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a Gale Hightower mystery
FOULED
OUT
Laura S. Jones
WWW.TIDALPRESS.
A SHORT NOTE ABOUT RACE. My protagonist and sleuth, Gale, is black. I am white. What does a white woman know about being a black woman? Nothing. But Gale appeared in my imagination fully formed about 12 years ago and wouldn’t leave. She looked like she looked.
Gale’s friend Leo is a white, gay, male dancer with rheumatoid arthritis. Aside from being white, I have nothing in common with Leo either.
In general, I write (and read) to spend time with people I like. To get to know them. I really like Gale. Do I know what it is like to be her? Only to the extent that she can tell me, and I am curious enough to ask. And she can’t tell me very much because she isn’t real. These are the limitations of fiction. But I try and put myself in her shoes by using my imagination and the bits and pieces I have experienced in the world.
I walked into this minefield and wrote this story because I thought it was worth writing. I also thought people might like to read it, and that in the act of writing and reading we might all share something worthwhile.
This is not a book about race. It is a book about the abuse of power and how people fight or succumb.
I hope I got something right about Gale. That is all I really hope about anyone.
CHAPTER ONE
Last spring
They needed to talk.
He knew that if he could just talk to her, he could fix everything. So, Connor grabbed his keys and drove to Gina’s apartment even though it was two in the morning. Even though he was probably too drunk to drive.
But there were no cops, every light was green, and the trip took less than ten minutes. That was a good sign, he thought. He parked and took the stairs two at a time, excited and hopeful. He would remind Gina that in a week, they’d both be college graduates. Basketball would be behind them. He would give up the NBA dream; deep down he knew he never really had a real shot at the pros anyway. The rest of their lives could start. They would be together. Just the two of them.
When he got to her door, though, it wasn’t just the two of them. Marcus was there. Marucs was his teammate. Friend even. He shouldn’t have been there, goddammit, not with Connor’s girlfriend. But Marcus answered the door like it was his home, like he was king of the castle. Connor’s hope snapped into a white-hot anger.
It would never have happened if Marcus hadn’t been there.
When it was over, Connor couldn’t even tell whether he was sorry. He knew he should be, but he was confused instead. And still angry. How long had it been? Five minutes? An hour? He couldn’t tell; time made no sense anymore.
He watched the blood spread across the yellow linoleum and started to feel the anger drain away. Suddenly he was so tired, like there was nothing solid left in his body to hold him up. He sank down to the kitchen floor. Connor wished he had saved some of the anger, at least enough to get out. Away.
But the anger wasn’t something he could ration. It wasn’t something he could summon up when he wanted and push away when he didn’t.
The blood moved more slowly now, in no hurry to get anywhere. As if it were tired too.
With the point of the knife, Connor played with a piece of Gina’s long black hair, swirling it into a little pile.
His mind was getting fuzzier. It always happened this way. Sleep was the only thing that would help.
As soon as he shut his eyes, he heard the sirens.
CHAPTER TWO
Friday, July 1, 2016
“Gale, can you come to my office right away? Or maybe yesterday? God, yesterday would be so much better….” Alex paused on the phone, clearly contemplating whether her editorial powers extended to time travel. “Anyway, Jerry is AWOL, and I need you to go to Waynesville to cover Connor Braxton’s murder trial. He killed – sorry – allegedly killed his girlfriend and a teammate last May. The trial starts on Monday. No, wait. It starts on Tuesday. Damn holidays. Okay? See you in a shake.”
She hung up. I sighed into the empty receiver. Alex loves military lingo even though she never would have lasted two seconds in any army. She has problems with authority – other than her own – and with guns. Jerry wasn’t absent without leave anyway; he was just late. Undoubtedly hungover as well. He is counting the weeks until retirement with beer bottles.
I was happy to fill in. Okay, to be honest, I was not happy to cover a double murder trial in a backwoods Virginia mountain town where I would stand out like a sore thumb and there would be no decent scotch. I was relieved. For the past two months, I’d been pulled off the Metro beat and stuck writing obituaries in the basement – standard probation at the newspaper – and I was ready to come up for air. I was getting rusty.
Before obits, my job as a Metro reporter was to cover whatever happened in the city or that affected the city. It was a beat defined more by geography than subject, although since crime is always a top subject, I covered a lot of crime. Metro reporters are generalists, and we can be asked to fill in on other stories at a moment’s notice. I liked the variety. With my background, I was pulled in on sports whenever they were short of bodies. Connor Braxton’s murder trial was sports plus crime. It had my name all over it. It just wasn’t in the city. But I had little room to argue the fine points of job descriptions.
My probation was for misquoting a source, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal if the source wasn’t the mayor’s wife, Louise Mattison. “Call me Louie,” she had said, “all my friends do.” Stupid, gullible me.
I took my lumps after it all shook out, even though I knew charming “Louie” was lying. I didn’t misquote her – she just chickened out. Of course, calling the former first lady a thief was a bold move even for the confident Louie, and maybe I should have softened her language, or called to make sure before we ran it. Jenny Turnbill, the former first lady in question, was a thief, though. She gave taxpayer money to her friend’s design firm for a renovation of the mayor’s mansion that turned out to be little more than a rearrangement of the furniture. I hate that stuff.
While it wasn’t like me to let a lie slide, I sensed I might be owed a favor in the future if I did. Plus, having tossed my notes of our conversation during my annual fit of cubicle cleaning, it’s not like I was going to mount an effective defense anyway. Maybe I did accidentally put a few extra words in Louie’s mouth, too.
I fumbled under my desk for my shoes and regretted my ultra-casual Friday attire of ratty gray Converse sneakers and a sleeveless black jumpsuit. The jumpsuit was “athleisure” explained the saleswoman in a store I should never have gone into. Maybe it was athleisure when it was new three years ago. Now it was just ratty. But comfortable, even though it didn’t fit very well. No one makes athleisure for six-foot-tall women. The banded cuffs hit me at mid-calf, not at the ankle like they were designed. I looked “leggy” according to the saleswoman. That sounded okay.
“So, I’m out on time served? Back in your good graces?” I asked as I walked into my boss’s office.
Although “office” doesn’t really describe the space very well. “Museum” is more like it. Twenty years ago, Alexandra Fall – Alex to both her friends and her enemies – had inherited the office and all its contents from the previous Metro Editor, and she never updated or even moved anything that didn’t plug into a socket. The leftover furnishings were showing their age. But she did upgrade the electronics, mostly so she could watch sports. Televised sports are a constant in Alex’s life, a fact that confounds me because she is completely, happily sedentary. She has two televisions, and there is always a game on at least one screen, sometimes a different one on each. Today it is baseball. I can’t tell who is playing.
Alex looked me dead in the eye. “Maybe. For now, at least. No expensive hotels, and twenty column inches a day plus a photo. Take one of my cameras. And some better clothes.” She waved me toward her bookcase where there were three cameras and four lenses to choose from, then went back to staring at her computer screen.
I took my time selecting a camera and lens pairing, although I knew I would mostly use my phone. For some reason I wanted to linger. I hadn’t talked to Alex much since I was sent down to the basement, and I missed her. Not that I could tell her that straight up. That wasn’t our relationship, or my relationship with anyone, really.
“First, I don’t think there are any expensive hotels in or near Waynesville and second, even if there were, I’m out of there as soon as it’s over. Trials are dull as church.”
Alex snorted. “Fair enough.” Then she looked up with a sudden expression of radiant joy. She always looked like that when she thought of something important. Like a Madonna in a Renaissance painting. Which made sense when you realized that for her, work was a religion. For me, too, sometimes. But I operate in boom and bust cycles. Zeal, then burnout. Alex only has zeal. I don’t know how she keeps her energy up.
“Your swimming background should come in handy,” she said.
That was not the thought I expected. “How?” I asked.
“You were an athlete! Which Olympics did you swim in– 1992? I know, I know, but you still look like one, all 18 feet of you with your long muscles and short hair and hungry walk. The defendant is an athlete. Or was an athlete. Maybe someone will spill their guts to you. If there is anything to spill about. You’re kindred spirits!”
Having never played sports, Alex has a misguided view of athletes and their similarities. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about the way she saw me, either. Hungry walk?
“It has been a long time since I considered myself an athlete, and I was never a college athlete,” I said. “Basketball players and swimmers didn’t spend much time together, either.”
Alex made a noise that may or may not have been on purpose. “Don’t you athletes have some Spidey sense for character in other athletes?” She wiggled her fingers.
“Sure. Character comes through in how you practice, how you race, how you play a game. But I’m not watching Connor or his teammates play. I’m only covering a trial.” I did not want to go down this particular memory lane. Not today. Not ever.
Alex took a different tack. “Well, you’re from North Carolina. Doesn’t basketball run in your people’s blood?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“By ‘your people’ I mean North Carolina people. Tarheels. Not black people. Jesus Christ. This probation thing has made you sensitive.” Alex rolled her eyes. “Look, something just seems off about the way the pre-trial jousting is playing out. It’s more the fact that there is no jousting. The defense seems to be playing possum.” She acted that out, too, closing her eyes and tilting her head to the ceiling. “For a rich, white kid to have a do-nothing lawyer, that is weird. So, just see what you can dig up, if you’re not too rusty.”
Alex spent a year in law school before realizing she hated playing games that involved lying, and she learned a lot in that year. Still, I had to argue with her. Mostly because she expected it, and partly because I was bored.
“What is there to dig up about an entitled white, male athlete getting drunk and killing his girlfriend and a teammate who probably was a rival in every sense? Sounds like a near everyday occurrence to me,” I said.
“It isn’t, and you know that.”
I shrugged. “It’s still not a mystery. People kill each other all the time without anyone taking notice. Seriously, the kid played at a public Division III school that no powerful people around here went to or care about. There are no scholarships, no television contracts, no money. Nothing. And the dead girl wasn’t even blonde.”
Alex glared at me, and I ignored her. We all know that blonde girls get the most ink when they die; we just aren’t supposed to say it. But by not admitting it, we—the “media”— are part of the problem.
“You cannot have gotten that cynical,” was all she said. I shrugged, and then I pushed because I was curious. “But really, how does the trial deserve this many resources?”
“I’d rather overreact and be wrong than underreact and get scooped,” Alex said with finality. “Plus, I’m feeling flush, although you’re not that expensive. And look at the picture of the kid…. he looks so lost. Come on,” Alex turned her computer screen to me, “aren’t you curious about why he did it, even if he is guilty?”
I looked and shrugged again. “If I remember correctly from scanning the headlines over the past months, Connor has a history of out-of-control behavior and a father more concerned with money and golf. Oh, and he played a violent sport. The story is why nobody stopped him before two people died,” I argued, before I realized I was playing into her hand. Damnit.
“Then write that story. I don’t care. There is something here; we just have to find it. Where there is smoke, there is fire.”
I groaned.
“Okay, sorry about the cliché. But I need column inches, and I need them to be good. You need to shake the rust off too. You’ve been in the basement too long. And basketball is not a violent sport.”
“Hah! The way they throw their bodies around under the net? The refs are allowing more and more contact each year.”
“Aha! You do follow basketball.”
“I pay attention,” I admitted. “It is the birthright of ‘my people,’ after all.”
“There is no better state for basketball than North Carolina, historically speaking. I mean the 1982 and 1983 championships alone, two different schools just down the road—” Alex said, warming up for her lecture.
“You’re getting soft-hearted,” I said to ward her off.
“I just have a feeling. A nose for news,” she made a production worthy of community theatre out of pointing at her nose, and I had to shake my head in defeat.
Alex took my silence as unhappiness, which it wasn’t, really.
“Look Gale, you’ve got to know by now that this big game that we all play is just a life-size version of Whack-A- Mole. Sometimes you’re the whack and sometimes you’re the mole.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked in mock confusion. “Just try not to be the mole on my dime.” Alex smiled and waved me out. I saluted and turned to leave. “Oh,” she called to my back, “I can get you some film of Connor’s games, if that helps.”
“Maybe,” I said, not meaning it. This assignment is about a trial, not basketball. Why would I need to waste my time watching old games?
I arrived back at my desk just as Olivia was returning from lunch. Olivia is my best friend in the office and also my complete opposite –small and demure in her sweater sets and pearls. She is quiet and kind, but whip smart. I try to be kind, although it doesn’t always come naturally. My smarts are getting duller each year, too.
“What’s new?” Olivia asked as she sat down across from me. The newsroom desks are arranged in pairs that face a shared partition. We have all learned to talk without looking at each other. It was weird at first, then freeing in a way, like being in a church confessional. Although everything I know about that is from movies.
“I’ve got to go to Waynesville and cover Connor Braxton’s murder trial,” I said.
“Ugh. Better you than me. I don’t think I could stand listening to all that evidence. You know they say the scene was more Charles Manson than humiliated boyfriend. Not one and done, in other words.”
“Lovely. You know, you should stop reading that stuff.”
Olivia covers the education beat but likes to spend her spare time poking around the sleazier “news” sites for leaked tidbits whenever there is a grisly murder.
“I know. It’s a horrible habit. I have bad dreams.”
“Try drinking yourself to sleep. It has always worked for me!” I mimed throwing back a shot, an action I could do in my sleep back in college. But I have slowed down a good bit lately, which sometimes feels like all I have left to be proud of.
“Jerry’s from Waynesville, you know,” Olivia said. “Maybe when he gets back he can give you some tips.”
“I’ll take all the help I can get. Yeah, if you remember, tell him to call me. Wait—never mind. I’ll just leave a note on his desk.”
Jerry developed his personal communication system pre- voice-mail. He would grab whatever note was left for him, stuff it in his wallet, and then call you the next time he pulled his wallet out to buy something. His system would work until he lost his wallet. Which he did once a year. I was always happy to get his name in the office holiday gift exchange, and he was always happy to get a new wallet.
“When are you leaving?” Olivia asked. “Monday, I guess. The trial starts Tuesday.” “Okay. Have fun and bring me something.”
I laughed. Olivia gets out of town more than I do. “A bottle opener from some backroads truck stop?”
“Sounds perfect.” Olivia smiled and went back to work.
Having made peace with my fate, I figured I better get prepared. I clicked on the icon for the newspaper’s intranet and started looking into Conner Braxton, former star forward for the Blue Ridge University Knights and current accused double murderer. All I had to do was type his name in the search box, and for that modicum of effort, I received in return a beautiful list of 16 articles we had written about him. Most were about the murders, one covered a streak of great games he had two years ago, and one was about a vandalism incident when Connor was in high school. Another 37 mentioned the Braxton family name. A quick scan of those headlines revealed stories mostly about his father’s charity golf tournaments and business deals. Mr. Arthur Braxton hobnobbed with the rich and powerful.
Research is so easy now. Back in Seattle, in my early days as a cub reporter, we had to traipse down the back stairs to the morgue—our profession’s word for library—to look at actual clippings that the librarian had torn out of the actual paper, using a ruler to keep the edges neat. (At least we didn’t call the librarian the coroner.) Those clippings were then filed in manila envelopes that ended up in swinging metal bins that sat in rows in giant revolving motorized files the size of small Ferris wheels. There were four of them, one just for photos, and they took up an entire wall. You could hide an average sized human body in one of those rows of files.
The librarian, Martha, was a hoot. She was barely five feet, counting her high heels and hair, and she wore jewelry that weighed more than my arm. When the files jammed, Martha would take off her leather pumps, climb a ladder and thrust a broomstick handle into whatever row was out of place, stabbing the bin back into line. She always looked like she enjoyed the process. Even back then, newspaper budgets didn’t stretch to include repairmen.
I miss Martha and the morgue. I miss a lot of things from my past, come to think of it. Fat lot of good it does me to dwell on it, though.
I leaned back in my chair as far as it would go and started reading the twelve articles about the murder in the order they originally appeared. I learned that Olivia was right. The murders of Gina and Marcus were gruesome crimes. Both victims were stabbed to death and suffered multiple wounds. Connor was sitting in their blood when the police arrived. Gross.
The second story covered the events leading up to the killings. Fourteen months ago, on the Thursday before final exams in May 2015, all the Blue Ridge basketball players went out on the town. “It’s a tradition,” explained one of the players interviewed. I groaned. Traditions always bring trouble of one sort or another, in my experience. The team rented a bus, and just after noon started visiting all the bars within a twenty-mile radius of the campus. There were rules for what to drink where and prizes for completing the “goals,” as well as penalties for failing to keep up. The cheerleaders met them at the last bar as the icing on the cake. All good clean fun and not sexist at all.
Supposedly, Connor was far from the life of the party that night, which was out of character for him. People said he kept to himself and acted like something was eating him instead of taking his usual place right in the thick of everything. He went through the motions, they said, but without his customary zeal. Now, I tend to be suspicious of people’s descriptions of criminals or their victims after the fact. Their memories are tainted with what think they are supposed to have noticed or thought. Still, I filed that tidbit away to think about later. What made him feel or act out of sorts?
The school’s public relations office immediately labelled it an “alcohol fueled tragedy.” The administration promised to tighten regulations on student drinking. The coach – the legendary Haywood Ford - mourned publicly over losing two star players in such “an awful way.” Ugh. I hated the way he lumped killer and victim together, but I guess from his perspective, there were his players before they became killer and victim.
A couple of the photos accompanying the later stories said even more to me, though. Not about the crime, but about the killer. Or the accused as I would be calling him in writing. When I compared his mug shot and an old basketball team photo with a picture taken recently at a pre-trial hearing, it looked like Connor had lost something like sixty pounds in his fourteen months in jail. He looked diminished.
I filed that away too and went back to reading. I learned that the case was going to trial, despite the overwhelming evidence of Connor’s guilt because the prosecutor never took plea deals. She said her policy was that “the community should always have a say, that it shouldn’t be up to her.” Huh. Madison Kupchak, Esq. must either be an idealist or a publicity hound. Or not very busy. At the least, extremely unorthodox. But Waynes- ville was a strange place to be unorthodox, I thought.
Connor’s lawyer, Isaac Sutton, was another unorthodox piece of the puzzle. I could not find a single comment from him. Most defense lawyers would play the press, but not this one.
I was starting to see why Alex wanted boots on the ground. I still wished they didn’t have to be my boots.
I pushed the keyboard away and put my head on the desk. My traditional thinking pose. If the thinking got really heavy, I put a jacket or sweater over my head to block out the world. I have been known to use a box, too, in a pinch.
I tried to digest what I had read. The more I chewed over the situation, the more a lot of things didn’t make sense. Why did this rich kid have such a limp lawyer? Why had he lost so much weight? I rubbed my eyes and stretched and pulled up the next to last article. It was on courtroom renovations. Boring.
I grabbed my mug and took the last sip of the tepid brown liquid that was still trying to be coffee and forced my eyes back to the screen when my phone buzzed. Internal calls buzzed, external calls rang. It could only be Alex.
“Did you find Jerry?” I asked. “Nope –”
“Hey,” I said, interrupting. “I think I will take you up on the offer of looking at film of some of Connor’s games. It will at least give me something to do in my boring evenings.” I was getting sucked in, like I always do. It’s why I never have a life outside of work. Or it’s part of the reason.
“Roger that. I will have it sent up. We don’t have much, but some magic interns scrounged some last summer. I called because I need that piece on the Bay Bridge repair timetable before you go.” I was still working a little for Metro on the sly. No by-line, but I didn’t care. Alex did take care of me. She said she didn’t want me to get stale.
“Sure. Anything else?”
“Drive carefully,” Alex said and hung up.
