“Come on, Enzo.” Ramirez levels his gaze at my husband. “You can be straight with me. Did you kill him?”
Enzo drops his face into his hands. “No. I swear. Benny, I would never.”
“Then you’re going to need a really good lawyer.”
Enzo punches his fist into the sofa in frustration, and I don’t even blame him. A good lawyer? We don’t have any money. We can’t afford any lawyer, much less a good one. We will have to take whoever we can get for free. The court-appointed attorney is going to have to be good enough.
“We don’t have much money,” I say to Ramirez. “So getting a really good lawyer is off the table.”
“I thought you might say that,” he says. “So I took the liberty of reaching out to a public defender who is one of the best I’ve seen. She’s based in the Bronx, so not in this jurisdiction, but we can pull some strings to make it happen. She’s young—two years out of law school—but really sharp. She has a great winning record, and she’s had a couple of murder trials that both went her way. When I told her about you, she was eager to help.”
“That’s great,” I say.
“She’s on her way over.” Ramirez looks down at his watch. “If she hasn’t hit traffic, she should be here shortly. And then you can fill her in on all the details.” He gives Enzo a warning look. “You tell this woman everything. No bullshit.”
“Never,” Enzo agrees.
I shake my head. “That’s so nice of her to make the trip on such short notice.”
“She moved a few things around, she said.”
I narrow my eyes at Ramirez. Something about this seems a little fishy. This woman is apparently an amazing public defender, yet she’s willing to drop everything and drive all the way out from the city to Long Island to help some couple she’s never even met? Who does that? I look over at Enzo, whose expression is equally skeptical.
There’s something going on here that I’m not aware of.
Ramirez reaches into his pocket for his phone. He reads the message on the screen, then swivels his head to look out the front window. A blue sedan has pulled up in front of our house.
“That’s her,” he says.
I lean forward in my seat to get a closer look at the woman climbing out of the vehicle. She has white-blond hair pulled back into a French twist and a trim build. She looks wispy—not the kind of person you would think would be a shark in a courtroom, but looks can be deceiving. If Ramirez says she’s good, I trust him.
Ramirez leaps off the couch to let her inside. I rise to my feet as our new lawyer enters the living room, clutching a briefcase. Enzo stands up as well, and I hear the sharp intake of his breath. “Oddio!” he gasps.
Our lawyer isn’t just any public defender. Enzo knows exactly who this woman is.
And a moment later, so do I.
FIFTY
“Cecelia!” Enzo cries.
The second he says her name, I know exactly who this girl is: Cecelia Winchester. I used to sort of be her nanny a while ago. And Enzo also looked after her while some other stuff was going on in her life. I haven’t seen her in person since she was ten years old. And now she’s…
Oh my God, she’s twenty-seven. I am horribly old.
Despite everything, Enzo runs over to her. He wraps his arms around her, and she hugs him back. He whispers something in her ear, and she smiles and nods. I couldn’t make out what he said, although I heard the words “your mother.”
I cross the room to get a better look at this girl. She might be twenty-seven, but she still looks very young. I would believe twenty if somebody tried to convince me. But there is something very shrewd and hard about her blue eyes. She has the eyes of someone twenty years older. Something about her eyes makes me believe that having her on our side might be the best weapon we can have.
“Hello, Millie,” she says. The last time I heard her voice, it was high and child-like. Now it’s crisp and business-like. She seems like the sort of woman who is working even at the dinner table.
I manage a smile. “Hi, Cece. It’s really good to see you.”
“Same.” She smooths out the lapel of her suit jacket. “I wish it didn’t have to be under these circumstances.”
“Cecelia is a public defender, so officially, we are mortal enemies,” Ramirez says. “But I admired her passion when I saw her in action. I ran into her about a year ago at the supermarket when I was picking up that cake you asked me to get for Ada’s birthday party, and we got to chatting. When I told her who I was getting the cake for, it turned out she knew you just as well as I did. So when you called me this morning, I gave her a call right away.”
“Just as well as I did” is pushing it. We’ve been friends with Benny for years, and I last saw Cecelia when she was a child. Has she been keeping tabs on us?
But if she has, I should be grateful. She’s our only hope right now.
“Benny has been filling me in on all the details while I battled the Long Island Expressway,” she says as we return to the living room. “They have been building quite a case against you, Enzo.”
He winces. “I know. Is terrible. Cecelia, you need to know, I didn’t…”
Cecelia settles down on the sofa, crossing one of her skinny legs over the other. She places her briefcase on her lap and opens it with a snap. She extracts a yellow legal pad of paper and clicks open her ballpoint pen. Clearly, she does not want to waste time on small talk, which I appreciate right now. “Maybe you didn’t kill him,” she says, “but they are going after you hard. I promise you that. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got a search warrant in the works.”
Enzo sneers. “Let them search. They will find nothing.”
I don’t feel the same way. I have had my home searched by the police before, and it’s the largest violation I can imagine. They go through everything. They rip apart your entire life, and they don’t put it back.
“What will they be looking for?” I ask Cecelia.
“A murder weapon,” she says without hesitation. “Any traces of Lowell’s blood.”
I think about that bloody T-shirt Enzo was wearing last night. I never ended up finding it. He must’ve gotten rid of it.
Except if it really was his blood, why would he get rid of the shirt? It wouldn’t be incriminating if it was his own blood.
