black-marker treatment, plus they get the entire discovery package, from detectives’ reports and photos to autopsy photos to crime lab reports. We briefly discussed if the latter would be all that helpful as Wicked had been so out of it with her pills and booze—would a murderer have bothered to inject anything else into her system? But then we discussed how murderers were rarely the most rational citizens on the planet, and maybe Deborah’s killer had given her a little something extra to ensure she breathed her last, so yes, the crime lab reports were a good idea.
“And by the way,” I said, “some Hispanic dude in a Santa suit tried to kill me with a switch blade. I slammed him with my knee, which has almost stopped hurting, and thought I’d knocked him out, but then he disappeared.”
“Are you back on drugs?”
“Sam, don’t be a fucking un-dude.”
Mistress Hardin was calling me back to the window, so I ended the call. After receiving the reports, streaked with more black than tire marks after a collision, I returned to my seat and flipped through them.
Like most police reports, there was little recorded to help an accused. Descriptions of the scene and interviews with drunk people offered no solid information. Iris’s statement read like a cover flap for a bad noir novel, painting me as a low-life, pissed-off, vengeful ex who’d cracked and pulled a knife on Deborah. And to think Iris would be on the bench soon, orchestrating justice for other poor souls like me.
The rest was a lot of boring details layered with unsupported conclusions by homicide detectives and patrol deputies, their grammar and punctuation so atrocious it’d make an English teacher commit hari-kari.
Heading back into the winter chill, my cell phone chirped. Not recognizing the number, I debated whether to answer. I had better things to do than listen to some guy who wanted to hire a PI to follow his cheating wife. It was rarely women, usually men, who cried in these calls —hell,
I’d
cried with them a few times.
But it might be a call pertaining to my case.
“Levine,” I answered, fishing in my pocket for the car keys.
“Rick.” That soft Southern drawl was unmistakable.
I stopped, the wind whipping my hair, but I no longer felt the cold as an old, hot pain crowded my heart. I closed my eyes, wishing this door to my past had been left closed.
“Rick, you there?”
“Hello Brianna.”
Sixteen
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.”
—Buddha
A fter Brianna dumped me, I swilled, smoked, and sniffed anything I could get my hands on, trying my damndest to numb my broken heart. It was bad enough to be dumped, worse that she’d traded me in for a hot-shot detective before we’d even officially broken up, a guy who could pass for one of those stud cop bad-boys in
The Wire
while I looked like the stand-in for
Columbo
. I hit bottom when, five years ago, I woke up one overcast Sunday morning on her front lawn, lying on an empty bottle of Patron tequila, wearing a pair of AC/DC pajamas I didn’t even know I owned, staring blearingly up at her unforgiving eyes. Soon after, I walked into my first twelve-step meeting.
“I heard what happened,” she said.
“Yeah.” Our first words since the front lawn debacle. I opened the Durango driver’s door. “I’m sorry about…that Sunday morning…” Me, who a judge once accused of needing a paragraph just to write my name, couldn’t think of another, single word to utter. So I didn’t try.
After a moment’s strange silence, she continued, “Saw some crime scene photos.”
I breathed in a lungful of air, the cold seeming to condense the scents of ozone with the outdoors, stinging my nostrils with a smell like metallic pine.
I got into the driver’s seat, slammed shut the door, sat in the silence for a moment. “Considering my own lawyer hasn’t seen them yet,
“And by the way,” I said, “some Hispanic dude in a Santa suit tried to kill me with a switch blade. I slammed him with my knee, which has almost stopped hurting, and thought I’d knocked him out, but then he disappeared.”
“Are you back on drugs?”
“Sam, don’t be a fucking un-dude.”
Mistress Hardin was calling me back to the window, so I ended the call. After receiving the reports, streaked with more black than tire marks after a collision, I returned to my seat and flipped through them.
Like most police reports, there was little recorded to help an accused. Descriptions of the scene and interviews with drunk people offered no solid information. Iris’s statement read like a cover flap for a bad noir novel, painting me as a low-life, pissed-off, vengeful ex who’d cracked and pulled a knife on Deborah. And to think Iris would be on the bench soon, orchestrating justice for other poor souls like me.
The rest was a lot of boring details layered with unsupported conclusions by homicide detectives and patrol deputies, their grammar and punctuation so atrocious it’d make an English teacher commit hari-kari.
Heading back into the winter chill, my cell phone chirped. Not recognizing the number, I debated whether to answer. I had better things to do than listen to some guy who wanted to hire a PI to follow his cheating wife. It was rarely women, usually men, who cried in these calls —hell,
I’d
cried with them a few times.
But it might be a call pertaining to my case.
“Levine,” I answered, fishing in my pocket for the car keys.
“Rick.” That soft Southern drawl was unmistakable.
I stopped, the wind whipping my hair, but I no longer felt the cold as an old, hot pain crowded my heart. I closed my eyes, wishing this door to my past had been left closed.
“Rick, you there?”
“Hello Brianna.”
Sixteen
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.”
—Buddha
A fter Brianna dumped me, I swilled, smoked, and sniffed anything I could get my hands on, trying my damndest to numb my broken heart. It was bad enough to be dumped, worse that she’d traded me in for a hot-shot detective before we’d even officially broken up, a guy who could pass for one of those stud cop bad-boys in
The Wire
while I looked like the stand-in for
Columbo
. I hit bottom when, five years ago, I woke up one overcast Sunday morning on her front lawn, lying on an empty bottle of Patron tequila, wearing a pair of AC/DC pajamas I didn’t even know I owned, staring blearingly up at her unforgiving eyes. Soon after, I walked into my first twelve-step meeting.
“I heard what happened,” she said.
“Yeah.” Our first words since the front lawn debacle. I opened the Durango driver’s door. “I’m sorry about…that Sunday morning…” Me, who a judge once accused of needing a paragraph just to write my name, couldn’t think of another, single word to utter. So I didn’t try.
After a moment’s strange silence, she continued, “Saw some crime scene photos.”
I breathed in a lungful of air, the cold seeming to condense the scents of ozone with the outdoors, stinging my nostrils with a smell like metallic pine.
I got into the driver’s seat, slammed shut the door, sat in the silence for a moment. “Considering my own lawyer hasn’t seen them yet,
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