“Sounds like a dirty tactic,” I said.
“Maybe it was. Or maybe there was some truth to it. I don’t know. The case was thrown out and a suspected murderer went free.” He looked down at his plate and spun his chopstick around with his fingers. “Detective Nichols was the arresting officer. It was pretty bad when she heard the news and worse when she found out I knew about Hal and Susan’s relationship.”
He didn’t say if he and Detective Nichols were still a couple then, but I put two and two together and assumed this was the catalyst for their split.
“Did Detective Nichols have something to do with you being put on leave?”
He looked up at me. His brows pulled together over dark brown eyes that looked troubled. I reached across the table and put my hand on top of his—the one not playing with the chopstick.
“I’m not the guy who runs to the principal and rats on the cheater. I’m the guy who works hard to get ahead. I mind my own business and I expect everybody else to do their job too. I don’t know if the rumors were true. I don’t know if opposing counsel manipulated things. I don’t even know if Susan really was up for pension or if she and Hal discussed the case or if the suspected murderer was guilty. My job in the district attorney’s office was to plan the expansion of Clark County, and I ended up learning something that I had no business knowing. Lives were changed because of that. My supervisor found out that I was friends with Hal and Susan. I was suspended pending review. And here we are.”
“You didn’t tell your parents the truth, did you?”
“No. I can’t shame them. My dad thinks I wanted to quit. That’s bad enough.”
“What does your mom think?”
“My mom knows something about the job is troubling me. She doesn’t know what it is and she respects my privacy. Since I came here, she’s said that it’s more important for me to be happy and live a life I can be proud of than it is to suffer under someone else’s rules.”
“Why did you tell me the truth?”
“This is going to sound pretty selfish, but I needed to tell someone. It’s like it was building up inside of me and I was going to burst. Ever feel that way?”
Again with the mind reading.
Tak set down his chopsticks and turned to me. “Margo, there’s something about you that’s different from the people I worked with. They work hard to get ahead, sometimes sacrificing their personal lives for opportunities. Those people will start rumors to undermine a defender’s case or get a judge pulled from the bench. They care about winning more than they care about the truth. But you—you’re driven to find the truth no matter what it takes. You’ve got this spirit about you, this sense of loyalty to Ebony that I don’t see every day. You believe in Ebony’s innocence so strongly that I want to believe it too.”
“That’s because I know Ebony is innocent. She didn’t kill Blitz Manners.”
“But what if she did?” he asked.
“She didn’t.”
“It’s that clear-cut to you, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Think of it in math terms. Imagine someone told you that the Pythagorean theorem was wrong. That C squared didn’t equal A squared plus B squared. And they try to show you evidence to support their argument, but you know there’s no way their evidence can be right, because you know the Pythagorean theorem is a fact. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“Tak, it’s pretty simple for me. I know Ebony didn’t do it. So somebody else did. I don’t know who or why, but I know they did. And now people are making up evidence against her and it’s making things worse.”
“Tell me about this evidence.”
“Amy Bradshaw came to Disguise DeLimit on Sunday morning and she was wearing a giant diamond ring. She made it sound like she and Blitz were engaged. Today I learned that she told Black Jack and Linda Cannon that she recognized the ring when she saw it in a pawnshop and bought it so she could return it to Blitz’s mom. There’s something wrong with that, but I can’t figure out what.”
“Why does it feel wrong? Talk me through it.”
I leaned back and looked at him. “You really want to help me figure this out?”
“It might do us both some good to try.”
Maybe it was the admission of what had really happened with his job in the district attorney’s office or maybe it was the fact that he’d sensed how out of place me and my thoughts were in the middle of his father’s restaurant, but I forgot about my trust issues and used him as a sounding board.
“For starters, Amy was wearing the ring on Sunday. The house was robbed on Monday afternoon. So if the ring was taken during the robbery, how’d she get it a day early?”