He Defended Her, He Said I Deserved It novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Six Hours
Lainie waits six hours outside her husband's office while he clears the protégée who sent a man after her; when he blames her for running out without a bra, she slaps him, leaves her ring on his pages, and goes to the bail bondsman who saved her, who shows her Kerri's car at the alley mouth, phone up.
My husband's protégée paid a man to pretend to be her brother and lure me into a dark parking lot.
My husband stayed up all night proving she'd done nothing wrong.
Brantley Treadway hasn't lost a jury trial in six years.
There's a billboard on I-95 with his face on it and one word under his chin. UNDEFEATED.
On Sunday night he sat at our kitchen table until four in the morning, with a highlighter in his teeth.
Ninety-six pages, he told me at breakfast. For the commonwealth's attorney. So they won't charge Kerri.
Then he kissed my forehead, right above the scar, and went to work.
At one o'clock I took the elevator to the twenty-first floor and stood outside his glass office.
I didn't knock.
I just stood there.
His assistant asked if I wanted to sit down. I said no.
She asked again at three. I said no again.
I draw people for a living. I'm the sketch artist for one of the Richmond stations. Nine years of courtrooms.
So I took out my pad and I drew him through the glass.
His jaw. His good navy suit. The pen he only uses to sign things.
At four, Kerri Gaskill walked past me with his coffee.
Platinum hair, cream blouse, a pearl in each ear.
She looked at the cut on my cheekbone, four stitches' worth, and then she looked away and smiled at the floor.
She went in and set the cup by his hand.
He said thank you without looking at her.
At seven the floor was still full. Associates eat dinner at their desks here.
That's when I opened the door.
"Why?"
My voice came out hoarse. I hadn't said a word in six hours.
He didn't look up from the page he was signing.
"Kerri hired a man to pretend to be her brother and frighten you," he said. "Because you accused her of sleeping with me. In front of two partners."
"Frighten me."
"What he did after that was his own decision. None of it is on her."
He said it in his courtroom voice. Soft and reasonable.
The voice juries love.
I crossed the room and grabbed the stack off his desk with both hands.
He caught my wrist.
Not hard. He never does anything hard where people can see.
"Enough, Lainie."
Out on the floor, heads were coming up over the cubicle walls.
He looked right at me.
"If you want to decide who's right and who's wrong," he said, "start with the fact that you ran out that night without a bra on."
Someone outside the door made a small sound.
I pulled my wrist free.
I slapped him so hard my palm went numb.
His head turned with it. The pen rolled off the desk.
Nobody on that floor moved.
"You'd never let a witness say that about your client," I said. "Not in front of a jury. You'd stand up and object."
He touched his cheek.
"You're upset. Go home. We'll talk when you're calm."
"I've been calm for six hours."
I twisted my ring off.
It stuck at the knuckle. It always did in summer, and I'd always laughed about it.
I didn't laugh. I got it off.
I set it on top of his ninety-six pages, dead center.
Then I took the house key off my ring and set it next to that.
Kerri was in the doorway now. Her face had gone very still.
I turned around so the whole floor could hear me.
"She's going to answer for that night in a courtroom," I said. "And you're going to sit in it and watch."
Brantley laughed, short and quiet.
"You draw courtrooms, Lainie. You don't win them."
I walked out past Kerri.
I didn't touch her. I didn't need to.
In the elevator my hands started shaking, so I held them under my arms all the way down.
In the parking garage I finally played the voicemail I'd been ignoring since last night.
A man's voice. Slow. Deep.
"Ms. Shore. It's Ike Bonner, from the bond office on Marshall. The night of the twenty-seventh." A pause. "There's something on my front camera you need to see. Darla Kittery across the street says I should take it straight to the police. I think it's yours first. I'm here all night. I'm always here all night."
I sat in my car for a long time.
Then I drove to Marshall Street for the first time in five and a half weeks.
The neon sign was already on. BAIL BONDS 24 HRS.
I didn't look down the alley at the lot behind it.
I parked out front and went in the front door.
The office was small and warm and smelled like burnt coffee.
A huge bearded man in a flannel shirt stood up behind the desk.
I remembered that shirt. He'd taken it off and wrapped it around me.
A little girl with two crooked braids sat at a card table in the corner with a tablet.
"You're the lady from the lot," she said.
"Nettie," he said.
"What? She is."
"Homework. Now."
She sighed and bent over the tablet.
He didn't ask how I was.
He just turned the monitor toward me.
"The police took the back camera," he said. "This is the front one. I never checked it. Then yesterday the paper said the woman who hired him was home all night."
The screen showed Marshall Street in gray and green. August 27. 11:32 p.m.
A white car pulled up at the mouth of the alley and stopped.
The lights went off. Nobody got out.
He sped it up.
11:41. That's when my phone rang at home.
11:50. My own car went past the front of the shot, much too fast.
He slowed it down.
Inside the white car, a light came on. Blue. A phone screen.
It lit a face from underneath.
Platinum hair. A pearl in each ear.
I knew that car. I'd parked next to it in my husband's garage a hundred times.
I'd drawn that face in the hospital, from memory, and a detective had told me it could be anyone.
The phone came up. It turned toward the alley.
It stayed there, perfectly steady, for the whole minute I was screaming.
Kerri hadn't been home.
She'd been right there, filming.
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