“I’d do the same thing you are,” I said. I had a good enough sense of who Ruiz was to know that if I wanted him to believe a word I said, I had to answer that one frankly. “On just those facts, if I was looking at it in a vacuum, I’d do the same thing. And maybe your Mr. Ludlow,” I said, meaning his boss, “is looking at it in a vacuum. But back at the bond hearing, you know, I was speaking the God’s honest truth. We got hospital records. That kid was beaten, had his bones broken, the works. Karl was… I mean, would you want any sister of yours to marry a man like that?”
“Oh, hell no. Look, I prosecuted Karl myself, nine or ten years ago, for breaking and entering and illegal possession of a firearm. That’s public record, and I know a lot more things that aren’t.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said. “That man was a blight on God’s green earth.”
“Sure, but murder charges don’t depend on whether the victim was a good guy.”
“Not whether he was a good guy exactly, no,” I said. “But would I be lying if I said the difference between the thirty-year minimum sentence for murder and the two-year minimum for manslaughter does sometimes come down to whether the sumbitch was asking for it?”
He chuckled despite himself and said, “Nope, you wouldn’t.” Prosecutors tended toward brutal humor. When you spent every working day dealing with atrocities, it was a necessity.
He finished his coffee and asked, “So is that what you’re saying? That what we got here is an abused boy who finally snapped?”
“If he did it at all,” I said, “then yeah, that’s how I see it. And I can tell you we’re looking at a not-guilty plea. I plan to put Jackson on the stand.” He would know that meant Jackson had not confessed murder to me. I wasn’t allowed to put a man on the stand who I knew intended to perjure himself.
He took that in, nodding like he could see a jury buying that story. If we did end up getting offered a plea on manslaughter, Jackson would hate me for it, and his mother might too. But two years was a hell of a lot better than thirty.
“Well,” said Ruiz, “I can’t reduce the charges just on your say-so. We got some steps ahead of us, and we got to go through them, and I got to run it past Ludlow.”
“You getting pressure from above?” It was odd that he hadn’t come into this meeting with permission to at least sketch out some options.
“Oh, you know,” he said. I didn’t know, and he seemed a touch uncomfortable, like he wanted to get off the subject. “But I do hear what you’re saying. And I like the way you work. I had some guy in here last week shouting Bible verses at me. You should tell your friends on the defense bar they’d help their clients a lot more by taking a cue from you.”
“Oh Lord,” I said. “I don’t have friends on the defense bar, and I don’t intend to. Soon as this case is over, I’m going back to trying to launch myself in business law and civil litigation.”
“This isn’t where you want to be?” he asked. “I figured that’s why you took the case. I mean, I know you know the family, but a murder case that’s all anyone’s talking about is a quick way to make a name for yourself.”
“Aw, hell no,” I said. “If I’m going to be in criminal law at all, I want to be putting bad guys away.”
“Yep, yep, yep,” he said, nodding. “I hear you on that.” Ruiz was a straight arrow. Even back in high school, I remembered, he kept his hair cut like a forty-year-old businessman, and he declined all invitations to get drunk or high. He tossed his coffee cup in the trash and asked, “So why you doing it? Just loyalty?”
“Partly that, yeah,” I said. “And partly, I do not think the kid did it. At all.”
“I mean, the abuse thing, though,” Ruiz said. “There’s motive right there.”
“He had that motive all his life,” I said. “And never did anything.”
“People can snap, though,” he said.
“Lots of people,” I agreed. “Karl was a nasty drunk, and his own brothers don’t care that he’s gone. I’m not saying that to cast aspersions on a dead man. I just mean there’s any number of people who might’ve had a grievance against him.”
“Only one who was seen by a police detective down by the marina, though.”
I nodded. Blount really was the linchpin. If Jackson wanted to be a free man, instead of going down at least a couple years on manslaughter, I was going to have to find some way to make Blount look like a liar.
But I also wanted to figure out why Ludlow was getting in the way of a plea. What did he stand to gain from seeing a teenage boy imprisoned for thirty years?
12
Friday, July 19, Afternoon
Heading up toward the highway to Charleston, I decided to swing past the Broke Spoke. I’d never been inside. When I was young enough to be interested in strip clubs—young enough to overlook how desperate most of the girls looked—the Broke Spoke was still just a twinkle in the eye of Dunk McDonough, one of our sleazier local entrepreneurs. He owned the highway truck stop, and at some point he’d had a storage shed behind it expanded and converted into a strip club. With all the passing truckers, I had to admit it was probably a good business move.
In broad daylight the club was plain ugly: a box with tiny windows and shabby siding the color of pea soup. I figured Dunk must’ve gotten a hell of a deal on that siding. It didn’t take much expertise in erotica to know that pea green was not widely considered a
