“You bought from Bully?”
Zorn shook his head. “Not directly from him but from one of his minions. He tape-recorded the transaction and, about three months before Jack was released from prison, he showed me the tape and told me what he wanted.”
“If Jack ever said anything about changing the beneficiary of his life insurance policy, you were supposed to tell Bully,” Bo offered, trying to keep him talking.
“More than that,” Zorn said. “Bully was worried that Jack would make the change. He knew Jack’s marriage with Kat was on the rocks and that Jack’s ex-wife, Barbara, was putting a lot of pressure on him to change the beneficiary to their son. Bully told me in no uncertain terms that I could not let that happen. If I did, he would release the tape and I’d lose my law license and be sent to jail.” Zorn took in a deep breath and then stood from the bench. He took a couple of steps to the left and puked on the pavement.
“You alright?” Bo asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m screwed is what I am,” Zorn said.
Feeling his pulse quicken, Bo squatted and held his breath so he wouldn’t inhale the scent of vomit. “Greg, if you have a copy of that change of beneficiary form, I need you to give it to me. That alone might be enough reasonable doubt for Wilma Newton to walk.”
“And just give up my future?” Zorn dry-heaved. “No way.”
“If you aren’t going to give me the copy, why did you just tell me your sob story?”
“Because I’m a dead man.” Zorn whirled around to stare at Bo, eyes wild with fear. “If Bully’s wench tried to kill us last night, then she’ll try again, dog.”
“We can hire you a security team. They’ll watch you 24/7.”
“For what?” Zorn said, spitting bile on the pavement. “So I can happily spend twenty carefree years in jail?”
“You can cut a deal. Turn state’s evidence. Tell Powell Conrad everything, see what he can offer you.”
“I violated the attorney-client privilege. Hell, I trampled all over it. I helped Bully Calhoun defraud an insurance company. What deal could Conrad offer me?” Zorn spat again. “I’m not an idiot, Bo. I’m a lawyer. Don’t you think I’ve played out these scenarios in my mind a million times?” He rocked back on his heels and gazed up at the cloudless South Alabama sky. “I was a dead man the minute I gave the original of that change of beneficiary form to Bully Calhoun.”
Bo chewed on the problem, and his head hurt from the various possibilities. He agreed that none were particularly appealing for Zorn.
“Greg, come with me back to Tuscaloosa. We can see Powell together. He’s a friend of mine. He’ll listen.”
“No chance,” Greg said, walking toward the garage. “Hey, are you guys finished?”
A mechanic patted the Porsche, which was back on the ground with four brand-new tires. “Hell of a nice ride, sir.”
“Thank you. Are we done?”
“Yes, sir. If you’ve already paid, I’ll drive it out of the garage and you’ll be ready to roll.”
“Greg,” Bo called after him, but the attorney ignored him and brushed past him to where the mechanic was backing the Porsche out.
“That’s good,” Zorn said, and the mechanic jumped out of the car.
Zorn handed him a twenty-dollar tip and climbed into the driver’s-side seat.
“Wait!” Bo yelled, and placed both hands on the open window seal. “Greg, if you won’t come with me, at least tell me where I can find the copy of the change form.”
Zorn looked over the wheel for several seconds before gazing up at Bo with dead eyes. “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know where it is.” Then, before Bo could respond, Zorn clicked a button and the window began to roll up.
Bo stepped back and watched as Greg Zorn pulled the Porsche out onto Highway 59, heading south toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Five minutes later, Bo pulled his Sequoia out of the Goodyear store and turned in the opposite direction.
Due north toward Tuscaloosa.
As he pressed the accelerator to the floor, he looked in his rearview mirror as Baldwin County receded into the distance.
Bocephus Haynes had a strong feeling that he would never see Jack Willistone’s lawyer again.
55
“He doesn’t know where it is?” Tom asked, not disguising his exasperation.
“That’s what he said.” Fatigue dripped from Bo’s voice.
“Where are you?”
“Getting on 65. About four hours out.”
“OK, no need to come in today. I know you’re worn out.”
“Thanks,” Bo said. “I think I’m going to go see Jazz and the kids. I almost orphaned them last night.”
Silence filled the line and Tom closed his eyes, thanking God that his friend was OK. “So, you’re glad I brought Rick in?”
“That decision saved my butt, Professor. Second time I’ve been staring down the barrel of a gun in the past year, and both times you’ve pulled me out of the fire.”
“We were lucky. I didn’t expect Rick to leave immediately when I called, but if he hadn’t—”
“You’d be picking me out a coffin.”
They said their goodbyes, and Tom walked back into the conference room. It was almost eleven thirty and he had kept the young man sitting at the end of the table waiting long enough. Frankie had scheduled the meeting for eleven, and the kid had showed up fifteen minutes early. But Bo had called just as Tom was about to go in, and catching up on his investigator’s near-fatal trip to the Gulf Coast took priority.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Caldwell,” Tom said as he entered the room.
Happy Caldwell stood and gave a slight bow with his head. “No worries, Professor McMurtrie. It’s an honor to meet you.”
“Thank you,” Tom said, gesturing to the chair. “Please, sit down.”
Caldwell did as he was told.
“You had indicated on the phone that your friend, Mr. . . .” Tom paused and began to flip through the Newton file, all of which had been stacked in boxes on the conference room table. He pulled out the folder with Wade’s investigative report, but before he found the name, Caldwell blurted it out.
“Shuman. Todd Shuman. Pledge name is Screech. I called and texted him several times and tried to get him to come with me, but he’s a pansy . . . er, I’m sorry, he’s a little gun-shy about all this.”
“And you’re not?”
Caldwell’s face turned a slight shade of red. “A little,” he admitted. “But I’m also curious. I’m prelaw at Alabama.” He looked Tom right in the eye. “You’re one of my heroes.”
Tom didn’t know what to say and felt his own face beginning to flush as well. Then, shaking off his embarrassment, he met the young man’s gaze. “Mr. Caldwell, have you read the witness statement that Detective Richey prepared summarizing his conversation with you and Mr. Shuman a couple hours after you and your fraternity brother discovered the body of Jack Willistone?”
Caldwell nodded. “I read it and signed it a few days later. It’s dead on.”
“Have your read it since then?”
“No.”
Tom again looked for the summary. After thirty seconds, he located it in a manila folder in the investigative file jacket. “Would you mind looking at it again?”
“Sure.”
Tom slid the statement over and watched as Caldwell took several minutes to read through the contents. When he was done, he looked up from the page. “It’s all there.”
“Is there anything else you remember that’s not in there? Anything at all?”
Caldwell didn’t say anything.
“Mr. Caldwell? Is there something else? Did you see any boats in the distance? Any strange-looking people down by the shore or in the parking lot of the Cypress Inn?”
“No,” Caldwell said, but he sounded less cocksure than he had a few moments earlier.
“Are you sure?” Tom asked. “My client’s life is on the line here, Happy.”
His face
reddened again and he looked down at the table. “I’m sorry, Professor McMurtrie, but I can’t remember anything else. I’d . . . really like to help.”
Tom watched him, trying to read whether he was telling the truth. Then he slid his business card across the table. “If you do remember something, call me, OK?”
“Yes, sir,” Happy said.
Happy Caldwell met Todd Shuman at Innisfree fifteen minutes later. Happy did two shots of Jim Beam before he was able to say anything. “We need to come clean,” he said, looking his fraternity brother dead in the eye.
“Are you crazy? We’ll be kicked out of school. Out of Phi Delt. My parents will kill me.”
“Screech, that woman’s life is hanging in the balance. How can we just—?”
“We can’t, alright, Happy? You can’t, you hear me? All for one and one for all, right, brother?”
Happy flinched at the sound of the fraternity slogan. “This is bigger than us, Screech.”
“No, it’s not,” Shuman said. “Nothing we say is going to stop the prosecution from convicting that woman of killing Jack Willistone. We add nothing. You read the article yesterday. He was killed with her gun. Her prints were on it. She spat on him.” He flung his hands up. “Your hero and his client are going down, Happy. And we don’t need to go down with them.”
56
Raina Farrell didn’t even line up the putt before she proceeded to yank it left. And eighty-seven becomes eighty-eight, she thought, backhanding the remaining one-incher in and retrieving her ball from the cup.
“Bogey?” her playing partner Michaela Jackson asked, trying not to sound obnoxious as they walked off the green.
“Yep. The bogey train rolls on. Double snowman today. I’m really on a tear.”
“Just a slump,” Michaela said. “You’ll get it back.”
In the parking lot, the two teammates hugged, and Raina put her clubs in the back of her Mustang hatchback. “Thanks for meeting me, Michaela. Are you home the rest of the summer?”
Michaela nodded. “Good old Hunts-Vegas,” she said, her pet name for Huntsville. “How about you? Home?”
Raina’s mom lived with her boyfriend in a two-bedroom shack in Bagdad, Florida, and her dad had been dead since she was five years old. Home didn’t sound all that enticing. “No, I’m gonna take some summer classes and try to get ahead.”
“Well, let’s do this again,” Michaela said. “Birmingham is only an hour and a half away from Huntsville, and with Eagle Point letting the team play for free on weekdays, you can’t beat the rate.”
Raina forced a smile. “Sure thing.”
As Michaela opened the door to her Cherokee jeep, she glanced over her shoulder at Raina. “Hey, what did you make on your astronomy final? I got a freaking C minus. Can you believe that douchebag Newell? Acting all cool and buying us beers before the exam and then he lowers the boom with such a ridiculously hard test.”
Raina felt heat on the back of her neck and in her chest. “I . . . I got a B,” she said.
“You what?” Michaela asked, cocking her head.
“I got a B.”
“But we studied together. You didn’t know that stuff any better than me. How could you have gotten a B?”
Raina knew her face had turned bright red, but she kept her voice neutral. “I studied on my own too, and I . . . I went to see Dr. Newell a few times for extra help.”
Michaela smirked. “I bet.” Then she held out a fist, which Raina touched with her own. “Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, huh?”
Raina took a step closer to her teammate. “I worked my ass off studying for that test. I’m sorry you didn’t make what you wanted, but I deserved the grade I received.”
Michaela tilted her head, obviously not buying it. “You and Newell were awful chummy at Phil’s that night.”
Raina blinked back tears and turned toward her car. “Have a nice summer, Michaela.”
“Raina, wait.”
But Raina already had the keys in the ignition.
“Raina, I’m sorry!” Michaela beat her fists on the driver’s-side window, but Raina ignored her. She pressed the accelerator to the floor and burned rubber out of the golf club.
Forty-five minutes after leaving the course, she turned into the Tuscaloosa Public Library on Jack Warner Parkway. Instead of going inside, however, she walked to the edge of the street, looked both ways, and crossed. Twenty paces later and she was on the Riverwalk.
She never parked at Manderson Landing anymore because she didn’t want to take a chance that Dr. Newell would see her car. She had blocked his cell phone number, and the one time he’d caught her walking on the Quad, she had literally run away from him. She never wanted to see that bastard again.
The affair had lasted all of a month and they had only had sex three times—four if you wanted to count the thirty seconds on the bench the night she saw the murder.
The prior times had all been in his office after class. She would act like she was leaving with the other students and then, feigning that she forgot something, walk back up the stairs. He’d lock the door, and five minutes later, if not less, they were done. She had never reached orgasm—there wasn’t time for it—but she had turned a failing grade into a solid B.
By the time she reached the bench looking over the river, she was weeping. She sat down and wondered if anyone had ever found the panties that she had forgotten in her panic to leave after witnessing the shooting. She had packed up the telescope but forgotten her damn underwear.
Despite her tears, she managed a laugh at the absurdity of it. She had told no one about what she had seen and no one had asked. She had noticed the flyers the police had put up at the park, but she hadn’t called.
Dr. Newell may be a douchebag, as Michaela had called him, but he was right about what he said that night. If anyone learned that she had given her fiftysomething astronomy teacher sex in exchange for a passing grade, she would lose her golf scholarship and probably be kicked out of school. Best case, she’d earn a healthy suspension.
I may lose my scholarship anyway, she thought. Raina, a scratch player whose scores almost always hovered between 68 and 74 had not broken 80 since May 8. Her other classes, which she hadn’t needed to screw the teacher to pass, also suffered, and she barely ground out Cs.
Raina had never been a good student. Her gifts lay in her physical talents. She was a hell of a golfer and knew how to please a man. When she was fourteen years old, she broke par and lost her virginity in the same summer and never looked back.
The tears began to fall again as her conscience ate away at her. She was trapped. If she did nothing, then she would keep her golf scholarship, assuming her game came back, and would still have a future at school and in the game she loved. But a murderer may walk free.
If she came forward and told what she had seen, justice would be done. And my life is ruined.
Raina placed her head in her hands. There was no way out.
57
Visiting hours at the Tuscaloosa County Jail ended at 4:00 p.m. By the time Laurie Ann got out of school and made the twenty-minute bike ride, it was 3:40. She sat across a plexiglass wall and held a telephone receiver tight in her right hand, waiting for the guards to bring in her mother. By the time they did, it was ten till four.
“Make it quick,” a guard snapped behind Laurie Ann, but she didn’t turn around. Instead she looked through the glass at the woman smiling back at her.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Wilma said. “It’s not the weekend yet, is it?”
Since her mother’s incarceration, Laurie Ann had come every Saturday morning to see her, bringing Jackie each time. “No, it’s Thursday,” Laurie Ann said.
Wilma nodded, but her gaze was unfocused. Leaning closer to the glass, Laurie Ann noticed that her mother’s eyes were bloodred. She looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks.
“How’s your sister?” Wilma asked.
“The same. Still doesn’t say much.”
<
br /> Wilma looked down at her hands. “How are you?”
Laurie Ann ignored the question. There was no time for small talk. “Professor McMurtrie asked me to meet with you.”
Wilma raised her eyes and folded her arms across her chest. “Oh?”
“He said you won’t tell him what happened the night of the murder.”
Wilma looked behind her to see if any guards were in the vicinity. Then she gazed up at the ceiling. When she lowered her eyes, they were full of tears. “You sure have grown up, you know that?”
Laurie Ann rolled her eyes. “Momma, we don’t have time—”
“When I’m in the cell at night,” Wilma interrupted, beginning to rock her shoulders in the plastic chair, her arms still wrapped tight around her sternum, “and the lights are off and the only thing I can hear is the guard in the hall whistling . . . I think about how things were. How Dewey used to mow the grass on the weekend so that he could grill steaks in the backyard. Do you remember our old house? The little rancher in Northport with the patio in back. Do you remember that last November? I guess that would have been 2008. I took all those pictures of your daddy and you two girls playing in the leaves. Lord Jesus, that man loved his children.” A sob escaped Wilma’s lips. “It’s all my fault, Laurie Ann. All of it. If I had just let Dewey quit trucking, none of this”—she flung an arm out to the side and looked around her—“would have happened. If I hadn’t been so greedy. So starved for money. If I had just let him walk away like he wanted, he’d still be alive. We’d still have our house. Jackie would . . .” She bit her lip. “Jackie would still be the happy-go-lucky kid she was.” Wilma stopped and a strange smile came to her lips. “Do you know what your daddy really loved to do?”
Laurie Ann said nothing.
“He loved to cook.” She giggled through her tears. “And he was good. Do you remember that chili he made every Halloween?”
Laurie Ann felt her own eyes begin to moisten as she saw a vision of her father as she remembered him best. White apron covering his flannel shirt and blue jeans, crooked grin on his face, stirring a huge pot of chili on the stove in their house and singing aloud the words of George Strait’s “Baby Blue” as the real George’s melodic voice poured out of the ancient transistor radio on the kitchen counter. “I remember,” she said, wiping her eyes.
The Last Trial Page 27
