A Matter of Life and Death by Phillip Margolin (ereader with dictionary TXT) 📕

“Lattimore is charged with killing Judge Carasco’s wife?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Attorney-client.”

“So, you do represent him?”

“Let me talk to Mr. Lattimore. I’ll tell you if I’ll take the case after I meet with him.”

The Multnomah County jail was on the fourth through tenth floors of the Justice Center, a modern, sixteen-story building in downtown Portland that was separated from the courthouse by a park. When Robin got out of the jail elevator, she found herself in a narrow concrete hall. She pressed the button on an intercom that was affixed to the wall next to a thick metal door that sealed the elevators from the area where defendants were housed in the jail.

After a short wait, Robin heard electronic locks snapping in place, and the door was opened by a corrections officer. The guard led her into another narrow hallway that ran in front of three contact visiting rooms that she could see into through large, shatterproof windows. The guard opened the steel door for the first visiting room, and Robin entered a concrete rectangle whose sole furnishings were two molded plastic chairs and a table that was secured to the floor by metal bolts.

Moments after Robin sat down, a second door on the wall opposite the window opened, and a guard escorted Joseph Lattimore into the contact visiting room. Lattimore was wearing a loose-fitting jail-issued orange jumpsuit. His shoulders slumped, and he looked at the floor when the guard guided him onto his chair. As soon as the guard left, Lattimore raised his head. He looked exhausted.

“I didn’t kill her,” he blurted out. “She was dead when I got there.”

Robin held up her hand. “Stop! I’m not your attorney, Joe. All I did was answer a question for you.”

“You’ve got to help me,” he pleaded. “I was set up.”

“You have a public defender. I know her. She’s experienced. She’ll do a good job.”

“I don’t want someone who’ll ‘do a good job.’ Maria and the baby have no one but me. If I’m convicted…”

Joe shook his head back and forth slowly.

“This was planned. Getting me to that house…” There were tears in Joe’s eyes. “They knew I was desperate. You have to hear me out. Once you understand what they did, you’ll see that you have to help me.”

Robin studied Lattimore. He sounded hopeless. More important, he sounded like he might be telling the truth.

“I’ll listen to what you have to say, but I’m not promising to represent you. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah. I get it. I’m sorry. I have no right to ask you to do this. You have big clients—important people with money. I’m broke. I don’t have anything to offer you. But I didn’t kill that woman. I was set up.”

Robin sighed. She had never been drawn to the practice of law for the money. Helping people motivated her, and anyone accused of killing the wife of a judge would need a lot of help.

“Talk.”

“Remember I told you about the illegal fight?”

Robin nodded.

“What you don’t know is what happened after I … after I killed the man I fought.”

“Let’s do this in order. Start at the beginning.”

“Okay. I was running to keep in shape when this guy passed me in a car. A little bit later, I saw the car again, and the man was standing beside it. He said that his name was Sal, and he knew I was a boxer. He asked if I wanted to make some money by fighting in a no-holds-barred fight. He said I could make three hundred dollars for a few minutes’ work. I was almost broke, and we needed the money, so I said I was in.

“The night of the fight, I was picked up in a van. There were other people in the van. We drove for about an hour. When we stopped, we were in the country at a farm.

“The fight was in a barn, and there was a big crowd. Everyone was gambling. When we got inside, the guy who seemed to be running the show had us write down our first names. Then he paired us up. He said that winners were paid and losers got nothing. He also told us to make the fight bloody.”

Joe stopped for a moment as an unbidden image of Carlos’s ruined face crept into his head.

“Are you okay?” Robin asked.

“No. I can’t forget Carlos, the guy I killed.”

“Was he one of the people who rode to the fight in the van?”

“No. They brought him out of a room in the back of the barn. I thought that was strange.”

Joe paused again and shook his head in an attempt to get rid of the vivid, blood-soaked image.

“I’ve thought about the fight over and over. Something was wrong with Carlos. He was old and so slow. It was easy to hit him, and I could see his punches coming from a mile away. I think he was drugged. I’m sure that’s why it was so easy for me to hurt him.”

Joe stopped again. He took a deep breath.

“I got carried away, Ms. Lockwood. I needed the money to get Maria and the baby somewhere safe. I couldn’t afford to lose, so I kept on hitting him, but as soon as I realized how bad I’d hurt Carlos, I yelled for a doctor. The guy who ran the fight told the crowd to leave. I wanted to stay and see if Carlos was okay, but he gave me an envelope with money and hustled me out. The guy who drove me to the barn was waiting outside with the van. We’d been staying in a tent city. He drove me there after the fight.”

“Did you get the driver’s name?”

“No. I didn’t get anyone’s name, except for Sal’s, who refereed the fights.”

“Okay, go on.”

“When we stopped, the driver told me they had a recording of me killing Carlos and they’d give it to the cops with the location of the body