P. Parrish - Thicker Than Water

Something passed over Cade’s eyes momentarily and was gone, like a final dissipating swirl of smoke from a dying fire.

“You didn’t know that, did you?” Louis said.

Cade was silent for a long time, head bowed as he picked at his hands. The Haitian’s creole mixed in with the hum of the florescent lights.

Suddenly, a hard twisted smile came to Cade’s face. “I should have known, man, I should have known.”

“Known what?” Louis asked.

“That it wouldn’t work,” Cade said. “The cards aren’t stacked that way for guys like me.”

The black woman in the next cubicle started to cry softly again. The Haitian man just sat there.

“When I was in the joint,” Cade said, “this guy who knew something about the law told me I could sue Duvall for a million bucks when I got out. I didn’t believe it. I mean, a fucking jury giving a guy like me a million bucks.”

He looked up at Louis. “Then I got out and saw how bad things were for Ronnie and I figured what the fuck, what do I got to lose?”

He gave a sharp laugh. “Now you tell me I couldn’t have gotten anything anyway. Ain’t the legal system fucking great?”

Louis was silent. The Haitian man had started up again. But his angry chattering was muffled, pushed to the back of Louis’s mind.

If Cade thought he stood to get a big settlement from Duvall, he was the last person who wanted Duvall dead. But there was something else here, too. Cade represented a part of the past that a lot of people wanted to forget. Suing Spencer Duvall would have brought back bad memories for a lot of people, no matter how hard the courts tried to keep the focus on Duvall’s alleged malpractice and away from the evidence that convicted Cade in the first place. The media alone would retry the case. He wondered if Jack Cade looked at it from that angle.

“What do you think would have happened if you could have sued Duvall?” Louis asked.

Cade just looked at him.

“The evidence would have been reexamined, Cade,” Louis said. “Other people, the newspapers, would retry it all over again, outside of the courtroom. Things would come out that have nothing to do with Duvall’s ability or intent. Hell, other lawyers would step forward with new technology, raise questions. It would have been a circus.”

“Told you, it doesn’t matter now.”

“Not to you, but maybe it did to someone else.”

Cade looked up at him. “Who?”

“The person who really killed Kitty Jagger?”

Cade gave a snort, shaking his head. “Now you’re saying you believe me, that I didn’t do it?”

Louis hesitated. “Let’s just say I believe that if someone thought Duvall could be sued, they’d be worried about what might come out.”

The Haitian man raised his voice and Cade looked over at him.

“Who did you tell that you planned to sue Duvall?” Louis asked.

“Everyone from here to Raiford for the last year.”

“Did you see a lawyer?”

Cade shook his head, his eyes still on the Haitian. “No money.”

“Then we’ll have to go another direction,” Louis said. “We have to talk about Kitty Jagger.”

Cade looked back quickly. “Fuck that, man.”

“It’s a believable defense for the mess you’re in now,” Louis said.

Cade was silent. The Haitian man was ranting, his girlfriend’s crying growing louder.

“You’ll have to tell me everything that happened twenty years ago,” Louis said.

Cade sucked in a slow, long breath that expanded his chest under the orange jumpsuit.

“The only thing I’m going to say is that I was set up.”

Louis didn’t reply.

Cade raked at his hair with both hands, glancing again at the Haitian. Suddenly, he spun toward the man. “Hey, shut the fuck up!” he yelled.

The Haitian man and his girlfriend froze, staring at Cade.

Louis tapped on the plexiglass.

“Cade, forget them. Look at me.”

Cade’s eyes shot back to him.

“Now tell me about Kitty Jagger,” Louis said.

Cade shook his head slowly. “It’s over, man.”

“How did you lose the garden tool?”

“Look, I told you I don’t know nothing about it.”

“Who else had access to your tools?”

“I said I didn’t do it, man.”

“But someone-”

“I told you!” Cade spat out. “I told you I don’t know who killed that girl!”

Louis’s eyes flicked up to the deputy watching Cade’s back, then he looked back at Cade.

“She had a name, Cade. Her name was Kitty.”

Louis was amazed to see a small smile tip Cade’s lips.

“Kitty,” he said slowly. He cut Kitty’s name into two sharp syllables, holding each between his teeth before spitting them out.

Louis felt something tighten inside his chest.

“I didn’t kill Kitty,” Cade said. “Kitty killed me, man.”

Cade sat back in his chair, staring at Louis. His eyes had gone opaque in the florescent lights. The Haitian man had started up again, his voice ricocheting off the concrete walls.

Louis rubbed the bridge of his nose. Suddenly, the room seemed to close in on him, the stale stench, the clang of a door, the muted bellow of a deputy and the desperate babbling of the Haitian man.

Louis rose sharply and pushed back his chair.

Cade looked up. “Where you going?”

“Think about what I said, Cade,” Louis said. “Think about Kitty Jagger. She might be the only person right now who can save your ass.”

Louis didn’t look back as he walked away. At the door, the deputy buzzed him through.

Out in the hall, Louis paused. He could still see Cade’s eyes, as murky as that damn plexiglass between them. He pulled in a deep breath. Nobody should have eyes that you couldn’t see into.

Louis took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he put them back on, the screen of the microfiche machine came back into focus. He had been at the Lee County Library for nearly two hours, tracking down anything he could find on Kitty Jagger’s murder.

“Excuse me.”

Louis looked up into the face of the librarian.

“We’re getting ready to close.”

Louis looked at his watch. It was only five.

“We close early the day before Thanksgiving,” she said.

Thanksgiving? Man, he had forgotten. He punched a button and the machine spit out a copy of the article on the screen.

Outside the library, he paused, then decided to go to the bar across the street. He ordered a Coke and arranged the clips in chronological order. He started with the earliest one, from the Fort Myers News-Press, dated April 11, 1966. The headline said, GIRL FOUND DEAD AT DUMP SITE.

It reported that the unidentified body of a young woman had been found at the city dump by two garbage men making an early-morning run. It was only a couple paragraphs on the bottom of the front page. Other news had taken precedence that day: Frank Sinatra had married Mia Farrow in Las Vegas.

Louis took a sip of the Coke.

He knew the dump site; he had passed it on the drive down to Bonita Springs. The locals called it Mount Trashmore. It was a giant landfill that had been sodded over to make it look nice for the new subdivision that was just a mile downwind. If it weren’t for the steady stream of garbage trucks and the gulls circling overhead, you could almost believe it was just a pretty hill. If South Florida had hills.

The next article was dated April 12th. Police had used a gold locket found on the body to help identify the girl as a local teenager named Kitty Jagger, age fifteen. The medical examiner’s report said she had been stabbed, beaten and raped. She had been dead about two days when found. Police had no suspects but had located a bloody garden tool that appeared to be the stabbing weapon.