31: Jailhouse Christmas

I don’t know about you, but it’s not every Christmas that Lynda and I face the decision of when to go to church and when to go to jail—for a visit. We finally decided to drag three sleeping kids off to midnight Mass and see Maggie in the morning. Late morning.

“How’s the food?” I asked the old gal, just to get the conversational ball rolling.

“Food? Is that what you call it?” She didn’t seem to have lost any weight. In fact, she looked just the same except that her white roots were showing beneath the pink. “How are my Binkie and Bunkie?”

Those damned cats!

“They’re fine. “We visit them several times a day. Sometimes we even take them home with us. They love the kids. You should be worrying about yourself, Maggie, not them.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m in good hands, defense-wise. Erica offered to take my case pro bono, so I fired Farleigh and let her at it.”

Maggie’s confidence was not misplaced. After just a few weeks on the job, Erica learned—to the shock of even Sebastian McCabe—that Dr. Calloway hadn’t just been careless in writing prescriptions. She’d also been trafficking on a medium-sized scale in oxycodone. Apparently, she tried to bail out her husband’s failing dog training business by making money on the side.

Mac thinks that explains why Dr. Calloway agreed to meet Maggie that day at the Athletics Building: Maggie must have called and said she wanted to talk to her about prescription opioids. The good doctor wrongly assumed that Maggie had somehow learned about her sideline and was selling her silence. “That is the merest speculation, of course,” Mac cautioned. I would say “the jury is still out on that,” but the jury hasn’t even been impaneled yet.

Dr. Calloway’s crime didn’t come close to justifying murder, but it will most likely whip up sympathy for Maggie with the twelve people who counted.

Jason Danvers is another matter. His parents managed to hire the second most-famous defense attorney in the country, John Henry Clayton of Chicago, but I still think it’s a lost cause. He hasn’t been tweeting lately, probably on advice of counsel.

Recently I heard that Catherine Burch and Roger Calloway joined the same grief-support group and are now “keeping company.” There’s an irony in there somewhere.

All of this was still in the future on Christmas Day at what I like to call “Oscar’s B&B,” the city jail.

“Now that I’m an inmate, Oscar treats me better than he did when I was a reporter,” Maggie said. “I’m not kidding about that.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Lynda assured her.

We talked for another half-hour or so, carefully avoiding any possibility that she could say something incriminating. I didn’t think the jail was bugged, but Oscar surprises me sometimes. Then we were off to Chez Cody, more than a little sadly, to celebrate Christmas and Donata’s birthday with Clan McCabe.

Lynda whipped up an Italian Christmas dinner, with braciola for the entrée and cannoli for dessert. Mamma mia!

In the evening we sat around the kid-proof family room, comfortably stuffed, surveying the wreckage of toys opened with great joy and quickly discarded for the next one. And that was just the adults.

“It’s funny,” I mused. “Gibbons had the right answer to the wrong case.”

“How so, old boy?” Mac barely opened his eyes.

“Last year, in that business of the opera murders, he theorized that the killer was a copycat. Right answer, wrong case.”

He chuckled. “Well, let us hope that the worthy Gibbons does not make a habit of that.”

“What do you mean?” Kate asked.

“He suspected Grant Kingsley of killing Warren Burch. I should certainly hate for that to be the solution to the next murder that comes our way!”

Yes, there would be another murder case for McCabe & Cody. But that, of course, is another story.