****
For the next few weeks, Len met with people in discreet places, people who’d said they knew certain things about a certain event. He slept only in spurts, in between researching old police records, investigators’ notes. He slowly pieced together such a tight, compelling story of a wrongly convicted man that he was positive the case would be reopened, retried, but the outcome would be the reverse. Too bad, he thought, it had taken thirty years for someone to come forward with the truth.
Once in print, the speed of the process surprised Len. The DA reopened the case after reading Len’s assertion that a key piece of evidence had been suppressed during the first trial.
A boy of fourteen at the time, Nate Jackson had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his friend’s father because two neighbors had testified they’d seen him at the home. The bloody imprint of Nate’s hand had been found on the father’s car.
When Len questioned Nate in his cell, Nate told him he’d come across the body, felt the man’s chest. When Nate realized the man wasn’t breathing, he ran, his legs pumping too hard, too clumsily. He’d lost his balance in the garage and must have touched the car. He’d left his bloody palm print on the trunk. For that, and for the crime of being black during the sixties, Nate had spent thirty years of his life in a ten by twelve-foot cell decorated with pictures of his Momma and Daddy and two brothers. He’d been too young at the time of his arrest, he’d told Len sadly, to have a wife, or even a real girlfriend.
On the day the judge declared Nate free to go, Len went along to his parents’ home with him, where family and friends had gathered for a celebration. Len wrote of Nate’s reaction to seeing a big screen color TV, video games, a cell phone – all novelties to Nate. With each word, Len felt a lightening of being, the flow of sentences carrying the burdensome weight away. A kind of salvation, it was.
Mrs. Jackson had described Nate’s coming home much the same way. Len had saved Nate’s life, she told him, given him a second chance. She laid a wrinkled brown hand against Len’s cheek.
“Now you need a good woman to save you,” she said with a tear-streaked smile.
Len’s eyes teared, and he laughed nervously, pulling away.
“Well,” he said, looking at the faces surrounding him. “I have to get going. I’m on deadline.”
Len shook Nate’s hand. “Good luck. See you around, okay?”
Nate’s eyes shone, his voice choked with emotion. “I can never repay you.”
He couldn’t tell Nate how unnecessary his gratitude was, how necessary it had been for Len to do it for him.
Len grasped his shoulder. “Just stay out of harm’s way.” His hand opened in a wave to Nate and his family and friends, then clenched tight as he walked out of the small home full of laughter and tears, hugs and animated conversation.
Len pounded out the story – it practically wrote itself – and turned it in to Pete an hour before it was due. He felt lightheaded as he drove to Buzzy’s.
As he walked into the bar, Len smiled and waved to a few friends and acquaintances. One of the hazards of his job, he thought – he knew so many damn people, he could fill a book with the strange tales they told him. Maybe someday, he told himself. When he was too old and tired to chase new story leads. Right now, he had a lot of drinking to do before the dollar drafts were done, before the image of Allison imprinted on his brain surfaced, before he allowed himself to wonder again.
###
About the Author
C.A. Masterson calls Pennsylvania home, but she’ll always be a Jersey girl at heart. When not with her family, she’s in her lair, concocting a magical brew of contemporary, historical, and fantasy/paranormal stories.
Visit her at https://paintingfirewithwords.blogspot.com/
Also writing as Cate Masters, look for her at https://catemasters.blogspot.com,
and in far-flung corners of the web.
Email her at: cate.masters AT gmail.com.
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