Scottie didn’t like that answer. “There you go again saying ‘new trial.’ Like I said, I’m a god damn innocent man! I’ve done some legal research to pass the time, and I know that if you show I am innocent I can get out. I can be released based on the fact I didn’t kill Ashley. And that’s the truth, man. I swear I didn’t even touch her at all. I never did. My only chance at getting out of here alive is if you believe me and find the real killer. None of my other lawyers believed me, so none of them tried. They all had other ideas, like you and your fucking new trial plan. None of them wanted to find the person who actually killed my wife.” Scottie caught himself and stopped ranting. He finally asked, “Do you believe me when I say I am innocent?”
“If you tell me, you are innocent, then yes, I believe you. But I’ve also read the news reports. There was quite a bit of evidence against you: the 911 call, the DNA evidence, the scratches on your face, the bloody footprints from your shoes, the fact you showered as soon as you got to the hotel room.” Steve listed the points off one by one. “I must admit, all of the evidence is leading to you being the one who did it. That said, I haven’t had an opportunity to review your entire file or the trial transcripts yet because they weren’t delivered to me until late yesterday, so I don’t know everything yet.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you sound just like my trial attorney. He never listened when I tried to tell him what happened; he didn’t even try to get me a not-guilty verdict. He always said his goal was to keep me from getting the death penalty, that we had no chance at the guilt/innocence phase, and he would get more respect from the jury if he didn’t argue for me until the sentencing stage. Now you keep saying you want to get me a new trial, not get me out of here. More of the same court-appointed lawyer bullshit. Man, if only I could afford a real lawyer.”
Then something clicked in Scottie’s brain, and his expression changed from pissed-off despair to hopeful consternation. He stared a hole through Steve’s head. “I’ll tell you what, you go read all that stuff and come back here and convince me that you believe I’m innocent. Only then will I tell you the story of what happened that day. Until you do that, I’m not going to waste my time talking to another shitty public pretender. I don’t trust you, and you probably won’t listen to a word I say anyway, just like all the other lawyers the government has gotten for me. Worthless.” He held up his cuffed hands as he said that.
Steve quietly considered his client’s words.
“I’ll leave you with one fact,” Scottie finally said. “When I left the house that day, she was living and breathing without a scratch on her. That’s the god-honest truth.” He stood up and pushed the intercom button. “We’re done in here. Please send Wayne back for me.”
While the two men waited in the room, Steve spoke up. “Listen, I believe you. I promise you. I will read everything and come back here and show you that I am different from any lawyer you’ve had in the past. I’m going to do everything I can to figure out the truth and get you out of here, even if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.”
Scottie only stood silently by the door until it clicked open, and a massive guard came in to retrieve him.
The guard said to Steve, “You need to stay in here until I get him back to his cell. No one is allowed in the hall while a prisoner is out of their cell.”
Scottie was escorted out. A few minutes later, Steve left the same way he came in, slowly and through many doors. When he signed out, he realized he had been inside H-Unit for almost an hour, even though he’d met with his client for less than five minutes.
When he stepped outside of the facility, Steve suddenly noticed how immense and blue the sky was above him. He had been inside Oklahoma’s death row for what was, comparatively speaking, a short amount of time. But the freedom he felt as he soaked up the vastness of the world outside was indescribable. He tried to imagine what it was like to live inside those walls day after day after day. How it would change a person to see only the sky that was visible through the slits in a grate three stories up, to never see the sun set or rise, to never see the horizon.
As Steve stared skyward and slowly turned in place beside his car, he thought to himself that, for some indefinable reason, Scottie didn’t really seem like a murderer. Although his client had opened with a threat, it seemed more bark than bite, almost like learned behavior from having to survive in custody for so long. And despite everything Steve had read in the news about the facts of the case, his gut told him that Scottie was telling the truth; maybe, just maybe, Scottie had left Ashley at home that day alive and without a scratch on her.
Steve decided he would start sifting through the boxes of the case as soon as he returned to Tulsa. Furthermore, he would read through everything from the perspective of innocence, looking for evidence to exonerate Scottie, rather than just looking for constitutional mistakes that would lead to a new trial. Steve knew this was the only way he would gain Scottie’s trust and get to hear his version of what happened that August day. That story was key to finding out if Scottie, or someone else, killed Ashley Pinkerton.
CHAPTER 7
By the time Steve returned to his office from his trip to Big Mac, any thoughts about lunch had left his mind entirely. He grabbed a protein bar and an apple from the bottom drawer of his desk and sat down in front of the stack of pink phone message slips that had accumulated while he was on death row.
Each slip relayed a different problem from the myriad of cases he currently had open. Memories from a seminar he once attended filled his mind; the Oklahoma Bar Association’s general counsel told the audience that the single most common cause for complaints against attorneys was their failure to respond to client inquiries in a timely manner. Ever since, Steve had promised himself he would do his best to return all phone calls on the same day he received them.
He stared at the pile of messages, then at the boxes containing all of the evidence and documents that may show him the path to liberating Scottie Pinkerton. The sixteen boxes from Scottie’s case were stacked in the corner of Steve’s office, staring back at him unyieldingly. He imagined they were saying, in the best Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction impersonation that boxes could give, “We are not going to be ignored, Steve.”
Steve smiled, briefly thinking how glad he was that the boxes were incapable of attacking him with a butcher knife. He picked up his phone, looked at the first pink slip on the pile, and began returning calls.
The first and second phone calls were to DUI clients and the third was to someone charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession. His office cell phone lit up and he saw he had a Snapchat
from an unknown number. He wondered if it was from the same person who sent him a picture of the scales of justice on the day he had visited Scottie.
He decided to open the app and look before he continued. This time it was a video of a car swerving down the road. The car was hitting parked cars on both sides of a city street basically bouncing between them down the road. Then the words “Stay in Your Lane” appeared on the screen.
The next several calls were to divorce clients. These were people whose soon-to-be-ex-spouses had done something to ruin their day, or possibly even their week. Usually, the calls were not emergencies in the legal sense, but to the person on the other end of the line, each situation was more distressing than waking to the sound of a burglar down the hall.
One such call was to a potential new client, Mr. Baxter.
“Thank you for calling me back. I was served divorce papers at work yesterday, and I don’t know what to do.”
“You called the right person. Situations like that are why you need to hire a lawyer. Whether it be me or another attorney, you need someone who can answer all of your questions and walk you through the horrible experience you are about to undergo.” Steve always asked this next question before he continued, “Are you sure your marriage is over? There is no chance of reconciliation?”
“No. We are done,” Baxter said, sounding resigned but mournful. “We have been going to counseling for a few months, and she finally said that she is done. She told me that she can’t be married to me any longer. She simply doesn’t love me anymore.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, and you sound extremely upset about this,” Steve said. “Now, not to be cold, but I will need a two-thousand-dollar retainer if you decide to hire me, and I charge two hundred and twenty five dollars an hour. I want you to understand that you are paying me to be smart and rational. You will be torn up with all kinds of emotions during this process; it will be my job to always be the voice of reason. I will be the Spock to your Captain Kirk, and we will get through this together as painlessly as possible.”
A small laugh broke through the tearful tone on the other end of the line. After twenty more minutes of talking, Mr. Baxter scheduled a meeting to bring in his retainer the next day.
Steve picked up the next pink message slip. It read “Mrs. Whitehurst—emergency.” Mrs. Whitehurst was a mother in her mid-thirties, and her husband had just recently left her for a coworker. She was blindsided by the news and, understandably, had a great deal of anger against him.
She answered the phone immediately and launched into her story. “He checked Nathan and Timothy out of school early today! I texted him, and apparently, he thinks that since it’s such a pretty day he is going to take them to the zoo. They shouldn’t be missing school for a zoo trip with Dad! This could affect their entire academic careers.”
“Okay, Barbara. I know you aren’t happy about him doing this, and I agree he should have consulted with you first. But… your boys are both still in elementary school. Do you honestly think missing a day of first or third grade is going to ruin their academic careers?”
“Maybe not, but he can’t just take them out whenever he wants! I know it was his day to pick them up, but he has to let them finish school first. I never pick them up early. He is just trying to be the fun dad and make me the mean parent.”
“That could be it. Or he could just love his children as much as you do and thought that, with all they are going through, they could use a fun day at the zoo. Either way, you are correct that he shouldn’t have done this without talking to you about it first. I will call his lawyer and let her know what happened. We’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you.” Mrs. Whitehurst chuckled a bit to herself.
“Maybe I did overreact a little, Steve. But that’s why I pay you, right?”
As the afternoon wore on, the stack of pink message slips whittled down to two. The one on top was from his personal insurance agent calling about quotes for renewing renter’s insurance on his personal items at home. The other one was from Jennifer Turner, the assistant district attorney on the Hamilton case. The message referenced another meeting with Dr. Emily Babbage.
Steve closed his eyes. Babbage’s face had been popping in and out of his mind ever since that first meeting the other day. He pictured, again, the complex blue of her eyes, a color so unique that he wanted to create a name for it. He remembered the motion of her body as she walked from the house to her car when she left, the way the skirt fit snugly around her thighs, almost clinging to her waist as she strode away. He couldn’t forget that electrifying moment when they shook hands. The insurance agent could wait. Steve picked up the phone and called Turner.
After a short pause listening to the chorus of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like a Wolf” played by a string quartet, Turner picked up the line. “Hello, Steve. How are you?”
“Good. I spent the morning down at Big Mac. I had a meeting with my client who is on death row, and I’m just happy they didn’t keep me overnight,” he said jokingly.
“I’m glad they let you out, too.” They shared a laugh before she said,”I didn’t know you represented anyone on death row, that’s a big undertaking, good luck. I called to let you know that Dr. Babbage has uncovered some evidence against your client. Apparently, Mr. Hamilton tried to delete several pieces of information from the hard drive of his computer.”
This wasn’t the news Steve had been hoping to hear regarding Dr. Babbage, but it wasn’t unexpected either.
“She has recovered all of it,” Turner said. “I have no doubt that I can now prove everything we have alleged. I was wondering if you would like to go to her office and look at what she has found. I am pretty sure that once you see the evidence we have against him, you’ll want to have a serious discussion with Mr. Hamilton about working out a plea deal instead of going to trial.”
“I would love to see what Dr. Babbage has found, but I must remind you, my client has consistently denied any wrongdoing in this matter. Every time I have met with him, he has told me he didn’t take any money. He is very adamant about his innocence and his intent to take this case all the way to—”
“I understand that’s his position,” she said, interrupting him. “However, the law requires me to show you all of my evidence ahead of time, whether your client decides to plea or not, so let’s at least go see what Dr. Babbage has found on your client’s hard drive. The defendant in just about every case I have ever prosecuted started out by claiming innocence. Hell, your death row guy probably said he didn’t do it, too. I think your tune just might change after you see what she has uncovered. When we are done, I’ll give you what the state would accept as punishment under a plea deal. If the evidence doesn’t sway you, at least we have taken another necessary step toward trial.”
“Okay, I agree. We need to do this at some point anyway.
Tomorrow might as well be the day,” Steve said.
“Are you available in the afternoon?” Turner asked.
“I can meet any time after three.”
“Let’s say four thirty. The meeting with Dr. Babbage shouldn’t take too long. I think we will be done around five or so. Her office is over by Cherry Street. We can go for a drink at The Empire Bar afterward and discuss the case, if you’d like?”
Steve knew that some of the older defense attorneys in town often had lunch or drinks with prosecutors to discuss their cases, but this was the first time he had been invited on such an excursion. He usually dealt with the junior prosecutors, and they were too young, hungry, and out to prove their moxie to ever be seen fraternizing with the defense bar.
