A Checklist for Murder (36 page)

She had already become slightly acquainted with Craig Richman a few years earlier when he was a novice prosecutor in the Newhall DA’s office and when she worked for the public defender there. Now, as she drove to the courthouse early on the morning of her testimony, she thought back to the beginnings of their relationship. They had once squared off against each other on some case she no longer remembered. Before proceedings began, Victoria noticed that Craig had brought a little stuffed donkey into the courtroom and had it sitting next to his legal papers.

“What’s that thing?” she asked him.

“Oh, that?” he responded innocently. “That’s the Donkey of Justice, here to make asses out of your clients.”

She laughed and went back to her last-minute preparations before the judge came in, but later, after she had dragged out the proceedings to her own advantage, Richman leaned over to her and whispered that if she didn’t speed things along, the Donkey of Justice was going to crap on her case.

She had just laughed it off, but for a long time after that, whenever they ran into each other, she used to ask him how
the Donkey of Justice was doing. He would always grin and say, “Just fine,” until one day he groused that some jerk had ripped off his Donkey of Justice and that now he was just going to have to get convictions on his own.

The memory of the little donkey story made Victoria smile and helped her breathe a bit easier as she headed for the DA’s office to check in with him.

“Craig,” she told him nervously, “Peernock keeps saying that I somehow set this thing up just to get my clutches on Natasha and to get at his money or something.”

“Don’t worry about that, Vicki, just keep your answers short and sweet. I’m the lawyer in this thing today, you’re just a witness. Lawyers are always the worst witnesses.”

“Yes, but the jury will know I’m an attorney. A lot of people hate attorneys. They want to believe any bad thing about us that you can think of. What if they accept his story that I’m some kind of a—”

“I’m telling you, trust me. And keep it simple. Don’t think you can improve upon my work by giving some kind of a speech. You’ll just make a bunch of little messes that I have to go back and clean up.”

“You haven’t answered my question, Craig. What if they decide to believe him and think that I’m actually behind all this? My God, this man twists facts like they’re made of Silly Putty.”

“Relax.” Craig grinned at her. “If you wind up being charged with any of these crimes, I promise I’ll tell the DA we’re friends. He’ll just have to get some other prosecutor to convict you.”

“Gee, Craig, thanks a heap,” Victoria grumbled. “I feel so much better.”

And so she was surprised and relieved when her time on the stand seemed to go without a hitch. Richman kept the questions focused on the legal aspects of Claire Peernock’s attempt
to divorce Robert. He had Victoria draw out the details of the civil actions and probate actions pending in the family’s estate. Then he just finished up. Victoria was surprised that it was so simple.

As Richman sat down, Donald Green spoke up regarding the whiskey bottle that had been held in evidence since the day it was recovered from Claire Peernock’s car.

“Your Honor, in light of the fact that we have been in trial almost two months, I would certainly like to renew my motion to have that Seagram’s bottle opened up and maybe passed around.”

“Even though I’m a teetotaler,” Schwab replied, “I’ll take it under submission.”

Then Green rose to take his turn at her.
So much for the easy part
, Victoria told herself. If there was going to be serious trouble, if she was going to be accused of having been complicitous in Claire’s murder, it would surely come now.

But it didn’t. And Victoria couldn’t believe how easy her cross-examination was. Green basically just went back over her testimony, are you sure about this, are you sure about that. No accusations, no sly hints that she was the mastermind of Natasha’s tragedy and an evil manipulator who had controlled Natasha’s part in the conspiracy against her poor father.

She walked out of the building in a daze, accompanied by her former law clerk, Elke Schardt, who had since become a lawyer herself and taken over Victoria’s old office in Saugus.

“My God, Vicki,” Elke marveled, “did you see the jury?”

“Are you kidding? I was too nervous to look at them. I didn’t want them to think I was sucking up to them or something.”

“Well,
I
watched them the whole time. Their body language
was incredible! Whenever Richman was speaking, they looked open and relaxed, but when Green got up to try to pick your testimony apart, their positions changed completely. They crossed their legs, folded their arms, they scowled. Some even looked in the other direction!”

“You think they like me, then?”

“Oh, hell, no. You’re an attorney. But Craig has them eating out of his hand.”

“Ah. Thanks.”

“He might actually get a conviction.”

“Sure, he
might
. But what if he doesn’t? I mean, what if the jury just doesn’t get it? What if they actually believe Peernock didn’t do this?”

“Well”—Elke smiled sweetly—“there’s always you ….”

The prosecution finally rested its case. Now, after four years of pretrial jockeying for position and nearly eight weeks of the prosecution phase of the trial itself, the defense of Robert Peernock was about to begin at last.

And Donald Green felt as if he were being led to his own execution.

Only days before the trial began, he had received a phone call from Mary Grace Ball, who had been running his office for years. She reluctantly brought news that a new complaint had been served by mail. Peernock was actually suing Green for malpractice
while the trial was still in session
. He was charging Green with having been bribed by the prosecution to throw the case. Now in addition to Green’s work on the defense phase of one of the most difficult trials he had yet had to face, he would somehow have to make time to plan his own defense against the very client he was trying to save.

Peernock was handling the malpractice suit as his own attorney, which gave him almost nothing to lose and a case that cost him next to nothing to pursue. If he somehow made
his charges stick it could easily mean the end of Donald Green’s career, even though he was still in his thirties and had a new family to support.

And then, as if the gods of stress had decided to place a few bets on how much the Las Vegas attorney could take, another unforeseen element entered the mix. Mary Grace called again to tell him it appeared that someone had sent private investigators to find the exact location of Green’s hotel room in Los Angeles. She had received calls to the Las Vegas office from mysterious “investigators” who claimed to need Green’s hotel-room number because they had “important new information” that could only be given to him.

But they would not say who they were.

Donald didn’t like paranoid thinking and hated to believe that his own client might try to get a mistrial by having his attorney drop dead at the last moment, but the accusations being leveled against him by Peernock did nothing to reassure him that his client might not resort to the same sort of thing he had been accused of trying on Victoria Doom and Natasha.

Green knew that any inmate with money can arrange to have someone on the outside killed.

Is this man that desperate
? Green asked himself.
Or am I just getting tired and picking up on everybody else’s paranoia? Could there be some natural explanation
? But who else, he asked himself, would send unidentified “investigators”? It took effort to push the thoughts out of his mind.

Leaving the courthouse, Donald returned to the Mission Hills Inn, where he had been staying during the trial, feeling as if he had iron weights strapped to his shoulders. His wife, Samantha, was waiting up in the room, ready to handle his paralegal work for him and do whatever she could to get him ready to mount his case, but with this malpractice suit hanging over him, he hardly knew where to begin. Peernock was demanding the right to testify on his own behalf, despite the
months of arguments that Green had given him against taking such a risk. Now the malpractice suit was a club in Peernock’s hand forcing Green to let his client have his way in order for Donald to prove that he was doing nothing to hinder the case. But he suspected that to allow Peernock to get on the stand and be subjected to Craig Richman’s verbal laser beam could amount to the same thing as simply throwing in the towel.

And then the hotel clerk stopped him at the front desk with the news that two men calling themselves investigators had been there earlier in the day, trying to get Green’s room number.

“You didn’t give it out, did you?” Green asked in alarm.

“No. I told them it’s not our policy. They took off.”

Green hurried up to his room. Samantha had recently delivered their first child and was accompanying him on all his trips for this trial so they could have their off-time together with their new daughter. Both would have been up in the room at the time these two men were looking for the room number.

He heaved a sigh of relief when Samantha greeted him at the door and happily held their little girl out for Daddy to kiss.

In the last few months Samantha Green had trained herself to become a skilled legal assistant. If that was what it took to make this marriage work, she had no objection to being listed as an office expense. Of course, she’d had no idea when she started helping her husband get up to speed that she and her daughter might be placed in personal jeopardy by the case. But she knew that Donald was trying to represent this Peernock guy without being paid anything up front, despite the $10,000-per-month cost of maintaining his office back in Nevada. In addition, Donald’s own investigators were growing increasingly disgruntled over payment they
hadn’t received, even though their arrangement with him was that they wouldn’t get paid until Donald himself got paid.

So she helped. It kept them together when work would otherwise have kept them apart and it held expenses down. Besides, she had thought, if the facts of the case were anything like the way Peernock described them, then it would be good to know that she and her new husband were working together to keep an innocent man from being convicted for a horrible crime.

But after Donald had paced nervously for a moment, he told her that they were going to have to move to a new hotel immediately.

“Why? I thought we were going to work on the case some more tonight.”

“We are, but first we’re moving. Right now.”

“What’s going on?”

“Mary Grace has had calls at the office from people trying to find out where I’m staying, and the clerk downstairs saw two men today who were … Jesus, Samantha, I think Robert might have people trying to find us.”

There was a silent pause. It did not last long.

“I’ll start packing.”

She handed Donald their daughter and let him take care of the formula bottle while she gathered the baby’s things.

She had begun this case thinking that it would be good to help her husband free an innocent man. Now, as she carried their daughter down to the car and Donald dragged out the heavy suitcases, Samantha Green found that everything about the situation felt much different to her.

Victoria’s former law clerk, Elke Schardt, drove back to New Mexico with Victoria to spend a couple of days and offer a little moral support after Victoria’s portion of the harrowing trial was finished. They combed the stores in Santa Fe where local artisans sell handmade goods to tourists. In one store
they came across a huge display of tiny carved stone animals called fetishes, traditional charms against all kinds of disasters, evildoers, and evil deeds.

One was a little stone donkey.

“Look.” Victoria laughed. “It’s the Donkey of Justice!”

“The what?”

“Never mind. Think we’ve got time to get to the post office and send an overnight package to Los Angeles?”

“What for?”

But Victoria was already hurrying to the front of the store with the new Donkey of Justice in her hand.

CHAPTER

28

D
onald Green called only two defense witnesses before Robert Peernock took the stand. Each witness was relatively minor. Both were neighbors of the Peernock family and offered testimony that proposed to cast doubt on facts presented by various prosecution witnesses. One claimed to have seen Robert Peernock with his youngest daughter on the evening of the crimes, but he became confused on the witness stand and could not be certain if it had not in fact been the evening of the previous day.

The other witness claimed to have seen Robert Peernock’s car at the house at 2:00
A.M.
on the night of the crimes, but on closer examination he agreed that it could have been 3:00
A.M.
or even 4:00
A.M.
, and while he didn’t think the Cadillac was at the house at that time, it turned out that he couldn’t be absolutely sure of that either. Nothing either neighbor said did much for Donald Green’s client.

Robert John Peernock was going to be the star of the show.

From the moment that Peernock took the stand and Green began to question his witness, it was clear that this was not a relationship based on trust. The honeymoon had been over for some time now. Green could get no cooperation from his client, even with the simplest point of the early establishing testimony.

Donald Green: “On or about September 4, 1987, were you arrested for the murder of one Claire Peernock?”

Robert Peernock: “I was arrested.”

Green: “On that same day were you also arrested for the attempted murder of Natasha Peernock?”

Peernock: “I was arrested on that day.”

And so it went, as Robert Peernock jockeyed for position in the attempt to show the jury that he was an innocent man being set up for murder and one who was simultaneously evading the attempt of his own attorney to trick him into saying something that might be used against him.