“It’s your law license. I’ll check out the detective agencies for you.”
“Thanks, Brooke. Bye.”
I punched the phone off and dropped it back into my purse.
When I saw Lynn in the visitor’s room, she looked as if she hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep. Her face had that splotchy look that blondes sometimes get under stress.
“How are you holding up?” I asked her when she had taken her seat across the table from me.
“Better than I would have expected.”
“Tell me about the gun they found.”
“It was in a shoebox in my closet.”
“Yes, you said that.”
“I didn’t put it there.”
“And you’ve never seen it before and you don’t know whose it is,” I said.
She looked at me without expression.
“Is that right?” I said.
She nodded.
“What have the police told you about the case against you?”
“Just the gun. And they asked me about my black eye.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing. You told me not to.”
I had told her, but hadn’t really expected her to listen. “Good job,” I said. “Did they ask you about your movements yesterday?”
“Yes, but I didn’t tell them anything.”
“Did they focus on any particular time period?”
“The evening from about five o’clock on.”
“What were you doing?”
“Reading a Stephanie Plum novel until Matt got home. Then I got him some dinner.”
“What did you have?”
“Meatloaf. With green beans and mashed potatoes.”
“I think it would be better for you and Steve to each have your own lawyer,” I said, changing the subject.
“No,” she said, some energy coming into her voice and posture for the first time. “I don’t want to get off at Steve’s expense. And he doesn’t want to hire a lawyer to try to pin the crime on me.”
I looked at her thoughtfully.
“It’s all or nothing,” she said. “I won’t lose him again.”
“What time did he leave the house last night?”
“He…” She stopped. “He wasn’t there.”
“But he has been there. He’s come and gone through the balcony off your bedroom.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“Lynn. He told me he had. Fingerprint evidence is going to prove it.”
“Why are you asking me then? Are you trying to trap me?”
“I’m trying to find out what happened. I have to know what we’re up against.”
She didn’t answer.
“Lynn?”
She got to her feet. “You’ll have to do the best you can,” she said.
I stood, too. “I’m on your side. You believe that, don’t you?”
She hesitated, then moved her head in a quick, birdlike nod.
“Then why won’t you talk to me?”
“I can’t tell you anything that will help us.”
“Don’t think about what will help. Just give me the facts, and I’ll do what I can with them.”
She gave me a sickly smile and turned away.
“Lynn said you were at the house last night,” I told Bruno. He looked better than Lynn did, though his skin had a sheen to it.
His eyes narrowed. “No, she didn’t.”
“Are you denying you were there?”
“I don’t think I like your methods,” he said.
Join the club, I thought. “I’ve been driven to them,” I said. “I have a couple of clients who for some reason are being selective in what they tell me. It’s bad for the quality of your representation.”
“That’s our call, isn’t it?”
“It’s also bad to have one lawyer representing two defendants who might develop opposing interests.”
“They seem to think we acted in concert,” Bruno said. “I think they’re going to try us together.”
“Suppose your lawyer could sell the jury on the possibility that Lynn acted alone? It would get you off the hook.”
He shook his head, his expression decisive. “I wouldn’t want that.”
“You’d rather die?”
“If that’s the alternative.”
“It’s not just a figure of speech here,” I said. “Virginia has the death penalty. If this goes to trial, it will be because the prosecution thinks it can get a conviction.”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“The way I understand it, both of you want me to represent both of you.”
“Why not?” he said.
“Even if you want to use the same lawyer, you might want to look around for someone with more experience. I’ve only had one capital murder case in my career.”
“How did it go?”
“I got the case tossed out at the preliminary hearing, but that may have been a fluke.”
His mouth stretched. “We could use a fluke like that.”
I gave up.
Chapter 9
Brooke had left a name for me on voicemail: Rodney Burns. His agency was on the back side of a strip mall on West Broad Street. I stopped my car in a parking space in front of the agency—all the spaces were empty—and sat staring dubiously at the Venetian blinds that hung inside the glass walls from ceiling to floor. Some of the blinds hung crookedly, and some were bent, giving the place a dilapidated appearance. Only the lettering on the door looked professionally done: Rodney Burns, Detective Agency.
I got my cell phone out and started to call Brooke, then didn’t. She was probably at her meeting. Anyway, she’d looked up the place in a phone book or on the Internet and wouldn’t know anything about Mr. Burns other than his address and phone number. I got out of my Beetle.
When I yanked at the door, I found it wasn’t locked, though I’d half-expected it to be. It opened into the outer of two offices. The only thing in it was a long computer table with a phone on it—no computer—and a secretarial chair with the back canted sideways.
A glass wall blocked off the inner office, the bottom panes, each about three feet square, painted white. A man’s head popped above the painted portion, and I yelped.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” His body turned a bit as he moved toward the doorway on the other side of the glass, but his eyes never left me, as if he feared I might vanish if he took his eyes off me.
“I’m Robin Starling,” I said, when he got to the doorway.
“Yes,” he said. “The lawyer?”
“A lawyer. I think there’s more than one.”
“Yes. Your associate called about you.”
“Brooke Marshall?”
“Yes. That was the name.” He had thinning hair combed over a domelike head, and a thin mustache to go with it. His brown suit looked as though he might have slept in it.
“I’m here about…”
“Fingerprints,” he said, nodding at me. “You want your car dusted for fingerprints.”
“That’s right. The person who left the prints is a redhead about five-four or so, somewhere in her twenties, and her name may or may not be Melissa Butler.”
He came forward, stopping close enough to me that he had to look up. “Your prints are on the car?”
“I assume so.”
“We’ll have to take them for purposes of elimination.” He turned away from me and went back into the inner office, where he bent down and disappeared behind the painted panes of glass.
His head popped into view again. “Got it,” he said. “Right in here.”
I went to the doorway. A big desk with peeling laminate dominated the small inner office. Magazines and folders were stacked along one wall, and papers were scattered over the desk. He opened a bottle and poured a little ink onto a rectangular sheet of glass, spread the ink with a roller, and, setting the roller on a stack of paper towels, looked up at me expectantly.
“I’m not sure I like this,
” I said.
“You’d like it less if I sent your prints around to a bunch of law enforcement agencies, asking for identification,” he said.
I nodded unwillingly, and he held out his hand for mine. “The sooner begun, the sooner done,” he said. The expression seemed too old for him by about thirty years, assuming him to be on the youthful side of fifty. I stepped forward, though, and didn’t pull away when he reached out matter-of-factly and took my hand.
“Just relax,” he said. “Let me do the work.” He rolled my index finger on the inky glass and then onto a large white card. He worked efficiently and had all ten fingers done in about a minute. “Now. Let’s do all eight fingers at once. Just touch them to the glass, then press them into these boxes at the bottom of the card here. Okay, now the thumbs.” He handed me a paper towel. “Wipe the worst of that off, then I’ll give you a squirt of cleaner.”
The ink came off easily, much more easily than I expected.
“Now let’s take a look at your car,” he said.
We went out.
“How long did this person have your car?”
“Not long, a few hours.”
“So we’re looking at the steering wheel, the gearshift, the leather seats, the dash…” He moved around the car. “Maybe the exterior of the trunk and around the door handles.”
“Okay,” I said.
He went back inside and came back with a plastic-sided briefcase. I stood and watched him work with his dark powder and his big, fluffy brush. He put white tape over the prints he found and scribbled a cryptic notation on the back of each piece, presumably to record the location of the print. Then he lifted the prints and attached them to a sticky sheet of cardboard. To a novice like me, it looked as if he knew what he was doing.
“I’ll photograph them inside,” he said. “I’ll get better results that way.”
“Okay.”
In less than an hour from the time I’d pulled up, I was on the road again. I drove back downtown to the office, where I found I had three missed phone calls, but no voicemail. I checked the phone’s directory to see who had called. The answer was Starling, Charles. My father had called three times without leaving a message. Maybe he had something serious to tell me, and he didn’t think I would call him back. He was right about that.
With an effort, I put Starling Charles out of my mind, and I managed to spend the rest of the afternoon on the commercial litigation the firm paid me to do.
Chapter 10
Brooke got home shortly after I did. She was wearing a casual, olive suit with matching pumps. The color went well with her red hair.
“Client?” I said.
“West End Pool Supplies.”
“Must be important. You’re wearing nylons.”
She looked down at her legs, turning her right foot. “They say they’re coming back, but I don’t know.”
The thought made me shudder. “I hate pantyhose,” I said.
“Me, too.” She lifted the hem of her skirt far enough to let me see the black garters.
I gave her a look. “There’s a man at West End Pool, isn’t there?” I said.
“Quite a few of them. They’ve got stores now from Ashland to St. Petersburg, which is why they need me to improve their inventory management.”
“You know what I mean. There’s one particular man.”
She gave me a shrug and a half smile.
“And I’ll bet he got a glimpse of those garters at some point today.”
She headed out of the living room, saying over her shoulder, “It doesn’t hurt to give a man something to think about.”
“Are you kidding?” I called, following her. “It’s all men do think about. If they suspect for a moment that you’re naked underneath your clothes, they can’t focus on anything else.”
She laughed, shrugging out of her jacket and getting a hanger from the closet.
“I’ll let you get changed, then I’ve got a proposition for you,” I said.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m straight.”
I held up my hands and turned back down the hall.
When she joined me in the living room, she was wearing jeans and a polo shirt, which was what I was wearing. “Okay,” she said. “What’s the proposition? Actually, first tell me how Rodney Burns worked out.”
I muted the television. “He worked out okay, I think. Time will tell.”
“That’s a ringing endorsement. So what’s your proposition?”
“I’ll buy you dinner if you’ll go with me to visit a potential witness,” I said.
“Who’s the witness?”
“Liz Lockard, Derek Nolan’s former secretary. She lives in a house on Three Chopt Road not far from the Country Club.”
“Is that where the dinner is?”
“At Liz’s house?”
“The Country Club.”
“I was thinking Fuddruckers.”
“You’re offering me a hamburger?”
“Long John Silvers?”
She laughed. “It’s getting worse,” she said. “I’ll go with the hamburger.”
When we got to the restaurant, though, she decided to have a grilled chicken sandwich instead. I had the burger, but forewent the cheese and, at the last moment, talked myself out of a milkshake to go with it. Being five-eleven and a runner, I get away with a lot, but every girl has her limits.
Liz Lockard’s house was a split-level dating from the 1950s. It had gleaming shutters and a nice lawn, though the car in her driveway was an old Civic with dulled paint.
Brooke and I went up the short sidewalk, mounted the stoop, and rang the bell. We waited and rang again. “I guess you didn’t call before we came,” Brooke said.
“If I’d done that, nobody would have been here, and it would have been on purpose.” I pointed to the car. “But I think somebody’s here.”
“Somebody could have picked her up. Boyfriend maybe.”
“It’s possible,” I conceded. Matt Nolan had seen Liz at the horse track with Mark Walker, which might mean he was her boyfriend if no one else was. “Let’s take a closer look at the car.”
“Who are you?” a voice said from inside the front door.
We turned back. “I’m Robin Starling,” I said. “I’m investigating the murder of your former employer, Derek Nolan.”
There was a sharp click, and the door opened to the length of its safety chain. A woman’s face was visible through the crack, one with close-cut, straw-colored hair and a reddish complexion. “I thought you guys had already made an arrest,” she said. Her voice was unexpectedly deep.
I smiled. “We guys work fast.”
Brooke said, “We’re always looking for additional evidence to bolster our case.”
I wondered that anyone could mistake us for cops in our jeans and topsiders, but the chain came off the door, and we followed Liz into her living room. She had a squarish physique and a charging gait, even over the short distance from her front door to a living room easy chair. Her brush-cut, blond hair had dark roots.
When we were all seated, she asked, “Can I get you something to eat, drink, smoke, or chew?”
“That opens up some possibilities,” I said.
Her laugh was like a donkey’s bray.
I glanced at Brooke. “Why don’t we get right to it?” I said. “How long did you work for Derek Nolan?”
Her eyes went from me to Brooke and back again. “Two years,” she said. “A little more.”
“How long did Mark Walker work for him?”
She shook her head. “Longer than that. Somewhere between five and ten years, I think.”
“Until when?”
“A week and a half ago, two weeks. Mr. Nolan fired him for what he said was embezzlement.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Mr. Nolan said Walker forged a note.”
“How did that work?”
“Somebody paid off his note early.” She stopped talking, as if reconsidering how much
she was prepared to tell us.
“And…,” Brooke prompted.
“And Walker marked the note paid and gave it back to the borrower,” I said, when Liz didn’t respond. “And printed off another one for the files. Is that how it worked?”
“That’s what he said.”
“What Mr. Nolan said?”
She nodded.
“Is collecting money part of Mr. Walker’s job?”
“Sometimes.”
“He works there in the office? Where were you when this borrower came in and paid off his note?”
“It was Wednesday, my afternoon off. I work a half-day on Saturday.”
“And Mark Walker fills in for you on Wednesday afternoons?”
She shrugged. “Not usually.” A fount of information she wasn’t.
“But he was there that afternoon,” I said.
“I don’t know. The debtor told Mr. Nolan it was some man.”
There it was again: some man without any qualifiers or description. “Could you tell us what Mark Walker looks like?”
She shrugged. “He’s a large man. Bald, except for a fringe of hair around his head.”
“Dark hair?”
“Medium brown.”
“How much money was missing?” Brooke asked.
“A little over sixteen thousand dollars,” Liz said, turning to her.
I asked, “Who do you think might have taken it, if not Mr. Walker?”
“Mrs. Nolan might have done it.”
“Mrs. Nolan?”
“If she needed it.”
“Why would she need it?”
“Mr. Nolan didn’t give her a lot of spending money, and what he gave her she had to account for. He kept her on a pretty tight leash.”
I nodded thoughtfully.
“And she had that old boyfriend hanging around. He could have been the man who took the money from the client.”
“Would he have known enough about the system to find the debtor’s promissory note in the files and to print a duplicate?”
“It isn’t that complicated.”
“What old boyfriend was this?” Brooke asked.
“Somebody named Steve. I never saw the man, but I understand Mrs. Nolan actually had him in the house. Mr. Nolan seemed pretty upset about it in that cold way of his.”
Juggling Evidence (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 6