Chapter Ten ♥
*
Daphne looked at Valerie. She looked patient, controlled, and seemed to be almost totally ignoring Daphne’s nerves. It did nothing at all to ease the anxiety, though. She wasn’t used to this part of the legal process, regardless of how much work she’d done over the past years.
“I don’t know what he’s going to be like, so just…”
“Dee, I’ve done this before,” came the response. Daphne pursed her lips, knowing that she deserved the sarcasm. She let out a breath and buried her hands in her face.
“I know. I’m just. I don’t know. This is kind of important to me.”
Val’s smile betrayed the amusement that she kept under the surface. She dared a look over at Daphne, and then had to cover her mouth to stop herself laughing.
“Is that why you’re coming with me, even though that’s not really normal?”
“I have to deliver those letters to him.”
“Whatever you say.” She shrugged and peered down the hall. An officer came back, taking her own sweet time. “I’ll ask your friend if he’s fine with you being there, and if he’s fine with it, then we’ll move on.”
“He’s ready for you,” the third woman said. Val followed close behind; Daphne maintained her space.
“Thank you, officer,” Valerie said when they stopped outside the door. She opened the heavy metal door with a key from her belt and pulled it open.
“Lawyer here for you,” she announced to the whole hallway.
“I’ll take it from here.” Valerie stepped through the door.
“We’ll be waiting right outside if you need us, ma’am,” came the response.
“Thank you, officer.” Valerie turned, and the exchange was over.
Daphne, standing in the back, finally moved to step through the door, and only then did she see Leo’s face. If Major and Dane had both grown more serious and settled down a little, she had wondered what she would see on Leo, since he’d always been serious and settled. What she hadn’t expected was a face that seemed to have been caved in with a pipe.
“Leo! Jesus! What happened to you?”
He looked past her at the door. Daphne didn’t dare touch him. He looked like the structures of his skull would collapse at the slightest nudge, and she wasn’t sure that it was legal in the first place. Behind her back, the door shut, and the lock shut.
“I had a charming introduction to the local constabulary,” he said, once he was sure that the door was good and locked.
“You can’t be serious, Mr. Wolff!”
For all her teasing up to that point, Valerie sounded genuinely furious. Daphne looked over as she sat down.
Leo’s eyebrow, or what used to be an eyebrow, seemed to raise. It was hard to be sure through the mess of purple and brown. “Who are you? My lawyer?”
“I’m afraid so,” came the dry answer. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Only if you’re married,” he answered. He leaned with one arm on the table and looked in her eyes, Daphne’s presence seemingly forgotten.
“I don’t know if that’s an entirely professional attitude to take, Mr. Wolff.”
“Leo, please.” Daphne had seen Dane put on the moves before, but Leo doing it was a rare sight. Seeing him do it with a face that was more bruise than skull was almost cute.
“Mr. Leo,” Valerie offered. Daphne almost cringed. He was putting the works on her, and she was totally uninterested.
“I feel like you didn’t go all the way there,” Leo said. He wasn’t giving up. That was something, at least.
Valerie adjusted her glasses on her face. From where Daphne was standing she could see that she was trying to hide a smile behind her hand. Maybe it was working. “Never on the first date.”
“Well played.”
Daphne cut in at that point. It was almost cute, watching Valerie get flirted with, but she was there for a reason. More than just amusement. “We brought those letters you were asking about.”
“Did you read them?”
“We did.”
“And?”
Valerie looked at him flatly for a moment and let out a breath. “Let’s talk about something else. What happened to your face? And don't be funny about it.”
Leo made a face. “I said the wrong thing to the wrong guy.”
Valerie clicked a pen, and leaned down over a pad. She didn’t write anything down, but when she was ready to write she glanced up. “Do you have a name for this ‘wrong guy’ you talked to? And can you be more specific?”
“I don’t know if it would be wise.”
“It’s important,” she said, tapping the bottom of the pen on the pad.
“The Officer’s name was Danvers, and I said that I thought I had seen him selling contraband to the prisoners.”
“And he did this to you?”
“He was the one I got the name of, at least. There were others, too. Others whose names were a little harder to pick up on.”
“I’ll start making efforts on that.” She wrote that information down, and then beside it, added ‘no bail?’ and underlined it twice. “Now, about the letters.”
“You got a name, Miss Lawyer? It is Miss, right?”
She looked confused. She thought a moment. In the excitement of walking in on a guy who’d clearly taken a beating, she hadn’t said, and unlike Daphne, there was no history to fall back on.
“Valerie. Miss Valerie Whitcomb.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said.
“Don’t be. It’s kind of cute,” She smiled at him. Daphne almost thought it was cute herself. “… in a thirsty kind of way.”
“You like them thirsty, huh?”
“Back to your case, Leo.”
“Back to my case.”
She took a breath and sat back in her seat. There was a
“If the evidence you’ve got here stands up to any kind of scrutiny, then… well, I hate to speculate.”
“Feel free to speculate.”
“I hope you don’t have a problem with roast pork for our first date.”
Leo looked surprised. “We’re going to have a first date?”
Valerie looked over at Daphne, who was just as confused as Leo, and then she winked. “Our first court date.”
“What a shame. I’d hoped that you meant something more.”
“Who says I didn’t?”
Daphne couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Valerie!”
“What, you can hang around with your ex all you want, but I’m not allowed to flirt even a little bit?”
“With a client?”
“With a friend of yours. Client… remains to be seen. I don’t think this is going to take long.”
She stood up and knocked on the door. A moment later, a view port slid open, and the officer’s face was just visible through it.
“You need something?”
“We’re done here,” she said. All business. “Mr. Wolff, I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow once I’ve got something to report.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he said.
“I know you will.”
The tone of her voice suggested more than a simple knowledge. They followed the officer out the same way that they’d come. Daphne didn’t see the officer she had dealt with when she was inside; she wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or not.
Major waited in the lobby, and stood up the second that they came through the door. He met them in the space between the door to the back and the seating. A man walked between them on his way to the counter.
“Well? What’s the word?”
“Nothing to tell,” Daphne said, with a shrug.
“You shouldn’t be here, kid,” said an old man in a suit. He had an ID badge pinned to his chest, and didn’t stop to watch the reaction play out on Major’s face. His jaw tightened.
“What? Why?”
The detective turned without breaking stride, his own jaw set in anger. “You know the answer to that as well as I do. It’s a damn disgrace. You had better not be trying to follow in your old man’s footsteps.”
“Yeah, well, it’s still a free country for now. But I’ll be leaving.”
“Make sure you do,” the detective said, and stepped through the door to the back.
Valerie spoke as they walked through the front door. “We talked to Leo. He looks like hell. Someone ran through his face with a meat tenderizer.”
“That bad?” Daphne could see the anger on Major’s face, compounding from a thousand things that had gone wrong.
“We’ll talk in the car,” Daphne told him. They weren’t going to waste any extra time.
A car swerved up onto the curb. Daphne had to step back to avoid getting her foot flattened. The car stopped and she stepped forward, smacking the glass hard. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Major didn’t hold back. “You could have killed us!”
The three guys who stepped out, though, were fast. The doors opened, and in a practiced motion, one took a bat to Major’s stomach, while the other two picked up Daphne, and threw her into the car. By the time they retook their seats, perhaps twenty seconds had passed.
“Let her go!” Major fought the urge to vomit and scrambled for the door handle. They pulled away, dragging him a handful of feet before his poor grip failed him. He turned the the lawyer with a fire burning in his eyes as he retook his feet. “I’ve got to go after them.”
“Major! Don’t…” Valerie stopped when she realized that he couldn’t hear her any more, and leaned back on a sign post, breathing hard from the adrenaline pumping through her system. “Shit. I don’t know how he’s planning on keeping up with that car. But what he’s going to do if he catches it… that’s what I’m worried about.”