James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

Jack was inching around the circle in his ten-year-old Saab convertible with the ragtop down, practically riding on the rear bumper of a new Maserati-so new, in fact, that it had a temporary tag. Bullet gray with dark tinted windows. Chrome wheels so shiny that they couldn’t have left the showroom floor more than two hours ago. Jack wondered how anyone could plunk down a quarter-mill on a new Maserati in the post-hold-on-to-your-ass-cuz-I-just-lost-mine economy. The answer was splashed across the back window in block white letters:

FLORIDAFORECLOSURES. COM.

Talk about a sign of the times.

Jack steered into CocoPlum, stopped at the guard house, and rolled down the window. “I’m headed to the Mays residence,” he said.

The guard jotted down his license plate number and offered quick directions. Jack followed the line of tall royal palms toward the water.

Last night’s phone call had come as a total shock. Jack still hadn’t decided to try the case. Even if he had, never in a million years would he have guessed that his first interview would be the victim’s father. Then again, never in a billion years would Jack have thought that Chuck Mays would call and insist on meeting him-alone. Jack was fully prepared for an angry lecture on why he shouldn’t stoop to defending the man who had murdered McKenna Mays.

Jack pulled into the driveway of a tri-level Mediterranean-style mansion. The new Mays residence was far more impressive and in a much pricier neighborhood than the one that had burned to the ground. The eight-bedroom waterfront estate hadn’t risen from the ashes with just insurance proceeds. In the past three years, Chuck Mays had made a pot of money in the data-broker business with a service that delivered billions of dossiers to police, private investigators, lawyers, reporters, and insurance companies. Success was relative, however. He now lived alone.

Jack was walking up the driveway when that new Maserati came flying around the corner, tires squealing as it pulled into the driveway behind him. A muscle-bound man with a surfer’s suntan and shoulder-length blond hair stepped toward him.

“Chuck Mays,” he said, shaking Jack’s hand. He was wearing nylon shorts and a sleeveless work-out shirt, the “V” of sweat on his chest suggesting that he’d just come from the gym.

“Nice car,” said Jack.

“Not my style. Got it on the cheap, but I’ll probably sell it. Basically for guys with little dicks.”

“You own a foreclosure company?”

“You mean that sign in the back window? Fuck no. Mr. Foreclosures-dot-com got foreclosed on, and I snatched up his wheels. Ain’t that fucking great?”

Jack had come expecting to meet the still-grieving father of a teenage girl. Instead, he found Hulk Hogan’s younger clone, who dropped the F-word like a carpet bomber. But Jack wasn’t fooled. “Chuck Mays could be the most intelligent human being you will ever meet,” Neil had told him at dinner the night before.

“So,” said Jack. “You wanted to talk?”

“Yeah.” He pressed the keyless alarm, and the Maserati chirped. “Follow me.” He led Jack up the walkway and into the house. It had all the charm of an unfurnished hotel lobby: twenty-foot ceilings, enormous crown moldings, bare marble floors, and naked white walls-not a rug, painting, or framed photograph anywhere. The chandelier in the foyer still had the price tag hanging from it.

“How long have you lived here?” asked Jack.

“Moved in after Shada passed away,” Mays said.

Jack had, of course, heard about his wife’s suicide. Lose a daughter, then a wife, and who could give a rat’s ass about decorating a new house?

Jack followed him toward the kitchen. Mays offered him a barstool at the granite counter and went to the refrigerator.

“You want a beer?”

It was not yet noon, but pointing that out to a guy like Mays would have probably earned Jack a major wedgie.

“Sure,” he said.

Mays popped open two cans and put one in front of Jack. “Cheers,” he said, and then he guzzled down most of it. Jack half expected him to start burping out the entire Mays alphabet: fucking-A, fucking-B…

“I didn’t used to drink, you know,” said Mays.

Jack knew what he was saying. “I hear you.”

Mays had a little beer foam on his mustache. He took care of it with a backhand swipe of the wristband.

“Your client called me from jail the other night,” said Mays.

“I heard about that in court yesterday,” said Jack.

“Told me where he was when McKenna was murdered.”

Jack wasn’t sure how to respond, so he let Mays keep talking.

“I’ve been giving his story a lot of thought,” said Mays.

“I know it must sound hard to believe,” said Jack.

Mays locked eyes with him, and for a moment Jack wondered if he was going to reach over the counter and slug him. Finally, Mays stepped away, took a file from a stack of papers on the kitchen table, and laid it on the countertop in front of Jack.

“What’s this?” asked Jack.

“Payroll records for my company. It’s from three years ago, when Jamal worked for me.”

Jack opened the file and found his client’s name on the list of employees.

Mays said, “We had automatic deposit for Jamal’s paychecks to go to his bank every week.”

Jack glanced at the transaction dates on the ledger. “So is it a coincidence that he was off the payroll for the two pay periods before your daughter was murdered?”

“Jamal stopped showing up for work. So I stopped paying him. Tried calling him, got no answer. Went to his apartment. Nobody there. Called his mother in Minnesota. No idea where he was. She even filed a missing person report.”

Jack looked at him, confused. “All that actually supports Jamal’s claim that he was abducted before the crime.”

“I realize that,” he said.

Jack studied his expression. The guy was no easy read. “Why would you help me defend the man accused of killing your daughter?”

Mays drained the last of his beer, then crushed the empty aluminum can in his bare hand. “Jamal Wakefield was sitting in Gitmo for three years.”

“Well, nominally at least it was Khaled al-Jawar.”

“That’s exactly my problem,” said Mays. “Those fuckers knew they had Jamal. But no one told me. They just let me go on thinking for three years that the man who killed my daughter was still on the loose, never going to be brought to justice.”

“I can see where you’d be angry.”

“This isn’t about anger. I’m just saying they have a different agenda, and I understand that. They think Jamal’s a terrorist, and they want to keep him locked up.”

“The Justice Department did take an unusual position in court yesterday,” said Jack.

“What do you mean?”

“Normally, when a criminal defendant wants access to classified information, the feds make him jump through all the hoops under the Confidential Information Protection Act. The government doesn’t care how long it takes. But in Jamal’s case, they’re suddenly all concerned about the swift administration of justice.”

“You see what I’m saying?” said Mays. “It doesn’t really matter if he killed McKenna. So long as he ends up behind bars, it works out either way for them.”

“But it matters for you.”

“I just want the truth. I think you do, too, which is why you’re on the fence about taking this case to trial.”

“Who told you that I was on the fence?”

He shook his head, as if Jack were naive. “My supercomputers can search eight billion files in an instant, tell me where you lived when you were in college, and pull up the Social Security number of every man, woman, and child who ever lived in the same zip code. Give me another minute and I can do the same thing for two hundred seventy million other folks, and not a single one will have the slightest idea that he was being checked out. Then, if you like, we can compile a complete personal dossier for every high-school graduate who earns six figures, smokes Marlboros, uses the name of his childhood pet as his preferred online password, and has a landlord named Bob.”