Thicker Than Water (7 page)

“What about Kitty Jagger?”

“What about her?”

“Can you forget that Cade was convicted of killing her?”

Louis hesitated. “Let's put it this way—I won't let it get to me.”

“Then I think we can do business.”

Susan extended her hand. Louis shook it without returning her smile.

“Christ, Kincaid, you look like you're making a deal with the devil,” Susan said.

Louis finished off his beer in one gulp. “Maybe I am, counselor.”

Louis sat in the hard wooden chair, waiting for Jack Cade. His gaze wandered around the visitation room. Standing near the back was a deputy, his green uniform crisp but his eyes limp with boredom. The florescent light flickered as the rattle of a fan suddenly filled the room. Louis could feel a spray of cold air from the vent above him.

He watched the plain black and white clock on the wall over the deputy's head. The thin red second hand made its way slowly around the stained face.

To Louis's left was a heavyset black woman in a brightly patterned cotton dress. She was speaking in a soft foreign accent to a weary-looking man on the other side of the dirty plexiglass. The man's eyes locked briefly on Louis's.

He had been behind bars himself once. It was brief, but he had never forgotten the soul-numbing feel of it. How did men stand it for decades? He looked away from the man's gaze.

The back door opened and a deputy escorted Jack Cade in, shoving him down into the chair across from Louis. Cade didn't even shrug off the deputy's hand. Just took it, like he was used to it or it no longer mattered.

Cade was cuffed and he settled into the chair uneasily. His hair was hanging in eyes, and he tossed his head slightly to throw it back. He peered at Louis through the scarred plexiglass.

“I see Miz Outlaw took my advice,” Cade said.

“Let me tell you something, Cade. You have nothing to gain by pissing off Susan Outlaw or me.”

“Well, you're here, ain't you?”

“For the time being. You pull anything like that again, I walk. And you better hope she doesn't walk with me.”

Cade didn't look at him. The prisoner next to them was starting to talk excitedly, his accent so heavy Louis couldn't understand what he was saying. Cade was staring at him.

“Did you hear me, Cade?”

“Why would I care if the bitch walks?”

Louis leaned close to the plexiglass. “Because she's probably the only person in Lee County who thinks you didn't kill Duvall. How's that grab you?”

Cade's eyes slid back to Louis. “You don't?”

Louis didn't answer.

“How the hell can you help me if you think I'm guilty?”

“Convince me otherwise.”

Cade looked away again. He was picking at his cuticles, scratching at them with the hard, dark nails of his other hand.

The prisoner in the next cubicle raised his voice, his speech slipping now into a foreign language that sounded like slurred French.

“Talk to me, Cade,” Louis said.

Cade was staring at the black man and his girlfriend.

“Cade,” Louis said sharply.

Cade shook his head slowly. “Fucking foreigners. Can't even get away from them in jail.”

He finally let his eyes drift back to Louis. “Haitians. Washing up on the beach like goddamn fish. They ought to toss them off a boat in the Bermuda Triangle and see if they can swim home past the sharks.”

Cade was waiting for Louis's reaction. But Louis wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of seeing his disgust.

“Tell me about the night Duvall was killed,” Louis said. “Why did you go back to his office that night?”

“I didn't.”

“They've got a witness who ID'ed you.”

“A homeless drunk.” Cade smiled.

“Why were you going to sue Duvall?”

“I told you.”

“You said he was incompetent. How?”

“I never said he was incompetent. Incompetent means somebody doesn't know what they're doing. Duvall knew exactly what he was doing.”

The Haitian prisoner was getting more agitated. His girlfriend was crying. Cade's eyes lasered onto the couple.

“What do you mean?” Louis asked.

“Duvall sold me out.”

“How?”

Cade shook his head.

“Cade, look at me.”

Cade shifted, his breathing turning hard. “It's fucking over. I got no way to get anything back now. My life is down the drain because of Duvall and I got no way to get anything back because the sonofabitch is dead!”

The guard was eyeing Cade.

“You've got to calm down here, Cade,” Louis said.

“Shit . . .”

“You've got—”

Cade leaned into the plexiglass. “Don't tell me what I gotta do,” he said. He took a deep breath and leaned back, running a hand over his hair.

“My kid was here yesterday,” Cade said. “He's lost most the yards on his routes,” Cade said. “Folks are telling him they don't want their lawns paying for his scumbag father's defense.”

Louis let out a long breath. “Look, Cade . . .”

“That sonofabitch lawyer took away my life and now he's taking away my kid's. He owes me.” Cade leaned forward, his eyes glistening. “You hear me? He owes me!”

Louis was quiet for a moment. He decided to play his card.

“You couldn't have sued Duvall anyway,” he said.

Cade looked up at him.

“Statute of limitations on legal malpractice is two years in this state,” Louis said.

Something passed over Cade's eyes momentarily and was gone, like a final dissipating swirl of smoke from a dying fire.

“You didn't know that, did you?” Louis said.

Cade was silent for a long time, head bowed as he picked at his hands. The Haitian's creole mixed in with the hum of the florescent lights.

Suddenly, a hard twisted smile came to Cade's face. “I should have known, man, I should have known.”

“Known what?” Louis asked.

“That it wouldn't work,” Cade said. “The cards aren't stacked that way for guys like me.”

The black woman in the next cubicle started to cry softly again. The Haitian man just sat there.

“When I was in the joint,” Cade said, “this guy who knew something about the law told me I could sue Duvall for a million bucks when I got out. I didn't believe it. I mean, a fucking jury giving a guy like me a million bucks.”

He looked up at Louis. “Then I got out and saw how bad things were for Ronnie and I figured what the fuck, what do I got to lose?”

He gave a sharp laugh. “Now you tell me I couldn't have gotten anything anyway. Ain't the legal system fucking great?”

Louis was silent. The Haitian man had started up again. But his angry chattering was muffled, pushed to the back of Louis's mind.

If Cade thought he stood to get a big settlement from Duvall, he was the last person who wanted Duvall dead. But there was something else here, too. Cade represented a part of the past that a lot of people wanted to forget. Suing Spencer Duvall would have brought back bad memories for a lot of people, no matter how hard the courts tried to keep the focus on Duvall's alleged malpractice and away from the evidence that convicted Cade in the first place. The media alone would retry the case. He wondered if Jack Cade looked at it from that angle.

“What do you think would have happened if you could have sued Duvall?” Louis asked.

Cade just looked at him.

“The evidence would have been reexamined, Cade,” Louis said. “Other people, the newspapers, would retry it all over again, outside of the courtroom. Things would come out that have nothing to do with Duvall's ability or intent. Hell, other lawyers would step forward with new technology, raise questions. It would have been a circus.”

“Told you, it doesn't matter now.”

“Not to you, but maybe it did to someone else.”

Cade looked up at him. “Who?”

“The person who really killed Kitty Jagger?”

Cade gave a snort, shaking his head. “Now you're saying you believe me, that I didn't do it?”

Louis hesitated. “Let's just say I believe that if someone thought Duvall could be sued, they'd be worried about what might come out.”

The Haitian man raised his voice and Cade looked over at him.

“Who did you tell that you planned to sue Duvall?” Louis asked.

“Everyone from here to Raiford for the last year.”

“Did you see a lawyer?”

Cade shook his head, his eyes still on the Haitian. “No money.”

“Then we'll have to go another direction,” Louis said. “We have to talk about Kitty Jagger.”

Cade looked back quickly. “Fuck that, man.”

“It's a believable defense for the mess you're in now,” Louis said.

Cade was silent. The Haitian man was ranting, his girlfriend's crying growing louder.

“You'll have to tell me everything that happened twenty years ago,” Louis said.

Cade sucked in a slow, long breath that expanded his chest under the orange jumpsuit.

“The only thing I'm going to say is that I was set up.”

Louis didn't reply.

Cade raked at his hair with both hands, glancing again at the Haitian. Suddenly, he spun toward the man. “Hey, shut the fuck up!” he yelled.

The Haitian man and his girlfriend froze, staring at Cade.

Louis tapped on the plexiglass.

“Cade, forget them. Look at me.”

Cade's eyes shot back to him.

“Now tell me about Kitty Jagger,” Louis said.

Cade shook his head slowly. “It's over, man.”

“How did you lose the garden tool?”

“Look, I told you I don't know nothing about it.”

“Who else had access to your tools?”

“I said I didn't do it, man.”

“But someone—”

“I told you!” Cade spat out. “I told you I don't know who killed that girl!”

Louis's eyes flicked up to the deputy watching Cade's back, then he looked back at Cade.

“She had a name, Cade. Her name was Kitty.”

Louis was amazed to see a small smile tip Cade's lips.

“Kitty,” he said slowly. He cut Kitty's name into two sharp syllables, holding each between his teeth before spitting them out.

Louis felt something tighten inside his chest.

“I didn't kill Kitty,” Cade said. “Kitty killed
me,
man.”

Cade sat back in his chair, staring at Louis. His eyes had gone opaque in the florescent lights. The Haitian man had started up again, his voice ricocheting off the concrete walls.

Louis rubbed the bridge of his nose. Suddenly, the room seemed to close in on him, the stale stench, the clang of a door, the muted bellow of a deputy and the desperate babbling of the Haitian man.

Louis rose sharply and pushed back his chair.

Cade looked up. “Where you going?”

“Think about what I said, Cade,” Louis said. “Think about Kitty Jagger. She might be the only person right now who can save your ass.”

Louis didn't look back as he walked away. At the door, the deputy buzzed him through.

Out in the hall, Louis paused. He could still see Cade's eyes, as murky as that damn plexiglass between them. He pulled in a deep breath. Nobody should have eyes that you couldn't see into.

Louis took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he put them back on, the screen of the microfiche machine came back into focus. He had been at the Lee County Library for nearly two hours, tracking down anything he could find on Kitty Jagger's murder.

“Excuse me.”

Louis looked up into the face of the librarian.

“We're getting ready to close.”

Louis looked at his watch. It was only five.

“We close early the day before Thanksgiving,” she said.

Thanksgiving? Man, he had forgotten. He punched a button and the machine spit out a copy of the article on the screen.

Outside the library, he paused, then decided to go to the bar across the street. He ordered a Coke and arranged the clips in chronological order. He started with the earliest one, from the
Fort Myers News-Press,
dated April 11, 1966. The headline said,
GIRL FOUND DEAD AT DUMP SITE.

It reported that the unidentified body of a young woman had been found at the city dump by two garbage men making an early-morning run. It was only a couple paragraphs on the bottom of the front page. Other news had taken precedence that day: Frank Sinatra had married Mia Farrow in Las Vegas.

Louis took a sip of the Coke.

He knew the dump site; he had passed it on the drive down to Bonita Springs. The locals called it Mount Trashmore. It was a giant landfill that had been sodded over to make it look nice for the new subdivision that was just a mile downwind. If it weren't for the steady stream of garbage trucks and the gulls circling overhead, you could almost believe it was just a pretty hill. If South Florida had hills.

The next article was dated April 12th. Police had used a gold locket found on the body to help identify the girl as a local teenager named Kitty Jagger, age fifteen. The medical examiner's report said she had been stabbed, beaten and raped. She had been dead about two days when found. Police had no suspects but had located a bloody garden tool that appeared to be the stabbing weapon.

He set the article aside and turned to the next one dated a week later.

It said Kitty Jagger had last been seen on April 9th, the day of her death, by her boss at Hamburger Heaven, a drive-in where she was a carhop. She had worked her usual five-to-eleven night shift and had left to walk to the bus stop as she always did. There was an interview with Kitty's widowed father, Willard Jagger, an unemployed roofer on disability who said that when his daughter did not come home, he called the police to file a missing person's report.

The article was illustrated with a small black and white picture of Kitty Jagger. It looked to be a yearbook photo, a blow-up from a group shot, probably Kitty's freshman class. In it, Kitty Jagger was staring straight ahead, a small smile tipping her lips. From what Louis could tell, she looked like your average pretty high school girl, with long blond hair parted in the middle and hanging straight around her round face.

Louis moved on to the next article, heavy with a black headline:
SUSPECT ARRESTED IN JAGGER MURDER
.

This was the first mention of Jack Cade. There was a photo of Cade being led into the Lee County Courthouse. He was wearing a jumpsuit like the one Louis had seen him in yesterday, but his face was that of a very different and younger man.

Cade's hair was flat and black, combed straight back away from a striking face. He was thinner, sinewy, the muscles in his upper arms tight against the grip of the deputy's hands. The difference was the eyes. Cade's eyes in this picture registered anger and bewilderment; they were nothing like the hard, flat eyes that stared back at him from behind the plexiglass.

Louis moved to the story. A bloody garden tool, recovered with the body, had been traced to Cade, who, like all lawn maintenance workers, regularly dumped his trash at the site where Kitty Jagger's body had been found. The article also revealed that a pair of semen-stained panties had been found in Cade's truck, and that the O blood-type, derived from the semen stain, matched Jack Cade's type.

Louis sighed. Ronnie Cade hadn't mentioned that.

The article finished up with a description of the damage done to Kitty's body: blunt trauma to her head and twelve stab wounds to the chest and shoulders. Louis set the clip aside and looked down at his arm.

About halfway up his forearm was a long thin scar. He ran his fingertips over it, feeling the faint ridge. Then he turned his hand over and looked at the knife scar that marked the fatty part of his palm, cutting sideways to the center. His little finger was still numb at the tip, and sometimes when it was cold and wet, he could feel the muscles in his hand tightening beneath the skin.

He finished the Coke and took off his glasses. If he was going to start digging into this, he would be facing some tough opponents. Mobley and the prosecutor, Vern Sandusky, were sure to fight it.

And Susan. God, he wasn't looking forward to telling her what he was thinking.

The bartender ambled over. “You want another one?”

“No thanks. Where's your phone?”

“By the john. But it's out of order.

Louis gathered up the clips. It was just as well. This was something he was going to have to do in person.

 

 

Louis pulled the Mustang to a stop in front of the yellow bungalow, double-checking the address he had written on a scrap of paper. It was a neat little house, tucked in the shadows of some swaying banana trees on Sereno Key. Susan Outlaw's car, an old silver Mercedes sedan, was in the drive and a bicycle lay in the yard.

At the front door, he knocked and waited. The door opened and a small brown face with black-rimmed glasses appeared behind the screen.

“Hello,” the boy said.

Louis smiled down at him, but the boy did not smile back.

“Hi, is your mother home?”

“Benjamin, who is it?”

“Just some guy, Ma!” he hollered over his shoulder.

“I told you never to open the door—” Susan stopped, coming up behind him. Her face registered first surprise, then irritation.

“How'd you get my address?” she asked.

“I'm a PI.”

“He probably looked it up in the phone book, Ma,” Benjamin said.

“You should've called,” she said.

“Sorry. I took a chance. We need to talk.”

She nudged Benjamin aside and stepped to the screen. Her hair was pulled back in a tight knot and there was a white powder sprayed across the front of her red T-shirt. The front of the shirt read: A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.

“Is this a bad time?” Louis asked.

Susan pushed open the screen. “Come on in. But don't look at the house. It's a mess. I'm baking.”

Louis stepped inside, expecting to see a messy house, but the living room was neat, furnished with a trim blue sofa and a wooden rocking chair with a quilted seat pad. The pale yellow walls were bare except for a large, black-framed poster of the Eiffel Tower. There was a scattering of magazines on the coffee table along with a Clue board game. A small entertainment center with a TV took up one wall, flanked by bookcases overflowing with novels, law books, and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. As Louis followed Susan through the small dining room, his eyes traveled over the table. It was covered with stacks of folders, yellow legal pads, books and an open briefcase—except for one end where an arithmetic book lay open next to a
Star Wars
looseleaf binder.

Nice house. Tidy, attractive, but all business.
Just like the lady herself,
Louis thought as he followed her into the kitchen.

The kitchen was painted a bright green in an attempt to match the ugly '50s tile. There was a Winn-Dixie bag on the floor with some groceries still stacked on the counter—a box of Stove Top stuffing, a can of cranberries, some potatoes. Louis could see a frozen turkey sitting in one side of the double sink.

“You shouldn't let that sit out,” he said.

Susan was standing at the counter and turned.

“What?”

“The turkey,” he said, nodding.

“It needs to defrost by tomorrow and it won't fit in the refrigerator,” she said.

“Put it in some cold water.”

“What, you working for the Butterball hotline now?”

Louis shrugged.

She went back to ripping away at something sticky in a big bowl. The stuff vaguely resembled cookie dough.

“Looks too dry,” Louis said.

She threw him a look as she struggled to work the wooden spoon through the dough. “I followed the recipe,” she said.

“Recipes don't always work,” Louis said. “Add some water.”

Susan grabbed a measuring cup, turning to the sink to fill it. She leaned down, watching the water carefully as it rose to the line.

“How much are you going to add?”

“Enough to make it look normal.”

“Then you don't know how much you're going to add?”

“No.”

“Then why bother to measure it?” Louis asked.

She turned. “Look, you came to talk, not cook. So talk.”

Louis watched her pour the water into the dough. She began to work it in, her hips swaying in sync with the rotations her hand made around the bowl.

“I went and saw Cade,” Louis said. “He knows now that we're a package deal.”

She nodded slowly. “I talked to my boss. He said I can add you to the payroll as an investigator. You are now an agent of the PD's office.”

Louis looked up at her, not comfortable with the title, especially with the name Jack Cade attached to it.

“Hold on,” Susan said. She left and returned a minute later. She held out a beeper.

“I'm not wearing that,” Louis said.

“Don't be crazy. I have to be able to get ahold of you.” She slapped it down on the table and returned to the sink.

He picked up the beeper, turning it over in his hands. “Does this mean we're going steady?”

She threw him a look and went back to the cookie dough. Louis saw something out of the corner of his eye and turned. Benjamin was leaning against the door jamb, watching them. He was a skinny little thing, huge brown eyes behind the big glasses, twig-brown arms poking out of a
Star Wars
T-shirt.

“You really a PI?” he asked.

“Kind of.”

“You track down murderers and stuff?”

Louis looked at Susan for help, but she was busy.

“What kind of gun you got?”

“I don't carry a gun right now,” Louis said.

The boy made a face. “What kind of car you got? Sonny Crockett has a Ferrari Spider but it's not really his—”

“Ben, go do your homework,” Susan said.

“I did it already.”

“Then go watch TV.”

The boy made a suffering face. “Oh man, I wanna stay in here.”

“No. Get.”

“Can I lick the bowl first?”

“I told you before it's not good for you.”

Louis suddenly recalled something his foster mother Frances used to say to him, and he turned to Benjamin.

“It'll give you worms,” he whispered.

Benjamin trudged off and fell to the floor in front of the television. Seconds later the
Jeopardy
theme song came on. Louis watched as Susan opened the oven door. The sweet scent of chocolate chip cookies filled the kitchen. He knew he needed to tread carefully. This was her case, after all, and he had to respect that. He had to find out what her plan was before he tried to force one of his own on her.

Susan started cleaning up the mess on the counter.

“Can I have the bowl?” Louis asked.

She turned. “What?”

“The bowl.”

She gave him a weird look, then brought the bowl over to the table, sitting across from him. He scraped the spoon around the rim and began to eat the dough.

“That junk's not good for you,” she said.

“Yeah, I know, it gives you worms. I need to know what your trial strategy is going to be,” Louis said.

She swiped a finger in the bowl and nibbled at the dough, like she was afraid to experience it all at once. “My strategy is that Jack Cade didn't shoot Duvall. Someone else did. A powerful man like Duvall had lots of enemies. My staff, such as it is, is working on his financials now to see if there was anything hinky there.”

“What about that witness who saw Cade at Duvall's office?”

“A bum named Quince,” Susan said. “He hangs out at the bus stop across the street and he said he saw a man leave Duvall's office just after nine-thirty. Never saw Cade's face, just said he looked out of place. He described a black leather jacket. They never found a similar jacket when they searched Cade's house. Quince doesn't know what he saw. He's a homeless drunk who served time.”

“Being an homeless ex-con makes him blind?” Louis asked.

“There you go, thinking like a cop again.”

“Okay, what about the fingerprints? Mobley said Cade's prints were on the credenza, like he was looking for something.”

“Cade was in the office that morning. Says he leaned against things.”

“They find the weapon?”

“No, and Cade doesn't own a gun. He can't.”

“Not legally anyway.”

“Well, they don't have anyone stepping forward to say they sold him one illegally either.”

“What caliber was the gun used on Duvall?”

Susan thought for a minute. “A seven-point-six-two by twenty-five.”

“A what?”

She chuckled at the puzzled look on his face. “It's a Tokarev. It's Chinese, an old semi-automatic. It shoots a 30-caliber bullet from a nine millimeter cartridge. It's probably a collector's gun.”

“Doesn't sound like something Cade would have,” Louis said.

“My thought exactly. He'd be lucky to snare something off the street.”

“Alibi?”

“His son Ronnie. Says he was home watching
Star Trek, the New Generation.”