Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “Suppose the DNA evidence and fingerprint evidence do hold up. It’s not the end of the story. We still need to consider how a knife from Mr. Shorter’s kitchen, if it came from there, came to be in the victim’s house. There might be innocent explanations—perhaps Mr. Shorter lent him the knife so that it was there in the house for the murderer to pick up—or there might be explanations that are a good deal more sinister. Many of us have left a key to our homes with a neighbor or even hidden somewhere on our property so that we don’t have to break a window if we’re ever locked out. Anyone who knew about such a key could walk into Mr. Shorter’s house and walk out again with a knife and a few items of clothing. After the murder, the killer could write the name of everyone’s least favorite neighbor in the dead man’s blood. He could leave the knife and take the bloody clothing, enter one more time into Mr. Shorter’s house, and there you have all the evidence of the prosecution’s case.”

  There it was in a nutshell, the only viable theory of a case for acquittal, the theory that Bob Shorter had been framed. I had presented it as matter-of-factly and prosaically as possible. Now I paused to consider whether I should deal directly with the common tendency to dismiss allegations of manufactured evidence as the product of nut-job conspiracy theorists. I decided to let it go.

  “You’re going to hear evidence that Mr. Shorter is not a very nice person. I don’t know what that has to do with the question of whether or not he committed the particular crime he is accused of, but you’re likely to get the idea that Bob Shorter is one malicious SOB.” I paused again to look at Bob Shorter. The jury looked at Bob Shorter. He bared his nicotine-stained teeth at them. He was wearing rumpled chinos and a light jacket over a polo shirt, which, combined with his yellow teeth, oily hair, and prominent hooked nose, made him look like Lucifer’s indigent second cousin. I should have foreseen this moment and gotten him some nice clothes and some dental work done, but there was nothing I could do about it now.

  I said, “Please keep in mind that even if we come to dislike Mr. Shorter, even if we come to despise him, there are a lot of malicious SOBs out there who have never killed anybody. Our job, your job, is to evaluate the evidence that ties this particular murder to this particular SOB. And the tie has to be a strong one. There can be no other reasonable explanation for the facts the prosecution is able to establish. If there is, it is your obligation to acquit.”

  It was probably not my strongest opening statement. I had dinner with Brooke and Mike and Paul that evening, and they confirmed my doubts. We were at Enrique’s, a Mexican restaurant we like, eating chips and salsa. Brooke and I were sipping margaritas, and Paul was drinking a mug of a draft beer I had never heard of, when Brooke said, “Something seems different about this case. Are you sure you have your heart in it?”

  She and Mike had gotten to court just as Maxwell started his opening argument, and Paul had gotten there just as I started mine. “He’s an SOB,” Paul said, lifting his mug, “but he may not be a murdering SOB.”

  “Damning him with faint praise,” Brooke said.

  “Having an unsympathetic client is the big weakness in my case,” I said. “I’m afraid Shorter’s going to look uglier and uglier as the trial progresses. I thought I’d better strengthen my credibility with the jury by acknowledging that up front.”

  Paul asked, “You think the unsympathetic client is a bigger liability than the bloodstained clothes and the fingerprints on the murder weapon?”

  “Not to mention the defendant’s name written in the victim’s blood,” Brooke said.

  “Well, none of that helps,” I acknowledged.

  “What did Shorter think of your tactic?” Brooke asked.

  “Not much.”

  “He didn’t comment?” Mike said. “I saw you talking to him.”

  “It would be more accurate to say you saw him talking to me. Specifically, he said he should have known better than to put his life in the hands of a ditzy blonde female with poop for brains.”

  They looked at me.

  “He said that?” Paul asked. “Poop for brains?”

  “No, he was a bit earthier in his description, but I think we all get the point.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to lose this one,” Paul said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Nobody bats a thousand. I lost a few cases when I was on the civil side of the docket, too.”

  “Out of how many?” Mike asked. “How many jury trials did you have before you got into criminal defense work?”

  I shrugged. “Here comes the food. Believe it or not, after a day in court I don’t find my professional shortcomings a relaxing topic of conversation.”

  “Point taken,” Paul said. When the waitress had distributed our food, Paul pointed to me. “This lady would like another margarita,” he said.

  “So would this one,” Brooke chimed in.

  For the rest of the evening we talked of other things, but I never felt completely in the moment. My mind kept drifting back to Bob Shorter, who I was pretty sure would have killed Bill Hill if he had felt like it. My doubts about him didn’t provide much basis for a wholehearted defense.

  I was in bed by ten, but my cell phone rang shortly before midnight, David Gates singing, “Baby, I’m-a Want You.” I groped for the phone, tapped the glowing screen.

  “Hey, Paul.”

  Beside me on the bed, Deeks came to his feet.

  “Robin. Are you awake?”

  “More or less. Someone just called me in the middle of the night and woke me up.”

  “Sorry. It couldn’t be helped. Mike and I are on our way over.”

  “What?” I pushed up in bed. “Is everything all right? What happened?”

  I heard Mike’s voice next: “We’ll tell you when we get there. See you soon.”

  The call ended, and I rested the phone against my chest. Deeks touched his cold nose to my cheek, and I worked a hand into his fur. “Hey, buddy. We got company coming.” I pushed my legs out of the covers and sat for a moment on the side of the bed as Deeks leaped lightly to the floor.

  “Show-off,” I muttered, then sighed and got up. In the dark, I rummaged in a drawer for some gym shorts to pull on over my panties. I thought for a moment, then opened the top drawer to find a bra. If it was just Paul, I probably wouldn’t have bothered—let him get hot and bothered if he wanted to—but I didn’t want to spend an evening with two men glancing surreptitiously at my chest.

  “I don’t know what it is with men and mammaries,” I told Deeks, shrugging into the bra beneath my oversize T-shirt.

  His tail thumped against the side of the bureau, and I reached down to scratch his head. Then I got the water bottle off my nightstand and opened it on my way to the living room.

  “You need to go potty?” I asked Deeks, standing in front of the picture window.

  He barked and wagged his tail, so I opened the front door. Paul hadn’t given me much warning. His car pulled up just as Deeks was finishing his business.

  Mike got out, wearing rumpled jeans and an even more rumpled T-shirt. Paul was wearing sweats. Deeks greeted each in turn on their way to the door, a bounce in his step and his tail wagging, clearly more excited than I was about the nighttime visitors. I do have to admit to being intrigued, but I waited until they were standing awkwardly in my living room before I said anything.

  “Can I offer either of you a hot beverage?”

  It didn’t even get a smile.

  “Is it Brooke?” I asked Mike.

  “No. She’s fine.”

  Good news. I sat on the sofa, curling my legs under me, and Paul and Mike sat, too.

  “It’s Sarah,” Mike said, his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced in front of him.

  “Sarah Fleckman? Something’s happened to Sarah Fleckman?” He was never going to disentangle himself from that woman, I thought.

  “Not exactly. She . . . let herself into my house. She was there when I got home from Enrique’s.”

  Mike’s story was t
hat he had parked on the street and let himself in through the front door, dropping his briefcase by the sofa on his way back to the kitchen to set up the coffeemaker so his morning coffee would be ready by the time he got downstairs. He’d gone to his bedroom, had hung his suit up in the closet, had tossed his shirt on the floor underneath his hanging clothes, which evidently was where he kept clothes that needed to go to the cleaners. Wearing boxer briefs and a T-shirt, he had gone into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face. He hadn’t known anything was amiss until he’d gotten into bed and a warm, naked female had pulled herself against him.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I’d been to his house now and knew the layout. “You went in and out of your bedroom, into your closet, into your bathroom, and you never noticed there was someone in your bed?”

  “All I noticed was a jumble of covers. I don’t always make my bed.”

  I rolled my eyes. Brooke, I knew, couldn’t stand an unmade bed, which told me who was going to be making theirs.

  “Anyway, I broke free of her and got out of bed.”

  “Got out of bed!” Paul said. “He launched himself out of bed like his sheets were on fire.” To Mike he said, “What? It’s the way you told it to me.”

  “Let’s just say I got out of there as fast as I could. I was halfway down the stairs before I realized I didn’t have anything on but my underwear. I had to run back up and snatch some clothes off the floor.”

  His house had been so neat when Brooke showed me through it. I wondered if she’d picked up after him, or if he did better when he was going to be away.

  “And Sarah was still there, I take it?”

  “She was out of bed at that point. I had to move her to get to my clothes.”

  “And she was still . . .”

  “Still wearing the clothes she was born in,” Paul said. He seemed to be relishing the mental image of a naked Sarah a good deal more than was strictly proper for a boyfriend of mine.

  “She still hasn’t given you up,” I told Mike.

  “The weird thing is, she says she has,” Mike said. “Evidently what she had in mind was something of a good-bye present.”

  “A thank-you for all the good times they had,” Paul said.

  “Must have been some good times,” I said drily. “So how did you leave it?”

  “I just left it, the house and everything.”

  “He can’t even remember if he locked the front door,” Paul said.

  “Sarah will lock it when she leaves,” Mike said.

  “How come she still has a key?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “She gave it back to me a long time ago. Evidently, she’d made a duplicate she never told me about.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “Sleep at Paul’s tonight. She’ll be gone in the morning.”

  “At some point she has to go to work,” Paul said.

  “No, I meant, what are you going to do about Sarah’s unbreakable attachment to you?” I said.

  “I thought maybe you could talk to her,” Mike said.

  And there it was. That was why they were here. “You have to change your locks.”

  “I know. Tomorrow morning.”

  “And this is another thing you have to tell Brooke about.”

  Mike glanced at Paul. “She’ll freak out. You know she will. She’ll be over at my house washing sheets and wiping down everything in sight.”

  “You don’t plan to wash your sheets?”

  “Well, sure. Eventually.”

  “Good grief.”

  “I know, I know. Brooke’s got to know about it. For one thing, after I’ve changed my locks, she’ll need a new key to the house. I did think I might leave out some of the details as to why.”

  “Details like Sarah being naked,” Paul said. “And in his bed, waiting for him like a bare-breasted spider.”

  My lip curled as I turned my gaze toward him. “Is that a new species?”

  “As of tonight,” he said. “I took the privilege of naming it.”

  “Even though I’m the one who discovered it,” Mike said.

  “I thought you wanted to keep that part of things quiet,” I said.

  “Good point.”

  I shook my head. Men and mammaries, I thought. Men and mammaries.

  Chapter 11

  The next morning Mike had back-to-back hearings in the federal building across the street, and Paul had to go to Norfolk for some reason. Only Brooke was there when court reconvened and Ian Maxwell called Mark Rehrer, whom I had last seen in Shorter’s kitchen, as his first witness.

  “Old man Rehrer” turned out to be fifty-six, an age consistent with his white side walls and the coal-black strip of hair that ran back from his forehead. Though Shorter’s tombstone had suggested he got the electric chair for cutting his wife from ear to ear, he currently lived with his unmurdered wife across the street from the house that had belonged to Bill Hill.

  “Did you see Mr. Hill from time to time?” Maxwell asked him after going through the preliminaries.

  “Yes, occasionally.”

  “You knew him fairly well?”

  “I knew him to talk to. He had problems walking, though, and he rarely left his yard.”

  “What gave him walking problems?”

  “The front half of one of his feet had been amputated six or seven years previously.”

  “Did you see him on the day of Friday, March 9?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see him on Saturday, March 10?”

  “No. Saturday night, though, the light in Bill’s living room was on all night. At least, it was on when I went to bed Saturday night and still on when I went out to get the newspaper before daylight the next morning.”

  “This was unusual?”

  “Yes. Bill was usually up pretty early, but he went to bed early, too. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and later that day I got to thinking about it. I thought maybe his light had been on all Friday night, too.”

  “How often did you see him normally?”

  “At least every day or two. Bill didn’t get out much, but he did run to the grocery store every few days. And he’d shuffle out to his mailbox. Mostly, though, I’d see him in his backyard or at his front window, looking out at the neighborhood and brooding.”

  “What did Bill Hill have to brood about?”

  I stood. “Objection. Relevance.” Some of this could come in as part of the res gestae, the circumstances surrounding the case, but Maxwell looked to be heading into things I didn’t want him heading into.

  “Sustained,” Judge Cooley said. To Maxwell he added, “I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but you need to get to the point.”

  “Very well. Mr. Rehrer. Was the defendant Robert Shorter responsible for Mr. Hill losing part of his foot?”

  “Objection,” I said again.

  Maxwell turned to me. “You can’t argue the relevance of that one. If Bob Shorter—”

  I interrupted him. “Whatever Bob Shorter may or may not have done might be relevant if you could prove it by competent evidence, but I’m betting that all Mr. Rehrer knows about the matter is what somebody told him.”

  Maxwell hesitated, which was fatal.

  “Are you attempting to solicit hearsay evidence, Mr. Maximus?” the judge asked him in his quavery voice.

  “Maxwell. I’ll be calling the physician who treated Mr. Hill at a later time, Your Honor.”

  “Let’s wait for that testimony then,” the judge said. “I’ll sustain the objection.”

  Maxwell adjusted his glasses. “Mr. Rehrer,” he said, “what did you do on Sunday, March 11, in relation to Bill Hill?”

  “Nothing until the afternoon, I’m afraid. A bit before two o’clock, I walked across to ring his doorbell. Bill didn’t answer, so I got down off the stoop and looked in his picture window. When I stood on tiptoe, I could see his legs. He was on the floor. I knocked on the glass and shouted to him, but he didn’t move, so I called nine-one-
one.”

  “You didn’t try the door?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rehrer.” To me: “Your witness.”

  The more time Mr. Shorter’s neighbors spent on the stand, the worse it was going to be for Mr. Shorter, I thought. “No questions,” I said.

  “Call Officer Steven Warren,” Maxwell said.

  Officer Warren had been the first cop on the scene. He rang the doorbell and knocked and tried the door. “It wasn’t locked,” Warren said. “So I went in. A man was lying facedown on the floor in front of a recliner. It looked like maybe he’d been stabbed in the chair and fallen forward.”

  “It looked like he had been stabbed? Did you see a weapon?”

  “I saw a small knife on the floor by the decedent’s body.”

  “Did it have blood on it?”

  “It was at the edge of a pool of blood that was only partly covered by the dead man’s body. The blade was smeared with blood.”

  “Anything unusual about the crime scene that you noticed?”

  “There was a pattern in the blood that looked like writing. It was a word, but not one I understood until later.”