“Sure you are, Mom,” Emma said. “I feel for you. Enjoy your
I shook my head. She didn’t understand. She had no idea how much I wanted out of this place, how much I wanted to go straight to the airport and head home.
“You better not do any partying with that Gabby, either, Miss Wiseacre. I love you, Wilson. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
After I hung up, I put in a call to Harris’s attorney, Charles Baylor, whose office I would be visiting tomorrow. No answer. What else was new? I was going to take a shower, but then I saw the sky. The sun was going down, and the sky was turning a ridiculously intense electric blue.
I shook my head again as I remembered partying in Mallory Square that last sunset on spring break. Dancing and singing to Bob Marley, I’d actually thought I could be happy and carefree forever.
I’d thought wrong.
Despite the memory, and my usual policy of not mixing business with pleasure, I decided to bring the bubbly bottle out onto the roof deck with a water glass. Because if anyone on earth needed a drink at that moment, it was me.
On second thought, I left the water glass inside and headed for the white chaise, the champagne bottle’s foil trailing behind me.
Chapter 73
CHARLES BAYLOR’S OFFICE was on Terry Lane, a block south of Hemingway’s house in Old Town. Nine a.m. sharp on Friday morning, holding a box of Dunkin’ Donuts in one hand and a box of coffee in the other, I rang his bell with my elbow.
As I waited, I heard a screaming saw at the rear of the house. On the porch, a rusty bicycle sat next to some beat-up diving tanks. What the hell kind of law office was this? When the saw stopped, I put down the coffee and whammed on the door with my fist.
A bleary-eyed, tan, shirtless guy wearing a green bandanna, goggles, and an air mask opened the door a minute later. He wiped his hands on his sole visible item of clothing, his cutoff jeans.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I’m looking for Charles Baylor. The attorney?” I said.
“He’s not here at the moment,” the guy said, grinning like an idiot as he pulled down the mask. “I’m Charlie Baylor, the carpenter. Maybe I can help you out?”
I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. Nice to meet you, too, wiseass, I thought. “I’m Nina Bloom from Scott, Maxwell and Bond. They put me on to assist in the Justin Harris case. I left you about a dozen messages.”
“Well, bless my banjo,” Baylor said in an exaggerated hick accent. “You must be Miss New York City here to learn the hillbilly beach bum some lawrin’. I got every one of yours and the righteous Mission Exonerate’s calls, all right. You didn’t get my e-mail? ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ My client is in competent hands. You should check your BlackBerry. My message heading, I believe, was ‘Go Find a Tree to Hug.’ Guess you’ll have to drink all that coffee yourself. Shame. See you around.”
Could this guy be a bigger prick? I thought, as he started to close the door in my face. I drop-kicked the doughnut box into the gap to stop it.
I’d come down here for a lot of reasons. Messing around wasn’t one of them.
“ ‘Competent hands,’ huh?” I yelled as he looked down at the crushed doughnuts in pained shock. “What are you building back there, Mr. Baylor? Harris’s coffin?”
He pulled off his bandanna and ran a hand through his sandy hair. He looked to be in his early forties, but his lean, brown, weather-beaten face was still boyish somehow. He looked more like a landscaper than a lawyer. One with eyes the color of the sky I’d seen from my balcony last night, but that was beside the point.
“Harris’s coffin?” he said with a grin. “That’s cold, woman. Damned if I’m not starting to like you. Please call me Charlie. When are they changing your firm’s name to Scott, Maxwell and Soulless Bitch?”
I held eye contact with him, then smiled for the first time myself. “Invite me in, and we can go over it, Charlie.”
Chapter 74
HALF OF THE LAWYER’S HOUSE was beautiful: golden, varnished Dade pine floors; a completely refurbished curving banister and stairway; a white-on-white marble cook’s kitchen out of
Luckily, I was quickly escorted through the construction site into an artfully finished oak-paneled office behind the kitchen.
Charlie dropped the salvaged doughnut box onto his immaculate desk and took a Heineken keg can from a minifridge.
“Out of orange juice?” I said, making a show of checking my watch.
“In Key West, this
I almost passed out when I noticed the framed Harvard Law diploma on the wall, a little magna cum laude banner bridged across its lower right-hand corner.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” he said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “I missed summa by like point-oh-six or some such. I really wanted to go to Yale, but their rugby team flat out blew that year.” He took a long sip, burped, and helped himself to a crushed Boston Kreme.
“What are you doing down here?” I said.
“Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame,” he sang with his mouth full. “But I know—”
“Please shut up,” I said.
“Fine,” he said, chewing. “Like everybody else, I guess things went south until there was no more south left to go. This is actually my granddaddy’s place. He was a Texas oilman. He actually won it in a poker game at the age of seventy. Family legend has it he came down, took one look around, and telegraphed back, ‘If all works out, I’ll never be sober again.’ ”
“Touching story,” I said.
“Anyway,” Charlie said. “A few years ago, I inherited it and his dusty toolbox. After I bring this baby back to its former glory, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I got a friend who works for HGTV, said I’d be a shoo-in for one of those hunky carpenter dudes. How much money they make, you think?”
“You’re too old,” I said.
He finished his doughnut with another slug of beer and made a growling sound. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m also actually taking a stab at being the next John Grisham or Ernest Hemingway. You been to Papa’s house yet? Did you know some of the cats there have six toes?”
“Did you know Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun?” I said quickly. “This is a lot of fun and everything, but we need to go over Harris’s case. I got the brief, but I’d like to hear in your own words, in a nutshell, where it went wrong.”
“In a nutshell,” Charlie said. “OK, let’s see. It all went wrong probably right around the time the cops said, ‘Hey, Harris, you have the right to an attorney,’ and Harris didn’t say, ‘Where’s the phone?’ ”
