Big Easy Bonanza

man, his skin a good, rich mud color, his hair in a buzz cut.
    She said, “Your parents told me you were dead. Now why would that be?”
    “Yeah. They told me they did that.” He stared straight ahead, no expression at all on his handsome features.
    “Why did they want me to think that?”
    “I really couldn’t say, Ms. Wallis.” He was sweating lightly.
    “Look, Calvin.” She no longer bothered with “Sergeant.” “Something very strange is going on in your hometown. I think Clayton was killed because Donny Troxell didn’t attack her, and she was about to blow the whistle on the person who did. If I’m right, it’s somebody mean enough to hire two goons to give her an overdose of heroin. I don’t think it’s you because it was somebody white. Somebody the other whites are covering up for. So tell me something—why are you helping them?”
    He still wouldn’t look at her. Still kept staring straight ahead. “You don’t know what you’re foolin’ with.”
    “Don’t give me that crap.” She was angry now. Furious. “You knew that girl and you know who killed her.” It was a shot in the dark, just something she blurted, but even as she said it, she knew it must be true. He knew and he wasn’t saying. Though she had only a side view, she could see the rage and fear in his face. He walked away from her without a word, a good-bye, any recognition at all.
    Her cell phone rang.

Chapter Twenty-Two
    Eddie said, “Ms. Wallis, ya busy? I got some real interestin’ reading matter for ya.”
    The transcript of the trial had come in. It was a tome as thick as a dictionary, sitting on her desk in a pristine plastic cover. By the time she got back to the office, Eddie had gone to lunch.
    Where to start? Jury selection looked long and boring. Okay, she could skip that.
    She began with opening statements. The prosecutor, one Steven Ortenberg, said he would prove that Donny Troxell had been hurt and angry when his girlfriend, Clayton Patterson, broke up with him, so angry that he went out and bought a machete with the intention of harming her; that he had removed the screen from her bedroom window, forced open the window, and attacked her with the machete, ripping the skin from the skull and causing horrible injuries; he had become frightened by her screams and left, once again through the open window, and later been caught with the bloody weapon in his car.
    Pretty much the story as Talba understood it from the way the paper had reported it.
    The young defense attorney, Lawrence Blue, the man she’d talked to in Sacramento, who was now a state senator and had clammed up on her so completely, in those days was full of passion and idealism, if the words on paper were any indication.
    He contended that Donny Troxell had not attacked Clayton Patterson, that he could not have attacked Clayton Patterson because he’d been with two friends that night, two friends who would testify, in this court of law, that he could not have done it. There was no evidence in the world that Donny Troxell had ever owned a machete, ever bought a machete, or indeed, ever even seen a machete before police showed him the bloody weapon they found in Donny’s car the morning after Clayton Patterson was attacked, a car, in fact, that had sat in his driveway all night, unlocked.
    There was not a shred of evidence to connect him with that machete, Lawrence Blue declaimed, not a fingerprint, not a witness, nothing at all except that it turned up in his car. And how did it get in his car?
    “I submit,” Lawrence Blue argued, “that it was placed there by someone seeking to incriminate Mr. Troxell. By the same someone who removed the screen from Clayton Patterson’s window, but who, in his haste and confusion, also removed every single screen from the Patterson house and left each one on the ground underneath its respective window.
    “Why was this done?” Lawrence Blue asked. “It was almost certainly done in some misguided attempt to prove that someone had entered the house from the outside, when no such thing occurred. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what crazed burglar removes each and every screen from the house into which he intends to break, especially, and this is important, ladies and gentlemen—especially in the case of a crime of passion, which my colleague, Mr. Ortenberg, would have us believe this was?
    “Who would do this? A son, ordered by his father to make it seem as if someone had broken into the