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As a lawyer, I'm asked occasionally to do public defender-type stuff, poor people who can't afford a lawyer, and so I got one Carlos Machado, a worker at our local big-box retail store, who was being held for murder, and had DNA all over the body of a guy who had apparently been found in a stack of peat moss. He claimed, in his broken English, that he had just moved the guy off of the peat moss, before he even realized he was dead. Sure, he was working in the garden section that night, but he was working in other sections too. He was innocent, he said.

The dead guy, a kid, was identified as one James Marker, and his parents, from the suburbs up north, wanted blood. They had a high-powered lawyer and were going after Mr. Machado with all they had. If Machado didn't do it, who did? It was unfair, they said: a twenty-year-old kid, his life in front of him, hit on the head with a metal pipe of some kind, thrown in a stack of peat moss sacks, in the garden section of an all-night retail store in the middle of the night. It just wasn't right; somebody had to pay.

The police said that the kid, dirty, unbathed, hair matted even before it was covered with blood, was part of a group of young kids camping out in the National Forest twenty miles from town or so; they'd been out there for a couple of weeks. The officer admitted that they, the police, were not well-liked in the encampment, and it was very likely that a dozen or so of the campers had escaped through the woods upon first realizing that the police were on the scene. But several of them had taken the time to fill the police in on what kind of character James "Reef" Marker was. Friendly, loving, guitar-player, not an enemy in the camp, no known girlfriend or love triangle, no outstanding debts or bad drug deals, no money to speak of, either. From what people said, virtually everyone in camp was like that, on top of being ecologically gentle on the earth, inclined to smoke marijuana once in a while, and tending to earn a night's meal by panhandling, running through a town's dumpsters, or doing odd jobs at odd hours. The police maintained that they had no known motive for killing "Reef" Marker; if Machado had done it, they didn't know why. They were holding him because his DNA was all over the body; because he was known to have been there at the time of the murder (roughly 4 AM on a Wednesday morning), and because he couldn't seem to explain why he didn't have an excuse; he couldn't say where he was, if he wasn't in the garden section. He'd told me he was in another section of the cavernous store, helping somebody out, no doubt, but in any case, the body wasn't found until the next day, his very next shift in fact, so that struck the police as an odd coincidence, I guess, and they didn't like something about his bearing, his rough insistence that he'd had nothing to do with it.

In the retail store, the manager, one Joseph Parking, I loved that name, said that Mr. Machado had worked there for about a year, was a faithful employee, had some trouble with English, yes, but no criminal record that he knew of, hailed from some small town south of the border, and, he didn't know where anyone was on that night, in spite of the fact that he himself was working. This was suspicious, but I couldn't get any more out of him. Registers were beeping, fluorescent lights shone down on us, as we stood shooting the breeze in front of the bathrooms, in the front of the store. People came by with large shopping carts of goods, mostly food- some of them knew Mr. Parking, and said hello.

Mr. Parking knew of the encampment in the National Forest, though he didn't know "Reef" Marks specifically and had not recognized him at all from the photos he had seen; he had actually been out of the store when they found and removed the body. He had a low opinion of the campers, and said that they never had money; they were a constant nuisance, panhandling and stealing creamers from the coffee machine, or lifting a candy bar here and there, which he suspected but couldn't prove. Sometimes they'd come in on a rainy night, spend two or three hours getting warm or dry, maybe buy one or two cans of beans between them, and head back for the woods, panhandling everyone they met en route. He had very little sympathy for Reef Marks, or his friends, or anyone else who thought the world owed them a living, and a place to spend a rainy night.

Parking was a universally unpopular manager, a chiseler, a cheapskate, an angry man with a grudge, according to other employees, but if Machado had any enemy, it would probably be Max Bacon, another worker who alternated with him in the garden section, but somehow failed to see a body in the pile of sacks of peat moss, on the Wednesday in question. Max Bacon was a hard drinker, spent a lot of time down at R.J.'s bar, which raised a bunch of red flags for me, since R.J.'s was a hard-drinking, low-life, wretched place. Max Bacon hated Carlos Machado, but nobody could quite tell me why. Was Max Bacon low-down enough to kill some kid in order to set up Carlos Machado, put him away, get rid of him? They didn't know for sure.

Down at R.J.'s they knew Max Bacon well, and they knew Joe Ferguson too, the guy Max Bacon had spent that Tuesday night drinking with. They had both left the bar at about 1:30 am. Both were regulars, hard drinkers, not always on the right side of the law. Max Bacon was well-known to hate Carlos Machado, and a number of other people, but was not known to have said anything suspicious, or even mention him on the night in question. Joe Ferguson also hated a number of people, especially his ex-wife, who was taking him for all he was worth, and had been for several years. But Joe Ferguson had no known connection to the retail store, or to Carlos Machado (except through Max Bacon), or to the encampment, that anyone knew of. They had simply drank heavily, and left. Nobody else had bothered them that night, got in their face, or anything. No sign of any of the campers that night, either.

According to the police, or at least Nellie Cather, who ran the dispatch most nights and knew almost everything, Max Bacon hated Carlos Machado because Machado had stolen his girlfriend, or so he thought, and that made Max Bacon a suspect, also because he worked at that same garden section, and could have known about what went on. Though how could Machado's DNA be on the body, and not his, she asked. And Bacon lived out by the Forest, way out that way, had reason to dislike the campers, if not know a few of them; it maybe wouldn't be beyond him to kill one, hide the body in the peat moss, set up Machado. She herself, Nellie Cather, was working on that theory, though she admitted it had some holes in it. Tuesday night had been a quiet night, she said, except for Joe Ferguson, who had come in at about 2 am, angry because some student with a bumper sticker on his car had bashed right through his living room wall, and put a hole in his house, right where his television was. The bumper sticker said, "You can make me go to school, but you can't make me think." That's why he knew it was a student. The guy (presumably a male) had left the scene of the accident. Ferguson had gone to the police station demanding to know who it was. Nellie Cather had refused to give out the information- for almost two hours. Ferguson, drunk and belligerent, said that she could at least look up the motor vehicle and find out who he was through the license plate- but he was drunk, may have forgotten a letter or maybe a number. He'd finally left, angry, saying he'd get the S.O.B. that rammed his car through his living-room wall.

This was just a distraction. Concentrate, I thought, an innocent working man is going to suffer if I don't find out who had it in for Reef Marks. I could try the case with what I knew; I could probably free Machado or at least cast doubt on the prosecution's story; I knew they'd have the best, though, and that they were after Machado's blood. I knew I had to be good. I knew it was an uphill road, defending an immigrant in a small town like this one. I needed more information.

Something stuck in my mind about Nellie Cather's story. It was Nellie Lytle Cather herself. I went and looked up an old yearbook, five years before my graduating class; you'll never guess where I found one, sure enough, there she was. She'd graduated five years before me, Nellie Lytle, married Alvin Cather, the police chief, a couple years later, and eventually came to run the graveyard shift dispatch at the police house. But, there on a yellowed back page, an old photo of Joe Ferguson and Nellie Lytle together, smiling, at the football game. They'd been sweethearts. That was a clue, I knew, but what kind, I couldn't fathom.

So Nellie Lytle had married the cop, instead of Joe. And Joe had married some woman who'd obviously turned on him, driven him to alcohol, to the point that he drank nights at R.J.'s, even drank with a mean old drunk like Max Bacon, drank even on Tuesday nights, stumbled home drunk, to his little house on the T at Hamilton Street, living at that T, he shouldn't be surprised when some other drunk failed to make a stop and slammed into his wall. But he gets mad, comes into the station, and hassles his former sweetheart for several hours, trying unsuccessfully to get the name of the drunken idiot who did it. I now wanted to know who this was, too, but I never found out, even though it was public record, and I could have had it if I wanted it. I was still stuck on the connection to Reef Marks, who, for all I could tell, had nothing to do with any of these people- had never been in the police station, had never been in R.J.'s, had never done more than walked on the road that Max Bacon used to get home from the bar- or possibly hitchhiked on it. I thought I'd pursue that angle.

Marks had no car; he had left the encampment at about 1:00 am, heading for town, for no known reason, and was very likely to hitchhike from the forest to the retail store, though this would have been the opposite direction from Bacon, who was going from town, back to his house, more or less, at about 2 am, if everyone's story held up. It was not unlike these country people to stop, turn around, give a hitchhiker a ride back to town in the middle of the night, and drop them off anywhere they wanted- for no other reason than to drive around, or maybe get some extra drugs to top off the evening. It wasn't altogether implausible for a mean old drunk like Max Bacon to turn against a dirty young kid, maybe for saying too much, or being too political, or even for panhandling. But killing him?

Max Bacon, in his little old house out by the Forest, looked back at me with dark, empty eyes, mean, hung over. Didn't know the kid, he said; hadn't seen him that night, had never seen him. Didn't care what happened to Machado. Didn't care about the campers. Didn't think Joe Ferguson had anything to do with it.

They found the pipe, a piece of toilet piping which could have come from right near the garden section; it was found under another nearby pallet, in the garden section, but had no fingerprints on it. Had Marks' blood on it, but no known mark of a killer, who had obviously worn gloves. Wearing gloves and handling a toilet pipe struck me as a strange combination that said deliberate murder all over it, to me, but I said nothing. They found a guy who claimed to have seen Reef Marks walking on the road, not more than a mile or two from the retail chain; nobody had seen Max Bacon come home that night, or could verify his story that he'd come straight home and gone to bed. Finally, Nellie Lytle Cather shut up- about Joe Ferguson, about high school, about the driver who missed the stop sign- it was police business, she said. She was not able to reveal anything else.

A week and a half had gone by, and I had nothing- I was barely ready to defend my client. Machado could tell me nothing more than what he'd already told me, though he consistently maintained his innocence. He'd been somewhere in the store when it happened, probably helping some customer find some item, is all he could say. He clearly hated Max Bacon, and didn't put it past Bacon or Joseph Parking to trick him, set him up and be rid of him. I told him we'd do our best if it came to trial; I was still on his side; it seemed like he was telling the truth to me.

But we didn't have to go to trial. A drunken Joe Ferguson was hauled back into the police station, two and a half weeks after the murder, and in the course of being charged with drunken driving, public obscenity, and assaulting a police officer, admitted to killing Reef Marks in the retail store that night. He'd been holding the pipe, he said, and wearing gloves, in the back of the store, when some dirty kid came up and asked him for money, and he'd snapped. Yes, he'd been planning a dirty deed with the pipe anyway, as soon as he'd bought it. No, he'd never seen the kid before, the kid had just walked up and asked for money, and he, Joe Ferguson, had just snapped. Maybe it was the lighting, or the colorful displays, or the Made in USA signs when nothing was in fact made in USA, probably. But that's my editorializing. Nobody could find out exactly why Joe Ferguson snapped, only that he did it, and nobody saw it, and it was amazing that he was able to hide the body, and get away with it for two weeks, as he did. And he might have gone a little longer, and he even could have left town, I figured, but he didn't, which may have been because he had nowhere to go. I didn't ask. As Machado's lawyer, I seemed to be off the hook; Machado went free, and I moved on to other clients, ones who paid real money.

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