by Greg Iles
“No,” I agree.
“Sexual battery is a statutory offense,” he says gravely, “and Dr. Elliott could well get thirty years for it, no matter what happens with the murder case.”
“I understand.”
“But”—Quentin winks at me—“if any lawyer can talk a jury into a little human understanding on the issue of younger women, I’m your man.”
I can’t help but laugh. “I’ll bet you are.”
We proceed slowly to the parking lot, Doris supporting Quentin’s right side by bracing his right arm. She looks strong, with taut calves showing beneath her skirt.
“Now that we’ve got things settled,” Quentin says, “I have one question for you, Penn.”
“Shoot.”
“What’s the real reason you’re not handling this case? Your friend’s life is at stake, and you’ve got the chops to defend him. I suppose you might have the good sense and detachment to realize you shouldn’t handle it, but I don’t think that’s it.” He looks hard into my eyes. “About the only reason I can see you giving it up is that you know he’s guilty.”
I shake my head. “That’s not it. The truth is, I’m thinking of running for mayor myself in the special election. And if I go to war with Shad to defend Drew—and lose—I’ll lose the election, too. So…maybe the future of the town is more important to me than Drew’s fate, as terrible as that sounds.”
Quentin Avery appraises me for several moments. Then there’s a wrinkling around his eyes, a glint in his pupils, and finally his lips break open to reveal his shining white teeth. “Boy, you’re gonna put a big old kink in Shad’s world, aren’t you? He’s gonna want to kill you before the month is out.”
Doris stops us at a shining new Mercedes and opens the passenger door.
“What do you think about me running for mayor?” I ask.
Quentin shrugs. “Don’t know you that well yet.”
“Fair enough. What do you think about another white mayor instead of a black one?”
The renowned lawyer chuckles and looks down into the valley of kudzu behind my father’s office. “What I’d like to see is a good mayor. This town’s in a world of hurt, and it’s got no time for racial ideology. It’s got no time for anything but getting down to the business of business. Maybe you’re the man for the job, and maybe you ain’t. All I know is, you’re the man who put Del Payton’s killer behind bars, and that’s more than I could do back in 1968.” He grins. “So I’m willing to give you a look, anyway.”
Quentin climbs into the passenger seat, settles himself, then peers up at me. “I sense you’ve got a question for me, too. Maybe more than one.”
He’s right. I want to ask him why he seemed to abandon the civil rights movement in the 1980s and ’90s to pursue personal injury and class action cases, which greatly enriched him but did little for the people he professes to love. But I don’t dare offend him. Drew can’t afford to lose a lawyer of this caliber, not with the system already aligned against him. “I’m just trying to get my mind around all this,” I reply, not untruthfully.
“No, you’ve got questions,” insists Avery. “But we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming days. After you get your confidence up, you can grill me to your heart’s content.” He faces forward and laughs. “Tell your daddy I’ll see him later in the week.”
Doris Avery closes the door, then takes me by the upper arm, pulls me to the rear of the Mercedes, and speaks in a low but intense voice.
“I want to make you aware of something, Mr. Cage.”
“Please call me Penn.”
“All right, Penn. Quentin’s in a lot worse shape than he pretends to be. Diabetes is a terrible disease, and it’s taken more away from him than a foot. A lot more than he’ll admit.”
Doris Avery’s eyes are wet with private pain, but she doesn’t cry. “I’m not going to tell him not to take this case. But I’m telling you—don’t push him too hard. I’ve already got a lot fewer years to spend with him than I’d like. And he gave far too much of himself over the years to people who didn’t appreciate it to kill himself doing the same thing now.”
“I hear you, Mrs. Avery.”
She nods once, then turns and walks to the driver’s door. Then she smiles, just a little. “You can call me Doris from now on. Good day to you.”
Chapter
20
Driving up the curving entrance to St. Stephen’s Prep, I realize I’ve given Sonny Cross all the time I can afford. I voice-dial his cell phone as I park in front of the high school. He answers after five rings.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Penn, Sonny. It’s six p.m. I’m about to go into the board meeting. You have anything for me?”
A squawk like a muffled yell comes through my phone. A cutoff grunt follows.
“Soon,” hisses Cross.
“Sonny? What the fuck was that?”
“Don’t know. Must be your cell phone. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”
Something’s going down, but I don’t have time to press him on it. “You’ve got nothing on Marko Bakic?”
“Right. As of now.”
“Don’t forget to call me.”
The St. Stephen’s boardroom looks just as it did on the night I learned Kate Townsend was dead. The ten faces gathered around the rosewood table are more than somber. It’s as though some catastrophic threat faces the entire town, and we are meeting to consider extreme responses. Holden Smith opened the meeting before I arrived, making it clear that my status in this group is now equivocal. Only the headmistress, Jan Chancellor, looks happy to see me arrive.
“Sit down, Penn,” says Holden. “Afraid we had to start without you.”
I sit but don’t respond.
Jan Chancellor says, “The board has just scheduled a memorial service for Kate and Chris tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“The school gymnasium,” says Holden. “Chris was Methodist, but Kate was Presbyterian. And we wanted to do it during school hours. Better not to try to transport all the kids out to a church. We can do it right here.”
“Did you talk to Jenny Townsend about this?”
“I’m going to inform her as soon as the meeting’s over.”
Typical. As if the board’s decision should rule everyone else’s life. “Okay. So why am I here?”
Holden’s voice takes on an almost feminine tone of irritation. “The next order of business is the expulsion of Marko Bakic.”
“Expulsion and deportation,” grunts Bill Sims. “It’s time for that little bastard to go back where he came from.”
“On what grounds are you expelling him?” I ask.
“They don’t really have anything specific,” Jan informs me. “Just a catalog of smaller infractions. Detention-type infractions.”
“Which I seem to remember he served detention for,” I think aloud, noting Jan’s use of “they.”
“Exactly,” she says, turning to Holden and Bill. “If you want to expel Bakic, you’re going to have to do it arbitrarily.”
“Fine,” says Sims. “He’s a damn Croatian. What can he do about it?”
“He can sue you and this school,” I say in an even voice. “Our insurance would cover it, but the publicity would eat us alive. You’d wake up every day and read the words ‘illegal drugs’ and ‘St. Stephen’s Prep’ in the same article.”
“He’s not even an American!” blurts Smith.
“That makes no difference. The foreign prisoners being held at Guantánamo are suing the federal government for unlawful imprisonment, among other things. American lawyers are lining up down there to represent them.”
“Bullcrap!” Sims bellows. “That’s just bull crap. That’s what’s wrong with this country.”
“No, that’s one of the things that’s right with it.”
Sims glares at me, then looks at Holden Smith as if to say, “What the hell’s he doing here anyway?”
“I’ll tell you something else,” I go on.
“You pulled the trigger too fast on Drew. The more I find out about Kate’s death, the more certain I am she was raped and murdered by someone else.”
“Who?” asks someone down the table. “That drug dealer mentioned in the paper?”
“I can’t discuss that here.”
“We’re in executive session,” says Holden. “No one’s keeping minutes. Nothing will leave this room.”
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all year. I don’t remember one sensitive topic discussed in this room that I didn’t hear about two days later from someone who shouldn’t have known a damned thing about it. Everyone in here talks out of school, to belabor the expression, and I’m not blowing Drew’s defense to hell to satisfy the curiosity of this group. I just want those of you who condemned Drew for murder the minute you heard about him and Kate to know you were wrong.”
“But he is guilty of the affair,” insists Holden. “Correct?”
“If he is, you know what that makes him?”
“What?”
“As human as the rest of us.”
Holden looks genuinely hurt. “Penn, you’re taking this personally. We all like Drew. We all respect him, apart from this, of course. But the damage that’s already been done to this school because of his involvement with Kate is incalculable. And what about the damage to Kate herself?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure how all that shakes out yet. What if Kate was already in deep trouble? What if Drew was a stabilizing influence in her life?”
“You’re saying that having sex with a forty-year-old man stabilized Kate’s life?”
“No. But being loved by him might have. Holden, the total tonnage of what we don’t know about these kids’ lives would sink an ocean liner.”
The board president blows out a stream of air like someone resigning himself to ambiguity. “Penn, you obviously know a lot more about this situation than we do. What do you recommend?”
“Regarding Marko? Watch him closely, that’s it. If someone steps forward and says they saw him bring drugs to that lake party, that’s a different matter. A police matter. The lake party happened off school grounds, of course, but since it’s a criminal offense, I think we could justify immediate expulsion under our zero-tolerance policy. But so far, nobody’s come forward. And now that the Pinella kid has been beaten up, I doubt anyone will.”
“Was Marko responsible for that?” asks a woman at the far end of the table.
“I don’t know, Jean. Look, even if Marko is selling drugs to our kids, he’s not the one bringing them into the city. Illegal drugs are an industry, and in this case they start down on the Gulf Coast and flow northward. Certain people here wholesale it to other people—possibly Marko—who then retail it to users, like a small number of our students. Marko’s only part of a very long chain. We don’t yet know who might have thought they had reason to beat up the Pinella boy.”
“But Marko is the link that most affects this school,” Holden says. “Until he showed up, we didn’t have a problem.”
“Not a visible problem. Every high school in America has a drug problem, Holden.”
“Should we test some of our students for Ecstasy and LSD?” asks Sims, reviving an idea we killed months ago.
Now I’m losing my patience. “Bill, if you’re worried about the school’s image, that idea is about as stupid as it was when you brought it up a couple of months ago.”
Sims reddens but doesn’t respond.
“What we need to do is calm down and let the police and the judicial system work. If you want Marko on a plane back to Croatia, you may get your wish sooner than you think.”
“What do you know?” Holden asks eagerly.
“I know that the best thing we can do is let things take their course. Now, do you need me for anything else?”
Jan glances at Holden. “Penn, we’d like you to remain on the board. This body was premature in asking you to step down.”
“I agree, Jan, but I can’t do that.”
“Are you officially Drew’s lawyer?” asks Holden.
“I haven’t decided yet. But it makes no difference. This body has given up any moral right to leadership that it had before this crisis started. Most of you are here because you have your own private agendas, which may or may not be in the best interest of the school as a whole. One of our most distinguished and generous alumni is in trouble—he may soon be fighting for his life, in fact—and you abandoned him without even hearing his side of things. So, I bid you good night.”
I stand and walk to the door.
“Penn, wait!” Holden calls.
“Let him go,” snaps Sims. “Goddamn bleeding heart lecturing us like that.”
As soon as I clear the door, I find myself jogging toward my car. My frustration is about to boil over. I climb in and start the car but leave the engine in Park. I’m not even sure where I should go now.
When my cell phone rings, I assume it’s Jan Chancellor trying to get me to return to the board meeting. But my caller ID says SONNY CROSS. “Sonny?”
“Yeah. Sorry I couldn’t talk before. I’ve got what you need now. Man, you’re not gonna believe it.”
“What?”
“Marko, Cyrus, Kate…I understand everything now. And, boy, have I got something to help Drew.”
“Tell me!”
“Not on your life. Not on a cell phone.”
“Where are you?”
“My house. Beau Pré Road. You know where that is?”
“Yeah. What’s the house number?”
“Two seventy-one.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” I pull into the southbound lane of Highway 61 and press the accelerator to the floor.
Chapter
21
A few miles south of Natchez, Kingston Road forks away from Highway 61 and curves through rolling land that a century and a half ago made up thriving cotton plantations populated with hundreds of slaves. Beau Pré Road is a serpentine offshoot of Kingston Road, lined with one-story houses and aluminum trailers, some with bass boats sitting in their front yards. The houses are set far apart, with small ponds, outbuildings, and dog runs in the overgrown border land between lots.
It’s full dark as I round a long curve that should carry me to Sonny Cross’s house. From what the drug agent said in our brief cell phone conversation, it sounded like he’s discovered the holy grail of this case. My greatest hope is that he can prove that Cyrus White murdered Kate. Scanning the homes flashing past on my left, I see two gold numbers tacked to the wall of a house trailer.
Two sixty-nine.
I ease my foot off the gas and coast around the tail of the curve. A lone porch light appears in the trees to my left. Then the beam of my headlights hits a rutted dirt driveway that intersects Beau Pré Road on my left. As I turn onto the dirt, a yellow rectangle of light appears beneath the porch light. The black silhouette of a man walks into the rectangle, then passes through it, and the orange eye of a cigarette bobs along the driveway at a height of about six feet. When I reach the cigarette, I stop my car, turn off my engine, and get out.
Sonny Cross takes a deep drag off his cigarette. The orange glow illuminates his haggard face and glints off a silver stud in his left ear. Despite the fatigue in his face, I see excitement in his eyes.
“How much do you want to know?” he asks.
“Everything.”
“Don’t be so sure. This is Dirty Harry stuff.”
“Tell me everything, Sonny.”
Another long drag. Smoke drifts into the night as he speaks. “I was pretty upset this afternoon. You saw it when we talked. I couldn’t just sit around waiting for something to break.”
“What did you do?” I ask, my gut tightening in anticipation.
“I decided to have a little talk with Marko Bakic. I picked him up outside the Wilsons’ house, easy as pie. Then I took him to, uh…an undisclosed location, where we had a frank and honest exchange of views.”
“A willing exchange of
views?”
Sonny chuckles softly. “There might have been a little duress.”
“Jesus, what did you do to the kid?”
“I just asked him some questions. But young master Bakic indicated an unwillingness to cooperate. He emphasized this with some well-chosen sarcastic remarks. He seemed quite pleased with himself, all in all. So I stuck my gun in his mouth.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
“To tell you the truth,” Sonny reflects, “even that didn’t rattle him much. I think that boy saw a lot of shit over in Bosnia, and guns by themselves don’t scare him. I don’t think he believed I’d really use it.”
“You didn’t, did you?”
Cross shakes his head slowly. “No. But I convinced him I would.”
“How did you do that, exactly?”
An unguarded smile. “Some things we must pass over in silence, my son.”
“Was that what I heard when I called you before the board meeting? You torturing Marko?”
“No. That was somebody else.”
“Who?”
“One of Cyrus’s guys.”
I’d like to sit Sonny down and have a talk with him about the niceties of the Constitution, but right now I have a different priority. “Enough foreplay, Sonny. Give me what you got.”
“Marko’s basically Cyrus’s punk, okay? He registered in the student exchange program hoping to get New York, L. A., or Miami. Instead, he got Natchez, Mississippi. Imagine his dismay. Marko saw himself as the next Scarface, a young Al Pacino coming to America to take over the drug trade. But when he got here, he didn’t find Robert Loggia, an old dealer soft and ready to fall. He found Cyrus White, a kind of nightmare he’d never seen before. Cyrus recognized something in Marko, though, maybe because they had both seen war up close. He saw Marko’s ambition, and he used that to open up new markets. White markets. Through the older brothers and sisters of our high school kids, Marko made contacts in the white fraternities at LSU, Ole Miss, USM, Millsaps, Louisiana Tech…you name it. This network is far more extensive than I imagined. The Asians on the Gulf Coast wholesale to Cyrus, massive shipments moving north by several different routes. When it gets here, Cyrus sends out his boys to supply Baton Rouge, Jackson, Oxford, Ruston, Hattiesburg—all the markets Marko opened up. It’s a massive operation, Penn. Mind-blowing, really.”
