Hoot fic, continued
Title: Beyond the Sea 2/3
Fandom: Hoot
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Roy is twenty-five and finished with law school, but he's not on the path to toward the environmental law career he wanted. When Napoleon Bridger Leep is wrongfully accused of arson and first degree murder, his career takes a sudden turn toward criminal law.
Roy leaves the offices of Funkhouser & Keely at five o'clock on Friday afternoon, which is unheard of even for senior partners, let alone first-year associates. Friday is when the real hard asses prove that they are such by staying until at least nine o'clock, but Roy has an errand to run, and anyway is beginning to doubt that he'll ever be much of a legal hard ass. Beatrice called him four hours earlier to tell him her flight would be arriving at six o'clock, and that she needs a ride, and also a place to stay. Roy had no idea she was planning to come, but given his scattered mental state for the past week, she very well might have told him and arranged all of this days ago.
Fighting through traffic, he barely makes it to the airport on time, but finds Beatrice easily once he comes through the main doors and arrives at the baggage claim. Beatrice reached her full height of six foot two while they were in college, and she's wearing three-inch heels as usual. She's never been a particularly girly girl, but she has always been fond of tall shoes, and anything that allows her to intimidate everyone in her path. Roy, who is not quite six feet tall, stands on his tiptoes to hug her.
"I can't believe any of this," she says, pulling her dark sunglasses onto her head. "Well, yes I can. It feels a little inevitable, you know?"
"I guess. I've got a lot to tell you."
"I'm sure you do. Listen, I know I can't be counsel of record, but I think I can really help you with this. I quit my internship."
"Yeah." Roy doesn't offer her the impressed surprise she was obviously expecting. "I'm thinking about quitting my job."
"It's funny that we're still so devoted to him." She clearly doesn't think it's funny at all. From the beginning, she's seemed a bit annoyed by the whole ordeal, and Roy is surprised that she's dropped everything to come to Georgia. Part of him can't wait to see she and Mullet Fingers together again, and another more rational part of him is dreading it.
"It feels a little inevitable," Roy mutters as they walk toward the parking lot.
"So," she says once they're in Roy's car and headed for his apartment. "Tell me everything you've learned so far."
"Not a lot," Roy admits. "I've spoken to some plant employees, but most refused to talk to me. None of the ones I was able to get in touch with could confirm that Mull -- Nap -- oh, hell, what should I call him?"
"The Defendant?"
"God, Beatrice. Anyway, what I'm thinking is that I really need to talk to Reynolds' widow."
"Oh, I'm sure she'd love to offer her husband's alleged killer some helpful testimony."
"I know it's a long shot, but I just don't have any information about who else was close enough to Reynolds to know that he had concerns about the treatment of animals in the plant, and that he was sincerely listening to what Leep was telling him."
"So he's Leep now?"
"Well, that's what I've --"
"Are we sure that Reynolds actually was listening to him?"
"That's what Mullet -- ah, Leep told me."
Beatrice raises an eyebrow. "Listen, don't worry about the widow. I'll take care of her. But what about these friends of his, this terrorist group -- are any of them still in Atlanta?"
"He doesn't want to say."
"Ha! Well. Just wait until I talk to him."
Roy sighs, exhausted by her already. Normally he loves Beatrice's outlook on life, as if it's a series of bowling pins she was born to knock over, but he wishes she would stop for a moment to appreciate the fragility of this situation. He's met with Leep every day since Tuesday, and it's getting harder and harder to walk away at the end of his lunch hour, leaving Leep to return to his cell. Roy goes to see him even if he doesn't have any new information, and Leep will sit beside him to watch him make notes, occasionally offering some input. He wants to bring Leep little gifts and packages of food like he did when they were kids, but of course that's not allowed. He can only offer tidbits of information about the outside world.
"It's raining out there," he said on Thursday.
"Raining hard, or just a little?" Leep practically jumped out of his seat as he asked the question.
"Pretty hard when I came in."
"Thunder and lightening?"
"No lightening. Some thunder."
Leep nodded as if this was better than nothing. Roy finds himself wanting to invent meteorological anomalies to describe for him, tidal waves and hurricanes. He always loved hurricanes, the way they seemed to suck the air clean just before they arrived, and Roy loved them, too, because they meant he could hide Mullet in the shed behind his parents' house. Roy wanted to cover the small window near the roof of the shed, for fear of the glass shattering, but Mullet liked to watch the storms. Roy would flinch whenever a stray stick hit the roof of the shed, and his embarrassment was worth Mullet pulling him closer, telling him he was safe.
"This must be so hard for you," Beatrice says as they search for street parking near Roy's apartment. He tries to ignore her, but she's staring at him.
"Yeah," he says. "Dammit, I'm gonna run out of gas before I find a space."
"Are you still in love with him?" Beatrice asks. Roy won't look at her. He's idling in the middle of the street, trying to resist the temptation to turn the question on her.
"I don't know," he says. "I just want him out of there."
"He'll run away again."
"That's fine." Roy squeezes the steering wheel hard. "Whatever happens -- I can't control it. But he doesn't belong in a cage."
When Roy finally finds a space, he helps Beatrice lug her bags up to his apartment and shows her around. She pretends to be impressed with the view, and doesn't mention the fact that the place is a dump.
"I haven't really had time to decorate," Roy says when she eyes the bare walls.
"That's understandable," she says. She goes to the fridge and surveys its contents: two fragrant take out boxes that need to be thrown away. "Roy," she says when she slams it shut. "Have you turned straight?"
"Funny."
On their way out to dinner, Roy pulls the apartment door open and finds Tim standing outside, his fist lifted in preparation to knock. He knocks on Roy's forehead instead, grins.
"Who's your friend?" he asks, giving Beatrice a once over. She scowls at him.
"What are you doing here?" Roy asks.
"Just came over to tell you you're my hero for bolting at five o'clock. I left ten minutes ago. Mary's still stuck there listening to Andrews lecture her about how she should invest her 401K."
"Beatrice, this is my friend Tim, from work," Roy says as they step out into the hall. "Tim, this is my friend Beatrice, from Florida."
"I work in L.A. now," Beatrice says, shaking Tim's hand so hard he bounces a little. "In entertainment law. Sort of. Maybe. I'm here to help Roy with a case."
"So am I!" Tim says. "I wanted to tell him I thought of a great insanity defense for Leep."
"He's not insane!" Beatrice and Roy say in unison. They look at each other warily.
"I know, I know! But listen, this mother of his who abandoned him to be raised by wolves or whatever? Why don't we put her on trial for being a shitty mother and ruining him? Huh? Huh?" He grins, waiting for them to appreciate this brilliant legal strategy.
"You told him about Lonna?" Beatrice glares at Roy, and he tries to remember when and why he did. He vaguely recalls Tuesday night after work, the day of his first meeting with Leep, and his attempt to keep up with Tim's scotch refills.
"I did," he says. "I was -- trying to get his opinion on a -- legal matter --"
"He was wasted," Tim says affectionately, beaming at Beatrice. "I know the whole story."
"Well, raised by wolves isn't quite accurate," Beatrice says.
"Oh, sure, sure, that's just a figure of speech. Anyway, what do you think?"
"I think you don't know the whole story," Beatrice says, glancing at Roy. She might be right. Roy isn't sure if the fact that he's in love with the Defendant came up during his drunken conversation with Tim.
"And anyway," she says. "Mullet -- Leep -- he'd never go for bringing his mother into this. She's off limits."
"Why, if she was so awful?" Tim asks.
"Off limits," she says again.
Beatrice's father and Lonna Leep divorced five years ago. He has since remarried, to another woman Beatrice doesn't like. Lonna has not been heard from.
Roy eats dinner with Beatrice and Tim at a sushi restaurant in midtown, and mostly sulks while Beatrice and Tim shout conversation at each other over the noise of the restaurant. He can't really keep up with anything except how lonely he feels. Occasionally Tim slaps his back or Beatrice pokes his hand with her chopsticks, but neither can get through to him until they start talking about the case.
"I think we've got work the back story in once we get to jury," Tim says.
"We?" Roy says.
"The back story is a bit more complicated than you may understand," Beatrice says.
"How?" Tim asks. "Tell me!" he says when Roy and Beatrice share a look.
"Screw the back story," Beatrice says. "I know him, he didn't do this. We've just got to do some investigative work and find out who did. The police aren't going to do it for us. As far as they're concerned, the case is closed. But somebody knew my brother -- step-brother -- ex-step-brother -- the Defendant was hanging around the Carver plant and regularly communicating with Reynolds. Someone else who wanted to get rid of the plant and maybe Reynolds in the meantime."
"We’ve got to figure out what the real motivation was,” Roy says. “Killing Reynolds or burning the plant."
"Right," Tim says. "This Reynolds guy might have just gotten in the way. Or burning the plant might have been a convenient way to destroy evidence."
"Speaking of evidence," Beatrice says. "What evidence do the police have against Mullet?"
"Mullet?" Tim says. He looks around the restaurant as if to search for someone who is sporting the haircut.
"The Defendant," Roy clarifies. He hates talking about this without Leep at his side to offer his opinion; it feels wrong. "They've only got circumstantial stuff. He was seen around the plant, protesting, he sent letters and made phone calls to Reynolds about the abuse of animals at the plant. He doesn't have an alibi -- or he does, but he won't tell the police, because it would implicate his friends."
"I will be putting an end to that nonsense tomorrow morning," Beatrice says. "What time are we meeting with him?"
"Ten o'clock," Roy says. He's been counting the hours since he left the courthouse at two. He thinks about Leep eating his prison dinner in stony silence, the way he often imagined him eating fish he'd caught or beef jerky donated by Beatrice, alone on his island. It was even harder to picture him slipping into his tent and curling up to sleep alone, though this was mostly tragic because Roy wanted so much to be with him. It’s no different now. For the past four nights, he’s gone to sleep imagining he’s in a jail cell, on a cot with thin sheets, barefoot with his legs twisted up in Leep’s. He would lock himself in with him if he could. That has always been the difference between the two of them. Leep would rather lose Roy than his freedom. Roy would lose anything before him.
*
He's ready to go by eight AM the following morning, sitting on his living room couch and tapping his heel on the floor. Beatrice is in his bedroom, where she slept while Roy moved to the couch. He did not sleep well, dreamed that he was imprisoned alone on an island, sleeping on the ground in the freezing cold. Throughout the dream, he knew it wasn't really him but Mullet Fingers who was whimpering in pain as his toes turned to ice, and he couldn't do anything about it even as he suffered in his place.
Beatrice makes coffee with Roy's dusty little machine, mostly used in law school for cramming sessions.
"I assume we'll have to go out for breakfast," she says.
"Oh." Roy has lost two pounds since he found out about Leep a week ago, keeps forgetting to eat. "Yeah."
"Roy." Beatrice comes to sit beside him, puts her hand on his knee. "Are you sure you're up for this? It's a lot for you to take on."
Suddenly Roy understands why she's come, not for Mullet but for him. He leans back on the couch and puts his hands over his eyes.
"I'm fine," he says. "I mean, I'm nervous, of course, yeah, this is his life we're trying to save." He hadn't put it that way out loud yet, and swallows thickly. "But I'm okay. Don't worry about me. You're just as -- involved as I am."
"No." She stands up, stretches her long arms over her head. "You two. That was different." She seems to consider saying more, but then goes to the door instead.
They walk to the courthouse, the streets quiet and the sky pale gray. Roy can smell the first hints of fall in the air, mostly buried by the unchanging stink of the city. If Beatrice is nervous about seeing her former step-brother after ten years, it doesn't show. She is talking less than usual, until she sees Tim waiting for them on the courthouse steps.
"Him?" She groans. "You're seriously going to let him help?"
"What? He's a good guy. He was top of his class at Emory."
"He tried to play footsie with me at the table last night."
"So? Just stomp on his shoe next time, he'll get the message." Roy is kind of surprised she didn't flip the table over and try to strangle Tim with his tie. Beatrice is an expert in dealing with unwanted sexual advances. She sniffs in annoyance, but accepts Tim's hand when they reach the steps, shakes it less violently this time.
"Good to see you again," he says, grinning big for her. "Man. You're tall."
"Man, you're short," she says, narrowing her eyes. He only smiles wider.
"I know, right?"
"Um." Roy steps between them, knocking their hands apart. "We're gonna be late."
The long process of passing through security and into the inner chambers of the building where prisoners are kept reminds Roy of his journeys to Mullet's hiding places around Coconut Cove. He was always excited, almost to the point of nausea, but he hated the trips at the same time, because he knew that he would be returning along the same path, alone. At least before he could imagine that Mullet was happy living in the wild, whether that was a friendly lie or not. There is no doubt about how he feels about being left alone in this place when Roy has to return to work. He's glad that it's a weekend, and he'll be able to spend the whole day here, going over the case. He should be at work, but earning a living suddenly seems like a frivolous whim that Roy doesn't have time for. He knows that reality will catch up with him eventually, but it's easy to ignore with Mullet Fingers back in his life.
They're led into the interview room, Beatrice squaring her shoulders purposefully and Tim snickering like a kid on a field trip to prison. Roy sits beside Tim on one side of the table, jealous already that Beatrice will be beside Leep. He watches the set of Beatrice's mouth intently, waiting to see the slightest signs of a crack. She has asked about the details of the case, but nothing about Leep himself. What he looks like, how he seems to have turned out. They would have been Roy's first questions.
The guard leads Leep into the interview room and Tim gapes at his handcuffs. Leep breaks into a grin when he sees Beatrice, as if this is something uncomplicated. Free of the cuffs, he rushes to her and hugs her hard. Roy's jealousy flames up around him until his ears are burning. The best he's gotten in four days is four handshakes.
"Beatrice," Leep says, still squeezing her waist. "You came."
"Yeah, stupid," she says, and Roy can hear her trying not to cry. Leep pulls back to look at her, laughs.
"What are you doing here?" he asks. "Roy told me you were a lawyer, too, but he said you were out in California."
"I'm surprised you even asked about me," Beatrice says. "I thought you might have forgotten I existed."
"Don't be mad," Leep says, his hands sliding down her arms. "I didn't have money for stamps."
Beatrice scoffs, but she's holding his hands now, and Roy can see that she's already forgiven him. Roy is going to lose his mind if they don't stop gazing at each other like that.
"This is Tim Harper," he practically shouts. "A colleague of mine."
Leep laughs at the word colleague. He walks over to shake Tim's hand, and Roy sits miserably at the table, wishing he hadn't brought anyone else along, Beatrice especially.
"Alright," Roy says, spreading the notes he's prepared across the table. "We've actually got a lot to do, so let's get started. Beatrice, I believe you had some issues you wanted to discuss with your brother -- er -- I mean --"
"It's okay, he's still my brother," Beatrice says. She and Leep sit down together, and she puts her arm around his shoulders. "He's got my name, hasn't he? Roy calls you Leep now," she adds, and they both look at Roy with identical smirks.
"I do not!" Roy says, his face burning. "I mean, I -- what do you want me to call you?" He's so clearly exasperated that Tim actually pats him on the back.
"You can call me Leep," he says. "I like that name. That's why I kept it. It's the only one I've got that my mother didn't give me."
"You do know they've divorced, don't you?" Beatrice asks.
"Yep." Leep is staring at Roy now, and Roy doesn't mind. "I saw her a couple years ago."
"You -- what?" Beatrice jerks in her chair like someone has slapped the underside of it.
"Nothing." Leep shifts his gaze to Tim. "Where do we start?"
"Green Hand," Roy says, and Leep gives him a grateful look, Beatrice's mouth still hanging open around the beginning of another question about his mother. Roy is wondering, too, but now is not the time.
"Until we find out what really happened, you've got nothing without an alibi."
"I guess I've got nothing, then." Leep's posture changes, and his eyes go dark.
"Why are you protecting them?" Beatrice asks, slapping his arm. "This is your life, Napoleon, this is not something to screw around with."
"Don't call me Napoleon. And don't try to tell me anything about my life, okay?"
An awkward silence descends. Tim is tapping his pen against his watch, and on a particularly hard slap it suddenly goes flying across the room.
"Don't throw things, they'll think you're discharging a weapon!" Beatrice says. Tim's eyes go wide.
"I wasn't --!"
"Look!" Roy says loudly. He feels like he's in the midst of a study group where no one wants to pay attention. "We need to know about Green Hand, Mullet."
"Green Hand Mullet?" Tim says, but Beatrice gives him a look that shuts him up.
"Whether you decide to give an alibi or not, at least tell us what was going on between you and them," Roy says. Mullet sits back in his chair and lets out his breath. He glances at Beatrice, Tim, and finally back to Roy.
"They took care of me," he says. "After I escaped from that prison in Texas."
"You were in prison in Texas?" Tim exclaims. "And you escaped?"
"Tim!" Beatrice says.
"What?"
"You guys!" It occurs to Roy that they are doomed. He looks back to Mullet, desperate. Mullet is watching him like he's already forgiven him for trying as hard as he could and failing anyway. It's happened before.
"Green Hand," Mullet says. "They're not the way the media makes them out to be. I was alone for six months after I left school, and without Beatrice to help me -- it was -- hard."
"Dammit, why didn't you just come to me?" Beatrice asks. She puts her hand over his wrist on the table, and Mullet shakes his head.
"I couldn't come back to Coconut Cove," he says. He stares at the table in lieu of explaining this. "I ended up in South Carolina. That was where I met James Vern."
"The leader of Green Hand?" Roy has been researching the group on the internet.
"Yep."
Mullet won't look at him now, and Roy tips his notepad toward his chest to hide what he's writing. He jots down James Vern, and beside the name writes a "W" to indicate that he's a potential witness, as well as an "S" to note that he's a possible suspect.
"And this guy who 'helped' you is just throwing you to the dogs, now?" Beatrice says. "Where the hell was he when you were campaigning to have Reynolds change the operations at the plant? Why aren't the police knocking on his door?"
"He can't really appear publicly anymore," Mullet says. "He's wanted for some stuff."
"For some 'stuff' he actually did, I suppose?" Beatrice says.
"I guess. I don't know. He only attacks big corporations."
"Like Carver Chicken," Tim says. Mullet glares at him, then spreads his look of fury around to Roy and Beatrice.
"He did not set that fire," he says. "I know he didn't."
"Because that's who you were with at the time of the fire?" Roy asks, afraid to look up from his notes.
"Yes," Mullet says, and something about the buried sound of his voice makes Roy flush. He wants to ask about the exact nature of his relationship with Vern, a real lawyer would, but on a personal level he doesn't want to know.
"Anyway, it couldn't have been someone from Green Hand," Mullet says.
"It's very touching that you have such faith in them, but we need a little something called proof," Beatrice says.
"I have proof!"
"Oh, really?"
"Yes." Mullet sits up straighter, as if he's preparing to address a jury. "The chickens died. All of them. The animals we were trying to protect. They all died in the fire."
Roy wishes he had all of this on tape. Mullet is so clearly heartbroken that any jury would let him off. He writes on his notepad: get him to talk about the chickens at trial. He's annoyed with himself after he writes it, realizes suddenly how cynical he's become. He looks up at Mullet, who is staring at him as if he's seen all of this clearly on his face. Once, they saved a colony of owls together. Roy sometimes wishes that summer had never happened. It made him think he could do anything, which is not true.
"I know they weren't endangered or anything," Mullet says. "I know they're just chickens. But they meant something. To me."
Beatrice makes a sympathetic face and slides her hand onto his shoulder again. Roy hates her for it, furiously scribbles notes.
"Alright," he says. "We need to split up."
"Don't say that!" Tim shouts, and everyone jumps. "That's what people in horror movies always say before they start getting hacked up. It's bad luck."
"Oh, of the love of God," Beatrice moans.
Roy sits with his mouth hanging open, shakes his head when he can't come up with any way to respond to that. Mullet is now grinning at Tim as if he likes him, which is disturbing.
"Beatrice thinks she can speak to Reynolds' widow," Roy says.
"I have a plan," she says, and the devious look on her face worries Roy a bit, but he continues.
"Tim, I need you to talk to the previous manager of the plant," Roy says. He tears a sheet from his notepad. "There's his name and address. Don't tell him who you're with. I just need to get a feel for what he thought of Reynolds, the direction Carver Chicken was going in when he left, and anything about the history of the plant."
"Um," Tim says. "Okay."
"What about you?" Mullet asks Roy. The words I'll stay here with you are halfway up his throat before he stuffs them back down.
"I'm going to write a name on a slip of paper," Roy says quietly. He tears the slip from his notepad, and jots J.V. on it, knowing Mullet will understand it's Vern he's after. "And you're going to tell me where to find him."
Mullet shakes his head. "It's not safe."
"Please," Roy says, sliding the piece of paper closer to him. "Trust me."
They stare at each other across the table, and Roy feels suspended in midair, weightless. Mullet has no reason to trust him. Roy once betrayed him in the most devastating way possible, but it was for his own good, and so is this. He's not planning to do anything but speak to Vern, but if he learns that Vern's incarceration will exonerate Mullet, he'll turn him in to the police without hesitation. He'd lose Mullet again, but he'll probably lose him anyway, and at least he'd be free.
Mullet finally takes the paper, and reaches for Roy's pen. Roy gives it to him without touching his hand. Mullet looks up at Roy once more before writing something on the paper. He turns it over and slides it back.
"Be careful," he says, and Roy isn't sure if he's asking him to protect his friends or watch out for himself.
*
After leaving the courthouse, Roy drives toward Buckhead, the piece of paper with James Vern's location written on it tucked into his shirt pocket. Buford Hwy, Super 8, Room 31. Roy expected something more exotic and dangerous, like an abandoned warehouse or a dilapidated farm on the outskirts of town. He parks as close as he can to room 31 when he reaches the Super 8. It rained an hour ago, and the cement parking lot reeks of it, everything damp and humid. Roy buttons his jacket, takes a deep breath. He considered going to his apartment and changing into street clothes, thought that Vern might be more trusting of a young man in a t-shirt than a lawyer in a suit, but he realized on the way there that he'd rather intimidate Vern than gain his trust. He hates him already, for all the years he had with Mullet, can't stop thinking of him as a thief.
He knocks on the door to room 31, and surveys the parking lot behind him. The Super 8 is not busy, and there's no one around, only the sound of cars passing out on the highway. Roy knocks again, though he knows Vern won't answer.
"Open up," he shouts through the door. "I'm here on behalf of Napoleon Leep. I'm his lawyer."
Again, no response. Roy hears footsteps and the sound of a television being turned off. He's glad these rooms don't have back windows.
"If you don't open this door I'll be forced to turn you over to the police," he says. "I hear they're looking for you."
Roy hears the chain on the door being pulled back. The door opens just a crack, and a man with gray hair glares out at him.
"How did you find me?" he asks.
"Mr. Vern?" Roy expected him to be younger. He saw a picture of him online, but it must have been an old one. Vern looks at least fifty. A bothersome suspicion that Roy doesn't want to confront continues to build in his stomach.
"Get in here," Vern hisses. He pulls Roy inside, and Roy jerks free of his hands. Vern shuts the door and bolts it. The hairs on the back of Roy's neck stand up as he looks around the dark motel room. This man could kill him. Vern is shorter and older but he looks dangerous. His eyes are wide and pale gray, and his expression is that of a startled animal who is ready to defend itself.
"People know I'm here," Roy says.
"What, so you're perfectly safe?" Vern laughs. "I could smoke you and be gone in thirty seconds. But anyway don't insult me. I'm a nonviolent person."
"Right. That's why you're on the most wanted list in two states?"
"I've never hurt another human being in my life. Nice line about being Napoleon's lawyer. Look at you, what are you, nineteen? I don't know what he told you, but I had nothing to do with all this madness about the chickens."
"I'm twenty-five, I am his lawyer -- Roy Eberhardt, I filed my Notice of Appearance on Wednesday if you want to look it up -- and I think it's real interesting that someone with so much respect for human life refers to a man's murder as 'madness about chickens.'"
"Real interesting, huh?" Vern smirks. "Where are you from, Roy? You want a drink?"
"No. Leep said he was with you the night of the fire. Is that true?"
"Are we still pretending you're a lawyer?" Vern picks up a tall liquor bottle and pours something brown into a plastic cup. Roy can't see the label in the dark room. "You're not the first kid who's come after me in a jealous rage. Yes, I was with him. But was I with him? No. And isn't all of this a little beside the point, now that they've arrested him?"
Roy hears something move in the bathroom, and notices that the light is on. There is a towel hanging over the top of the door, preventing it from fully closing. Roy sees a flicker of movement, a snatch of bare skin.
"Who's in there?" Roy asks.
"That's none of your concern. What do you want, exactly?"
"I want Mr. Leep to tell the police his alibi," Roy says. "But he won't."
"Well, he's smarter than you, I'm afraid. What good is my word going to be to the police? They're not exactly my biggest fans. They'll just think I was involved and arrest me, too. Napoleon won't gain anything from it."
"He might, actually. If he were to make a deal."
"Did you come here to warn me that you're going to turn me in to the police? Cause that's not very smart, either."
Roy walks to the room's window, which is covered by heavy drapes. He feels defeated, wants to pummel Vern and drag him in to the police station just out of spite. Someone coughs in the bathroom; water runs.
"Look, I know what's really going on," Vern says. "You're his type. Black hair, blue eyes, obsessed with him. We've been through it before, kiddo. I helped him out when he was starving to death, that's all. I'm sorry that he got himself arrested, but I told him not to trust that Reynolds character. I love him, but he's so damn naive. I knew it would catch up with him eventually. It's a sad thing, but you and I can't help him now. Napoleon Leep was born without a destiny. You could see it on him, he was drifting. That's why people like you and me like him so much, huh? You think you can fix him up, set him back on course. I thought so, too. Now look what's happened."
"So you admit this is all your fault?" Roy says, his voice close to breaking. He knows who is really at fault here.
"Kid, you're not getting it. You could spend your whole life trying to save him and only come up with empty hands. Believe me, I'd know. He was born to a pro football player who didn't want him and a twenty-year-old cheerleader who wanted him even less. That's the definition of doom, eh?"
"You should hear the way he defends you!" Roy says, furious. "I wish I had this all on tape, the way you dismiss him so easily. He could get the death penalty!"
"Wake up!" Vern shouts, so loud that Roy jerks backward, stumbles against the wall. The bathroom door opens just a bit wider, and Roy sees a girl with long hair peek out.
"That young man has lived with the death penalty since the day he was born." Vern's voice is grave and strong, as if he's speaking from a pulpit. Roy scoffs so hard he spits.
"Oh, wow," he says, something as tall as a tidal wave rising in his chest. "That's deep. What the hell are you talking about? Lived with the death penalty? Yeah, well, we're all gonna die someday, so. You say you love him? What a crock. I wish he could hear this. I'm surprised, really. I thought you'd at least pretend to care."
Vern sighs and finishes his drink. Roy looks to the bathroom door, and it's fully shut now, the towel gone.
"I will not get into a fight about which of us loves him more," Vern says. "I've been known not to give up easily, but when it comes to people, sometimes you have to. If Leep were free, you'd learn that eventually. He's a good person, we both know that, but he's not all there. I wouldn't be surprised if he 'escaped' from prison like he did from all those schools. They could put him in a box made of mile-thick concrete and he'd appear on the outside eventually. He's transient. He's from some other world."
"You're drunk," Roy says with disgust. The bathroom door opens, and the girl Roy saw steps out wearing a red sun dress, her thin hair hanging wet around her shoulders.
"Dad," she says. "Are we gonna order lunch or what?"
Roy takes that as his cue to leave. There is nothing to learn here except what sort of people took Mullet in when he was desperate. A bunch of old hippies who think they know everything. No destiny. What a load of shit.
"Tell him I'm sorry," Vern shouts as Roy walks out. "And wish him luck."
Roy slams the door hard enough to shake the building.
*
The guards at the courthouse are beginning to look at Roy askance. He couldn't care less, particularly now, just after his meeting with James Vern. He signs in at the front desk and follows the usual guard back to the prisoner holding area. A lawyer can meet with his client as often as he wants from eight o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock in the evening. Even on weekends.
Mullet looks surprised first, then happy. Roy is annoyed by the order in which these reactions crossed his face, and by Vern's very existence, and the ten voicemail messages from Tim and Beatrice that he doesn't yet have the patience to listen to. He needs to get some things off his chest.
"Did you meet with him?" Mullet asks when they're seated.
"Yes." Roy doesn't even know where to begin. Mullet raises his eyebrows.
"Was he mad about me telling you where he was?"
"Oh, he was mad alright. As a hatter."
"What happened?"
"He told me you have no destiny, that you're transient, whatever that means, and, oh, he's not particularly worried about you being locked up, because apparently you can walk through mile-thick concrete walls. Which explains your escapes from boarding school." It doesn't occur to Roy until he's said all of this that Mullet might be hurt to know what Vern really thinks of him, and that Roy might have protected him from that. Mullet folds his hands on the table. Roy wants to grab them and kiss them, even now.
"He was drinking?" Mullet says.
"Drunk."
Mullet nods as if he knew this would happen. Roy wishes he'd been warned. He gets out his notepad and slaps through the pages until he finds a blank one.
"Roy," Mullet says, but he pretends not to hear, flicks the cap off of his pen.
"I need you to tell me everything about your life before the fire," Roy says. He can't look at Mullet while he asks this of him, so he outfits the notepad page with a title: LIFE BEFORE FIRE. He underlines it.
"For the case?"
Roy didn't expect to get called out. Mullet always went easy on him when they were kids, never forced him to explain himself. Roy once extended that same mercy to him, but he's gone long enough without knowing anything.
"Of course it's for the case," he says, his eyes still on the pad. Mullet sighs. Roy wishes he could articulate what he wants from him, but the best he can do is everything, and anyway it's pointless. It becomes clearer every day that he's going to get nothing.
"Where do you want me to start?" Mullet asks. Roy can't think of which answer is worse: at birth, or after you left me.
"School in Texas," he says.
"It was a bad situation," Mullet says, and the mildness of this description frightens Roy more than anything vivid would have. "I left."
"And you ended up in South Carolina, and you met Vern."
"Yes. They -- Green Hand -- cared about the things I cared about. There were other people there who had no place else to go. It felt like family for awhile."
"Until?"
"Until, I don't know. Until I saw you again."
Roy looks up from his notepad, caught off guard. Mullet has his fingers spread out on the table now, and only when Roy stares at them does he consciously realize that he's begun to think of him as Mullet Fingers again.
"Until you saw me?"
"Yeah. You and Beatrice, you were something better than what I had in Green Hand. I still appreciate what they did for me, but it wasn't like having a sister, or a, you know. Whatever you were."
Roy puts his notepad down and stares at the chipped surface of the table. He'd thought he wanted details, a minute by minute description of the time Mullet spent away from him, but Mullet is right to skip over all of that. Nothing matters now but this.
"Beatrice and Tim have left me messages," Roy says. He isn't sure why he's changing the subject. He's afraid to learn things that will make leaving Mullet here in prison more unbearable. "I should listen to them."
"Yeah." Mullet picks at the table top with his short nails. Roy tries and tries to swallow what he's been wanting to ask since he first walked into this room, and before that, when there was no one around to hear the question.
"What did you think?" he finally says. "When they knew you were going to run away from the hospital? Did you know that I told them?"
Mullet looks at the one way mirror. Roy does, too, and thinks that their reflections don't look real enough.
"Not until you didn't come back," Mullet says. "I was in the hospital for two more days before they shipped me off to Texas, and you didn't come."
"I thought you'd hate me."
"Well." Mullet's fingers curl into fists just as Roy works up the nerve to slide his hands forward by half an inch. "I tried to."
They sit in silence for awhile. Roy is not uncomfortable with it, and he hopes that Mullet isn't, either. He's studying Roy's face as if he's trying to figure out what he'll say next.
"You know how I came out to my parents?" Roy asks. Mullet grins, clearly wasn't expecting that.
"How?"
"Cried every night for two months after you left. It was like clockwork. I'd come home from school, and you were gone, so I'd wander around town looking for you. I went to the owl sanctuary and the shipyard and the island. I sat in your tent and waited, knew you'd never show up. I'd come home after dark with my eyes red. They figured it out."
"Why two months?" Mullet asks. "What stopped you?"
"I guess that's when I tried to hate you."
"Did it work?"
"Nope."
He hears Mullet's foot slide forward under the table, until his cloth prison bootie meets the tip of Roy's polished black Oxford. Roy's eyes sting like Mullet pushed a button to set him off. He doesn't mind.
"Shit," he whispers, so quiet he barely hears it himself. Mullet shakes his head.
"It'll be okay," he says, but Roy knows he doesn't really believe that. He wipes his face, tries to get his chest to stop jittering.
"I wish I could stay here with you," he says, comforted and bothered by the familiar words. He said it all the time when they were kids. Mullet could have been living in a trashcan, and Roy would have begged to stay.
"Be glad you don't have to," Mullet says.
"Vern said you had a type," Roy says, hoping to spoil the moment. It's getting late. He needs a reason to want to leave.
"I thought he might say something like that." Mullet shrugs. "I don't know, Roy. I tried. No one was enough like you."
Roy flexes his fingers on the table, wonders if the guard behind the mirror has noticed their feet. Mullet's shoe is still pressed against his, and though Roy can barely feel it through the thick leather of his shoe, it's the biggest thrill he's had in years. He remembers all of their first, maybe accidental touches like historic events. Mullet would take a bottle of water from his hand, and if their fingers brushed Roy would analyze the moment for days.
"Why didn't you just come to me?" Roy asks. "I would have -- would have --"
"What, let me live on the floor of your dorm room?"
"Yes!" Roy can hardly imagine anything better. His freshman year roommate walked in on him with another guy and moved out two days later. He had the room to himself for the rest of the year, and moved off campus as a sophomore, into an apartment with Beatrice and two other girls who practically looked forward to walking in on him when he was with guys. Mullet could have moved in, stayed in Roy's bed, spent his days lurking in the back of biology classrooms. It would have been perfect.
"I did come, once," Mullet says.
"What? No, you -- what are you talking about?"
"It was fall. I guess you would have been a junior. Green Hand was moving through Florida, and I broke away from them for a few days. I'd looked you up on a computer at a library in Virginia a couple years earlier, found out where you were going to school. So I hung around the place hoping I'd see you."
"You should have called my parents, they would have told you how to find me --"
"I did find you. The second afternoon I was there, I saw you walking with Beatrice and a guy in a red sweatshirt. You were all laughing about something, holding books. I couldn't tell if the guy was with you or Beatrice, but he looked like he was nice, you know? You seemed really happy. I just wanted to make sure that you were."
"I wasn't," Roy says, though that's not entirely true. He liked college, got good grades and thought that he'd go on to change the world with what he'd learned. But the guy who Mullet saw was definitely one of Beatrice's boyfriends. None of the ones Roy brought back to his room ever wanted to be seen with him in public.
"You should have said something." Roy's voice is undependable, but he can't let it dissolve entirely. The guards are already suspicious, and he doesn't want them to learn the truth, is almost certain that would make things here worse for Mullet.
"What could I have said, Roy? We were on different planets. I turned around and got on a bus with money Vern had given me. I hadn't gone anywhere without Green Hand since I was seventeen, and when I met up with them in Savannah, he asked me if I'd gone to see about a boy. When I didn't answer he said, 'it was the boy, wasn't it? The original black-haired boy?' That's how well he knows me. I know he's crazy, but he gets me, you know? You and Beatrice, you cared about me, but. You wanted me to be like you, and I couldn't."
"I never wanted to change you." Roy keeps his voice low, wonders if they should be passing notes instead. He imagines the guards watching this like a soap opera from behind the one way mirror, bowls of popcorn balanced on their stomachs.
"I know that," Mullet says. "But you wanted me to stay in one place."
"Yeah, with me! Maybe you were relieved when we were apart, but I hated it. Every time I left it felt like I'd swallowed nails. Fuck, it still does."
When Mullet offers no response, Roy starts packing up his things. His things consist of a pen and the notepad, so this doesn't take long. He takes his foot away from Mullet's, but before he can stand up, Mullet reaches across the table and grabs his hand. He holds on tight as Roy tries to flinch away, and when Roy meets his eyes something rakes from the top of his chest all the way down past his lap. Mullet is the only person who ever set earthquakes off inside him.
"I wanted you back," Mullet says. "Every time you left. But you had people waiting for you. You did and I didn't, and I can never explain what that felt like."
Roy squeezes his hand. His skin feels drier and colder every day, and if he's in here much longer he won't recover.
"I never asked you to explain," Roy says.
"I know. But you wanted me to."
Roy can't argue that. He's beginning to understand what James Vern was trying to tell him. He does want to assign Mullet a destiny, wants to take him to Disney World and buy him pajamas and make him sandwiches to take to the real job he'll never have. He tried to put shoes on him once. Roy wants him to belong in his world, even though he loves him this much and for so long mostly because he doesn't. Mullet might have had Roy imitators over the years, but Roy never met anyone who came close.
Someone knocks on the door to the interview room, and Roy starts. Mullet lets go of his hand and turns to see the guard come through, holding the handcuffs.
"Dinner's served, Mr. Leep," he says. "Eat it now or wait until breakfast."
"I can wait," Mullet says, but Roy shakes his head.
"No, go eat. I need to call Beatrice and Tim and find out what they learned. I'll be back tomorrow morning to let you know."
Mullet looks disappointed, and Roy loves him for it. He's trying to sort out what everything they just said really means, but all it amounts to so far is that Mullet is not going anywhere unless Roy gets his head out of the past and figures out what the hell really happened at that plant. This is not likely to happen, so he thanks God for Beatrice and Tim, and hopes their days were more productive than his.
Mullet shakes Roy’s hand again before he leaves, though it's less like a shake and more an excuse to put their palms together. Roy feels much too conscious of the inside of his mouth, can't stand the taste of his own tongue. He doesn't remember what Mullet's tasted like, but he knows he would recognize it the second he licked through his lips.
He's so worked up on the way out of the courthouse that he seriously considers going home to spend some time alone in bed before calling Beatrice and Tim. Instead, he gets to his car, buckles his seat belt, and slaps his cheeks, just once but hard. This was his strategy for waking himself up during all night study sessions in law school. He's never worked on anything this important, but it's hard to concentrate on the case not knowing if these will be his last days with Mullet.
On the way up to his apartment, he dials Beatrice's number. As he comes to the door, he can hear her phone ringing inside. He flips his phone shut and lets himself in. When he steps into the foyer, Beatrice is walking rapidly from the living room to the kitchen with a glass of wine in her hand. Tim is sitting on the couch looking guilty.
"What?" Roy says, standing with the door still open behind him.
"Nothing," Beatrice shouts from the kitchen. "What do you mean? Come in, we've got a lot to tell you. Did you meet with Vern? We've called you eighty times, where the hell have you been?"
Roy has never heard her talk so fast. She's busying herself by wiping down his counter tops with a wash rag. Tim is still on the couch, whistling now.
"Um." Roy shakes his head and shuts the apartment door, bolts it. "Yeah, I did meet with Vern. He was a total dead end."
"Are you sure?" Beatrice asks.
"Absolutely." Roy surveys a scene of wreckage in the kitchen: fast food wrappers and a mostly empty bottle of red wine. Beatrice hurriedly scoops the wrappers into her hands, and dumps them in the trash as if she’s disposing of damning evidence.
"Reynolds' widow told me plenty," she says. "I said I was Leep's sister, and that I was trying to understand how he could do anything so horrible. I was crying and everything, it was fantastic. She made me tea. She did say that Reynolds was known in Indiana for treating the animals ethically, and that the company actually had an issue with it at one point, because it was costing them money. She thinks that's why they moved him down to Georgia, so they could get a more bottom-line oriented manager at the Indiana plant, which is much bigger."
"Will she testify?" Roy asks.
"I don't know, I didn't exactly play to the 'exonerate Leep' angle. She thinks he did it. She didn't know anything about their relationship. Mullet sent the letters to Reynolds at the plant, not at home. She did say he was complaining about work just before he died. He was talking about getting his pilot's license and giving up poultry science altogether."
"You didn't get this on tape, did you?"
"No, Roy, I wasn't wearing a wire, and she may have been a little suspicious if I came in there with a recorder. But I wrote several extensive memos." She gestures to Roy's kitchen table, which is littered with papers.
"What did you find out from the former manager?" he asks Tim.
"Lawrence?" Tim says, as if they've become great friends. "I pretended I was with the unemployment office. He was real bitter about getting replaced with Reynolds. He said it was a PR move, and that Carver must have really regretted it after their stock decreased in value last month. He said the Georgia plant was obsolete and has been costing them a fortune since Doraville started their whole gentrification program. All the construction and new residential zones in the area made delivery slower and more expensive."
"So why didn't they just close the plant?" Roy asks. "Why burn it down?"
"Hello, Roy," Beatrice says. "Insurance. It was worth more to them dead than alive."
"And Reynolds?"
"Accidentally found out about it? If Mullet was talking with him, he might have begun to really sympathize with the animals, especially if he came from Indiana already favoring ethical operations. His wife said he wanted to quit the company and fly planes. He's got two young kids and a big house out in Sandy Springs -- how was he going to afford to become a retired aviation hobbyist all of a sudden?"
"He was going to sell the story about Carver after he quit!" Tim shouts, grinning as if this is the punchline of a great joke. "This is so Law & Order. It's always the white collar higher-ups, never the homeless guy they arrest at the beginning."
Beatrice groans. "Yeah. And I came up with that theory, by the way."
"We made a chart of the financial motives, and got the names of the Carver CFOs who’re in charge of the Georgia product," Tim says, gesturing to the papers on the table. Roy takes a deep breath, picks up the bottle of wine and takes a swig directly from it.
"Good work, you guys," he says. "But we still don't have any proof."
"Roy." Beatrice slings an arm around him. "We've had this problem before."
"What, when we were kids and I stole that environmental impact report? Yeah, it worked on an angry mob of citizens, but that kind of stunt isn't exactly going to be admissible in court."
“No kidding.” Beatrice gives him an insulted look. “I’m not suggesting we break into the Carver offices. We’ll subpoena their emails and financial information. I’m sure they were smart enough not to have anything about plans to destroy the Georgia plant in writing, but at least we’ll have circumstantial evidence that they had motive to burn it themselves. All they’ve got on Mullet is circumstantial, and countering it with our evidence would be enough for a dismissal, if not summary judgment.”
“Maybe,” Tim says, looking doubtful. “It’s worth a try. It’s something.”
“Won’t they destroy evidence if we subpoena them?” Roy asks. “I mean, if they were willing to kill a man to cover this up . . .”
“We’ll file the subpoena under seal and they won’t know a thing about it until the cops are banging on their office doors,” Beatrice says with a wave of her hand, as if she’s done this a thousand times.
“I don’t know,” Roy says. He sits down on the couch beside Tim and puts his head in his hands. “Carver Chicken is owned by Mutual Foods. They’re enormous. They’ll find some way to bury this.”
“Hey!” Beatrice says. “Knock it off with that defeatist crap, alright? I know he’s not around to talk you up like he did when we were kids, but you have to do this for him, okay? You’ve done it before.”
“I think there’s a little more at stake here,” Roy snaps.
“I doubt he’d agree with you,” Beatrice says. “When he stood in front of that bulldozer in Coconut Cove, it wasn’t just an act.” She shakes her head. “You went to see him again, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did. So what? Was I supposed to ask your permission?”
“Roy!”
“What, goddammit? Quit acting like this is a game!”
“Quit acting like he’s already dead!”
Her shoulders jerk after she’s said it, and Tim makes a noise like he’s just seen a squirrel get run over. Roy gets up from the couch and goes to his room, throws the door closed behind him. It’s heavy, and it latches with a reverberating click that reminds Roy door of the interview room at the courthouse. Beatrice’s things are all over the place, her clothes on the floor, the lingering sweetness of her lotion and shampoo and face wash wafting out of the attached bathroom. Roy wants to go back into the living room and apologize, though she was the one who said something unforgivable. She knows too much about him, because she was the only one who ever saw the way his eyes changed when he talked about Mullet Fingers. She knew from the beginning what would happen if they were introduced.
He lies on his bed and listens to the muffled sound of Beatrice and Tim talking, hears papers being shuffled about. Beatrice was right, he can’t handle this, but it’s happening anyway, and he’ll draft a subpoena in the morning. He needs help, but like that summer when he was thirteen, the summer of the owls, there is no one to launch this crusade but three dumbly optimistic kids who are in over their heads, never mind that life and death are at stake. Beatrice is right that Mullet would put his own fate on scale with that of the owls. Vern was right that he’s been living with the end of his life since he was born, much more intimately than most people. He seems so resigned when he thinks Roy isn’t looking.
Roy falls asleep, dreams that he and Mullet are arrested together for stealing candy from a desert gas station. They are put in a prison that looks like something out of an old Western, and though Roy is initially okay with this arrangement, things change when Mullet walks through the prison wall and waves in at him from outside the barred window.
“I’ll be right back to get you,” he says, and then he tears off running, barefoot.
Roy holds onto the bars and forgives him in advance. He’ll never be back.
*
Fandom: Hoot
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Roy is twenty-five and finished with law school, but he's not on the path to toward the environmental law career he wanted. When Napoleon Bridger Leep is wrongfully accused of arson and first degree murder, his career takes a sudden turn toward criminal law.
Roy leaves the offices of Funkhouser & Keely at five o'clock on Friday afternoon, which is unheard of even for senior partners, let alone first-year associates. Friday is when the real hard asses prove that they are such by staying until at least nine o'clock, but Roy has an errand to run, and anyway is beginning to doubt that he'll ever be much of a legal hard ass. Beatrice called him four hours earlier to tell him her flight would be arriving at six o'clock, and that she needs a ride, and also a place to stay. Roy had no idea she was planning to come, but given his scattered mental state for the past week, she very well might have told him and arranged all of this days ago.
Fighting through traffic, he barely makes it to the airport on time, but finds Beatrice easily once he comes through the main doors and arrives at the baggage claim. Beatrice reached her full height of six foot two while they were in college, and she's wearing three-inch heels as usual. She's never been a particularly girly girl, but she has always been fond of tall shoes, and anything that allows her to intimidate everyone in her path. Roy, who is not quite six feet tall, stands on his tiptoes to hug her.
"I can't believe any of this," she says, pulling her dark sunglasses onto her head. "Well, yes I can. It feels a little inevitable, you know?"
"I guess. I've got a lot to tell you."
"I'm sure you do. Listen, I know I can't be counsel of record, but I think I can really help you with this. I quit my internship."
"Yeah." Roy doesn't offer her the impressed surprise she was obviously expecting. "I'm thinking about quitting my job."
"It's funny that we're still so devoted to him." She clearly doesn't think it's funny at all. From the beginning, she's seemed a bit annoyed by the whole ordeal, and Roy is surprised that she's dropped everything to come to Georgia. Part of him can't wait to see she and Mullet Fingers together again, and another more rational part of him is dreading it.
"It feels a little inevitable," Roy mutters as they walk toward the parking lot.
"So," she says once they're in Roy's car and headed for his apartment. "Tell me everything you've learned so far."
"Not a lot," Roy admits. "I've spoken to some plant employees, but most refused to talk to me. None of the ones I was able to get in touch with could confirm that Mull -- Nap -- oh, hell, what should I call him?"
"The Defendant?"
"God, Beatrice. Anyway, what I'm thinking is that I really need to talk to Reynolds' widow."
"Oh, I'm sure she'd love to offer her husband's alleged killer some helpful testimony."
"I know it's a long shot, but I just don't have any information about who else was close enough to Reynolds to know that he had concerns about the treatment of animals in the plant, and that he was sincerely listening to what Leep was telling him."
"So he's Leep now?"
"Well, that's what I've --"
"Are we sure that Reynolds actually was listening to him?"
"That's what Mullet -- ah, Leep told me."
Beatrice raises an eyebrow. "Listen, don't worry about the widow. I'll take care of her. But what about these friends of his, this terrorist group -- are any of them still in Atlanta?"
"He doesn't want to say."
"Ha! Well. Just wait until I talk to him."
Roy sighs, exhausted by her already. Normally he loves Beatrice's outlook on life, as if it's a series of bowling pins she was born to knock over, but he wishes she would stop for a moment to appreciate the fragility of this situation. He's met with Leep every day since Tuesday, and it's getting harder and harder to walk away at the end of his lunch hour, leaving Leep to return to his cell. Roy goes to see him even if he doesn't have any new information, and Leep will sit beside him to watch him make notes, occasionally offering some input. He wants to bring Leep little gifts and packages of food like he did when they were kids, but of course that's not allowed. He can only offer tidbits of information about the outside world.
"It's raining out there," he said on Thursday.
"Raining hard, or just a little?" Leep practically jumped out of his seat as he asked the question.
"Pretty hard when I came in."
"Thunder and lightening?"
"No lightening. Some thunder."
Leep nodded as if this was better than nothing. Roy finds himself wanting to invent meteorological anomalies to describe for him, tidal waves and hurricanes. He always loved hurricanes, the way they seemed to suck the air clean just before they arrived, and Roy loved them, too, because they meant he could hide Mullet in the shed behind his parents' house. Roy wanted to cover the small window near the roof of the shed, for fear of the glass shattering, but Mullet liked to watch the storms. Roy would flinch whenever a stray stick hit the roof of the shed, and his embarrassment was worth Mullet pulling him closer, telling him he was safe.
"This must be so hard for you," Beatrice says as they search for street parking near Roy's apartment. He tries to ignore her, but she's staring at him.
"Yeah," he says. "Dammit, I'm gonna run out of gas before I find a space."
"Are you still in love with him?" Beatrice asks. Roy won't look at her. He's idling in the middle of the street, trying to resist the temptation to turn the question on her.
"I don't know," he says. "I just want him out of there."
"He'll run away again."
"That's fine." Roy squeezes the steering wheel hard. "Whatever happens -- I can't control it. But he doesn't belong in a cage."
When Roy finally finds a space, he helps Beatrice lug her bags up to his apartment and shows her around. She pretends to be impressed with the view, and doesn't mention the fact that the place is a dump.
"I haven't really had time to decorate," Roy says when she eyes the bare walls.
"That's understandable," she says. She goes to the fridge and surveys its contents: two fragrant take out boxes that need to be thrown away. "Roy," she says when she slams it shut. "Have you turned straight?"
"Funny."
On their way out to dinner, Roy pulls the apartment door open and finds Tim standing outside, his fist lifted in preparation to knock. He knocks on Roy's forehead instead, grins.
"Who's your friend?" he asks, giving Beatrice a once over. She scowls at him.
"What are you doing here?" Roy asks.
"Just came over to tell you you're my hero for bolting at five o'clock. I left ten minutes ago. Mary's still stuck there listening to Andrews lecture her about how she should invest her 401K."
"Beatrice, this is my friend Tim, from work," Roy says as they step out into the hall. "Tim, this is my friend Beatrice, from Florida."
"I work in L.A. now," Beatrice says, shaking Tim's hand so hard he bounces a little. "In entertainment law. Sort of. Maybe. I'm here to help Roy with a case."
"So am I!" Tim says. "I wanted to tell him I thought of a great insanity defense for Leep."
"He's not insane!" Beatrice and Roy say in unison. They look at each other warily.
"I know, I know! But listen, this mother of his who abandoned him to be raised by wolves or whatever? Why don't we put her on trial for being a shitty mother and ruining him? Huh? Huh?" He grins, waiting for them to appreciate this brilliant legal strategy.
"You told him about Lonna?" Beatrice glares at Roy, and he tries to remember when and why he did. He vaguely recalls Tuesday night after work, the day of his first meeting with Leep, and his attempt to keep up with Tim's scotch refills.
"I did," he says. "I was -- trying to get his opinion on a -- legal matter --"
"He was wasted," Tim says affectionately, beaming at Beatrice. "I know the whole story."
"Well, raised by wolves isn't quite accurate," Beatrice says.
"Oh, sure, sure, that's just a figure of speech. Anyway, what do you think?"
"I think you don't know the whole story," Beatrice says, glancing at Roy. She might be right. Roy isn't sure if the fact that he's in love with the Defendant came up during his drunken conversation with Tim.
"And anyway," she says. "Mullet -- Leep -- he'd never go for bringing his mother into this. She's off limits."
"Why, if she was so awful?" Tim asks.
"Off limits," she says again.
Beatrice's father and Lonna Leep divorced five years ago. He has since remarried, to another woman Beatrice doesn't like. Lonna has not been heard from.
Roy eats dinner with Beatrice and Tim at a sushi restaurant in midtown, and mostly sulks while Beatrice and Tim shout conversation at each other over the noise of the restaurant. He can't really keep up with anything except how lonely he feels. Occasionally Tim slaps his back or Beatrice pokes his hand with her chopsticks, but neither can get through to him until they start talking about the case.
"I think we've got work the back story in once we get to jury," Tim says.
"We?" Roy says.
"The back story is a bit more complicated than you may understand," Beatrice says.
"How?" Tim asks. "Tell me!" he says when Roy and Beatrice share a look.
"Screw the back story," Beatrice says. "I know him, he didn't do this. We've just got to do some investigative work and find out who did. The police aren't going to do it for us. As far as they're concerned, the case is closed. But somebody knew my brother -- step-brother -- ex-step-brother -- the Defendant was hanging around the Carver plant and regularly communicating with Reynolds. Someone else who wanted to get rid of the plant and maybe Reynolds in the meantime."
"We’ve got to figure out what the real motivation was,” Roy says. “Killing Reynolds or burning the plant."
"Right," Tim says. "This Reynolds guy might have just gotten in the way. Or burning the plant might have been a convenient way to destroy evidence."
"Speaking of evidence," Beatrice says. "What evidence do the police have against Mullet?"
"Mullet?" Tim says. He looks around the restaurant as if to search for someone who is sporting the haircut.
"The Defendant," Roy clarifies. He hates talking about this without Leep at his side to offer his opinion; it feels wrong. "They've only got circumstantial stuff. He was seen around the plant, protesting, he sent letters and made phone calls to Reynolds about the abuse of animals at the plant. He doesn't have an alibi -- or he does, but he won't tell the police, because it would implicate his friends."
"I will be putting an end to that nonsense tomorrow morning," Beatrice says. "What time are we meeting with him?"
"Ten o'clock," Roy says. He's been counting the hours since he left the courthouse at two. He thinks about Leep eating his prison dinner in stony silence, the way he often imagined him eating fish he'd caught or beef jerky donated by Beatrice, alone on his island. It was even harder to picture him slipping into his tent and curling up to sleep alone, though this was mostly tragic because Roy wanted so much to be with him. It’s no different now. For the past four nights, he’s gone to sleep imagining he’s in a jail cell, on a cot with thin sheets, barefoot with his legs twisted up in Leep’s. He would lock himself in with him if he could. That has always been the difference between the two of them. Leep would rather lose Roy than his freedom. Roy would lose anything before him.
*
He's ready to go by eight AM the following morning, sitting on his living room couch and tapping his heel on the floor. Beatrice is in his bedroom, where she slept while Roy moved to the couch. He did not sleep well, dreamed that he was imprisoned alone on an island, sleeping on the ground in the freezing cold. Throughout the dream, he knew it wasn't really him but Mullet Fingers who was whimpering in pain as his toes turned to ice, and he couldn't do anything about it even as he suffered in his place.
Beatrice makes coffee with Roy's dusty little machine, mostly used in law school for cramming sessions.
"I assume we'll have to go out for breakfast," she says.
"Oh." Roy has lost two pounds since he found out about Leep a week ago, keeps forgetting to eat. "Yeah."
"Roy." Beatrice comes to sit beside him, puts her hand on his knee. "Are you sure you're up for this? It's a lot for you to take on."
Suddenly Roy understands why she's come, not for Mullet but for him. He leans back on the couch and puts his hands over his eyes.
"I'm fine," he says. "I mean, I'm nervous, of course, yeah, this is his life we're trying to save." He hadn't put it that way out loud yet, and swallows thickly. "But I'm okay. Don't worry about me. You're just as -- involved as I am."
"No." She stands up, stretches her long arms over her head. "You two. That was different." She seems to consider saying more, but then goes to the door instead.
They walk to the courthouse, the streets quiet and the sky pale gray. Roy can smell the first hints of fall in the air, mostly buried by the unchanging stink of the city. If Beatrice is nervous about seeing her former step-brother after ten years, it doesn't show. She is talking less than usual, until she sees Tim waiting for them on the courthouse steps.
"Him?" She groans. "You're seriously going to let him help?"
"What? He's a good guy. He was top of his class at Emory."
"He tried to play footsie with me at the table last night."
"So? Just stomp on his shoe next time, he'll get the message." Roy is kind of surprised she didn't flip the table over and try to strangle Tim with his tie. Beatrice is an expert in dealing with unwanted sexual advances. She sniffs in annoyance, but accepts Tim's hand when they reach the steps, shakes it less violently this time.
"Good to see you again," he says, grinning big for her. "Man. You're tall."
"Man, you're short," she says, narrowing her eyes. He only smiles wider.
"I know, right?"
"Um." Roy steps between them, knocking their hands apart. "We're gonna be late."
The long process of passing through security and into the inner chambers of the building where prisoners are kept reminds Roy of his journeys to Mullet's hiding places around Coconut Cove. He was always excited, almost to the point of nausea, but he hated the trips at the same time, because he knew that he would be returning along the same path, alone. At least before he could imagine that Mullet was happy living in the wild, whether that was a friendly lie or not. There is no doubt about how he feels about being left alone in this place when Roy has to return to work. He's glad that it's a weekend, and he'll be able to spend the whole day here, going over the case. He should be at work, but earning a living suddenly seems like a frivolous whim that Roy doesn't have time for. He knows that reality will catch up with him eventually, but it's easy to ignore with Mullet Fingers back in his life.
They're led into the interview room, Beatrice squaring her shoulders purposefully and Tim snickering like a kid on a field trip to prison. Roy sits beside Tim on one side of the table, jealous already that Beatrice will be beside Leep. He watches the set of Beatrice's mouth intently, waiting to see the slightest signs of a crack. She has asked about the details of the case, but nothing about Leep himself. What he looks like, how he seems to have turned out. They would have been Roy's first questions.
The guard leads Leep into the interview room and Tim gapes at his handcuffs. Leep breaks into a grin when he sees Beatrice, as if this is something uncomplicated. Free of the cuffs, he rushes to her and hugs her hard. Roy's jealousy flames up around him until his ears are burning. The best he's gotten in four days is four handshakes.
"Beatrice," Leep says, still squeezing her waist. "You came."
"Yeah, stupid," she says, and Roy can hear her trying not to cry. Leep pulls back to look at her, laughs.
"What are you doing here?" he asks. "Roy told me you were a lawyer, too, but he said you were out in California."
"I'm surprised you even asked about me," Beatrice says. "I thought you might have forgotten I existed."
"Don't be mad," Leep says, his hands sliding down her arms. "I didn't have money for stamps."
Beatrice scoffs, but she's holding his hands now, and Roy can see that she's already forgiven him. Roy is going to lose his mind if they don't stop gazing at each other like that.
"This is Tim Harper," he practically shouts. "A colleague of mine."
Leep laughs at the word colleague. He walks over to shake Tim's hand, and Roy sits miserably at the table, wishing he hadn't brought anyone else along, Beatrice especially.
"Alright," Roy says, spreading the notes he's prepared across the table. "We've actually got a lot to do, so let's get started. Beatrice, I believe you had some issues you wanted to discuss with your brother -- er -- I mean --"
"It's okay, he's still my brother," Beatrice says. She and Leep sit down together, and she puts her arm around his shoulders. "He's got my name, hasn't he? Roy calls you Leep now," she adds, and they both look at Roy with identical smirks.
"I do not!" Roy says, his face burning. "I mean, I -- what do you want me to call you?" He's so clearly exasperated that Tim actually pats him on the back.
"You can call me Leep," he says. "I like that name. That's why I kept it. It's the only one I've got that my mother didn't give me."
"You do know they've divorced, don't you?" Beatrice asks.
"Yep." Leep is staring at Roy now, and Roy doesn't mind. "I saw her a couple years ago."
"You -- what?" Beatrice jerks in her chair like someone has slapped the underside of it.
"Nothing." Leep shifts his gaze to Tim. "Where do we start?"
"Green Hand," Roy says, and Leep gives him a grateful look, Beatrice's mouth still hanging open around the beginning of another question about his mother. Roy is wondering, too, but now is not the time.
"Until we find out what really happened, you've got nothing without an alibi."
"I guess I've got nothing, then." Leep's posture changes, and his eyes go dark.
"Why are you protecting them?" Beatrice asks, slapping his arm. "This is your life, Napoleon, this is not something to screw around with."
"Don't call me Napoleon. And don't try to tell me anything about my life, okay?"
An awkward silence descends. Tim is tapping his pen against his watch, and on a particularly hard slap it suddenly goes flying across the room.
"Don't throw things, they'll think you're discharging a weapon!" Beatrice says. Tim's eyes go wide.
"I wasn't --!"
"Look!" Roy says loudly. He feels like he's in the midst of a study group where no one wants to pay attention. "We need to know about Green Hand, Mullet."
"Green Hand Mullet?" Tim says, but Beatrice gives him a look that shuts him up.
"Whether you decide to give an alibi or not, at least tell us what was going on between you and them," Roy says. Mullet sits back in his chair and lets out his breath. He glances at Beatrice, Tim, and finally back to Roy.
"They took care of me," he says. "After I escaped from that prison in Texas."
"You were in prison in Texas?" Tim exclaims. "And you escaped?"
"Tim!" Beatrice says.
"What?"
"You guys!" It occurs to Roy that they are doomed. He looks back to Mullet, desperate. Mullet is watching him like he's already forgiven him for trying as hard as he could and failing anyway. It's happened before.
"Green Hand," Mullet says. "They're not the way the media makes them out to be. I was alone for six months after I left school, and without Beatrice to help me -- it was -- hard."
"Dammit, why didn't you just come to me?" Beatrice asks. She puts her hand over his wrist on the table, and Mullet shakes his head.
"I couldn't come back to Coconut Cove," he says. He stares at the table in lieu of explaining this. "I ended up in South Carolina. That was where I met James Vern."
"The leader of Green Hand?" Roy has been researching the group on the internet.
"Yep."
Mullet won't look at him now, and Roy tips his notepad toward his chest to hide what he's writing. He jots down James Vern, and beside the name writes a "W" to indicate that he's a potential witness, as well as an "S" to note that he's a possible suspect.
"And this guy who 'helped' you is just throwing you to the dogs, now?" Beatrice says. "Where the hell was he when you were campaigning to have Reynolds change the operations at the plant? Why aren't the police knocking on his door?"
"He can't really appear publicly anymore," Mullet says. "He's wanted for some stuff."
"For some 'stuff' he actually did, I suppose?" Beatrice says.
"I guess. I don't know. He only attacks big corporations."
"Like Carver Chicken," Tim says. Mullet glares at him, then spreads his look of fury around to Roy and Beatrice.
"He did not set that fire," he says. "I know he didn't."
"Because that's who you were with at the time of the fire?" Roy asks, afraid to look up from his notes.
"Yes," Mullet says, and something about the buried sound of his voice makes Roy flush. He wants to ask about the exact nature of his relationship with Vern, a real lawyer would, but on a personal level he doesn't want to know.
"Anyway, it couldn't have been someone from Green Hand," Mullet says.
"It's very touching that you have such faith in them, but we need a little something called proof," Beatrice says.
"I have proof!"
"Oh, really?"
"Yes." Mullet sits up straighter, as if he's preparing to address a jury. "The chickens died. All of them. The animals we were trying to protect. They all died in the fire."
Roy wishes he had all of this on tape. Mullet is so clearly heartbroken that any jury would let him off. He writes on his notepad: get him to talk about the chickens at trial. He's annoyed with himself after he writes it, realizes suddenly how cynical he's become. He looks up at Mullet, who is staring at him as if he's seen all of this clearly on his face. Once, they saved a colony of owls together. Roy sometimes wishes that summer had never happened. It made him think he could do anything, which is not true.
"I know they weren't endangered or anything," Mullet says. "I know they're just chickens. But they meant something. To me."
Beatrice makes a sympathetic face and slides her hand onto his shoulder again. Roy hates her for it, furiously scribbles notes.
"Alright," he says. "We need to split up."
"Don't say that!" Tim shouts, and everyone jumps. "That's what people in horror movies always say before they start getting hacked up. It's bad luck."
"Oh, of the love of God," Beatrice moans.
Roy sits with his mouth hanging open, shakes his head when he can't come up with any way to respond to that. Mullet is now grinning at Tim as if he likes him, which is disturbing.
"Beatrice thinks she can speak to Reynolds' widow," Roy says.
"I have a plan," she says, and the devious look on her face worries Roy a bit, but he continues.
"Tim, I need you to talk to the previous manager of the plant," Roy says. He tears a sheet from his notepad. "There's his name and address. Don't tell him who you're with. I just need to get a feel for what he thought of Reynolds, the direction Carver Chicken was going in when he left, and anything about the history of the plant."
"Um," Tim says. "Okay."
"What about you?" Mullet asks Roy. The words I'll stay here with you are halfway up his throat before he stuffs them back down.
"I'm going to write a name on a slip of paper," Roy says quietly. He tears the slip from his notepad, and jots J.V. on it, knowing Mullet will understand it's Vern he's after. "And you're going to tell me where to find him."
Mullet shakes his head. "It's not safe."
"Please," Roy says, sliding the piece of paper closer to him. "Trust me."
They stare at each other across the table, and Roy feels suspended in midair, weightless. Mullet has no reason to trust him. Roy once betrayed him in the most devastating way possible, but it was for his own good, and so is this. He's not planning to do anything but speak to Vern, but if he learns that Vern's incarceration will exonerate Mullet, he'll turn him in to the police without hesitation. He'd lose Mullet again, but he'll probably lose him anyway, and at least he'd be free.
Mullet finally takes the paper, and reaches for Roy's pen. Roy gives it to him without touching his hand. Mullet looks up at Roy once more before writing something on the paper. He turns it over and slides it back.
"Be careful," he says, and Roy isn't sure if he's asking him to protect his friends or watch out for himself.
*
After leaving the courthouse, Roy drives toward Buckhead, the piece of paper with James Vern's location written on it tucked into his shirt pocket. Buford Hwy, Super 8, Room 31. Roy expected something more exotic and dangerous, like an abandoned warehouse or a dilapidated farm on the outskirts of town. He parks as close as he can to room 31 when he reaches the Super 8. It rained an hour ago, and the cement parking lot reeks of it, everything damp and humid. Roy buttons his jacket, takes a deep breath. He considered going to his apartment and changing into street clothes, thought that Vern might be more trusting of a young man in a t-shirt than a lawyer in a suit, but he realized on the way there that he'd rather intimidate Vern than gain his trust. He hates him already, for all the years he had with Mullet, can't stop thinking of him as a thief.
He knocks on the door to room 31, and surveys the parking lot behind him. The Super 8 is not busy, and there's no one around, only the sound of cars passing out on the highway. Roy knocks again, though he knows Vern won't answer.
"Open up," he shouts through the door. "I'm here on behalf of Napoleon Leep. I'm his lawyer."
Again, no response. Roy hears footsteps and the sound of a television being turned off. He's glad these rooms don't have back windows.
"If you don't open this door I'll be forced to turn you over to the police," he says. "I hear they're looking for you."
Roy hears the chain on the door being pulled back. The door opens just a crack, and a man with gray hair glares out at him.
"How did you find me?" he asks.
"Mr. Vern?" Roy expected him to be younger. He saw a picture of him online, but it must have been an old one. Vern looks at least fifty. A bothersome suspicion that Roy doesn't want to confront continues to build in his stomach.
"Get in here," Vern hisses. He pulls Roy inside, and Roy jerks free of his hands. Vern shuts the door and bolts it. The hairs on the back of Roy's neck stand up as he looks around the dark motel room. This man could kill him. Vern is shorter and older but he looks dangerous. His eyes are wide and pale gray, and his expression is that of a startled animal who is ready to defend itself.
"People know I'm here," Roy says.
"What, so you're perfectly safe?" Vern laughs. "I could smoke you and be gone in thirty seconds. But anyway don't insult me. I'm a nonviolent person."
"Right. That's why you're on the most wanted list in two states?"
"I've never hurt another human being in my life. Nice line about being Napoleon's lawyer. Look at you, what are you, nineteen? I don't know what he told you, but I had nothing to do with all this madness about the chickens."
"I'm twenty-five, I am his lawyer -- Roy Eberhardt, I filed my Notice of Appearance on Wednesday if you want to look it up -- and I think it's real interesting that someone with so much respect for human life refers to a man's murder as 'madness about chickens.'"
"Real interesting, huh?" Vern smirks. "Where are you from, Roy? You want a drink?"
"No. Leep said he was with you the night of the fire. Is that true?"
"Are we still pretending you're a lawyer?" Vern picks up a tall liquor bottle and pours something brown into a plastic cup. Roy can't see the label in the dark room. "You're not the first kid who's come after me in a jealous rage. Yes, I was with him. But was I with him? No. And isn't all of this a little beside the point, now that they've arrested him?"
Roy hears something move in the bathroom, and notices that the light is on. There is a towel hanging over the top of the door, preventing it from fully closing. Roy sees a flicker of movement, a snatch of bare skin.
"Who's in there?" Roy asks.
"That's none of your concern. What do you want, exactly?"
"I want Mr. Leep to tell the police his alibi," Roy says. "But he won't."
"Well, he's smarter than you, I'm afraid. What good is my word going to be to the police? They're not exactly my biggest fans. They'll just think I was involved and arrest me, too. Napoleon won't gain anything from it."
"He might, actually. If he were to make a deal."
"Did you come here to warn me that you're going to turn me in to the police? Cause that's not very smart, either."
Roy walks to the room's window, which is covered by heavy drapes. He feels defeated, wants to pummel Vern and drag him in to the police station just out of spite. Someone coughs in the bathroom; water runs.
"Look, I know what's really going on," Vern says. "You're his type. Black hair, blue eyes, obsessed with him. We've been through it before, kiddo. I helped him out when he was starving to death, that's all. I'm sorry that he got himself arrested, but I told him not to trust that Reynolds character. I love him, but he's so damn naive. I knew it would catch up with him eventually. It's a sad thing, but you and I can't help him now. Napoleon Leep was born without a destiny. You could see it on him, he was drifting. That's why people like you and me like him so much, huh? You think you can fix him up, set him back on course. I thought so, too. Now look what's happened."
"So you admit this is all your fault?" Roy says, his voice close to breaking. He knows who is really at fault here.
"Kid, you're not getting it. You could spend your whole life trying to save him and only come up with empty hands. Believe me, I'd know. He was born to a pro football player who didn't want him and a twenty-year-old cheerleader who wanted him even less. That's the definition of doom, eh?"
"You should hear the way he defends you!" Roy says, furious. "I wish I had this all on tape, the way you dismiss him so easily. He could get the death penalty!"
"Wake up!" Vern shouts, so loud that Roy jerks backward, stumbles against the wall. The bathroom door opens just a bit wider, and Roy sees a girl with long hair peek out.
"That young man has lived with the death penalty since the day he was born." Vern's voice is grave and strong, as if he's speaking from a pulpit. Roy scoffs so hard he spits.
"Oh, wow," he says, something as tall as a tidal wave rising in his chest. "That's deep. What the hell are you talking about? Lived with the death penalty? Yeah, well, we're all gonna die someday, so. You say you love him? What a crock. I wish he could hear this. I'm surprised, really. I thought you'd at least pretend to care."
Vern sighs and finishes his drink. Roy looks to the bathroom door, and it's fully shut now, the towel gone.
"I will not get into a fight about which of us loves him more," Vern says. "I've been known not to give up easily, but when it comes to people, sometimes you have to. If Leep were free, you'd learn that eventually. He's a good person, we both know that, but he's not all there. I wouldn't be surprised if he 'escaped' from prison like he did from all those schools. They could put him in a box made of mile-thick concrete and he'd appear on the outside eventually. He's transient. He's from some other world."
"You're drunk," Roy says with disgust. The bathroom door opens, and the girl Roy saw steps out wearing a red sun dress, her thin hair hanging wet around her shoulders.
"Dad," she says. "Are we gonna order lunch or what?"
Roy takes that as his cue to leave. There is nothing to learn here except what sort of people took Mullet in when he was desperate. A bunch of old hippies who think they know everything. No destiny. What a load of shit.
"Tell him I'm sorry," Vern shouts as Roy walks out. "And wish him luck."
Roy slams the door hard enough to shake the building.
*
The guards at the courthouse are beginning to look at Roy askance. He couldn't care less, particularly now, just after his meeting with James Vern. He signs in at the front desk and follows the usual guard back to the prisoner holding area. A lawyer can meet with his client as often as he wants from eight o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock in the evening. Even on weekends.
Mullet looks surprised first, then happy. Roy is annoyed by the order in which these reactions crossed his face, and by Vern's very existence, and the ten voicemail messages from Tim and Beatrice that he doesn't yet have the patience to listen to. He needs to get some things off his chest.
"Did you meet with him?" Mullet asks when they're seated.
"Yes." Roy doesn't even know where to begin. Mullet raises his eyebrows.
"Was he mad about me telling you where he was?"
"Oh, he was mad alright. As a hatter."
"What happened?"
"He told me you have no destiny, that you're transient, whatever that means, and, oh, he's not particularly worried about you being locked up, because apparently you can walk through mile-thick concrete walls. Which explains your escapes from boarding school." It doesn't occur to Roy until he's said all of this that Mullet might be hurt to know what Vern really thinks of him, and that Roy might have protected him from that. Mullet folds his hands on the table. Roy wants to grab them and kiss them, even now.
"He was drinking?" Mullet says.
"Drunk."
Mullet nods as if he knew this would happen. Roy wishes he'd been warned. He gets out his notepad and slaps through the pages until he finds a blank one.
"Roy," Mullet says, but he pretends not to hear, flicks the cap off of his pen.
"I need you to tell me everything about your life before the fire," Roy says. He can't look at Mullet while he asks this of him, so he outfits the notepad page with a title: LIFE BEFORE FIRE. He underlines it.
"For the case?"
Roy didn't expect to get called out. Mullet always went easy on him when they were kids, never forced him to explain himself. Roy once extended that same mercy to him, but he's gone long enough without knowing anything.
"Of course it's for the case," he says, his eyes still on the pad. Mullet sighs. Roy wishes he could articulate what he wants from him, but the best he can do is everything, and anyway it's pointless. It becomes clearer every day that he's going to get nothing.
"Where do you want me to start?" Mullet asks. Roy can't think of which answer is worse: at birth, or after you left me.
"School in Texas," he says.
"It was a bad situation," Mullet says, and the mildness of this description frightens Roy more than anything vivid would have. "I left."
"And you ended up in South Carolina, and you met Vern."
"Yes. They -- Green Hand -- cared about the things I cared about. There were other people there who had no place else to go. It felt like family for awhile."
"Until?"
"Until, I don't know. Until I saw you again."
Roy looks up from his notepad, caught off guard. Mullet has his fingers spread out on the table now, and only when Roy stares at them does he consciously realize that he's begun to think of him as Mullet Fingers again.
"Until you saw me?"
"Yeah. You and Beatrice, you were something better than what I had in Green Hand. I still appreciate what they did for me, but it wasn't like having a sister, or a, you know. Whatever you were."
Roy puts his notepad down and stares at the chipped surface of the table. He'd thought he wanted details, a minute by minute description of the time Mullet spent away from him, but Mullet is right to skip over all of that. Nothing matters now but this.
"Beatrice and Tim have left me messages," Roy says. He isn't sure why he's changing the subject. He's afraid to learn things that will make leaving Mullet here in prison more unbearable. "I should listen to them."
"Yeah." Mullet picks at the table top with his short nails. Roy tries and tries to swallow what he's been wanting to ask since he first walked into this room, and before that, when there was no one around to hear the question.
"What did you think?" he finally says. "When they knew you were going to run away from the hospital? Did you know that I told them?"
Mullet looks at the one way mirror. Roy does, too, and thinks that their reflections don't look real enough.
"Not until you didn't come back," Mullet says. "I was in the hospital for two more days before they shipped me off to Texas, and you didn't come."
"I thought you'd hate me."
"Well." Mullet's fingers curl into fists just as Roy works up the nerve to slide his hands forward by half an inch. "I tried to."
They sit in silence for awhile. Roy is not uncomfortable with it, and he hopes that Mullet isn't, either. He's studying Roy's face as if he's trying to figure out what he'll say next.
"You know how I came out to my parents?" Roy asks. Mullet grins, clearly wasn't expecting that.
"How?"
"Cried every night for two months after you left. It was like clockwork. I'd come home from school, and you were gone, so I'd wander around town looking for you. I went to the owl sanctuary and the shipyard and the island. I sat in your tent and waited, knew you'd never show up. I'd come home after dark with my eyes red. They figured it out."
"Why two months?" Mullet asks. "What stopped you?"
"I guess that's when I tried to hate you."
"Did it work?"
"Nope."
He hears Mullet's foot slide forward under the table, until his cloth prison bootie meets the tip of Roy's polished black Oxford. Roy's eyes sting like Mullet pushed a button to set him off. He doesn't mind.
"Shit," he whispers, so quiet he barely hears it himself. Mullet shakes his head.
"It'll be okay," he says, but Roy knows he doesn't really believe that. He wipes his face, tries to get his chest to stop jittering.
"I wish I could stay here with you," he says, comforted and bothered by the familiar words. He said it all the time when they were kids. Mullet could have been living in a trashcan, and Roy would have begged to stay.
"Be glad you don't have to," Mullet says.
"Vern said you had a type," Roy says, hoping to spoil the moment. It's getting late. He needs a reason to want to leave.
"I thought he might say something like that." Mullet shrugs. "I don't know, Roy. I tried. No one was enough like you."
Roy flexes his fingers on the table, wonders if the guard behind the mirror has noticed their feet. Mullet's shoe is still pressed against his, and though Roy can barely feel it through the thick leather of his shoe, it's the biggest thrill he's had in years. He remembers all of their first, maybe accidental touches like historic events. Mullet would take a bottle of water from his hand, and if their fingers brushed Roy would analyze the moment for days.
"Why didn't you just come to me?" Roy asks. "I would have -- would have --"
"What, let me live on the floor of your dorm room?"
"Yes!" Roy can hardly imagine anything better. His freshman year roommate walked in on him with another guy and moved out two days later. He had the room to himself for the rest of the year, and moved off campus as a sophomore, into an apartment with Beatrice and two other girls who practically looked forward to walking in on him when he was with guys. Mullet could have moved in, stayed in Roy's bed, spent his days lurking in the back of biology classrooms. It would have been perfect.
"I did come, once," Mullet says.
"What? No, you -- what are you talking about?"
"It was fall. I guess you would have been a junior. Green Hand was moving through Florida, and I broke away from them for a few days. I'd looked you up on a computer at a library in Virginia a couple years earlier, found out where you were going to school. So I hung around the place hoping I'd see you."
"You should have called my parents, they would have told you how to find me --"
"I did find you. The second afternoon I was there, I saw you walking with Beatrice and a guy in a red sweatshirt. You were all laughing about something, holding books. I couldn't tell if the guy was with you or Beatrice, but he looked like he was nice, you know? You seemed really happy. I just wanted to make sure that you were."
"I wasn't," Roy says, though that's not entirely true. He liked college, got good grades and thought that he'd go on to change the world with what he'd learned. But the guy who Mullet saw was definitely one of Beatrice's boyfriends. None of the ones Roy brought back to his room ever wanted to be seen with him in public.
"You should have said something." Roy's voice is undependable, but he can't let it dissolve entirely. The guards are already suspicious, and he doesn't want them to learn the truth, is almost certain that would make things here worse for Mullet.
"What could I have said, Roy? We were on different planets. I turned around and got on a bus with money Vern had given me. I hadn't gone anywhere without Green Hand since I was seventeen, and when I met up with them in Savannah, he asked me if I'd gone to see about a boy. When I didn't answer he said, 'it was the boy, wasn't it? The original black-haired boy?' That's how well he knows me. I know he's crazy, but he gets me, you know? You and Beatrice, you cared about me, but. You wanted me to be like you, and I couldn't."
"I never wanted to change you." Roy keeps his voice low, wonders if they should be passing notes instead. He imagines the guards watching this like a soap opera from behind the one way mirror, bowls of popcorn balanced on their stomachs.
"I know that," Mullet says. "But you wanted me to stay in one place."
"Yeah, with me! Maybe you were relieved when we were apart, but I hated it. Every time I left it felt like I'd swallowed nails. Fuck, it still does."
When Mullet offers no response, Roy starts packing up his things. His things consist of a pen and the notepad, so this doesn't take long. He takes his foot away from Mullet's, but before he can stand up, Mullet reaches across the table and grabs his hand. He holds on tight as Roy tries to flinch away, and when Roy meets his eyes something rakes from the top of his chest all the way down past his lap. Mullet is the only person who ever set earthquakes off inside him.
"I wanted you back," Mullet says. "Every time you left. But you had people waiting for you. You did and I didn't, and I can never explain what that felt like."
Roy squeezes his hand. His skin feels drier and colder every day, and if he's in here much longer he won't recover.
"I never asked you to explain," Roy says.
"I know. But you wanted me to."
Roy can't argue that. He's beginning to understand what James Vern was trying to tell him. He does want to assign Mullet a destiny, wants to take him to Disney World and buy him pajamas and make him sandwiches to take to the real job he'll never have. He tried to put shoes on him once. Roy wants him to belong in his world, even though he loves him this much and for so long mostly because he doesn't. Mullet might have had Roy imitators over the years, but Roy never met anyone who came close.
Someone knocks on the door to the interview room, and Roy starts. Mullet lets go of his hand and turns to see the guard come through, holding the handcuffs.
"Dinner's served, Mr. Leep," he says. "Eat it now or wait until breakfast."
"I can wait," Mullet says, but Roy shakes his head.
"No, go eat. I need to call Beatrice and Tim and find out what they learned. I'll be back tomorrow morning to let you know."
Mullet looks disappointed, and Roy loves him for it. He's trying to sort out what everything they just said really means, but all it amounts to so far is that Mullet is not going anywhere unless Roy gets his head out of the past and figures out what the hell really happened at that plant. This is not likely to happen, so he thanks God for Beatrice and Tim, and hopes their days were more productive than his.
Mullet shakes Roy’s hand again before he leaves, though it's less like a shake and more an excuse to put their palms together. Roy feels much too conscious of the inside of his mouth, can't stand the taste of his own tongue. He doesn't remember what Mullet's tasted like, but he knows he would recognize it the second he licked through his lips.
He's so worked up on the way out of the courthouse that he seriously considers going home to spend some time alone in bed before calling Beatrice and Tim. Instead, he gets to his car, buckles his seat belt, and slaps his cheeks, just once but hard. This was his strategy for waking himself up during all night study sessions in law school. He's never worked on anything this important, but it's hard to concentrate on the case not knowing if these will be his last days with Mullet.
On the way up to his apartment, he dials Beatrice's number. As he comes to the door, he can hear her phone ringing inside. He flips his phone shut and lets himself in. When he steps into the foyer, Beatrice is walking rapidly from the living room to the kitchen with a glass of wine in her hand. Tim is sitting on the couch looking guilty.
"What?" Roy says, standing with the door still open behind him.
"Nothing," Beatrice shouts from the kitchen. "What do you mean? Come in, we've got a lot to tell you. Did you meet with Vern? We've called you eighty times, where the hell have you been?"
Roy has never heard her talk so fast. She's busying herself by wiping down his counter tops with a wash rag. Tim is still on the couch, whistling now.
"Um." Roy shakes his head and shuts the apartment door, bolts it. "Yeah, I did meet with Vern. He was a total dead end."
"Are you sure?" Beatrice asks.
"Absolutely." Roy surveys a scene of wreckage in the kitchen: fast food wrappers and a mostly empty bottle of red wine. Beatrice hurriedly scoops the wrappers into her hands, and dumps them in the trash as if she’s disposing of damning evidence.
"Reynolds' widow told me plenty," she says. "I said I was Leep's sister, and that I was trying to understand how he could do anything so horrible. I was crying and everything, it was fantastic. She made me tea. She did say that Reynolds was known in Indiana for treating the animals ethically, and that the company actually had an issue with it at one point, because it was costing them money. She thinks that's why they moved him down to Georgia, so they could get a more bottom-line oriented manager at the Indiana plant, which is much bigger."
"Will she testify?" Roy asks.
"I don't know, I didn't exactly play to the 'exonerate Leep' angle. She thinks he did it. She didn't know anything about their relationship. Mullet sent the letters to Reynolds at the plant, not at home. She did say he was complaining about work just before he died. He was talking about getting his pilot's license and giving up poultry science altogether."
"You didn't get this on tape, did you?"
"No, Roy, I wasn't wearing a wire, and she may have been a little suspicious if I came in there with a recorder. But I wrote several extensive memos." She gestures to Roy's kitchen table, which is littered with papers.
"What did you find out from the former manager?" he asks Tim.
"Lawrence?" Tim says, as if they've become great friends. "I pretended I was with the unemployment office. He was real bitter about getting replaced with Reynolds. He said it was a PR move, and that Carver must have really regretted it after their stock decreased in value last month. He said the Georgia plant was obsolete and has been costing them a fortune since Doraville started their whole gentrification program. All the construction and new residential zones in the area made delivery slower and more expensive."
"So why didn't they just close the plant?" Roy asks. "Why burn it down?"
"Hello, Roy," Beatrice says. "Insurance. It was worth more to them dead than alive."
"And Reynolds?"
"Accidentally found out about it? If Mullet was talking with him, he might have begun to really sympathize with the animals, especially if he came from Indiana already favoring ethical operations. His wife said he wanted to quit the company and fly planes. He's got two young kids and a big house out in Sandy Springs -- how was he going to afford to become a retired aviation hobbyist all of a sudden?"
"He was going to sell the story about Carver after he quit!" Tim shouts, grinning as if this is the punchline of a great joke. "This is so Law & Order. It's always the white collar higher-ups, never the homeless guy they arrest at the beginning."
Beatrice groans. "Yeah. And I came up with that theory, by the way."
"We made a chart of the financial motives, and got the names of the Carver CFOs who’re in charge of the Georgia product," Tim says, gesturing to the papers on the table. Roy takes a deep breath, picks up the bottle of wine and takes a swig directly from it.
"Good work, you guys," he says. "But we still don't have any proof."
"Roy." Beatrice slings an arm around him. "We've had this problem before."
"What, when we were kids and I stole that environmental impact report? Yeah, it worked on an angry mob of citizens, but that kind of stunt isn't exactly going to be admissible in court."
“No kidding.” Beatrice gives him an insulted look. “I’m not suggesting we break into the Carver offices. We’ll subpoena their emails and financial information. I’m sure they were smart enough not to have anything about plans to destroy the Georgia plant in writing, but at least we’ll have circumstantial evidence that they had motive to burn it themselves. All they’ve got on Mullet is circumstantial, and countering it with our evidence would be enough for a dismissal, if not summary judgment.”
“Maybe,” Tim says, looking doubtful. “It’s worth a try. It’s something.”
“Won’t they destroy evidence if we subpoena them?” Roy asks. “I mean, if they were willing to kill a man to cover this up . . .”
“We’ll file the subpoena under seal and they won’t know a thing about it until the cops are banging on their office doors,” Beatrice says with a wave of her hand, as if she’s done this a thousand times.
“I don’t know,” Roy says. He sits down on the couch beside Tim and puts his head in his hands. “Carver Chicken is owned by Mutual Foods. They’re enormous. They’ll find some way to bury this.”
“Hey!” Beatrice says. “Knock it off with that defeatist crap, alright? I know he’s not around to talk you up like he did when we were kids, but you have to do this for him, okay? You’ve done it before.”
“I think there’s a little more at stake here,” Roy snaps.
“I doubt he’d agree with you,” Beatrice says. “When he stood in front of that bulldozer in Coconut Cove, it wasn’t just an act.” She shakes her head. “You went to see him again, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did. So what? Was I supposed to ask your permission?”
“Roy!”
“What, goddammit? Quit acting like this is a game!”
“Quit acting like he’s already dead!”
Her shoulders jerk after she’s said it, and Tim makes a noise like he’s just seen a squirrel get run over. Roy gets up from the couch and goes to his room, throws the door closed behind him. It’s heavy, and it latches with a reverberating click that reminds Roy door of the interview room at the courthouse. Beatrice’s things are all over the place, her clothes on the floor, the lingering sweetness of her lotion and shampoo and face wash wafting out of the attached bathroom. Roy wants to go back into the living room and apologize, though she was the one who said something unforgivable. She knows too much about him, because she was the only one who ever saw the way his eyes changed when he talked about Mullet Fingers. She knew from the beginning what would happen if they were introduced.
He lies on his bed and listens to the muffled sound of Beatrice and Tim talking, hears papers being shuffled about. Beatrice was right, he can’t handle this, but it’s happening anyway, and he’ll draft a subpoena in the morning. He needs help, but like that summer when he was thirteen, the summer of the owls, there is no one to launch this crusade but three dumbly optimistic kids who are in over their heads, never mind that life and death are at stake. Beatrice is right that Mullet would put his own fate on scale with that of the owls. Vern was right that he’s been living with the end of his life since he was born, much more intimately than most people. He seems so resigned when he thinks Roy isn’t looking.
Roy falls asleep, dreams that he and Mullet are arrested together for stealing candy from a desert gas station. They are put in a prison that looks like something out of an old Western, and though Roy is initially okay with this arrangement, things change when Mullet walks through the prison wall and waves in at him from outside the barred window.
“I’ll be right back to get you,” he says, and then he tears off running, barefoot.
Roy holds onto the bars and forgives him in advance. He’ll never be back.
*