Based on what Clement told me about his medical condition and hallucinating a bear, I’d probably suggest he be evaluated by a forensic mental health professional. That evaluation should open up some possibilities for what we could argue in court even if he had done it.
I slowly chewed my last bite of chicken. “I have time to decide. The first thing we need to do is get through the bail hearing so Clement can go home.”
7
The next morning, when I showed up at the police station to talk to Clement about his bail hearing, Quincey led me down the hallway that went to the cells.
I’d personally spent some time in the cells last winter, and they weren’t built for hosting guests. I wouldn’t have anywhere to sit. “Why isn’t he being brought up to an interview room to meet with me?”
“His request. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it happen.” Quincey put an arm in front of my path before we went through the final set of doors. “There’s no one else in the cells right now, so I’ll wait out here to give you privacy. All you need to do is knock.”
Quincey wasn’t even going to unlock his cell door? That was odd to say the least. It must have been Clement’s request as well. There wasn’t any point in asking Quincey about it. If he hadn’t known why Clement refused to meet with me in the traditional setting, he wouldn’t know the reasoning behind this choice, either.
I made my way down the walkway between the cells and stopped at the first occupied one. Clement perched on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, his hands dangling loose. He looked up when I stopped, but he didn’t immediately say anything.
I hadn’t thought it was possible for Clement to look worse. I’d been wrong. He looked faded, like a black-and-white picture of himself.
I wrapped a hand around one of the bars. “How have you been?”
His shoulders hunched forward. “There’s too much time to think here. At least at home, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d read, or Darlene would stay up with me, and we’d play a game of chess.”
“The bail review hearing is scheduled for tomorrow. You should be able to go home then. You’re a well-known and respected member of the community, and you’re not a flight risk. It’s more a formality than anything.”
The look he gave me was so empty it made me feel as if I was going to be sucked in and forget how to smile, like a black hole of unhappiness. Not that I expected Clement to be happy at all about what had happened—I’d be concerned if he was—but this was a new level of despair from when I’d seen him last time.
“I can’t go home. Darlene came and saw me last night, and we talked. She’s right. If I did this to Gordon, I’m a danger to others.”
I’d been so focused on Clement’s disease and pitying him that I hadn’t thought about the wider implications of this. If Clement killed Gordon because he’d been hallucinating and thought he was a bear, his wife would be in danger. He could also be a danger to others.
“Is that why you refused to come out of your cell?”
He nodded. “I can’t trust myself.”
Darlene was right, but the suspicious part of me also thought that it would be a perfect way to continue framing her husband for a murder she might have committed. Mark had been certain, though, that a woman would have had a hard time doing the damage Gordon suffered. Unless Darlene had an accomplice, I could cross her off the list as an alternative way to explain what had happened.
And that brought us to the real crux of the situation.
“So what do you want from this? Most people, when they hire a defense attorney, only care about an acquittal.”
“I want the truth.” He ran his fingers through his beard. “Darlene and I were high school sweethearts. We were almost a cliché. Football player and cheerleader. We’ve been married thirty-five years. Now she’s afraid of me. She hasn’t looked at me the same since. Not going to prison isn’t enough if I lose my best friend.”
He stopped talking suddenly, like he’d forgotten where he’d been going with what he was saying. Now that I understood what was happening, I waited rather than assuming he was done.
He blinked rapidly a few times. “I already lost a good friend. Gordon was a friend to both of us. If I did this, I need to be locked up where I can’t hurt anyone else. If I didn’t, whoever killed him needs to be punished for it, and Darlene needs to be able to be sure that she’s safe with me.”
Mark had once commented that it didn’t seem like finding evidence to clear a client was enough for me. I always seemed to want to find the real killer, because the truth mattered, and someone should be held accountable for causing all that pain.
Listening to Clement was like hearing my own thoughts parroted back to me.
If Clement had killed Gordon in a hallucination, we’d talk about best options. I still didn’t think prison was the right place for him, but he would need to go somewhere that he couldn’t hurt anyone else during a moment of delirium.
Instead of turning Clement over to Anderson as a client, I’d accept Anderson’s suggestion of working this one as co-counsel. It felt like the right thing to do to see this case through. Clement wasn’t trying to get away with a crime, and that’s what I hadn’t liked about working for my parents. And Anderson would be there to skillfully argue Clement’s case if this did end up going to trial.
I moved as close to the bars as I could so that he could clearly see my face. “I’ll find the truth for you. I promise.”
8
As soon as I was out of the police station, I called Darlene Dodd and asked if she had time to speak with me. She told me to meet her at their house. The police had released the scene, and she’d already hired a crime scene clean-up crew to deal with the mess.
My mind gnawed on that as I drove. The suspicious part of me wondered about how fast she’d moved, as if she didn’t want me getting a look at the scene before the evidence was gone. The rational part of me knew I wouldn’t have waited an additional minute once the police cleared the scene to have it cleaned up, either. There’d be no way to process what had happened and start to cope as long as blood coated your house. Besides, the police would have taken plenty of pictures that I would look over.
Darlene waited for me outside the house when I pulled up. I hadn’t paid much attention to her the day of the murder. Today she wore jeans and an oversized fuzzy green-and-black coat that looked like it might belong to Clement, given the size. Her blonde hair was naturally curly and almost as wide as her face was tall. She reminded me a little bit of a younger Kate Chapshaw.
Darlene hugged her coat around herself even though the zipper was done up. “I thought I’d meet you out here. We can either talk in the kitchen or the living room, your choice.”
She turned her statement into a question somehow, like she lacked the self-confidence to choose for herself where it would be best for us to talk.
I’d made the assumption because Clement said he’d been trying to fall asleep in his chair that he’d been in the living room. The crime scene clean-up crew’s truck was still here, though. “Won’t we be in the way in the living room?”
She shook her head, opened her mouth, and closed it again like she was searching for words. “It happened in Clem’s office.”
That was a bit odd. And bad for our case. If someone brought Gordon’s body in, the most logical place to plant him was the living room. They wouldn’t know which room the office was or where it was or how often it was used unless they were intimately familiar with the family.
“Did Gordon usually go into Clement’s office when he came over for breakfast?”
Her smile looked stiff around the edges like old leather. “Always. They were the ones who cooked. Even before he stopped sleeping, Clem was the early riser. I hate mornings. Clem came to wake me when breakfast was ready. Gordon makes…made the best blueberry waffles you ever tasted.”
She had the red around the nose and eyes of someone who’d spent much of the previous day crying, but her eyes were dry now. That struck me as authentic. If she’d been wanting to convince me of grief she didn’t feel, she’d have been blubbering. She wasn’t. She was trying to hold strong.
