Page 11 of Fade Out
In the basement of the courthouse, we reached an elevator. When the doors opened he said, “Face the back, keep your mouth shut.” We went up one floor.
“All right, turn around.”
We stepped into an open area that offered three possibilities, all lockups. I was led to the one on the far right. I’m sure there was some sorting principle, but I had no idea what it was. Inside the lockup were about eight men of various ethnicities, all wearing street clothes.
The guard took the cuffs off me and opened the door. He put my plastic bag on a set of shelves next to the elevator.
“I’ll be back for you in about forty-five minutes.”
The lockups had bars on all sides. In the other two, prisoners were talking to their attorneys through the back bars. There was a wide hallway on that side of the lockups and a door that probably led to the court.
I sat down on a bench, closed my eyes, and let my head hang. I didn’t want to think about what might happen next. They weren’t going to give me a public defender, I had too much money in the bank for that. I was either going to have to represent myself or ask the judge to hold off until I could arrange a lawyer. If I did the latter, I was going to have to go back to my cell and repeat this whole process at a later date. Neither option was appealing.
Nearby, someone cleared his throat. I ignored it. Already I was getting used to the random noises that came with constant contact with other human beings.
He cleared his throat again.
Then the guy sitting next to me kicked my foot. I looked up at him.
“You have company,” he said.
I glanced at the back of the lockup and there on the other side of the bars was my former-friend and sometimes lawyer Owen Lovejoy, Esquire. He was short and thinner than the last time I saw him. He wore gigantic glasses that made his pretty brown eyes look enormous, a thin mustache and freshly styled brown hair. He wore a three-piece charcoal gray suit and a pink tie with a blue stripe. I walked over.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Darling, I could ask you the same thing. Now we don’t have much time so let’s skip the personal rancor and get down to business.”
“No,” I said firmly. “Why are you here? I didn’t call you.”
“Yes, I noticed that, and I’m trying not to take offense. Really though, it’s one thing not to invite me to a party but not inviting me when you’ve been charged with murder, well that’s just plain rude.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“Good. I don’t want you to trust me. I don’t want you to trust anyone. Trusting people only leads to disappointment.”
He waited for me to say something. I didn’t.
“All right, fine, if you must know there’s a group in the CPD trying to start a gay officers’ group. I’ve done a little pro bono work for them. One of them heard about your predicament and called me. We really do have to hurry. This is just a bond hearing and it’s going to be very short. Do they have any actual evidence against you?”
Now I had a new option. I could represent myself, ask for enough time to call a lawyer I liked or at least didn’t know, or I could go with Owen. I sighed heavily. Shit.
“Someone got ahold of my credit card and used it to mail a body to a nonexistent address downtown. The return address was the office next to mine, so that’s where the body ended up. When they searched my office they found a license belonging to Regina Larson—one of the aliases Rita Lindquist has been known to use.”
“So the corpse is Rita?”
“They think so, but I think they’re wrong.”
“Who do you think the dead woman is?”
“No clue. But it’s not Rita.”
“Where were you when the woman was killed?”
“Sleeping.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
