Crazy, Stupid, Dead

by Wendy Delaney

  “That construction company? You think they have something to do with …” She looked at Duke behind the grill and then lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “You know what.”

  I didn’t know what I thought other than it seemed like a strange coincidence that they were trying to acquire property on the street where Naomi Easley’s daughter was living.

  And I wasn’t big on coincidences.

  “It could be nothing.” And it was definitely nothing I wanted to set the rumor mill spinning into high gear about since I didn’t want to hurt Byron’s negotiations. “I was more curious than anything else.”

  “Because they’re linked to Naomi in some way?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” So don’t you say it either. “I think they built my mother’s house, and I was just looking into something for her.”

  Planting a fist at her thick waist, Lucille cocked her head at me. “For someone good at spottin’ liars, that’s the best you can do?”

  It was this morning. “Just let me know if you hear anything, okay?”

  “I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. You can count on me.”

  “I’d rather count on her getting some work done this morning,” Duke grumbled at me as I went by. “So if you’re finished recruiting my employees to help with whatever this thing is you’ve got going—”

  “I beg your pardon. We were simply chatting.” I shot him my best innocent smile. “Girl talk, remember?”

  “My memory’s fine. So is my hearing.” The crease between his bushy silver eyebrows deepened. “You’re not sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, are you?”

  No doubt the man I loved as much as my own grandfather would think so. “Of course not.”

  He shook his head. “Lucille’s right. You’re a rotten liar this morning.”

  * * *

  After I got to the office and made an early morning appointment for Thursday with Dr. Carpp, I spent the next ten minutes running background checks on everyone I could find who was related to Naomi Easley.

  Other than discovering that Gordon Easley had a lead foot with a decades-old history of speeding tickets, I found a big fat nothing on the rest of the family until I ran a search for nine-one-one calls. There had been two, both placed by Robin Easley Kranick.

  The most recent was last August, when she reported seeing a prowler trying to break into her neighbor’s house. Which didn’t surprise me, since it corresponded to what her daughter had said during that confrontation in front of the house.

  The other, dated July seventeenth two years ago, summarized the medical response to Robin’s call for an ambulance for her mother. At first, the paramedic’s report back to Dispatch appeared to be a lot less dramatic than I had expected. Then, I read four words that kicked my heart into high gear as if I’d mainlined a carafe of Duke’s coffee: Victim claims accidental fall.

  Claims? That was a word I would use if I felt I wasn’t getting the whole story.

  The summary concluded with Naomi being transported to the local ER for treatment.

  If anyone else had questioned Naomi about what caused her to fall down the stairs of her home, it didn’t make it into any regional database I had access to. So I had nothing else to go on other than a lot of conjecture on Lucille’s part that Robin should have been criminally charged with something resembling reckless endangerment.

  With the sound of heavy footfalls coming in my direction, I shut down my computer screen before I had to explain what I was doing to one of Ben Santiago’s more rotund junior prosecutors.

  “Are you available to sit in on a meeting?” Mason asked when he reached my desk, wheezing as if he had just completed a marathon.

  Instead of filing? “You bet. Now?”

  “Now.”

  Mason marched back toward the criminal division, and I trotted to catch up with him. “What’s this about?”

  “Not sure why you’re needed,” he wheezed as we approached the conference room next to Ben’s office. “I thought this was going to be routine.”

  Since I was the administrative assistant who had scheduled this morning’s witness preparation session with Ben, so had I. That’s why, when the door swung open, I wasn’t surprised to see a skinny twenty-year-old. But I hadn’t expected to see two men the size of Mack trucks bookending him. Nor had I expected Ben to reach for one of the yellow ruled pads on the table.

  While Mason claimed the seat opposite the younger bookend, Ben motioned me in. “We should have known better than to start without you, Charmaine.”

  From prior experience, I knew this to be code for You’re here to tell me if I can rely on this witness, so I smiled with the knowledge that Ben wanted me to quietly observe and follow his lead.

  When I stepped to the table, he turned to the big man with the graying crew cut sitting across from him. “She helps keep me on track.”

  That was more Odette’s job, but if it would keep me off my knees in the file room, I was happy to play along. “I do my best,” I said as Ben slid the legal pad and a pen in front of the empty chair to his right.

  I figured that was to give me the appearance of functioning as his scribe. More important, it gave me license to plant my butt in the best seat from which to observe Ryan Pollard, one of the key witnesses in a drug trafficking case scheduled for next month.

  Ben pointed his pen across the table at the slouching kid with the acne dotting his forehead. “Charmaine, I believe you spoke to Ryan on the phone.”

  Rising from the black upholstered chair, I reached out to shake his clammy hand. With the close proximity, I was immediately struck that he reeked of flop sweat and cigarettes. “Nice to meet you in person.” Not so nice to smell you.

  Ryan looked as enthused to see me as my ex at our settlement hearing and gave me a tight-lipped nod.

  “His father, Brad Pollard,” Ben said, indicating the block of stone with the crew cut to Ryan’s left. “And brother, Mike.”

  Since testifying at trial could be a frightening experience, I was accustomed to younger witnesses bringing a parent to these prep sessions for moral support. But Ryan’s family members looked more like mob movie enforcers straight out of central casting.

  I smiled as I shook their hands.

  They didn’t. Instead, Mike slanted a look of contempt at Ryan sulking next to him. “Can we get on with this?”

  Spoken like a man who didn’t want to be here any more than his little brother.

  “Certainly,” Ben said, keeping his expression carefully neutral as he proceeded to explain what Ryan could expect to be asked by opposing counsel.

  With every second that ticked by, I noticed Ryan getting increasingly twitchy. Same with the brother. But it wasn’t until Ben mentioned one of the drug deals that took place at the job site where Ryan had been working that he stared down at the table as if he wanted to disappear into the wood grain.

  “And you didn’t say a word,” Mike muttered through clenched teeth.

  Ryan sunk lower in his chair.

  Mike folded his beefy arms. “I told you to stick with me.”

  So Mike Pollard was there when that drug deal went down? “What do you do, Mike?” I asked to get a better sense for why he wasn’t on the witness list.

  “Roofer for Cascara Construction.” He jabbed his thumb in his brother’s direction. “I’m this one’s foreman.”

  Cascara?! “This happened at a Cascara job site?”

  Mike’s steely eyes narrowed to slits. “On this idiot’s first day.”

  “How was I supposed to know who they were?” Ryan asked, his voice high and whiny like a petulant child’s. “They arrived with the food truck.”

  Hurling expletives at him, Mike smacked his brother’s arm. “You ask, you freaking idiot!”

  Mike’s father pointed a bratwurst-sized finger at him. “Enough! Get out of here so we can get this done.”

  “I can take Mike to the break room for some coffee,” I wh
ispered to Ben.

  He nodded. “No need to rush back. We’ll find you two when we’re done here.”

  I took that to mean that it was the older brother he wanted me to observe. Again, not what I had expected, but okay.

  “If you’ll follow me,” I said, extending my arm toward the door like a maître d’ leading Mike to his table.

  Fortunately, the break room was unoccupied and the coffee pot contained some relatively fresh brew.

  I pulled out a chair for him, but he glared at as if it came with a trap door before he lowered himself into it.

  I pretended not to have noticed. “How do you take your coffee?”

  “Black.”

  “Heights don’t bother you, huh?” I asked while I filled two cups to direct his focus on something he’d be more comfortable with.

  “What?”

  “Being up on two-story houses … That’s about, what … fifty feet off the ground?” Hoping that was a gross exaggeration that made me look dimmer than the partially burned-out overhead fluorescent, I set the cups on the table and took a seat.

  The dismissive smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth told me I’d hit my target. “More like twenty.”

  “Still, that’s up there. I sure couldn’t do it.”

  That earned me two seconds of eye contact before his gaze dropped to the bacon grease stain I managed to get this morning on the placket of my green silk blouse.

  Yep, you don’t think very highly of me.

  If it helped him to view me as less of a threat, I was fine with it. “How long have you been doing this kind of work?”

  “Pretty much since high school,” he said between slurps of coffee.

  “And you worked your way up to foreman. That’s impressive.”

  Mike glanced at the door, reminding me of Steve when Marietta won’t shut up.

  “It shows that the people in charge at Cascara Construction have a lot of trust in you.”

  “Someone quit and I took his place, that’s all.”

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t give that job to just anyone, especially when there’s so much work to be done. Just the other day I heard that a project is going to be starting uptown, near the park.”

  He gave my cup a hard stare as if he’d like me to occupy my mouth with it. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Mike wasn’t trying to mask his annoyance with me, so I had no reason to doubt him. At least so far.

  “Might just be rumor. The Easleys mentioned that a certain party might be looking at their house since it’s such prime real estate.”

  He gazed out the window without emoting even a sputtering spark of interest.

  Okay, he didn’t appear to know anyone by the name of Easley and had no knowledge of Cascara’s future plans.

  I took a sip of coffee to give us both a break from my fruitless interrogation, and noticed that Mike was tapping his cup as he stared into space.

  Duke did that when he had a decision to make. He also did it when he was annoyed—his early warning system to the rest of us to cease and desist or prepare for a loud eruption of Mt. Duke.

  Since Mike no longer looked like he wanted to swat me like a fly, I set my cup down and smiled across the table at him. “I know this is a difficult situation for you and your family.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But your brother is doing the right thing by testifying.”

  The tapping continued. “I hope so.”

  “Mr. Santiago is very good. He’ll help Ryan know exactly what to expect when he takes the stand.”

  “I’m sure.”

  More tapping combined with the rigid set to Mike’s jaw told me that he wasn’t so convinced.

  “Really,” I said, waiting for him to meet my gaze. “Your brother will be okay.”

  The tapping stopped. Instead, he gripped the cup as if he needed it as an anchor. “You don’t know these guys.”

  “They’re going to prison. I really don’t think—”

  “You people have no idea.”

  “Mike, are you worried about your brother’s safety?”

  His mouth a grim line, Mike stared into the depths of his cup. “Not if he gets out of town.”

  “You mean after the trial.”

  He hesitated a little too long. “Sure.”

  Criminy. Ben’s key witness might bolt. No wonder Ryan was so twitchy.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you concerned for your safety?”

  “Don’t expect any of those punks will do anything to me.” He shrugged a meaty shoulder. “Other than to try to get me fired.”

  What “punk” had that kind of pull? “One of those guys is in a management position at Cascara?”

  “Hardly.”

  Okay, I was getting confused. “I don’t understand. “Who’s gonna—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I can take care of myself.” Mike pushed out of his chair and headed for the door. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  I bolted out of my seat. “I think you should talk to Mr. Santiago before you leave.” Because this situation had escalated far beyond my pay grade.

  “I got nothing else to say.” He pointed down the hall. “Is this the way out?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Tell Ryan and my dad that I’ll meet them at the car,” he said, turning Patsy’s head as he stalked by.

  I ran to catch up with him. “Mike, you should really talk to …” Then the door swung shut behind him. “Crap!”

  Patsy aimed a smug smile at me. “Did your meeting go well, Charmaine?”

  “It went swell,” I said, spinning on my heel without a second to spare. Because I needed to go back to deliver Mike’s message, and then tell Ben that his key witness might be the next one to rush out of this courthouse.

  Chapter Twenty

  “RYAN’S OBVIOUSLY NERVOUS about testifying,” Ben replied after I parked myself in one of the black leather chairs in front of his massive desk and provided the blow-by-blow of my conversation with Mike Pollard. “But if the kid isn’t going to help himself by telling us who’s been threatening him, there’s not much we can do beyond what we went over in our first meeting.”

  I was sufficiently familiar with the witness deposition process to know that a risk assessment would have been conducted, and Ryan Pollard would continue to receive periodic calls from our witness advocate.

  “His dad said that he and the brother will keep an eye on Ryan until the trial.” Leaning back in his desk chair, Ben removed his horn-rimmed glasses to clean them. “Don’t think we can get him better bodyguards than that.”

  “I guess.” Although one of those bodyguards had been truly scared for his brother.

  You don’t know these guys.

  Just thinking about the way Mike looked like he wanted to take refuge in his coffee cup when he said that gave me gooseflesh. It also made me wonder if Steve might know them.

  * * *

  I had just returned from lunch when my grandmother called to ask me to take her grocery shopping.

  I had a suspicion that an ulterior motive lurked behind her request. But it wasn’t until almost six hours later, when we were putting away her four bags of groceries, that Gram pointed to the brand-new white car still parked at the end of her walkway. “What have you decided to do about that?”

  I stifled a groan. “I haven’t given it a ton of thought.”

  Gram scoffed. “I seriously doubt that.”

  I obviously needed to up my game. Hardly anyone who knew me believed a word I said today. “Really. Rox called yesterday and I spent most of my evening with her, so that didn’t leave a lot of time for other stuff.”

  “Then maybe you’d better make some time, because that car can’t sit out there forever.”

  Something that I was all too aware of. “I will.”

  “Have you spoken to your mother yet?”

  “No,” I said on a sigh.

  Gram echoed m
y sigh. “What am I going to do with you?”

  Was that a multiple-choice question?

  She rested her fists at her hips. “Do I have to get your mother over here so that you two can have a conversation?”

  Good grief.

  “No. I’ll handle it.” Eventually.

  “In the meantime, what’s going on with your car in the shop?”

  “Now it’s getting its brakes replaced.”

  Her expression softened. “That sounds expensive.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry, sweetheart, but is that going to happen soon? Because, while I don’t mind being chauffeured to the store, I will need my car back for mahjong Friday.”

  Dang. “George said it should be ready by then, so no problem.”

  Gram brightened. “If it’s not, you have that nice new car you can drive.”

  “Right.”

  “And since you’re already here, maybe you’d like to trade cars now.”

  Just the thought of driving Marietta’s “prop car” made my molar ache. “I really don’t—”

  “Oh.” Gram’s gaze fixed on the wrought iron wall rack by the back door, where I had hung her car keys. “I forgot. Your mother took the keys with her. You’ll have to get them from her when you two have your chat.”

  Of course I will.

  * * *

  After I got home and took Fozzie for a walk, I returned with a decision made to call my mother to set up a meeting.

  Then, instead of calling her, I ate two of the chocolate chip cookies I had baked that morning, cleaned out my refrigerator, and made a sweep of all the dog-hair dust bunnies I missed the prior weekend. Then, after fifteen minutes on the elliptical to atone for the cookies, I called to check in on how Rox was doing. That’s when Steve arrived to a chorus of barking, and I cut the call short.

  “Hey,” I said, happy for the nice distraction. I gave him a kiss while Fozzie danced at our feet.

  “Hey, you.” Steve pulled out of my arms to scratch behind Fozzie’s ears and then grabbed the living room remote to turn on the flat screen. “Sit and be good. The playoff game’s on.”