Juggling Evidence (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “Derek Nolan was murdered earlier this week,” I said.

  “I heard that.”

  “And he doesn’t seem to have left any documentation of that final payment. I’m hoping you have a copy of the note or something.”

  “Are you Mrs. Nolan?” he asked.

  “I’m a lawyer representing the estate.”

  His gaze cut to Brooke.

  “My sidekick,” I said. “You can call her Tonto.”

  It surprised a burst of laughter from him. “Just a minute. I’ll see if I can find it.”

  He went into the kitchen. I could make out his voice and Jen’s amid the sound of childish voices and laughter. After a few minutes, he came out again with a manila folder.

  “How many kids do you have back there?” Brooke asked him.

  He smiled a little ruefully. “Only four,” he said.

  “Only!”

  “Sometimes it seems like quite enough.” He opened the file and handed me the paper on top. “That what you’re looking for?”

  What he handed me was a promissory note, marked paid and signed by Mark Walker for Derek Nolan.

  “I don’t guess you have a copy machine here,” I said.

  “As a matter of fact, I do. You know, it’s interesting. This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked to produce a copy of this.”

  “Really?”

  “A couple of weeks or so ago I ran into Derek Nolan at the Commonwealth Club. My in-laws are members there, so Jen and I get to go have dinner sometimes. He seemed surprised to hear I’d paid this off. Decided he had a few glitches in his filing system.”

  Michael Dillon disappeared back into the house with the file. I looked at Brooke, and she raised her eyebrows. He seemed an unlikely murderer. On the other hand, it seemed we had found the subject of Mark Walker’s alleged embezzlement.

  Chapter 16

  Brooke dropped me off in front of the office building, and I took the elevator up. “I’m here,” I told the receptionist. “Call Pete.” I gave her a smile.

  Jennifer looked flustered. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Larsen…He told me he wanted to see you as soon as you got in.”

  I waved a hand in forgiveness. “It’s all right. Do you mean he wants to see me today?”

  “No. That was yesterday. There is a Mr. Burns here to see you, though.”

  I turned my head and saw him, getting up from a chair, his scalp shining through his thinning hair. He’d changed suits—this one was a solid blue—but it looked just as rumpled as the brown one had. Maybe he had given up on clothes hangers and kept his suits in a jumble on his closet floor.

  “Mr. Burns,” I said.

  “Ms. Starling.” He nodded his head at me. “I think I’ve found your girl.”

  “Come on back.” I led him down the hall to my office.

  “Tell me about her,” I said, pointing him to a client chair and walking around my desk.

  “Her real name is Melanie Burke.”

  “M.B.” I sat and pulled over a yellow legal pad.

  “Yes. She kept the same initials when she moved to Richmond.” He opened his attaché case and took out a three-page memo, stapled at the corner. I put down my pen.

  “I wouldn’t have said she looked like a Melanie,” I said, irrelevantly.

  “She was out on bail for criminal assault when the victim died. The charge changed to murder, but before they could pick her up, she disappeared.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Nine months. The Arlington police would really like to find her.”

  “Join the club.”

  Burns said, “She got into an altercation with her boyfriend, evidently. They lived in one of the older high-rise apartment buildings off I-95. He dangled her off the eighteenth-floor balcony and threatened to drop her.”

  I snorted incredulously.

  “According to witnesses, hung her over the rail so that her knees on the bar and his grip on her ankles were all that was keeping her from falling. He was moving her feet up and down and laughing like a crazy man, and she was screaming profanity at him. It seemed to have attracted half the neighbors in the building before he tired of it and pulled her back in.”

  “And when she got back inside she assaulted him,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Stabbed him?”

  “Actually, she hit him in the head with a baseball bat and castrated him with a steak knife.”

  I cringed, but Burns continued tonelessly, “Evidently, he was high on ecstasy at the time, so it’s possible he didn’t even know it was happening.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Ms. Starling?”

  I shook myself. “I’m sorry. I’m waiting for my flesh to stop crawling.”

  He nodded.

  “This doesn’t get us any closer to finding her, does it?” I said.

  “Probably not. It does tell you why she disappeared again when she found herself at a murder scene with police on the way.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  He smiled thinly. “Your associate gave me some background when she called to set up your appointment. I got a few more details from the newspaper, and a secretary in the police department is a special friend of mine.”

  I raised my eyebrows, wondering what kind of friend a “special friend” was.

  “She faxed me the statement of a Matthew Nolan.”

  I nodded.

  He took an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I have my bill here. I don’t know how you want to handle it.”

  I didn’t know how I wanted to handle it either, but I took the envelope and opened it. The bill was for 650 dollars. I nodded. “Seems reasonable,” I said, and dropped it on my desk. I had a couple of problems to resolve before I could pay it. I hadn’t arranged for my clients to pay me yet, and of course Larsen had told me to drop the case.

  “There’s one more thing you could do for me,” I said.

  Burns raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m trying to locate a Mark Walker.”

  He took a small yellow pad from the same jacket pocket from which he had extracted his bill. “Tell me what you know about him,” he said.

  I told him.

  “It shouldn’t be too hard,” he said when I was done.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  Chapter 17

  By five o’clock, I hadn’t managed to get anything else done on the Bruno-Nolan case. As routine as preliminary hearings generally were, this was only the second of my career, and I needed to spend time preparing for it. Though it was Friday, I packed some of the files in my briefcase before heading down to my car.

  I had entered the parking garage before I remembered that my car wasn’t there. Brooke had driven me to work that morning. I fished my cell phone out of my purse and hit “3” on the speed dial. After four rings, I got shunted to her voicemail. I frowned and closed the phone.

  I went back into the office building. Standing in the lobby, I looked out at the street. Headlights were on in the early dusk of late October. No parking was permitted along the street during rush hour, and I knew Brooke couldn’t be waiting at the curb for me to come out, but I pushed through the revolving door to look.

  A river of headlights flowed toward me and past me. From where I stood, I could see, several blocks away, the corner of the hotel where Lynn had gone to meet Steve Bruno. I looked back up the one-way street in the direction Brooke would be coming from, hoping that she would slide to a stop against the curb as I stood there.

  After a couple of minutes, I said, “Well, crap.” I went back inside and took the elevator up to my floor. Just down from my office, a light was on. It was John Parker, working late.

  I walked past my office and looked in on him. He was on his feet behind his desk, shoving files into an accordion-style briefcase.

  “No hot date?” I said from the doorway.

  He jumped, then shook his head as he closed the briefcase and clicked the tongue into
place. “Not tonight. Not unless you’re volunteering.”

  I made a face. “I find myself stranded,” I said.

  “You need a ride?”

  “Were you going home from here?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He got his jacket from the hanger on the back of his door and shrugged into it. “Let’s go.”

  We rode down the elevators without talking. John and I lived only a couple of miles apart in the West End. While we had been dating, we carpooled together more often than not. After he cheated on me, that stopped, along with a number of other things that it would make me blush to tell you about.

  In the parking garage, John and I put our briefcases in the floor of the back seat on opposite sides of the car, then got in the front. As he backed out of his space, one hand braced on my headrest, John said, “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In normal circumstances, you’d rather walk home than catch a ride with me. What’s up?”

  “It would be more accurate to say I’d rather drive myself than catch a ride with you,” I said. “Brooke was supposed to pick me up, but she didn’t show and I can’t get her on her cell.”

  “So riding with me ranks above walking home.” He put the car in drive and started winding his way down out of the garage. “It’s something,” he said.

  I nodded. “High praise,” I agreed. “It might surprise you to learn that having dinner with you ranks above eating out of trashcans.”

  “Whoa,” he said, braking to a stop at the garage exit. “You’re going to have me panting.” After he’d pulled into traffic, he glanced at me. “That wasn’t a hint, was it? You’re not inviting yourself out to dinner.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I didn’t think so. Doesn’t hurt to check.”

  “Oh, don’t act so woebegone! You’re not interested in me.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Let me rephrase: You’re not more interested in me than any other piece of tail.”

  He accelerated onto the Downtown Expressway, his fingers picking change for the toll out of his center console. He closed the console with his elbow. “One indiscretion and that’s it, isn’t it? I’m forever branded as a philandering creep.”

  “That’s like Lynn Nolan bending over her husband’s cooling body and saying, ‘Why can’t you forgive me Derek? It was just one murder.’”

  His eyes cut toward me as he lowered his window, but he had to look away again to chuck his change into the toll bin. The light changed from red to green, and he accelerated. “You think she did it then?” Ahead of us were two streams of taillights as far as I could see.

  “No. At least I hope she didn’t. I was just making a point.”

  “Yeah, I got the point. You’re still handling the case?”

  “I am. What do you know about it?”

  “The word is Larsen pulled you off it.”

  “He can’t actually pull me off it. I’m attorney of record. It’s going to take a judge to cut me loose, and in the meantime the preliminary hearing’s Tuesday.”

  John shook his head. “You’re a law unto yourself,” he said. “You just do whatever the hell you want to do.”

  “Not all the time.”

  “All the time. You’re a good person, but you’re chaotic good.”

  “What? What’s chaotic good?”

  “It’s an old Dungeons-and-Dragons term.”

  “You played Dungeons and Dragons?”

  He moved his head uncomfortably. “In high school.”

  “I can’t picture it. Did you wear a pocket protector and go around with an H-P calculator dangling from your belt?”

  He looked irritated. “No, and I didn’t wear short-sleeve dress shirts and Coke-bottle glasses with thick plastic frames.”

  “Did you participate in bizarre rituals in sewage drains?”

  “None of those either.”

  I nodded silently, feeling disappointed. The D&D study-geek would have been a fascinating predecessor to someone like John, but the mental image I had conjured was quickly fading, dissipating like so much smoke.

  We were on I-64, heading west, when John said, “You know he’s going to can you.”

  “Larsen?”

  “He doesn’t like seeing his associate attorneys written up in the Times-Dispatch. And he’ll only tolerate so much insubordination.”

  “I guess I’ve given him a bit to tolerate. Of course, a lot of it’s been your fault.”

  “My fault!”

  I looked at him.

  “Well, okay. Your last case was maybe my fault. That’ll make me feel even worse to see you out of a job.” He swung the car onto the exit ramp. As he braked for the light, I leaned across the car to kiss his cheek.

  “What was that for?” he said, glancing at me.

  “You’re concerned about me. That’s sweet.”

  “Unh huh,” he said.

  When he stopped in front of my house, I thanked him, got out, and waved good-bye to him from the end of my sidewalk. Lights were on in the house. I fished in my purse for my keys as I approached it and didn’t realize I was missing them until I got to the porch. Since Melissa Butler had run off with my full set, I’d been operating off three different key rings.

  “Rats,” I said, realizing that I needed to take time to consolidate those key rings. “Big, long-haired, flea-covered rats.” I looked after John, but he was already making the turn at the end of the block. I rang the bell, thinking Brooke might be back from wherever she had gone, but got no answer. I rang again, and something crashed in the interior of the house.

  My eyes cut toward the plate glass window to one side of the porch. The window wasn’t curtained, but the lawn sloped away from the house, and from outside the hedge I wouldn’t be able to see anything other than the living room ceiling. Though I wasn’t dressed for it, I stepped down off the stoop and pushed my way between the bushes and the house. Sharp twigs poked against my bottom through my silk dress as I stood on tiptoe to look through the window.

  Mine is a big, square living room with a few large, comfortable pieces of furniture set well in from the walls. The floor lamps were off, but enough light came from the kitchen on the right and the hallway on the left to give the living room furniture a strange, half-lit quality. I couldn’t see Brooke or anyone else, though. Dropping back onto my heels, I glanced at the front door.

  A sound like the bang of a door came from the back of the house. I listened, my heart pounding, but there was only silence.

  I rammed my way out through the hedge, heedless of the branches clutching at my dress and raking my skin, and I staggered out onto the lawn. It took a couple of steps to regain my balance, and then I headed around the house at a trot.

  A chain-link fence stopped me at the corner. Beyond it, the backyard was darker than the night, shadowed by pine trees. I thought I saw a man moving in the graveled alley, maybe two men. They were shadows among shadows, though, and I could not be sure.

  “Hey,” I shouted.

  For a moment the shadows stopped, then they were moving again, away from me.

  I looked for the gate, using my hands as much as my eyes, and when I found it yanked at the handle. My dress caught on something as I went through, but I pulled away, losing one of my pumps in the soft grass and kicking away the other. Almost immediately, I stepped on a pinecone and yelled something that was both unladylike and unprofessional. As I limped across the yard, an engine roared to life. Tires spun against the hard-packed gravel in the alley behind my house. A vehicle jerked into motion—a pickup of some kind. I reached the alley and saw its brake lights flare, but then it turned out of the alley and was gone.

  As I turned back toward the house, I felt a breath of air against my side. I put my hand to it and felt a rent in my dress big enough to put my hand through. “Good grief,” I said. I started picking my way back across the backyard toward the gate I had come through, but stopped when I noticed some pine-filtered moonlight refle
cting unevenly in the panes of the French doors.

  I limped toward them and pushed at the partially open door. It swung open with the gentlest of sighs. As I entered the living room, goose bumps breaking out all over my body, I could see through the house to the front door, which was now standing open.

  “Son of a gun,” I said, wondering how many of them there had been and how many directions they had gone. I walked through the house, looking warily about me, and stepped out onto the front stoop.

  A pickup, one of the big ones, slowed to a stop several houses down from me. I had no idea whether it was the one I had seen in the alley. Surely not, but the streetlight was between us, and the night was too dark to make out the color even now.

  I walked down the sidewalk, moving closer to the pickup without moving directly toward it. When I was halfway to the street, the license plate, a gray smear of shadow against the front bumper, was almost legible. The tires turned toward me, scratching grittily on the pavement, and I stopped. The engine rumbled powerfully, but the pickup didn’t move. It had Virginia plates. The first letter was either an M or a W; in another step I would know which.

  My left foot started to rise, but my weight came back down on it when the volume of the pickup’s engine leaped upward and the pickup itself lurched into motion, its front-end rising as it surged over the curb toward me. My eyes flicked up to the windshield, but the pickup was moving and the streetlight reflected in the glass, obscuring the cab’s interior.

  I turned and ran barefoot toward the house, aware already that I couldn’t make it. An instant before the truck hit me, I threw myself to the side, the edge of the pickup’s bumper just grazing the heel of my foot and sending me spinning. The pickup climbed the steps toward my front door, taking out one of the pillars supporting the gable over the stoop before coming to a stop. I lay looking up at it for an instant, half stunned and breathing hard.

  The pickup’s reverse lights came on, and its rear tires spat turf as it bounced down off the steps. It skidded to a stop perhaps ten yards from me and came at me again. I staggered up, clutching my right elbow against my side without being aware of any pain. I didn’t actually feel anything, physical or emotional. Pain, outrage, panic—all of it was there, somewhere, but it was closed off in a part of my brain where it couldn’t distract me. The roar of the engine grew as the truck bore down on me.