Louis had to ask. “Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Try to pick her up?”
Ray’s beefy face got redder.
“Ray, I’m not a cop,” Louis said.
“Okay, I asked her out once. She turned me down, all right?”
Louis had a vision of the fat teenaged Ray sweating up the courage to ask Kitty Jagger out. He hoped she had been kind.
“She give you any reason?”
Ray frowned. “Yeah, in fact she did. And you know what? I still remember. Twenty years later and I still remember exactly what she said.”
Louis waited.
“She said, ‘I’m saving myself for a rich guy.’ ” Ray shook his head. “Shit, like she was going to find a way out, going home every night to her crippled old man.”
The tone of Ray’s voice had changed. “What a waste,” he said.
A phone rang. The waitress called Ray’s name and told him he had a call.
“I gotta go,” Ray said to Louis. He pointed at the fries. “What do you think?”
“Best in Florida,” Louis said.
Ray gave a wry smile. “Lot of good it does me. The high school is only two blocks away, but they all go to McDonald’s now.”
Louis popped the last fry in his mouth and stood. “Thanks for your help.”
Ray went in the back. Louis left money on the counter with a nice tip for the waitress. Outside, he paused, his headache gone now, but the images of Kitty’s bedroom still a swirl in his head. He had to find Joyce Novack.
He paused to put on his sunglasses and his eyes drifted down to the newstand by the door. The headline in that morning’s News-Press couldn’t be missed.
HAITIAN PRISONER KILLED IN JAIL
Louis bought a paper and scanned the story. Jesus. The man who had been sitting next to him and Cade the other day had been stabbed to death. An investigation was ongoing, according to Mobley.
Louis got in the car. He was just starting the car when the beeper went off again. He grabbed it off the seat and got out, going to the pay phone. He dialed Susan’s office.
“Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.
“Never mind that right now.”
“Never mind? Look-”
“Susan, we have to talk.”
“Damn right we have to talk. We had a deal-”
“Not now. I’ll meet you at O’Sullivan’s in fifteen minutes.”
“Screw that. I can’t-”
“Be there, Susan. This is important.” He hung up.
Chapter Sixteen
O’Sullivan’s was nuts-to-butts cops. The Tampa Bay Bucs were battling the Bears to a soundtrack of clacking billiard balls and the swoosh of the bar dishwasher.
Louis made his way to the bar, the newspaper under his arm. He scanned the smoky room for Susan but didn’t see her. He hoped she hurried.
The football game broke for half-time and Louis looked up as a news update came on the screen. A small picture of a Haitian man came on the screen and the bar went silent.
“Sheriff’s officials are remaining silent on the death of a Haitian inmate Friday night in the Lee County jail. In a statement released this morning, the sheriff’s department said Lucien Faure was found dead in the inmates’ shower facilities. Officials stated Faure bled to death, but no weapon has been found. Officials have not named any suspects.”
“Who the fuck cares?” someone hollered from the back.
The man next to Louis shook his head. “The lawyers will be all over this. I heard the Haitian Liberty League is already beating down Mobley’s door.”
Louis didn’t comment. He pulled the newspaper from under his arm and stared at the face of the dead Haitian.
Someone touched his shoulder. He turned to see Susan. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater, her face icy in the flat light given off by the bar. He motioned for her to follow him into a dim hallway back by the restrooms. He handed her the newspaper folded to the article.
She looked at it, then back at him. “So?”
“I think Jack Cade killed him.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Last time I saw Cade at the jail, this same guy was next to us, talking to someone,” Louis said. “Cade got pissed at them, wanted them to shut up, said they were annoying him.”
Louis waited while a man pushed between them, headed for the john. “Then last night, Cade showed up at my house.”
“He came to your house? Why?”
“He gave me this bullshit story about wanting to talk about Kitty Jagger, but while he was there, he told me his old man was killed by a fork to the belly. Leaves a hole, he said.”
She looked at him blankly.
He poked a finger at her chest. “A hole, he said.”
“Cade’s been out since. . what? Saturday afternoon?”
“The guy was stabbed Friday night.”
Susan frowned. “That doesn’t mean Cade killed-”
Louis raised a hand to silence her until another man moved past them.
“All right, we know he’s despicable, Louis,” she said, her voice lower. “But there’s nothing we need to do about this. There’s no evidence, and Cade’s not a suspect or I would have been the first to know.” She held out the paper. “I’d say it’s not our problem.”
He took the paper back. “We have to tell Mobley.”
“The hell we do. Besides, you can’t even if you wanted to.”
“Why not?”
“Excuse me,” someone said.
Susan stepped aside to let a man pass, then leaned close to him. “You’re an official agent of the public defender’s office. You’re bound by confidentiality. Anything Cade says to you is privileged.”
“Bullshit. Not if he was planning to commit another crime. Even I know that.”
“Did Cade threaten the Haitian man? Did he make any move toward him?”
“No.”
“When he came to your place, did he tell you he did it?”
Louis was getting pissed. “No.”
“Then we have no legal obligation,” she said.
“What about a moral one?” Louis snapped.
“Morality doesn’t come in to play here. Besides, do you know what an accusation like that would do to our case at this point? We have a big enough problem with Cade’s image as it is.”
Louis tightened, turning away. “I don’t believe this.”
Susan gave him a minute, then touched his arm. “It’s just your cop brain kicking in, Kincaid. It’ll pass.”
“It’s wrong.”
“It’s the law.”
“Aren’t you the least bit worried Cade will get pissed at me or you and put a hole in one of us?”
Susan was trying to keep a steady gaze, but it wavered slightly as she spoke. “I’ve been threatened before. Goes with the territory.”
He leaned back against the wall.
“Look, forget this,” Susan said. “What else have you got? Did you hunt down Candace’s girlfriend yet?”
“No,” Louis said, folding the newspaper slowly.
“What about Bernhardt? Or the divorce? Anything new?”
He was silent.
“Damn it, Kincaid, what the hell have you been doing all day? I paged you four or five times.”
“I went to see Bob Ahnert and Willard Jagger.”
Susan’s mouth drew into a line. “Who is Bob Ahnert?”
“The detective who worked Kitty’s murder.”
She was silent. Louis could almost see her counting to ten. Or thinking of a way to take his head off while twenty cops watched.
“Well, that’s just great,” she said finally. “I’m grasping at straws and you’re out chasing irrelevant shit.”
Louis glared at her. “Ahnert is important.”
“For what?”
“Background. It’s important to show Duvall may have manipulated Cade’s case. It’s important to Cade’s motive.”
“Cade doesn’t have a motive because we’re trying to show he didn’t do it!”
Another man tried to push past them and Susan turned on him. “Can’t you wait?”
“Screw you, lady,” the man mumbled.
Louis took her by the shoulders and moved her aside. When the man passed, she shook her head.
“Reasonable doubt, Kincaid, reasonable doubt. That’s all I need to show. I’m not Perry Mason, for God’s sake. Real lawyers don’t prove who else did it, only that someone else could have. We can’t waste time-”