Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [59]
“ ‘Competent hands,’ huh?” I yelled as he looked down at the crushed doughnuts in pained shock. “What are you building back there, Mr. Baylor? Harris’s coffin?”
He pulled off his bandanna and ran a hand through his sandy hair. He looked to be in his early forties, but his lean, brown, weather-beaten face was still boyish somehow. He looked more like a landscaper than a lawyer. One with eyes the color of the sky I’d seen from my balcony last night, but that was beside the point.
“Harris’s coffin?” he said with a grin. “That’s cold, woman. Damned if I’m not starting to like you. Please call me Charlie. When are they changing your firm’s name to Scott, Maxwell and Soulless Bitch?”
I held eye contact with him, then smiled for the first time myself. “Invite me in, and we can go over it, Charlie.”
Chapter 74
HALF OF THE LAWYER’S HOUSE was beautiful: golden, varnished Dade pine floors; a completely refurbished curving banister and stairway; a white-on-white marble cook’s kitchen out of Architectural Digest. The other, gutted half, with its shattered plaster walls and garbage-brimming joint compound buckets, had a striking resemblance to a crack house.
Luckily, I was quickly escorted through the construction site into an artfully finished oak-paneled office behind the kitchen.
Charlie dropped the salvaged doughnut box onto his immaculate desk and took a Heineken keg can from a minifridge.
“Out of orange juice?” I said, making a show of checking my watch.
“In Key West, this is orange juice,” Charlie said, popping the beer can’s top and taking a slug.
I almost passed out when I noticed the framed Harvard Law diploma on the wall, a little magna cum laude banner bridged across its lower right-hand corner.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” he said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “I missed summa by like point-oh-six or some such. I really wanted to go to Yale, but their rugby team flat out blew that year.” He took a long sip, burped, and helped himself to a crushed Boston Kreme.
“What are you doing down here?” I said.
“Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame,” he sang with his mouth full. “But I know—”
“Please shut up,” I said.
“Fine,” he said, chewing. “Like everybody else, I guess things went south until there was no more south left to go. This is actually my granddaddy’s place. He was a Texas oilman. He actually won it in a poker game at the age of seventy. Family legend has it he came down, took one look around, and telegraphed back, ‘If all works out, I’ll never be sober again.’ ”
“Touching story,” I said.
“Anyway,” Charlie said. “A few years ago, I inherited it and his dusty toolbox. After I bring this baby back to its former glory, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I got a friend who works for HGTV, said I’d be a shoo-in for one of those hunky carpenter dudes. How much money they make, you think?”
“You’re too old,” I said.
He finished his doughnut with another slug of beer and made a growling sound. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m also actually taking a stab at being the next John Grisham or Ernest Hemingway. You been to Papa’s house yet? Did you know some of the cats there have six toes?”
“Did you know Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun?” I said quickly. “This is a lot of fun and everything, but we need to go over Harris’s case. I got the brief, but I’d like to hear in your own words, in a nutshell, where it went wrong.”
“In a nutshell,” Charlie said. “OK, let’s see. It all went wrong probably right around the time the cops said, ‘Hey, Harris, you have the right to an attorney,’ and Harris didn’t say, ‘Where’s the phone?’ ”
He leaned back in his swivel chair, balancing the can on his bare chest.
“Harris was his own worst nightmare. First he tells the cops he didn’t know Foster. Lie numero uno. Then, faced with the DNA results, he claims he remembers having consensual sex with her at the prison where he worked and she was a volunteer. He said the coed scholarship musician was ‘quite the little freak,’ quote unquote. That she liked to slap and scratch him and for him to cuff her