“It has nothing to do with this case,” she says.
“Yes, it does. You most likely don’t have to go through a trial at all; the judge would delay it long enough for … for it not to matter.”
“But I’d sit in jail for the rest of my life?”
“Yes,” I say. “There’s no way around that.”
“And people would always assume I was a murderer?”
“Probably.”
“Wow … that sounds like a terrific deal. We should grab it. Did you win your law degree in a raffle?”
I can’t stifle a laugh; she has nailed the situation pretty well. But I try a different tack. “A trial is not going to be a pleasant experience.”
“Unless we win.”
“Even then,” I say.
“Better than sitting in a cell, waiting to die. I did not do this, and I’m not going to let anyone believe that I did.”
I’m not going to talk her out of this, and, as much as I dread preparing for a murder trial, I’m not sure I want to. I’m not big on screwing around with dying wishes.
I nod. “OK, we go to trial. We don’t have time to talk now, so I’ll set up a meeting to go over things. But in the meantime, there’s something I want you to think about.”
“Good. I have plenty of time.”
“The gun that killed Hennessey was found in your basement.”
“That’s a bunch of crap,” she says.
I shake my head. “No, it’s true. And there’s more.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“It’s the same gun that killed your husband.”
I can tell that she is stunned by this. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s innocent. It could mean that she is surprised the police discovered the connection.
“That can’t be,” she says.
“I’m told that the forensics are conclusive,” I say. “But I’ll be getting more details.”
She’s trying to formulate her thoughts, but it’s not easy to do. “I don’t even know where to go with this. What does it mean?”
“I’m not even close to answering that question,” I say. “But for now I want you to think about a couple of things. One, although at the time everyone thought Jake was in the wrong place at the wrong time that night, it’s possible he was the target. Try and think of why that could be and who might have wanted him dead.”
“Wanted Jake dead?” she asks, as if she is rolling the idea around in her mind.
“And think if there’s any connection between Hennessey and Jake.”
“There can’t be,” she says. “Hennessey moved in long after Jake died.”
“That’s the wrong way to approach it. Assume there’s a connection, and try to figure out what it is.”
She nods her agreement, but I can see that she just doesn’t fully accept what I’m telling her. “What are you going to do?” she asks.
“I’m going to try and let you die with dignity.”
If there is anything more boring than arraignment number 1, it’s arraignment number 2.
Not that this is a full arraignment; the only purpose is to decide whether to set a trial date. Judge Chambers wants to do it in the courtroom with a court reporter, but, in deference to the confidential medical information that could be discussed, he does not allow spectators or media to attend. Since I know what is going to happen, I don’t even bother to tell Hike to show up. I can handle this on my own.
Once the judge is seated, he asks me what is the defense’s position on holding or delaying a trial. “We absolutely want a trial, Your Honor, and we invoke our right to a speedy one.”
I detect a slight frown on the judge’s face, but he simply turns to the prosecution. “Mr. Tressel?”
Tressel stands up. “The prosecution can be ready very quickly, Your Honor.”
Chambers nods. “Very well. I am hereby ordering a medical examination, the purpose of which is to assure the court that Ms. Boyer will be physically able to stand trial. If that answer comes back in the positive, I will provide you both with a date at the earliest possible time.”
He adjourns the hearing, and I tell Pups that I will see her soon, probably tomorrow.
“Give ’em hell,” she says. “And give it to ’em fast.”
I nod. “Fast hell, that’s what I’ll give them. As soon as I figure out how.”
I tend to think of myself as an unconventional attorney; I sort of wear it as a badge of honor. But the truth is that I am a creature of habit. I approach each case in the same manner. I try and look at the big picture, and I do everything I can not to let my predeterminations and biases lead me in a particular direction.
I also always take two initial steps, regardless of the case. The first is to visit the scene of the crime, when that is at all possible. I don’t necessarily learn that much, but it somehow clears my head and brings me emotionally into the case. The second thing I always do is convene a meeting of our investigative and legal team.
My first call is to Laurie, to tell her that I’ll pick her up and take her to the crime scene. As a former police detective and my chief investigator, she can assess it with a more practiced eye than I can.
I then call Pete Stanton, to arrange for us to be allowed into the scene. He once again tells me that it’s Luther Crenshaw’s case, but he agrees to do so anyway, since he knows I can gain admittance through the court if he or Luther resisted. “I’m sure you’ll crack the case,” he says, rather drily.
“When I find the real killer, I’ll bring him in to you,” I say. “Try not to screw up reading him his Miranda rights. Sound out the words phonetically.”
My third call is to Hike, to tell him to officially request discovery and to round up the team for an early afternoon meeting. “She’s not pleading it out?” he asks, in obvious surprise and disappointment.
“No, we’re going to trial.”
“But she’s got three months to live,” he says.
“Actually, she’s been told six to twelve months.”
“They always guess long,” he says. “She’ll be history in three, four months tops. Vegas will be taking bets on whether she makes it through jury selection.”
“Stay upbeat, Hike.”
Laurie meets me in front of the house when I pull up. It’s just a short ride to the scene, but she has time to inform me that the media has broken the story of Pups’s illness.
I’m embarrassed for Pups; it can’t be pleasant to have her intimate health details out there for the world to see. In terms of the case, it probably cuts in our favor. The public, including the future jurors, would possibly see this as a heroic fight to prove her innocence and save her reputation before dying. What other reason could she have for going down this road?
There is one police officer on the porch of Hennessey’s house when we arrive. There’s also police tape surrounding the entrances to the house, and I’m not sure if the cop is assigned here or if he’s here because Pete knew we were coming. Either way, Laurie knows him from her days on the force, so he lets us right in.
Hennessey was new to the area, having moved in only three months before his death. He doesn’t seem to have been a type A personality, since there are a number of boxes that he hadn’t gotten around to unpacking.
I’m the same way; if I were living alone and moved to someplace new, I’d probably never unpack. Laurie, on the other hand, would have the place looking like she lived there for ten years before the moving men left.
The den area looks fairly undisturbed, except for the residue that shows that fingerprints were lifted throughout. We go into the kitchen, and it’s not too hard to tell where Hennessey was shot; the blood and chalk marks are still on the floor.
It’s always weird to be in a place where someone has recently died a violent death. The incident has long since happened, but you can almost feel the violence and fear in the air.
“My guess is we’ll find out that Hennessey was shot in the back,” Laurie says.
�
�Why do you say that?”
“Because it happened here, near the door. It seems unlikely that he was surprised to find someone hiding in the kitchen; it’s more likely that he was talking with his killer, and then tried to get out when he realized what was about to happen. If he wasn’t coming in the door, he was going out. I think he was probably going out.”
“Pups said that when she got here, Hennessey called out to her to come in. She didn’t know his voice anyway, so she assumed it was him. But she didn’t hear a gunshot or the sound of someone falling, so he was obviously dead already, and it was someone else calling to her.”
Laurie nods. “If it happened the way she said, then it’s possible that when she came in here, the killer went out the front.”
“If,” I say.
She smiles. As an ex-cop, it’s her instinct to disbelieve the accused—the opposite of the way a defense attorney has to think. She’s working on it, but it’s hard to change old habits. She continues. “It’s more likely he went out the back.”
We walk to the back door and look out. The small backyard is adjacent to the yards of the houses next door on either side and those of the houses on the block behind us. Behind those houses is Route 20, also known as McLean Boulevard.
“In the dark, it would be easy to get away through here,” I say. “And the killer could have a car parked on that street. He could be on the highway in twenty seconds.”
She nods. “No question.” Then, “I assume nothing was stolen?”
I shrug. “Not sure, but I doubt it. The phone call means the purpose of the killing was not to rob the house but, rather, to implicate Pups.”
Once we get the discovery, we’ll be able to understand things better for having been here, but right now there’s little more to learn.
So we leave. Speaking for myself, I find leaving a murder scene to be preferable to arriving at one.
We’ve got to go after this from a number of directions simultaneously,” I say.
I’m looking around my office conference table, which is really two small wooden tables butted up against each other. It seems fitting; somehow an expensive, ornate conference table in an office one floor above a fruit stand might seem a bit much.
I was in this office on Van Houten Street before I inherited a fortune and then added to my bank account with lucrative cases. I haven’t moved for four reasons. One, it just feels like a lot of trouble. Two, I’m comfortable here. Three, moving would make me feel like I was going to continue being an active lawyer, and I don’t want to come close to admitting that. And, four, I really like fruit.
The team is all here. In addition to Hike, Laurie, and me, there’s Sam Willis, my accountant, who goes into a phone booth and changes into Sam Willis, computer superhero, when we have a case. Sam can hack into anything, and we frequently use that mostly illegal skill to our advantage.
Then there’s Edna, my less than hardworking assistant. Edna has perfected a new form of retirement: she does pretty much no work at all but continues to draw a weekly check. Nice nonwork if you can get it.
Willie is here also. He has no official role on the team, but he’s always available to help. Willie is fearless, totally reliable, and, as a martial arts expert, is one of the most dangerous people I have ever been around. Of course, that makes him the second most dangerous person on the team.
When it comes to scary and deadly, Marcus Clark makes Willie look like Cinderella. He’s a very competent investigator, but we more often use him for his amazing physical skills. Marcus has literally saved my life on a number of occasions and has nearly scared me to death on others. He and Laurie get along great, so he reports in to her. He’s a man of very few words, none of them intelligible.
“First of all, we investigate it like we would any murder,” I say. “We need to learn everything we can about the victim, Randy Hennessey. What was his job, who were his friends, why did he complain about the dogs, why was he a target, and who had reason to kill him?”
I continue. “At this point, Pups is only accused of the Hennessey murder, but we have to broaden our scope beyond it. The same gun that killed Hennessey killed Jake Boyer and Little Tiny Parker in front of that restaurant eighteen months ago. It is simply not possible that it is a coincidence; somehow, those murders are connected to Hennessey.
“So for the time being, we need to assume that Jake Boyer was the target back then, not Parker. This was not a drive-by shooting of a gang member; it was a targeted assassination of our client’s husband. We’ve got to find out why he was killed, who had reason to kill him, and what the hell his connection is to Hennessey.”
“What does our client say about it?” Hike asks.
“She was stunned when I told her and couldn’t imagine a connection. Hopefully when she digests it and has time to think, she’ll come up with ideas that we can look into. Hike, when will we start getting the discovery?”
“I told Tressel that if the material doesn’t start flowing by tomorrow morning, he’ll have to explain why to the judge. I reminded him that he agreed to expedite the trial, which means expediting the preparation.”
“Good. Once we get the forensics linking the gun to the shooting a year and a half ago, we’ll request all the evidence from that case. There will be a truckload of it, but most will be focused on Little Tiny Parker, since he was thought to be the target.”
“What have you got for me?” Sam asks. He’s the one person in the room who is delighted that we have a case. He finds the whole thing exciting, and I guess compared with his day-to-day accounting work, it is. But Sam is chomping at the bit to move from the computer side to what he calls “working the streets.” Sam, I’m afraid to admit, wants to shoot people. I think he only wants to shoot bad people, but you never know.
“Don’t know yet, Sam, but there will be plenty. There always is.”
I divide up the responsibilities so that I’ll look into the killings from eighteen months ago, while Laurie and Marcus can dig into Hennessey’s life. I’m not sure which will take more manpower, but we can revisit it if we need to.
The meeting breaks up, and I drive with Willie down to the Tara Foundation to see how Pups’s dogs are doing. He assures me that they’re fine, but she’s going to ask me when I talk to her—she always does—and I want to be able to say that I saw them.
The mother and puppies are at the Tara Foundation building in Haledon, so we head down there. Willie and Sondra are keeping Pups’s dog, Puddles, at their home, but she spends the days with them at the foundation.
There is a small school bus in the parking lot when we get there, and I realize that today is the day that kids from the local grammar school spend a couple of hours at the foundation. It’s something that Willie agreed to do; the ten-year-olds interact with the dogs and help take care of them. The school hierarchy thinks that it teaches them good values, and I have to say I agree.
When we get in, I see that the puppies, who give the word “adorable” new meaning, are surrounded by all the kids—actually, all but one: a little girl is sitting on a chair with Puddles in her lap. She’s gently scratching Puddles’s stomach, and the dog is loving every second of it.
I go over there and ask the girl her name.
“Micaela Reasoner,” she says.
“Hi, Micaela. I’ve got a feeling you like Puddles?”
“I LOVE Puddles,” she says. “She’s my favorite.”
“Do you have a dog at home?”
“No. I have a fish.”
She says it in a way that indicates she’s not a big fish fan, probably because a fish doesn’t react as well when you sit on a chair with it and scratch its stomach.
I walk over to the mother and puppy area, where the other kids are doing their doting. Then I ask Sondra how it’s going.
“Great,” she says. “We’ve probably had twenty people in wanting to adopt these puppies. But we’re going to hold on to them for at least a few more weeks, until they’re more grown.”
“W
hat about the mother?”
“There won’t be any problem placing her either.”
I always enjoy my time at the foundation, and this time hasn’t been any different. Good things happen here, and for the right reason.
Unfortunately, it’s time to go back to real life.
There just isn’t anyone who would have wanted to kill Jake,” Pups says.
“I’ve thought about it, and it’s not possible. Jake never hurt a fly.”
I’m not surprised to hear Pups say this, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a natural reaction for a spouse. To believe that someone wanted to kill her husband, she would have to tacitly acknowledge that he had given a person a reason to hate him, justified or not.
Secondly, at the time of the shooting, to my knowledge she never expressed the belief that Jake might have been a target. If she thought he was, I would think she would have told the police.
“Did the police at the time ever mention that they thought Jake could have been the intended victim?”
She shakes her head. “No, just the opposite. They made it clear they considered him an innocent victim. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“Tell me about Jake,” I say.
“What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you think is worth telling me,” I say, but I prompt her. “How long were you married?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“Was he married before?”
She nods. “Yes. Twice.”
“Any children?”
“He had one son with his first wife, but he never saw him.”
“Why not?”
She shrugs. “Bunch of reasons. Geography, for one. They lived in upstate New York. But the ex-wife didn’t handle the divorce well, and she turned the kid against him. Then I heard he started up with drugs, but Jake didn’t talk about it much. He had walled off that part of his life. But he said one thing that made me know how much it hurt him.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know Jake and I have always been Mets fans. Jake really got me into it. Well, Jake told me his son pitched in high school, and he was really good. But one day Jake got a phone call, and it upset him. He wouldn’t tell me what happened. All he said after the call was that he thought his son was going to be Jerry Koosman, and he wound up being Doc Gooden.”
The Twelve Dogs of Christmas Page 5