The powers-that-be would be delighted to replace her with a Silverback, and they’d probably think they were doing Tug Mosier a favor. In fact, she had already had a similar conversation with the courthouse Silverback, and he had allowed her to keep the case, but his misgivings in the matter were evident. He had advised Powell Hill to plea-bargain, and to avoid a trial at all costs. That wasn’t a decision she felt she could make yet, but one thing was certain: she had better do a good job on this case. Her immediate future was riding on it.
A. P. Hill’s client was hunched in a wooden chair, awaiting their conference without apparent interest. She looked at him appraisingly, trying to see Tug Mosier as a jury would. He would not do, she decided. She would have to see about getting Tug some presentable clothing before his court appearance; the jury and the press (not to mention her family) really would freak if they could see him in his present unshaven glory. He looked like the sergeant-at-arms for a biker gang. His shoulder-length brown hair seemed to have been styled with Quaker State, and a blue dragon tattoo peeped out from under the sleeve of his undershirt on a flabby arm the color of a fish belly. There wasn’t much she could do about the close-set piggy eyes and his habitual truculent scowl, but a suit and a haircut might soften the effect. She wondered how to bring up the topic without offending him, and decided to start their conversation with a less delicate subject.
“How’s it going, Tug?” she asked. “Are you getting enough to eat?”
He shrugged. “Not too hungry anyhow. Not with all this hanging over me.”
“The charges are very serious. The prosecution is saying that you killed Misti Lynn Hale and put her in the trunk, intending to take the body off somewhere and bury it. They say that if you hadn’t been put in jail on the bad-check charge, you’d have ditched the evidence, and maybe they wouldn’t have caught you. You need to tell me your side of the story so that we can begin to build a defense.”
Tug Mosier put his head in his hands. “You won’t believe me.”
“It’s my job to believe you. It’s the jury you have to worry about.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. What the hell. You know I’ve been laid off from my welding job; that’s why I had trouble paying the bills. And those collection-agency people just kept calling and calling and nagging us about it and making Misti cry, so I wrote them dud checks just to get a little peace and quiet. Figured they’d leave us alone-at least till they bounced.”
“I can certainly see the temptation,” A. P. Hill agreed.
“I thought it would make me feel better, but I was still miserable, ’cause I knew it was just postponing the flak. So I got tanked up to try to put it out of my mind.”
His attorney raised her eyebrows. “Define tanked up.”
“I did some coke and some shine. I was with some old boys I been knowing for a long time, and by the end of the evening we were purt near blasted.”
Defendant used cocaine and bootleg liquor and admits to a state of complete intoxication, A. P. Hill wrote on her yellow legal pad. She looked up and nodded for her client to continue.
“So I don’t remember too awful much about that night at all. I know I went home. The next thing I knew, I was sort of coming out of it-somewhere between waking up and walking out of a fog-and there was Misti Lynn, laying on the floor, not moving.”
“Was she dead? Could you see any injuries?”
Tug Mosier frowned with the effort of remembering. “She wasn’t moving. I couldn’t see no blood.”
“All right.” There would have been no blood. Misti Lynn Hale had been strangled. “Was there anyone else present?”
Tug Mosier rubbed his scalp as if he were trying to massage his brain cells. He squinted at the bare green wall beyond the table. “That’s the funny thing,” he said at last. “Seems like I sorta remember somebody going home with me. Helping me, like. ’Cause I wasn’t in no shape to do much walking on my own. But when I came to and saw my Misti on the kitchen floor, there wasn’t nobody around.”
“So what did you do once you realized that she was dead? Did you call anybody?”
Tug Mosier looked shocked at his attorney’s naïveté. She probably would find a dead body on her floor and call somebody about it, his expression seemed to say. “No,” he said wearily. “I didn’t call nobody. I’ve had a run-in or two with the cops before, and I didn’t think I’d have too much luck making them believe in my innocence.”
“What did you do, then?”
“I picked up Misti Lynn and I put her in the trunk of my car. I couldn’t just leave her laying there. I don’t know what I was fixing to do with her. Maybe take her to the hospital, or just leave her somewhere. I don’t know. I kind of blacked out again. We had some pills in the medicine cabinet, and I think I took a couple of them. Anyhow, next thing I knew, the cops were banging on the door with their warrant about those damn checks, and it just plain slipped my mind about her being in the trunk.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about her when I first talked to you about the check charge?”
He shrugged. “Figured maybe they wouldn’t find her. I guess I was hoping I dreamed it.”
Powell Hill stared at her client. There really were people in the world who could forget about having a woman’s corpse in the trunk of their car. Or if they dimly remembered, they might ignore it, hoping that it would go away. His story rang true. It wasn’t much help with his defense, though. As far as she could tell, not even he knew if he had killed her or not.
Flora Dabney looked at her watch. It was time to start getting ready to go. At least it was time to tell Anna Douglas to start getting ready, because she always took twice as long as anybody else. It wasn’t really vanity on Anna’s part, Flora decided; it was just that Anna was a methodical person, and the good Lord had only given her first gear, so there was no use in trying to speed her up. Anna had lived in the Home for twenty years now and her housemates hadn’t found anything yet that could make her hurry. After a long spell of getting upset and angry over Anna’s slowness, Flora and the others had learned to give her an extra hour’s notice whenever they wanted her to do anything. It saved worry all the way around.
They had all been together for such a long time that they were like family now. At eighty-three, Flora had outlived her own sister by a dozen years, but they hadn’t been close since childhood. Flora married late, staying home to care for her invalid father, while her pretty younger sister had married a man from Alabama and moved far away. Finally their lives did not touch at any point. Common circumstances and decades of living together had made these seven women more her sisters than blood ties ever could. Flora felt responsible for all of them, even the exasperating Julia Hotchkiss, who looked like a bird but could eat more than a mule. They needed someone who could take care of them, and after time’s winnowing, Flora was left as the strongest in body and mind; so it fell to her to look after the others. Dolly Smith was her closest friend and she was certainly no fool, but arthritis had nearly crippled her, weakening her fighting spirit. She needed better health care than they could afford.