Read Online The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens - Free Book Online

him as the victim.”
    â€œHe wants to give me his dying declaration,” I said, pouring the spaghetti into the strainer to rinse it.
    â€œHe wants to give you his what?”
    â€œHis dying declaration…that's what he called it. It's a statement that's true because you don't want to die with a lie on your lips.”
    â€œAs opposed to dying with a murder under your belt?” she said. “You see the irony, don't you?”
    â€œIt's not the same thing,” I said. I had no argument as to why it wasn't the same thing. I couldn't hack my way past her logic. Every turnpresented another blocked path, so I signaled my defeat by carrying the noodles to the coffee table and dishing them onto the plates. Lila picked up the pan of marinara sauce and followed me. As she started to pour the sauce, she stood up and grinned like the Grinch on Christmas Eve. “Oh, do I have an idea,” she said.
    â€œI'm almost afraid to ask.”
    â€œA jury convicted him, right?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhich means he had a trial.”
    â€œI assume so,” I said.
    â€œYou can look at his file from the trial. That'll tell you exactly what happened. It'll have all the evidence, not just his version.”
    â€œHis file? Can I do that?”
    â€œMy aunt's a paralegal at a law firm in St. Cloud. She'll know.” Lila pulled her cell phone from her pocket and scrolled through her contacts until she found her aunt's number. I handed Jeremy a paper towel to use as a napkin so that he could start eating, and then I listened to Lila's end of the conversation.
    â€œSo the file belongs to the client not the lawyer?” she said. “How do I find that out?—Will they still have it?—Can you e-mail that to me?—Perfect. Thanks a bunch. I gotta run.—I will. Bye-bye.” Lila hung up her phone. “It's easy,” Lila said, turning to me. “His old attorney will have the file.”
    â€œIt's been thirty years,” I said.
    â€œBut it's a murder case, so my aunt said they should still have it.”
    I picked up the newspaper articles, paging through them until I came across the name of the attorney. “His name was John Peterson,” I said. “He was a public defender out of Minneapolis.”
    â€œThere you go,” she said.
    â€œBut how do we get it from the lawyer?”
    â€œThat's the beauty,” she said. “The file doesn't belong to the lawyer. It belongs to Carl Iverson. It's Carl's file and the lawyer has to let him have it. My aunt's gonna e-mail me a form that he can sign requesting the file, and they have to give it to him or whoever he sends over to get it.”
    â€œSo all I have to do is get Carl to sign this form?”
    â€œHe'll have to sign it,” she said. “If he doesn't sign, then you know that he's full of crap. Either he signs it or he's nothing more than a lying, murdering bastard who wants to keep you in the dark about what he really did.”

I'd seen my mom wake up in the morning with the remnants of her previous night's binge still smeared in her hair; I'd seen her stumble into the apartment cross-eyed drunk with her shoes in one hand and wadded-up undergarments in the other; but I'd never seen her look as pathetic as she did when she came shuffling into the Mower County Courthouse wearing her jail-orange jumpsuit with her wrists in handcuffs and shackles on her ankles. Three days of no makeup and no showering brought out the burlap in her skin. Her blonde hair with its dark-brown roots hung heavy with dandruff and greasy build-up. Her shoulders slumped forward as though the cuffs on her wrists weighed her down. I had dropped Jeremy off at Mom's apartment before heading to the courthouse to wait for her first appearance.
    She entered with three other people also dressed in orange. When she saw me she waved for me to come up to the wooden railing, her on one side, standing beside the attorney's table