Smooth-Talking Texan Page 2

  Quinn nodded. “Well, take Benny back to his cell when he’s through talking to the lady. I imagine we’ll have to release him after that, but I’ll give Ms. Mendoza a chance to tell me off first. She looks like she’s bustin’ to do that. I’ll be in my office.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  Quinn strode back through the maze of hallways and stairs to his office. Most of his staff, he found, were sitting waiting for him in the outer office, faces turned expectantly toward the door. He walked in and raised his eyebrows exaggeratedly.

  “What’s this? All the crime in this county’s been settled? You folks need something more to do?”

  With a martyred sigh, his secretary turned back to her desk and the others scattered.

  “Say, Ruben…” Quinn stopped him as he walked back toward his desk. “Come into my office.”

  Ruben followed him and closed the door behind him. “Hargrove’s right, for once,” he said with a grin, turning to face Quinn. “She is a looker.”

  “Yeah, she’s a looker,” Quinn admitted, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “Don’t think she’s too happy with me at the moment, though.”

  Ruben grinned with a noticeable lack of sympathy.

  “Do you know if Benny has any cousins named Enrique Garza?” he asked the deputy, who had lived all his life in the small town of Angel Eye.

  “Garza?” Deputy Padilla looked doubtful. “I don’t think Benny’s related to any Garzas. ’Course, I don’t know that much about his real dad’s family. Why?”

  “Because that attorney told him that his cousin had hired her, and he looked like he about swallowed his tongue, and he said, ‘Julio?”

  “Julio?” Ruben repeated and began to laugh. “Julio Fuentes? My three-year-old’s about as likely to find an attorney and hire her as Julio Fuentes.”

  “That was the impression I got from Benny’s expression. But then Ms. Mendoza told him that his cousin Enrique Garza had hired her. Benny recognized the name; I could see that. But he got this funny look on his face…You know anybody at all named that? Related to Benny or not?”

  “Off the top of my head, no. But there are lots of Garzas. Could be from Hammond or someplace else, too.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m going to call Señora Fuentes and see if she knows who he is and what relation he is to her grandson.”

  “You think Señora Fuentes knows about that attorney?”

  “My guess would be no.” Quinn smiled ruefully. “I expect she’s going to give me holy hell about letting Benny go, too.”

  “Better you than me,” Ruben replied, grinning. “I used to get enough of that for cutting across her lawn when I was a kid.”

  “Listen, check around. See if you can find anything out about this guy Garza.”

  “Sure. You think it’s somebody involved in what’s going on at old man Rodriguez’s place?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “You think Ms. Mendoza’s connected with them?”

  “I don’t know.” Quinn frowned. “They hired her, if I’m right, but that ‘cousin’ stuff—I’m guessing she doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.”

  Quinn didn’t want to admit, even to himself, how intensely he hoped that was true.

  “He arrested you because you had a broken taillight?” Lisa asked, amazement sending her voice soaring upward.

  “Well, no, not exactly. I mean, that’s why he stopped me. Then he looked at my license and walked around the car and all. Asked me questions.”

  “Questions? About what?”

  Benny shrugged, not looking at her. “Oh, you know. Where I been and who I was hanging out with.” He raised his eyes to meet hers. “Just general kind of sh—stuff, you know, like cops do. And he said a car like mine had been seen, you know…”

  “Seen? What do you mean? Seen where?”

  Benny frowned. “I’m not sure. He didn’t say exactly. I—he was kinda holding out on me, you know, like, waiting for me to say something I shouldn’t.”

  “Okay. What do you think he was wanting you to say?”

  Benny shrugged elaborately. “I don’t know.”

  Lisa had the feeling that her client, if not precisely lying to her, was at least possessed of more knowledge than he was letting on to her. It didn’t surprise her. One canon of criminal law that she had had drummed into her in law school was this: Your client always lies. She had experienced it herself with her clients, and not only in the criminal cases she had had. All clients wanted to present their best case to their attorney, even if it meant hiding a few things that would later sabotage their case. She wasn’t sure how much of it was sheer denial, the hope that if they hid the negative things from their attorney, they wouldn’t really exist, and how much of it was the simple human desire to look good in the eyes of their new ally. Whatever it was, it all too often backfired. But no matter how many times she warned them, it was rare that some little lie didn’t surface at some point during a case to muddy it up.

  She started to press Benny about it but decided to let it slide. Whatever Benny was concealing, it wasn’t really the point. What mattered was that Sheriff Sutton had hauled Benny off to jail.

  “So—when you didn’t say whatever he was hoping you would say, what happened?”

  “Finally he told me he was gonna have to take me down to his office.”

  “Did he say why?”

  Benny shrugged again. “I don’t know. ’Cause I wasn’t telling him anything.”

  “Is that what he said? Specifically?”

  Benny frowned, concentrating. “I don’t remember exactly what he said. I think he said he wanted to ask me some questions, and, oh, yeah, he made me get out of the car, and there was this beer can on the floor, and he picked it up and asked me if I’d been drinking. And I said, no, ’cause I hadn’t.”

  “Did he give you a test? Breathalyzer, walking straight, anything?”

  “Nah. He knew I wasn’t drunk. Only there was some beer still in the can, see, and so he was saying I was a minor in possession, like that.” Benny shrugged. “It wasn’t even my beer can. Julio left it in my car the day before, but…”

  “So he took you to jail on an MIP—a minor in possession?”

  “I guess. I mean, we both knew he was just jacking me.” Benny seemed unmoved by the thought—accepting, Lisa assumed, that getting hassled by the law was simply a fact of life.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Benny repeated what seemed to be his favorite phrase, even when offering up what he obviously did know in the next sentence. “’Cause I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. He wanted to grill me.”

  “And did he?”

  “He took me into his office and asked me a bunch of questions and then he had Padilla lock me up.” He grimaced. “Probably hoping I’d tell that cabron something just because he’s Chicano.” He followed this statement with a Spanish word that Lisa did not recognize but the derogatory intent of which was clear.

  “And when did this happen?”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  “So you’ve been here ever since? Were you arraigned? Taken into court for a hearing?”

  He shook his head. “I ain’t been nowhere but my cell.”

  “What did he tell you he was charging you with?”

  “I don’t know. MIP, I guess. He said he was going to let me think about it and then we’d talk some more.” His lip curled expressively. “Trying to scare me.”

  “Did he hit you?” Lisa asked. “Hurt you in any way? Threaten you with bodily harm?”

  The teenager looked at her in faint surprise. “Nah. He’s not like that. He’s okay, most of the time.” He paused, then added, “He’s just…you know, playing his game. And I’m playing mine.”

  Lisa sighed. This was not the first time she had encountered this attitude of being locked with the police in some sort of elaborate game, the rules and movements of which were known to her clients and the cops. Benny had his game face on, the blank mask
that withheld emotions, giving nothing away. She had seen it on a hundred faces of young men, black, white, and Latino, when she had worked at the Dallas Public Defenders office the last summer of law school.

  “You know, Benny, this is a game where he holds most of the cards,” she pointed out. “The best thing for you to do is not play. Just clam up and call for your attorney next time. Will you do that? Will you call me?”

  He nodded. “You gonna get me out of here?”

  “Yes. When we get through here, I’ll have a talk with the sheriff. He knows he doesn’t have enough to hold you here. And if he refuses to release you, then I’ll get a writ and go to court.”

  Lisa stood up, picking up the pad on which she had taken a few notes and sticking it back into her briefcase. She shook Benny’s hand and went to the door. The deputy opened it and escorted her through the set of locked doors back into the courthouse.

  She walked purposefully up the stairs and though the halls, getting lost once, but finding her way back to the wide central hall of the main part of the courthouse. She wondered if the sheriff had led her the most confusing way on purpose.

  Her heels clacked briskly on the old granite floors as she headed toward the sheriff’s office. She was sure that everyone along the corridor would know that she was coming. She turned into the large outer office, where the secretary and two deputies were at their desks, seemingly busy about tasks, but she could feel their sideways glances as she marched through and into the inner office of the sheriff, not pausing or even glancing at his secretary for permission.

  Mindful of the listening ears outside, she closed the door behind her. She didn’t want the sheriff’s employees to hear what she had to say to him—not out of any concern about embarrassing the sheriff, but because she was well aware that the knowledge that his people were listening would make it harder for the sheriff to back down and might result in his refusing to release Benny simply because of the loss of face.

  Quinn Sutton rose from his seat behind the desk. Lisa was reminded all over again of how tall and overwhelmingly masculine the sheriff was. She quelled the involuntary response of her own body to that masculinity.

  “Ms. Mendoza.” Sutton smiled in that cocky way that she found both profoundly irritating and annoyingly charming. “Have a seat.” He gestured toward the chair in front of his desk.

  “This won’t take long.” Lisa was not about to let her guard down around this man, even to the extent of relaxing enough to sit. “I just came here to tell you that I want my client released immediately. You know, and I know, that you arrested him on the flimsiest of pretexts and brought him down here, where you have been holding him without arraignment for two days now.”

  “Well, yesterday was Sunday,” he pointed out, and amusement lit his mahogany-brown eyes.

  Lisa’s hand clenched tighter around the handle of her briefcase. “Yes, and today was Monday, and you still didn’t arraign him. You may find it amusing to hold a young man without reason for the weekend in the county jail, but I can assure you that I do not. First you stop him, no doubt doing a little racial profiling…then—”

  Quinn grimaced. “Oh, come on, don’t go throwing around your big-city buzzwords in here. There was no racial profiling going on.”

  “Then,” Lisa plowed ahead, ignoring his words, “you harass him, even though he had done nothing except have a broken taillight, making him get out of the car. You find an empty beer can in his car, which you had no right to search—”

  “I didn’t search,” Quinn responded tightly. “It was in plain view on the floor. And it wasn’t empty.”

  “Oh, right,” Lisa replied sarcastically. “It had, what, maybe a teaspoon of liquid in it? On the basis of that, you hauled him down to the jail. When was the last time you took a kid to jail for an MIP instead of just writing him a citation?”

  “Last weekend,” he responded, crossing his arms across his chest. “This isn’t the big city, Miss Mendoza, and I take underage drinking seriously. My deputies and I don’t write a drunken teenager a citation and turn him loose on the road. I find it’s pretty effective with an MIP or DUI to have them come down to the jail and spend a while waiting for their parents to pick them up.”

  Lisa hesitated, momentarily nonplussed by his response, then picked up on his last statement. “Benny Hernandez has been here quite a bit longer than a ‘while.’ Why weren’t his parents called to come pick him up?”

  “Because his father skipped out before Benny was born, his mother’s in San Antonio living with her new boyfriend and his stepfather’s in prison in Huntsville.”

  “Oh, I see. That makes Benny automatically a criminal, right? He’s got a crummy homelife, so the place for him is jail? His family is bad, so he is, too?” Lisa’s eyes snapped, and her body was stiff with anger.

  Quinn Sutton’s eyes lit with an answering anger. He was also aware that the emotion in Lisa Mendoza’s face had stirred a primitive desire in him that was as strong as his anger. That fact irritated him even more.

  “No, Ms. Mendoza,” he said, his voice clipped and precise. “As a matter of fact, most of the people in Benny’s family aren’t bad at all. His mother just has the world’s worst choice in men. One of her brothers, his uncle Pablo, has been in and out of jail most of his life, but the other two uncles are as honest and hardworking as anybody in Angel Eye. His grandmother raised Benny most of his life, on and off, and they don’t come any better than Lydia Fuentes. She’s the one who wanted me to haul him in!”

  Lisa looked at him with great scorn. “So you’re saying that you arrested Benny and stuck him in jail for two days as a favor to his grandmother?”

  “Well…sort of.”

  Lisa simply gazed at him, eyebrows raised in disbelief. Quinn could feel a flush rising in his cheeks. He went on hastily. “This is a small town, Ms. Mendoza. We do things differently here.”

  “I should say so if you arrest people and stick them in jail because their grandmother’s mad at them!”

  “That’s not the way—”

  “Look! I don’t care what way you do things here! And don’t try to con me with some lame story about his grandmother wanting you to arrest him. The fact is that you arrested Benny Hernandez without just cause, and you’ve been holding him without due process. If you persist in detaining him, I will obtain a writ of habeas corpus tomorrow to get him out, and then you and this county are going to be slapped with a big lawsuit for false imprisonment!”

  Lisa stabbed the air with her forefinger as she talked, the force of her fury carrying her closer and closer to the sheriff until she was almost touching him with her punctuating finger. Quinn thought about wrapping his hand around her far smaller one and jerking her up against him, then silencing that berating voice with his own mouth.

  That would be, he reminded himself, a good way to get his face slapped. Of course, it might be worth it….

  They stared into each other’s face for a moment, poised on the edge. Lisa could see the red light burning in Quinn’s brown eyes, feel the heat of his body only inches away from her, and something in her wanted to lean forward that last little bit, to precipitate some final explosion between them.

  His jaw tightened, and he stepped carefully around her, going to the door and opening. “Padilla!” he barked. “Go down and release Hernandez. His attorney is taking him home.”

  Chapter 2

  It was Deputy Padilla this time who escorted Lisa back to the locked double doors leading into the county jail. He spoke with the deputy inside, and a few minutes later, Jerry brought Benny Hernandez through the double doors, dressed this time in the usual jeans and T-shirt of a teenaged boy.

  “Hey, you did it.” He smiled, looking a little surprised.

  “Can I give you a ride home?” Lisa didn’t know whether the sheriff had literally meant that she would take him home. But in any case, she was a little curious to meet the young man’s grandmother—could the sheriff had been serious when he said the woman had asked
him to lock up her grandson?—and she couldn’t imagine any place in this little town that would take her too far out of her way.

  She drove through Angel Eye, following Benny’s direction. The courthouse sat in the courthouse square typical of little Texas towns. A few stores lined the other sides of the street around it. It was not thriving, but neither did it look as abandoned as some little towns she had driven through. Past the stores, the streets were lined with trees, obviously planted and nurtured by the people who had lived there in the past, for outside of town, the landscape boasted little more than bushes of varying heights, yucca, and prickly pear cactus.

  It was actually a rather pleasant-looking little town, Lisa thought, though she could not imagine what it must be like to grow up here. She had noticed when she drove into town that the population was just over sixteen hundred people, a mind-boggling concept to someone who had grown up in Dallas. The number of students attending her high school had been more than lived in this entire town. She had thought Hammond was small, but Angel Eye made it seem a positive metropolis.

  She had never dreamed that she would wind up here. A scholarship she had applied for and received in law school had stipulated that she must spend the first year after she graduated doing legal aid work at one of the Hispanic organization’s legal aid clinics. She had agreed readily to the terms, for she had already intended to use her law degree to help needy Hispanics. However, she had simply assumed that the work would be done in some large city, such as Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. It had never occurred to her that the position she would fill would be in Hammond, Texas, a town of little more than ten thousand people about an hour’s drive from San Antonio. She had been certain she had landed in an alien place when she drove down main street and saw that the only two national fast-food chains in town were lodged in the same building, sharing a kitchen and eating space.

  The first month she had lived in Hammond, she had found herself making the six-hour drive back to her parents’ home in Dallas every weekend. Finally that had grown too tiring, and now, after two months, she was more or less resigned to remaining the rest of her year there.