Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “It doesn’t,” Mike said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I waited too long then.” She sounded as if she might start crying, but I kept my eyes on my salad, avoiding any possibility of making eye contact. “I’ve let the best thing that ever happened to me just slip away,” she said.

  “Sarah, don’t.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” She pushed her plate with its half-eaten quiche away from her. Mike pushed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and stood with his tea, his chair scraping back behind him.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said again, getting to her feet. A glance showed me that tears had broken free and were trailing down her cheeks. She was a beautiful woman, even with tear-reddened eyes. She bumped the corner of the table as she went around it, and she strode for the door, her head down and her small purse clutched in one hand.

  Mike turned to watch her go, and his eyes focused on me.

  I chewed my mouthful of salad a few more times and swallowed. “Mike McMillan,” I said, as if in surprise. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  He glanced at the door, and I followed his gaze, but Sarah was gone. Mike took a breath and exhaled. Then he took two steps and pulled out the chair across from me. He dropped into it, leaning back with his legs out. When he didn’t say anything, I put another forkful of salad in my mouth.

  He cleared his throat. “Where’s Paul?”

  I shrugged, chewing.

  “Does Brooke have you following me?”

  I swallowed. “I’ve been in court. Bob Shorter’s preliminary hearing.”

  “Just my luck then. How’d the hearing go?”

  “Judge bound him over.”

  “So you lost.”

  “I didn’t win.”

  One corner of his mouth rose. “Never concede defeat,” he said.

  “‘Never say die.’ It sounds more dramatic, if you’re looking for a motto for me.”

  He sat, mouth pursed, head nodding thoughtfully. I started to take another bite of salad, then put my fork down. “I didn’t hear much,” I said. “You’ve been ready—now she’s ready. I assume the best thing that ever happened to her would be you.”

  His head moved equivocally. “The best and the worst.”

  “And now you’ve slipped away.”

  “I am marrying Brooke.”

  “And you stood by that.”

  “I did.”

  “Where is Brooke anyway?”

  “Fredericksburg, working with a company up there.”

  I nodded.

  “Sarah called me this morning, said she was having a personal crisis and needed to talk.”

  “Are her personal crises still your business?”

  “No. Of course not, though maybe I wasn’t as clear on that this morning. I thought maybe this crisis was something I ought to clean up.”

  “And it turned out not to be anything you could clean up.”

  He sighed, shook his head.

  “You need to let her go, Mike.”

  “I know. I have.”

  I took a sip of my water.

  Mike said, “I don’t know why she’s so insecure about this.”

  “Well, you are marrying someone else.”

  “I meant Brooke.”

  “I know what you meant. I have to say, it’s not like her. I’ve never known her to be insecure or clingy. It may be a reflection of the uncertainty she has about getting married generally—the permanence of it, the loss of freedom . . .”

  “She’s not losing her freedom! She can do anything she wants, work late, hang out with you, take up long-distance running—”

  “Listen to rap music at full volume,” I continued for him. “Have MSNBC on the television whenever she’s home. Keep her clean laundry piled on the sofa to fold whenever she decides to take the time . . .”

  Mike was beginning to look a little panicked. “You know her better than I do,” he said.

  I grinned at him. “I’m kidding. But you see what I mean. There’re a lot of ways a person might find a permanent roommate constricting.”

  “So you’re telling me I’ve found myself yet another woman who loves me but doesn’t want to marry me.”

  “Not at all. She said she’d marry you, didn’t she? She wants to marry you. There’s just a lot of uncertainty in her life at this point. Having a dark-haired beauty like Sarah Fleckman bumping around the edges of yours doesn’t help.”

  He sighed, then nodded. “I’ll do better.”

  “I know how I’d feel if one of Paul’s old girlfriends kept turning up.”

  “Really?” His mouth quirked upward at the corner. “I’d think you’d either chew her up and spit her out or ignore her entirely. Besides, Paul doesn’t have any old girlfriends. He’s always fallen for hot women who were out of his league and worshiped them from afar. Until you.”

  “Ah. Probably good for me to be taken down a peg.”

  “I didn’t mean that. You’re as far out of his league as any of them. This is just the first time he’s managed to develop a relationship with one of the goddesses he’s fallen for.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. What was it with me and Aphrodite?

  “I didn’t mean it quite that way, either.”

  “You mean I’m not a goddess?”

  “Just flesh and blood. Impressive as hell, but just flesh and blood.”

  “I can settle for impressive as hell.”

  “So are you going to tell Brooke about this?”

  “No.” I shook my head decisively. “That would be like throwing a gas can onto a fire.”

  Mike exhaled carefully as some of the tension eased out of him.

  “But you are,” I said.

  Chapter 7

  The Monday after Shorter was bound over for trial, I cleared my desk except for the autopsy report on Bill Hill, the police reports, and the exhibit list I’d gotten from the prosecution. On the wall I pinned the crime scene photos. I was sitting at my desk, drumming my fingers and looking at my wall of photos when Brooke stuck her head in.

  “Hard at work, I see,” she said.

  “As usual.”

  Brooke came in and sat down. She said, “I thought you were going to say something about how late I was, but I stopped off at a client’s.”

  “I’ll make a note of it.”

  As I’ve mentioned before, Brooke’s business seemed to grow like kudzu, while mine still lurched from case to case. I wasn’t jealous of her success, but it was a continuing point of comparison.

  “So what are we looking at?” Brooke asked, her eyes on my wall of photos.

  “Crime scene photos. I’ve got a client sitting in jail and a trial in three weeks. Take a look at this print of his neighborhood off Google Earth. See, here’s the murder victim’s house, and here, just around the corner, is my client’s.”

  “Old Pit Bull Shorter.”

  “You’re doing an injustice to pit bulls. Here’s a close-up of the victim’s house.”

  “Bill Hill. I like that name.”

  “It is short and pithy.”

  “I guess when he had a headache, his wife would say, ‘Do you fill ill, Bill Hill?’”

  “Chill, Bill Hill, and take this pill,” I said. “But I don’t think he was ever married. This is a picture of the murder scene. It looks like he was sitting in that upholstered chair when he was stabbed and fell forward onto the floor. Here’s the dried pool of blood after they moved the body, soaking into the edge of the area rug and running out onto the wood floor.”

  “Shorter,” she said. The word scrawled in blood stood in stark relief against a wood floor that had been worn almost white. She moved back to the photograph of the body lying facedown on the floor with one arm extended. “He was wearing a coat?”

  “It was during the cold snap a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t have his heat on.”

  “Gloves, too.”

  “Yeah, maybe he couldn’t afford heat,” I said.

  “Have you been in the house?”

  “N
ot yet. I thought I’d try to arrange it for this afternoon. Want to go?”

  She did, and for once she had a break in her schedule that allowed her to do it.

  Neither Hernandez nor his partner Jordan were available that afternoon.

  “I can have a uniform meet you there at four o’clock,” Hernandez offered. “Would that work?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Maybe two uniforms. Their job will be to watch your hands at all times.”

  “Meaning that if I’m going to plant evidence, I need to be subtle?”

  “Don’t even joke about it, Starling. Any new evidence that’s uncovered after you walk in that house, Biggs is going to claim you put there.” Aubrey Biggs, Richmond’s commonwealth attorney, was not my biggest fan.

  “Then I hope you did an adequate job of searching when you had the chance,” I said.

  I was parked on the curb in front of Bill Hill’s house when Jordan and Hernandez pulled up behind me in their SUV. Brooke and I got out.

  “I thought you couldn’t be here,” I said.

  “You didn’t mention you were bringing company,” Hernandez said.

  Jordan added, “We got to talking it over and decided if you were going in that house, we needed to be here, too. You showing up with reinforcements just confirms our suspicions.”

  “Suspicions of what?”

  “Of nefarious motives,” Hernandez said.

  “You know Brooke Marshall. She’s my assistant,” I said.

  “She’s your suite mate in the Ironfronts,” Jordan said.

  “Your best friend and your former roommate,” Hernandez said.

  “Well, today I’ve hired her as a consultant.”

  “You’ve hired her,” Jordan said. “What are you paying her? I thought she did computer stuff.”

  “She does, but for her work today I’m planning to buy her dinner.”

  “Hey, that’s good news,” Brooke said.

  Jordan shook his head. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Bill Hill had been stabbed in his living room. We saw the chair he had fallen from, saw the stained carpet and the discolored wood flooring. Even the name of my client was still faintly visible on the old wood.

  I had a printout of the house’s layout I’d gotten off the city assessor’s website and magnified with the executive suites’ copier. Brooke, whose artistic talents exceeded my own, sketched in the major pieces of furniture as we walked through the house. Actually, all she was doing was putting labeled squares and rectangles on the page, which doesn’t take a lot of artistic talent, but I was sticking with my strengths.

  “I can’t see what you’re hoping to get out of this,” Jordan said. “What are you looking for?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Will you let us know when you find it?”

  “If I know myself.”

  In the bedroom there was a machine next to Bill’s bed, a plastic hose snaking out of it. I lifted the hose. A clear plastic mask with two black straps was attached to the end of it. “Did Bill Hill have sleep apnea?” I asked.

  “Could be,” Hernandez said. “I’ve got a buddy that uses one of those things.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “A BiPAP machine?” he suggested. “B-PAP?”

  “C-PAP,” Jordan said.

  “Do you know?” I asked Jordan. “Or are you just guessing?”

  “I’ve heard the term somewhere.”

  “Oo-kay.” We weren’t getting anywhere in a hurry.

  I got out my smartphone and took a couple of snapshots of the clothes hanging in Bill Hill’s closet and another shot of the two pairs of shoes and the ratty-looking pair of slippers lined up on the closet floor. I opened each drawer in his dresser to take a picture of its contents. In the bathroom was a little mirrored medicine cabinet, the mirror spotted with what looked like toothpaste.

  “I had a medicine cabinet like this in my apartment when I was in law school,” I said, opening it. Bill Hill had a lot of pills. After taking a picture of the contents of the medicine cabinet, I turned the bottles so that the labels faced out and took a couple of close-ups so I’d be able to read the labels.

  Off the kitchen, an open staircase led down to a quarter basement with an oil furnace and a washer and dryer.

  “This is a big waste of time,” Jordan told Hernandez as we trudged single file back up the steps.

  “Who knows what she’d have tried to pull if we weren’t here?” Hernandez said. “And I didn’t expect it to take so much time. I thought she just wanted to do a walk-through. I didn’t know she was going to go Sherlock Holmes on us.”

  “So Jordan was in favor of sending the uniforms?” I asked, turning when I got to the top of the steps. “But Ray thought it needed the personal touch?”

  “Ray was the one sparring with you on the witness stand the other day,” Ray Hernandez said.

  “Like I did my client any good.” The kitchen was really too small for the four of us.

  “I felt like I was faced off against a cobra. The whole time I was expecting a lethal strike.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.” I held out my hand. “Well, I’m done here. Have I told you how much I appreciate this?”

  “Not enough,” Jordan said, taking my hand and giving it a squeeze that might have been a touch harder than necessary.

  “Maybe you could buy us dinner, too,” Hernandez suggested.

  “Just you two, or do you think Mrs. Jordan and Mrs. Hernandez would like to come along?”

  Neither one of them said anything to that. When we were out on the front walk again, I said, “I don’t suppose we could walk over to Bob Shorter’s house and do the same thing.”

  “You’ve got access to Shorter’s house. You don’t need us,” Jordan said.

  “I might need a witness if I find something.”

  “A couple of stooges is what you mean,” Hernandez said.

  Three kids were watching us from across the street about half a block down. They looked like high school students.

  “What’s your theory?” Jordan asked me. “You thinking Shorter killed Hill over there and then moved him?”

  “My theory doesn’t involve him killing Hill at all, but that’s where the bloody clothing was found.”

  “And?”

  “Maybe whoever planted it left traces.”

  Hernandez jerked his head in the direction of the teenagers down the block. “Who are they, do you know?” The tallest was a skinny kid with red hair, then there was a light-skinned black guy and a short white kid with dark hair and a round blob of a face.

  I shook my head. “Never seen them.”

  “There weren’t any traces,” Jordan said, “because nobody planted the bloody clothes. We went over the place.”

  “Did you make an inventory of the contents of the house? Do you have pictures?”

  “We have a few pictures of the closet where the bloody clothing was found.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen those.”

  Hernandez said, “None of the house locks were broken. None had the telltale scratches on them that might suggest they’d been jimmied.”

  “Don’t try to tell us you haven’t already been in Shorter’s house,” Jordan said.

  “Well,” I admitted.

  “So you know there are no indications that anyone other than Robert Shorter was ever in that house. None at all.”

  “Unless you found something we missed,” Hernandez said, “and you’re just not sharing it.”

  “Would it do me any good? If I came forward with a bit of exculpatory evidence, is there anyone in the police department or the DA’s office who would believe I didn’t plant it?”

  “No,” Hernandez said.

  “Face it,” Jordan said. “However good a job we did or didn’t do of checking out Shorter’s house, you’re stuck with it.”

  Hernandez said, “And you don’t really believe this theory of Shorter being framed by a person or persons unknown.”

  �
��He told me he didn’t do it.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that a person who would commit a murder would also lie about it?” Jordan asked.

  “Sure, but he’s my client. I have to explore the possibility that he’s telling me the truth. I owe him that.”

  Jordan shook his head. “We did an inventory of the closet, if that helps.”

  They’d been more thorough than I had. “I don’t think I’ve seen that. If you could send me a copy, I’d be grateful.”

  “How grateful?” Hernandez said.

  Brooke said, “I thought you two were married.”

  “We are, but Jordan’s not too happily.”

  Jordan held up a hand. “I’m very happily married,” he said. “I’m ecstatic. Just ask my wife.”

  “Then let me ask you this,” I said.

  His head rolled toward me, and he looked at me from under his salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

  “Shorter told me he kept a spare key in his toolshed. Do you know anything about it?”

  “No, we don’t. Given what the neighbors say about him, though, if someone was going to use his spare key, it would have been to go in and kill him.”

  “Or frame him. Can we check to see if it’s there?”

  If the key had ever been there, we couldn’t find it. Hernandez, who had brought a flashlight from the SUV, shone it on the inside casing and all along the floor inside the shed. We saw a few empty nails, a few other nails with tools hanging from them, but no key. “Satisfied?” Hernandez said.

  “Not really.”

  Jordan said, “I would say you’d removed the key last time you were here, but I can’t see where it gets you.”

  I gave him a humorless smile. “If you figure it out, let me know.”

  Hernandez said, “I don’t get it. I was expecting a key. I thought the whole reason you dragged us over here was because A, you’d planted it, or B, you’d already seen it, but you wanted us to be the ones to find it.”

  “I don’t sense of lot of trust here.”

  “No, really? You gotta know we believe everything defense lawyers tell us.”

  Chapter 8

  Hernandez and Jordan left. Brooke and I walked across the yard to Shorter’s house. I wanted her to see the tombstones in the basement.

  “Too bad it’s not Halloween,” I said, holding up the one about Jenn who died in her sin. “I’d put them out.”