Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3

by Rachel Sinclair

  Heather laughed. “Oh, my lawyer is speechless.” She touched my arm with her black-nail-polished hand. “You didn’t know that straight boys like girls like me, did you? Well, they do. Trust me, I’m very popular at parties. It’s because of this.” She stuck out her tongue and I saw that it was pierced. “They love that, but they love sucking me off too. You’d be surprised to know how many straight boys like to eat dick. So, if I’m in prison, I think that I can get by.”

  I cleared my throat, finally seeing what Heather’s game was. “Heather,” I said. “You don’t have to try to shock me. Trust me, I’ve seen it all. And I do know that lots of straight guys like to eat dick, as you say. But all of this is neither here nor there. I need to know what happened, in your own words. And then I can start to build a defense.”

  Heather sneered, her bright red lips puckering and her nose scrunching. She glared, thinking she was going to intimidate me, but I was determined not to let her. She was the client, I was the lawyer, and I was the one who was going to be in control.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “I’ve been trying to think this whole thing over. What I’m going to tell you. Because I’ve seen Law and Order. I know that if I tell you that I offed that old bag that you can’t put me on the stand.” She made a face that briefly reminded me of a parakeet that I used to have – the bird saw himself in the mirror and thought it was another bird. He would flirt with that image all day long, just staring at it and cocking his head. Somehow, Heather reminded me of that bird at that moment.

  I got out a yellow pad and pen. “Heather,” I said. “That’s true what you say. If you tell me that you did it, and then plan on mounting a defense that is built around somebody else doing it, then I can’t put you on the stand. Not if your testimony is going to be that you had nothing to do with the murder. I would be suborning perjury if I allowed you to lie, knowing that you’re lying. So, what I tell my clients is that, if we’re going to go with what us attorneys call the SODDI defense – some other dude did it – then I suggest that you don’t tell me that you murdered your mother.” I struggled with this, ethically. I needed to know the truth, but, yet, I needed to give her the best defense. I didn’t know how I would do this if I knew for a fact that she was guilty.

  “SODDI defense,” she said with delight. “Some other dude did it. I like that.” Then she nodded her head. “Except some other dude didn’t do it. I did it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I groaned. There went my defense. At least one of them. I wrote down on the paper the client confessed and felt the despair creeping back into my bones. I cracked my neck and looked up the ceiling and took a deep, cleansing breath. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea, taking Heather into my home. I certainly didn’t want to get attached to her, not when she was most likely going to spend the rest of her natural life in prison. And her “natural life” was probably going to be very short.

  I closed my eyes, wondering how I was going to get through this. After what had happened with Gina, I was a wreck. I was ready to quit. I got somewhat hopeful with Heather, although I didn’t know why I would be. My line of work was soul-crushing. Soul destroying. I always got way too involved with my clients, always cared way too much. Losing their cases was always personal for me, like I was losing a friend. Yet winning a case like John Robinson, and having it all go so wrong, was even worse than losing.

  Now here I was, my first case back, and looking at having to plea a girl who wasn’t going to survive prison because she was different.

  When I opened my eyes, and looked at Heather, I decided that I was going to have to shift my attitude. Perhaps all wasn’t lost. “Okay,” I said in a brusque tone that belied the emotional churning I was feeling inside. “You killed your mother. Now we have to look at mitigating circumstances. Perhaps I can show that it was a heat of passion, in that you didn’t plan it out for even one second. That would be a basis for a manslaughter charge. I can, alternatively, have you psychologically evaluated for an insanity defense.” Even as I chewed my pen and prepared to rapidly explain the insanity defense - that would mean that Heather couldn’t know, because of a mental disease or defect, the nature, quality or wrongfulness of her act. That would mean that either a) she didn’t know she was committing a murder or b) she didn’t know that murder was wrong.

  Heather shook her head. “It was a murder but not a crime,” she said with a smile. “I always loved that line in Chicago. Never thought I’d be saying it one day, but here we are.”

  I tapped my pen to my forehead as I contemplated her. That was the last thing I was going to ask her about. The one thing, outside of jury nullification, that could possibly get her off completely. And that was self-defense.

  “And what do you mean by that? A murder but not a crime?”

  “Just what I say. I killed her but only because she was about to kill me first.” She flipped her head back to and fro, and, just for one second, I saw the depth of pain in her eyes. It was like I was looking, for a split second, at a heartbroken and devastated person. I had seen that look in clients’ eyes too many times – it wasn’t a blank look, but, rather, it was like looking at a deep well that plunged miles into the earth and ended in blackness.

  But with Heather, that look came and went so quickly, an ordinary person wouldn’t have necessarily even caught it at all. If I hadn’t seen it in numerous desperate people over the years, I wouldn’t have seen it either.

  I scribbled on my pad. “Go on,” I said. “What do you mean?” I always preferred to let my clients talk, as opposed to questioning them. I felt that I got more natural responses that way, so I deliberately asked very open-ended and vague questions.

  Heather sat back in her chair, slumping with her feet on the floor in front of her. “Well, my mother, she was…well, she was and she wasn’t. I mean, let’s start from the beginning. She hated me from the start. She always dressed me up in boys’ clothes and cut my hair short, but I always knew that wasn’t right. Always. Always always always. Since I was four years old, I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be dressed in boys’ clothes and having my hair cut short. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have this…thing…between my legs. Do you know what it’s like, Harper, to feel like you want to crawl outside your own body, just so you would have the chance to crawl into somebody else’s body? I know that sounds sexual, but I don’t mean it that way.”

  Heather was suddenly becoming more serious than before. No more joking around about chicks with dicks and straight boys getting their freak on with her. She seemed to know that it was time to be straight with me, and I appreciated her decision to do so.

  “Actually, I do,” I said to her, thinking about the times, when my depression was at its most acute, and I wanted to somehow turn my skin inside out. I wanted to do anything at all that would make the pain stop. I would imagine that Heather felt that way her whole life. “But go on.”

  “You do.” That was a statement, not a question, and I wondered if she somehow knew about my darkness. “She never understood me. I would scream, absolutely scream, when she would drag me into the barber shop to get my hair cut, because I so wanted long hair like my little cousin, Cathy. On Easter Sunday, when all the little girls were in their pretty little dresses, and I was in my little three-piece suit, I felt that everyone was staring at me because I looked out of place. In my mind, I wasn’t supposed to wear that little suit, I was supposed to wear a dress, so I just assumed that I looked like a freak. Of course, in reality, I would be a freak if I wore the dress, but I didn’t know that. I was only 6 years old.”

  She shook her head. “When I was ten, I started to demand that my mom and everyone else call me Heather. I refused to answer to the name Heath. Well, you can imagine what happened next. It was always ‘Heath, do your homework. Heath, do the dishes. Heath, pick up dog poop. Heath this, Heath that.’ I told her, I flat-out told her, that I wasn’t going to answer to the name Heath, and that if she wanted me to do something, she had to address me by my proper n
ame, Heather.”

  She sighed. “If only she had named me Cameron. Or some other boy-girl name like Terry or Dana or Kelly or Stacey or Tracy or even Blair. There wouldn’t have been a problem, because I could simply pretend that my name was a girl’s name, not a boy’s, and I wouldn’t have been beaten all the time.”

  I continued to scribble and wrote down the words possible abuse? Not that the fact that there was abuse would get Heather off for murder. In Missouri, evidence of abuse can be used for a spouse or partner, but not for a child. I thought that was a hideous miscarriage of the law – if a spouse can use the defense, why can’t a child – but I didn’t make the law. Still, I could possibly get evidence of abuse in front of a jury to at least mitigate the case to manslaughter.

  But even manslaughter was going to be too much for Heather. I had to find a way that she didn’t serve even a single day in prison.

  Heather tapped her black nails on the plywood desk and looked at me. “So, yeah, my mom wasn’t exactly happy with me, to say the least. My father, neither, but he got himself killed by a drunk driver when I was 13 years old. Stupid fool was wearing all black, it was at night, and he just dashed in front of this wasted dude. My father’s fault, but, since the guy was drunk behind the wheel, he spent 10 years behind bars.” Heather rolled her eyes. “The justice system totally reeks sometimes.”

  I knew that better than anybody – how much the justice system reeked. But I didn’t want to tell her that.

  “After my father bit it, that was all she wrote for me. Which all would have been just fine, except mom became all Jesusy on me. Started quoting Revelations and shit.” Heather shook her head as she looked up at the ceiling. “Started telling me that I was bound straight for Hell. Do not Pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars. I didn’t know where she was coming up with this shit.”

  “Did the abuse get worse after your father died and your mother started getting religious on you?”

  Heather looked at me as if she didn’t hear a word I said. “Good lord, I don’t know where she came up with all that bull crap. She never went to church, not once, when I was growing up, and all of a sudden, she starts coming at me with this ‘man shall not lie with another man’ crap. Her Flying Spaghetti Monster bullshit wasn’t setting with me. At all.” She shook her head and crossed her arms in front of her. “I told her that I wasn’t a man lying with another man, but a girl lying with a man, and, frankly, I don’t think that I ever ‘lied’ with anyone. That ain’t what I do if you know what I mean.”

  I did know what she meant, but I didn’t necessarily want to encourage her.

  “She not only started telling me that I was going to Hell, but she also started to threaten me. She would say shit like she thought that I had the Devil in me, and that Satan was working through me to try to corrupt the world. Shit like that. I started to get scared and I wanted to get the fuck out of her house, but I had no place to go at that time. I finally agreed to go to conversion therapy because she insisted on it. As I said, I didn’t want to do any of that crap, but where was I gonna go? I was 17 at the time and I didn’t know Charlie or anybody else who would have been able to take me in. I certainly wasn’t as fabulous as I am currently. I was just a scared kid.”

  “Tell me about the conversion therapy.”

  “I had to go to this clinic that treated being gay and transgendered as some kind of a serious mental illness. At first, it wasn’t that bad – I had to see some weird dude who tried some kind of cognitive behavioral therapy or some shit. Every time I had a sexual thought about a man or a thought that I was supposed to be a woman, I was supposed to stop the thought and immediately think about something else.” Heather shrugged. “That wasn’t so bad. Of course, it didn’t work, mainly because I didn’t try. I really don’t care what people think about me and my lifestyle, and I wasn’t about to change. I just went to those conversion therapy sessions so that my mom would get off my ass.”

  My mind started to turn as Heather spoke. I wondered if her mother was a latent schizophrenic, who didn’t show signs until she was older, or perhaps she always had schizophrenia and it simply got worse after Heather’s father died. I knew that was a possibility – sometimes a person has mental illness tendencies, but the mental illness didn’t manifest until there was some kind of extremely stressful incident, such as a sudden death of a spouse.

  “At some point, the weird dude decided that his therapy wasn’t taking. I don’t know why he thought that, but he did. I mean, I lied and said that I was all cured - I didn’t think of men or boys sexually anymore and I accepted that I was a boy. I even told him that I was dating a girl and that things were going awesome with her.” Heather shook her head. “I guess the guy was trained to know when people were bullshitting, because he decided to go to the next level, so he called it.”

  “The next level,” I said, scribbling on my paper. I didn’t know if the gay conversion thing was relevant to Heather’s defense, but something told me that it was a piece of the overall puzzle. That was how I saw these cases – as puzzles for me to solve. Each moving part was pertinent in slowly building a case. “What was the next level?”

  “It was called aversion therapy, and it was pretty fucking sick.” Heather shook her head. “Basically, they would show me pictures of things that might get me off, like two guys sucking each other off or a chick with a dick getting with a couple of dudes, that kind of thing. It got me hard, and then they would show me something disgusting. Like showing a mound of shit or an overflowing toilet. They found out through a questionnaire what I found disgusting, and they would show me that. Big spiders, animals that had been slaughtered and hanging up on a tree, that kind of thing. They even showed me erotic images and then proceeded to force me out on the balcony of the building, and the office was on the 12th floor, and they made me look down. They did that because I made the mistake of telling them that I was afraid of heights.”

  Heather sighed. “I need a smoke. I hope you don’t mind. Just remembering this shit is giving me a serious case of the shakes.”

  I looked at her hand and saw that she was literally shaking, so I nodded my head.

  “Thanks. I can’t smoke indoors, so I have to go outside on the front porch. You’re welcome to join me. They have a porch swing out there and stuff, if you’d like to talk some more out there.”

  We went out on the porch, and Heather lit up a cigarette, her hands shaking the entire time. She sucked on the end of the cigarette and put her face up to the sky. “So, yeah. There was all kinds of bullshit going on in that place. I don’t know why or how my mom even heard of this place or even started thinking about it or what. But I told her, after the day that I was forced out on that balcony, in the freezing cold, mind you, I was done with the conversion therapy. I told her that I wasn’t going through any more therapy, and I was just fine the way that I was.”

  We rocked on the swing as we talked. Heather’s hand was gripping the metal chains that were holding the swing, her high heels scraping the wood of the porch.

  “What happened when you confronted her?”

  Heather shrugged her shoulders. “She didn’t throw me out of the house, like I thought she was going to do. I was all prepared to go and live on the streets if I had to, because I had no desire to go through the foster care system or wherever it is that kids go when their bat-shit cray mom kicks them out of the house. In fact, she didn’t say anything to me at all. Which actually freaked me out all the more. I was prepared for her to start yelling at me again about going to Hell, but she didn’t.”

  I made some notes, thinking that, although it sounded like things calmed down a bit between Heather and her mother, I knew that the storm was coming. It always did in situations like this. I had done enough criminal cases that involved domestic violence of some sort to know that peaceful lulls never lasted.

  Heather rolled her eyes and smacked her lips. She brought out a tube of lipstick out of her pocket and carefully applied it without a mirror. She was an expe
rt at this, as her lips were perfectly outlined in cherry red, with no smudges nor any of the color getting on her teeth. I wished that I could do as well.

  She shook her head. “That didn’t last. In fact, one night, I was sleeping in bed and I woke up in the middle of the night to see that she was standing over me. She had a pillow in her hands and she was staring at me and saying some kind of shit in Latin. Turns out she thought that I was possessed by a demon and she was chanting some kind of spell. I remembered some of the words that she was saying to me, even though I couldn’t really spell them or understand them, and Googled them. They were words that people say in an exorcism. Cray shit.”

  “She had a pillow in her hands?”

  “Yeah. She did. And this look in her eyes…she looked like she was in some kind of a trance or some shit like that. The first thing I thought was that she was wanting to kill me by smothering me with that pillow.”

  “Did you ever go to the police after that?”

  “No. I should have, but I didn’t. I didn't want them getting involved, because I told myself that my mom was crazy as a bat, but she wasn’t violent and maybe she didn’t mean anything by holding the pillow over me like that. I don’t know, I told myself that the whole thing was a fluke. Mainly, I didn’t want the cops involved because I might have been taken out of the home, and that was the last thing I wanted. No way did I want to get into the foster care system. Heard too many horror stories about that, and I was 17 – who was going to want me? And transgendered. I had more of a chance of hitting the Powerball than getting into a decent home. I wanted just to stay there with my mom until I finished high school and then hopefully get into a good college about a million miles away from her and her bullshit.”

  “Did you tell anyone about the pillow incident? Any of your friends, your teachers, anyone at all?”

  Heather shook her head. “I should have, but I didn’t. I was afraid that they would call the police for me. Teachers are required to report that shit. And my friends might have called the police, too, ‘cause that’s some trifling shit right there. I just wanted the pillow thing to be a secret. I was desperate not to have to leave the home under any circumstances. Besides, I was almost 18 at the time that the pillow thing happened. If I could make it to my 18th birthday, then I could be sure that the foster care system wouldn’t have to get involved if any more shit went down. I was a few months out at the time, so I thought I could just roll with her cray for awhile. And I had applied to several colleges, and I was accepted by a few. Got some scholarships, some grants, some student loans. I was all set to get out of that hell-hole. I needed to make it just a few more months.”