Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

  I raised my gaze to the witness. “Blood, Mr. van Blaricum. When did Blair Dane approach you asking for blood?”

  Van Blaricum blinked. “What?”

  “You heard me. When did Blair Dane approach you asking for blood?”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Blair Dane will testify that he approached everyone he could find who was related to him and asked for a blood sample. According to him, he had a genetic disorder and needed some kind of blood factor from a relative for therapeutic purposes. Are you testifying that he didn’t approach you and ask for blood?”

  Roger van Blaricum looked testy. “I know virtually nothing about this person. This must be the fiftieth question you’ve asked that I don’t know anything about.”

  “That’s not my question. You’re a blood relative, through Diana. Blair Dane knew that. If he asked them for blood, he would have asked you, too. He asked you for some blood, too. Didn’t he?”

  There was a long pause. Something seemed to be creeping into his eyes. It was that odd thing I’d noticed the first time I’d seen him, the way half of his face seemed to look one way, and half the other. Half-angry, half . . . what? Frightened? Why would he be frightened? “No,” he said finally.

  “He asked, but you didn’t give him the blood, did you?”

  I felt something rising inside me then, a lightness, like I was being buoyed on a current, hurtled down a torrent toward something that I sensed but couldn’t yet see.

  “How could I give him something he didn’t ask for?” A triumphant glint in his eyes.

  And then, there it was in front of me, the answer.

  I smiled a little. “When did your hair turn white, Mr. Van Blaricum?”

  Up went Stash again. “Objection. This is ridiculous.”

  “Your Honor,” I said, “if I don’t get somewhere with this line of questioning, I will gladly spend yet another week in jail. But please let me finish this line of questioning.” I was about to embark on a fishing expedition of major proportion. But sometimes you have no choice. And my guess was, if I could pull it off, there was one hell of a fish down there somewhere. If I could just get my hook close enough to it.

  Evola looked ready to blow his stack. He glared at me for a long time. “Make it quick. Objection overruled, pending some payoff for this line of questioning.”

  I continued the questioning. “You’re a tall man, Mr. van Blaricum. How tall?”

  “Six-three. And a half.”

  “And your hair, it’s white, correct?”

  Van Blaricum snorted. “Obviously so.”

  “When did it start going gray?”

  Van Blaricum looked at the jury with obvious irritation. “When I was in my late twenties, I suppose.”

  I turned to my client. “Mr. Dane, would you mind standing?” Miles stood slowly. “Mr. van Blaricum, how tall is my client?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Okay, but you’d concede that he’s a short man, yes? Would it surprise you if I said he was five-six?”

  “Nothing would surprise me at this point.”

  “His hair, it’s brown, isn’t it? He’s well into his fifties, and it’s just got a fleck or two of gray in it, correct?”

  “Yes. But don’t ask me his shoe size because I don’t know it.”

  There was some laughter from the jury. I smiled obligingly, then handed him a picture. “Can you identify the man in this photograph?”

  He pulled out a pair of reading glasses. “It’s a criminal mug shot. I don’t know, but I’m guessing that it would be Blair Dane.”

  “You are correct, sir. What color is his hair?”

  “It’s gray.”

  “And behind his head, there’s a measure on the wall. How tall is Blair Dane?”

  “It says seventy-six inches.”

  And then, suddenly, I was there.

  “Hair color and height, so far as you are aware, these are things that are all genetically determined, correct?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Passed on through your DNA, right? The genetic code?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is found in your blood, right?”

  Stash Olesky stood. “Please! Your Honor! These are obvious stall tactics.”

  “I swear, Your Honor, I’m almost there,” I said.

  “You’d better be,” Evola said.

  “Blair Dane discovered something odd when he had Miles Dane’s blood tested, didn’t he?”

  “I really wouldn’t have the slightest idea.”

  “Oh, yes you do. What he found out was that Miles Dane, in fact, is not his father at all.”

  “How could I possibly have any knowledge of that?”

  “Because, Mr. van Blaricum, you’re Blair’s real father. Aren’t you?”

  The room was dead silent.

  The left side of van Blaricum’s face worked furiously, while the right remained calm. After some struggle both sides went calm, and both sides of his face smiled. “No. That’s ridiculous, that’s scandalous. I am not Blair Dane’s father.”

  “Your son Blair figured out the truth, didn’t he?”

  “That’s a lie!”

  Stash stood up. “Objection. There’s been no evidence introduced to support these outlandish and sick allegations.”

  “Give me a moment, Your Honor,” I said. “I’m getting there.”

  Judge Evola wanted to sustain the objection so badly he could taste it. But he was petrified of looking biased in front of that camera in the back of the room, or worse, of having the biggest trial of his career reversed on appeal in the middle of a future political campaign. “Pending some sort of proof,” he said through clenched teeth, “I’ll let you take this one step further. But if you fail to offer hard evidence supporting these allegations, I am going to sanction you in the harshest kind of way, Mr. Sloan.”

  I had, of course, no such evidence at all. Unless . . . I thought back to my one previous meeting with Roger van Blaricum. And suddenly something struck me. There are times—rarely, I admit—when it pays to be somewhat less than a neatnik. But this was one of those times. I reached into the pocket of my rumpled suit—the same suit I’d worn on my trip to New York, the same suit that hadn’t been dry-cleaned since November—and there it was. I pulled out a wadded handkerchief, held it up in the air. “Do you know what this is, Mr. van Blaricum?”

  He stared at it. “It’s a handkerchief,” he said in a sarcastic tone.

  “Let’s get a little more specific. Could you read the initials embroidered there in the corner?”

  He stared at the handkerchief for a long time.

  “Mr. van Blaricum?”

  “RVB,” he said quietly

  “Big R. Little V. Big B. The initials on this handkerchief stand for Roger van Blaricum. Correct?”

  Stash stood up, “Okay, okay, okay. Objection. This whole thing is going out of bounds. Here we go with more alleged evidence to which the state has not been privy. I’d ask that it be excluded.”

  “Your Honor,” I said, “this evidence is being profferred solely for the purpose of impeachment. I had no obligation to disclose it to Mr. Olesky.”

  “You’re impeaching your own witness?”

  I shook my head. “This man is the state’s witness. They simply opted not to call him.”

  Evola stared at me furiously. I was glad I wasn’t in a dark alley with him. I probably wouldn’t have walked out alive. Evola slowly brought himself under control. “Subject to your making a nice, crisp point, I’ll allow it.”

  “Thank you.” I turned back to van Blaricum. “We’ve established that you met with my daughter. I believe it was in the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.”

  “So?”

  “Do you recall dropping a glass of scotch that day? You made a grab for it as it shattered, and you cut your hand?”

  He shrugged.

  “Yes or no?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And you bled, didn’
t you?”

  “When one is cut, one bleeds.”

  “And you wiped the blood off on your handkerchief. Correct?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mr. van Blaricum, there’s no maybe about it. That’s what happened. Look at the stain.” I waved the handkerchief in the air, showing off a large brown splotch. “You wiped the blood off on your handkerchief. This handkerchief.”

  “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “And minutes later, when you found out who Lisa was, that she worked for me, you threw this handkerchief in her face, didn’t you?”

  Van Blaricum just glared at me.

  “You might be interested in knowing, Mr. van Blaricum, that we tested that blood for DNA. We also tested Mr. Dane and his alleged son, Blair. Guess what we found, Mr. van Blaricum. The man who left his blood on this napkin is the father of Blair Dane.”

  Van Blaricum’s face went white as a sheet.

  Stash Olesky stood. “Your Honor, counsel is testifying! None of this is in evidence. None of this was produced to the prosecutor’s office prior to trial. Move to strike this entire line of testimony.”

  I ignored Stash. I picked up a piece of paper off the table. “Mr. van Blaricum, I’d be happy to show you the test . . . unless you’d prefer to just skip straight to telling the truth.”

  “Let me see this alleged DNA test,” Judge Evola demanded.

  “Actually Your Honor, if Mr. van Blaricum would just tell the truth, I probably won’t bother introducing it,” I said.

  “Give me that DNA report!” he snapped. “Now!”

  I handed him the paper I was holding.

  He stared at the sheet of paper through narrowed eyes. It was just a blank sheet of paper. When Evola looked up at me, he was smiling. His smile was tight as a drumhead as he turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mr. Sloan has testified—there’s no other good word for it—that he has a DNA test proving Mr. van Blaricum is the father of someone named Blair Dane. Apparently he has lied. No such evidence exists. I’m asking you to do something fairly difficult. That is, to purge your minds entirely of these spurious and outrageous allegations made by Mr. Sloan in which he has implied that Mr. van Blaricum had some sort of incestuous affair with his sister.”

  Then he turned toward me and his smile broadened in triumph. “And you? You know better. So congratulations, Mr. Sloan, I’m now going to file a recommendation to the state bar to have you disciplined and your license suspended. Please continue with your examination. But if you mention anything about incest or any other spurious irrelevancies, I’ll declare a mistrial, and we’ll do this whole dance over next week.”

  It was a horribly tantalizing moment. I’d reached the point where I finally believed that I understood the case. But now I couldn’t go the last yard.

  “Mr. van Blaricum,” I said, “you came to Detroit back in October, didn’t you?”

  Van Blaricum’s eyes burned into me. “No,” he said.

  “You came to Miles Dane’s house on the night of October 20, didn’t you?”

  “That’s absurd.” A little smile of ugly triumph licked at the corner of his mouth.

  “You’re lying.”

  Stash hopped up. “Objection. Badgering.”

  “Did you or did you not come to Miles Dane’s house on the night of October 20?”

  “Asked and answered,” Stash yelled.

  “Sustained,” the judge said. “Move on, Mr. Sloan.”

  And there I was. Stuck. No evidence, no corroborating witnesses, no way of impeaching what I knew in my heart to be lies. Behind me somebody cleared their throat loudly. I turned. It was Lisa.

  And she was alone.

  “Your Honor, could I have about thirty seconds with my paralegal?” I said.

  Evola looked up at the clock. It was twelve on the nose. “I think this might be a good time to take lunch,” he said. I could see in his eyes that he thought that an hour of lunch would cool everybody down, kill my momentum, and derail my entire examination. Fortunately for me, he couldn’t have been more wrong. “Any objection, Mr. Sloan?”

  I put a look of annoyance on my face and stood there for a while like I was debating whether or not to make a stink. “I suppose,” I said grudgingly.

  “Lunch it is.”

  Fifty-nine

  “Where’s Blair, Lisa?” I said.

  “He’s outside. He’s sitting in the car. Trying to decide what to do.”

  I rubbed my face in my hands. What to do? All along I’d thought that Blair was the guy. But now, suddenly, I was convinced I’d been wrong.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Forget Blair for the moment. There’s something else I need you to do . . .”

  Then I went in and sat down with Miles. “Remember what you said? You said that when you walked into the room with Blair and Diana at ten o’clock, Blair said, ‘I guess he’s not coming,’ or something to that effect. What if he was talking about Roger?”

  “Roger?” Miles shook his head in disbelief. “Jesus H. Christ. I never even thought of Roger! I thought for sure that . . . Oh, my God.”

  “There’s something else I need to know . . .” I said.

  After lunch I put van Blaricum back on the stand.

  “Mr. van Blaricum, I’m giving you State’s Exhibit 59. Can you identify this for me?”

  Van Blaricum looked sullenly at the book I’d handed him. “It appears to be one of Miles’s books. The title is How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It.”

  “Interesting reading, wouldn’t you say?”

  Van Blaricum seemed very much in control of himself now. “I wouldn’t know.”

  I feigned surprise. “You’ve never read it?”

  “I wouldn’t read his trash if you paid me.”

  “There’s a paper clip on one of the pages in the book there. Could you turn to that page and read me what it says? The highlighted portion?”

  Van Blaricum flipped the book open, looked at it for a long moment.

  “Cat got your tongue, Mr. van Blaricum?”

  His voice was low and cold. “It says, ‘My special thanks to Roger van Blaricum, who gave me both the original idea for this book and the implement that inspired the murder weapon itself.’ ”

  “So you gave him the idea for this book,” I said acidly. “But you didn’t actually read it?”

  “The book is about a man who hated his relatives. I presume that’s what he meant.”

  “So you have read it.”

  Van Blaricum saw his mistake and tried to correct it. But it was a little late. “I haven’t read it.” His voice went defensive. “I haven’t. I just heard on the news what the, ah, what the plot was about.”

  “No doubt.” I laughed derisively. “Earlier you testified you had studied martial arts in Japan. What was the name of the martial arts style called again?”

  “Muto Ryu.”

  “I’m not a martial arts expert,” I said. “Is that like karate or kung fu or what?”

  There was a long pause. “Swordsmanship. It’s a style of Japanese swordsmanship.”

  “You practice that with a real sword?”

  “Generally, no.”

  “What do you use?”

  One side of his face twitched a couple of times. “A bokken.”

  I lifted the presumed murder weapon. “Like this one?”

  He spread his hands slightly. “Similar, I suppose. But . . .”

  I waited.

  “But what, Mr. van Blaricum?” I said finally. “But . . . no, I didn’t frame my brother-in-law? But . . . no, I didn’t sneak his bokken out of his office while he was in the bathroom? But . . . no, I didn’t kill my sister? No, I didn’t use Miles Dane’s book—the book I myself served as an inspiration for—as a road map for helping me frame an innocent man? Is that what you were going to say?”

  “Objection to form,” Stash said.

  “Sustained.”

  But van Blaricum answered anyway. “This is perfectly ridiculous.
I was in New York when he killed her. I can prove that.”

  I was about to break into a nervous sweat when the back door of the courtroom banged open and Lisa literally ran into the room, a triumphant smile on her face. She thrust a piece of paper into my hand.

  “You were right,” she whispered loudly.

  I smiled at her, scanned the piece of paper she had given me, then turned back to the witness stand.

  “Your Honor, I’ve got another piece of evidence which hasn’t been disclosed to Mr. Olesky. Again, this is for the purposes of impeachment.”

  “Show me.”

  I showed it to him. He winced. “This has no foundation. I’m extremely reluctant to admit this.” He scratched his head furiously. I could see the wheels turning. If Miles was really innocent; if this was what it looked like; if Miles got convicted when he should have gone free; and if the whole question resolved itself on appeal rather than in trial—then his face would be on TV about a million times, with every legal correspondent in America saying that his flawed decisions had put an innocent man in prison for life. “Very well,” Evola said, sighing. He handed the paper to his clerk. “Mark it, please, Mrs. Wilson.”

  I took the piece of paper back from the clerk, set it gently on the edge of the witness stand.

  “Could you read the lines I’ve marked with my pen?” I said.

  Roger van Blaricum looked at it.

  “It says, ‘Record of Travel. Northwest Airlines. Flight 921. Date: October 21. Departs 11:05 AM. Arrives 1:25 PM. Ticket type: One-way. Origination. Detroit. Destination. New York-La Guardia. Payment, cash. Passenger name, colon . . .” He looked up at me, eyes wide. “This is . . . this is . . . this is someone else.”

  “Keep reading.”

  “Passenger name, colon, van Blaricum, comma, Roger.”

  Suddenly there was a lot of noise in the courtroom. It took a few seconds for the hubbub to subside.

  “Earlier, Leon Prouty testified he saw what he called an ‘old guy’ leaving the house at around midnight. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Roger van Blaricum blinked, then stared around the room in shock. He didn’t answer.