Atty at Law Page 6
“You mean a receipt,” I said. “He gave you a receipt and the gun.”
“Atty, you’re going to get me in trouble here,” Dad said. “These are things that are between me and Mr. Gersham.”
I leaned in. I couldn’t help myself. “Who gave you the receipt? Ambrose? The man who was shot?”
“No, some other guy,” Jethro said. “Guy in a red ball cap.”
“That’s it, Atty. One more word and I’m sending you to the lobby.” Dad pushed some papers and a pen toward Jethro. “You’ll want to read and sign these.”
“I don’t need to read them,” Jethro said. “You tell me what’s in there.”
“It gives me permission to be your attorney,” Dad said. “But you should read it on your own before you sign, and ask any questions you need to ask. I insist.”
Jethro bent down close to the page, turning his non-cloudy eye toward the words, and hummed to himself as he looked it over.
While he read, I quietly slipped another paper off the desk. It was what they call the indictment, the list of charges against Jethro. And attached to it was a photocopy of Exhibit A—the lottery ticket that was found on Jethro.
It was clear from the copy that the lotto ticket was stapled to something. On the second page of Exhibit A was a photocopy of the thing that was stapled to the front of the lottery ticket: a slip of paper with a bunch of gobbledygook printed on it:
1234567
wefpoj
wf;l
qpweodfk
pfoj
‘sdlfkef
12345
Weird, I thought. What was that for?
Jethro signed the papers and we were done, for now. More buzzes, more squawks and we were out in the lobby of the jail. Almost home free.
But as Dad stopped at the window to sign us out, I felt someone tapping me lightly on the shoulder. I looked up to see Backsley Graddoch, the county attorney.
“Well, Ms. Peale, what brings a young girl like you to the county jail?” he asked with a grin.
“It’s confidential,” I said firmly.
Dad turned and shook Graddoch’s hand. “Hey, Backsley, good to see you. Yeah, I’ve been appointed on the Ambrose case. We have first appearance tomorrow.”
“So you were here meeting your client?” Graddoch said. He was asking Dad, I guess, but he was looking straight at me. “Good of you to bring the kids along.”
Dad nodded. “So what brings you here, Backsley?”
Graddoch laughed. “Oh, nothing, really. I’m here to meet a deputy, Troy Butler. You’ve probably heard why already.”
“No,” Dad said. “Fill me in.”
“It’s confidential,” Graddoch said, winking at me. “But the rumor mill works fast. You’ll find out soon enough.”
Flags are popular in Strudwick County. Alabama and Auburn football flags, Marine Corps flags, the Confederate battle flag, and of course the American flag. Probably every third house has some banner hanging off the porch, or on a pole in the yard.
And lots of them are faded and tattered. I’ve always wondered about that. If you’re patriotic enough to hang up the American flag, why do you leave it when it’s all ragged and faded into pink and light blue?
As I watched trailers and porches and flags whiz past on the way home, I realized I already knew why. It was guilt. You realize the flag’s a little faded, and it fills you with embarrassment. So you ignore it. Weeks later, the flag is starting to look tattered. More guilt. So you ignore it even harder. Soon everyone driving by knows your flag is ragged and tacky. But when you look at it, the guilt pulls at you like the gravity on the surface of Jupiter. You can’t lift an arm to take the flag down.
That’s how I felt about the visit from Deputy Troy Butler. I knew I’d done nothing criminal, and I knew Graddoch’s charge was bogus. Why didn’t I just tell Dad as soon as I saw him? For some reason I didn’t, and that wasn’t like me. I’m not a sneak; in my family, we don’t keep secrets.
But I did keep a secret, and the longer I kept it, the harder it pulled at me. The more I worried about getting into trouble—the more I wanted assurance from Dad that everything was okay—the less inclined I felt to tell him. By the time we got home, I decided that I’d never tell Dad.
I guess we all want to look better than we are. Even when we’re innocent. I wondered how many people, accused of a crime, lied about it not because they feared jail, but just because they didn’t want to look so bad.
The thought kept me quiet all the way to dinnertime. Frozen pizza, Dad’s go-to when Taleesa is out of town.
“So who’s the man in the red ball cap, then?” I asked. “If he exists, we can find him.”
“He exists,” Dad said, with an it’s-my-client certainty. “I just haven’t found him yet. Ambrose, the store owner, had a partner, who runs the store now. But the partner has an alibi. He was fishing all day at Lake Rufus King. He’s got receipts to prove it, from the marina where he put his boat in.”
Fishing’s a big thing in Strudwick County. The whole state of Alabama is covered in lakes named after stodgy old white guys, lakes that were created like a hundred years ago when they dammed up the rivers. Without the Rufus King Dam, there wouldn’t be anything in Strudwick County but pine plantations and Red Creek. If you stop up the river with a dam, of course, all the water piles up on one side and makes a lake. Dad said Lake Rufus King was probably only four feet deep, but old guys always make a big deal about buying a house out there and living the good life. And on the other side of the dam, there’s just a trickle of a river, a pile of gray rocks on the creek bank where people fish, and some scraggly forest where nobody lives, I guess because it’s not safe to be there when they open the dam up and let water out. Taleesa says Alabama is all about dams. Everywhere you look, she says, they’ve drawn a line and put all the good stuff on one side.
“Did the cops even look for Red Hat Man?” I asked.
“It’s our job to find him, I guess,” Dad said. “And to be clear, by our job I mean my job. You’ve got your own causes to work on. I’m thinking we could both get into hot water if you meddle in my work.”
I gulped, nervous.
But I still wanted to know who Red Hat Man was.
Sleep is great when you’re feeling anxious. I was dreaming that I was at the helm of a starship. My mom, Ilia, was there, in a Starfleet uniform like in her picture. Taleesa and Miz Megg were working at a computer panel. And Mario, from the video game, was in the back of the room, on hands and knees, rolling dice on the floor. And then everything shook.
I opened my eyes. It was Martinez.
“It’s a code,” my brother said. He was holding his phone, a square of painful light.
“What on earth?”
“That piece of paper that was stapled to the lottery ticket. I took a picture of it.” He showed me the photo on the phone.
“Ugh, that’s bright,” I said. “Why did you take a picture? I’m pretty sure that’s evidence. I don’t know if it’s something we’re allowed to take a picture of.”
“This is the key to the case,” Martinez said. “It isn’t just nonsense. There are repeating letters, like words. It’s a code and I’m going to crack it. And then I’ll solve the case.”
“What are you talking about? Why would Red Hat Guy give Jethro a message in code?”
“We won’t know until we crack the code, dummy,” Martinez said. “I’m going to crack it. Cryptology. That’s my thing. It’s my calling.”
I’d never heard him say the word “cryptology” before, but okay.
“We can save Jethro like we saved Easy,” he said. “I’ll do the secret stuff. You do the legwork.”
“If we’re saving him like Easy, you mean life in prison instead of death,” I said. And I thought of all those dogs that were going to be put down at the shelter. Guilt sat on me heavy as a hippo.
“Don’t be a jerk,” Martinez said. “Life and death, that’s a big difference. And if we don’t defend the defenseless, who will? Especially you. You’re a world-famous lawyer now.”
I sighed. But he was right. If no one else is doing the right thing, you have to stand up and be the one.
“Okay, we’ll take the case,” I said. “But we have to keep our work on the down-low. Now go to bed.”
Slowly I drifted off to sleep again, but Ilia and Taleesa and Mario were gone. Instead, I dreamed about yellowed pages with squiggles and nonsense words, just waiting to be decoded.
7
To be honest, for the next week, I was too busy to even think about Jethro Gersham. Martinez was working on his codes. And I had a bunch of “Pet of the Week” profiles to write for the Houmahatchee Herald.
It was weird how the Herald column worked out. Miss Megg gave me the name and number of an editor to call about bringing the column back to life. Taleesa said it would be better to go in person and talk to someone.
“It’s always better to work for an editor who’s seen your face,” she said. “It’s not far. You should be able to take your bike.”
The newspaper office wasn’t what I expected. Even though I knew the Houmahatchee Herald was printed right here in town, I’d always imagined they worked in a tall building with rows and rows of desks on an open floor as big as Walmart. There would be phones that rang all the time and printers that made click-clacking sounds and some old guy mixing cocktails at his desk and a mean old editor who comes out of his office and shouts, “Peale, GET IN HERE!!” An awesome, cool madhouse.
When I pulled up to the Herald I realized I’d passed the building a thousand times. It was in an old Burger Meister restaurant that closed before I was born. When I was little, you could still see the Burger Meister sign that someone had torn down and thrown out back. Now the sign was covered in kudzu. Only now did I notice the little black-and-white “Houmahatchee Herald” sign over the door, in that old-timey newspaper writing that nobody can read.
A bell on the door dinged when I went in. There was nobody there. It still looked a lot like a Burger Meister. The counter was still there, but behind it, in the kitchen, there were filing cabinets and a bunch of bright studio lights on stands, like photographers use. There was still brown-and-orange tile on the floor, like at a Burger Meister, and all the yellow-topped Burger Meister tables were still there, only now they were piled with newspapers and boxes of paper and a couple of computers. In the corner, where the drink stand would normally be, there was a bulletproof vest sort of slumped against the wall, with a military helmet propped on top of it as if the Martians had vaporized a soldier right there. Next to that stood a five-foot statue of Meisterburger, the Burger Meister mascot, only instead of holding out a big plaster burger on a tray, he held a tray stacked with wooden plaques.
“I’ll be right there,” shouted a voice from what, at a Burger Meister, would have been a bathroom.
I’m a snoop, so I picked up the plaques on Meisterburger’s tray. They were all awards, for “investigative reporting” and “deadline reporting.”
I heard a flush and then out came a white guy who looked a little younger than Dad, blond but already losing a lot of hair on top and wearing a button-up shirt with a ketchup stain on the front.
“Sorry about that,” he said, extending a hand. “Ricky Braxton. Ricky with a Y.”
“Atticus Peale,” I said. “I’d like a Meister Burger, large, with fries please.”
He laughed. “Wouldn’t we all? You’re here for the Pet-of-the-Week thing, right?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I didn’t realize this building was the newspaper. I thought it was a place where druggies sleep at night.”
“Nope,” Braxton said. “We fired that guy.”
I dug into my backpack. “I’ve got a résumé here. And Taleesa, my stepmom, said I should bring writing samples, so here’s a fantasy novella I wr—”
“You’re hired,” he said. “Not that it’s a paying job. But you’ve got it.”
He headed back toward the tables with computers and motioned me to come along.
“That’s it?” I said. “I mean, you’ll just let a twelve-year-old write a column in your paper without an interview?”
“We’re a very small operation,” he said. “I’m the editor. My wife, Rickie with an I-E, is the only writer and the only photographer. If you read the paper regularly—I’m sure that’s what preteen girls just love to do—you’ll see that the entire front page is written by Rickie Braxton or Ricky Braxton. On the inside, world news from the Associated Press and then community news, written by the community.” He handed me a newspaper. “Just look. Here’s notes from the Daughters of the Confederacy meeting. A weekly column by a local preacher. Another column by the mayor, who never meets his deadline. All of them have to have a ton of edits before we can put them in print. What I really, desperately need is photos, photos of something other than the Daughters giving medals to old guys again and again. People love animal stories.”
“How many do you need per week?” I asked.
“As many as you can write,” he said. He squinted at the seventy-page manuscript in my hand. “I take it back. Four. No more than two hundred words each. The trick is making each one of them fresh when you’re writing the same thing again and again. Have them to us by 5 p.m. every Wednesday.”
“Do I get a—what do you call it—where you have your name at top of the story?”
“A byline? Do you want a byline?”
I thought about the trouble I’d already gotten into with the Daily Royal Post. “I’d rather not.”
“Then you can’t have one. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’re the helmet and vest for?”
“To stop bullets,” he said. “They don’t really work. Turns out you have to know someone’s shooting at you beforehand, so you can put them on. Not as useful as you might think.”
He saw the shocked look on my face.
“We sent a reporter to Iraq, with the National Guard, a long time ago,” he said. “In better times, when the newspaper had more money.”
And that was it. I was a newspaper columnist. After a day of cleaning dog poop, washing dogs, and walking dogs, I’d sit at the table with dog pictures and my phone and I’d thumb-type little riffs about dogs and cats. It was hard, like writing poetry.
HANS AND FRANZ
These kitten brothers do everything together. Cuddle, chase bugs, play with yarn. They almost suffocated together, when someone dropped them off in a stapled-up paper bag. They could find a home together too. Will it be yours?
“The paper bag thing is a little edgy,” said Taleesa, looking over from her own writing. “But maybe it will grab somebody’s attention.”
JOY
This happy mutt is aptly named. She’s
“Happy is too plain,” I said. “Taleesa, what’s a better word for happy?”
“Joyful,” she said.
“The dog’s already named Joy.”
“Change the name. Joy is a fairly common name. People might ignore it. What if you just rename the dog Joyful?”
“I can do that?” I said. “Okay. Joyful it is.”
My phone double-beeped. A text message.
Princess_P: YOU THINK YOUR SO COOL BEING A DOG LAWYER BUT YOUR GOING TO JAIL
Ugh. Who was Princess P? Some girl from school, no doubt. I’m not super-popular, but I didn’t know of anybody who hated me. Strange.
atticustpeale: Learn punctuation.
I went back to writing, but it bothered me. Jail. Was that a real possibility after all?
Princess_P: EVEN IF YOU DON’T GET JAIL, YOUR LIFE WILL FEEL LIKE JAIL WHEN SCHOOL STARTS. NOBODY LIKES YOU.
atticustpeale: GO JUMP IN THE LAKE, MARTINEZ. THIS IS NOT FUNNY.
“What’s wrong, Atty?” Taleesa said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“It’s nothing, I’m cool,” I said. Well, Princess P definitely wasn’t Martinez. Who uses slurs like that, really? I tried to think of a girl at school who would stoop that low.
Another double-beep.
Princess_P: JUST LOOK AT THE COMMENTS OF THE ROYAL POST STORY. YOU DESERVE IT.
I went back to the Royal Post column. In the comments was this:
Attythedoglawyer: I’m Atticus T. Peale. Me and my monkey brother defend dogs that bite. My dad defends murderers. Someone should come to our house at 922 Burnt Corn Creek Road, Houmahatchee Alabama and give us what we deserve.
I pushed away from the table.
“You’re right, Taleesa,” I said. “I don’t feel so good. I’m going to lie down in my room and play with McNutters.”
Even McNutters, in his hot tub with his martini, wasn’t safe. Every knock on the dollhouse door made him wet himself in fear.
Half an hour later, I looked at the Royal Post story again.
Attythedoglawyer:
The door creaked open. It was Martinez.
“Are you okay, Atty?” He looked like he did as a baby, when he’d ask me to pick him up. “Dad worries all the time. But when you or Mom look worried, I get worried.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m totally fine, dude. Get out of here. McNutters is naked.”
My brother, at 922 Burnt Corn Creek Road. Just another troll on the Internet, I told myself. But I also thought about that Army helmet and vest at the Herald. Turns out you have to know beforehand that someone is shooting at you . . .
8
I don’t know how it is for you, but in my world, grown-ups are always whining about how we kids don’t play outside enough. What is out there, really, to play with? All the computers and pens and paper and easels and paints are inside. I’m already outside the dollhouse, isn’t that enough?