“You’ll have our letters in the morning.”
“We’d prefer to have Drew’s tonight.”
I hung up on him.
While I drove along in a funk, Caitlin called me from Boston. Apparently, a reporter for the Natchez Examiner had called her and delivered a summation of the rumors spreading across town. Caitlin was stunned that I was being mentioned as Drew Elliot’s lawyer. She knows Drew, but only superficially, and she has no special reason to believe he’s innocent of the crimes being attributed to him.
“Exactly when were you going to tell me you were representing Drew?” she asked. “Or were you going to tell me at all?”
“I’m not sure I’m going to represent him.”
“I thought you didn’t practice anymore.”
“Drew is a lifelong friend, and he needs help. Right now, I’m acting primarily as a friend.” This wasn’t strictly true, but I’ve been deceiving myself as well as Caitlin about that. “When I see how this develops, I’ll make a decision about the legal side of things.”
“Penn, why didn’t you tell me about all this last night?”
Caitlin sounded hurt, but she hasn’t been very communicative to me about her recent situation either. “I couldn’t get you on the phone last night. You were at your party.”
“You could have called me this morning.”
“Yes, but you already had reporters working the story. You may even end up working it yourself.”
“We’ve been in that situation before, and we handled it fine.”
“But not without tension.”
A little laugh. “Tension’s okay. We can live with tension. It’s deception we can’t live with.”
“I agree.”
More silence. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just agreed with you.”
“You had a tone.”
“No tone. Look, things are breaking fast on this. I’ll call you tonight and give you a better idea of where I stand, okay?”
Her sigh told me she was far from happy with this arrangement. “Did Drew kill her, Penn? I’m asking as your lover, not a journalist.”
“You know I can’t answer that. Even if I knew the answer.”
“But he was involved with her?”
“You won’t report my answer?”
“No.”
“Yes. He was in love with her. But I don’t think he killed her.”
“Classic midlife crisis?”
“I don’t think it’s that simple. Drew says he and Ellen have been living a charade for ten years. He was starved for affection, and he finally found exactly what he was missing. And now here we are.”
“What about the two semen samples—”
“No more,” I cut in. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”
“I love you,” Caitlin said after an awkward silence.
“You too.”
When Annie gets into the car, I set my phone on silent. I also keep quiet about the fact that I’ve spoken to Caitlin. Annie would want to call her back immediately, and I don’t want to deal with that right now. Annie says she needs to go to Walgreen’s for some school supplies, so we make a run to the drugstore, one of my few sources in town for iced green tea. By the time we get home, my phone shows eight missed calls. While I scroll through the list, an incoming call pops up. It’s from Sonny Cross, a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics. Sonny has two young boys at St. Stephen’s, and through me, he’s spoken to the board a few times about Marko Bakic, our Croatian exchange student. Sonny suspects that Marko has gotten involved in the local drug trade, but so far he’s been unable to prove it.
“Sonny,” I say. “What’s up?”
“I’m calling to give you a heads-up,” Cross says in his laid-back, urban-cowboy voice.
“Marko Bakic again?”
“Among other things. Last night there was a big party out at Lake St. John. A rave. There was a lot of X there, and a lot of St. Stephen’s kids, too.”
Lake St. John is a horseshoe lake about thirty miles up the Mississippi River, on the Louisiana side. It’s thronged with Natchez natives in the summer, but this time of year, most of the lake houses are deserted.
“Was it only St. Stephen’s kids?”
“No, thank God. The Catholic school and the Baptist boys were well represented.”
“Did you bust the party?”
“No. We didn’t find out about it until it was over. Whoever organized it did just what they do in the cities. The kids get word over their cell phones to go to such and such a place. When they get there, they find a sheet of paper taped to a pole with a coded message, a rhyme only the kids will understand. After they get led around to four or five different spots, they know where the rave is, and they know whether they’re being followed or not.”
“I know the routine.”
“Word is, these raves have been going on for a couple of months now. Different location every time. And I’m hearing our boy Marko is behind them.”
“Great.”
“Yeah. You know, most of the X in Mississippi gets brought up from the Gulf Coast. The Asian gangs down there control the trade. And Marko’s been down to Gulfport and Biloxi a couple of times that I know about. I wanted you to know we’re going to be stepping up surveillance on him.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I just want to try to minimize the damage to St. Stephen’s if we have to take Marko down. You know, once you get X into a community, you usually get LSD, too. It tends to be cooked and sold by the same crews. One of my sources said some kids may have been doing acid last night at the lake party. And check this, Marko bought out a roadside fireworks stand and put on a psychedelic show at the end of the night. Sailed out on a party barge and let off five grand worth of rockets.”
“Sorry I missed it. But where does a poor exchange student get the money to do that?”
“That’s no mystery, bubba. It’s proving it that’s the bitch.”
“Hey, do you know where Marko was yesterday between three and five-thirty?”
Sonny Cross laughs darkly. “Already thought of that, my man. Checked it out, too. Marko was with Coach Anders from three until nearly six.”
“At
