Saving Grace (What Doesn’t Kill You, #1): A Katie Romantic Mystery

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

Chapter Seventeen

  My new client arrived before I’d finished reading the first document in the file. Lovely. I went to meet him in the reception area. Tan on beige on drab brown accented by more tan met my eyes. After a week on St. Marcos, the expensively understated scheme seemed dreary. McMillan, dressed in black from head to toe, didn’t exactly blend into the décor. He leaned over our entry desk, chatting up the receptionist. Tina, all of twenty-three years old, simpered and gushed, putty in his very large hands.

  I hated to interrupt such a special moment. “Mr. McMillan?”

  Zane stood up, and up, and up, and up. He was the tallest person I’d ever seen, but he wasn’t just tall. He was enormous. His file claimed he was 6′9″ and 270 pounds. I believed it. And all muscle and bone, encased in baggy black jeans riding low on his behind to showcase his black Calvin Klein underwear. Nice.

  He pulled a cellophane-wrapped item from his pocket and tossed it onto Tina’s desk. “I always leave a package of McZillions when I meet a pretty lady.”

  Please God, not condoms. My eyes darted around the lobby. No other clients. Only Tina to worry about, and the sexual harassment lawsuit McMillan could bring on our firm. I moved closer, ready to snatch them from her hands.

  She beamed and ripped the package open, then out came something that didn’t appear to bear any relation to contraception. I exhaled. Long shoelaces dangled from her fingers, sparkling in the light of her smile. He thumped his chest twice with his fist and shot her a peace sign. Finally, he acknowledged my greeting.

  “Yo, McZillion here. Are you taking me to my lawyer? Whoa, no, you are my lawyer. You look like your picture,” he said. He looked me over, head to toe. “Fine, damn fine.”

  I tried not to let my distaste show. Yet. “I’m Katie Connell, your attorney. Nice to meet you.” I grasped and shook his hand. It swallowed mine whole. “Right this way.”

  I escorted Zane to my office through the quiet main hallway of the firm. Or at least it was normally quiet. News of Zane’s arrival had zipped through the instant message boards at warp speed from the tips of Tina’s typing fingers, and every single human in the firm had invented a reason to be standing in the hallway. Zane strutted by them like an oversized rooster, and held his hand out to slap high fives as he went past. The fleshy sounds of slap, slap, slap followed me. Finally, we reached the celebrity-worship-free zone of my office.

  Zane dwarfed the same chair that Gino had sat in a half hour before. He leaned back, legs askew, and said, “What now, lawyer lady?”

  I had intended to prep him for the do’s and don’ts of trial, explain my rapidly-percolating action plan, and run some strategy by him. But I had a question for him first.

  “Mr. McMillan,” I said.

  He interrupted in a voice that I assumed was “street,” but I wasn’t down with the ’hood, so who knew. “You can call me Zane or McZ if you want. Nobody calls me Mr. McMillan.”

  I was tempted to call him Vanilla Ice. “Zane. My partner Gino Hart said that you asked to work specifically with me. Have we met? Or do I have someone to thank for the referral?”

  “Honey, if we’d met, you’d remember me. I always give my women something to remember me by.”

  I held up my hand in the “stop” position and just managed to stop it from continuing on to the “gag me” one, too.

  “Sorry, just playing with you.” Witchu. Oh, brother. “No, we don’t know each other. But you come highly recommended.”

  “By whom?”

  “Shit, I can’t remember. By lots of people. I told them what I was looking for, and they said you was it.”

  No one to punish. Great. The pain was all mine.

  I spent two hours with “McZ,” an exercise for which I deserved combat pay. After I was able to pry him out of my office by pleading my very real and urgent need to prep for his trial, I hooked up with Emily. We crammed for the rest of the day like it was a final in a class we’d never attended. She had done a brilliant job putting together our exhibits and trial notebooks, though, and she confessed she’d called Shannon more than once for help. Emily should have gone to law school; she was wicked smart. It was just my good luck that she hadn’t. My blood pressure went down ten points due to her efforts alone, and I read every word she had put together for me on Zane’s case. I drafted my opening statement. I typed out witness questions and listed our exhibits.

  All of this was good, but none of it substituted for hearing what Nick had to say after working the case for three days. And Nick was nowhere to be found. It was after five. Where was he? The trial started at 9:30 in the morning.

  I looked out my office window. No beach. No ocean. No canopy of branches and vines. Levolor blinds sliced the views of traffic gridlocked on I-35. On the wall beside the window, the big hand moved steadily toward the six on the clock, the clock my parents had given me to hang in my office when I’d first graduated from law school. My heart hung low in my chest. I was already back into the thick of a job I hated, on this case of all cases, without having made meaningful progress on the investigation into their deaths. How easily my life here pulled me away from what was important.

  Like Collin’s birthday. I dialed his number. “Am I still your birthday date, or have you thrown me over for some sweet young thing?” I asked when he answered.

  “I would never,” he said.

  “That’s exactly what you did last year,” I retorted. And he had, in the wake of his humiliation at the hands of his former fiancée. She’d been a cellist in the Dallas symphony. He’d chased anything in a skirt that looked fast and easy since then.

  “Who, me? Well, this year I am all yours, sis. Tell me about your trip.”

  “I’ll have to save it for dinner Thursday night. I got stuck defending that basketball player, Zane McMillan, in a rape trial. I need to get back to work,” I told him.

  “What?” Collin barked. “Your dog has fleas, Katie. I’m warning you.”

  “It seems OK,” I told him. “We’ve got a witness. The girl’s own roommate has sided with our guy. I just hate taking a criminal defense case, because it feels disloyal to you and Dad.”

  “It doesn’t exactly light me up with happy, either.” No one would ever fault Collin’s honesty. “Listen to me. I didn’t work this one, but I’m tight with the guys that did. They’re confident. They’re beyond confident. They’re giddy this one’s going to trial. Fleas,” he said again, drawing the word out this time. “Be careful.”

  “That’s it? Fleas? Can you tell me anything else, or give me the name of someone to talk to?”

  “You know I couldn’t, even if I knew the details, which I don’t. I’ve said too much already.”

  We ended the call. Great. I hung up and closed my eyes. I’d renew my efforts to talk Zane into a plea bargain. To ward off my mounting stress, I tried to use one of the visualization techniques I learned at the Peacock Flower Spa. Picture yourself in a peaceful, happy place, they taught us. I pictured myself barefoot and walking on the beach beside the flying fish hut. That didn’t work. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the instructor. I tried again. I pictured myself strolling through Annalise’s orchard. Standing in the backyard with a mango at my feet. A pungent odor filled my nostrils. Ah. Heaven was the scent of fermenting mangoes. I concentrated on breathing through my nose so I wouldn’t lose the smell.

  “Good. You’re still here.” Nick’s voice. The scent of mangoes wafted away. I opened my eyes slowly.

  The sight of his face was a gulp of fresh air after too long in a stale room. My traitorous heart fell for him all over again, just that easily. God, who was I kidding that I could forget about him? I loved to look at him. I loved him, dammit, and it was just awful. I held onto that breath of air as long as I could. Keep it normal, Katie, keep it light.

  “Yep, I’m still here, and very eager to talk to you,” I said. “About the case, I mean.”

  Nick stood in front of my desk holding a redweld folder. “Did you have time to review the fi
le today?”

  “Every word of it. It seems straightforward. The state will claim that Zane gave the alleged victim, a Miss Tabitha Brown, a ride home from Good Sportz, and that when she said goodbye outside her apartment, he forced his way in behind her, and then tied her to her bed with his shoelaces and raped her.”

  “Right,” he said. He propped his redweld on my desk and held it with both hands.

  “But we’ve got her roommate, Sherry something-or-other, who’s going to provide some colorful testimony about Tabitha dragging Zane into the house, climbing all over him, and telling him to tie her up and give it to her rough,” I said.

  “Talmadge. Sherry Talmadge. Right again,” he said.

  “Here’s a question for you. Do you know if there were any problems with the search of Zane’s house? Zane’s making a big deal about how the police took things they shouldn’t have. I think he’s watched too much CSI. I don’t know if it was a good search or not, but if the whole theory of our defense is that Ms. Brown had sex with him voluntarily, I can’t see how this matters anyway.”

  “I haven’t seen anything about problems with the search. Sounds like a lawyer question to me.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. I’ll have to research it tonight. So, what don’t I know, and what else are you working on?”

  “I’m trying to track down and verify all the information in the file we got from his old law firm, and I’m making good headway. I don’t want any surprises in court.”

  “Agreed.”

  “What is your plan, then, tomorrow?” I asked.

  He lifted a hand and straightened the lapel on his shirt. Nick didn’t dress up unless we were in trial. He wore khakis and an orange golf-type shirt today, with the words “Aransas Pilots Association” on the left breast. “That depends. Do you want me there to help you pick the jury?”

  Nick had a sociology degree with a minor in psychology from Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. Lots of firms paid jury consultants big bucks, but Nick had filled this role very well for us in the last year. What he couldn’t intuit from observing the potential jurors, he could find by working his investigative magic online. Nick’s advice to me in the Burnside case had resulted in the selection of a pivotal juror, someone I hadn’t thought we should keep, but who ultimately became the jury foreman in our multimillion-dollar verdict.

  And even if he was terrible at it, I’d still want him there.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “OK. I’ll come for jury selection. You can text me anytime if you have questions or need me to chase something down for you.”

  I thought, “Actually, Nick, I’ve done that before and it didn’t go so well for me.”

  But I said, “That sounds good to me.” If nothing else, I’d get to spend the morning with him.

  He picked his file back up and turned to go.

  “Nick,” I said.

  He stopped in my doorway, his body facing me, one hand on the frame. “Yes?”

  “Are you OK—I mean, I assume you’re OK—that Gino has us working together on this? After what you said in Shreveport. I just don’t . . .” I got tangled in my words and couldn’t finish.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  I tried again. “I didn’t ask for the case. I didn’t want the case.”

  “I said it’s fine. It is. It’s fine.”

  We stared at each other for a moment, and then he turned and left my office. Maybe it would all be fine. Maybe this case would bridge the gulf between us. Maybe this was the start of something wonderful. A tiny match touched the wick of the candle in my heart. Maybe.

  ~~~