Free Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane Page B

Coach.”
    “And why wouldn’t they?” I said. “Coach it is.”
    “When an attorney of Cheswick Hartman’s stature calls me up and says he’ll cochair my litigation on a case, pro bono, I sit up in my seat.”
    “Yes.”
    “He said you are a man who never breaks his word.”
    “That was kind of him.”
    “Kind or not, I want your word in writing.”
    “Understandable,” I said. “I brought my own pen.”
    Coach Mayfield pushed a stack of papers across the desk and I began to sign. He picked up the phone. “Come on in now, Janice, and bring the stamp.”
    When I was finished signing a page, Janice notarized it. By the time I was done, she’d notarized fourteen pages. The contract was, in its essence, quite simple—I agreed that I was working for the firm of Dufresne, Barrett and McGrath as an investigator on behalf of Taylor Biggins. In that capacity, anything Mr. Biggins said to me fell under attorney-client privilege. I could be charged, tried, and convicted if I ever discussed our conversation with anyone.
    I rode out to the courthouse with Coach Mayfield. The sky had that milky blue cast it got sometimes before a nor’easter, but the air was mild. The town smelled of chimney smoke and wet asphalt.
    The holding cells sat in the bowels of the courthouse. Coach Mayfield and I met Taylor Biggins on the other side of the bars, where the jailers had left a wooden bench for us.
    “Yo, Coach,” Taylor Biggins said. He looked younger than twenty-two, a stringy black kid wearing an extra-large white T that draped his body like a dinner bell over a toothpick, and drooping jeans he kept pulling up over his bunched-up boxers, because they’d taken his belt.
    “Bigs,” Coach Mayfield said and then to me: “Bigs played Pop Warner for me. Baseball and football.”
    “Who’s this?”
    Mayfield explained.
    “And he can’t say nothing to nobody?”
    “Not a word.”
    “Throw his ass in a hole if he does?”
    “Without a flashlight, Bigs.”
    “A’ight, a’ight.” Bigs wandered around his cell for a minute, his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. “What you need to know?”
    “Did someone pay you to kill the woman?” I asked.
    “Nigger, what?”
    “You heard me.”
    Bigs cocked his head. “You saying, was I put up to this dumb shit?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Who the fuck would do what I did if they was thinking straight? I was high as a motherfucker, man. I been whaling on the clear for three days.”
    “The clear?”
    “The clear,” Bigs said. “Meth, cheese, crank, whatever you want to call it.”
    “Oh,” I said. “So why’d you shoot her?”
    “I wasn’t trying to shoot nobody. Ain’t you been listening? She just wouldn’t give up the keys. When she grab my arm— pop . And she stop grabbing my arm. I just wanted to take her car. I got a friend, Edward, he buy cars. That’s all it was.”
    He looked out through the bars at me, already heading down a dark corridor’s worth of DTs, his skin shiny with sweat, eyes wider than his head, mouth taking quick, desperate breaths.
    “Walk me through it,” I said.
    He gave me an injured, incredulous look, like I was putting him out.
    “Hey, Bigs,” I said, “besides Coach here, you’ve got one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country looking into your case because I asked him to. He’s capable of cutting your sentence in half. You understand?”
    Bigs eventually nodded.
    “So answer my questions, dickhead, or I’ll make him go away.”
    He wrapped his arms around his abdomen and hissed several times. Once the cramps had subsided, he straightened and looked back through the bars at me. “Ain’t nothing to walk you through. I needed a car that’s easy to chop. A Honda or a Toyota, man. Those parts give for years—swap ’em out on a ’98 or an ’03, don’t matter. Shit’s interchangeable as a motherfuck. I’m in the parking lot, got me a black hoodie and these jeans, ain’t no one seeing me. She come out, go to the Accord. I