I was fighting for both of them, I realized. And if I could give Jackson a shot at getting his life back, I had a shot at being redeemed.
“’Scuse me, Mr. Munroe.” Ruiz knocked my train of thought right off its tracks. He held out his hand. As we shook, I saw Mazie glaring at both of us. I’d warned her about this, told her me being polite to the prosecutor was in Jackson’s best interest, but I was pretty sure she still saw normal attorney collegiality as some kind of betrayal.
Ruiz said, “I assume you’ll be wanting a preliminary hearing?”
He meant the probable cause hearing. “Yep.”
“We’ll be sending over some more discovery as it comes in,” he said.
“Thanks.” I saw the bailiff coming over to get Jackson and excused myself.
We all went down to the pen with him. When Mazie saw him starting to undress in front of everyone, I could tell it was taking everything she had not to bust out crying. He traded my suit for his prison garb, gave her a hug, and let himself be led back out to the van.
She cried all the way back to her car, and then she started shouting in anger.
“Aw, man,” Noah said. I followed his gaze and saw what he was reacting to: Mazie’s car had been booted. She was parked just fine, but I remembered what she’d said about all the unpaid tickets Jackson had stuck her with.
“Dang,” I said. “Listen, Mazie, you want a ride home?”
“I ain’t going home,” she said. “I finally got a new job, and I got to be there in fifteen minutes. Leland, I am never going to get out of this hole!”
“You will. My car’s right here. You just tell me where to drop you.”
She gave me directions to a roadside restaurant where, she said, everyone was passing through. There were no regulars to whisper about her son’s murder charges and stiff her on tips.
As we drove, she said, “Leland, was that normal, how the judge treated him?”
“How do you mean?”
“He never even looked at him. When you said Jackson didn’t do it, it was like he didn’t want to know.”
“Oh, that’s because you don’t enter a plea until the preliminary hearing. We weren’t supposed to talk about that yet. I just wanted to plant a seed of doubt in the judge’s mind, on account of that bit of character assassination we heard from the solicitor.”
From the back seat, Noah said an enthusiastic, “Yeah!”
Mazie said, sniffling, “It’s like he’s not a person no more. When I call the jail, they ask for his inmate number, not his name. It’s like nobody cares if his life gets wrecked.”
“Well,” I said, “we care. And the preliminary hearing will be different. The judge will hear us out. It won’t be for a little while—I want to wait until the last day to request it, which would give us nearly three weeks to dig up more info and find the holes in the prosecution’s case.”
She nodded, looking numb. We’d arrived at her highway restaurant. She glanced in the wing mirror, wiped off her smeared mascara, said thanks, and got out.
Noah took her place in the front and said, “I was hoping for lunch, but I guess now I got to get to my PT appointment.”
I turned around and headed north. “I’ll bring you a sandwich when I pick you up. How’s PT going?”
He sighed and looked at his lap. “Well,” he said, “last week the therapist was talking about this case, actually. Everyone’s talking about it. He said trials these days are done before they start. People see your Instagram and it’s like, case closed.”
I thought of Jackson’s podcast and winced. “Most of that stuff doesn’t come in as evidence,” I said. “And we question the jurors to get rid of the, you know, the tainted ones.”
He didn’t seem too convinced. We drove in silence for a bit. Then he said, “Does he have an alibi?”
“You know I can’t discuss the details of a case.”
He exhaled irritably. “Okay. I just meant, has he told you where he was that night?”
Something in his tone made me think he had something in mind and was checking to see if I had it too. When we stopped at a light, I turned to him. He kept looking straight ahead.
“Noah,” I said, “do you know something?”
He didn’t answer.
“Okay,” I said. “But if you do, if you know anything, the best thing you can do is tell me.” The car behind honked at me, and I accelerated a little too fast, throwing both of us back in our seats.
“Smooth move,” he said.
“Well, nobody hired me for my driving,” I said. “I get hired for my legal skills, but I can’t do my best unless I know the truth. If you know anything, you got to tell me. Even if you think it’s bad for Jackson’s case, you telling me means I can be prepared to deal with it, instead of getting ambushed.”
“Look, I’m not your goddamned spy,” he said. “I’m not going to narc on my friends for the rest of my life just because you caught me doing stupid shit in high school.”
He sat with his arms crossed, not talking, until I pulled up in front of the physical therapy place. My alarm bells were ringing. I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. I also knew I couldn’t keep pushing, or he’d leave.
As he got out of the car, I said, “Have a good session. I hope you know I’m just trying to help Jackson.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” He slammed the door, then said through the window, “I thought the prosecution had to prove its case. Why do you want me to tell you all his private business like it’s on us to prove he’s innocent?”
I had no answer. He knew it. He walked away.
11
Friday, July 19, Morning
Sitting in my office at Benton & Hearst, watching
