Laughing Heirs (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “What, am I the spokesman for all guydom? Yes. It’s true. We don’t always wash our jeans. Listen, that siren’s getting louder. Can we assume, while we’re standing here, that Macy Buck’s corpse is lying unreported in her house not very far away?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If the body needs to be discovered, we could go discover it ourselves,” Brooke said. “I can do it. There’s nothing to connect me to Macy’s death.”

  “It puts you in the position of lying to the police, unless you’re going to tell them about Brian and his calls to us and all the rest of it. Lying to the police in a murder investigation is not good.” Paul was right: The siren was getting louder. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. That siren sounds like it’s right on top of us.”

  We went down the back stairs, locking the doorknob and deadbolt behind us. Brooke had her brother’s jeans rolled up and tucked under her arm.

  “You know those are evidence,” Paul told her as we descended the stairs.

  “That’s why I’m taking them,” she said.

  The siren stopped abruptly just as we got to the bottom of the staircase. Paul held up a hand as he eased the outer door open and peered out. It was no good: we had a puppy with us. Deeks pushed his nose into the crack between door and jamb and pushed through.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ve got to get to my car, so we have to be inconspicuous. Here.” I took the jeans from Brooke and draped them over Paul’s head. I started tying the legs under his chin, positioning the jeans so that they looked like a great, misshapen bonnet.

  “I thought you said inconspicuous,” he said, resisting.

  “I meant innocuous. Be still and try to get into character. You’re drunk as a skunk. We all are. I’m going to take one of your arms, and Brooke’s going to take the other. We’ve been partying, and we’re still going strong.”

  We pushed out through the door to where Deeks, thankfully, was waiting for us, but when he saw Paul with the jeans on his head, he started to bark. Inconspicuous we were not, but I laughed and patted Paul’s chest, leaning on him heavily and throwing him off balance as I staggered forward. My behavior did nothing to reassure Deeks, who began backing away from us, darting from side to side and continuing to bark.

  “Look at the cute little puppy,” Brooke crooned, reaching for him. “Hey, cutie. Hey there, pretty boy.”

  Deeks didn’t like that at all. He skittered away from her outstretched hands, barking at her over his shoulder as we managed to lurch a few more feet down the sidewalk.

  “This is going to take forever,” Paul said.

  “Oh, you,” I said. I pushed aside the jeans that covered most of his head and stuck my tongue in his ear. His neck straightened like he’d received a shock.

  “Forever’s good,” he said.

  Chapter 8

  We went around the corner of the building and saw the flashing lights of a police car double-parked on Malvern, blocking my car in. Deeks, finally, had stopped barking, but he was keeping a wary eye on us and keeping his distance as we moved along the sidewalk.

  “We’ll take my car,” Brooke sang out. “I’m the des-igna-ted driver.” Her laughter sounded like a donkey’s bray, not her usual laugh at all. It seemed to me she wasn’t very good at pretended merriment, but who was I to criticize?

  “Maybe I’d better drive,” I said. “Give me the keys.”

  “No. I’m driving. I’ve had less to drink.” Waving her keys, she let out a burp of legendary proportions, a talent that until now I hadn’t known she possessed.

  “Whoa,” said Paul, who had taken the burp full in the face. He wiped his wrist across his forehead, knocking the jeans cockeyed. “That was enough to make you tear up. You’re both wrong.” He snatched the keys from Brooke’s waving hand. “I’ll drive. One of you can sit on my lap. The other one can sit behind me and rub my shoulders.”

  I smacked the back of his head, knocking the jeans over his face. “In your dreams, butterbean.” I pinched his butt, and he staggered forward moving the jeans around in an effort to see.

  “Can we take the puppy with us?” Brooke said, leaning toward Deeks again. “Can we take the pretty brown puppy wuppy?”

  The puppy wuppy seemed to realize she was talking about him. He scooted further ahead of us, keeping his tail tucked and out of reach.

  No one was at the police car when we passed it, and we didn’t see a cop on the grass or sidewalk. Probably all our histrionics were so much wasted effort. Deeks jumped into Brooke’s car as soon as Paul opened the door, and I ducked into the back seat after him.

  “It’s okay now, boy,” I said to him. “We’re back to normal.”

  He gave me a distrustful stare, then extended his neck to give my face a tentative lick. I hugged him to me and put my cheek against the top of his head.

  It was Brooke’s car, but Paul got behind the wheel, pulling the jeans off his head and tossing them on the center console. “You say Macy’s house is on Patterson?” he said, pulling away from the curb. “It’s right up here, you know.”

  “I’m betting the police are there,” I said.

  “I’ll be circumspect.” He slowed as we crossed Patterson Avenue, and we saw red-and-blue police lights flashing a block or two to the left. He accelerated again.

  “Somebody else has found the body,” Brooke said. “And reported it.”

  “And the somebody saw Brian there,” I said. “And was able to give the police his license number, or maybe even tell them who he was.”

  “For anyone who knew him, that old Corvette’s pretty distinctive.”

  Paul said, “Are you thinking that whoever saw him at Macy’s house not only recognized him, but knew his address and was able to give it to the police?”

  “Don’t know.” The only person I knew who fit that requirement was Brian’s sweetheart, Whitney Foster.

  “You’re assuming the siren we heard was the police going to Brian’s apartment,” Paul said.

  “We have to assume that, don’t you think?” Brooke said. “Otherwise it’s just too much of a coincidence.”

  “Coincidences happen.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t like this one.”

  We decided we were going to have to wait until morning to retrieve my car from the curb along Malvern Avenue, so Paul headed west on Monument, the idea being to cross the river to his place and let Brooke take her car on from there.

  “But your car's not at Paul's apartment,” Brooke said.

  “Paul can take me home.”

  “I could take you home,” Brooke said. “I live closer.”

  I felt heat rise to my face. “Good point.”

  At the wheel, Paul turned his head to give Brooke a sharp glance.

  “What?” Brooke said. “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “It’s late. It does make more sense for me to ride home with you.”

  “Sorry, Paul.”

  “That’s all right. My designs are so deep and unfathomable…” He shrugged, giving up on the thought.

  She touched his arm.

  “These jeans worry me,” I said, lifting them from the console between Brooke and Paul. “The police find them in our possession, and we’re accessories.”

  There was a momentary silence as Paul and Brooke adjusted to the change of topic.

  “They just look like jeans, don’t they?” Paul asked. “Before the police thought to test them for blood and thought to match the blood to their murder scene, they’d have to first know Brian was at Macy’s house…”

  “Check,” I said.

  “And that we were at Brian’s place.”

  “They may get there. It would be pretty obvious the jeans don’t fit anyone in this car.”

  “Just holding them up, they might not realize that. You and Brian are about the same height.”

  “The odds of getting caught with them are low, I’ll admit,” I said. “But the consequences of getting caught are through the ro
of. Pull over.”

  He saw a space along the curb and pulled into it. I was craning my neck to look behind us. A couple of cars passed us, their shadowy forms appearing behind their headlights as they went past us. “I don’t see anyone following us.”

  “No one could be following us.”

  “Let’s hope not. Deeks and I will get out here and walk that way.” Deeks, who was curled on the seat beside me, lifted his head from his paws as I pointed through the windshield at a street sign that identified the cross-street as Bevridge Road. “By the time you circle around to get me, I’ll have disposed of the jeans.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Brooke’s objected.

  “All the better.” I pushed her seatback forward, and she opened the door with one hand as she allowed herself to be pressed against the dash. In the seat beside me, Deeks was on his feet. He tried to wriggle out the door along with me, but I told him to stay.

  He paid no attention. I pushed him back and held his chin to force him to look at me. “Stay,” I said.

  He looked forlorn in the dome light.

  “Deeks, stay.”

  He sat back on his haunches, but jammed his body between me and the seatback in front of me as soon as my foot touched the pavement. He reached the pavement at the same time as my other foot.

  “We’re still working on stay,” I said, leaning down to speak into the car.

  “You’re still working on who’s the alpha dog,” Paul said.

  I closed the door and looked at Deeks, who stood looking up at me, his tail wagging.

  “I wasn’t going to leave you,” I said.

  His tail wagged harder, and I shook my head.

  “Let’s go.”

  After half-a-block on Bevridge I turned into an alley where my feet crunched on loose gravel. The darkness would have been near total but for the light from the occasional floodlight on the back of a house. At the third trash bin I came to, I pushed up a lid and wedged the jeans as deep into the pile of rounded trash bags as I could. I lowered the lid and kept walking, shoving my hands into the pockets of my jacket. There was something in the left pocket. I pulled it out, but it took me a couple of seconds to recognize it in the dark. It was the glasses case I had picked up in Brian’s apartment, Whitney’s glasses case. I switched it to my jacket’s inside pocket, feeling the shifting of the glasses inside, and realized I’d lost track of Deeks.

  “Deeks?” I spotted movement in the dark, a shadow among shadows. “Stay close, buddy.”

  My cell phone rang, and I fished it out of my pocket, expecting to see Brian’s name on the screen, or Whitney’s, but it was neither. I slid my finger across the screen.

  “Hello, Jordan,” I said, but there was no immediate answer. “Jordan?”

  “I thought the number looked familiar. What have you been up to?”

  “What number?”

  “The number on Brian Marshall’s phone. It looks like you talked to him not very long ago.”

  I felt suddenly even colder than the weather warranted. “How do you come to have Brian Marshall’s cell phone?”

  “It’s customary to take possession of a man’s personal effects when we arrest him.”

  “Arrest him! For what?”

  “You do surprise very well. Want to tell me what the exchange of calls and missed calls was about?”

  “He’s my best friend’s brother.”

  “Not to mention a client,” Jordan said.

  “It would be more accurate to say that his employer is my client. Whitney Foster. You remember.”

  “Uh huh. Does that mean you have no interest in Mr. Marshall’s legal problems?”

  I exhaled through puffed cheeks. “No, it doesn’t mean that. Where is he?”

  “Right now he’s in a vehicle with Ray and me heading toward the house of one Macy Buck. I believe you met her at the funeral.”

  “Is she…”

  “Is she what, Robin?”

  “I’ll meet you there,” I said.

  I’d come to the end of the alley. I tucked the phone into the pocket of my jacket and stood waiting, the wind blowing my hair and the cold seeping into me, body and spirit. A car appeared to my left, its headlights raking the houses at the corner as it turned toward me.

  When it stopped, the door opened, Brooke leaning forward to give me access to the back seat. Deeks brushed my leg as he shot through the opening.

  “They’ve arrested Brian,” I said as I climbed in behind him.

  Macy’s house, a small cape cod that probably dated from the early days of World War II, was a block and a half from Malvern Avenue. Most of the parking seemed to be on the street, though there were a few driveways, some of them no more than cracked runners of cement with close-cropped grass growing dark between them. I parked my VW Beetle—I’d retrieved it from the street in front of Malvern Gardens—behind a police car illuminating the night with its silently flashing lightbar. I got out of my car alone, having with some difficulty left Deeks with Paul and Brooke.

  Parked on the other side of the street was a white van with Richmond Police Department stenciled on the door—the forensic unit, I guessed. I took a breath and started toward the house, where rectangles of light spilled through the picture window and the open door.

  The roots of a large oak had buckled the sidewalk, and the shade of the oak had reduced the yard mostly to dirt. A uniformed policeman stood on the front stoop, wearing a jacket and with his arms crossed over his chest against the cold.

  I stopped, looking up at him.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Robin Starling. Detective James Jordan suggested I meet him.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “How awkward for me,” I said.

  He smiled. He was not very old, probably still in his twenties. “What’s your connection to all this?” He jerked his head at the house behind him.

  “A friend’s brother has been arrested. Evidently they think he’s tied to it somehow.” I shrugged. “Jordan thought he might need a lawyer and was kind enough to think of me.”

  The cop lost his smile. “You’re a lawyer? What did you say your name was again?”

  I told him.

  “Robin Starling,” he repeated, uncrossing his arms and moving them back and forth for warmth. “Yeah, I’ve heard of you. Oh, golly.”

  “I don’t guess there’s any chance of us waiting inside,” I said.

  “You got that right. Nobody goes inside. Why do you think I’m standing here on this porch freezing my garbanzos off?”

  “I’d wondered about that. Why did you say oh, golly?”

  “What?”

  “You said you’d heard of me, oh golly.”

  “Ah. Well.” His mouth twisted. “You know Ray Hernandez, don’t you? Jordan’s partner. He says you’re not an attorney, you’re a hand grenade in a fox hole.”

  “Ray’s a fan,” I said.

  “And Aubrey Biggs, from what I hear—”

  I raised a hand to wave off whatever the district attorney had said about me. “Not a fan,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Austin Maxwell.”

  “Good to meet you.” I stepped forward and reached up to shake his hand. As he let go of mine, his gaze slid past me, and I turned. A Ford Explorer was pulling to the curb in front of the police car with the flashing lights.

  “That’s probably Jordan,” Maxwell said. “The detectives all got new Explorers last month.”

  “I’ll go see.” I started down the sidewalk, my hands in the pockets of my jacket. Jordan got out on the driver’s side and stood looking at me over the top of his vehicle.

  “You got here quick,” he said.

  “I was cruising the city on the lookout for malicious malfeasance.”

  He didn’t smile.

  “I left my cape in my car,” I said. “But I can go put it on if it will make you feel safer.”

  He closed his car door and came around. “I’d give a lot to know what you
’ve been doing the last couple of hours.”

  “So what’s going on? They wouldn’t let me in the house.”

  “Macy Buck is dead. But I guess you knew that.”

  “Let’s say I feared it when I got your call. What makes you think Brian Marshall was involved?”

  “We found a blood-soaked T-shirt in his apartment wadded up at the bottom of his laundry basket.”

  Deeks the Crime Dog had missed the T-shirt; taking the blood-stained jeans had accomplished nothing. “What were you doing rooting around in his laundry basket?”

  The door on the passenger side opened. “We had a warrant,” Ray Hernandez said, stepping out onto the sidewalk.

  “What was your probable cause?”

  “Your client’s in the back seat, if you want to confer with him. We’ve got to go inside.” Hernandez opened the back door for me and stood waiting. It felt like a trap, and I hesitated, my eyes going to his face.

  “What?” he said.

  Maybe it was just the yawning door and the dark interior working on me. I ducked my head and slid in, and Hernandez closed the door behind me.

  Brian sat huddled against the door on the far side, his cuffed hands between his knees.

  “I don’t guess this has been the best night of your life,” I said. “How are you holding up?”

  His head turned toward me, but his face was in shadow.

  “Where did they find you?” I asked, and this time I waited for a response.

  “Bus station in Petersburg.”

  “Your Corvette was parked outside, I guess?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What have you told them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You haven’t made any statement, answered any questions, anything?”

  “I admitted I was Brian Marshall.”

  “I assume they’ve asked you other questions.”

  He shrugged. If his name was all he had told them, I was impressed. It’s hard to remain silent when people in authority are demanding answers.

  “Everything’s happened pretty fast,” I said. “When did it start?”

  “When I found the body.”

  “When was that?”

  He shrugged. “Just after dark. Six o’clock, six-fifteen?”