Rescued Read online

  While we’re walking, Ricky asks, “Are you going back to work?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “But if you don’t like to work, why are you doing it?”

  From the mouths of babes. But I’m in a bit of a tough spot here; I don’t want to prejudice Ricky against working. “Working is good; I just like to spend time with you and your mom even more.”

  “Am I going to have to work when I grow up?”

  “You’re going to pick the kind of work that you love, so you’ll look forward to it.”

  He nods. “Okay. Sounds good.”

  I bring Ricky, Tara, and Sebastian back home and then head down to the foundation building. It’s only eight thirty, but I’ve never seen the place busier. In addition to Willie and Sondra, there are at least half a dozen volunteers.

  “You got enough help?” I ask Willie.

  “More than we need. The story hit the newspapers that we have all these dogs, and people are calling like crazy to volunteer.”

  “You have them all logged into the system?” I ask. We keep a computer file on every dog we take in.

  He nods. “Sondra took care of it. There’s one dog that seems to be missing … there was a cage on the truck that was empty. There was a card for the dog, but no dog.”

  “Maybe it was already placed in a home?” I say. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Willie, about the workload. You know I’m taking on a case, and—”

  He interrupts. “Don’t worry about it. It’s cool.”

  Willie knows that I feel guilty about him and Sondra doing all the work, but they love it. Willie is a former client; I represented him after he spent seven years on death row. We proved his innocence, got his conviction overturned, and then won a fortune for him in a suit against the real murderers. So he doesn’t have to work and is happy to spend his time saving the lives of deserving dogs.

  I go into the dog area to visit with the newcomers. I generally gravitate to the seniors, and I spend some time petting several of them. But the golden retriever puppies are ridiculously cute. Sondra has named the mother Wiggy, because she has what seems like extra hair on the top of her head. She seems to tolerate the puppies grudgingly and would clearly rather sleep than dote on them.

  The dogs are in caged runs, and the volunteers are letting them into the play area in shifts to interact with their traveling buddies. Willie and Sondra are being cautious about it until they make sure that they know which ones are dog-friendly. So far, no issues have cropped up.

  I could happily spend the entire day here, but I have to go down to the jail. There it is the humans who are in cages; some are already housed in what will be their “forever home.” My task is to make sure that Kramer is not one of those people.

  We meet in a room reserved for lawyer-client conferences. Kramer is brought in handcuffed but seems in relatively decent spirits. Many clients, having spent their first night in prison and facing the concept of long-term incarceration, are distraught and panicked. Kramer is much savvier and more experienced, and while I’m sure he’s very unhappy with his circumstances, he doesn’t seem to want to use emotional capital on things he can’t control.

  “Start at the beginning,” I say.

  “I already have. The beginning was when I beat the hell out of Zimmer for molesting my client’s daughter.”

  “Have you had contact with him since that situation was concluded?”

  “No, not until a few days ago. He called me out of the blue.”

  “Why?”

  “He said we needed to meet, that there were things to resolve. He said he had information for me that would be helpful to a case I was working on.”

  “Did he say what case?”

  “No, he wouldn’t provide any more information. When I asked why he would want to be helpful to me considering our history, he said he would get something out of it as well.”

  “Did you believe him?” I ask.

  “I wouldn’t believe him if he told me the sun came up this morning.”

  “Was there any reason to believe he would have been involved with one of your cases?”

  “No. Like I said, I thought he was lying, and I turned out to be right. He never said a word about a case or anything else; he just came out slashing. The story was a pretext so he could kill me.”

  “Why did you agree to see him?”

  “I was curious about it, and I knew that he was someone I could handle if there was a problem.”

  “And the meeting place was the truck at the rest stop?”

  “Right. When I arrived, the truck wasn’t there yet. About ten minutes later, it pulled up. I looked in, but there was no one in the driver’s seat. I thought he was going to come out, but he didn’t. So then I figured he wanted me to come onto the truck and talk to him there.”

  “So you did?” I ask.

  He nods. “Yes, I heard all the dogs barking, which didn’t surprise me, because he had told me what he was doing. When I got on the truck, I still didn’t see him, so I took a few steps inside. That’s when he took a swing at me.”

  “He tried to punch at you?”

  “No. It was a large knife; coming at me, it looked like a damn machete, but it wasn’t. He jumped out from behind some kind of partition and tried to slash me in the throat with it. Almost got me the first time, so he wound up to try again.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I shot him,” he says and then smiles. “You know what they say; never bring a knife to a gunfight.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I checked to confirm he was dead, and then I left.” When he sees me react slightly to this admission, he says, “I know; big mistake. I should have known better.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t have a lot of time, and I was pretty shaken up; he’s the first man I’d ever killed. Since I had assaulted him once, and … did I mention that it was part of the record that I had threatened to kill him?”

  “No, you left that part out,” I say.

  “Well, I did. Considering all that, I thought I might just leave and not be implicated. Then after I did, I realized I had forgotten to see if there were any security cameras installed at the rest stop. I didn’t want to drive back there, so I went south to the next rest stop, thinking it would be the same.”

  “Cameras?” I ask.

  He nods. “A single camera. But in a position that it would have seen me. That’s when I decided I should talk to you. Laurie and I have kept in touch a bit over the years, so I called her. I told her I was in trouble, and she said to come right over.”

  The fact that he and Laurie had been in touch is news to me, but not really the point at the moment. “How did the police know you were at my house?”

  “I stopped at my place and left a note on the door saying that if anyone was looking for me, that’s where I’d be. I figured there was no harm; if by some chance they hadn’t ID’d me yet, then they wouldn’t see the note. But obviously they had; it wasn’t exactly a whodunit.”

  “Where’s the gun?” I ask.

  “It was at my house where I left it. My guess is it’s in the police lab now getting tests done on the ballistics. Those tests won’t come back in my favor.”

  “It will all be turned over to us.”

  “I’m in deep shit,” he says. “Now what do we do?”

  “We start digging you out.”

  I’ve done this so often, I know what everyone’s thinking before we even enter the room.

  Laurie and I have driven to my office on Van Houten Street in downtown Paterson for our initial team meeting on the Kramer case. Laurie has rounded them up, and all will be there with the exception of Hike, the other lawyer in my firm, who is out of town. He will participate by phone.

  Everyone is in place when we arrive, sitting around the conference table. The air-conditioning is not working well, or really at all, but since we’ve spent the summer without a client, I haven’t been checking to see whether it’s b
een fixed.

  It hasn’t. The owner of the building is Sofia Hernandez, who owns the fruit stand on the street level … we’re on the second floor. She probably hasn’t gotten around to it because we’re never here, and also because this is prime summer fruit season. Sofia has her priorities.

  So it’s very uncomfortable, even though someone has turned on a couple of fans and opened the windows. The upside is that the smell of fresh cantaloupe is wafting through the window, and I do love cantaloupe. The downside is that it’s so hot in here you could fry a cantaloupe on the floor.

  The conference table can barely fit in the small room, and everyone looks crowded, hot, and generally miserable. Welcome to the big time.

  To my immediate left is Edna, who used to be my secretary. She has given herself promotions in title, initially to administrative assistant and then to office manager. The key thing to know about her work is that she doesn’t do anything, and if she did, it would be with great reluctance. She must realize that the fact that we called this meeting means that we have a client, which I am sure she finds horrifying. Edna has the seat closest to the door, because she always wants to be the first one out.

  Next to her is Sam Willis, my accountant and neighbor, in that he has an office down the hall. Sam is a computer genius, capable of hacking into absolutely everything, even when the law considers such hacking impermissible. Fortunately, I consider it permissible and take great advantage of his skills when we need them.

  Sam hates accounting almost as much as I hate lawyering, so he loves when we have a case. He wants to be in on the action, though his preference would be that he could be working for a SWAT team commander instead of a lawyer.

  Next is Willie Miller, not officially a team member but someone whose toughness and reliability often prove very valuable. Willie is the one person in the room other than Laurie and me who knows why we’re here, since he was at the murder scene.

  Next to Willie is Marcus Clark, whose presence causes me to reconsider my claim that I know what everyone is thinking. I never, absolutely never, know what Marcus is thinking. He is the scariest person on the planet, and the toughest. He has literally saved my life on a number of occasions.

  Marcus is also a top-notch investigator, but he almost never talks; he throws around barely decipherable syllables like other people throw around Winnebagos. He and Laurie have a terrific relationship, which I’ve always assumed is why he allows me to continue living.

  There’s some noise that is disconcertingly loud; it sounds like people are having a party. I go to the window, thinking it’s coming from the street, but it isn’t.

  Edna points to the phone, which is on speaker. “It’s Hike,” she says.

  “Hike?”

  Hike’s voice comes through the phone. “Andy? You guys ready? Let me get somewhere quiet.”

  “I think he’s at a brunch with a few hundred of his closest friends,” Edna says, rolling her eyes in a combination of amazement and disdain.

  The thing to know about Hike, and I don’t want to overstate this, is that he is the most downbeat person in the history of the world. He sees the bad in everything and assumes every situation, no matter how dire, is going to get worse.

  But I sent him to South Carolina on a case not long ago, and he just took to it. His entire personality changed; within forty-eight hours, he was the toast of the town, surrounded by newfound friends.

  When he came back here, he returned to good old miserable Hike, but he takes occasional trips to South Carolina for enjoyment. I actually never thought I would create a single sentence that included both words Hike and enjoyment, but there it is.

  About thirty seconds later, he comes back on the phone. The background noises are gone. “I’m back. What’s up?”

  “We’ve got a client.”

  “Definitely?” Edna asks, obviously hoping I just forgot to use the word possible or potential before client.

  “Definitely. His name is Dave Kramer, and he’s accused of killing a man named Kenny Zimmer.”

  “But he didn’t do it?” Sam asks.

  “Oh, he did it, but in self-defense,” I say and then go on to describe what we know. It isn’t much, just basically what Kramer has told us. We haven’t gotten any discovery yet; that will come after tomorrow’s arraignment.

  This meeting is basically just to get everyone aware of, and ready for, the upcoming case. There isn’t a lot I can tell them, and there’s only the most bare-bones strategy to be formed.

  “We’re going to have to demonstrate motive for Zimmer to have brought Kramer to the rest stop for the purpose of killing him,” I say. “That should not be so difficult because of their prior history. But we’ll need to get phone and email records to document Zimmer’s contacting him.”

  Sam nods at this; he will be in charge of getting those records. I might have him do it in his own way, which means not bothering with the legal niceties. If they show what we hope they do, we can then get them legally. If not, the prosecutor doesn’t have to know we were going after them.

  “The forensics and crime scene material will be crucial; we’ll need to prove that our client was defending himself on that truck,” I say. “The security video should help in that it will show he didn’t draw his gun before he got on.”

  I continue. “We’ll also need to do a deep dive into Zimmer. The worse we can make him look, the better. This is going to be a ‘he said, he said,’ and the opposition ‘he said’ guy is dead. Our client has his own issues, especially the assault against Zimmer. But we should be able to get character witnesses on his behalf. Right, Laurie?”

  Laurie nods, and I notice that Marcus does as well.

  “Absolutely,” Laurie says. “Dave has a lot of friends in law enforcement. He’s always had their backs, and they will have his.”

  “Marcus, you know him?” I ask.

  There is a pause of about fifteen seconds. Marcus sometimes holds conversations as if he is on tape delay, yet I know for a fact that he is whip-smart and capable of amazing split-second decisions. Finally, he says, “Yunh.”

  With a ringing endorsement like that, how can we lose?

  “Who is the prosecutor?” Hike asks through the phone.

  “Don’t know yet,” I say. “I’ll find out after we’re done here. Anybody have any questions?”

  Nobody does, so I guess we are, in fact, “done here.” I tell everyone that I will update them as soon as I know more and am ready to give out specific assignments.

  Once we break up the meeting, Laurie and I head back home. Anything I have to do, I can do from there. In fact, the need to have an office at all has lessened over time to the point where it’s an unnecessary luxury, if you can call a stiflingly hot dump over a fruit stand a luxury. But it somehow feels like I should keep the office, if for no other reason than to give Edna a place not to go to every day.

  On the way home, I ask, “How does Marcus know Kramer?”

  “He did some investigative work for him maybe five years ago, after Dave left the force,” she says. “And…”

  She doesn’t seem inclined to go any further, and since and is not a complete sentence, I prompt her. “And…?”

  “And we all went out a couple of times.”

  “You, Marcus, and Kramer?”

  “And Marcus’s wife.”

  I’ve only met Marcus’s wife once, at a victory party after a successful case. She referred to him as her “little Markie.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” I say. “Where did you go? Bowling? Ice-skating? Karaoke?”

  “Andy, you need to get past this. I had a life pre-Andy, hard as that may be for you to believe.”

  “How come we never go out with Marcus and his wife?”

  “Would you like to?” she asks.

  “Not particularly.”

  When we get home, I take Tara and Sebastian for a walk in Eastside Park. It gives me a chance to discuss with Tara my attitude toward Kramer. “I’m having trouble getting past this,�
� I say. “It bugs me that this guy was with Laurie.”

  Tara doesn’t say anything, for a couple of reasons. For one, she knows that I need to deal with this on my own; that’s the only way I’ll get to a resolution. The other reason is that she is a dog, and dogs can’t talk … not even Tara.

  So I continue uninterrupted. “I don’t know why I’m jealous of this guy; I know how Laurie feels about me. I mean, look at you; when Sebastian came to live with us, you just took it in stride. You knew how we felt about you, so you dealt with it.” As I’m saying this, Sebastian is pissing on a garbage can and doesn’t seem like a dog that Tara would have jealous pangs over.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m going to play it your way. You’re not threatened by Sebastian, and I’m not threatened by Kramer. And if things change, I’ll just intentionally lose the case and let him spend the rest of his miserable life in jail. Then if Laurie wants to ‘stay in touch’ with him, they can whisper sweet nothings through the glass in the prison visiting room.”

  With that resolved, I take the dogs home and call the prosecutor’s office to find out who will be handling the Kramer case. I’m told it is Carla Westrum, a relative newcomer to the office. She moved here from the West Coast and is highly thought of, though I haven’t gone up against her yet.

  “Carla?” Laurie asks when I tell her who the prosecutor is. “Really?”

  “You know her?” I ask.

  “We went to college together. I heard she was in town, but I didn’t realize she was working in the prosecutor’s office. I haven’t talked to her in years, but we’ve emailed.”

  “This case is like old home week for you.”

  “Unfortunately, she’s smart, Andy. And she’s one of the hardest workers you’ll ever come across.”

  “Super.”

  “It gets worse. She’s also the single most competitive person I’ve ever met. She was this really nice, normal human being until she got on the volleyball court or the tennis court, and then she became a driven maniac.”