Juggling Evidence (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “I think he lives in Oregon Hill, up around Hollywood Cemetery somewhere.” He sat at Lockard’s desk, opened a file drawer, and started flipping through it. After a moment, I went to the file cabinet and opened a drawer. Brooke went to Nolan’s desk. We gave up after thirty minutes.

  If there had been a file on Walker, it wasn’t there now.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning I got to the office as the receptionist was tucking her purse into the drawer of her desk. “Hello, Jennifer,” I said as I stepped off the elevator.

  “Hi, Robin.” Our firm operated on a first-name basis except in the presence of clients.

  “Anything new?”

  She shook her head, and her dark hair bounced. She was a fresh-faced twenty-year-old to whom I’d once heard one of the (male) partners refer as “scenic,” whatever that means. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pick up the phone as I turned down the hall.

  I put my own purse in the desk drawer, punched the button to turn on my computer, and sat down. Pete Larsen, the firm’s managing partner, appeared in my doorway. “Hello, Robin.” He came in and sat in one of the client chairs.

  “Hi, Pete.”

  “How’s your practice going?”

  “Can’t complain.” His go-slow approach had me bracing myself.

  “What case is occupying you most right now?”

  I moved my head. “One of our clients was murdered Monday,” I said.

  Larsen’s eyebrows went up as if this were news to him.

  “I did some estate planning for Derek and Lynn Nolan about a year ago,” I said. “Then Monday morning Lynn showed up with her son to talk about divorce. Now she’s in jail on a murder charge.” I let one corner of my mouth rise in a half-smile. “There’s a lot of variety in a law practice.”

  “Maybe too much variety,” Larsen said. “We can’t be all things to all people.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  After a brief silence, Larsen said, “Criminal law is very much its own specialty. It isn’t the kind of thing you can dabble in with any degree of competence. A lot of things are that way. It’s why we maintain our referral list.” The referral list was a list of approved attorneys for different areas of law. I’d used it before when I couldn’t take a case because of a conflict of interest.

  Larsen cleared his throat. “Who have you referred the Nolan matter to?”

  “I haven’t referred it.”

  “Have you been talking to somebody about it? Which lawyer do you have in mind?”

  “I guess I’d thought about handling it myself.”

  Larsen frowned. “I think that’s a bad idea, Robin. Aside from the potential liability…”

  “I think of myself as a trial lawyer,” I said. “A trial lawyer is by nature a generalist.”

  “And a criminal lawyer is by nature a specialist.”

  “I sat in on some criminal trials when I was in law school,” I said. “One of them was a capital case: The defendant stabbed a fellow inmate in the state penitentiary. It didn’t strike me as rocket science.”

  Larsen inhaled and exhaled, his nostrils flaring. “That’s a different kind of defendant and a different kind of case.”

  “Are you telling me I’m incompetent? I’ve come up to speed in obstetrics and vasectomies for medical malpractice cases. I’ve boned up on securities law for…”

  “This is different,” Larsen said sharply.

  I waited.

  Larsen leaned forward. “Criminal defense is not something we want this firm associated with, particularly not in a potentially high profile case like this one.” He sat back. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be, Robin. There are any number of lawyers we can hand this off to.”

  Rebellion rose in me, and I had to make an effort to control my respiration.

  “Okay, Robin? Are we clear on this?” He sat forward, his hands on the arms of the chair.

  “I understand you,” I said.

  “Good.” He smiled at me.

  I smiled back with an effort. He nodded at me, and I nodded back. Larsen left my office. The phone rang, and I picked it up. It was Rodney Burns.

  “Ms. Starling?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted you to know I’ve eliminated your prints, and I have some inquiries underway concerning the rest of them.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It will likely be tomorrow before I hear back from anyone. Tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “That’s okay. Just let me know.”

  I dropped the phone back into its cradle and sat staring moodily at the corner of my desk. I could hear myself breathing.

  I was still angry when Jennifer the backstabbing receptionist buzzed me to let me know I had a visitor. “A Charles Roberts,” she said sweetly. “Shall I bring him back?”

  I resisted the urge to ask why she hadn’t followed precedent and sent him back without warning. “I’ll come get him,” I said.

  He stood as I entered the reception area.

  “Charles Robert Starling,” I said.

  “Hi, Robin.” My father was still tall and straight, but he had lost weight and his hair had gone steel gray in the fifteen years since I had last seen him.

  “Better come on back,” I said.

  I led the way, conscious of the too familiar stranger right on my heels. As he took a client chair, I walked around my desk to put it between us. When I turned, I found him studying me.

  “So,” I said. “I guess there’s a reason you’ve begun harassing me?”

  “Harassing you?”

  “Calling repeatedly. Not leaving a message.”

  The ghost of a smile touched his face. “I didn’t think you’d call me back.”

  I gave him a fierce smile in acknowledgment that he was probably right.

  He took a breath and let it out again. “I would like to get reacquainted with my family,” he said at last. “I’ve spoken to your mother and your brother.”

  “What about Jasmine?” She was the veterinary assistant he had run off with when I was sixteen.

  “She’s dead. Cervical cancer.”

  It knocked the breath out of me. She had been twenty-four or twenty-five, one of my favorite people before she had taken up with my father.

  “It was a long fight,” my father said. “She lasted almost two years after the first diagnosis. She died last month, the day after Labor Day.”

  I could see the strains of that fight still in his face. “Not quite what you signed on for, huh?”

  He shook his head. “No. I traded everything for youth and energy and laughter…” He trailed off, looked away. “Even that turned hollow pretty quickly,” he said. “Despite Jasmine’s many fine qualities.”

  “But you stuck with her.” The words were like dust in my mouth.

  “By that time I didn’t have anything else.”

  I stood. “Okay,” I said.

  He looked startled. “Okay?”

  “That’s enough for right now. I’ve got all I can process.”

  He got unwillingly to his feet. He was still a handsome man, though not as fit as I remembered him—thin rather than lean. He had aged more than the fifteen years that had passed. “Will I…May I call you again?”

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “My phone got your number.”

  He looked at me a long time, and I met his gaze with an effort. He turned, finally, and left the office without saying anything else. I fell back exhausted into my chair, my eyes tracking him through the glass walls of my office until he disappeared from sight.

  When I met Brooke for lunch, I didn’t say anything about my father’s visit. Even a mention would result in a lot of talk, and I simply wasn’t up to it. We were at O’Riley’s, a little restaurant on Grace Street just off the VCU campus. It was a narrow building with a cash register near the front and a row of booths on each side. When our waitress showed up to take our drink order, I asked, “Is Melissa working today?”

 
“Melissa Butler?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Redhead about your age?”

  “Sure, I know Melissa, but she’s not here. She’s supposed to be. I heard she just didn’t show up for work this morning.”

  “Was she here yesterday?”

  “It was her day off. What can I get you to drink?”

  “I’ll have iced tea,” I said.

  The waitress looked at Brooke.

  “Me, too.”

  “She got engaged recently to a boy named Matt,” I said. “Maybe she took him home to show off to her family.”

  “Huh. Maybe.” She gave me a mechanical smile and moved off.

  “She really opened up to you, don’t you think?” Brooke said.

  “I found out Melissa didn’t show up for work today.”

  “And didn’t give notice. Yeah, that’s something.” She shifted in her seat and her khakis squeaked on the smooth vinyl.

  The waitress brought our teas. I ordered a BLT on whole-wheat toast, and Brooke ordered a veggie wrap. None of us mentioned Melissa.

  “After this we can go by her apartment,” I said, taking the lemon slice off the edge of my glass and squeezing it into my tea. Brooke was stirring Splenda into hers.

  “It was on Franklin, wasn’t it?” she said. “Do you remember the number?”

  “1313, apartment B,” I said.

  “Impressive.”

  “I called Matt just before I came and asked him.”

  “I should have known.”

  “Preparation as opposed to memorization,” I said. I fished the key out of my purse and laid it on the table. “We can even get in. I swung by the house in Church Hill when I left the office.”

  “Matt had a key?”

  “He’s her fiancé. He wasn’t real anxious to let go of it, but I managed to sweet-talk him.”

  The waitress showed up with our food. “Anything else?” she said. According to her nametag, her name was Rhonda.

  “You don’t like Melissa much, do you?” I asked.

  Her eyebrows lifted, and her chin retreated into her neck. “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t like her much myself. Day before yesterday, she borrowed my car without permission. Not so much as a please or a thank you.”

  “Melissa takes care of Melissa.”

  “Do you know Matt Nolan? I understand they met right here in this restaurant.”

  “You’re not just making casual conversation, are you?”

  I moved my head equivocally.

  “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  Brooke said, “She can’t help it, she’s a lawyer. It’s hard for her to sound like a human being.”

  “It’s a struggle,” I acknowledged. “I know the Nolans—Matt and his family. I’m just curious, I guess.”

  “So do your sandwiches look okay?”

  I smiled at her. “They look fine, Rhonda. Thanks.”

  She moved off, and Brooke said, “You do have a knack.”

  “I do, don’t I?”

  Chapter 13

  Franklin Street was a one-way street. We turned onto it at Stuart Circle, skirting the huge equestrian statue of J.E.B. Stuart. Melissa’s apartment house was a large building with white paint that had flaked off in places to expose the red brick beneath. Franklin was parked up on both sides, so I went around the block, looking for a space along the curb. I finally found one about a block-and-a-half away.

  “This close to VCU a lot of the tenants will be college students,” Brooke said as we walked toward it. At one time the apartment house had been a single-family residence like many of the apartment buildings on this part of Franklin, but it had been cut up into apartments some decades before.

  “Probably.” The front door bore enough layers of old paint to give the wood a lumpy appearance, and it had warped in its frame so that I had to hit it with my shoulder to get it open. Inside, a narrow hallway ran right and left, seeming all the narrower because of the twelve-foot ceilings. Ahead of us, a staircase went up to a second floor.

  We turned left into the hallway. In this wing were four apartments, two on each side of the hall. Apartment B was the first door on the left.

  “Bingo,” I said. I fitted the key into the deadbolt, and it slid back easily.

  “Is this breaking and entering?” Brooke said.

  “Not with the intent to commit a felony within.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Even if we are breaking and entering, we’re not committing burglary. And we do have the fiancé’s permission.” I pushed the door open and stood back so Brooke could go in ahead of me. “The tenant herself gave him a key.”

  “Does that mean he’s authorized to give it out to anyone he wants?” She went in, and I followed.

  “We’ll let him be responsible for that.”

  The entrance way was narrow, with slatted sliding doors on the left. Beyond it, the living room was split vertically by a rude loft, painted white, about seven feet off the ground. The edge of a quilt was visible along one side of it.

  I climbed two rungs of a ladder with two-by-four rails and looked over the edge. A full-sized mattress, neatly made, filled most of the space, a small nightstand beside it and a plethora of pillows of all shapes and sizes scattered around.

  “It’s really kind of nice up here,” I said.

  Brooke didn’t believe me. “Let me see,” she said, tugging at my arm and wedging herself onto the ladder beside me. “Not too bad,” she conceded.

  We stepped down. Only about half of the living room was under the loft, a 25-inch TV set sitting diagonally in the darkest corner. A painted rocker, a floor lamp, and an old sofa with wooden arms sat out in the open. I walked through the living room to the kitchen, passing a tiny bathroom with a rust-stained tub.

  In the kitchen, two plates, two glasses, a mug, and two sets of flatware sat on the Rubbermaid drain board. There was no dishwasher. In the cabinets over the sink were a couple more plates, two bowls, three more glasses, and half-a-loaf of bread. Beneath the sink was an open can of Comet and some dish detergent. I opened the refrigerator: A half-gallon of milk, a quart of juice, a bowl of grapes covered with plastic wrap, and two containers of yogurt. There was cheese and some sandwich meat in the meat drawer, a bag of salad in one of the bottom drawers, and a couple of apples in the other.

  “Robin, take a look at this.”

  I closed the refrigerator and left the kitchen. Brooke was in the bathroom looking into the medicine cabinet over the sink. There was a safety razor, a toothbrush, a bottle of ibuprofen, and a can of shaving cream. What caught my eye, though, were the birth control pills. I took down the dispenser and opened it. About a third of the pills were missing, the last empty space under the label for Monday, the day of the murder.

  “I’d say she left in a hurry,” Brooke said.

  I nodded. “She didn’t come back here after driving off with my car.”

  “But when she left her apartment, she didn’t expect to be leaving town.”

  “She’s got a record,” I said. “She’s jumped bail or something. Rodney Burns is going to get a match on those prints.”

  “Arlington would be his best bet.” Brooke pointed to the label. A Walgreens in Arlington, Virginia, had dispensed the Loestrin just over a year ago. The prescribing physician was a Dr. Yarbrough.

  “I’ll let Rodney know,” I said.

  Melissa’s clothes were behind the slatted doors just inside the front door. She didn’t have a lot of them, but those she had were nice.

  “This is cute,” Brooke said, holding a blouse and a skirt in front of her.

  “Wouldn’t fit you,” I said.

  “I wasn’t…What do you mean it won’t fit me? What are you implying?”

  I grinned at her. Brooke was both hippier and bustier than Melissa, but I wasn’t going to be the one to say it.

  “Melissa?” called a masculine voice. The door pushed inward, and I stepped away f
rom it. A dark-haired guy in his middle twenties looked in at us. He needed both a haircut and a shave, but in spite of that looked good enough to eat.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just us chickens.”

  “I’m Brad,” he said. “Where’s Melissa?”

  “No idea. We expected to find her here.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Can’t you guess?” I asked.

  He looked at the deadbolt and the doorframe. He said, “Used a key?”

  “Yep.”

  “She give it to you?”

  “Matt did.”

  Brad nodded. “The boyfriend,” he said.

  “You haven’t seen Melissa recently, have you?” I asked.

  “Not for a couple of days.”

  “Me either,” I said. “I’m Robin Starling.”

  “Brad Flowers,” he said.

  “Brooke Marshall,” Brooke said.

  He gave us a slow smile. “I’m very glad to meet you.”

  “We’re worried about her,” I said. “She just disappeared without telling anyone where she was going. You don’t have any ideas, do you?”

  His smile changed, lifting one corner of his mouth. “I have some ideas, but not about where Melissa could be,” he said.

  I thought maybe there was a double entendre in that somewhere, but I ignored it. “Does she have any family that you know about?”

  He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “She moved in about six months ago. If you bring over a six-pack, she’ll sit on the couch with you and help you drink it. That’s about all I know.”

  “Thanks, Brad,” I said.

  “Listen. We’re having a party tomorrow night, just down the hall at the apartment on the end. Both of you are invited, if you want to come.”

  Brooke smiled at him. “We might just be there,” she said.

  “Cool. It’s at eight o’clock.”

  When he had gone, I shut the door. “Social life a little slow?” I said.

  “We’ll see more people from the apartment building. We might find out something about Melissa.”

  “Good point.”

  “And meet some really cute guys,” Brooke said.

  I rolled my eyes.