Evidence of Guilt

by Jonnie Jacobs

  Jake cleared his throat. “I understand you grew up in Silver Creek,” he said, nodding in my direction.

  “Yes; in fact, Wes and I were in school together for a while.”

  Grace looked up from her roast beef, confused. “You were a friend of his?”

  “Not a friend, really. We had a couple of classes together.”

  She nodded, apparently relieved. “It would surprise me if anyone in that group of his amounted to much.”

  “It certainly was rough there for a while,” Jake said evenly, “but Wes has turned out just fine. Not everyone has to go to college or be a superstar.”

  Andrea snickered. “Auto mechanic, my life’s ambition.”

  Grace gave her a stern look, then turned back to Jake. “That’s not what I meant,” she said pointedly.

  “Have you done much criminal work in the past?” Jake asked, directing his question my way.

  “Some, not a lot.”

  “Kali knows her stuff,” Sam said.

  Jake made some more inquiries, mostly about my education and training, then hit me with the big question I’d known was coming.

  “What’s your assessment of the case? Are the odds as bad as they appear?”

  “It’s kind of early to tell.”

  “I’m not asking for promises, just your gut-level feeling.”

  I shook my head. “Feelings don’t bear on much of anything at this point.”

  Grace cut a string bean in half, then set her fork down next to her plate. “Don’t the police have quite a bit of evidence against Wes?”

  ‘There’s no shortage of evidence the DA can use, but none of it’s conclusive. We’re hoping to chip away at most of it. We’re also exploring other angles.”

  Jake was refilling the wineglasses. He looked up. “What other angles?”

  “Nothing specific just yet. We thought we’d look into Lisa Cornell’s background. She’s relatively new to town. Also, there’s a homeless man who lives in the woods near the Cornell place. It’s possible he saw or heard something that could help us.”

  Sam’s head nodded in agreement. “Apparently there’s been quite a bit of interest in the property Lisa Cornell inherited from her aunt. That’s an avenue we’ll pursue as well.”

  Grace pushed the string bean around on her plate. “Don’t you think the police have done that already?”

  “Not necessarily,” Sam said. “The police see what they want to see. Once they identify a suspect, they focus on that person to the exclusion of all others. They build a case against him based on their interpretation of the evidence.” He paused to tear off a piece of roll, then held it in his hand while he continued. “But there are a lot of twists you can put on the facts. That’s one of the approaches we take in trying to counter the prosecution’s position. But the police also reach the wrong conclusion sometimes simply because of a missing piece they’ve overlooked. That’s why we want to explore every possible angle.”

  Jake appeared thoughtful. “I understand that Lisa Cornell was engaged. Don’t statistics show that women are killed most often by a spouse or lover?”

  “What the statistics show,” I explained, “is that most people are killed by someone they know. With women it’s often someone they’ve been involved with romantically, but there can be other connections as well.”

  “Don’t you think it’s worth exploring?” Jake’s tone was patronizing, and I bit back the urge to tell him so.

  “I’m sure the police talked to the boyfriend,” I said, “but I intend to also. If nothing else, he’s likely to know about Lisa’s recent activities. His name is Philip Stockman. His family owns the Big Bob Hardware stores.”

  Pammy bobbed to attention. “You’re kidding. His son goes to our school.” She looked at Andrea. “Danny Stockman. He’s a year behind you, I think. Do you know him?”

  “Great,” Andrea huffed, her voice thick with sarcasm.” This gets better and better. As if it’s not bad enough having a murderer in the family, now it turns out his victim is practically related to someone I went to school with. Thank God I graduated so I don’t have to face all that when school starts.”

  “Your brother has been charged,” Jake said, emphasizing the last word, “not convicted. You watch what you say, understand?”

  Andrea lifted her chin and met his gaze. “Half-brother,” she corrected.

  “Danny’s mother was killed in a boating accident when he was a baby,” Pammy said. “He wrote a story about it for the school literary magazine.”

  “Are you sure it’s the same family?” I asked. “If this guy has a sixteen-year-old son, he must be quite a bit older than Lisa.”

  Andrea arched her perfectly tweezed brow and looked at me as though I were unbelievably out-of-it. “So?”

  I shrugged. Maybe I was.

  Jake drummed the table lightly with his fork. “I’d like to be kept apprised of these other leads you’re following. I’ve got my own network of connections, and I may be able to help out. I’m always amazed at the volume of information that travels via the grapevine.”

  Throughout the discussion Grace had remained quiet, pushing the food around on her plate without ever taking a taste. Now she folded her hands and looked up. “What about trying to work out some sort of deal with the DA’s office?”

  Jake’s eyes met hers. “Grace, we’ve . . .”

  She turned to me. “Do you think there’s a chance they’d let him plead to a lesser charge?”

  “Wes doesn’t want that,” I reminded her.

  “Maybe you could talk to him, change his mind.”

  Jake placed a hand over hers. “We’ve been over this, Grace. You don’t want him to spend the rest of his life in prison if he’s innocent.”

  She pulled her hand away. “It’s better than being dead, isn’t it?”

  Jake’s expression was pained. I wondered if, like me, he wasn’t so sure.

  Chapter 10

  After dinner, Grace retreated to the kitchen, steadfastly refusing my offer to help. Sam and Jake moved to the living room with glasses of brandy. I passed up the brandy and instead stepped outside to drink in the freshness of the night air. The sun had set and a few stars glimmered above, but the sky was still cast in gradations of blue and gray. I took a seat, leaned back and gazed out at the hills, lulled by the pleasant drone of crickets and the faint rustle of the breeze in the grass. I wondered, fleetingly, what sounds greeted Wes’s ears right then.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” Pammy slid into the seat next to mine, tucking her feet up under her. She rested her chin in her hand. “So, what do you think? Is my brother guilty or not?”

  Before I could decide how to answer she jumped ahead.”That’s okay, I know you can’t tell me. I’m not sure I want to know anyway.” She shifted position and sighed. “Unless you’re certain he’s innocent, that is.” She paused and looked over at me. When I didn’t respond right away she sighed again. “Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Just because I’m uncertain doesn’t mean he’s guilty.” The fact of the matter was that as his attorney, I didn’t want to know the truth.

  “Andrea is sure he did it.” Her voice was thin, like a puff of dust. “That’s what my mom thinks, too, though she’d never admit it. I don’t know about my dad. Sometimes I think his standing solidly behind Wes is all for show, and other times I think he really believes Wes is innocent. Maybe he just wants to believe it so bad he’s convinced himself it’s so.”

  “And what about you — what do you think?”

  She pulled a loose thread from the bottom of her cutoffs and rolled it into a ball. “I don’t know what to think. Wes has been really nice to me. I know he’s got a reputation as a rowdy, but I’ve never seen that side of him. In fact, I’ve only seen him lose his temper once, and that was when he’d had a lot to drink.”

  Pammy played with the ball of thread for a moment, rolling it between her palms. “There’s no way I can imagine him doing what was done to that w
oman and her little girl, but there’s an awful lot of people who think he did it. I keep wondering if maybe they know something I don’t.”

  “Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe you know Wes better than they do.”

  “I get along better with Wes than I do with anyone else in the family. Better than I get along with my mother and sisters anyway.”

  I nodded. I knew about sisters. Sabrina and I had been like oil and water the whole time we were growing up.

  “Sometimes I’d drop by his place after school or on weekends. Help him strip wallpaper, work on his car, stuff like that. It wasn’t so much real conversation as just hanging out.” She paused. “Wes and I are a lot alike actually.”

  “Alike how?” Myself, I didn’t see much similarity.

  A shrug. “We like the same movies and we’re not real social.” She laughed unevenly. “We’re both big disappointments to our parents.”

  Wes, maybe, but I couldn’t understand how the Hardings would be disappointed in Pammy. I started to tell her so. “Everybody feels that to some extent, but—”

  She cut me off. “Spare me the lecture; I’ve heard it. And I’m not saying my parents don’t care about me. It’s just that my mother wants me to be more like my sisters — you know, pretty and popular. And my dad . . . well, what he really wanted was a son. Someone he could take fishing and hunting, do the male bonding trip with. It didn’t work out with Wes, and then he ended up with three daughters. I was his last hope.”

  “Daughters can hunt and fish.”

  She responded with a disgusted laugh. “Not these particular daughters. Andrea wouldn’t do anything that might muss her hair or cause her to break a nail, and I don’t have the patience for that stuff. Or the stomach. That’s another way I’m like my brother.” This last was said with a hint of adolescent pride.

  “I thought the group of guys Wes hung out with saw guns as the answer to everything.”

  “Some of his friends are like that, but not all of them. If you ask me, it’s mostly for show anyway. Besides, Wes is squeamish about blood.”

  Recalling the headless cat that Wes had supposedly left in the chemistry lab in high school, I wasn’t so sure. But I found Pammy’s fondness for him touching. “His arrest must be hard on you.”

  A quick nod, and then a scowl. “What really bugs me is that my parents won’t talk to me about it. My dad says there’s nothing to discuss, and my mother finds it an embarrassment. Her biggest worry, I think, is what her friends will say.”

  “She’s probably more worried than she lets on.”

  “Don’t bet on it. She wasn’t any too happy when Wes moved back to Silver Creek in the first place. I think she’d tried to forget all about him. But having him right here in town, getting in hot water all the time — she could hardly ignore that.”

  “Wes does seem to have a way of attracting trouble.”

  A flock of birds flew overhead and Pammy was quiet for a moment. “I think he does that on purpose. He likes the image of being bad. I’ve heard him tell people his name is John Wesley Harding, like the outlaw, even though it’s really plain old Wes.”

  “The outlaw was named Hardin; Harding came from a Dylan song.”

  “You’re kidding. I wonder if Wes knows that. Of course, Harding isn’t his real name anyway.”

  “It isn’t?”

  She shook her head.”The way I understand it, my dad wanted to adopt Wes, but they couldn’t track down my mom’s first husband to get his consent. Wes started calling himself a Harding anyway. He never knew his real dad, who was apparently a total loser. Andrea says that’s the reason Mom has a problem with Wes; because he reminds her of his father.”

  She wouldn’t have been the first woman in history to think that way. But it seemed unfair. Who wanted a mother who associated you with some of the worst years of her life?

  “Wes was lucky to get a second chance with someone like your dad,” I said.

  “Yeah, although they sent him away to some militaristic boarding school when he was sixteen, so it must not have been as cozy as they’d hoped.”

  Having known Wes during that period, I was fairly certain things weren’t cozy at all. But what had been at the heart of all that anger and acting out? It struck me that I’d never once wondered what the world looked like through Wes’s eyes.

  “Tell me about Wes,” I said. “What’s he like?”

  “When he’s here at the house he’s kind of quiet. But he’s different when my parents aren’t around.”

  “Different how?”

  “Looser, funnier. He has a way of imitating people that cracks me up. He can do Mom perfectly.”

  “Have you met any of his friends?”

  “A few. I usually leave if they come over.”

  “How about girlfriends?”

  “He’s got a bedroom drawer full of condoms, so I guess he must, uh . . .” she gave an embarrassed shrug, “. . . date, but I’ve never heard him mention any girlfriend in particular. When he’s had a lot to drink he sometimes talks about a girl named Kathy. She was big-time rich, or her family was, anyway. They had houses everywhere — Palm Springs, Maui, Aspen, even a flat in London. She had horses, so there must have been a ranch in there, too. If you believe Wes, anyway. I don’t know how much of it’s true because he gets really mad and talks in circles.”

  “Has he mentioned anyone else?”

  She shook her head. “He’s a private person, even with his friends.”

  “He never mentioned Lisa Cornell?”

  ‘The dead woman? No. Why would he?”

  I shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out the connection between them.”

  “You think there is one? He told the police he’d never heard of her.”

  That’s what he’d said, but to me the evidence indicated otherwise.

  <><><>

  It was only nine o’clock when I got home that evening, but I couldn’t settle in. I tried television. I tried the book I’d picked up at the library earlier in the week. Even vacuuming. Everything chafed, as though I were suspended in skin that wasn’t my own.

  I called Sabrina, who wasn’t in or wasn’t answering. Ours may not have been the easiest relationship, but the very fact that she saw things so differently than I did was sometimes a tonic.

  Finally I took Loretta and Barney for a walk, thinking the night air might clear my mental palate.

  We headed down the road past Tom’s house, which stood in darkness save for the single interior light that was supposed to fool burglars. When we walked at night I kept the dogs on a leash, which they considered an unnecessary hindrance and I considered a measure of precaution. We moved more slowly that way, having to coordinate ten legs and three strong wills, but at least I could think my thoughts without constant worry about their safety.

  My thoughts this evening were largely of Wes Harding. And they came unevenly, in bits and pieces. The past mixed with the present, Pammy with the girl I’d been when Wes and I were in school together.

  I wanted to understand Wes. He was a puzzle, just as he had been when we were growing up. Then he’d been a “bad boy,” but not a person you actually feared. And the bad, being draped in mystique, caught your imagination the way innocence and purity never would. The Wes Harding of my girlhood had been an untethered force, like the handsome villain in a tale of gothic suspense. An entity unto himself.

  I realized I’d never envisioned the young Wes with a mother and father and baby sister. Probably two baby sisters by then. I’d never considered that he might have fears or worries or sorrows of his own.

  Wes was still attractive. Still something of a mystery. I wondered what fears and sorrows he lived with today. And I wondered what he was hiding.

  <><><>

  Sunday morning I put thoughts of Wes Harding aside and went to visit Irma Pearl. Although she was not, technically speaking, my client, I felt a responsibility toward her. Maybe I was subconsciously trying to make up for the visits I hadn’t paid my fath
er in the last years of his life. Or maybe it was the fact that I didn’t entirely trust her daughter, who was my client.

  The Twin Pines Rest Home was named for two spindly pines that stood on either side of the front entrance. Like the residents inside, they’d seen better days.

  Irma Pearl had chosen the Twin Pines herself, back when she’d first been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was adamant about not wanting to be any more of a burden on her daughter than was necessary. By the time Sheri approached me about handling the conservatorship proceedings, however, Irma had trouble remembering that decision. It wasn’t that the Twin Pines was so bad — in the scheme of things, it was fairly decent. But it wasn’t home, and that was where Irma wanted to be.

  To her credit, Sheri had tried that, bringing in private-care nurses to help her mother with the myriad of daily tasks that were now beyond her. But it was an expensive and imperfect solution. On the other hand, cutting all ties with home and spending the remainder of your days in a convalescent center didn’t strike me as so perfect, either.

  I checked in at the nurses’ station, then went to find Irma. On her good days she was often outside, with friends, or in the lounge watching television. The bad days she usually spent in her room, which was where I found her this morning.

  I knocked on the already open door. “Good morning,” I said, crossing to the far side of the room. Irma sat in a straight-backed chair, near the window. She was still in her nightgown, although she’d thrown a shawl over her shoulders. The thin white hair she usually twisted into a bun now hung limply around her face. She wasn’t a frail woman, but at that moment she looked as fragile as crystal.

  I handed her the box of chocolates I’d brought with me.

  “A present for me? How lovely.” Her face lit up for a moment, then went blank. She blinked at me. “You’re not Sheri, are you?”

  I shook my head. “I’m a friend of Sheri’s.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “We’ve met a couple of times. I’m an attorney. My name’s Kali O’Brien.”