“Del, could you leave us alone for a moment?” Clay walked to the door with Del and closed it behind him. When they were alone, he pulled a chair close to Wes’s.
“How sure are you that this kid did it?” he asked.
“Dead sure,” Wes replied. “He was there. Puked outside after it was over. He did it. I don’t think it was premeditated but he did it. He was probably mad because she turned him down.” It was Clay who was now eager for background.
“Tell me about this Lucy Ochoa.”
“She’s seasonal, been coming here for years. Married once. Divorced. Very loose. Neighbors say she’s always had a lot of guys come and go. Hard to keep track of her. But nobody saw this kid from the convenience store over there before.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“Positive.” Clay needed that commitment before he went any further. Clay was a master manipulator, probably the only thing he did very well. It was in the blood. Although he had no use for the fat little bastard sitting in front of him, after ten years he could read Wes like a book. There were no nuances in Wes Blume’s life. Everything was as black and white as the pants and shirt he wore every day. When his wife decided to go back to work after their second child started school, Wes left her because he believed a woman’s place was in the home. It was that simple.
“There were no signs of rape?” Clay inquired, although he already knew the answer.
“Nope.”
“You know what a defense attorney is going to do with these two blood types.” It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Wes hated defense attorneys. They manipulated facts, evidence, coached their clients to lie-anything to win, even if winning meant putting a criminal back on the streets. He could hear the son-of-a-bitch now, claiming some “phantom fucker” was responsible for the murder while his client, who just stopped in for a cup of tea, was totally innocent. Wes’s face was turning red. He just didn’t understand how the Constitution guaranteed a scum-sucking parasite the right to be represented by a scum-sucking lawyer.
“Yeah, I know,” was all he said to Clay, but Clay had caught it all. It was time to make his pitch. Slowly.
“Let’s assume this kid’s blood matches the blood on the carpet and the blood on the mug, which is a pretty good assumption based on what he told you. Are you with me?” Wes nodded.
“And let’s assume that we conclude from the physical evidence that there was no rape. She must have had sex earlier that evening, don’t you think, Wes?” Clay could tell Wes hadn’t really thought that part through. With Clay’s help he would get it. . eventually.
Wes nodded his head again, but a little uncertainly this time. “I believe under those circumstances we could exclude the semen as evidence in the murder investigation completely. Do you agree?” Wes had it now. It was brilliant. There was no rape so don’t give them that evidence. Don’t let them confuse the jury with that “reasonable doubt” voodoo bullshit. And it made perfect sense that somebody else had fucked her earlier, a slut like that.
“I agree.”
“Good. But we’ve got to keep this close to the vest. Can you swear Del to secrecy?”
“No problem. But what about the coroner?”
“Harry Tuthill? Don’t worry about Harry, I’ll handle him.”
Since they were officially co-conspirators now, Clay had a few other housekeeping matters to discuss.
“Start a separate rape file.”
“Why don’t we just ditch the semen?”
“No, too dangerous.” He knew Harry would never go along with eliminating the evidence but he didn’t tell that to the Grunt. “If it ever comes out we can explain our position, but if we destroy the evidence, it will look very bad.”
“But why start a rape investigation if our position is there was no rape?”
“We have no probable cause to believe there was a rape but we’re continuing that investigation. That keeps the evidence from becoming part of the public record. If it was in the public record, any newspaper idiot could request all evidence that we found at the trailer and we’d have to give it to them. Hell, they’d get more than we gave the defense in discovery. We’d look very bad. We need to hide that information for now and this is the best way. Down the road when the hubbub dies down, we’ll declassify it, so to speak. The Feds do this all the time.”
Once again Wes was impressed with the way Clay was thinking everything through. He obviously had a talent for this kind of thing. He left Clay’s office shaking his head. He still couldn’t believe how great the meeting went. He’d been looking for a prosecutor like this all his life.
Nine
While Clay Evans IV was plotting to parlay her son’s life into new career choices for himself, Elena was making arrangements to visit the law offices of Tracey James for her initial consultation. Austin had made the call for her and scheduled the meeting for the following Tuesday. Elena was amazed that he’d managed to get her in so quickly. Austin conveniently neglected to tell her that he was an interested party.
“Her main office is in Vero Beach,” Austin told her. “You have to go there if you want to see her on Tuesday.”
“That will work out fine, Austin. Thank you so much for setting this up.”
“No problem, Elena. I was happy to do it for you.” And for myself, of course.
Elena didn’t mind the drive at all. Rudy was under investigation for murder. If she had been asked to walk to Vero Beach to clear his name, she would gladly have done it.
Tracey James’s headquarters was an ostentatious three-story building northwest of Vero. It originally had been built as a nursing home, but when the financing for the project fell through, the building lay empty until Tracey discovered it and purchased it for a song. There had been relatively little needed in the way of renovation. The second and third floors were all patient rooms except for the cafeteria, and Tracey filled those rooms with her adjusters. It was the downstairs and the outside that needed to be fixed. Outside, she had installed a circular driveway with a fountain in the middle. On both sides of the entrance to the grounds she had placed huge identical stones with the words “The James Law Firm” and “Let the James gang fight for you!” carved in the center. Columns were placed at the grandiose entrance. Inside, she had built a marvelous marble-floored foyer and waiting room. The receptionist’s desk, an antique mahogany table with a phone, anchored the middle of the waiting room, which was always empty.
Tracey scheduled her clients hours apart, a technique designed to make each one feel special. At the appointed hour, the chosen one was brought through a narrow hallway to Tracey’s office, which took up a full third of the downstairs and was bordered on the entire west side by a picture window that looked out on a magnificent multi-flowered garden, a garden that Tracey had never set foot in. Nor could she name one flower that sprung from its rich soil. The garden was designed to soothe the client. The magnificent Persian rug, the plaques, the white mahogany desk, the soft blue leather couch and matching chairs-all of it was there to impress on each of them that they were in the presence of a great lawyer.
Elena was born in Puerto Rico in a run-down shack on a farm where her father was a sharecropper. When she was five, her family moved to New York City and she grew up on the tough streets of Spanish Harlem. At twenty-two, when she realized her husband was a hopeless alcoholic, she took her son and two hundred dollars and moved to Florida to start a new life. She had lived in squalor without heat and running water. She had worked for the worst people imaginable. She was a hard person to impress and, as she sat in the soft leather chair looking out at the garden waiting for the queen to make her grand entrance, she had this uneasy feeling, like she was on the subway at rush hour and somebody was about to grab her purse. At that moment, Tracey entered the room from a door located behind her desk, a too-sweet smile pasted on her face. Elena instinctively pulled her handbag close to her body.