Riptide

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOURBy the time the cruiser arrived, Billy Ray and his zombie brigade were gone. The cop who responded looked to be about sixteen. He and Billy Ray could have attended high school together. Maybe sat in the same homeroom. Compared notes on the same girls.

The kid—the cop, that is—walked up to us, a quizzical look in his baby blues.

“Did one of you call about a disturbance?”

I raised a hand. “I did. The disturbers have hit the frickin’ bricks.”

Jamila counted her barrettes and combs, shaking her head. “One’s missing.” She squatted to peer beneath the cars again.

The cop’s brow furrowed. He scratched it with his pen. “I can file a report, if you’d like.” His tone suggested, “Why bother?”

“I think we should,” I told Jamila.

“Why?” She squat-stepped sideways, ducking her head and doing another visual sweep. Finally, she straightened and added, sounding annoyed, “What good will it do? We don’t even know his full name?”

“Ah, but I got his tag number.”

Jamila did a double-take and smiled. “Quick thinking, Sam. Way to go.”

I hoped that my quick thinking would help make up for the inadvertent damage to her music box. I didn’t realize it would just lead to more trouble.

Who knew that Billy Ray, aka William Raymond Wesley, would end up knifed in the gut while passed out on the downstairs porch that night? Or that someone would plant Jamila’s comb near his body?

Filing the report provided more evidence of animosity between Jamila and the deceased. Surely, not enough for her to commit murder, I argued to the cops. My words fell on deaf ears. Before I knew it, they’d arranged a lineup. A witness fingered Jamila as the one he’d seen at the scene of the crime hours earlier. As they led my friend away to be fingerprinted, I realized we needed local counsel. We were both outsiders and city slickers. Neither of us knew the local ropes or had the proper connections to handle this.

A couple of hours after they’d taken her, I was allowed to see Jamila. In the visiting room, it felt more than a bit peculiar to see her in an orange jumpsuit seated on the wrong side of the table.

“I’ve called Rudy and my parents.” Jamila sounded tired.

“I can only imagine how they must feel.”

Jamila blew out a breath. Her shoulders sagged, her body deflated. “Not good. Rudy hasn’t told the kids.”

“Hopefully, he won’t have to. You realize, of course, we’ve got to hire a local attorney.”

Jamila raised her index finger. “I used one of my calls to reach my father. He recommended someone he worked with here years ago.”

Sounded hopeful. Jamila’s father was an attorney at one of D.C.’s biggest firms. “Who?”

“His name is Edward G. Mulrooney.”

“If he’s as impressive as his name, he should be good.”

I called Mulrooney. Jamila’s father had already hired him to cover her bail hearing later that morning. With that out of the way, I arranged in the wee hours to move into temporary quarters since our condo was still off-limits and crawling with crime techs. I scrounged up a motel on Coastal Highway near the Delaware line. It was late (or early) and vacancies were few and far between, so I took the room without close inspection. I stumbled through the door, threw myself on one of two double beds, and drifted off for a few hours. I woke up in a musty, oversized closet passing itself off as a room.

I heaved myself off the bed with a grunt and trudged to the window. A peek through the curtains revealed a canal lined with a chain link fence and scrubby grass. The stagnant waters reflected the murky dark sky.

“Charming.” My voice sounded like the bottom of a shoe scraping against a curb.

Splashing water on my face, I rinsed out my mouth and tried to tidy up before heading downtown to attend the bail hearing.

Things went about as well as could be expected. Bail was set at $5 million—a heart-stopping figure, but not for Jamila’s parents. They’d probably manage to cover the bond.

Mulrooney arranged to see Jamila after the hearing. When she insisted I sit in on the meeting, Mulrooney wasn’t thrilled. However, she persuaded him to take me on as pro bono co-counsel to cover confidentiality concerns. I also made it clear I had no desire to steal Mulrooney’s thunder. For my own part, I was glad to let him take the lead and play second fiddle.

We met in a visiting room painted in soothing shades of doody-diaper green and furnished with the latest in institutional gray metal table and chairs.

Mulrooney was a country lawyer straight from Central Casting. White hair, wire-rimmed glasses, seersucker suit, pleasant demeanor with a glint in his eyes that suggested intelligence buried beneath the country corn.

“Your father,” Mulrooney said to Jamila. “That man could pick crabs like no one else.”

“God, yes. He loves crabs,” Jamila said. “Oysters and rockfish, too.”

“And ribs?” Mulrooney tilted his head back, letting his jaw drop. A raucous laugh echoed through the visiting room. “That man could suck every last piece of meat off a rib. Or a chicken wing, for that matter.”

Jamila smiled politely. I checked my watch. It had been nearly ten minutes of chitchat. How long were we going to discuss Jamila’s dad and his dietary habits? Would we move onto his bathroom habits next?

“Now.” The sound of the word ricocheted around the room like a rifle shot. Mulrooney’s gaze bored into Jamila over his wire-rims. “Let’s talk about your case.”

“So soon?” I muttered.

I didn’t think I’d been audible, but Jamila threw me a look. Mulrooney either didn’t hear or chose to ignore me.

“The police have shared some of the evidence they’ve turned up with me. Unfortunately, there is an eyewitness—”

Jamila shook her head. “Does this witness claim he saw me kill the victim?”

Mulrooney held up a hand. “Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we?”

He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, as he spoke. “The body was discovered at approximately 11:30 P.M. on the front porch of the condo beneath yours. According to his friends, they’d been having a party. Wesley had so much to drink that when the others decided to get something to eat, he could barely walk. Apparently, they left him passed out on the porch in a lounge chair.

“Now.” He nearly shouted the word again and paused before continuing. “According to these friends, they left around 10:30 and didn’t return for about an hour. That’s when they found him. He was in a lounge chair, bleeding from his gut. A gruesome death.” He shook his head. “A horrible crime.”

I yawned deliberately. “Boo hoo.”

Mulrooney swiveled his laser gaze toward me. “You should have more respect for the dead, Ms. McRae.”

“And the dead should have had more respect for my friend. Could we possibly—” I made circles with my finger in a speed-it-up gesture.

Mulrooney’s look never wavered. “Respect. It’s an important thing to remember here. People respect Wesley’s family. That will be a factor.”

Rather than ask, I gave an inward sigh and awaited his explanation.

He turned back to Jamila. “As I was saying, the friends called the police upon finding the deceased. After the cops arrived, a passerby on a bicycle approached them. He claimed he’d seen someone coming down the stairs and slipping into the shadows on the front porch. This witness also thought it appeared to be a tall, slender woman. Dark complexion. That was the sum and substance of the description. When he picked you out of the lineup, that’s when they decided to go for the arrest.”

“This is all very fascinating,” I interrupted. “But what about the forensics? What about all the blood? If Jamila had done this, wouldn’t there be evidence of blood in the condo? Or on her clothes?”

“Ah.” Mulrooney held up a didactic finger. “The police found bloody clothing.”

“They did?” This was news.

“After the lineup, they asked Jamila to identify some clothing they’d found near the crime scene.”

Jamila shook her head. “I told them, they could be anyone’s and wouldn’t say more without legal counsel.”

“A wise move,” Mulrooney observed, nodding her way. To me, he said, “They found a pair of women’s jeans, a T-shirt and tennis shoes, along with the knife in the dumpster next door. There was blood all over them.”