I leaned forward. Into the twin beams of his studied glare. And it wasn’t easy, believe me. “You got nothing but me and my partner holding smoking guns, and a witness you refuse to believe. So you’re not letting us walk. Are you, Inspector?”
“You got that right,” he said. “So run the story by me again.”
“Nope.”
He folded his arms across his chest and smiled. “‘Nope’? Did you just say ‘nope’?”
“That’s what I said.”
He stood up and lifted his chair, brought it around the table beside my own. He sat down and his lips touched my ear as he whispered into it, “You’re all I got, Kenzie. Get it? And you’re a cocky, white, Irish motherfucker, which means I hated you on sight. So, tell me what you’re going to do.”
“Send in my lawyer,” I said.
“I didn’t hear you,” he whispered.
I ignored him and slapped the tabletop. “Send in my lawyer,” I called to the people behind the mirror.
27
My lawyer, Cheswick Hartman, had caught a flight from Boston an hour after my phone call at six in the morning.
When he arrived at St. Petersburg Police Headquarters on First Avenue North at noon, they played dumb. Because the entire incident on the bridge had happened in a no-man’s-land between Pinellas County and Manatee County, they sent him to Manatee County and the Bradenton PD, feigning ignorance over our whereabouts.
In Bradenton, they took one look at Cheswick’s two-thousand-dollar suit and the Louis of Boston garment bag in his hand, and dicked around with him some more. By the time he got back to St. Pete, it was three. It was also boiling hot, and so was Cheswick.
There are three people I know who should never, and I mean never, be messed with. One is Bubba, for obvious reasons. The other is Devin Amronklin, a Boston homicide cop. The third, however, is Cheswick Hartman, and he may be more dangerous than either Bubba or Devin, because he has so many more weapons in his arsenal.
One of the top criminal lawyers not only in Boston but in the country, he charges something in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars an hour for his services, and he’s always in demand. He has homes on Beacon Hill and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and a summer villa on the island of Majorca. He also has a sister, Elise, whom I extricated from a dangerous situation a few years back. Since then, Cheswick refuses to accept money from me, and he’ll fly fourteen hundred miles for me on an hour’s notice.
But it screws up his life to do so, and when his time gets wasted even further by yokel cops with bad attitudes, his briefcase and Montblanc pen turn into a nuclear weapon and an ignition switch.
Through the grimy window in the interrogation room, I could see the squad room through even grimier venetian blinds, and twenty minutes after Jefferson left me alone, a commotion erupted as Cheswick burst through the scattered desks with a legion of police brass in tow.
The cops were shouting at Cheswick and each other and calling Jefferson’s name and the name of a Lieutenant Grimes, and by the time Cheswick threw open the door of the interrogation room, Jefferson was in the crowd, too.
Cheswick took one look at me and said, “Get my client some water. Now.”
One of the brass went back out into the squad room as Cheswick and the rest filed in. Cheswick leaned over me and looked at my face.
“This is good.” He looked over his shoulder at a sweaty white-haired man with captain’s bars on his uniform. “At least three of these facial cuts are infected. I understand his shoulder blade might be broken, but all I see is a bandage.”
The captain said, “Well—”
“How long have you been here?” he asked me.
“Since three-forty-six in the morning,” I said.
He looked at his watch. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.” He looked at the sweaty captain. “Your department is guilty of violating my client’s civil rights, and that’s a federal crime.”
“Bullshit,” Jefferson said.
Cheswick pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket as a pitcher of water and a glass were placed on the interrogation table. Cheswick lifted the pitcher and turned to the group. He poured some water onto his handkerchief, and the spillage splashed on Jefferson’s shoes.
“Heard of Rodney King, Patrolman Jefferson?”
“It’s Inspector Jefferson.” He looked at his wet shoes.
“Not once I get through with you.” Cheswick turned back to me and dabbed the handkerchief against several of my cuts. “Let me make this clear,” he said to the group, “you gentlemen are fucked. I don’t know how you do things down here and I don’t care, but you kept my client in an unventilated box for over twelve hours, which makes anything he said inadmissible in court. Anything.”
“It’s ventilated,” a cop said, his eyes on fire.
“Turn on the air conditioner, then,” Cheswick said.
The cop half turned toward the door, and then stopped, shook his head at his own stupidity. When he turned back, Cheswick was smiling at him.
“So the air conditioner in this room was turned off by choice. In a cinder block room on an eighty-six-degree day. Keep it up, gentlemen, because I already have a lawsuit in the mid six figures. And climbing.” He took the handkerchief from my face, handed me a glass of water. “Any other complaints, Patrick?”
I inhaled the entire glass of water in about three seconds. “They spoke to me in a rude fashion.”
He gave me a tight smile and clapped my shoulder just hard enough to make it scream. “Let me do the talking,” he said.
Jefferson stepped up beside Cheswick. “Your client shot a guy three times. His partner blew out the throat of another guy. A third guy was rammed off a bridge in his car and died upon impact with Tampa Bay.”
“I know,” Cheswick said. “I’ve seen the tape.”
“The tape?” Jefferson said.
“The tape?” The sweaty captain said.
“The tape?” I said.
Cheswick reached into his briefcase and tossed a videotape onto the table. “That’s a copy,” he said. “The original is with the offices of Meegan, Feibel, and Ellenburg in Clearwater. The tape was sent to them at nine this morning by private courier.”
Jefferson picked up the tape and a thin drop of sweat slid from his hairline.
“Help yourselves,” Cheswick said. “The tape was recorded by someone heading south on the Skyway at the time of the incident.”