Hex on the Ex (15 page)

“Stan, don’t. I was going to—” Too late. Exposed pipes peeked through a gaping hole in the wall beneath the showerhead.

“Hey, Liz. Thanks for clearing out this bathroom. It’s easier for me to get a full view of the plumbing from both sides.”

I sagged against the doorjamb. “Maybe this will speed things up?”

“Yeah. It should.” Stan cleared his throat. “Listen, we have to run out to an emergency job tomorrow. We’ll be back on Monday.”

He decided to tear up my spare bathroom wall then leave
me stranded for the weekend?
I clenched my teeth, conscious of rule number one: don’t insult the plumber mid-job. Not if I liked running water. I decided on a new rule: don’t let the plumber off the hook.

“Monday? What about Saturday?”

“On the weekend?” His mouth dropped open. You’d think I asked him to work on Christmas.

I creased my forehead and blinked as if ready to cry. It was low but I was desperate. I sighed and said, “I smell. I haven’t showered at home or had a decent bubble bath in over a month. I feel like I’m living in a tent. I’m going back to work next week and I—” I covered my face and sniffed.

Stan waved his hands. “Don’t. Don’t do that. I’ll come Saturday morning and see how far I can get alone.”

“Would you?” I touched his arm, sincere as a con man.

“Sure.”

“Thank you, Stan. You’re amazing,” I said. “By the way, I have a last-minute meeting this afternoon. I need to lock up the house before I leave. I’m so sorry. We have to call it a day.”

Stan grunted agreement and carried his drill and equipment into the master bedroom. He and Angel began removing the tarps off the furniture and packing their tools. I took a black sundress and bronze sandals out of my closet and crossed the hall into the guest bedroom to make a quick change of clothes. They shouted their good-byes from downstairs while I dotted my lips with red lipstick in front of the dusty mirror over my vanity.

With nervous adrenaline pumping through me, I closed up the house and jumped into my car with thirty minutes to get to my new lawyer’s office. The air-conditioning kicked
in high once I turned on Riverside Drive for a four-mile drive west. The right turn to Van Nuys Boulevard took me past the dealerships on “Auto Row” and the Van Nuys Government Center. After a quick left at a pawnshop onto Victory Boulevard, I passed a tattoo parlor and pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the address Kitty gave me, a five-story bank building. I got out and shielded my eyes from the sun while I surveyed my surroundings. A derelict curled under a blanket beside a Dumpster in the alley. Across the street, a Goodwill Donation Center and two bail bonds storefronts advertised in English and Spanish.

Granted, the bank building stood walking distance from the courthouse and jail complex, but Oliver Paul’s office location didn’t smack of elite, high-powered attorney. I entered the building, skeptical. Kitty had told me to trust her.

The directory in the glass-and-chrome lobby listed Oliver Paul, Esq., in Rm. 404. I got off the elevator on the fourth floor and wandered down the beige corridor bookended by green plastic trees until I located “404” posted on a small plate next to the third door on the left. No name on the door, no sounds coming from inside.

I knocked. No answer. I checked my watch. On time. I tried the doorknob. Unlocked. The door bumped a row of file cabinets lining the wall of an outer office barely large enough to house an old metal desk covered with a disaster of paper stacks, a dusty computer, and a telephone. The weathered chair behind the desk was empty.

“Hello?” I hovered inside the doorway.

A gravelly male voice answered from an interior hallway, “Back here.”

As I curved around the desk and down the hall, I smelled
tobacco smoke. The sickly-sweet odor drifted out of the open door to a green shag-carpeted office. A tall red Chinese cabinet took up the wall to my right. A massive mahogany desk spread in front of a window overlooking the west valley. Behind the desk, an olive-skinned mid-fortyish man with curly brown hair rocked in a leather chair, puffing on a cigar. A striped tie hung loose from the open collar of his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows.

With the cigar between his teeth, he stood and straightened his shirt. He stuck out his hand and with a glint in his eye said, “Oliver Paul.”

“Liz Cooper,” I said, accepting his handshake.

Short and slight, Oliver Paul exuded confidence as big and comfortable as the furniture surrounding us. He pointed at a banker’s chair facing the desk. “Sit down, Liz Cooper. Tell me your troubles.”

I sat with my purse in my lap, relating an extended, detailed version of how I wound up a suspect instead of a witness at a murder scene—my history with Laycee, Jarret, and Kyle, along with my reason for being at the house. Oliver listened without comment or expression until I started to tell him about my meeting with Carla Pratt at Aroma.

He doused his cigar in an ashtray and sat forward. “You went alone?”

“I had nothing to hide,” I said.

“Go on.” He dragged his hand across his mouth then rested his cheek on his fist.

Twenty minutes later, he was up to date on every conversation I had and every movement I made over the past two days, ending with Carla’s accusation at my house. “That’s when I told her to contact my lawyer if she wanted to talk
to me again.” I felt proud of my smart move to shut her down. I knew he would approve. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re doomed,” he said.

I closed one eye, not sure I heard him right. “Excuse me?”

“What? You want me to tell you everything is okay? Everything’s not okay. You got a homicide detective accusing you of murder. What’s okay about that?”

“What should I do? Jarret’s lawyer is fueling her suspicions about me.”

“Well, what can you do? Ya know?” He shrugged. “Give the cops somebody else to look at. Another schmo to tag the murder on. That’s what your ex-husband, Jerry, did.”

“Jarret.”

“Jerry, Jarret, whatever. I don’t know. What do you want me to do? I can bring in my private detective to follow him. Well, ah, you know, we’ll have a…” Oliver rubbed his mouth again and studied the wall behind me. “Who is Jason’s lawyer?”

“Jarret.” I sunk into the hard-backed chair, my faith in Oliver shriveling. “My ex-husband’s name is Jarret.”

“I know.” Oliver cracked a smile. “I know everything about Jarret Cooper. He graduated from the University of Illinois. He’s a Major League left-handed reliever with an ERA of four-point-four in his career with the Dodgers and an ERA of four-point-one-eight when he played for the Braves. Want me to recite his win-loss statistics? His history in the minors?”

“No, I get it. You know who he is.”

“No, you don’t get it. You see, every time you correct me, I ask myself, ‘Why does this woman care so much about me, a total stranger, getting her ex-husband’s name right
when she’s accused of murdering his girlfriend?’ You’re lucky I’m not a cop, because right away I think four years after your divorce you still give a crap about him. He has a lawyer busy creating a smoke screen to cover his ass and you’re upset that I’m getting his name wrong?” Oliver relit his cigar and blew smoke in the air. “Let’s start again. Who is Jarret’s lawyer? That’s the guy who’s pointing the finger at you.”

“I don’t know his name,” I said.

“Find out. Now tell me about you and Jasper. You were married a long time. What happened?”

I sighed. “Fifteen years sounds like a long time, but we lived separate lives. Jarret spent the six or seven months during baseball season on and off the road. I buried myself in studies for my PhD, then built my career. It’s painful to admit, but I dealt with broken relationships in my practice while ignoring the destructive signs at home. Jarret’s affair with Laycee forced me to face the truth about his infidelities. He and I made a haphazard attempt to stay together after I found out, but I had stopped trusting or caring. I was done.”

“You hated this Huber woman?” Oliver said.

“Laycee personified all of the women he bedded. But hate? No. I wouldn’t give her that much of my energy. I didn’t respect her. I’m angry with myself for befriending her.” I fidgeted with my purse strap. Revisiting my marriage and the mistakes I made? Not my favorite subject. “How do we handle Detective Pratt? She wants to talk to me again.”

Oliver sat back, puffing his cigar. “Let her wait. The cops got nothin’ to bring you in or hold you on. They got guesses. Everybody’s got guesses. Here’s my guess: they don’t have confirmed time of death, they don’t have the murder weapon,
and they don’t have the fingerprint reports back. So Pratt is shooting out accusations at people like cardboard ducks in a carnival booth, waiting for someone to quack out a confession. Ain’t happening. Ain’t happening, honey.”

I felt a little more encouraged, although not completely convinced about Oliver. “In other words, you want me to wait for her to find another suspect?”

“You can bet that right now, she’s not looking at anyone but you and Jarret. Gives her something to do. That box you let her take out of your house, you know, the one she removed with your permission? What’s in it?”

“Books I haven’t looked at in years, just some…I don’t know exactly.”

“What do you mean you don’t know exactly? You didn’t open it when you got home?”

“No.” I braced for another lecture.

Oliver sat forward in the big leather chair, sweeping a hand through his mop of hair. “You…you’re kidding. What?” He sighed. “What if the killer dropped the murder weapon in the box on his way out? Oh boy, they must be having a party at the police lab. Commendation plaques are being ordered.”

“Stop.” I held up my hands. “First of all, Carla Pratt isn’t ignorant, neither am I, and according to Kitty, neither are you. Carla had to know the contents of the box before she came to see me today. If the knife were inside, you and I would be talking from opposite sides of a table at the jail down the street instead of here in your office. Second, I’m not amused by the name game we just played. You’re the man I’m thinking about hiring to protect my freedom. My freedom is precious to me. I don’t know anything about you.”

He pointed to the wall behind me. A JD degree hung above four framed commendations from the California State Bar Association.

“I have a wife and two kids who eat too much,” he said. “I work too hard, I don’t sleep enough, and I’m impatient. What else can I tell you?”

“Why did you opt to practice criminal law?”

“Is this the character interview part? I love the interview part. You’re curious why I chose to defend criminals.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way but—”

“I like practicing law. I like seeing the justice system work. I like
making
the system work. I would rather read sports statistics than contracts. Divorcing couples are nastier than petty criminals. Probate and trusts would make me feel like a funeral director. Okay? So do I like working with criminals? Let me ask you this—did you become a psychologist because you like working with crazy people?”

I smiled. Maybe I could appreciate Oliver Paul. “I like all kinds of people. Kitty told me—”

“Gotta love old Kitty Kirkland, right? The gal’s got balls.”

“I wasn’t finished,” I said.

“Maybe you’re not, but I am. I like you. You’re thorough. I’ll take your case. We have work to do. We need information to move the spotlight off you. I want the lowdown on the other names on Pratt’s witness and suspect lists. I want to know what she knows. You haven’t been charged—I don’t have discovery to dig through. As I said before, I’ll have my private detective do some checking.”

“He won’t have much time to investigate. How long can we stall Detective Pratt?”

“She’ll have a hell of a time reaching me tomorrow. I’ll be in court. She knows she can’t talk to you without me present. Maybe I’ll take the family to Palm Springs tomorrow night for a weekend visit to my mother. Ma misses me. She called me twice this week for money.” Oliver rocked back in his chair. “But the longer we put off Pratt, the more ticked off and suspicious she’ll get.”

“Who’s your detective?”

“His name is Hank McCormick. Ex-LAPD. He’s been on disability since a rifle shot blew out his knee.”

“I wonder if he knows my father and brother,” I said. “Dad is a retired homicide detective and Dave is RHD. They may be able to help him out.”

“We’re not doing a potluck where everybody brings a dish.” Oliver pointed at me. “I want your word—no ‘helpful outsiders’ to muck up the investigation.”

I had heard and ignored the same warning a few times before. My life, my potluck, and my decision. “Not outsiders—family.”

Oliver squinted at me and then broke into a half grin. “It’s your neck, kid.”

He opened his bottom desk drawer and took out a disposable cell phone encased in a large plastic shell. He ripped apart the packaging and dropped the phone, a battery, and the power cord onto the desk blotter. After he popped the battery into the phone and closed the casing, he plugged the phone into a charger then turned to his computer, typing furiously. Then he reached into another drawer, pulled out a card, scraped the back like a lottery ticket, and punched some numbers on the phone screen. “What’s your cell phone number?”

I gave him my digits, he dialed, and my phone rang in my purse. I answered, amused and curious. “Hi, Oliver.”

“See the number on the screen?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the number you call me at. Don’t give it to anybody, okay? Hear me? Don’t give it to anybody. Not to the police, not to your lover, not to your priest, family, or friends. Only you can call me on this phone. Did Pratt give you her business card?” I nodded, dug in my purse, and then slid her card across his desk. Oliver read the card and said, “Okay, good. I’ll e-mail her tonight. If she calls you, all you say is ‘Contact my lawyer’ and give her my regular office number. Got it?”

“Sure,” I said. “But why the intrigue with the phone?”

“There are people I want to talk to and people I don’t. You’re my client. I will always take your calls, but no one else needs to know how or when. After the case is over, you fire me, or I quit, this phone and the number disappears. That’s the deal. All right?”