A Killer's Alibi (Philadelphia Legal)

by William L. Myers Jr.

  5

  FRIDAY, APRIL 12, CONTINUED

  It’s just before 7:00 p.m., and Mick and Gabby are on the side lawn in front of a soccer net. Mick is guarding the goal as Gabby tries to kick the ball past him. In two weeks, the Radnor Soccer Club will begin its spring/summer season. It will be Gabby’s second year with the sport, and she’s determined to excel. She practices passing, dribbling, and attacking the net every day, both before and after school. At four foot one and fifty-nine pounds, she’s a little small for a nine-year-old, but her tenacity more than makes up for it.

  “Come on, guys,” Piper calls from the front door. “Dinner’s ready. Time to wrap it up.”

  “One last shot,” Gabby says, spearing the ball past Mick and into the net.

  “Hey, I wasn’t ready.”

  “You snooze, you lose.” Gabby picks up the ball and walks past Piper and inside. Mick carries the net into the garage.

  A few minutes later, they’re seated on the back patio. The temperature is in the low seventies, so Piper decided they would eat outside. Franklin has strategically positioned himself between Gabby and Piper, both of whom are notorious for breaking the rule against feeding him from the table.

  “So, what are you painting at Grandma’s house?” Piper asks.

  Gabby chews a mouthful of salmon. “Grandma’s painting an old man. His hair is completely white, and he has a mean look on his face. I’m painting Franklin,” she adds, tossing him a piece of fish.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, honey,” Piper says.

  Gabby rolls her eyes. “Well, then don’t ask me a question with my mouth full.”

  Mick smiles at Piper’s own eye roll. “She’s got you there.”

  “How was school today?” Piper asks, switching gears.

  “Boring. Gym was fun.”

  “Who’s Jim?” asks Mick. “You haven’t mentioned him before.”

  “You’re such a nerd, Dad.”

  “You really are,” Piper agrees.

  They continue trading jabs as they finish their meals.

  The sun goes down, and the temperature begins to drop.

  “I’m going in,” Gabby says.

  “Right behind you,” Piper says.

  Mick volunteers to clean up. He spends the next fifteen minutes clearing the table and loading the dishwasher while Piper pours herself another glass of wine and relaxes in the living room. Gabby retreats to her bedroom to do homework and text her friends.

  After cleaning up, Mick joins Piper on the couch. She asks him how the arraignment went.

  “As expected. No bail. He stays in county lockup until trial.”

  Mick pauses, knowing Piper can sense that he has more to say but is holding back.

  “What?” she asks.

  “When I met with Nunzio at the Roundhouse yesterday, he brought up the Hanson trial. He said it was quite a move we pulled at the end.”

  Piper sits up. “You don’t think he’d try to look into it, do you? Jesus.”

  Mick shrugs. “I’m going to return the favor and find out everything I can about him, in case we need leverage.”

  Piper doesn’t respond, but she sets her wine aside, a sick look on her face.

  Around nine thirty, Mick walks upstairs and goes into Gabby’s room. Sprawled on the floor at the foot of the bed, Franklin opens his eyes but doesn’t bother lifting his head.

  “You’re late,” Gabby says.

  He’s read to her almost every night of her life: Not Now, Bernard; The Tiger Who Came to Tea; The Elephant and the Bad Baby; Lost and Found; Dear Zoo; The Story of Babar; A Sick Day for Amos McGee; Oh, the Places You’ll Go; The Complete Adventures of Curious George.

  When Gabby was eight, she got into the Harry Potter books. Mick found that she could read them herself. But he still comes to her room and reads her to sleep. She’s made it to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in which, for the first time, Lord Voldemort’s physical appearance is described.

  Gabby listens quietly as Mick reads the passages conveying Voldemort’s skeletally thin physique, his white face, red eyes, and snakelike snout. When he’s done, he sees a confused look on her face.

  “I thought Voldemort would be handsome. He was good-looking when he was Tom Riddle, wasn’t he?”

  Mick considers her question. Before he has time to answer, she asks harder ones.

  “Why was Voldemort so bad? Was he always bad?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Will I turn bad someday?”

  “No!” Surprised at the vehemence in his voice, he leans over, hugs her. “You’re a good person. You will always be a good person.”

  She looks up at him.

  Is that doubt in her eyes? Does she already think she’s a bad person?

  He hugs her tighter, kisses her on the forehead. “Come on, it’s time to go to sleep.”

  He tucks her in, places the book on the nightstand. When he gets to the door, he turns. Her eyes are already closed, her chest rising and falling with her breathing.

  So innocent.

  6

  MONDAY, APRIL 15

  It’s 8:00 a.m., and Piper and Susan are on I-476 North, heading toward the Lehigh Valley. The Darlene Dowd case is the second innocence case they’ve worked on together at the firm. As with the earlier case, they’ll share the legwork, but Susan will prepare all the legal papers.

  The two women are close in age, Piper being forty-three and Susan three years younger. It was awkward between them following Piper’s revelations in the Hanson case. Piper sensed that Susan simply didn’t know how to treat her. But their relationship has warmed over time, and Piper knows it’s largely because of her work on the innocence cases. Susan has told her more than once that she is impressed by Piper’s work ethic and her passion for winning freedom for people who don’t deserve to be in prison.

  For Piper’s part, she admires Susan’s strength. The woman is a fierce competitor. In their previous case together, she saw Susan stand up to—and dismantle—two senior male prosecutors. She expects that the same inner strength and willpower underlie Susan’s success as both a triathlete and a trial attorney.

  They talk awhile about Gabby, but when Piper asks Susan about her own life, she cuts her off and brings up the case. Piper knows Susan has been missing work lately. Angie thinks it has to do with Susan’s father showing up after being absent for years. But Piper suspects there’s more to it.

  “I went over everything again last night,” Susan says as she riffles through the file and pulls out the deathbed letter from Darlene Dowd’s mother. Holding it up, Susan reads the letter aloud:

  I told you this so many times but Im so sorrie for what happened and for me not stopping it. Pleas find it in you’re heart to forgive me. There is something you don’t know that can help you get out of jail. Lois knows where the claw hammer is. And she saw you walking home that morning and that you didn’t have blood on you. She told chief Foster but he wouldnt lisen. You have to find Lois!

  I am so sorry

  I will love you forever

  Mom

  “I feel like a teacher,” Susan says. “I want to pull out a red pen.”

  “Her spelling leaves much to be desired. But what do you think of the letter itself?”

  “Sounds like some pretty explosive stuff. But the state Innocence Project passed on it?”

  “The director wouldn’t say why.”

  “They have a nose for bad leads, you know.”

  “I do, but given the . . . other stuff, I want to give her a chance.” Piper has already told Susan about Darlene Dowd’s sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

  “I get it. And I hope there’s something there.”

  “If Darlene’s mother is right, the police hid a witness who might have helped exonerate her.”

  Darlene Dowd was convicted fifteen years prior and long ago exhausted her direct appeals. Her only hope is to win a new trial under the Pennsylvania Post Conviction Relief Act, which provides another
avenue of redress in certain circumstances, including cases in which new evidence comes to light that the defendant could not have known about at the time of his or her trial, or in which the state wrongfully withheld evidence.

  Half an hour later, Piper and Susan approach the State Correctional Institution at Muncy and spot the main building, a three-story brick-and-stone structure with a central bell tower. The rest of the sixty-two-acre enclosed campus consists of both permanent and modular inmate housing units.

  “Looks more like a small college than a prison,” Piper says.

  “A small college surrounded by chain-link fence topped by razor wire.”

  Piper pulls the car into the visitors’ parking lot, and she and Susan walk to the small building used as the waiting room. There, they enter their information into the logbook, hand over their driver’s licenses, and receive their day passes.

  They leave and cross the road to the visitation room. Inside, they pass through the metal detector and hand their passes to the guard in charge. The visitors’ room is large, filled with rows of chairs and movable coffee tables. Piper chooses a set of chairs in the corner of the room, where she hopes they can have some privacy. Susan sits with her. They wait.

  It doesn’t take long before they see Darlene. Piper recognizes her—barely—from an old newspaper photo taken during her trial. The girl in the picture was nineteen. And although she was wearing conservative-to-dowdy clothing probably provided by her public defender, there was no mistaking her beauty. Young Darlene Dowd was a buxom girl with broad shoulders, a thin waist, and narrow hips. The shimmering blonde hair, bright-blue eyes, and sprinkling of freckles across her button nose evoked Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

  At thirty-four, after fifteen years of little exercise and a prison diet, Darlene’s girlish figure is now long gone. Her belly and hips push out against her red jumper. Her once-glistening hair is dry and tangled. Her face is heavy. Her eyes are sunken and dull.

  Darlene spots them and walks over as they stand.

  “Darlene, I’m Piper. We spoke on the phone. This is my boss, Susan Klein.”

  Darlene cautiously shakes their hands, and they all sit.

  Darlene says, “I know you explained on the phone, but I’m still not clear why you’re here. I thought the Project wasn’t taking my case.”

  “The Pennsylvania Innocence Project has declined, that’s right. But our firm also handles innocence cases. We’ve overturned convictions for two inmates already. One had his case retried and won an acquittal. The other is set for trial in a few months, and we think we’ll win that one, too.”

  “So this kind of thing really happens? People who were convicted and locked up can actually get out of prison? Even after years and years?”

  Piper nods and smiles an encouraging smile. “One of the two men I told you about served twenty-eight years. The other, seventeen years. They were both convicted of murders they didn’t commit. We found new evidence that wasn’t available to them at the time of their trials, took it to a judge, and the judge let them both out.”

  “We read your mother’s letter,” Susan says. “If it’s true that the police chief scared off a key witness, that could be enough to get you a new trial, too.”

  “Do you know who ‘Lois’ is?” asks Piper.

  “It has to be our neighbor. Lois Beal. She and her husband lived right up the road from us. My mother was good friends with Lois. She was very nice. Her and her husband. When I was little, I’d visit their house sometimes, and they would give me treats. Cookies and milk. Or a candy bar. Sometimes, she’d make me a fluffernutter sandwich.” Darlene smiles sadly. “I remember Lois coming to the farm the morning my father was killed.”

  “Did she say anything about seeing you that morning, before your father was found?”

  Darlene looks from Piper to Susan. “I don’t know. She could have. It was all so confusing. My mother was shouting at the chief to let her help me, he was shouting back, and the other officer was holding my arm. I was so upset. I felt like I was in a fog.”

  “How about the hammer? Did you hear anyone, including Lois, say anything about that?”

  “I didn’t even know for sure it was a hammer until I read my mother’s letter. The police never found the murder weapon. The state’s doctor, the medical examiner, testified at trial that he thought my father could have been killed by a hammer. But he couldn’t say for certain.”

  Piper looks at her notes. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go through everything in chronological order. What can you tell me about your parents?”

  Darlene thinks a long time on this. “My mother . . . was very quiet. She was kind. She liked it when everyone got along. I remember she was always cleaning. Or doing laundry. Or cooking. Or sweeping the porch. Always keeping busy.”

  “And your father?”

  Darlene’s eyes flatten; her body goes still. “He was strong, and had black hair and very large hands, always dirty. When I was young, he mostly ignored me. Went about his business, trying to grow things on our farm. He was always fixing things for other people, in his workshop. He was always criticizing my mother, telling her she missed a spot, or overcooked something, or undercooked it. Or that her dress made her look heavy.”

  “You said when you were young, your father ignored you,” Piper says. “But when you got older . . .”

  “You want me to tell you what he done to me.”

  Piper nods. “I’m sure that’s the last thing you want to talk about. But it’s all important in regards to what happened . . . or didn’t happen.”

  “I talked to so many counselors about it—before the trial and after I was convicted and sent here. After a while, it stopped feeling like something that happened to me and more like it was just a story I was telling, over and over again. That was years ago, though. I haven’t talked about it in a long time.”

  Piper sees worry flash across Darlene’s eyes, so she reaches out and touches the woman’s hand. “We can take this as fast or slow as you need.”

  Darlene looks away. Then she looks back at Piper. “A Pepsi would be good. Would you mind getting one? I don’t have any change.”

  Susan fetches a can. She and Piper wait until Darlene takes a swallow. And then another.

  “The first time it happened was the day after I turned twelve. He would never let me up in his workshop. He said it was dangerous because it was where he had his big circular saw set up and kept his other power tools. Then, the day after my birthday, he asked if I wanted to help him with a project in the shop. I couldn’t believe it. It made me feel special.”

  She pauses again. Piper can see that she’s steeling herself.

  “So he took me up to the workshop and gave me a little tour, showed me some of his tools, explained what they were used for. And while he was doing this, he started brushing up against me. Like, he’d reach for a tool, and his hand would brush my chest. I was an early bloomer, and I had breasts by then. I told myself it was just accidental, his touching me, but at some level I knew it wasn’t.

  “That was as far as it went the first time, and for a couple times afterward. But then he called me up there and told me he was going to show me how to whittle a duck out of wood. So he sat down next to me on the bench and laid a block of wood on my thigh. He told me I had to grip the one end of the block firmly because I was going to whittle the other end with a knife. And to illustrate what he meant, he grabbed my thigh. He kept his hand there for a long time. I had shorts on, so my skin was bare. Then he told me I was going to have to make long, smooth cuts in the wood with the knife. And he showed me what he meant by slowly caressing my thigh.

  “He said he wanted to make sure I understood what he was saying, so he asked me to do the same to his thigh. Again, I knew that something wasn’t right, but I thought, Well, he’s my dad, he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.

  “We did the whittle thing a couple times. Every time, he’d move his hand—or my hand—closer to our private parts. One day, he just
started rubbing me there, and had me rub him. He told me I was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, much prettier than my mother. And he leaned over and kissed me. And then he took himself out of his pants, and . . .”

  Darlene stops and excuses herself to go to the restroom.

  Piper watches her, watches the guard search her before she goes into the bathroom. “This is awful,” she says. “But we need her to tell her story.”

  “That’s right. And we need to look her in the eye as she tells it. Our innocence project is just that—we can represent only someone who is actually innocent. Someone sent to prison for a crime they did not commit. So we listen to this part, watch her as she tells it. When we get to the killing, we’ll have something by which to gauge her veracity.”

  Piper watches Darlene exit the women’s room, get searched again by the guard. When she walks over and sits down, her face is set in stone. Piper knows Darlene needed time to build her resolve, prepare herself to retell, and relive, the horrors she suffered at her father’s hands.

  Darlene doesn’t waste time.

  “The first time he actually raped me was a week after he started with the whittling routine. He called me up to the workshop, but that time he didn’t even bother to pretend what was going on. He just pulled me close to him, kissed me, and then took my clothes off, and his, too. He had an inflatable mattress laid out on the floor. That’s where he took me.”

  Darlene’s mouth quivers, but she presses forward. “When he was done, and we were putting our clothes back on, he told me how beautiful I was. That I was his special little ‘sugar-pie.’”

  Piper cringes at the pet name.

  “I don’t remember if he told me not to say anything to my mother, but there was no way I could’ve brought myself to tell her what we’d done. It was wrong and disgusting, and I knew it. I knew it would hurt her to find out, and I was also afraid she’d be really mad at me.”

  Darlene looks out the window, but Piper knows she’s not seeing the fields outside or the hills beyond.