Binds that tie, p.13
Binds That Tie, page 13
“Great. What’s the defense?” Chris liked efficiency. He rubbed his hands together. In two weeks, it could all be over. He could be home. His stomach lurched. Home to what? He pushed that thought away. Home with Maggie. Everything that entailed was still better than prison. Maybe.
“Well, right now, we’re just hole poking. What some lawyers call the house of cards. It’s a good defense, and sometimes the only one. The D.A.’s job is to make a case that we can’t knock down. If we can knock down every card they have, the house comes down. Sometimes all it takes is the one right card, one at the very bottom.”
“So am I staying here?”
“I’m gonna see about keeping you here until the hearing. SCI Camp Hill is a medium-security facility, but with your charges, you should be in a high or max facility. I’m thinking we can drag out the transfer until at least after the hearing.”
“After the hearing?”
Jake held up his hands. “If we need to. I can’t guarantee anything, Chris.”
“Okay, well can you pretend to have some kind of confidence? I didn’t kill him,” he said.
Jake eyed him and leaned back in his chair. “Then what the fuck happened?”
“I told you what happened.”
“That story is bullshit. I know it, you know it, and the cops know it.”
“It’s the story we’re going with.”
“But not the truth.” That statement hung in the air, heavy like wet wool. “Another thing you should know. They found Logan’s blood. In your truck.”
“How would that happen?”
“Are you serious? You tell me.”
“What if I punched him?”
“Did you punch him?” Jake looked skeptical and lifted an eyebrow.
Chris wanted to laugh. “Sure, but he swung at me first. He missed. I hit him back because I was trying to get him to leave my house.”
“Then how did the blood end up in the bed of your truck?”
“I have no fucking clue. I didn’t watch him leave.”
“According to the statement on file, you didn’t touch him. Do you want to amend that?”
“I don’t know. Should I?” Chris blew out a slow breath.
“If that’s the truth, then yes.” When Chris made no attempt to answer, Jake gathered his file and paperwork into a pile. “Listen, if you let me go out there, balls to the wind, I can’t help you. I can’t protect you if I’m vulnerable. If you lie to me and I go up to the judge with just my dick in my hand, that’ll be what kills you. Do you get that? You’re giving them just enough rope to hang you with.”
“You want the truth? Fine, here’s the truth. I didn’t kill him.”
“Who did?”
Chris didn’t answer, and the air between them crackled.
Jake banged the table, his wedding band glinting in the fluorescent light. “Chris, goddamn it, this isn’t about Killington or Maggie—”
“But it is about Maggie. Let me ask you this, hypothetically—what if I knew who killed him? What if I was a witness, not a suspect?”
“Then we go to the police, and we tell them the story.” Jake held up one finger. “Chris, if you tell me something right now, it has to be the story we go with. This whole conversation is covered under privilege, but what I can’t do is put you on the stand to lie. That’s called the subornation of perjury, and I will lose my license for that. So you are free to talk to me, but if we’re not marching into the D.A.’s office with the truth, I cannot put you on the stand. You’ll basically lose the right to testify on your own behalf. Is that clear?”
Chris considered that. He wasn’t sure that testifying on his own behalf was an option anyway, but it seemed foolish to take that away. “Okay. What if I ask you a question, hypothetically?”
“Hypothetically? Fine, what’s the question?”
“Say someone buried a body and lied about it. But didn’t kill the person. What’re the charges?”
Jake held Chris’s gaze. “A year. Maybe two. Could this someone prove they didn’t kill the person?”
“Maybe. Beyond a reasonable doubt? No.”
“They don’t need reasonable doubt. They need probable cause. They need prima facie.”
“Then yeah. Maybe. If we talk out of hypotheticals, what happens then?”
“Well, I can’t put you on the stand knowing that you’re lying. Which, right now, hypothetically, I don’t know that,” Jake said.
“So in the scenario, the ‘witness’ goes to jail anyway. A year, maybe two you said. That’s still jail, though.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“But without a body, it’s probable that everyone just walks away.”
“Possible, not probable. There’s a difference.”
“It’s a gamble.”
Jake nodded. “Yeah. It is.”
When Chris returned to his cell, Smith was gone. Chris lay on his cot, staring at the ceiling, and missed the chatter. He hovered at the door until he saw a guard. It wasn’t the Dickhead. Someone softer, round, and fleshy. Chris suspected he was new. Not first-day new, but somewhat unfamiliar with how things worked. His eyes darted back and forth.
“Hey, what happened to the red-headed tweaker?” Chris asked.
“Bonded out. He’s probably cranked as we speak.”
Chris nodded and faded back, away from the door. He’d broken about five of his rules.
Prison was one lonely fucking place.
Chapter Sixteen
Maggie
She headed east on I-81, marveling at the vast, green Pennsylvania countryside. Whenever she returned to her hometown of Haverford, her calm slipped away, replaced by tight anxiety, the sensation of failing expectations, and an irrational feeling of suffocation, like trying to breathe through fabric.
When Maggie had called, Miranda answered the phone, sounding irritated and impatient. “Hold on, ISAAC, WILL YOU PLEASE! Hi, Maggie, what’s up?”
As though Jake hadn’t been staying at Maggie’s house. As though Chris wasn’t in jail for murder. As though it was a normal Saturday afternoon.
“I’m coming out. I mean, can I come out? I’m going crazy. I want to see my niece and nephew,” Maggie said.
“Sure. Doesn’t Jake or Chris need you there, though?”
“The hearing is eight days away. Jake doesn’t need me for anything. And Chris… I went to visit him. I might not again. I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“How are you holding up?”
The background quieted, and Maggie could tell she’d gone into another room. Most likely the laundry room, just off the kitchen, where Miranda frequently sat against the closed door to have a quiet conversation. Maggie craved the craziness of Miranda’s house, the inability to have a complete discussion or even a coherent thought. She couldn’t stop the movie in her mind, the one where Logan crumpled to the floor and the blood on her hands left red handprints on his white T-shirt.
“I’ve been better, but I guess not as bad as Chris.”
“Have you talked to Mom and Dad?”
“Once. I called and told them the whole story. Mom was… surprisingly empathetic. Dad seemed to expect it. Like Chris had finally fulfilled some kind of expectation.”
“Oh, Maggie, you’re imagining that. You’ve always been so sensitive. Chris, too.”
Maggie’s dad, Phillip, was as tall and imposing as Chris, but he had the dignity of a self-made millionaire, which he was. Not to mention he was silver haired and tan from winters spent yachting in various Caribbean locales. When Maggie and Chris had gotten engaged, they made the drive east to tell Maggie’s folks.
Her father had looked Chris up and down and asked, “What do you do again?”
When Chris had replied that he was in construction, Phillip’s eyes flitted to his daughter, a glance so brief that only Maggie caught it. He smiled then, because he was a gracious and polite man, and so very slick.
He’d said, “Welcome to the family, Chris. Every man should be so lucky to have a handyman as a son-in-law.”
Maggie had snapped back at him, “He’s more than a handyman, Dad. You couldn’t do half of what he does.”
Phillip had laughed, an unfamiliar sound to Maggie’s ears. “So sensitive, honey. I meant it as a compliment.”
Rich men knew how to make insults sound like compliments, and Maggie seethed, confident that any protest would be treated with utter disregard.
Years later, when they’d learned of Chris’s stint in prison in college—how they’d learned, she never found out—her father merely shook his head and waved, which could have meant any number of things. To Maggie, the gesture meant I should have known.
Maggie had ended the call with Miranda with a vague promise to finish the conversation later, when she arrived. Truthfully, talking about Phillip and Charlene gave her a headache, and she was already dreading the entire weekend.
Maggie loathed visiting her parents, and she fulfilled the obligation only as frequently as required. Her childhood memories felt stiffly starched, as if they’d been sanitized and dubbed together like a Tide commercial. As if the less-than-pristine bits lay on a cutting room floor somewhere. Miranda claimed to have wonderfully happy memories of them as kids and always spouted off incidents that Maggie could never recall.
Maggie had some flashes of beach vacations, exotic locations and bright, bright sun with blue water, and staying in houses with cold marble floors. Her father’s silver hair, glinting and plasticky, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Her mother saying, “Shhhh, don’t yell, you’ll wake your father,” as they made silent sand castles. Her mother, preening and fluffing around her father as though he were an exotic bird. Maggie and Miranda were unwelcome appendages, interruptions to their carefully calculated life. Maggie remembered watching her parents kiss and wondering what it felt like to kiss glass.
Maggie pushed the thoughts of her father down where she always pushed them. Somewhere deep inside her was a pit of memories as sharp and cutting as the day they’d happened. She spent the rest of the drive thinking about Chris, about their situation. She couldn’t get Logan’s eyes out of her mind, his black, flat eyes staring up at her from the living room floor. She couldn’t shake the sensation that when Chris had wrapped Logan in a tarp, he’d thrown in a piece of her soul. Until the day she died, she’d only be pretending to be a real person. Pretending to be whole.
She pulled into the curved driveway two and a half hours later, circled the outdoor fountain, and put her late-model Volkswagen in park. Her childhood house had been sold years earlier, replaced with a formidable brick structure that didn’t look like anyone’s home. She felt a surge of gratitude toward Chris, followed by a disappointment so pervading, she felt it in her limbs. He would have been a good father.
Maybe a year or two earlier, at Jake and Miranda’s, Chris had raked all the leaves from the street into a pile almost as tall as she was and then threw himself backward into it while Rebecca and Isaac shrieked with laughter. Later, on the drive home, Maggie said she thought it was odd that the kids had never done that. They were seven and five!
Chris had shrugged and said, “Well, who would show them that? Jake? He’d have to be home first.”
The image of Jake, in his thousand-dollar suits with his omnipresent cell phone, jumping into brown, rotting vegetation, wouldn’t stick. Chris, though, would have been so alive, so in love with his kids. She imagined him showing a boy the intricate workings of an engine, his hands stained black but steady. He would pass along his love of all things mechanical, his need to fix things and build things, his quiet study of how things work. She fought back tears, swallowing the tightness in her throat.
Before she could get out of the car, Phillip, in a dark, tailored suit and yellow tie, opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. He held up his hand in a formal wave, and she slowly climbed out of the car.
“Maggie.” A simple statement with so many possible meanings.
As always with her father, Maggie was left to look for significance. Normal people had conversations and their intentions were obvious, or at least decipherable, but her father spoke in a code she’d spent a lifetime trying to decipher. She’d read somewhere that the tribes along the banks of the Amazon River all spoke in a different tongue with their own words, customs, and traditions. Their intertribal fights were as deadly as full-blown wars. But they also had a common vernacular with less than a hundred expressions, a universal way for the leaders to communicate. Over half of the words were centered on peace. Love. Family. Food. Eat. It was, in effect, a truce language. If Maggie and Phillip had a truce language, it would have one word. Money.
“Phillip.” She nodded once before he enveloped her in a stiff, distant hug.
“You should come by more often, Maggie Bell. Not just when you need something.”
His use of her long-buried nickname, short for Margaret Isabel, brought her up short. She stared at his face, which seemed to be all straight lines, his jaw and mouth rigid.
He looked down at her and smiled, a small and unexpected gesture. “What? You think I don’t know why you’re here? Come in, your mother is anxious to see you.” He walked ahead of her, and she double-stepped to keep up.
“Maggie, honey!” Her petite mother hovered in the foyer, her blond hair up in an elegant chignon. Everything about her, from her “casual, Sunday skirt” to her designer flats, oozed sophistication and style. Although her face was fine lined, she was dolled up, her makeup settling in the cracks around her mouth. She held Maggie’s face in her cold hands, and her black, spidery eyelashes blinked frantically. “Are you okay?”
Maggie didn’t answer, and Charlene led them into the dining room. She poured herself and Maggie a cup of tea from a scrolled teapot adorned with blush-pink roses and delicate gold leafing. Maggie hated tea and always had. She left her cup untouched.
“What do they think Chris did?” Charlene asked.
“They think he murdered a man.” Maggie’s voice sounded flat, even to her ears.
“Did he?” Phillip’s voice boomed behind them.
“No, of course not, Phillip.” Charlene turned to Maggie, her eyes wide. “He didn’t, did he?”
“Mom! No, of course not.”
“Well, why do they think that? What happened?”
Maggie sank down in the dining room chair and relayed the official story, the one where Maggie slept while Chris and Logan had a middle-of-the-night conversation and Logan left alive.
Charlene shook her head. “My goodness, what a mess. I wonder what the boy wanted with you.” She cocked her head to the side, and Maggie shifted in her seat. She was uncannily sharp. Maggie had forgotten that.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know him, except to say hello. I certainly didn’t know he was stalking me.” She was improvising; there were too many details they’d never discussed.
“How much do you need?” Phillip asked. He hadn’t moved from the doorway, and during Maggie’s recounting, he hadn’t even leaned against the door jamb. In another lifetime, he would have made an excellent Queen’s Guard.
“Um, we have to pay Jake. His usual retainer is fifty thousand dollars. He said he’d do it for twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five!” Phillip’s forehead creased. “Not a bad price tag for a criminal defense.”
“Phillip!” Charlene’s voice was sharp.
He lifted one shoulder, his frown deepening, and strode out of the room. Charlene patted Maggie’s hand, her skin soft and cool, her heavy gold bracelet clattering against the table. Maggie fought her desire to pull her mother’s hand against her cheek, to wrap herself around Charlene’s arm and nuzzle it like a child.
“Do you need more?” Phillip walked back in waving a check, filled out in the perfect penmanship of a man groomed in Catholic boarding schools. He held out the check to Maggie. “I always have more, Maggie Bell. You can always ask.”
She nodded, feeling too sick to speak, and pinched the check as though it were foul. She pressed it into her purse with her forefinger, not even glancing at the amount.
Later, when she stood to go, her mother looked startled and uncertain, her eyes darting between Maggie and Phillip, willing one of them to speak. Maggie kissed their cheeks, said she’d call, and let herself out the front door. She climbed into her car, the seat burning from the midday sun, and sat in the driveway with the vague sensation that she’d just narrowly escaped.
When Maggie was eight, she counted on her fingers the times she’d seen her father smile at her. Not at something else while she happened to be in the room, but legitimately at her. One, when she’d made the Junior Mathletes team at school—even though he’d never come to a match. Two, when she’d told a joke at dinner—she couldn’t even remember the joke—and he genuinely laughed. Three, when she was seven and had asked Phillip what he did for a living. That also made up their longest-running solo conversation to date. Four, the week Charlene had pneumonia, and they all worried she would die, Maggie had begged Phillip to sit with her in bed, like her mom always did. That time it was sort of sad, more like the faint, faded memory of a smile. She still counted it.
Number five had been that New Year’s Eve. Her parents threw glamorous parties—glittering, low-lit affairs with heavily perfumed women and tuxedoed men. Her mother, in gold lamé, laid out pink party dresses for the girls, identically hideous with satin and ruffles. Miranda squealed, clapping her small, dark hands while Maggie had to be prompted at every step.
