“Well, I just don’t think so,” I said. “And I don’t think Karl would want to see his son jailed for life for something he didn’t do. You already lost a brother. You want to lose your nephew too?”
He shook his head. I could see it kind of tore him up.
“They told me,” he said, “I mean them detectives, he probably wouldn’t go down for too long. Because it’s probably just manslaughter, right? With all that Karl done to him, that ain’t really murder.”
“Well, it depends,” I said, deploying the poker voice again. “Was this Detective Blount? He try to get you to testify to something?”
“Yeah, that crew-cut guy,” he said. “The tall one. The resident asshole. But, I mean, he’s just trying to do his job.”
It sounded like someone in the strip club was approaching the door, about to join us in the parking lot, so I cut to the chase. “If you’d tell me a little more about that, or about Karl’s friend Pete, it’d be much appreciated.”
“Look, why you got to root around in all this shit? Best thing for anyone to do is forget it and move on.”
The door pushed open, pouring electronic music into the parking lot. A few men stumbled out as Pat stalked off to his truck.
22
Tuesday, August 27, Afternoon
After Jackson got the wires removed from his jaw and let me know on the jail phone that he could talk again, I went over to visit. The sun was streaming through the high windows of the visiting room, highlighting how pale he was. The lower half of his face was still a little swollen, but apart from that, he was even skinnier than he’d always been. I realized why when he complained about eating nothing but smoothies and vegetable puree all month. His old bravado was gone; he slumped in his chair, discouraged.
I knew from all my mistakes with him and with Noah that I was not exactly a master in the art of relating to teenage boys, so I tried to take off both my lawyer hat and my dad hat and just listen. It wasn’t easy. Dispensing advice seemed second only to breathing in terms of things I did automatically. I kept my hands under the table so I could gouge my palm with a fingernail whenever I felt that urge coming on. It didn’t work perfectly, but it helped.
When he fell into a quiet funk, I told him, “I talked to your uncle Tim at work. He’s having second thoughts. I mean, since testifying at your probable cause hearing.”
“Huh.” He gave a shrug and said, with maybe one-tenth of his usual feistiness, “Well, that’s big of him.”
“He’s been thinking about how you saved Karl from choking. And thinking, you know, a killer wouldn’t have done that.”
He sighed and shook his head. “You know what, though? I shouldn’t have. ’Cause then none of this would’ve happened, and I’d be out living my life.”
“Yeah. It didn’t turn out right, did it. But it says something about you that you’d save a human life, even if you didn’t like the guy.”
“Don’t know where I learned that from. Not him, for sure.”
“Your mom, maybe. Or maybe it just comes natural to you.”
He looked at me. His hazel eyes were so shiny I thought he might be holding back tears. “How’s my mom? I mean, she comes here, she acts strong, but…”
“She is strong,” I said. “She loves you more than anything in the world, and she ain’t gonna rest until you’re home.”
He nodded. He was looking me in the eye, and I had the sense that his fiery defiance was just about extinguished. Then he said, real quiet, “If there was something I could plead to, if they’d give me just a couple of years, maybe I ought to. That way she’ll know I won’t be gone too long, and she can—I don’t know—have some hope.”
“Well, I can talk to Ruiz,” I said. “That’s always something they could put on the table, and they normally do.” I jammed my fingernail into my palm about a second too late; by the time I felt the pain, I was already saying, “But you don’t have to make that decision now. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“I’m tired of waiting, though,” he said. “I’m tired of not knowing.”
The look on his face reminded me that for a young man, sometimes “tired of” was code for “scared of.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s hard.”
He sighed and picked at the hem of his orange prison shirt. Shaking his head, not looking at me, he mumbled, “I looked up the arson stuff. There’s a computer in the little library they got here.”
I waited. He didn’t say anything.
Finally I said, as casually as I could, “Oh, yeah?”
“I mean, you can go away for a long time for that. Like, longer than I’ve been alive.”
I waited. He looked up at me but didn’t say anything. The look on his face, the how-does-this-law-make-sense expression, made me think that despite being a teenage boy, he actually might want a little advice from a grown man for once.
“Okay,” I said. “So, for an arson that damages a building but doesn’t cause any injuries, that’s second degree, and it gets between three and twenty-five years in jail.”
“Yeah, that’s what I saw. I don’t understand that. I mean, if you’re going away for twenty-five years, you might as well be convicted of murder.”
“Oh, you’re not looking at twenty-five years. If you set fire to, like, a historic mansion or a museum or something, if you caused $10 million in damage, that’s what the high end of that sentencing range is for. But, my God, a little ice cream shack on the beach? A place they built back twice as nice
