-Li Cantil. “You want some references?”

  Dr. Cantil pursed her lips and shook her chin at me. “I’ve been doing research on Alabama juries for four years now. Talking to lawyers and judges all over the state. Don’t worry, Mr. McInnes. I’ll find out about you.”

  I looked into those intelligent green eyes, and I believed her. And that made me feel strangely unsettled.

  With forty-five minutes to kill before my pictures were promised to be ready, I found a sandwich shop called Over the Hump, where I ordered the speciality of the house—a Hump, of course—some chips, and a Coke. There were a half-dozen high school kids out and about on Christmas break, hanging out in the sandwich shop, smoking cigarettes and playing video games beneath the mounted head of an African water buffalo.

  Too much dinging and clanging. Too much juvenile bravado. I loaded back into the Expedition with my lunch and drove to the arboretum next to the university president’s mansion. I sat on a small, arched bridge, with my feet dangling over a stream, and ate. It was cold but quiet. And it was beautiful. Beautiful day. Beautiful landscape. Nice memories. Sixteen years ea
rlier, on a warm spring night, I had passed an amazing, slightly inebriated midnight hour on that bridge with a little Chi Omega named Cheryl Lansing.

  I found myself humming as I ate.

  At 1:30, I found a trash can for my sack and cup and napkins and climbed back onto the chilled seats of the Expedition. Ten minutes later, I presented a claim stub to a pale-skinned, long-necked photographer type behind the counter at Tiger Tooth Photo. And he looked at me as though he couldn’t fathom why I’d do something so embarrassingly stupid.

  I nodded at the stub. “You said the pictures would be ready at one-thirty.”

  He sighed. “And they were.”

  “Well, could I have them please?”

  He shook his head. Clearly, I was a moron. “They’ve already been picked up, sir.”

  Something started to claw at my stomach. “What are you talking about?”

  “Cindy, the girl you sent in to get them. She came in five minutes after you did and said you needed the prints in a hurry and she was supposed to wait. We gave ’em to her before one o’clock. If you’ll just check with her …”

  The tiny, instinctual thorns that had prickled my nerves since I awoke that morning in Montgomery thickened into a sinuous vine that squeezed some soft and vital organ just above my stomach. I said, “I don’t know anybody in Auburn named Cindy, and I didn’t send anybody in here to pick up my pictures.”

  The clerk’s veneer of superiority faded. “She knew your name, uh …”

  “Who is she? You said her name like you know her.”

  He stuttered a little now when he talked. “I, uh, don’t, uh, want to get anybody in trouble. Listen, uh, let me give you a coupon for free develop …”

  “Who is Cindy?”

  “Uh, listen. Why don’t I …”

  Someone was getting farther and farther away with my hard-won pictures of the Cajun while this idiot was trying to give me a coupon for free film. I walked around the counter and stood toe to toe with the slight, pale-skinned clerk.