“So he took you to jail on an MIP—a minor in possession?”
“I guess. I mean, we both knew he was just jacking me.” Benny seemed unmoved by the thought—accepting, Lisa assumed, that getting hassled by the law was simply a fact of life.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Benny repeated what seemed to be his favorite phrase, even when offering up what he obviously did know in the next sentence. “’Cause I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. He wanted to grill me.”
“And did he?”
“He took me into his office and asked me a bunch of questions and then he had Padilla lock me up.” He grimaced. “Probably hoping I’d tell that cabron something just because he’s Chicano.” He followed this statement with a Spanish word that Lisa did not recognize but the derogatory intent of which was clear.
“And when did this happen?”
“Day before yesterday.”
“So you’ve been here ever since? Were you arraigned? Taken into court for a hearing?”
He shook his head. “I ain’t been nowhere but my cell.”
“What did he tell you he was charging you with?”
“I don’t know. MIP, I guess. He said he was going to let me think about it and then we’d talk some more.” His lip curled expressively. “Trying to scare me.”
“Did he hit you?” Lisa asked. “Hurt you in any way? Threaten you with bodily harm?”
The teenager looked at her in faint surprise. “Nah. He’s not like that. He’s okay, most of the time.” He paused, then added, “He’s just…you know, playing his game. And I’m playing mine.”
Lisa sighed. This was not the first time she had encountered this attitude of being locked with the police in some sort of elaborate game, the rules and movements of which were known to her clients and the cops. Benny had his game face on, the blank mask that withheld emotions, giving nothing away. She had seen it on a hundred faces of young men, black, white, and Latino, when she had worked at the Dallas Public Defenders office the last summer of law school.
“You know, Benny, this is a game where he holds most of the cards,” she pointed out. “The best thing for you to do is not play. Just clam up and call for your attorney next time. Will you do that? Will you call me?”
He nodded. “You gonna get me out of here?”
“Yes. When we get through here, I’ll have a talk with the sheriff. He knows he doesn’t have enough to hold you here. And if he refuses to release you, then I’ll get a writ and go to court.”
Lisa stood up, picking up the pad on which she had taken a few notes and sticking it back into her briefcase. She shook Benny’s hand and went to the door. The deputy opened it and escorted her through the set of locked doors back into the courthouse.
She walked purposefully up the stairs and though the halls, getting lost once, but finding her way back to the wide central hall of the main part of the courthouse. She wondered if the sheriff had led her the most confusing way on purpose.
Her heels clacked briskly on the old granite floors as she headed toward the sheriff’s office. She was sure that everyone along the corridor would know that she was coming. She turned into the large outer office, where the secretary and two deputies were at their desks, seemingly busy about tasks, but she could feel their sideways glances as she marched through and into the inner office of the sheriff, not pausing or even glancing at his secretary for permission.
Mindful of the listening ears outside, she closed the door behind her. She didn’t want the sheriff’s employees to hear what she had to say to him—not out of any concern about embarrassing the sheriff, but because she was well aware that the knowledge that his people were listening would make it harder for the sheriff to back down and might result in his refusing to release Benny simply because of the loss of face.
Quinn Sutton rose from his seat behind the desk. Lisa was reminded all over again of how tall and overwhelmingly masculine the sheriff was. She quelled the involuntary response of her own body to that masculinity.
“Ms. Mendoza.” Sutton smiled in that cocky way that she found both profoundly irritating and annoyingly charming. “Have a seat.” He gestured toward the chair in front of his desk.
“This won’t take long.” Lisa was not about to let her guard down around this man, even to the extent of relaxing enough to sit. “I just came here to tell you that I want my client released immediately. You know, and I know, that you arrested him on the flimsiest of pretexts and brought him down here, where you have been holding him without arraignment for two days now.”
“Well, yesterday was Sunday,” he pointed out, and amusement lit his mahogany-brown eyes.
Lisa’s hand clenched tighter around the handle of her briefcase. “Yes, and today was Monday, and you still didn’t arraign him. You may find it amusing to hold a young man without reason for the weekend in the county jail, but I can assure you that I do not. First you stop him, no doubt doing a little racial profiling…then—”
Quinn grimaced. “Oh, come on, don’t go throwing around your big-city buzzwords in here. There was no racial profiling going on.”
“Then,” Lisa plowed ahead, ignoring his words, “you harass him, even though he had done nothing except have a broken taillight, making him get out of the car. You find an empty beer can in his car, which you had no right to search—”
“I didn’t search,” Quinn responded tightly. “It was in plain view on the floor. And it wasn’t empty.”
“Oh, right,” Lisa replied sarcastically. “It had, what, maybe a teaspoon of liquid in it? On the basis of that, you hauled him down to the jail. When was the last time you took a kid to jail for an MIP instead of just writing him a citation?”
“Last weekend,” he responded, crossing his arms across his chest. “This isn’t the big city, Miss Mendoza, and I take underage drinking seriously. My deputies and I don’t write a drunken teenager a citation and turn him loose on the road. I find it’s pretty effective with an MIP or DUI to have them come down to the jail and spend a while waiting for their parents to pick them up.”
Lisa hesitated, momentarily nonplussed by his response, then picked up on his last statement. “Benny Hernandez has been here quite a bit longer than a ‘while.’ Why weren’t his parents called to come pick him up?”
“Because his father skipped out before Benny was born, his mother’s in San Antonio living with her new boyfriend and his stepfather’s in prison in Huntsville.”
“Oh, I see. That makes Benny automatically a criminal, right? He’s got a crummy homelife, so the place for him is jail? His family is bad, so he is, too?” Lisa’s eyes snapped, and her body was stiff with anger.
Quinn Sutton’s eyes lit with an answering anger. He was also aware that the emotion in Lisa Mendoza’s face had stirred a primitive desire in him that was as strong as his anger. That fact irritated him even more.
“No, Ms. Mendoza,” he said, his voice clipped and precise. “As a matter of fact, most of the people in Benny’s family aren’t bad at all. His mother just has the world’s worst choice in men. One of her brothers, his uncle Pablo, has been in and out of jail most of his life, but the other two uncles are as honest and hardworking as anybody in Angel Eye. His grandmother raised Benny most of his life, on and off, and they don’t come any better than Lydia Fuentes. She’s the one who wanted me to haul him in!”
Lisa looked at him with great scorn. “So you’re saying that you arrested Benny and stuck him in jail for two days as a favor to his grandmother?”
“Well…sort of.”
Lisa simply gazed at him, eyebrows raised