She shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
“We have very compelling evidence to indicate he was in the house the night of the murder.” This was a bit of a stretch, but I figured I’d see how she responded. “If he didn’t do it, why not go to the police, explain his presence there, and tell what he saw?”
Sister Beatrice studied my daughter for a moment. “Let me put this in simple English: That’s not going to happen.”
“Can I ask you one question?” Lisa said.
“What’s that?”
“Does he own a black Lincoln, midsixties model?”
Sister Beatrice studied her for a while. “I drive an old Continental. I’ve loaned it to him on occasion.”
“The kind with the rear doors that open backward?”
“I think we’ve about clarified our positions here, hm?” Sister Beatrice looked back down at the book she’d been reading when we walked in, and her lips began to move.
“Sister . . .”
She didn’t look up from the book.
I raised my voice. “Sister.”
She was still looking at the book as she said, “I know I’m being a pain-in-the-neck old religious crank, but if I look up again and you’re still sitting there, I’m going to have some of my boys hustle you out. They don’t get treats like that very often, and I’m afraid they’re liable to make the most of it.”
We made fairly good time back to the car.
Thirty-one
There is probably nothing grimmer or sadder than a jail on Christmas Eve. Every peeling gray-painted steel door, every rusting steel bar, every slipshod weld and deteriorating caulk joint, every crumbling slab of concrete amplifies the message of hopelessness and shame, the life-stops-here quality so central to what jail is all about. It is not just that a jail is a hard place to escape from, but that even barriers erected with such apparent disinterest and negligence are nevertheless so easily capable of hemming in a life. Jail says this: The wild freedom of the individual is nothing in the face of even the most careless and inefficient bureaucracy. In this place, you are a nullity: Get used to it.
It was Christmas Eve, and the time had come when I couldn’t avoid talking to Miles about his son any longer.
The warden said I could bring him dinner—plastic utensils only. Presumably so he couldn’t tunnel out of the jail with a spoon. So while we talked in the depressing little interview room, reeking of industrial disinfectant, he ate with a plastic fork out of a plastic box I’d bought at a franchised cafeteria: turkey and dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberry salad. It wasn’t the most appetizing thing in the world . . . but it was the same thing Lisa and I planned to eat a couple of hours later.
After some halfhearted pleasantries, I said, “Look, here’s the thing. We know about Blair.”
Miles set down his plastic fork and looked up from his cheerless meal. His face wasn’t showing anything.
“Did he do it, Miles? Are you protecting your son?”
Miles looked up at the gray concrete ceiling. “I don’t want him involved, okay?”
“Miles. Let’s get real here. Without Blair, you’re toast. You understand how your wife’s trust works, right? The money goes to blood children, not to you. Stash is going to argue in trial that you killed Diana for her money. If we can ambush him and argue that you knew about Blair’s existence, then motive goes out the window.”
Miles chewed on his turkey.
“Furthermore, Miles, I believe Blair was at your home the night of the murder.”
Miles scowled. “See, this is what I wanted to avoid. You want to use him for reasonable doubt. You want to say, ‘Hey, lookee here, folks, here’s this violent dirtbag in the house the night of the murder, he’s the one, he’s the real killer.’ ”
He was right, of course. “Reasonable doubt, Miles. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life in the penitentiary, then you’ve got to give me the tools to reach reasonable doubt.”
“And who pays the price for that reasonable doubt?” Miles picked up his plastic fork, stabbed a piece of turkey, stuffed it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. When he was done, he said, “Nope. I won’t let you do that to him.”
I drummed my fingers. “How long have you known about Blair?”
Miles’s eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. “I always knew,” he said. “That jerk, Diana’s brother, Roger—he told me a few weeks after the birth that the child hadn’t actually died. He had that snotty Harvard accent: ‘Marvelous thing, having connections. We’ve pulled a few strings, made sure your little baaahstard goes to the grimmest, foulest orphan age in the state. And I’ll make certain he stays there forever.’ I could have tried to get custody, but I knew that if I did, I’d never have had a chance with Diana. See, I felt sure that if I kept after her, I could win her over eventually. But not if that child was part of the equation. She was only nineteen. It would have been too much for her then; the idea of walking away from her family, her money, her life, shackling herself to a screaming baby and a husband who didn’t have two cents to rub together—it just would have been impossible for a nineteen-year-old socialite to make a decision that radical. I traded that child for Diana.” Miles wiped one eye with the back of his hand, smearing some gravy across his forehead. “I couldn’t ever bring myself to tell Diana.”
“Did he do this thing, Miles? Did he kill Diana?”
“I felt so responsible. For how that poor kid turned out.”
“I’m asking you a question. Did Blair Dane kill your wife?”
Miles kept eating, tears running down the sides of his nose. Finally, he said, “Do what you have to do, Charley. But if you accuse my son of anything in court, I’ll fire you on the spot.”
I sat there looking at him.
“Can you just go away?” He prodded his mashed potatoes. “I’m trying to enjoy my Christmas Eve dinner.”
Thirty-two
The holidays had flashed past in a nerve-racking blur. Everywhere you looked, there was Miles’s face. On the TV, in the papers, in the magazines. It was impossible to relax, impossible to shop or eat or even walk across the street without being accosted by journalists or kooks, impossible to escape from the pressure, the cameras, the incessant phone calls.
And it didn’t help that when the journalists got tired of slicing at Miles’s character, they turned their knives on me. Everyone from the New York Times down to Hard Copy had something unflattering to say about Charles Sloan, Attorney at Law. They talked about my alcoholism, they talked about the year I’d been suspended from the practice of law for a variety of shady things done while under the influence of eighteen-year-old scotch, they’d interviewed two of my ex-wives (neither of whom, needless to say, had anything good to say about me), and of course they never failed to show the same blurry Polaroid snapped by the insurance investigator, a photo of the car I’d crashed through the door of an emergency room down in Detroit while plastered on Courvoisier. I tried to stay away from the television and the newspapers, but it was hard to do. Until you’ve lived through something like that, you have no idea how it chafes the spirit. You try to leave the person you were behind, and he just keeps sneaking up behind you, tapping you on the shoulder and leering at you.
For two solid weeks the temperature never rose above four degrees below zero, and the sun never came out from behind the clouds. A week before Christmas, one of the cracking towers over in Sarnia blew out a pipe and caught on fire. For days the wind whistling steadily out of Canada dropped a film of black, stinking ash over the thin snow until by Christmas Eve all of Pickeral Point looked like a black-and-white photo of some grim nineteenth-century English industrial town. It was a miserable, miserable month.
Lisa and I sat down on Christmas morning and looked at the meager pile of presents we’d managed to pick up for each other. By the time we’d opened the first present, we were talking about the impending trial. Finally, I said, “Why don’t we put these things away and open them after it’s over?”
I
didn’t have to specify what it was.
I took Miles’s pronouncement to “Do what you need to do” as license to keep the Blair-Did-It strategy alive as an option: I placed him on the witness list, buried among a number of character reference witnesses, and hoped that Stash would figure him for a distant cousin.
I had filed two motions to exclude. First, I moved to exclude the book How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It. Having read the book, I was doubtful that he would grant the motion, but it was not an unreasonable possibility.
In the second motion, I moved to exclude the bloody clothes and the bokken as fruits of an illegal search. It was a ridiculously long shot, but I felt obliged to do it just to cover all my bases. So I was surprised—even a little shocked—when I got a call the day after Christmas from Judge Evola’s secretary saying that the judge wanted briefs from me on both of the exclusion issues. Not just for the book, but for the clothes and the bokken as well. Evola’s secretary said that he would hear oral arguments on both issues on the day before trial.
As a result, Lisa spent the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s working on the briefs and doing research on the subject. Truth was, I hated to take her away from the other work she was doing. I had experts to prep, documents to organize, witnesses to run down . . . We were dreadfully undermanned for a task as daunting as this trial.
But I couldn’t afford to blow the opportunity: If we excluded the book, that would help our case significantly. But if we managed to exclude the clothes and the bokken, Stash Olesky had no case. No clothes, no bokken—Miles goes free. It was that simple.
Thirty-three
Judge Evola held the two motions up in front of his nose, closed his eyes, and sniffed deeply. Then he opened his eyes and put a wide smile on his face. “You know what I smell here?” he said.
It was New Year’s Eve, six o’clock in the evening, and we were sitting in Mark Evola’s expansive chambers on the third floor of the county courthouse. There was a lot of memorabilia hanging on the walls from back in Evola’s glory days as a basketball player at Michigan State. During daylight there was a nice view of the river over his left shoulder, but right now all I could see were the reflected lights of Canada, leaving twinkling, wavering smears of white on the dark river. Stash Olesky sat beside me in a red leather chair.
I was surprised Judge Evola had even been willing to hear arguments on my motion to exclude the clothes and the bokken. Normally it would have been dismissed out of hand. But since he had, I figured maybe I had a fighting chance. Until I saw his face, anyway. Mark Evola is a hail-fellow-well-met type of the worst kind and usually acts excruciatingly cordial to me despite how deeply he hates me. But today his smile had gone thin and hostile. His true feelings were sneaking out.
“What I smell here, Charley,” he said, “is desperation. But, please, let’s hear your argument.”
I began to launch into a summary of the position Lisa and I had worked out for the motion to exclude the clothes and the bokken. Evola leaned back and sat there with his arms crossed, looking at me with an amused expression on his face while I monologued. I must have gone on for half an hour before he said, “Thank you so much. That was quite educational.”
“Your Honor, if I could respond,” Stash said.
“Oh, save the wear and tear on your throat, Stash.” Mark Evola reached into his pocket, took out a fat gold pen, then slid a sheet of paper out in front of him. It was obviously an order. He signed it with a flourish. “Motion for exclusion of evidence dee-nied!”
I stared at him. “Just like that?”
Evola leaned forward. “Charley. I—and this entire jurisdiction—have gotten sick to death of your cheap tricks and your sly little maneuverings. You and I both know what this is.” He held the two motions to exclude up in the air, pinched between two fingers for a moment, then let them go. They drifted down in a heap on his desk. “These are BS. Total BS.”
“Your Honor . . .”
“You don’t have to Your-Honor me in chambers. It’s just Mark, Stash, and Charley, and we’re just having a little chitchat on a subject of mutual interest.” The smile grew broader. “And here’s my view on the matter. The police acted on a legitimate tip. They gained consent. They made the search. It’s perfectly admissible.”
“Then do you mind my asking why you made me shag all this . . .” I pointed to the stack of papers, the seventy-five-page briefs—all of which represented hours and hours of frantic research on the subject—“. . . why you made me shag this stuff up here from my office—on a holiday evening, no less—why you made me and my clerk spend countless hours preparing for this brief, why you encouraged me to squander vast amounts of our extremely precious time on this motion, when you obviously had made up your mind long ago?”
“Because, Charley—my dear, close and personal friend—I just wanted to see the look on your face.” Mark Evola grinned broadly, then pulled out another order and signed it. I could see without even reading it that he was denying my second motion, the motion to exclude the novel How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It.
“Now wait a minute,” I said angrily. “You want to rule the seizure is legal, fine, I’ll buy it. But that book is another matter! It’s a work of fiction, and it has no place in a murder trial.”
“Let me try this again, Charley. Dee. Nied. That clear enough for you?” He pushed both orders across the desk toward me. “See you in court, old buddy.”
Stash and I walked down the stairs of the dark empty courthouse together in silence.
He let us out the front door with a key. “Sorry,” Stash said. “I didn’t know that would happen.”
I shrugged. The winter wind was bitter coming off the river from Canada. The air temperature had already made pretty good progress down toward a predicted low for the night of ten below.
“Look,” Stash said. “You and me, we’re friends. But I know how you are in court. If you come in cleats high, I’m gonna take it right back at you.”
“I know that.”
He looked out at the dark river. “You want to come over to my place, catch the Michigan State game? Might take our minds off things.”
“Nah. Thanks. I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it.” I put out my hand and we shook.
“You’re a miserable excuse for a lawyer and a discredit to the bar,” he said.
I smiled, but my heart wasn’t in it. In the cold, it felt as though my face might crack. I had a suspicion this trial might get ugly, and that prospect made me feel a little down, like maybe our friendship might not be quite the same after this. “Yeah. You, too, buddy.”
We turned and walked away from each other, the wind clawing at our coats.
TRIAL
Thirty-four
“We all know who Charley Sloan is.” Stash Olesky waved a couple of fingers airily in my direction. Jury selection was complete, the courtroom was crammed to capacity with reporters spilling out into the halls. And in the back of the room was the all-seeing eye, the camera from Court TV, running a live feed into umpteen million households nationwide.
“Charley Sloan,” the prosecuting attorney of Kerry County continued, “he’s far and away the best-known defense attorney in our little county. A man of . . .” He smiled wickedly, first to the jury, then to the reporters in the back of the courtroom. “He’s a man of some, ah, reputation? Shall we say? Back a few years we all saw him on Hard Copy and those other trashy shows when he was involved in another case that made the national headlines. Now, I know Charley personally, and I like him. And goodness knows he’s a heck of a fine lawyer. But some people in the press, on the TV, homespun pundits down at the barbershop, wherever, have tried to say that this trial is all about Mr. Sloan. Well, folks, I’m here to tell you right now, this trial is not about Charley Sloan, and I refuse to make an issue out of his reputation. Or his tactics. Or the class of people he’s represented in the past. And certainly not of his unfortunate and well-documented personal problems.”
Yeah,
right, I thought. That, of course, was precisely what he was doing. My friend Stash was coming in cleats high right out of the box. I knew it, the judge knew it, Stash knew it, every single person in the jury box knew it. Even the folks out there watching the live feed on Court TV knew it. But there was no point jumping up in front of the jury and complaining about it, not just yet. Opening statement was no place to be getting on the jury’s bad side. As the prosecutor had alluded, my reputation was cloudy enough as it was. The best thing I could do was sit there looking like a harmless country lawyer, slightly puzzled at all the fuss.
“No, folks,” the prosecuting attorney said. “The only reason I even bring up Charley Sloan at all is because I’m setting the scene of this awful crime. All I’m doing is acquainting you with the undisputed facts of what the Pickeral Point police observed when they arrived at 221 Riverside Boulevard on the night of October 21 of last year. The evidence will show that the first thing Officer Jerry Ingram saw when he responded to the scene of Diana Dane’s murder was Charley Sloan, who stepped out the front door of Miles Dane’s home, and said, ‘Officer, my name is Charley Sloan, and I’m representing the interests of Miles Dane. You have questions for Mr. Sloan, you ask me before you ask him. Now, if you’ll step inside, I’ll show you the corpse.’ ”
That wasn’t exactly what I’d said. But it was close enough. The prosecuting attorney paused and looked significantly over at me, then turned his gaze toward Miles Dane, who looked straight ahead with his haunted gray eyes.
“And, for that matter, it’s not about Mr. Dane’s reputation either. Mr. Dane’s a famous man in his own right, and some of you folks may have heard whispers here and there about him.”
Finally, I felt compelled to stand up. “Your Honor.” I smiled a wounded smile, spread my hands in supplication. “I know, I know. Opening statement, latitude and so on. Fair enough. But at some point, gosh, I really must insist that the prosecuting attorney actually address the issue of what this trial is about. I’m growing intensely curious to know if he intends to present a case here or not.”
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