Evidence of Guilt (A Kali O'Brien legal mystery)

by Jonnie Jacobs

  “There at the end of the bar,” Ricky said.”The guy in the denim shirt.”

  Although the man was sitting, I could tell that he was long and thin. He was clean shaven, with a narrow, angular face and dusty blond hair that hung unevenly around his face like the dry, wild grasses of summer. When I got closer I saw that his nose was slightly bent, as though it had been broken at some point and never set.

  Luckily, the stool next to him was vacant. I slid onto it, ordered a beer and waited for him to glance my way.

  He didn’t. Instead, he remained hunched over his nearly empty glass, fingering a pack of matches.

  Finally I grew tired of the passive approach. “You come here often?” I asked, grimacing inwardly at the clichéd opening.

  The man looked over, letting his eyes run down my body and back up again. They were glassy and a bit bloodshot. “Some,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Just once before. I’m kind of new to the area.”

  “That makes two of us.” He hailed the bartender and ordered another beer. “Where are you from?”

  The Bay Area. How about you?”

  “Oh, a little bit of everywhere.”

  “My name’s Kali,” I said, with a smile twice as wide as usual. I’ve never felt comfortable with bar-scene maneuvers, but I reminded myself that I was here on business.

  “I’m Jerry.” He nodded, but seemed unable to come up with anything close to a smile.

  “So, Jerry, how’d you get from everywhere to here?”

  “It’s a long story.” He drained his glass. “Looks like I may be moving on again soon. I got fired today.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a shitty job.”

  “What sort of job?”

  “Road construction. Spent the whole day out there on the hot, dusty pavement breathing exhaust fumes, worrying that some half-assed driver was going to plow through the cones and run me over.”

  I sipped my beer. “Why’d you get fired?”

  “Smoking dope on the job.” He flashed a grin. “How about you? What do you do?”

  “I’m a waitress,” I said.

  “That’s a shitty job, too.”

  I shrugged. “It pays the rent.”

  “Life of Riley, ain’t it? You bust your butt all day so you have a place to rest it at night.” He pulled out a pack of Camels and lit up. “You want one?”

  I declined with a shake of my head. Then I took a deep, silent breath and mentally crossed my fingers. “It was a woman at work who introduced me to this place.”

  Jerry offered a polite grunt and tucked the pack of cigarettes back into his shirt pocket. “She come with you tonight?”

  “She was killed a couple of weeks ago. You might have seen her here, though. She used to come here pretty often.” I had no idea whether that was true or not, but it made a good story. “She had long hair that came halfway down her back. She wore it in a single braid most of the time.”

  His face remained impassive.

  “You might have read about it in the papers. Lisa Cornell. She and her little girl were murdered.”

  Jerry blew a long plume of smoke. He cupped the cigarette in his hand and studied the glowing tip. “Yeah, I read about it,” he said after a moment.

  “Did you ever see her here?”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and looked at me. “You worked with Lisa?”

  I nodded, hoping I hadn’t just painted myself into a corner.

  “I was married to her,” he said after a moment’s pause. I leaned back and let out a breath. Of all the possible connections between Lisa and the shaggy-haired stranger, I hadn’t expected that. “How terrible for you. To lose a wife and daughter in such a horrible way. . . I’m sorry.”

  Jerry nodded, folded his hands and stared at them silently for a moment. “At least they caught the bastard who did it.”

  I murmured something indecipherable, which he probably took as agreement.

  “You work with Lisa long?” he asked after another stretch of silence.

  I gave a shrug. “Ever since she started at the Lazy Q.” He cocked his head. “So you probably know all about me, right?”

  “We didn’t talk much about personal stuff.”

  “Well, whatever she told you about us, don’t believe it.”

  “The only thing I knew was that she’d been married once.”

  “Figures.” He wrapped his hands around his beer. “She never talked about us getting back together?”

  I shook my head.

  “Never mentioned seeing me?”

  “Like I said, we didn’t get into personal stuff.”

  His expression grew sullen. He folded the matchbook between his fingers, struck a match and blew it out.

  “Were you really going to get back together?” I asked.

  “Who knows? Lisa wasn’t exactly sold on the idea.” He struck another match and watched it burn down to his fingertips. “We were both young when we met, both of us kind of screwed up. And then the baby came along—”

  “Your daughter Amy?”

  “Wish to hell I knew.” He gave a small, hard laugh. “Lisa never told you that part, did she? I bet it was always what a deadbeat I was, and nothing bad about herself at all. She had this image of herself as a goddamn debutante or something. Honest-to-God truth was, she went after anything in pants.” He glanced at my blue jeans over the top of his beer glass, then grinned. “Guess that saying doesn’t apply anymore. I think she did draw the line at women.”

  “Is that why you got divorced?”

  “It’s why we split up. Lisa didn’t hand me the divorce papers until a couple of months ago. Wanted to wrap up all the legalities so she could get remarried.” He paused. “You ever meet that guy she was going to head down the aisle with?”

  “Philip Stockman?”

  “Yeah. What a pitiful specimen. An old fart, too. Living with his sister if you can believe it. The whole setup was weird. I tried to convince her it was a mistake, but she said she was doing it for Amy’s sake.”

  “Stability?”

  “And money.” He spat out the words as though they were distasteful. “I got to take a piss. I’ll just be a sec.”

  I ordered us both another beer. Jerry was gone quite a bit longer than a second, and I began to worry that he’d slipped out a back door, or maybe passed out under a urinal. When he returned the unsteadiness of his gait was more pronounced. When he sat down I realized why. The pungent odor of marijuana hung about him like cheap perfume. He slid back onto the stool and gave me a glassy-eyed grin.

  I nodded toward the bottle of beer. “My treat.”

  “Thanks.” He took a sip and picked up where we’d left off. “She wouldn’t have been happy with him. No way. I knew that even if she didn’t.”

  “Stockman?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “Is that why you moved here, to be near Lisa and Amy?”

  “Who the fuck knows why I came. It was one of those harebrained ideas that seemed to make sense at the time.” He lit another cigarette. “I ran across this picture of Amy Lisa sent me not long ago. Kid looked like me, you know? Then when Lisa sent the divorce papers I started thinking about her and us, and about what we’d had going. There was a lot of good mixed in with the bad. And times change. Lisa claimed to want to do the picket fence routine, I figure I could give it a try. Maybe I don’t have the money this other guy has, but I know I gotta be better in the sack than him.”

  “So you tried to convince her to give it another shot?”

  “Basically.”

  “And she wasn’t interested?”

  “I don’t know what she wanted. I don’t think she did either. But she was getting cold feet about going through with the wedding.”

  Remembering my friend-of-Lisa persona, I nodded. “I remember they had set a date and then she postponed it.”

  “And then she called it off altogether,’ Jerry said.

  “She broke off with Stockman
?”

  “She was gonna break off with him. I don’t know whether she actually got around to it or not. She was kind of distracted because of those headaches she got.” Jerry’s eyes had grown more glazed. He rested so unsteadily on one elbow, I was afraid he might keel over. “Did she ever tell you about that shrink she was seeing?”

  “She mentioned her in passing,” I said.

  “Sounded like a real trip — hypnosis, guided imagery, tapping the unconscious and all that crap.”

  “What kinds of things were they looking for?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Jerry guzzled what was left of his beer. A thin stream missed his mouth and ran down his chin. He wiped at it with the back of his hand.

  “I don’t think Lisa bought into most of it, anyway,” he continued. “She was supposed to be keeping some sort of journal where she recorded her dreams and fears, that sort of shit. But she hated to write, so she didn’t.”

  “She didn’t keep a journal at all?” No wonder I was having trouble tracking it down.

  “Not the kind her shrink wanted. Lisa liked to draw. She had notebooks full of sketches. She used to draw some when we were together, too, but that was different.” He picked up his empty glass and looked at it. “You want another?”

  “I think I’ve had enough.”

  He hailed the bartender and got himself a fresh beer. “She told me she was waking up in the middle of the night, sweating and confused. She’d try to sketch what she was feeling. I can’t see that they’d be much help. They were pretty weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Kind of. . . what’s that word — abstract. Like that guy who paints people with three eyes and no neck.”

  “She drew people?”

  “People, trees, spooky old barns. All the stuff was kind of dark and grim. And weird. But she drew other things, too, when she wasn’t half-asleep.” He paused. “Seems ironic, her dying in that barn. It was in a lot of her drawings. Like maybe she had a premonition or something.” He listed in my direction, his elbow sliding across the bar top. “You sure she never talked about me?”

  “Not to me.”

  His expression was gloomy. “You’d think she might have said something. That she’d have cared just a little bit.”

  “Look on the good side,” I said sympathetically. “She didn’t say anything bad about you, either.”

  Jerry burped. “I got some good grass back at my place. What’s say we head over there? We’ll pick up a six-pack and some munchies on the way.”

  “Some other time maybe.” I plastered on a big smile, but I think he was too drunk to notice.

  “I got to hit the head again. Why don’t you order another round, on me. I’ll just be a jiffy.”

  When he had gone I found Ricky and gave him a twenty for cab fare. “If you let your friend drive home tonight,” I warned him, “you’re leaving yourself open for a lawsuit.”

  He laughed. “What are you, my guardian angel or something?”

  “Pretty close. I’m an attorney. And now that you’ve been warned, you can’t claim you never knew he was drunk. Don’t be stupid and pocket the money for yourself.”

  I pushed open the door and stepped outside, sucking in the fresh air as though I’d been too long underwater.

  Chapter 26

  I was still in bed when Daryl Benson called at eight the next morning.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I lied.

  “I checked on Dr. Markley’s accident like you asked me to.”

  I pulled myself to a sitting position. “And?”

  “There were no skid marks, you were right about that.” Benson’s voice spiraled a little at the end, as though he hadn’t finished his thought.

  “Anything else?”

  “Not about the accident per se. There’s some question about what the doctor was doing on that stretch of road in the first place. She’d called a friend before leaving her office and was supposedly headed straight home.”

  “Will the sheriffs department investigate further?” I asked, removing my leg from the vicinity of Loretta’s wet nose. She’d padded over to the bed when the telephone rang and was now giving me a doleful look, the canine equivalent of poor me, I’m so hungry.

  “They don’t really have much to go on, Kali. The absence of skid marks doesn’t necessarily spell foul play.”

  “It’s suspicious, though.”

  “Maybe, but not unheard of.”

  “Her death has got to be connected in some way to Lisa Cornell’s.” Loretta had maneuvered her front paws onto the mattress and was trying to ease the rest of her body on as well. “Does the sheriff know she was Dr. Markley’s patient?”

  “Yeah. For what it’s worth, I passed on your concerns.” Again there was an odd, unfinished quality to his words.

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  Benson drew in a breath. “There’s something else you should know. It’s about the Harding case. We’ve just turned up some female undergarments in the compost bin belonging to Wes’s neighbor. One pair was a woman’s, the other a child’s.”

  My throat closed down so that I had trouble speaking. “Were they Lisa’s and Amy’s?”

  “That hasn’t been determined. The sizes are right.”

  For a moment I couldn’t move. It was as though the wind had been knocked out of me. Finally I swung my legs over the side of the bed, causing Loretta’s feet to slip to the floor. “Are you at the station?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stay there, okay? I’ll be by in half an hour. Maybe less.”

  <><><>

  On the way into town I made a quick stop at The Sugar Plum for two coffees and a dozen of their legendary cinnamon rolls. More than Daryl Benson and I could finish, but I knew the rest would be snatched up in short order by members of the department. It never hurt to have the police think kindly of you.

  “How did your detectives happen to be searching the compost bin in the first place?” I asked. We’d settled in Benson’s office with our coffee. The box of sweet rolls was between us.

  “Curt Willis was interviewing the neighbor, Mrs. Lincoln. In the course of their conversation, it happened to come up that Wes sometimes used the bin to dump his lawn clippings.” Benson added sugar and stirred the coffee with the end of his pencil. “Willis asked us to search there for the missing murder weapon.”

  “Did you find it?”

  He took a bite of roll and shook his head. “But we did find the underwear.”

  I sipped my coffee, but I couldn’t eat. My stomach felt as though it had been tied into a knot. I’d been inclined to believe Wes’s story. To feel sorry for him, even. What’s worse, there was a part of me that wanted to believe him still.

  “Is there any way to determine whether the clothing actually belonged to Amy and Lisa?”

  Benson frowned. “Probably not. Looks like there may be some bloodstains. We should know that fairly soon. But it’s going to be difficult to do much in the way of meaningful testing. You’ve got decomposing lawn clippings, carrot peels, God knows what all in there. The bin’s pretty ripe from what I’ve hear.”

  “A compost bin seems like an odd place to discard hard physical evidence.” Although fabric would eventually decompose, it would take significantly longer than lawn clippings and carrot peels.

  “The criminal mind is not always a logical one,” Benson observed. “Particularly in a situation where a person’s trying to get rid of evidence in a hurry.”

  A neighbor’s compost bin still seemed to me an unusual choice. “Are the items here at the station?”

  “You want to take a look?”

  I did, although I wasn’t sure why. “Can 1?”

  “Just don’t touch anything. We’ve had a criminalist go over them once, but I’m sure he’ll want to do further testing.”

  Benson took a last, long swallow of coffee. He led me down the hall, and then down the elevator to the lab. He mumbled an exchange with the
technician in charge and we passed through to an interior room. There, spread out on a mesh pallet for drying, were two pairs of underpants—one pink and decorated with kittens, the other a lacy-style black nylon. The pink pair was small, similar to the ones favored by my niece. I felt my eyes begin to sting.

  “We’ve already dried and tested the outer garments, of course,” Benson said. He went to a drawer at the back and pulled out a number of transparent, sealed plastic bags. “You want to take a look at these, you can. Without unsealing them, of course. I’m guessing you and Sam are going to have your own experts run through things a second time anyway.” He spread the bags on the table.

  One bag held Lisa’s jeans; another, her jersey top, which was stained with an inky substance I knew must be dried blood. Amy had been wearing a pair of shorts, pink like her underwear.

  “It’s the victim’s blood,” Benson said. “In both cases. The two bodies were far enough apart in the barn that the samples weren’t cross-contaminated. There’s no trace of the assailant’s blood.”

  The knot in my stomach twisted tighter, and I was glad I hadn’t eaten. Seeing the physical evidence, clothing worn by a woman I’d known, now grossly discolored by her own blood — it made the crime real in a way even the most graphic photographs had not.

  Benson lifted the plastic packet containing Amy’s striped T-shirt and held it in his hand, as though testing its weight. “It takes a real sicko to cut the throat of a child,” he said at last.

  I nodded numbly and turned away. There would come a time, as we got closer to trial, when I would have to immerse myself in the evidence, maybe even stand by while one of our own defense experts examined the bloody clothing. But at the moment I wanted to banish the images from my mind forever.

  “I’m no fan of your client,” Benson said as we wound our way back to his office, “but for your sake, I’m sorry to see all the chips lining up with the prosecution.”

  I shook my head to clear it. “I’ll let you in on a secret," I told him. “They aren’t lining up as neatly as you think.” My tone suggested a conviction I didn’t feel, but I was reasonably sure the gist of our conversation would make its way back to Curt Willis. And the last thing I wanted was for him to know how desperate we were.