Blue Blood: A Debutante Dropout Mystery by Susan McBride Page B

acquaintances pay the right lawyers and get off the hook for things like insider trading, fraud, and embezzlement. Even murder. (Okay, murder for hire.) The Great State of Texas liked to keep its rich out of the pokey so they could build more houses, drill for more oil, raise more cattle, buy more land, and sell more IPOs. The kind of things that were supposed to keep the economy rolling. I wasn’t sure if the high-priced defense attorneys were really that good or if prosecutors just had a hard time convicting and sentencing well-groomed men and women dressed in Armani.
    So what would happen to Molly?
    She wasn’t rich. I’d bet she didn’t own an Armani.
    Would the jury look at her and see a killer? Would they assume she was a desperate woman who’d stabbed a man in order to make off with five thousand dollars of restaurant receipts? Would the security guard’s testimony and her fingerprints on the knife be all the proof they needed to put her away for life?
    The mere idea that Molly might actually be convicted rankled me to the core. Heck, I was a Libra. I always wanted the world to be fair—which it rarely was—so the whole thing didn’t sound right to me. It was different for the rich. Just ask good ol’ O.J.
    Would Molly stand a chance against those odds?
    Sighing loudly, I drew my legs up and wrapped my arms around them, setting my chin on my knees.
    “I ran out of there so fast. I heard him call after me, so I figured he was pissed as hell. But he was alive.”
    Molly hadn’t stabbed Bud to death. The superficial cut on his face proved to me that she wasn’t lying. It explained why her prints were on the murder weapon and accounted for the blood-spattered shirt and shoes.
    I thought of the missing bank bag containing the day’s receipts and tried to figure out where it might be, who might have taken it. Its disappearance made me surer than ever that someone had been at Jugs after Molly had run off. Maybe there was more than one person involved in Bud’s death.
    My head throbbed, and I reached up to rub my temples.
    “Do you know what you’re doing, my dear? Getting entangled in the troubles of a woman you haven’t seen in years, one who’s been accused of murder?”
    I groaned.
    Mother’s warning returned to nag at me, and the pounding in my brain increased.
    “. . . now for an update on the murder of the local restaurateur . . .”
    I glanced up to see the ten o’clock news anchors for Channel 11 filling the television screen. They quickly switched to a close-up of Cinda Lou Mitchell wearing her “I’m a serious reporter” face. The tape of her interview with Julie Costello rolled and ended with a mug shot of Molly on a split screen with her senior class photo from the Hockaday yearbook.
    Oh, Cinda was good about using the word “alleged,” as in “alleged knife-wielding murderer,” but it pissed me off just the same.
    Snatching up the remote, I flipped channels only to find the story playing out on the news at every other local station.
    Except for one.
    A twenty-four-hour local UHF setup (Channel 3, if you had cable) featuring the Reverend Jim Bob Barker and his purple-wigged cohort who cried “Amen!” every time the man uttered a word. Just watching the two was enough to cause indigestion. No wonder I had nightmares about them.
    Though the number for their prayer line running constantly across the bottom of the screen tempted me briefly.
    With a jab of my finger, I shut the television off and sat in the quiet of my living room, wondering what had ever made me think I could actually help free Molly from Lew Sterrett when even the Dallas P.D. believed she’d killed a man.
    “You’re a good friend,” I heard her voice then, soft and tremulous, and I saw the tears in her eyes when she’d said it. “Coming to my rescue, getting me a lawyer, taking care of David.”
    Yikes, what had I done?
    Was I giving her false hope where there was none?
    Were Malone and my mother both right?