Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

I heard the door in the back of the courtroom open a second time. I turned and looked. A tall young man with prematurely gray hair and scary blue eyes was standing in the back of the room. “There he is, Mr. van Blaricum. I’ve been instructed to avoid the issue of paternity. But that man back there has run the blood tests. He knows the truth, and will testify to it when I put him on the stand. I’m sure he has copies of the tests, even if I don’t. Are you prepared to continue perjuring yourself? Or do we have to hear it from him?”

  Van Blaricum said nothing.

  “All we want is the truth.”

  Van Blaricum stared angrily at the man in the back of the courtroom. “Alright,” he said finally. “Alright. I made a terrible mistake one time in my youth.”

  “Say it plain. The truth. Everything.”

  Van Blaricum continued to glare at the gray-haired young man in the back of the courtroom. “I suppose, yes, I suppose he is my . . . offspring. But—”

  “Your son.”

  Long hesitation. Van Blaricum couldn’t seem to bear looking at the tall man in the back of the room. “My son,” he finally whispered, one side of his face twisted in disgust.

  “Look, here’s your choice, Mr. van Blaricum. Right now, before Mr. Olesky gets mad and embarrassed, and charges you with first-degree murder, you can feel free to make a confession. If your confession shows that you killed her in the heat of passion, then Mr. Olesky will be obliged to charge you with manslaughter. Which, I might add, carries a substantially lower penalty than first-degree murder. So I’ll ask you again. Did you kill your sister?”

  The courtroom was dead silent. Stash could easily have objected. Judge Evola could easily have called a halt to the proceeding, too. But I guess they wanted to know the truth as badly as I did.

  Van Blaricum’s gaze shifted from the man in the back of the court over to the defense table. He pointed a shaking finger at Miles. “This is all his fault. Miles was nothing before he met her. A cheap, poor, chiseling, worthless little Midwestern nobody. If it weren’t for her contacts, her strength of character, her assistance, her money—why, he would still be hitchhiking around America telling people in third-rate saloons that he was working on a novel and, gosh, he sure hoped he’d get it published someday.”

  “Tell us the truth,” I said again. “You killed her.”

  Slowly van Blaricum’s eyes went down until he was looking at the floor. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  With that, Blair Dane walked slowly down the aisle toward his father.

  “I suppose I’m capable of anything. After all, I spawned that.” Van Blaricum looked at his son with disgust. “A criminal, a drug addict, a convict with tattoos on his knuckles. He is nothing. He is less than nothing. And I did that.”

  “Hi, Dad,” Blair said brightly. “Great to see you, too. Thanks for all your love and support over the years.”

  Then Blair raised a small silver .32 Smith & Wesson—the one he’d taken from the top drawer of my desk—fired once, and hit Roger van Blaricum just above his right eye. Roger slipped out of the chair, stone dead, and hit the ground before the deafening crash had ceased to echo.

  Blair Dane just stood there, staring with his empty eyes at the blood splashed on the wall next to Judge Evola’s chair.

  “Drop it!” It was the bailiff—the same big aggressive guy who’d restrained me when I attacked the dummy in the back of the courtroom. The bailiff’s muscular arms were extended, chin on his shoulder, his automatic pistol leveled at Blair Dane’s chest. Perfect form, just like they taught in police training school. “Now!”

  “Some people are born to go out easy,” Blair said to the bailiff. His voice sounded casual, almost sleepy. “Me, from the day I arrived, I was born to go out hard.”

  “Drop it!” The bailiff said, still pointing the gun. In his eyes you could see it: He was the kind of guy who’d been looking for this moment ever since he pinned on his badge. Itching for an excuse to pull that trigger.

  And Blair gave it to him—raising his gun slowly toward the bailiff, a bitter smile on his face. I could see the crude green tattoo on his hand. GO DOWN SHOOTING. “There’s no fighting fate, man,” Blair said.

  I dived under a table, pulling Lisa with me. There were two small cracks from the .32, and an uncountable number of the loud, terrifying wham-wham-wham-whams from the bailiff’s big automatic. When the sound stopped, I poked my head up. The bailiff was still standing, eyes wide with adrenaline. Blair Dane lay on the floor groaning.

  The room was utterly silent for what seemed a long time, though it was probably only a second or two.

  Finally, someone broke the silence. Me, actually.

  I stood, tugged at the lapels of my jacket, and said, “Your Honor, the defense rests.”

  VERDICT

  Sixty

  “Okay, okay,” Lisa said after we had walked out of the courthouse, waded through the forest of microphones. “You’ve convinced me. I’m going back to law school.” Her face was glowing with the cold, the excitement, and the horrible triumph of the moment.

  “I didn’t say a word, Lisa.” I held up my hands in mock surrender.

  Behind us Miles Dane stood in the middle of a circle of cameras, boom mikes, and journalists waving their pocket recorders. He was thanking the judge for the wise and fair handling of the case, thanking the prosecuting attorney for having the guts to dismiss the charges in such a complex and high-profile case, thanking his friends, thanking the marvelous and courageous Charley Sloan, lawyer extraordinaire.

  “Yeah, but you planned it, didn’t you, Dad? This whole trial was just a ploy, wasn’t it? Just to make me go back to law school.”

  I laughed for a minute, then looked out at the river. The wind off the water was frigid, and yet I felt hot as a radiator, like I could warm the whole county.

  “So you ever going to tell me what happened back there in New York?” I said. “Why you dropped out? Why you fell off the wagon?”

  Lisa’s face fell. She looked at me thoughtfully, then finally stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. “If there’s anything I’ve learned this week,” she said, “it’s that some things are best left in the past.”

  Then she walked away, whistling the theme to some old TV show. Perry Mason, I think it was.

  Sixty-one

  “It’s funny,” Miles said, “the things that come over you sometimes.”

  I frowned, not sure what he was getting at.

  “I was always good at writing under pressure,” Miles said. “I came up with the whole plot to Fisticuff in ten minutes. Every twist and turn just appeared full-blown right there in my head—ten minutes, tops.”

  I had asked Miles a simple question just minutes earlier. His reply seemed, as we lawyers say, nonresponsive—as though he were answering another question entirely.

  It was a few months after the trial, and Miles and I had gotten together for a drink, sitting out by the boardwalk over behind the Pickeral Point Inn. Miles was looking good. Ten pounds heavier, tanned, fit. All the publicity surrounding his trial had revived his career to an almost unimaginable degree. How I Killed My Wife was being made into a movie with Mel Gibson; his latest book was hanging doggedly at number two on the Times best-seller list; and he was working on a made-for-TV screenplay about his experience as a falsely accused person. The tentative title—Blindside.

  Sitting on the table between us was a yellowing, fragile old copy of How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It. Miles had given it to me after the trial, signed and addressed to me personally. Lisa tells me that signed copies of the original—not the reprint—are going for upward of two grand on eBay. Recently I had found something odd in my copy, something I had felt compelled to ask Miles about.

  “Okay,” I said, “but what I asked you is this: I was looking at this copy of How I Killed My Wife. Right? And there’s no dedication in it. That whole thing—thank you, Roger, for giving me the idea for this book, blah blah blah, it’s only in the reprint, not the original. So what
I’m asking is how do you account for that?”

  It was the second time I’d asked the question, and still Miles seemed intent on not answering the question.

  “She told me that night,” Miles said.

  “Told you what?”

  I had been nursing my soda water while he sipped on a double of some obscure and expensive single malt with an unpronounceable Scottish name. It was a warm May day, sunny, with just a hint of coolness in the air that you only felt when the wind picked up.

  “I went to bed that night. She was waiting up. Diana. She told me about everything. She told me that Blair had come to visit. That the results of the blood test had come back, and she wanted to tell me herself. About . . . whatever you want to call it . . . the incest thing with Roger. That her child—Blair—that he wasn’t mine. That she’d always known the baby was Roger’s. She told me that she had been young and scared. She told me that she knew she had to get away from her family or her whole life would have ended up a ruin. She told me that when she married me, she had done it mostly because she hated her family so much—and Roger in particular. She said marrying some hick striver like me had been the most malicious thing she could possibly do to her brother.”

  Miles looked out at the river. The surface was smooth and tranquil in the late-afternoon sun. His gray eyes, reflecting the blue of the water, looked luminescent, like smoke caught in a shaft of sunlight.

  “Yeah, she told me she had made a truce with fate. She said that she knew I was attracted to her money. She said she knew that even if she couldn’t give me her love, fair’s fair, she could at least support my little writing career with her dough, and try to make me happy. Her freedom for my happiness.”

  I made one of those uncomfortable murmurs that you use when you really have no idea how to respond to somebody.

  Miles laughed mirthlessly, a sharp exhalation of breath. “I couldn’t believe, after all these years, that she’d got me so wrong. I never gave a damn about the money. Never! I just loved her. Worshiped her.” His eyes closed briefly. “And I thought she felt the same way about me.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  The sad smile lingered on his lips. “She told me this: She said, ‘I’ve always been alone, Miles, even when I was with you.’ I asked her if she loved me, if at least she had grown to love me, if she had ever loved me, and she said, ‘You’re a decent man, but I don’t think I ever learned how to love anyone . . .’ ”

  He finished his scotch in one swallow.

  “Up on the stand? When Roger said he killed her? That wasn’t really a confession. What he meant when he pointed at his son and said he’d killed her was that by siring Blair—the guy who, by that point in the trial, he believed had actually killed her—that in that sense he was responsible for her death. ‘I’m responsible.’ That’s what he meant. Not, ‘I did it.’ But then Blair shot him, and the bailiff shot Blair before anyone could clarify that point.”

  I wrinkled my brow. “You’re getting me all confused,” I said. “Are you saying Blair killed her?”

  The light off the river made shadows come and go in the brightness of his eyes. “No. I’m saying that’s what Roger believed, once he’d heard the evidence. In his heart, Roger knew I loved her, so he figured, okay, maybe it wasn’t me after all.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  There was a long silence. “But, of course, Blair didn’t kill her either.”

  I felt goose bumps rise on my skin.

  “I loved her more than you can possibly imagine,” Miles said. “I mean—God!—I can feel it in my bones. Even now, even after all these years and everything that’s happened.”

  A big steamer slowly slid into view from the north, heading down toward Detroit.

  “When she said she had never loved me?” He shook his head slowly as though puzzled by something. “I felt like everything had fallen apart, like my whole life had come to nothing. I had set out from this crummy little town with such big dreams. Money, success, love, family, fame . . . I wanted all of that. But mostly I wanted love. And where was I now that I’d reached the end of my life? Broke, childless, forgotten, career in the crapper. And where I’d thought there was love, there was nothing at all. Just some kind of good-mannered patrician toleration.”

  He sat for a long time.

  “I had nothing left, you see, Charley? I was right back where I’d started when I left this town forty years ago—minus all the hope and all the possibility. When she said those things, it all just kind of bubbled up in me. That’s what I’m saying: Strange, you just never know what you’re capable of.”

  He finished his scotch and set it on the table.

  “After it was over, I stood there looking at Diana, and I realized what a horrible thing I’d done, that the person who really deserved punishment was not her. It was Roger. And that’s when it came to me.”

  “What did?”

  “Act Two, you might say.”

  “I don’t follow.” My voice had gone low and soft.

  “Like I said earlier, I always came up with ideas real quick. It just came to me.” He snapped his fingers. “In one second I saw how I could avoid being punished and how I could get back at Roger at the same time, for the terrible thing he’d inflicted on Diana, on me. Even on that poor bastard Blair.”

  Suddenly, I was having to concentrate on my breathing. The air seemed to have gotten dense as mud.

  “It always bothered me,” I said finally, “that Roger only bought a one-way ticket from Detroit to New York. Why not a round-trip? That didn’t make any sense to me.”

  Miles nodded. “Sure. I had to run down to the airport and buy a ticket with cash. That’s why the body was already cooling by the time I called you. That’s why the timing didn’t make sense. Couldn’t buy him a round-trip ticket to Detroit, obviously. It was too late by then. But I figured if I bought a return trip, that would be enough. Then I opened the book of Japanese erotic woodblock prints on the living room table. Then went out and planted the clothes in Roy Beverly’s boat.”

  I prodded the copy of How I Killed My Wife with one finger. “So that’s it then. That’s why there’s no dedication in the original.”

  Miles nodded. “I had to call Bob Gough’s assistant at Elgin Press from the jail and have her add that dedication in the new edition. She was the only person who even knew I’d added it—just some lowly kid, two months out of Haverford or Bryn Mawr or whatever. The general theory was that I’d try to make what happened to Diana fit the crime out of How I Killed My Wife. I figured that if it totally matched up with something out of a book, that the whole thing would be too perfect, too easy, too crisp and unnatural. And so everybody would eventually conclude that someone was trying to frame me.” He laughed, a brief and mirthless sound, like the cracking of a stick. As the late-afternoon light failed, his gray eyes had gone flat and dead, like roofing nails driven into his face.

  My hand was shaking slightly. I felt sick. Not quite nauseated; it was more that clammy, weak feeling that comes over you when a high fever is just about to break. “What about those splinters of ebony?”

  “I planted them, too. Right in the wound. Why do you think that tool mark woman, Helen Raynes, said they were snipped off at the end? Raynes may have been a flake, but she was right on the money: I chipped the splinters off the bokken with a Swiss army knife. Like I say, I wanted the crime to match up point by point with that stupid book. Remember how he almost got caught in chapter fifteen because of the splinters? But then he turned it around, used it to incriminate his friend Horace, the guy with the boat?”

  “So you didn’t kill her with the bokken at all?”

  He shook his head. “No. Like I said, I just got mad. Crazy mad. I grabbed what came to hand. A lamp. It’s out there in the river somewhere. That’s why the blood spatter didn’t quite match up. JoEllen Flynn was right too: The lamp was shorter than the bokken.” He smiled without warmth. “I guess I got too cute, huh? It really came down to the wire. I kept thinking y
ou’d catch on that it was supposed to be Roger who did it. You almost didn’t make it, did you?”

  “And Leon Prouty?”

  “I ran into him at the lockup the day I was arrested. Promised him five hundred bucks to tell you that story. He was supposed to tell you about Blair coming in the old Lincoln, then, oh by the way, there was this rental car that came later with some tall, white-haired old guy in it. That moron. He forgot all about the second half of the story. Until trial anyway. Nearly blew the whole thing.”

  The big steamer sounded its foghorn—a low, dismal note that hung in the air, then slowly died into nothing.

  “Why not just say you saw Roger do it?”

  He shook his head. “I had to make you work for it. If I had come out at the beginning and said it was him, they’d have dug around, found that he had an alibi, so on, so forth. No, the ideal situation was for it to come out in trial, way late in the game. That way there wouldn’t be any time to check on his alibis or anything like that.”

  He picked up his empty glass, then set it back down.

  “There were a bunch of other details, Charley, little clues I planted that were supposed to point toward Roger. But you never really picked up on them. Like I say, I got too cute. Real life ain’t an Agatha Christie novel. It’s too messy, isn’t it?”

  A big breakbulk steamer came and went, carrying wheat down from Canada. The bow waves spread slowly across the channel, lapping noisily against the pilings of the boardwalk. I wanted to stand up and walk away, but I was pinned to my seat—maybe out of horror or maybe because I had one more question I wanted answered.

  “Why did you tell me this?” I said after a while. The air was growing chillier now, the sun working its way down toward the horizon. “Do you want me to do something about this?”

  He breathed out heavily. “No. No, not really. But you wouldn’t have asked me about the dedication if you hadn’t suspected something, am I right?”

  After a moment I nodded.