“HOMELESS. PLEASE.” CLAUDETTE blew ripples across the top of her coffee. “You know who’s homeless? Those poor people down along the creek.”
After so many years of friendship with Claudette, Julia should have known better than to seek sympathy.
They faced each other across a table in Colombia, a weekly get-together that had started after Claudia moved out of their shared office and into the job as top prosecutor, imposing an unspoken rule of never discussing each other’s cases, although they commented long and loud on others moving through Peak County’s court system.
But today was for the personal stuff they rarely discussed.
“I’m happy for her.”
Claudette eyebrows climbed high.
“Really, I am. You should see them together. They’re like a couple of teenagers.”
Claudette shoved the piece of pie they were sharing toward Julia. “I remember somebody else acting like a teenager not so long ago.”
“Oh.” Julia mumbled around a piece of triple-berry gone to cardboard in her mouth. “That.” She swallowed. “It’s off.”
Claudette dropped her fork. She’d been an early proponent of Julia’s relationship with Dom, often reminding her, “You’re too young to be the sad widow forever.”
Julia looked around, ascertaining the necessary distance for earshot, and lowered her voice. “His daughter walked in on us.”
Both fork and pie lay forgotten, a measure of Claudette’s shock. Colombia’s pies were legendary.
“As in …?”
“As in into the bedroom. Her shift at the refugee center was canceled. She wasn’t supposed to be home for another couple of hours.”
“Any chance you were just getting going? Still dressed, even? Or maybe afterward, just cuddling under the covers?” Claudette ran through all the best bad-case scenarios, Julia shaking her head at each one.
“You mean …”
“No clothes, no cuddling. Full howl, if I remember correctly. Which I wish I didn’t.”
Claudia’s long, low whistle turned heads. “Damn. His daughter’s a teenager, right?”
“Sixteen.”
Claudia winced. “Years of therapy, guaranteed. But as awful as that is, why the breakup? Can’t you two just see each other on the sly until the embarrassment for all concerned eases up?”
“You mean in a century or so?” Julia pushed the pie back to Claudia. The single bite she’d forced down threatened intestinal mayhem. “That was my thought. But Susan had other ideas. She’s sued for full custody.”
“Bullshit.” Claudette was herself again, in control and ready to fight. She dispatched the pie in a few efficient bites. “If the girl is sixteen, it’s not up to the courts. She gets to choose.”
“Looks like she’s already chosen. She’s staying over in the next county with her mother. Already transferred to the school there. Dom looks like—well, you can just imagine.”
“Oh, I can,” said Claudette. Just the thought of losing a child injected steel into Claudette’s spine. Her eyes blazed. Her fingers curled into fists.
Dom, on the other hand, had seemed diminished, gray, receding into himself. Why couldn’t he have been more like Claudette? He’d been so quick to give up on Julia that she wondered if she’d missed some sign that their still-new relationship was already faltering.
Claudette uncurled one fist and drummed her fingers on the table, thinking it through. “As a legal maneuver, I suppose it’s smart. Saying he’s not seeing you anymore. It gives his daughter time to calm down and rethink things, and it’s probably the right thing to say to a mediator or a judge, even if it’s utter crap. Speaking of which.”
She stood and shrugged into her coat. Julia followed suit. Their weekly meetings were by necessity brief, with Claudia increasingly focused on her campaign and Julia on her always-crushing workload, complicated by the addition of Ray’s case.
“What?”
“Given that I’m going to be prosecuting the case against Ray Belmar and you’re going to be defending him, we probably should put these kaffeeklatsches on hold for a while. You understand, right? The optics—they’re terrible.”
Julia had never known anyone less concerned about optics than Claudette and said as much.
“The campaign …” Claudette’s voice trailed off. She blew a breath. “Wayne Peterson paid me a visit today. Said if I wanted an endorsement from law enforcement, I’d better cool it on backing all those reforms Leslie Harper proposed.”
Julia stepped through the door and stood to one side, her back to the icy wind. “But those are key to what you want to do with the prosecutor’s office! Focus on serious crime and quit filling up the jail with people who can’t pay their fines and fees.”
Claudette faced the wind full on, as though welcoming its bracing slap. “No shit. But I need to get elected before I can push for them. Wayne’s no fool. He knows we’ll all be better off if we can get those changes through the legislature. But not every cop agrees with Wayne. Anyway, he has his own agenda. He doesn’t want to be Deputy Dawg forever. He wants to be the Big Dawg. If I can get past this interim shit and get elected and Wayne can get elected as sheriff, between the two of us, we can get stuff done. But first …”
“You’ve got to get elected.” Julia finished the sentence for her. She wondered at the toll the campaign was taking on her friend. Claudette’s idea of gamesmanship relied not on elaborate bob-and-weaves but on clobbering her opponent into oblivion with the sheer force of her facts. Defense attorneys who found themselves facing Claudette begged their clients to go for the plea agreement rather than go up against her in a trial.
Now Claudette found herself in a situation that called for accommodations, dissembling, smiling to mask the impatience within.
“Of course we shouldn’t see each other.” Julia gave a wan smile. “I understand completely.”
She waved her friend ahead of her so that Claudette would not see the moisture in her eyes, her unavoidable reaction to the loss of her friend—the sour cherry on top of the shit sundae of the last few days.
She didn’t see Claudette again until Monday, when they confronted one another at a bail reduction hearing that Julia had requested for Ray. He’d been slapped with $100,000 bail at his initial appearance, standard for a homicide case—but not for one with such flimsy evidence, Julia argued to the judge.
The case had moved into the higher court that was the next step after initial appearances. The judge, who’d held the seat for decades, had a well-deserved reputation for unpredictability and lived up to it on this particular day.
Maybe Claudette was a little too sure of herself.
Maybe Julia, mad at the world over the bad luck burying her up to her chin, argued more forcefully than usual.
Maybe the sight of Ray, slumped and dispirited within his jailhouse jumpsuit, worked on the judge’s hard heart.
Julia thought the most likely explanation was that the judge was just feeling mischievous, wanting to shake things up, put Claudette on her back foot to even up the odds.
At any event, when he tapped his gavel with more force than usual, Ray was declared a free man, to the extent that anyone about to have a hard plastic electronic monitoring device fitted to his ankle was free.
“Your Honor,” Claudette protested, even as the gavel landed.
The judge swept from the room without a backward glance.
Julia turned to Ray with a surprised smile and suppressed an urge to hug him.
“Congratulations. Now all you have to do is keep your nose clean.”
Ray’s tone could have cut glass.
“That’s what I was doing before. Look where it got me.” He glared down at the table, refusing to meet her eyes.
“Before all this happened, you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t want to.”
Julia pushed away the memory of all the calls from Ray she’d ignored. “I did. But you got arrested first. Let’s try again. Now?”
The sheriff’s deputy who escorted the jail inmates to and from their court appearances cleared his throat. He jerked his head toward the door they used.
Ray’s lips twitched in a bitter smile. “Gotta go back to jail. Get my things, get this electronic ball and chain fitted on my ankle.” He rose.
“Tomorrow, then,” Julia said. “Same time, same place as we’d planned before? I’ll see you there.”
But Ray followed the deputy without a word.