by Rose Connors
I’m barely seated when the Kydd clambers up the steep staircase. I know it’s the Kydd because he always takes the steps two at a time, and my middle-aged partner doesn’t.
The Kydd bursts into the room with his usual air of urgency. “Can’t stay,” he warns, both hands in the air. “People waiting. But I have to know. What’d ole Geraldine have to offer?” His grin expands when he mentions his former boss.
The Kydd’s speech drops no hint that he ever left Georgia. He’s slender and tall, but his posture is poor; his shoulders are stooped. “Stand up straight,” I always tell him, but he never does. Instead, he routinely gives me his slow, Southern grin and says, “Gert.” Gert, he finally admitted last week, is his great-aunt, the nag. I haven’t told him to stand up straight since.
“Murder two,” I tell him now.
“What does Buck say?”
“Buck says no.”
He grins again, pointing his pen at me. “What do you say?”
The Kydd is a quick study. He assumes more and more responsibility each day, it seems, taking on clients Harry and I would otherwise have to turn away. He learned the basics from me, in the DA’s office. Now he’s learning from Harry how to blend that competence with a tough compassion. Our clients are, for the most part, people battered by life and baffled by the system. Handling them is something of an art form, and Harry has it mastered.
I take off my glasses and consider the Kydd’s question. “I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “My crystal ball is cloudy this week.”
“Well, are you ready?” he asks, already turning back toward the staircase.
“Nobody’s ever ready for trial, Kydd, you know that. But I’m as close as I’m going to get.”
The Kydd rolls out his Southern grin from the top step. “You’re ready,” he tells me. “My crystal ball says Stanley’s about to meet his match.”
I start to thank him for his vote of confidence, but the look on his face stops me. His eyes dart from me to the first floor and back to me again. He utters one word before he disappears. “Trouble.”
Chapter 3
The Kydd takes the entire staircase in three strides. I follow as fast as I can. The door to the front office is wide open, a raw northeast wind blowing snow inside, papers flying everywhere. A stack of files on the edge of the Kydd’s desk slides to the floor.
The waiting clients are on their feet, easing a tall, wafer-thin woman into the Kydd’s high-backed leather desk chair. She’s coatless and it’s freezing. Her face is swollen and bruised. Her white blouse is blood-spattered and open in front, the top buttons torn off. Her lower lip bleeds profusely, a dark red stream running down her neck and pooling at her collar.
The men part to let me through, and I see at once that her right arm is broken. It hangs from her shoulder at a tortured angle, the wrist taking a brutal bend. I take off my suit jacket and cover her chest, press my handkerchief against her lips.
“Who did this to you?” My own hands suddenly tremble.
Her eyes meet mine, but she doesn’t answer.
The Kydd reappears with a makeshift ice pack in a kitchen towel and an old blanket from the hallway closet. I replace my saturated handkerchief with the ice pack and cover the thin woman up to her neck with the worn blanket.
“Who did this to you?” I ask again, holding the ice pack away from her mouth so she can answer.
Her eyes dart around the room before she speaks. “My husband,” she whispers finally, “but he didn’t mean it. It was the drink. He didn’t mean it.”
Swell. That’s great. This scenario walked into the DA’s office more than once during the years I worked there. She defends the bastard even before she’s sewn up. By sunset, she remembers falling down a flight of stairs.
“How did you get here?” I ask, pressing the ice to her lips. She points behind me with her good hand, the left one, and I turn to see a skinny teenage girl wearing silver hoop earrings and a faded denim outfit, gnawing a thumbnail. She can’t possibly be old enough to drive-not legally, anyway. I decide not to inquire, the hallmark of a good defense lawyer, Harry says.
“Your father did this?” I ask instead.
The skinny girl gives up her thumbnail reluctantly. “He’s not my father.” She shakes her head. “And he’s not her husband either. She just says that. Like he’s some kind of prize.”
Harry rushes into the front office, Steady Teddy following at a slower, almost leisurely, pace. Steady’s light gray suit, a fine Italian cut, probably cost more than all of Harry’s suits put together. Steady has a narrow build, and he’s about four inches shorter than Harry’s six-foot frame, but he wears enough gold around his neck to stoop a much larger man. He stays behind Harry, adjusting his shiny watch band, looking away from the injured woman in the chair.
Imagine that. Steady Teddy doesn’t want to get involved.
Harry, though, moves to the woman’s side without a word and takes her pulse, one of those skills career criminal defense lawyers master somehow. “She’s not in shock,” he says, his eyes moving from the wall clock to the ice compress on the woman’s bleeding lip. “But she’s got to get to a hospital.”
Harry looks to the Kydd. “I’m due in court in an hour. Can you take her?”
The Kydd’s eyes widen and he gestures helplessly to the two men who’ve been waiting to see him since I got here. Harry’s eyes move to mine, but he doesn’t ask. He knows how anxious I am about tomorrow’s trial.
“I’ll call the rescue squad,” he says.
The woman pushes the kitchen-towel compress away and tries to get out of the chair, but she falls back against it almost at once. “No,” she cries. “No ambulance. No rescue squad. I won’t go with them.”
“She won’t go in an ambulance,” the teenage daughter confirms, her eyes rolling to the ceiling. She shakes her head again and sighs. “Never mind,” she says. “Forget it. I’ll take her.”
The mother sobs now, leaning to one side in the chair, her good arm over her eyes. “He didn’t mean it,” she repeats. “He didn’t. He had too much to drink, that’s all. He loses his temper when he drinks that much. He didn’t mean to hurt anybody. He probably won’t even remember.”
Harry lifts the telephone receiver, but I press my hand over the keypad before he can punch in the numbers. “I’ll take her,” I tell him. “I’ll take her to Cape Cod Hospital. But that’s all, Harry. I can’t do any more than that. You can’t either. Not with Buck’s trial starting tomorrow.”
Harry presses the receiver against the front of his suit jacket, looking like a schoolboy about to pledge allegiance to the flag. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll call and tell them you’re coming.”
The Kydd and his two clients struggle to raise the thin woman from the chair without hurting her arm. My suit jacket falls to the floor, but she manages to hold on to the blanket and the ice compress. The men wrap the blanket carefully around her shoulders before guiding her out to the porch, down the front steps, and across the snow-covered lawn toward my ancient Thunderbird.
The daughter follows without a word, her thin denim jacket wide open in the winter wind. She looks back at me from the bottom step and when our eyes meet, it hits me. Something is wrong with this picture.
The young girl brought her bleeding mother to a law office. Not a hospital; not even a doctor’s office. A law office.
Somewhere in the depths of my stomach I register a once familiar tightness. A few seconds pass before I can name it: it’s the onset of dread.
I hurry up the old staircase, grab my parka from the hook at the top, and head back down. I’m almost out the door when Harry catches up to me. “Marty,” he says.
I pause in the doorway. Harry’s rugged features are worried. He feels it too. Something isn’t right here. There’s a reason this skinny teenage girl brought her battered mother to us.
He cups the side of my face in his big hand the way he always does now. “Be careful” is all he says.
Chapter 4
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br /> The Kydd and his helpers install the long woman in a prone position on the backseat of the Thunderbird, leaving her sullen daughter with no choice but to ride shotgun. When I get behind the wheel, she moves to the far edge of her seat and stares out the side window. I look to the rear, where the mother has her eyes closed, her left arm once again slung over her face. The blanket lies across her chest, the cold compress against her mouth.
I look out my own window at the Kydd as I start the car and turn both the heat and the defrost on high. He shrugs his stooped shoulders at me and grins. “Good luck,” he says.
If we don’t hit traffic, we’ll reach Cape Cod Hospital in little more than half an hour. For the first ten minutes, the teenager beside me doesn’t utter a word. She keeps her face turned away, her thumb nail back between her teeth. Her limp, dirty-blond hair hangs forward, almost covering the fine features of her profile.
“I’m Marty Nickerson,” I finally say to her. “What’s your name?” She turns toward me, looking surprised to see me here, as if she assumed the car had been driving itself to the hospital. “I know who you are,” she says, so quietly I can barely hear. “I saw you on the news all weekend.”
The news. Stanley and I argued pretrial motions in Buck Hammond’s case on Friday. The press was all over us. They were even worse with Buck’s wife. One group of reporters essentially held her hostage in the courthouse hallway; I had to elbow my way in for the rescue.
My head aches all over again as I remember the mobbed courtroom, the microphones outstretched to receive Stanley’s caustic comments, the camera lights blinding all of us. Buck’s trial promises to be nothing short of a circus.
I look back at my soft-spoken passenger, still turned toward me. Her eyes aren’t quite focused, like those of someone under hypnosis. “I’m Maggie,” she says after a pause, and it occurs to me that Harry should have checked her pulse as well. “Maggie Baker,” she adds.
She turns toward the rear seat, then looks back at me. “That’s my mother, Sonia Baker. Don’t even think about calling her Sonny. She hates it when people do.”
“Okay.” I’m grateful for even this tidbit of volunteered information.
Maggie turns away again, so I check on her mother in the rearview mirror. Sonia Baker appears to be asleep-eyes closed, breathing deep and regular-though it’s hard for me to believe that’s possible under the circumstances.
I’d like to ask Maggie why she brought her injured mother to our law office, but something tells me to wait, to move slowly here. This young girl, nothing but tough and surly until just moments ago, now seems vulnerable, fragile even.
“Where do you and your mom live?” I’m hoping to stay on neutral territory a little longer.
Maggie twirls one long strand of fine hair around her right index finger; she’s distracted. “On Bayview Road,” she says after a while. “You know where it is.”
I nod, aware that Maggie’s response was a statement, not a question.
Bayview Road intersects with the east end of Forest Beach Road, just a stone’s throw from Buck Hammond’s cottage. I’ve been there at least a dozen times during the past six weeks, visiting Buck’s wife, Patty, eliciting the awful, necessary details. Preparing her-to the extent possible-for Buck’s trial, for the ordeal she will have to endure on the witness stand, the nightmare she will have to relive, this time in public.
The entire Forest Beach area is a magnet for summer tourists. Its beaches are wild and pristine, vast stretches of white sand punctuated by rugged black jetties, year-round favorite sunning spots for hundreds of harbor seals. The cottages in the Forest Beach neighborhood are quaint, but small; most aren’t winterized. The year-round residents are few and far between.
“You must know Buck Hammond, then,” I say to Maggie. “You’re practically neighbors.”
“We know Buck. Mom and I both know Patty and Buck. He’s in big trouble, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not fair,” she says, her small voice growing strong for the first time. “After what that creep did to their little boy.”
I agree, of course, but say nothing.
Minutes pass before I summon the courage to broach the matter at hand. “Maggie,” I ask, “the man who did this to your mother, what’s his name?”
“Howard,” she says to the dashboard. “Howard Davis.”
I catch my breath before I can stop myself, but Maggie doesn’t seem to notice. She looks back at her mother, then closes her eyes and shakes her head again, letting out a short, bitter laugh. “Mom calls him Howie, if you can believe that.”
I know Howard Davis; he’s been a Barnstable County parole officer for two decades. He’s an enormous hulk-he hardly seems human-with a booming voice and an intimidating stance. He routinely handles the most dangerous of the county’s parolees; he’s the only employee on staff with any chance of keeping them in line. The first time I saw Howard Davis, in the courthouse hallway with one of his clients, I was at a complete loss. There was no way to tell which one was the ex-con.
Sonia Baker is lucky she’s breathing. And Howard Davis is going to jail, parole officer or not. I don’t say either of those things to Maggie, though. She doesn’t need any more drama at the moment.
“Does Howard Davis live on Bayview Road with you?” I ask instead.
Maggie stares at me without speaking for a minute, tears pooling in her eyes, but not falling anymore. “Yes,” she whispers.
“Has he done this before?”
Maggie opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She nods her head up and down, though, hard enough to dislodge her tears from their pools, hard enough to tell me that the answer is a resounding yes. “When he drinks,” she says at last. “And he drinks a lot. He was drinking again before we left.”
She’s had enough. I had planned to explain to her some of what lies ahead-the reporting requirement imposed on the hospital; the police interviews; the arrest; the necessary restraining order-but Maggie Baker has had about all she can handle for the moment. We’re just minutes from the hospital anyway; the shingled cottages we’re passing now have all been converted to doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and medical supply stores. The process will unfold soon enough.
“Maggie,” I ask, “how old are you?”
She squirms a little at this, and I’m charmed by her innocence. Under the circumstances, even Geraldine Schilling wouldn’t press charges against Maggie for driving without a license.
“Are you asking as my lawyer?”
I laugh. “Do you think you need one?”
Maggie’s thumbnail goes back to her teeth and she speaks to the dashboard again. “Maybe.”
“Okay then,” I tell her. “I’m asking as your lawyer.”
“Fourteen.”
“When did you learn to drive?”
“Today.”
She really has had enough. I pull to the curb in front of the emergency entrance, and an orderly pushes a wheelchair up to the back seat almost immediately. Harry called ahead as promised. Sonia Baker lifts herself from the car with a modest amount of help from the orderly, still pressing the blanket to her chest and clutching the bloody kitchen towel to her mouth. The orderly slams the back door and whisks her away.
“Maggie, go ahead in with your mother. I’ll park the car, then come and find you.”
Maggie does as she’s told, but her eyes are like pinwheels. Her hands tremble when she reaches out to close the car door, and a wave of guilt rushes through me. I had to send her ahead with her mother; I need a few minutes alone to make a phone call. But I should have given her some idea of what to expect. The unknown is a terrifying thing.
Chapter 5
Cape Cod Hospital’s parking lot is just about full. It takes ten minutes to find a vacant spot, and even that one is partially blocked by a drift from yesterday’s snowfall. I maneuver the Thunderbird into it anyway, cut the engine, and dial the District Attorney’s office on my cell phone. I need to alert
them.
One of the ADAs will have to be available, when we’re through here, to appear before a District Court judge with Sonia Baker and secure a restraining order against Howard Davis. Given the extent of Sonia’s injuries, we’re likely to be here for a while.
Geraldine can’t take my call; she’s in a meeting. Stanley, though, is available. He picks up at once. “Attorney Nickerson, so good to hear from you. May I assume you’ve come to your senses?”
Stanley is probably about thirty-five. I wonder how many times he’s been decked.
“No,” I tell him, “you may not assume any such thing. I’m still daft.”
The line is silent. He’s apparently not surprised.
“Listen, Stanley, one of you needs to be in the office at the end of the day. I’m at the hospital right now with a woman who’s been roughed up big time by her live-in. And her live-in happens to be Howard Davis, the parole officer.”
“Jesus Christ,” Stanley mutters.
“Yeah. Sounds like he drank himself stupid and then lost it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Stanley repeats.
“She can’t go home with him there; he was drinking again when she left. I’ll bring her straight to the courthouse from here, but it might be a while. She’s in rough shape.”
“Not a problem. We’ll be here.”
Those might be the kindest words J. Stanley Edgarton III has ever said to me. I thank him and cut the connection, not wanting to press my luck.
The car door smashes into frozen snow when I squeeze out. I hurry back toward the emergency room, my hood useless against the unrelenting wind. It’s about two-thirty. This morning’s sunshine is gone, blanketed by a thick bank of darkening clouds. More snow is headed our way.
