THE LOW CONCRETE building housing the Peak County Jail crouched on the outskirts of town, a badly needed upgrade from the dank cells in the courthouse basement that now served as a repository for one-armed office chairs, three-legged desks, and dented file cabinets that would have adequately served Marie if only there’d been space in the office.
The present jail had been state-of-the-art when it was built thirty years earlier. Now, in an expression favored by Julia’s image-conscious mother-in-law, it looked “tired,” likely due to the fact that it had been filled to capacity the minute it was built and overcrowded ever since, something that attracted the occasional ACLU lawsuit, with a series of reliably inadequate improvements as a result.
Throughout the week the public defenders took turns meeting at the jail with the clients they’d represent later in the day at the initial court appearances that followed their arrests. During those brief court proceedings, held assembly-line fashion, their clients entered pleas—nearly always “not guilty”—and then saw their bail set, or were released on their own recognizance.
Most of the people Julia represented had been picked up on drunken driving or minor drug charges. Mondays brought a handful of assault cases stemming from Saturday-night barroom brawls, and holidays bore out the truism that domestic violence always worsened then.
Truly serious crimes—rape, felony assault, and the like—were rare, and Julia hadn’t seen a homicide case in the five years she’d worked in the Public Defender’s Division. She’d lost count of how many times she’d represented Ray Belmar over the years, but each time he’d been the same—funny, sarcastic, and defiantly unrepentant, an attitude unaffected by his recent sobriety. They’d fallen into an easy, companiable banter, Julia gently chiding him, Ray’s responses teasing and almost—but respectfully not quite—flirtatious, a welcome alternative to the outright grotesqueries voiced by some of her male clients.
But today he slumped at the table in the interview room, arms folded across his thin chest, eyes dull. The goose egg on his forehead seemed larger and more violently hued, purple shading into a greenish yellow. He didn’t look up as she came into the room; didn’t respond to her hello.
“Ray. What the hell happened?”
“Nothing.”
His voice was so soft she leaned across the table to hear him.
“Not nothing. I just read the affidavit. They’ve got people saying they saw you down by the river Sunday night into Monday morning when that guy was killed.”
“Probably because I was down by the river.”
It was one of his haunts. Members of Duck Creek’s homeless and transient communities congregated there, the tangled willow shrubs along the bank shielding their drinking and other unsightly behavior from the town’s solid citizens. Every so often, the police and sheriff’s department joined forces to clear out their makeshift camps, donning face masks and neon-blue rubber gloves as they tossed rotting tarps and foul-smelling sleeping bags into heavy-duty trash bags and taking it all away to be burned, while the camp’s inhabitants cursed them from a safe distance.
Julia, fearful for Ray’s fragile sobriety, had hoped he’d abandon his old companions, but he’d passed every breath and pee test mandated by his program. Until his arrest in the courthouse rotunda.
“Your blood test showed a point-three-oh blood-alcohol level. That’s got to be a typo. I’ll get it fixed. But still, Ray. What’d you do, chug a whole bottle of vodka?”
He finally looked up, meeting her eyes with his own, which were still spider-webbed with red.
“I haven’t had a drink since I went into rehab.”
She turned her hands up. “Blood tests don’t lie, Ray.”
He rubbed his arms, thin and brown and pimpled with gooseflesh, his short-sleeved orange jumpsuit an inadequate defense against the interview room’s default thermostat setting several degrees shy of comfort. Julia assumed it was intentional, complained intermittently, and always brought a sweater, even on the most sweltering August days.
She noted Ray’s swollen fingers, the scratches and bruises mapping the backs of his hands. “Those Rotary folks did a number on me when I landed on their float,” he’d told her, and she’d believed him.
“Stupid,” she muttered now, castigating herself for falling for it. “Hold your hands out.” As though she’d know the difference between injuries inflicted by elderly feet in orthopedic shoes and those incurred during a deadly fistfight.
He complied, showing her first the backs of his hands and then his palms, pink and unmarred. Something caught her eye, a shadow on the soft flesh inside his elbow, as though someone had pressed a thumb deep into his skin.
“Jesus, Ray.”
She’d never known him to use hard drugs. When he’d fallen off the wagon, he’d fallen hard. Too late to get into that now.
“Jesus, what?”
“Stop the innocent shit. Do you realize what you’re looking at here? Just be glad Claudette’s not hitting you with deliberate homicide. Otherwise you could end up in the single-wide.”
The state’s execution chamber was enough of an embarrassment to make even the most zealous prosecutor glad it was so rarely used. It lived within a house trailer in a weedy lot on the prison grounds, in sight of the exercise yard. Occasionally someone in the legislature submitted a bill for something more dignified, a macabre version of a steel-and-tile operating room, but given the cost, lawmakers inevitably decided the single-wide was good enough for the rare and brief procedure involved in lethal injection.
Julia tried to soften her tone. “Even with mitigated deliberate homicide, you could end up with forty years.”
The orange jumpsuit shifted with a shrug. He crossed his arms again.
Julia pushed her chair back from the table. “I suppose we’ll be entering a not-guilty plea today.”
“Yeah.” Finally, a bit of life to Ray’s voice. “Because I didn’t do it.”
“Then help me out here.”
“I tried. You wouldn’t listen,”
It took her a moment. Right. He’d reminded her in court yesterday that he wanted to talk. Had blown up her phone with voice mails earlier, calls she’d ignored.
“Let’s just get through today. I’ll do my best, but there’s probably no getting you out on your own recognizance. You know that, right?”
He didn’t bother to respond, just stood and waited for her to leave.