Page 16 of The Devil's Advocate

I felt a shiver worming through my back.

‘Soon as this case is done, we’re out of here. And we’re not coming back,’ I said.

The fields stretched for miles in every direction until we came over the brow of a hill, and there was forest ahead of us. The road wound around great oaks and willows, clothed in Spanish moss. Their limbs were a gothic veil, stretched over the blacktop. There were old timber houses along the side of the road. Single story. Not one of them with a decent roof or standing up straight. They looked abandoned, or at least they should have been. There were lights on inside a few of them. Some didn’t even have windows, just tar paper that became luminous and strangely beautiful with light behind it.

‘You read all the case papers?’ asked Harry.

‘I did. What do you think?’

‘If he says he’s innocent, and he might be, we’ve got a hell of a hill to climb. You’ve had tough cases in the past. Me too. But never like this. We’ve got two confessions to throw out before we even get started. One to a cellmate, one to the sheriff,’ said Harry.

‘We need to talk to him. If he says the police confession was coerced, we need evidence of that. The other confession is to a jailhouse snitch. That might be easier to fight.’

‘I don’t think the kid murdered that poor girl,’ said Harry, bluntly.

‘What makes you so sure?’ I asked.

‘There’s something off about this whole thing. I’ve seen cops bolster poor cases with doctored evidence before, but not like this. They’ve got Andy’s blood and DNA underneath the victim’s fingernails, and the kid has a scratch on his shoulder. Why get not one, but two false confessions on top of that? It’s not right.’

‘What’s not right is we’ve got a death-penalty trial coming up in a few days, we’re not getting paid, we’re in the middle of nowhere and we’ve got a client who’s confessed to murder twice. What’s right about it?’

‘Not one goddamn thing. The victim is the key to this case. We need to know everything about her. There’s not much in the file.’

A gas station marked the beginning of the town. Harry took us down what the GPS told us was Main Street. Apart from a bar and a 7-Eleven, the place was closed for the night. The buildings thinned out. At the edge of the street, the last building had three county sheriff cruisers parked outside. The Sheriff’s Department. A long, two-story brick building that stuck out like a sore ass. The second floor was painted white, the bottom half exposed brick. Around halfway along Main Street was a crossing. Buck Street intersected Main Street like the crosshairs on a rifle. I’d checked the internet and found that the only hotels in town were both on Buck Street. There were no websites to book online, and they hadn’t picked up the phone when I’d called earlier that day. We would have to wing it.

Harry liked the look of the first hotel we saw, called The Chanterelle, and parked outside.

It was no more than a large colonial house, with faded white paint and a swing chair on the porch. The sign in the window said ‘Vacancy’.

Soon as I opened the car door, the Alabama climate splashed my face with sweat. There was eighty-nine percent humidity, and it was baking hot. Hot and wet I was used to, living through New York summers, but this was different. It was thick and sodden with not a breath of wind to move it. Like the air inside a rotten tomb. And there were bugs everywhere.

I followed Harry through the front door to a mahogany reception desk complete with a mahogany receptionist. The name badge on her blue dress said ‘Clara’ and she would have been white, once, but sixty-plus years of sunbathing and sucking on Camel cigarettes had turned her pallor the same color as the furniture. The desk looked younger, and cleaner.

‘Names?’ she said, in a dead voice. Her blond hair curled up at the fringe, making it appear as though it was making an effort to avoid skin contact.

‘Ford, Harry. Pleased to meet you. This is my colleague, Eddie Flynn.’

Clara took a drag on the Camel, blew a cloud of blue smoke at the ‘No Smoking’ sign and croaked, ‘Sorry, gentlemen. We’re fully booked.’

And with that, she screwed the cigarette into the ashtray and pointed her head toward a copy ofCosmopolitan.

‘Excuse me, ma’am. The sign outside said you have a vacancy,’ said Harry.

‘The sign don’t work here,’ she said, never taking her eyes from an article entitled, ‘Essential Bikinis’.

Harry gave me a knowing look. The ball had dropped for him. Whatever ball that was, it still eluded me.

‘I think I know what the problem is here. Ma’am, we understand this is a traditional town. Eddie and I work together. We’re not a couple. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. All the same, we would like two separate rooms.’

‘We’re fully booked,’ she said.

Harry leaned forward, I took his arm.

‘Let’s try the other hotel,’ I said.

I wasn’t exactly excited at the prospect of staying at The Chanterelle. We stepped outside, and Harry tapped me on the shoulder.

‘You think she wouldn’t let us stay because she thought we were gay?’