“Your dad fought hard,” Mazie said. “He got Tim Warton to admit right in front of everybody that Jackson couldn’t have wanted Karl dead, because last Christmas he saved Karl’s life.”
“Oh, that’s great,” Noah said. “Yeah, I remember him telling me about that.”
“And the judge said something—what was it, Leland? You’ll explain it better.”
I sat down and handed out plates. “Yeah, Judge Chambliss said he had to let the case go forward, because with evidence that’s consistent with either manslaughter or murder, he couldn’t just toss the murder charges. But he told the prosecution that if the evidence still looked like it could go either way at trial, then he’d instruct the jury on manslaughter if I asked him to.”
Noah said, “What’s that mean?”
“Just that he’d let the jury consider manslaughter too. Which only has a two-year minimum sentence, instead of thirty to life.”
“Dang,” said Noah. “I mean, that’s a lot better, but I can’t believe he really might not get out of this.”
Mazie slumped back in the armchair, eyes closed. I gestured to Noah to fix her a plate and pass it over.
Terri said, “We got a lot of good information too.”
“Well, Ruiz gave me an envelope of stuff,” I said, “but I don’t know how useful it’s going to be.” As we were leaving, he’d held it out with a perfunctory “Here you go.” I hadn’t had a chance to look at it.
“I didn’t mean that,” Terri said. “I mean on cross.” To Noah, she said, “You ever seen your dad do a cross-examination?”
“No, ma’am. He said I was too young.”
“Leland, no! If he’s interested, you’ve got to take him.”
“It’s a deal,” I said. “Long as you can survive without your phone. They won’t let spectators bring them in.”
He shrugged like I was an idiot for even thinking that might be a problem. Then he seemed to realize that, even as he was sliding a piece of pizza onto a plate for our guest, his phone was still in his hand. It had been in his hand ever since we got home. He put it down.
Terri told him, “You’ve got to watch sometime. It’s like martial arts. Or, no, here’s what it’s like: Picture a couple ballroom dancing, you know? So smooth, so nice, and then suddenly the guy flips his partner over his shoulder and you realize he was doing judo the whole time.”
I said, “I can’t say I’d ever choose Detective Blount as my dance partner. Or Tim Warton.”
“Blount?” said Noah. “Is that the tall one? That cop who looks like Thor, but with a crew cut?”
Terri laughed.
I said, “Yeah. You know him?”
“Yeah, he’s always patrolling the beach. He’s, uh…” He paused—I thought he was adjusting his language for our guests—and then said, “He’s not a nice dude. Unless you’re the right kind of person, which I guess I’m not.”
“Yeah,” said Terri, “he picks and chooses.”
Noah said, “Jackson told me Blount hated Karl. And him. Both of them.”
“Huh,” I said. I was going to have to ask Jackson about that.
Mazie sat forward and picked up her plate of pizza. “Blount had a thing for me in high school,” she said. “For a little while. But I was with you at the time, Leland, and one day he called me a whore, and that was that.”
Terri said, “He sure knows how to sweet-talk the ladies.”
We laughed.
She shook her head, thinking about it, and added, “Sometimes I think it’d take a whole filing cabinet to keep track of all Blount’s grievances. He doesn’t lose his temper all that often, but he is an angry man.”
That night, I asked Noah to show me the photo of him and Jackson again. Just as I recalled, Jackson was wearing a blank white T-shirt, not a skull or flame in sight.
“Okay,” I said, “can you make sure that’s backed up? And in a way that’s time-stamped?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I texted it to Jackson that night, after making him swear on his mom’s life that he wouldn’t post it on Instagram.”
I laughed. “Good call.”
“Does that picture help? That’s awesome.”
“It just might. Is there a way you can email me the file with its original time stamp?”
“Sure.” He made his way over to his laptop.
I put a note in my calendar to ask Mazie about the T-shirt. To Noah, I said, “There’s no blood on that T-shirt either, is there.”
He peered at his screen. “No. Even zoomed in, I don’t see anything red at all.”
“Do you remember how he was acting that night? Or what he was talking about?”
“’Course I remember,” he said defensively. “We only smoked that one bowl.”
“Look, that’s not even what I meant. It was two months ago. Anybody could forget the details in that length of time.”
He glanced over at me, then back at his laptop. His eyes flashed anger and apology all at once.
“Well, he talked about Karl,” he said. “He was mad as hell, on account of the fight they’d had. And I’m not gonna lie, he said he wished Karl was dead. But he was talking like he was still alive. He said he wanted to do that Viking boat thing and see Karl’s face when he realized that was his boat on fire. And wasn’t Karl already dead by then?”
I hesitated, then shook my head. “I wish I could tell you what we know and what we don’t, but I don’t want to, you know, influence what you actually remember.”
He looked startled. “You gonna put me on the stand?”
“Oh, hell no.” I wasn’t even sure I could put my own son on; that wasn’t something I’d ever looked up the rules for. But the idea gave me nightmare visions of Ruiz raking him over the coals to show he was an unreliable witness: Isn’t it true that you’re a drug user? Isn’t it true that you stole prescription opiates and then spent two months in rehab as part of a juvie-court plea deal?
Not to mention the stress testifying would put on his
