Dachshund Through the Snow

by David Rosenfelt

  Because I think the jury will ultimately be hung, I think that by definition they will take a long time to deliberate. I would think they will eventually tell the judge they’re deadlocked, and he’ll send them back to try harder. This could happen two or three times.

  We’re only in the third day of deliberations now, so while I don’t think a verdict is imminent, I stay by the phone that I doubt will ring.

  So of course it rings.

  And of course it’s Rita Gordon, the court clerk. “Judge Stiller wants you down here now.”

  “Is there a jury issue?”

  She laughs a short laugh. “Yeah, you might say there’s a jury issue, Andy. They’ve reached a verdict.”

  I’ve gotten to court too early.

  When a verdict is about to be announced, I like to arrive late, just before the judge takes his spot behind the bench. Every minute sitting at the defense table feels like a minute on the treadmill, which is to say it is endless.

  But this time I’ve arrived well in advance, and I just sit and watch as the gallery fills up. Laurie is here, and Sam Willis, and Willie Miller.

  Julie Traynor comes in, and before she takes her seat, she comes over and squeezes my arm. “Thank you.”

  Hike comes in, sits down, and shakes his head from side to side. “Too soon. Way too soon.”

  Jenna comes in with her team. We make eye contact and both get up and walk toward each other. We shake hands and she says, “I’ve enjoyed the battle.”

  “I wish I could say the same. I think I’m getting too old and cranky for this.”

  “I thought you were going to have your client testify.”

  I don’t answer her; I just nod and we go back to our respective corners. She didn’t mean it in a negative way, but the comment cuts right through me. If we lose, I’m going to attribute it to that decision, and it’s going to be hard to deal with.

  Finally the court clerk arrives and Noah is brought in, sure signs that we’re about to start. “Do you have a prediction?” Noah asks me, the strain evident on his face and in his voice.

  “Never. We wait and hope.”

  He nods. “I’ve been doing a lot of both.”

  Judge Stiller finally comes in; I feel like I’ve been sitting here since August. He puts the sternest look on his face that he can muster and warns the gallery not to react when the verdict is announced.

  It’s an empty warning. They will react, and he’ll slam his gavel, and nobody will care. His power over them will be gone. The verdict boat will already have sailed.

  He calls the jury in and asks the foreman if they have reached a verdict. He says that they have. I scan the faces of every one, trying to memorize them, because if they convict Noah, I am going to send Marcus after every last one of them.

  Judge Stiller asks for the verdict to be brought to him. Everything is happening in slow motion; it always does in these situations. The judge reads the verdict to himself. It’s an obnoxious process; there is no reason he can’t wait like everyone else.

  He betrays no emotion and keeps his face impassive, but inside he must feel like he’s hot shit to be the only one besides the jury to know how this is going to end.

  Judge Stiller tells the defendant to stand; for all I knew I was already standing. I get up along with Noah and Hike; I can’t even feel my legs.

  This never gets any easier.

  The judge gives the verdict form back to the court clerk to read. A requirement for the position of court clerk must be that the applicant has to have the dullest voice imaginable. After three words of her monotone, everybody would be asleep if she wasn’t revealing the fate of someone’s life.

  I always have to force my mind to concentrate in these situations. One would think I’d be completely focused, but it doesn’t work that way, not for me. It’s like my brain wants to escape to some other less stressful place. So I force myself to listen for the word guilty and focus on whether the word not is positioned in front of it.

  “We the jury, in the case of the State of New Jersey versus Noah Traynor, find the defendant, Noah Traynor, not guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree.”

  I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it correctly, and that is confirmed when Noah hugs me. I look into the gallery and see the smile on Laurie’s face as she hugs Julie Traynor, who is sobbing into her shoulder.

  Life, at least for the moment, is once again good.

  This is not the typical post-trial victory party.

  We’re doing it on Saturday afternoon, and rather than taking over Charlie’s, we’re located in an upstairs large private room there. The owners of Charlie’s have made this accommodation because they are friends of mine and because on behalf of Vince, Pete, and myself, I have purchased about half a million beers over the years. And maybe two hundred thousand burgers.

  The afternoon time and the special room are because of the unusual guest list. It includes Ricky and Danny Traynor, who would have trouble staying up if we had the gathering at night. But also present are Tara, Sebastian, Murphy, and Simon. While dogs are not allowed in New Jersey restaurants, Pete Stanton’s presence has provided a tacit Police Department blessing.

  Vince is here as well. To enjoy free food and beer, Vince and Pete would if necessary climb to the Mount Everest base camp at four o’clock in the morning. But in this case all they had to do was climb the steps to the second floor in midafternoon. They were pleasantly surprised to see that I had televisions brought into the room so we could all watch the Giants lose a playoff game.

  The other celebrating humans, besides Laurie and me, are Julie and Noah Traynor, Sam, Hike, Willie, Sondra, Edna, Marcus, and Corey Douglas.

  Victory parties are always upbeat because they involve, well … victory. In this case it’s sort of extra-special because it reunites Noah with his wife and son. Danny hasn’t stopped smiling since we got here.

  “Looks like your record as the Christmas-wish genie is intact,” I say to Laurie.

  “Admit it,” she says. “It feels good.”

  “I admit it.”

  Noah and Julie walk over to thank Laurie and me; if they thank us one more time, it will officially break the all-time indoor thank-you record.

  “Time for me to get back to work,” Noah says. “I wrote a lot in jail, but it isn’t exactly upbeat stuff.” He smiles. “I wonder why.”

  “There was a lot of media and public attention paid to this case and trial,” I say. “Maybe a book might be a good idea?”

  He nods. “I’ve already started to plan it. If I get an advance, I can starting paying your fee.”

  “Read my lips,” Laurie says. “There is no fee. Seeing Danny and his father together is all the fee Andy wants.”

  Laurie has clearly never been to law school; she has a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics of the profession. I’m going to need to draw a line on this right here and now, but unfortunately I forgot to bring my crayons. So instead I just smile and nod.

  Corey Douglas comes over, with Simon at his side. That dog is completely devoted to him. “Here are the reasons I am still alive and able to continue not collecting fees,” I say.

  Instead of acknowledging his saving my life in the park, Corey says to Laurie, “Did you tell him?”

  “No. I was about to.”

  “Tell me what?” I ask.

  Laurie, instead of answering, calls over to Marcus to join us, which he does. Then she turns back to me. “You seem to have a tendency to avoid taking on new cases.”

  “I try.”

  “But if you don’t have clients, then we as investigators have nothing to investigate. Which means we have no work.”

  “So you’re thanking me for giving you extended vacations?”

  “I think I should probably just come out and say it. Corey, Marcus, and I … along with Simon, of course … we are going into business together. We are starting an investigation firm, and we even have a name. We’re calling it the K Team, because of Simon.”


  “Canine starts with a c,” I point out.

  “I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture here. But if you are worried, don’t be. When you take on cases, you will be our most important client. And if our work requires a lawyer, you will have first option.”

  “Yunhh,” Marcus says, eliminating any confusion that might exist.

  I’m not sure how I feel about this news. I’m sort of feeling left out, but I want to be left out.

  “You guys will be a great team,” I say, because they will be a great team. I raise my glass of Diet Coke. “To the K Team.”

  It doesn’t turn out to be a great toast because I’m the only one holding a glass. But they get the idea.

  A trial, at least for me, is about answering questions.

  If I like the answers, I tell them to the jury. If I don’t, I try to keep them to myself. But basically it is a search for truth, and that truth is reached by answering questions. And usually it works pretty well.

  But I like to have all the questions answered, even if just for my own peace of mind. When it comes to that, the Noah Traynor trial didn’t end satisfactorily at all.

  When no open issues are left in my mind after a trial, I would never consider looking at the trial documents again. Instead I would always pack them up and give them to Edna to file, and within a couple of years she’d get around to doing it.

  In this case more issues are open than closed. I have tried to answer some questions from the very beginning and have just been unable to. Fortunately, the big one has been resolved. Arthur Wainwright is responsible for Karen McNeil’s death.

  I don’t believe he did it himself; the actual killer no doubt was one of the unsavory characters who have themselves since bitten the dust. If I had to take a guess, my vote would be on Taillon, but that doesn’t matter now. Arthur willed it and Arthur paid for it.

  But the key question, the one I’ve been asking myself since the day I took the case, is why? Why was Kristen McNeil killed?

  Everything else follows from that. What was Kristen so afraid of that she was running away? How did Charles Arrant, international criminal on the run from Interpol, wind up on a killing spree in Paterson, New Jersey? Whatever Arrant was doing here, had he finished his mission, or is someone else here to take his place?

  How did Arrant know that Mitch Holzer knew his name and told it to me, and why did that represent such a threat that he killed Holzer and tried to do the same to me? Arthur Wainwright killed himself before I unloaded the big guns in court … the phone calls he received from Taillon around the time of Kristen’s death, and of course the letter that she left. How did Arthur know those revelations were coming?

  The Wainwright suicide is particularly troubling for me, and not just because I feel some guilt for having precipitated it. This guy spent sixty-plus years growing a business, a fortune, and an impeccable reputation. He was smart and resourceful; why did he think he couldn’t survive what I was throwing at him? Why did he give up so easily?

  The questions go on and on. The answers? Not so much.

  So once again I turn to the dreaded trial documents, both the discovery and all the stuff we generated internally. Looking at them now is not quite like looking at them before the verdict; that hovering dread of failure is not there.

  It’s sort of like taking an SAT after you’ve been admitted to college. I’m driven by a nostalgic curiosity, but there’s nothing urgent about it.

  Not surprisingly, I spend three hours learning absolutely nothing. It’s unsettling to me in that Arrant and Wainwright seemed to know what we were doing, yet it’s inconceivable that any member of our group did any leaking.

  I discuss it with Laurie, and she says, “Let me get Roger Carrasco in here, just in case.”

  I know who she’s talking about. Roger is a former colleague of Laurie’s in the Police Department who now works in private surveillance. We’ve used him before to come in and make sure our home and my office were not being bugged. He does a full sweep for listening devices, webcams, phone taps, et cetera. He also checks our computers and cell phones for any evidence of infiltration.

  “You think we’re being bugged?” I ask.

  “I have no idea, but it would explain it. We talked about Holzer and Arrant in the house, and we certainly talked about the letter that Kristen McNeil wrote.”

  Laurie calls Roger, and he’s at our house within an hour. Two hours go by before he determines that there are no signs of surveillance devices anywhere. He goes down to check out my office, but I’m sure the result will be the same. We haven’t spent that much time there, and as an example, I was not in the office between the time the McNeils gave me the letter and Karen testified in court.

  Sure enough, since the office is small, Roger goes through it in less than an hour and calls with his report.

  The place is clean.

  Back to the documents.

  Two things about the letter that Kristen wrote bug me.

  One is that it appeared too conveniently; after fourteen years it was discovered just before I needed it at trial. I don’t often get that lucky, and I distrust it when I do. But I can’t figure out how its appearance could in any way be sinister because the McNeils certainly had no interest in getting Noah off the hook.

  The other thing that bothers me, though not as much, is that in the letter Kristen mentions that she had saved money, and that therefore her parents shouldn’t worry about her. Noah had told me that Kristen said she needed him to take her away because she had no money, and Kristen’s friend Gale Halpern said that Kristen spent money faster than she made it. Gale even said that despite Kristen’s earning a nice salary at NetLink, she was always borrowing from Gale.

  This is not an earthshaking inconsistency. There are plenty of explanations. The most likely is that she was lying in the letter about having money so that her parents would worry less about her.

  But it’s worth checking out.

  I call Karen McNeil and get her voice mail. I assume she is at work at the hospital, so I leave a message for her to call me back. She does, about an hour later.

  “How are you doing?” I ask.

  “Okay. Better than my parents, but they’re getting through it, processing all that’s happened. I think things will get better from here, now that we know who did it. We’re all grateful to you for making sure the real truth came out.”

  “I want to ask you a question about Kristen’s letter. She mentioned that she had saved plenty of money, but other people have told me that she never saved a dime in her life, that she spent it as fast as she made it. Did that strike you as strange?”

  “I guess it did, but I just thought she was saying it to ease my parents’ mind.”

  “I thought of that as well.”

  “But…” Karen stops.

  I am looking forward to hearing the rest of this sentence. “But what?”

  “There were a couple of things that were strange about that letter. Things were so emotional I hadn’t focused on them, but I’ve thought about them since.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Well, for one thing, she called our parents ‘Mother and Father.’ Kristen just didn’t talk like that; she wasn’t nearly that formal. She called them ‘Mom and Dad,’ always.”

  “It was an unusual letter; maybe she felt the need to be more formal.”

  “I don’t think so because of the other thing that bothers me. That was even stranger. She signed the letter ‘Kris.’”

  “So?”

  “So Kristen hated the name Kris; she’d never let anyone call her that. She thought it made her sound like a boy.”

  “So you think she may not have written it?”

  “No, she wrote it; I’m sure of that. I recognized her handwriting even before your expert confirmed it.”

  “You think she wrote it, but those aren’t her words? And maybe she used ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ and ‘Kris’ so you would realize that?”

  Karen pauses for a few momen
ts before answering. “I can’t say that. She was under tremendous stress, right? Maybe it made her talk differently.”

  “Here’s a tough one for you. Would she be smart enough to change those words deliberately, to tip you off that she was being forced to write it?”

  Karen thinks for a few more moments. “Maybe. One thing people never seemed to understand about my sister. She was really smart.”

  I hope that I’m seeing things that aren’t there.

  I hope that the letter from Kristen was written just as originally represented, in advance of her expecting to leave on her own, probably with Noah. Because if that isn’t how it happened, if she was forced to write it, then nothing is as it seemed.

  It would mean that Arthur Wainwright, the man who killed himself because Andy Carpenter accused him of murder in open court, was innocent. Arthur, or a killer hired by Arthur, would not have forced Kristen to write a letter implicating Arthur in the murder. That would make no sense whatsoever.

  But it physically can’t have happened that way. The only way Kristen could have been forced to write that letter would be if she was under threat from her ultimate killer. But the letter was hidden in her desk drawer, waiting to be placed where her parents would find it, after she had run away.

  If someone had forced Kristen to write it, someone who was set on implicating Arthur in the murder, they would have done a better job of it. They would have maneuvered a way to get the letter into the hands of her parents, not hidden in a place where it might not be discovered for fourteen years, if at all.

  Besides, Arthur was wealthy, and Arrant, Taillon, and even Siroka were not in this for the thrill of the hunt. Whatever was going on, Arthur was in a unique position to finance it.

  It has to be Arthur.

  I am now in this all the way, which means I will bring Laurie back into it. She often sees things that I don’t, but just talking it out is helpful and clears my mind. It’s a very different situation from what I usually face in that I don’t have a client to worry about and protect. I can just follow it where it goes, without worrying about the repercussions.