I said, “Did you know Macy Buck was telling a story about hearing Jared’s voice in the backyard the afternoon of the day Robert Walsh was found floating in the hot tub?”
“Yeah, we heard something about that,” Darrell said.
“Any idea whether it was true?”
“We figure it wasn’t. What we figure is she was looking to get Jared charged with killing old Mr. Walsh, see if she couldn’t increase the brother’s inheritance. They were engaged to be married, you know.”
“Be a good motive for her murderer. Shut her up,” I said.
“How about you? You thinking to throw suspicion on Jared Walsh, too?”
“I was,” I said, “until a couple of old codgers who have the same motive forced themselves on my attention. Jared does owe you a good deal of money, doesn’t he?”
Darrell laughed, and Charles smiled faintly.
“You hear that, Charles? She’s threatening us. She doesn’t just have brains. This girl’s got moxie.”
I could feel sweat cold against my sides and prickling my brow. I glanced down at my phone, tapped the screen to keep it awake.
“You can’t pin that one on us,” Charles said genially.
“The two of you could have killed Macy Buck, then bump-keyed your way right into Brian Marshall’s apartment to clean the blood off yourselves in his sink using a pair of his old jeans to do it with. One of you could have stripped off his bloody T-shirt and dropped it in his laundry basket. Brian lives just a few blocks away from Macy’s house.”
The two of them had stopped looking so damn smug. “We wouldn’t like our names coming up in court,” Charles said.
“Your names!” I said. “I was thinking I’d subpoena you, put you on the stand and see what I can do with you.” I glanced down again, tapped Call on my phone. Maybe I was overreacting, but my heart was pounding, and I didn’t like being afraid.
“She’s threatening us, Charles,” Darrell said. “Can you believe it? When was the last time someone threatened us?”
I raised my voice, hoping the phone I was holding against my leg would pick it up. “What do you expect? You break into my home at 1017 Beechnut. You won’t leave. You won’t tell me what you want.”
Darrell straightened to peer over the couch. “What’s that you’ve got against your leg? That’s your dadgum phone, isn’t it? Charles, she’s gone and called the police on us.”
Charles said, “I’d hoped we could come to an understanding.”
“You should have made an appointment with my secretary,” I said.
“What we want,” Darrell said, “is to know whether Whitney was helping her uncle to empty all his bank and brokerage and retirement accounts. We know he wasn’t as senile as Jared Walsh was making out…”
“We suspect he wasn’t as senile,” Charles corrected.
“…but he wasn’t any hundred percent, either.”
“Macy Buck may have had a hand in that, all the pills and powders she was getting him to take, but maybe he was already having his troubles,” Charles said.
“He didn’t just empty his accounts, he converted everything to cash and made it disappear,” Darrell said. “Somebody helped him with that.”
“We’re thinking Whitney Foster. If she’s convicted on this murder charge, she’s gonna have trouble spending any of the old man’s money she’s squirreled away…”
“But if she helps us, maybe we can help you. She’s only entitled to a third, you know. No point in trying to grab it all and getting herself locked up for the rest of her life.”
“What do you know that might clear Whitney?” I asked, but already I could hear a siren in the distance, and the brothers Strumpf were moving toward the door.
“We gotta run. If you hadn’t called the police on us, maybe we coulda come to an arrangement,” Darrell said, holding the door for his brother. He went through it himself, and the door closed.
I put my hands on the back of the couch and sagged against it. Deeks was still lying at my feet, derelict in his self-appointed duty to see people to the door. When he saw me looking at him, though, his tail thumped the floor.
It was only a minute later that a knock sounded on the door. The cavalry had arrived.
I sat on the sofa, looking down at Deeks. The police had gone. Though I’d given them the names of Darrell and Charles Strumpf, I doubted anything would come of it. They might or might not have information about the case. If they did, I had the threat of a subpoena to use as a lever to pry it from them. Or I could forget about threats and just put them on the witness stand, though the Strumpfs were smart…at least collectively.
“On the witness stand, I could have a go at them one at a time,” I told Deeks.
He rolled his eyes toward me, but otherwise didn’t move.
“Want to go potty?” I said.
A single thump.
“Let’s go potty,” I said. I got up and went to the French doors to take him into the back for his nighttime wee.
On the postage stamp of a patio, I stood hugging myself as Deeks plodded past me to the dogwood in the center of the yard. He looked back at me.
“Go potty,” I said encouragingly.
He lifted his leg against the tree, but when he was done just stood there as if gathering his strength.
“Come on,” I called. “Time to go night-night.”
He headed in my general direction, but veered off behind the rhododendron that grew against the house to one side of the patio.
“Deeks?” I followed him around the big bush and found him tugging at the edge of a tarp that covered a wheelbarrow.
I went closer, peering at it in the darkness. I had a wheelbarrow, but I was pretty sure it was in the garage. This one looked like it had a deeper bed than mine, and it had wooden handles. I didn’t do a lot of yard work, but I thought mine had metal handles with plastic grips. At any rate, I hadn’t left it out here with a tarp strapped over the bed with bungee cords.
Deeks gave up on the tarp and moved away a few paces to let me deal with the intruding lawn equipment. I went back to the house to turn on the floodlights, which revealed my breath on the cold night air, but left the wheelbarrow in the shadow of the rhododendron. I gripped the handles to move the wheelbarrow to the porch for easier inspection, but I couldn’t move it.
“Holy moley,” I said. I got a better grip and braced my feet. I got the legs supports off the ground, but only barely. If I tried to move it, I was going to turn it over.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Deeks, and I went inside for a flashlight.
The tarp was a small one, strapped over a pile of hard, lumpy stuff with crossing bungee cords that ran beneath the bed and hooked through the grommets at the corners of the tarp. Another much longer bungee cord that went all the way around the load. I unhooked that one, then lay down on the hard ground to unhook the other two. My shoulder caught the edge of the tarp as I rolled onto my hands and knees, and the tarp slid half off the wheelbarrow. I stood and shone the light into the bed.
The wheelbarrow was piled high with white cloth bags, tied off with cloth straps. I leaned closer with my flashlight. “Provident Metals” was printed on at least some of the bags, a compass in place of the “O” in Provident. I picked up one of the smaller bags. Even though I could almost close my hand around it, it weighed several pounds. The hairs prickled at the nape of my neck as I opened the bag under the patio floodlights.
All that is gold does not glitter, the rhyme goes, but this gold did. Holding the bag against my body, I reached in for a few of the coins. Eagles were engraved on one side, and on the other a woman with long flowing hair, a torch in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Liberty. I dropped all but one of the coins back in the sack and turned the remaining coin over in my hand: United States of America, 1 oz. fine gold ~ 50 dollars. But one ounce of gold wasn’t worth fifty dollars; it was worth maybe twelve hundred dollars. If I was holding a five-pound bag, this one little sack was worth…I did the math in
my head…one hundred thousand dollars? I tried again: Five times 16 gave me 80 ounces. Eighty times 1200, to make it easy say 100 times 1000...It was true. I was standing there with a hundred thousand dollars in my hand, give or take.
I looked back at the rhododendron, toward the wheelbarrow on the other side of it. There were bigger sacks over there than the one I was holding. How many five or ten pound sacks?
I went back and counted, laying them on the grass in piles, one pile for the smaller sacks, one for the larger ones. There were forty-five of the little sacks, twenty-five of the larger ones, all of them heavy. If the little sacks each had five pounds of gold and the big ones each had ten…that was roughly ten million dollars’ worth of the stuff.
“This is crazy,” I said to Deeks, speaking softly. “No wonder I couldn’t move it.” The question now was whether to move the wheelbarrow now that I had it empty. Did I want the gold on the patio? In my garage, my house? I didn’t have a safe. If this came from Robert Walsh’s estate, then Jared should be the one responsible for it, but I didn’t trust him. Ditto for his shark-toothed lawyer, and the Strumpf brothers were out of the question.
What I needed to do, I decided, was decline all responsibility for the gold, at least until I could think what to do with it. I picked up two of the bigger sacks and put them back in the wheelbarrow, then I picked up two more. It took nearly fifteen minutes to get them all arranged as compactly as possible. I laid the tarp across the load and lay down on my back to secure the tarp with the bungee cords.
When I was done, I got up and looked down at Deeks, who was lying in the grass. “If you’re not yourself in the morning, you’re going to the vet,” I said, and he got to his feet. I led him back inside, pausing with my hand on the switch that would kill the floodlights. Deeks stopped in the living room and looked back at me.
“We must never speak of this to anyone,” I told him.
He wagged his tail in agreement.
Chapter 17
I was serious when I told Deeks we must speak to no one about the wheelbarrow filled with gold. I didn’t tell Paul. I didn’t tell Brooke. I didn’t tell Brian or Whitney. As far as I knew, the only people in the world who knew it was there were me and whoever put it there—and, as far as I was concerned, I had never seen it.
But it’s not as easy to forget about 450 pounds of gold sitting unprotected in your backyard as you might think. There was Deeks to worry about, too. He’d seemed better that morning, almost back to normal, and of course he had a retired physician watching over him. Still, between Deeks and the ten million in gold, I was distracted and jumpy at work, so much so that Brooke asked me what was wrong.
“Your brother’s arraignment’s tomorrow,” I said, though that didn’t weigh on me especially. Nothing much happens at an arraignment. The judge reads the charges and asks whether the defendant is represented by counsel; the defendant pleads guilty or not guilty; the question of bail is revisited; the date of the preliminary hearing is set. Momentous events to be sure, but I thought I could handle my part adequately even under heavy sedation.
“You’ll do fine,” Brooke said, touching my arm. “Try not to worry.” After a few moments, she added, “Thanks for worrying.”
I smiled at her. “Part of the job. Keeps me sharp.”
Brooke went with Paul and me to lunch, but my mind kept drifting. “I’m starting to worry about our relationship,” Paul told Brooke at one point. “You thought that was funny, right? Robin’s stopped laughing at my jokes.”
“No, that was a good one,” I said. I tried a chuckle, but knew it was unconvincing.
“She’s worried about the arraignment tomorrow,” Brooke said.
I wanted to tell them about my golden wheelbarrow, but I remained firm in my resolution.
At the arraignment the next day, Judge Cochran read the criminal complaint against Brian Marshall, informing him that he was charged with murder in the first degree for which the penalty was not less than twenty years in the state penitentiary and with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Brian pleaded not guilty, confirmed that he was represented by one Robin Starling—that would be me—and the judge asked me and the attorney from the district attorney’s office to address the issue of bail. I argued that bail should be reduced from 750,000 dollars to 75,000. The prosecutor, a thirty-something lawyer named David Miller, argued that bail should be denied altogether. The judge left the bail where it was.
We went through the same rigamarole with Whitney Foster. When it was done, Judge Cochran asked David Miller if he had any documents for me, and Miller presented me with a folder purported to contain Macy Buck’s autopsy report, James Jordan’s police report, and the transcript of a 9-1-1 call.
“No other statements from witnesses?” I asked.
“A few, I think. We’re still pulling things together.”
“Do you think you could have those for counsel by Monday?” the judge asked.
“I think so, your honor.”
“In that case, suppose we schedule the preliminary hearing for Tuesday.”
“Of next week?” I said.
“You can’t be ready?”
“No, I can be ready.”
“Good.”
When the judge had left, I asked the sheriff’s deputy if I could have a few moments with my clients.
“Sure. There’s a conference room in the clerk’s office.”
“Thanks. If you could escort my clients, I’ll meet you there.”
I went across the aisle to introduce myself to the assistant district attorney. “Robin Starling,” I said, holding out my hand.
He took it, smiling. “David Miller. I don’t guess you remember me. Five or six years ago I bought you a glass of Perrier in the bar at the Tobacco Company. I remember you especially because you were in a bar and you didn’t drink alcohol.” He had a model’s good looks, with dark, curly hair and dusky skin that made him look like he had a suntan even in the middle of February. I didn’t remember him from the Tobacco Company, though I couldn’t imagine why not.
“I’ve relaxed a bit about the alcohol,” I said. “I don’t remember you, though. I’m afraid you wasted your money on the Perrier.”
He laughed. “It’s all right. I’m married now. Probably best for all concerned.”
“I halfway expected to see Aubrey Biggs here.”
“At an arraignment?” He glanced around. “He considered it, actually, then decided it would be beneath him. I’m sure you’ll see him in the main trial, but you’ve got me for the preliminary.”
The deputy sheriff was waiting with my clients in the clerk’s conference room. “Let me know when you’re ready,” he said, and he stepped out and closed the door.
“Have a seat,” I told Brian and Whitney, setting my briefcase on the table and dropping into a chair myself.
They looked at each other. Brian held a chair for Whitney, awkwardly in his handcuffs, then sat beside her. He rested his cuffed hands on the table. Whitney kept hers in her lap.
“How does it look?” Brian said. “Be brutally honest.”
“I see some glimmers.”
“What are they?”
I moved my head. “They’re glimmers. Not much shape to them yet, but they’re there.”
“That doesn’t sound like brutal honesty,” Whitney said.
“Brooke always described you as a hopeless optimist.”
“I hope she said ‘hopeful optimist,’ ” I said. “Optimism is usually justified. Admit it: ninety-five percent of the bad possibilities you contemplate in life never materialize.”
Brian’s mouth curled. “I’m not usually on trial for murder-one. Surely you’re not suggesting you have a 95 percent chance of getting us acquitted.”
“Well,” I said. “No.”
“And the district attorney’s office is filled with experienced lawyers, isn’t it? Surely they think they have better than a five percent chance of a conviction.”
“Most lawyers are not especially
good at their jobs, just like most people.” Though I thought David Miller probably was.
He let it go. “I know Whitney got into this mess trying to give me an alibi. I don’t want her to suffer for it. Would it help her if you got us separate trials?”
“Maybe. They’re trying you together on the theory that you conspired to do the murder together.”
“I don’t want a separate trial,” Whitney said. She put her cuffed hands on the table so as to rest one of hers on one of Brian’s. He looked at her, then back at me.
“Suppose I confessed and said I did the crime alone. Do you think you could plea bargain her out of it?”
“Maybe.”
“Suppose I confessed?” Whitney said. “Same answer?” She looked at Brian, her chin slightly upraised.
He turned his palm up so he could close his hand on hers. The two of them looked at each other, and my eyes watered. They looked back at me.
“Ninety-five percent, huh?” Brian said.
I gave him a bleak smile.
In a preliminary hearing, the judge must determine whether there is probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed and that the defendant—in this case, defendants—committed it. If the judge finds probable cause, the defendant is bound over for trial.
From the defense standpoint, preliminary hearings provide a helpful look at the prosecution’s case. I get to take a look at the prosecution’s evidence and cross-examine its witnesses well in advance of having to try to knock holes in the prosecution’s case before a jury. The witnesses testify under oath, locking in their testimony and making it very difficult for them to change it credibly at trial. Of course, the prosecution tries to limit the benefits to the defense by putting on only as much of its case as is necessary to ensure the trial will take place.
On the last Tuesday in February, the bailiff called the court to order, we all stood, and Judge Cochran swept in in his black robes. Before the bar, I seated myself at the table on the left with Whitney Foster and Brian Marshall. David Miller sat at the table on the right, alone. The spectators in the gallery—there were a dozen or so, even at this preliminary hearing—settled into their seats. Brooke Marshall was sitting in the row of seats directly behind us, alone because Paul was off examining a bank in Norfolk that week. Just a few rows behind Brooke sat the Strumpf brothers, Darrell wearing a plaid shirt and a jean jacket, and Charles wearing a plaid sport coat. Darrell waggled his fingers at me, but I ignored him.
Laughing Heirs (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 17