Ezra shrugged, visibly regretted it, and stepped back before Clay buttoned him all the way into his collar. He grabbed the jacket from the back of the door and pulled it over one arm, the other side left draped over his shoulder.
“Yeah, and that’s why I’m divorced,” Ezra said. “I have kids twice a week, a dog when Janet doesn’t want it to see her hooking up, and I’ve never scared them. None of them flinch if they break something or slam the door. If they get scared at night, they come in and jump in bed with me without worrying I’ll slap ’em into a wall. That’s worth not being as sharp as I used to be.”
He held up his field-bandaged hand and turned it over to check it from all sides.
“Most of the time,” he added with a grimace.
They headed toward the back door. Clay got there first and unlocked it. He nudged it open with his shoulder.
“You’re getting old, too,” he said as Ezra stepped past him. “Can’t forget that.”
Ezra gave him a dirty look. “Shut up and get in the car,” he said. “You’re going to have to drive.”
He clumsily pulled the keys from his pocket and tossed them to Clay, who grabbed them out of the air before they hit him in the chest.
“Who first?” he asked. “Hawes or Verne?”
It had to be one or the other. Lawyer or private investigator. Everyone else on the payroll was more of a blunt instrument.
“You heard me,” Ezra said as he gingerly pulled himself into the passenger seat of the Range Rover. “Between Fisher and the fact she’s a judge, there’s not much we can do to Charity unless we can take one—preferably both—of those things away. So Hawes first. She said she’d meet us at the Slap. Besides, Verne isn’t answering his fucking phone.”
***
“Charity Parker,” Vera Hawes said as she got up from behind Ezra’s desk to give him his seat back. She was sixty years old and six feet tall, her hair cut in a sedate bob and dyed what she liked to call fuck-you fuchsia. Her legal career had started at twenty-one, took a thirty-year hiatus, and then she’d picked it up again after her husband killed himself rather than be convicted of money laundering. About the same time that Ezra and Clay had needed civilian legal counsel for the first time. She wasn’t the best lawyer in the world, but she didn’t have to be. If she couldn’t find dirt on someone, it was because she already knew it. “Your enemies are coming up in the world.”
“What can I say,” Ezra said as he lowered himself into the leather chair with a wince. “I’m a social climber.”
She snorted and walked over to the drinks cabinet.
“You look like you need this,” she said as she got out a bottle of whiskey. She poured a glass and then turned around to use it to gesture at Ezra. “Don’t suppose there’s any chance the cops beat the shit out of you after an illegal traffic stop?”
Clay grabbed a chair from the corner of the room and pulled it up to the desk.
“He wasn’t driving,” he said.
Vera looked at him and sniffed. “So the stop would have been righteous,” she said as she handed the whiskey to Ezra. That was fair enough; Clay could admit that. “Come on, boys. You know all I want in life is to be an ambulance chaser. Criminal law is a pain in the ass.”
Ezra sat back.
“No crimes have been committed—”
“That you have to know about,” Clay added as he sprawled out in the chair, his feet kicked up onto Ezra’s desk.
“All we need to know is what we asked you about. Any dirt on Charity and any connection between her and Melanie Ledger,” Ezra said. He nodded to Clay’s feet. “And if you push his fucking feet off my desk, I’ll give you a bonus.”
Vera grabbed hold of Clay’s jeans, down near his shins, and lifted his feet off the desk. She let them drop to the floor—with a thunk that Clay felt in his ankles—and brushed the spot on the desk off so she could perch her hip on it.
“It would have saved time,” she said, “if you’d told me that was one and the same thing. Melanie Ledger was fired two years ago because the district attorney wanted the press to shut the fuck up about the whole jailhouse informant scandal that had blown up.”
Clay hung his arm over the back of the chair. “We got that from the news.”
“It was bullshit,” Vera said. “My bestie in the DA’s office says that everyone knew it. Ledger was a solid DA, but she didn’t make any waves and never showed any spark. A workhorse, every office needs them. Right? Up until she was in court before Judge Parker, prosecuting some guy for beating the living shit out of his own mother. Parker threw every roadblock she could into the prosecution: Disallowed witnesses, upheld theflimsiestobjection from the other side, and pushed for Ledger to offer mom-beater a deal.”
“Who was the kid?” Clay asked.
“Why? So you can give him a slap if you meet him?” Vera asked. “Feel free. Tomas Grannick.”
Clay hesitated for a second as he tried to place the name. Then he gave it up as a bad job—his brain hated logging names of people he needed to remember, so he wasn’t going to remember some random kid—and looked over at Ezra.
