Heat Wave (21 page)

The students seemed stunned. Her question
was met first with silence, then with a low rumble of murmurs,
which were abruptly punctuated by a shout from Tommy Lynch, of all
people: “What, are you joking? We don’t want a sub! We’ll all flunk
the frickin’ final if you don’t do the review with us.”

His outburst was greeted by a chorus of
support: “No sub! We want Ms. Benoit!”

Tears sprang to her eyes, the first tears
she’d shed since that afternoon in Caleb’s office. She remembered
his producing a box of tissues, and being startled to learn that
she carried a linen handkerchief. They’d gone to the Faulk Street
Tavern. “Heat Wave” had played.

Unlike that afternoon in his office, though,
these were happy tears. Her students—led by Tommy Lynch, of all
people, the punk who’d mocked her last Friday—still respected her.
Or at the very least, they wanted to score high on their English
final, and they knew their odds were better if she prepared them
for it. Whether out of admiration for her or for their own selfish
reasons, they were willing to stand up to the principal on her
behalf.

He scowled at the students, then at her.
“See me after class, then,” he barked before storming out of the
room.

He hadn’t specified
after
which
class.
She’d see him after her last class if she had to. But she would
take care of her students first. All of them, all day
long.

The rest of her first-period class went
fine. The students actually seemed more engaged than usual. Some
called out jokes and snarky comments, but none of them mentioned
breasts or any crass nicknames for that part of a woman’s anatomy.
Her second-period class also went relatively smoothly. She had a
break after that class, but she didn’t dare to leave her classroom,
on the chance that Stuart might be lurking just outside the door,
ready to clamp a hand around her arm and drag her to his
office.

Instead, she pulled out her cell phone,
thinking she ought to leave a message for Reuben Martinez. And
perhaps one for Henry, letting him know she was still standing,
although feeling as wrung out as a rag rolled through a mangle.

As soon as she turned on her phone, her
message light blinked. She clicked into voice mail and summoned the
message. “Ms. Benoit? It’s Ed Nolan from the Brogan’s Point P.D. We
chatted yesterday at the Faulk Street Tavern. I stopped by the
Community Center after our chat and asked Nick Fiore to talk to
some of the high school kids who participate in his programs there,
to see if he could get a hold of that video. He contacted me this
morning and said he’s got it. If you want to access it, give him a
call.” Ed Nolan recited a phone number and concluded the call,
“Good luck. Let me know if you need any further help with
this.”

She lowered herself to her chair, staring at
the phone, wondering if she had the strength to watch the video.
For some reason, viewing it struck her as more frightening than
standing up to Stuart Kezerian.

A deep breath. Another deep breath. And then
she punched in the number Ed Nolan had provided.

“You’re wrong. I never said any of those
things,” Jerry Felton declared.

He sat across from Caleb in the sauna-like
enclosure of Caleb’s office. A repairman was working on the air
conditioning, or else practicing for a drum audition. Caleb
couldn’t tell where the constant thumping and banging were coming
from—through the walls, through the ceiling, through the floor. The
AC ducts distorted the sound, sometimes magnifying and sometimes
muffling it.

It was the sound of potential comfort, a
cacophony that promised cooler air. Caleb tried to convince himself
he welcomed the noise.

He supposed he could have met Felton
somewhere else. But if he’d suggested that, Felton might have
chosen the Faulk Street Tavern again, and then he might have
started drinking. At ten-thirty in the morning.

The dickhead had interrupted
Caleb’s night with Meredith. And he
had
said all of those things—about
having embezzled the money, about supporting a girlfriend and their
baby, about setting up Sheila Valenti to take the blame for his own
criminality. About how he’d accidentally deposited some of the
stolen money in the wrong bank account, and that deposit had been
the red flag Blanche Larson had spotted in her audit of Felton’s
finances.

After Felton’s phone call last night, Caleb
had managed to drop back to sleep, his body wrapped snugly around
Meredith’s, his mind struggling to return to the post-coital peace
he’d been enjoying. Unfortunately, his dreams hadn’t been of
Meredith. They’d been lawyer dreams. Dreams of dickhead Jerry
Felton. Dreams of finding a strategy that would avoid a conviction,
even though the guy was guilty, guilty, guilty.

The greatest satisfaction in being a defense
attorney came not from seeing justice done but from getting a
client acquitted. Innocent or guilty, a good defense attorney lived
for that acquittal. And Caleb was one of the best.

Was Jerry Felton worth the
fight? Either he’d lied to Caleb when he was drunk last
night—unlikely,
in vino veritas
and all that—or he was lying now. He stared at
Caleb across the desk, once again clean-shaven, his upper lip
glistening with perspiration and his eyes bloodshot but steady. “I
don’t even remember calling you last night,” he said.

“Do you want me to show you the call queue
on my cell phone? You called. You told me you’ve got a sweetheart
and a little love child in Somerville, and you stole the pension
funds to cover her living expenses. If you want me to defend you,
Jerry, you’ve got to tell me the truth. Forget about whether it
comes out in court. Forget about whether your wife finds out about
it. I am your attorney. If you want me to do the best job I can for
you, you have to be honest with me.”

Thump thump
thump
. The damned repair guy sounded as if
he was wielding a maul directly above Caleb’s head. Through the
banging, he and Felton stared at each other. Caleb waited for
Felton to blink.

After a few long seconds, he did. “You
promised you’d get me off.”

“I promised to defend you to the best of my
ability. And I will, Jerry. It’s what I do. I don’t know if I can
get the charges against you thrown out. You can’t let Sheila
Valenti go to prison for your crimes.”

“Why not? She’s a nosy bitch. If she’d just
minded her own business, no one would have ever noticed the missing
money.”

“Her business was to keep
track of the town’s money. She
was
minding her business when she discovered that
funds were missing.” Caleb sighed. “If your case goes to trial, I
can’t allow you to get on the stand and testify that you didn’t do
it. That’s called suborning perjury.”

“I don’t care what you call
it. I’m not announcing to the court that I
did
do it.”

“Well, we’ve got some other options. One
option is to negotiate a plea bargain with the district
attorney.”

“That’s the same as announcing to the court
that I did it.”

“We could avoid court altogether that way.
We could negotiate a sentence you could live with. No jail time.
Restitution. Maybe a small fine.”

“What restitution?” Despite
his improved grooming, Felton looked half-mad, his bleary eyes
glinting with rage and fear. “If I had enough money, I wouldn’t
have taken the pension money in the first place. I took it because
I
needed
money
. Because I
didn’t
have
money
.”

Caleb bit his lips before retorting that he
wasn’t an idiot and Felton shouldn’t speak to him as if he was.
“You stole it, Jerry. If we negotiate a plea bargain, restitution
is going to be a part of it.”

“I can’t.” His eyes lost their vivid rage
and grew glassy with tears. “If I do that, my wife will find out.
My kids. I’ll be ruined.”

You’re already ruined,
Bozo
. “If you haven’t got the money to make
restitution, you might be able to declare bankruptcy. I can have
Niall handle that. He’s our expert at bankruptcy filings. As for
your wife, well, you’ve gotten yourself into an untenable position.
It couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, your wife was going to
find out about your other family in Somerville.”

“I was thinking, she might die first,” Jerry
said, the tears spilling over his lids and skittering down his
cheeks. For a moment, Caleb believed he was weeping over the
thought of his wife’s death. Then it occurred to him that, had the
shit not hit the fan when it had, Jerry might have hastened poor
Mrs. Felton’s death. Then Caleb could have had the pleasure of
defending the SOB for murder as well as embezzlement.

“Heather is our divorce specialist,” he told
Felton. “She might be able to help you resolve things with your
wife—if it comes to that. But first things first. We have to deal
with the embezzlement charge. If you don’t want to consider a plea
bargain, we go to trial.” Observing the increasing velocity of
Felton’s tears, Caleb pulled the box of tissues from his desk
drawer and placed it within Felton’s reach. He doubted the guy
carried a classy linen handkerchief like Meredith. “I can keep you
off the stand. You won’t have to say anything in court. But I can’t
keep Blanche Larson off the stand. I can’t keep your financial
records from being entered as evidence. For all I know, the
district attorney will locate your sweetheart in Somerville. It’s
really hard to keep something like that a secret, especially when
he’s got investigators on his staff who are looking into every nook
and cranny of your life.”

Felton helped himself to a tissue, wiped his
cheeks, and blew his nose with a loud honk. “It’s all gonna come
crashing down, isn’t it.”

Caleb nodded. “Our goal is to minimize that
crash. Minimize your guilt. Minimize your punishment. I can go to
the district attorney and say you were a man made irrational by
love. You needed and wanted to take care of this child, you were
desperate, and a desperate man commits desperate acts. You never
intended to commit a crime. You weren’t taking the money to line
your own pockets, to buy fancy cars and a vacation house in Tahiti.
Your only thought was for that precious little baby in Somerville.
You acknowledge what you did was wrong, and you’re throwing
yourself on the mercy of the justice system to give you a chance to
make things right.”

“And they’ll let me off?” Felton asked
hopefully.

Of course not, you
dipwad.
“I think it’s your best option. We
present mitigating factors. We show you’re a decent guy at heart
who made a terrible mistake which you regret with every fiber of
your being. The court may show clemency.”

He sniffled a bit, mopped his cheeks again,
and nodded. “Let me think about it,” he said.

“Fine. Give it some thought and get back to
me.”

Rising, Felton plucked a wad of tissues from
the box and stuffed them into a pocket. If he was too broke to buy
his own tissues, Caleb wouldn’t begrudge him.

He waited until Felton was gone before
buzzing Megan. “Can you set up a meeting with all three partners
and Annie?” he requested. “We need to discuss the Felton case.”

“It’ll have to be this afternoon,” she
informed him. “Niall’s in court all morning.”

“This afternoon is fine.”

“Is Mr. Felton okay? He looked pretty
upset.”

“He’s facing reality. In his case, reality
is pretty ugly. I’ll talk to you later.” He had other people to
talk to first, starting with Blanche. But the person he really
wanted to talk to was Meredith.

Waking up with her had not been as much fun
as sleeping with her, but it hadn’t been bad. She’d been a bit of a
grouch, but at five a.m., she was entitled not to be at her
Southern-charm best. He wished she hadn’t felt the need to get
dressed in the bathroom—they’d spent the night naked, after all—but
maybe she was a little bashful. Maybe they needed to spend a few
more nights together before she felt as willing to dress in front
of him as she’d been to undress.

Forget a few more nights. He wanted to spend
many, many more nights with her.

He lifted his cell and punched her number.
Two rings, and he was diverted to her voice mail. She must keep her
phone turned off while she was teaching—and damn, but he hoped she
was teaching, and not expelled from the school building like an
out-of-control student. Or trapped in the principal’s office,
muzzled and tied to a chair.

“Hey,” he said into the phone. “It’s me. I
hope your day is going better than mine. Give me a call when you
have a chance. ’Bye.”

Above him—or maybe below him—the AC
repairman started banging again. Caleb was tempted to find the guy,
ask to borrow his hammer, and bang a few things himself. Instead,
he dialed Blanche’s number, figuring he might as well find out what
other bad news she had for him.

***

Some people might not recognize him. But
Meredith did. She heard a snippet of his voice in the grainy video,
laughing as she leaped to her feet, her breasts in full view as she
charged after him. Although the camera remained mostly on her as
she charged across the sand, there were glimpses of him. She
recognized his gait. She recognized his dark hair and the braided
leather bracelet he wore around his wrist. She recognized his blue
duckbill cap, with Colby printed above the visor. He’d been wearing
it ever since he got accepted to Colby College.

And it broke her heart.

She survived the rest of the school day by
concentrating on everything that made her a teacher: her love of
the subject matter, her devotion to her students, her desire to
help them survive the ordeal of their final exams. Twice during the
day, she glimpsed Stuart spying on her through the sidelight window
beside her classroom door, but he didn’t dare to enter the room. He
probably didn’t want to get outshouted by her loyal pupils a second
time.